No Straight Lines, argues that we have reached the nadir of the adaptive range of our industrialised world. Now faced with an unsustainable trilemma of social, organisational and economic complexity, we have entered an era in which the rules we have previously organised our lives around no longer apply. Leaving us with both a design problem and a design challenge which we must urgently solve. By describing an entirely new way for true social, economic and organisational innovation to happen, No Straight Lines presents a revolutionary logic and an inspiring plea for a more human-centric world.

#camerjam #mobileculture

This was synchronous because Intersections was exactly about the same thing – but within a different context, how design thinking can come to the aid of social innovation and also the commercial world, resulting in business transformation by exploring emerging trends in technology and design. The summit also turned its gaze to, sustainable design and the environment, as well as social design and collaborative practices. Because it is when two unlikes come together in close adjacency, creating an edge and an intersection real creativity happens.

I met some great people. I second Michael Thompson in congratulationing Andrea on becoming Associate Director of the Academy for Innovation and Research (AIR) and Head of the Centre for Sustainable Design at the University College Falmouth starting on 11th April, and the great job Andrea Siodmok and her team had done.

There was for me, a palpable sense that people genuinely wanted to make and create a better world, and I also think that the two days expamded peoples idea of what design is and could be – whilst still retaining the origins of what motivates design and craft – to create new forms and give them to the world as a civilizing force.

My presentation ended up becoming highly emotive as in the Q&A I discussed the extreme frustration I felt trying to educate my intelligent but dyslexic son in the state education system, with a very engaged audience. Here is my presentation for those that asked for it. #intersect

Did the Church see Gutenberg coming? I asked this question recently at an event on innovation and disruption. Those of you that are fans of Blackadder, let me use the comedic twinning of Rowan Atkinson as Bishop Blackadder and his side-kick Tony Robinson as Baldrick.

So Baldrick comes running into Bishop Blackadders bedroom as he is preparing for his day

Blackadder: ahhhh there you are Baldrick, I wondered when you might turn up

Baldrick: sorry sir, I was out last night in the Tavern

Blackadder: the Tavern Baldrick, have you taken leave of your senses

Baldrick: well no sir, but I ended up over-hearing a conversation between two men, a Johannes Gutenberg and some other geezer, that, that, that, that,

(Baldrick pauses)

Blackadder: c’mon man out with it

Baldrick: that could change the whole power base of the church sir – Gutenberg has taken a wine press and he’s going to print bibles on it sir

Blackadder just stares at Baldrick, and slaps him around the head, knocking him over and then kicks him

Blackadder: POPPYCOCK Bladrick (turning to face the window looking out onto the town of Mainz and its surrounding countryside) As Bishop Baldrick, I rule everything I see, and even that which I don’t. How on earth do you think that some fool up in a garret in Mainz with a convertible wine press is going to reform the church, and remove our strangle hold over the whole of Europe, hmmmmm?

This particular question has a certain relevancy if not urgency today, as it was through Gutenberg’s invention we as a society moved from the Dark Ages into the Reformation. The Church controlled all, its omnipotence felt by every single European man woman and child. Yet within a brief decade of the printing of the 42-Line bible and the facsimile re-creation of Gutenberg’s printing press, between 8 – 20 million books had been printed, whereas before, none had existed outside of a monastery. Martin Luther unleashed of the power of the printing press to decouple the Church from its divine power base, whilst simultaneously challenging political stability.

The lesson is – when new communication tools are not only invented but ubiquitously adopted, they can become a tool wielded for profound societal and political change, if society wills it.

So lets ask another question; which business, which industry, which NGO or political organization, democratic or otherwise has not been touched by the impact of our most recent communications revolution? In a breath it seems, businesses defined by their socialness, community, and peer to peer interactivity have erupted in complete violation of the orthodoxy of traditional business, and how that business is made: controlled access to stuff, to information. This is the Gestalt Switch – once we were atomized but connected up to each other by big media but not across each other, today that power has eroded, people are using communication technology to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions.

In 2005, Facebook, and YouTube were born – we were aware of the emergence of digital communications but that was seen from afar, there but not here. Today Facebook has a congregation of 500 million people connecting and getting stuff done though its platform, Youtube uploads 20 hours of audio visual content every minute of every day of every year, Flickr holds the largest repository of still images anywhere in the world – but why all this sharing? Because, as USC Professor Henry Jenkins states, an expert on participatory cultures, we were ready for it. Linux is a co-created operating system, (which companies like IBM use) generating huge sums of money for those that build businesses around its services even though the operating code is free and the people that write the code do so for free. From a traditional standpoint it is illogical, yet it works.

At the same time we are using the words social media and social networking, which drip off our lips like an adman would say 60 second TV spot 15 years ago, it seems people are all atwitter about twitter and the CBI produces a report about how employees using “social media” during their working hours are losing the UK millions. The truth is the connection of participatory cultures, socialness and a communications revolution in the true context of our age has been misunderstood by many.

In The Enterprise of the Future a report published by IBM in 2006 – their survey of CEO’s revealed that 8/10 CEO’s saw significant change ahead and yet the gap between expected levels of change plus the ability to manage it had tripled. This is natural because as a new economy takes hold, as a consequence of the old one faltering, it unleashes a powerful set of forces that cleave the fabric of the economy along fault lines, consequently there is a catastrophic resistance to change. For example, social media from a business context is easy to dismiss, it is looked at with idling curiosity, or downright mistrust in the C-suite as it is not a core part of daily grown up business, sadly this is the same mistake which the church made in misunderstanding Gutenberg in his garret in Mainz.

The reality is people are a highly participatory social species, we are designed to work in aggregates, this is different to the logic that created firms perfected for industrial production. We are in the process of renegotiating that power relationship. What companies face today is a design problem and part of that problem is understanding that embedding socialness into the core of what makes a company work successfully is very different to thinking about social media as an addendum to what it does. It requires a new philosophy, language, media and communications literacy, tools and processes. There are companies which whether it be automotive; Local Motors, venture funding; GrowVC, scientific innovation; innocentive, YourEncore, or Topcoder which has NASA as a client, books; Amazon or book mooch, mobile marketing; Qustodian, trading; ebay, that have all embedded socialness into the DNA of the company to improve commercial success. So is it social media or social business – as answering that question might be more important than you think.

Related articles

• Trend for 2011: Collaborative story-telling on social media (reportr.net)
• Facebook Nation, Facebook World (lewrockwell.com)
• Gutenberg In The Middle East (andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com)
• The Gutenberg Bible. (jwitness.wordpress.com)

Lars writes in Japan’s super advanced mobile-web

The entire approach from key players in the value chain is focused on the direct benefit of the industry as a whole, ultimately via the satisfaction of their customers. A perfect example would be the generous – from day one – 90/10 revenue share to content providers. By the vary nature of building an open sales channel platform and offering an acceptable merchant billing fee the operators primed the data pump with plenty of interesting content rushing into their pipeline. Another key move from the operators was their decision in 2004 to make Flash-Lite a mandated pre-install on all devices. While of course their menus looked even more compelling, the move also allowed content players a common code platform with less concern about specific handset rendering parameters. The golden triangle of open web access combined with flat-rate data plans and ubiquitous 3G speed has lead to a server-side model driving ever greater adoption of content and services. Of course the telcos are happily counting their flat-rate data subscriber revenues as a result of even more great contents on offer and the satisfied mobile web surfers keep on clicking.. the win-win-win scenerio.

Alan Moore mobile/enterprise keynote video

Related articles

• The DoCoMo-Baccarat Phone: Smart in Another Way (blogs.wsj.com)

The whole spectrum of sciences, including vitally important areas such as cleantech, life sciences and biotech, and engineering, is facing extreme upheaval, particularly related to the funding of scientific research. In an overall difficult economic situation, cuts by governments in the area of blue-skies research and less funding available from corporates have created an environment in which the funding of science that is not immediately of commercial value is seen as unnecessary, imprudent, and wasteful.

At the same time, scientific advancement has been very rapid, and tremendous progress has been made in all areas of science. But this has come at a price, quite literally: scientific research is expensive, it takes place at a very high level of complexity, and some of it is speculative with often long and rarely direct routes from idea to commercialization.

A sustainable answer?

Finding a sustainable answer is important, Lucy points to the complexity of funding science, its long gestation, and the increasing desire by VC’s for short-term gain and a decreasing appetite for “risk” as they perceive it. Informed and prudent investment decisions thus require a new level of sophisticated scientific expertise, and most venture funds are not well equipped to do this. As a consequence, they seek the comfort and greater certainty of later-stage investment that comes with a proven idea and income stream on its side. The question arises then is the VC model broken, or broken enough to be rethought?

Innovation eco-systems and architectures

Lucy argues: If retaining their positions as world leaders in scientific exploration and its commercialization is vital to the G7 economies, what needs to be done and are we willing to do it? The gap that needs to be covered is between the origin of an idea and that stage in its development where its successful commercialization is more likely than not. Early-stage investment funds can play a vital role in bridging this gap: they pick up where notional research leaves off but well before the commercial value of a discovery has been completely verified. Early-stage investment funds thus provide the answer to the question of who decides what gets funded because they bring together scientific experts with venture capitalists — those who understand the complex science behind the idea right at the point of due diligence and those who have the business acumen to vet business plans, fund them, and guide their implementation.

And one cannot argue with that, so what to do? Those economies, argues Will Hutton prepared to stay open and create national innovation architectures that support a diversified landscape of vigorous firms, institutions and technologies will repeat the amazing feat of the British Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th Century – But such innovation eco-systems will not be created spontaneously we need to develop an interconnected eco-system that can respond to these dilemma’s by designing answers that today do not exist. Something that the many people I met in Boston recently were at pains to point out to me. This eco-system is created out of networks or networks which are both local and global. These new models of entrepreneurship, argues John Seely Brown, are built upon also the human talents of deep listening, recipricocity and embedded trust in networked knowledge flows. The eco-system in Boston has a thriving situated community around Boston (academia, entrepreneurs, mentors that want to give back and angel + VC funding, and whole support infrastructure), they use mentoring extensively, in a recent conversation with Sherwin Greenblatt of the MIT Venture Mentoring Service, he explained to me how anyone at MIT (staff or students) can use the service, and that recently a great success was the sale of a drug delivery system innovated at MIT which had been in gestation for 8 years. In fact the eco-system for funding innovation and bringing that innovation to market is central to how science is funded. Equally the MIT Industry Liason program is very good at attracting inward investment into MIT. This is structured in such a way to be of huge incentive for academia to engage with the commercial world. And a case in point is a large company investing $70m over 5 years into a particular form of life sciences, and then hiring quite a few MIT grads consequently.

In a post I wrote on the challenges with big pharma, funding, accelerating innovation I quoted John Martin who was writing in New Scientist,

There is another way to fund the development of new treatments. Many innovative ideas that have changed society have arisen from the combination of curiosity and academic freedom found in universities. This is where small amounts of funding can produce big results. In recent years, university research has been exploited by industry to produce new drugs, such as blood clot-busting “tissue plasminogen activator”, courtesy of the Catholic University of Leuven (KUL) in Belgium.

Now, while big pharma has so much money it doesn’t know what to do with it, universities are being starved of resources and research funding has decreased in real terms. At the same time, university research strategy is under-organised and there is ignorance of how to exploit intellectual property and utilise patents. Nevertheless, the potential of universities is enormous.

So the problem is not just VC’s – its the eco-system they exist in and the way in which innovation and scientific breakthroughs can be made – it is essentially a design problem. Gordon Brown, our recent PM visited MIT and consequently wanted to create something similar in the UK – but we have not been successful, and that has a great deal to do with culture.

Open Innovation

Another aspect which we should consider is the emergence of new platforms for venture funding, and new approaches to innovation. The answer is yes, and it comes from an unexpected and unrelated corner of the universe: open source software development, argues Karim R. Lakhani, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. His research leads to these conclusions:

1. Practices in the open source software community offer a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving.
2. Open up your problem to other people in a systematic way. A problem may reside in one domain of expertise and the solution may reside in another.
3. Find innovative licensing ways or legal regimes that allow people to share knowledge without risking the overall intellectual property of the firm.

TopCoder is one very good example: TopCoder is a company which administers contests in computer programming. TopCoder hosts fortnightly online  competitions — known as SRMs or “single round matches” — as well as weekly competitions algorithm in design and development. The work in design and development produces useful software which is licensed for profit by TopCoder. Competitors involved in the creation of these components are paid royalties based on these sales. The software resulting from algorithm competitions — and the less-frequent marathon matches — is not usually directly useful, but sponsor companies sometimes provide money to pay the victors. Statistics (including an overall “rating” for each developer) are tracked over time for competitors in each category.

Karim Lakhani believes,

Open source collaboration is a very different model for innovation and product development than most firms are used to. I began to wonder where we might see similar patterns occur outside the software domain. In open source communities we see a vast degree of openness in which everybody can participate, but also the practice of broadcasting your work to everybody else. People continually broadcast their problems, others broadcast solutions, and the person with the problem is not always the one with the solution. Oftentimes, somebody else can make sense of both what the problem has been and what people are proposing as solutions, and can come up with a better answer.

Something I explore in a summing up presentation I gave at the conference Competing to Innovate which was held at MIT/Sloan School of Management in Boston 12 January 2011.

Over a matter of days, the code was hacked and made open. As a consequence, (Inside the race to hack the Kinect)

The hackers’ success has unlocked what promises to be a revolution in robotics research. At robotics company Willow Garage in Palo Alto, California, researchers have bought around 20 Kinects. “We’re losing count,” says engineer Ken Conley. He and colleagues have shown that multiple Kinects can be combined without generating interference and are currently integrating the device into the company’s PR2 robot.

At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, engineer Philipp Robbel has already run a proof-of-concept experiment in which he used the Kinect to provide vision for a robot. He says the Kinect could one day help produce cheap robots that could scour disaster areas for victims.

All amazing stuff – of course the story questions orthodox issues around IP, the nature of value creation, innovation and entrepreneurship – what is shared or what be shared to kickstart innovation and what is not. Commonwealth in the networked society [3] Big Pharma

As this video shows Kinect controlling Windows 7

And body dysmorphic disorder

Body Dysmorphic Disorder from flight404 on Vimeo.

What has changed and what has not!

What has changed since 2007 when I wrote the first book (released in 2008) is that social technology has gone mainstream. As I was writing the first book, Twitter was in use by primarily among digital technology fans and those concerned with the intersection of society and technology: SXSW 2007 was one of the first really notable Twitter events that started to catch mainstream attention, still far in advance of the big uptick in member growth that happened in 2009. Similar story for Facebook: In mid-2007, with 50 million or so members globally, Facebook opened its API to developers, driving new social technology. In 2008 membership crossed 100 million and in 2010 it crossed 500 million.

I started writing the second book in early 2010 while working with 2020Media (Public Relations) in India. It became really clear that this next wave of social technology was truly global at a societal–and not just technology production–level. I saw people doing things with social technology in India, Asia and South America, where I work with video community startup Looppa, that were essentially identical to what was happening in Europe and North America. People were playing off of each other, sharing ideas and experiences to make more informed choices.

In this view, the big change is simply the “now mainstream” adoption of social technology, and as such the mainstream expectation that businesses are likewise participants on the social web, an expectation that is still only partly met in actual practice.

What inspires you and what leaves you feeling a bit glum?

What inspires me is the continued, frenzied growth in applications–across a very wide range is uses–that encourage the sharing of ideas, experiences, and information. In 1995, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, speaking at MIT for the 50th Anniversary of the publication of Dr. Vannevar Bush’s seminal Atlantic article “As We May Think,” remarked that the web should be “a sea of shared knowledge” wherein people could work together on the problems facing the world, and could do so in a context that encouraged “those who followed to accept, adopt or correct” these collaboratively developed solutions. Looking around today at the both the significant challenges and outright problems along with the incredible opportunities and boundless capabilities, the promise of social technology is truly inspiring.

That said, the majority of the social applications are still based on a fundamentally questionable assumption: If one amasses a sufficient audience whose attention can be systematically interrupted, those interruptions can be used to promote or sell goods and services. In other words, in the most cynical view of the social web it’s all about regaining control over the (global) “TV” audience for the purposes of advertising, a business model that is at the heart of the majority of social platforms and technology startups.

If you have a point of view why not leave a comment or question for Dave, or maybe tweet your question to Dave Evans @evansdave.