My argument is that better much better does not necessarily cost the earth.

Its is about a new literacy and logic in how we make stuff. This is a key part of the No Straight Lines Story.

Some interesting key points highlighted over at the p2p Foundation

1. Designed and manufactured a 4-passenger street-legal car that gets 100 mpg
2. The car was constructed using off-the-shelf parts
3. The car is entirely modular in design
4. They innovated a new process for carbon-fiber body construction that costs 1/360th the traditional process
5. You can pre-order cars now for less than $29,000
6. This is not just a one-off prototype. Currently they are manufacturing one car per week (yes, that’s the low volume manufacturing retail price). They are targeting a future price of under $20,000.
7. With no capital investment
8. Though accept donations
9. Everything is done through volunteers

Also read:

• The No Straight Lines challenge: be realistic imagine the impossible
• 6 challenges for a non-linear world
• The NEXT Silicon Valley is not a place it’s a platform
• LEGO CUUSOO – the WHAT’S NEXT for business in a non-linear world
• Patients Know Best: a new literacy for healthcare

Why Andrew Lansley is not talking to people like Mohammad demonstrates why BIG GOV struggle with designing for a better world. Its not top down with lots of expensive consultants. Designing for transformation is flat, emergent and networked. And the clue is in the name of Mohammad’s company PATIENTS KNOW BEST. Better thinking, better world. Its about blending technologies of cooperation, with data, platforms and people. Designing around people, for people, not inspite of them.

Mohammad’s story is the reason a patient knows best is because they are the only one who goes to all the consultations. So Mohammad has come up with a simple program so a patient can access their health records.

Existing models of crowd behaviour  treat moving masses of humanity as though they were fluids. This works, up to a point. But it often fails to predict the changes that happen as a crowd’s density increases and its movement becomes chaotic.

Apparently marching soldiers will automatically break step on a suspension bridge – and over the last 5 years or so I have been fascinated by all sorts of participatory cultures – here is a selection of posts that explores such a fascinating and increasingly important area of investigation

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 –  today people are using communication technologies to get what they want and need from each other rather than through existing organisations and institutions. Why? Because those institutions have been recognised as being unable to deliver on their promise to society. Because they abuse their position of power, because they lose sight of why they were there in the first place.

So why is access to financial capital any different? In No Straight Lines: making sense of a non-linear world, I make the case and argument that as our world has become increasingly unfair, to the point whereby that unfairness is highly corrosive, people will take action, political action, dramatic action, action with consequences. It is no accident that today, communications tools are being wielded as powerful agents of political change. As much as everything ‘digital’ has affected our world, the point is we are in a social revolution not a technological one. And, as much as we have seen profound change in certain areas of society, the owners of monetary power (banks, venture capital, financing) have seemingly been unaffected by the disruptive energy of a non-linear world until now, other than by their own doing. But what the banking crisis demonstrated is how dysfunctional finance and money markets have become, not only in venture funding and lending but in pensions, the managers of which know they will never be able to properly pay back to society.

So at either end of people’ lives; the creation of jobs and then a happy retirement, the system which should support that has failed. Its not failing, its failed. So where do the new entrepreneurial companies that create the new jobs come from? How will we finance our retirement? We need novel ways to make this all happen.

In the same way that Martin Luther used Gutenberg’s printing press to reform the church, organisations such as GrowVC, or Profounder or Kiva or Zopa, or Kickstarter, to name but a few, are also part of this challenge to financial hierarchies and their positions of power that now serve themselves rather than society at large. And this process is starting to accelerate, (see the Startup Exemption Petition)

Disruption does not ask permission

So disruption does not ask permission, and it never comes from the centre, the future of investing and the kickstarting of innovation requires radical new ways of funding and this will have a significant impact on society. This innovation will flatten  powerhouses of financial capital and if the idea proves as exciting as the ideas explored and brought to life in the writings and pamphlets that led to the French Revolution, then that idea will spread. As Tony Judt wrote in, Ill Fares the Land, (review)

By the time the revolution broke out, this new language of politics was in place, and in so doing discredited everything that had gone before it.

And once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t go back to your day job. Who is an entrepreneur? Who is an investor? Who has the right to be either? Such perspectives are as skewed as the myopia of those that whinge about professionals and amateurs, and how the internet has destroyed culture. The question to that is who owns culture and who makes it? What we are seeing is a decoupling from the belief systems that have defined our world for generations.

In this process of the democratisation of venture funding, and the creation of a new innovation eco-system (to accelerate deal flow, that creates more companies and that creates more jobs), it has been reported back to me that some American’s believe this could be the re-invention of the American Dream. And Ross Dawson suggests, that a significant shift in capitalism could be coming. As head of vision at Grow Venture Community (GrowVC), I have watched these developments with great interest. I think, in the same way that micro loans work in many countries, rather than pointing to such financing models as ‘only for the really poor’, there is a more fundamental dynamic at work here, that participatory human systems when connected by the connective tissue of communications media can do some extraordinary things. It also I think breaks down the false barriers between who can and who cannot engage in wealth and value creation. This false distinction has corrupted many in their greed, consequently hurting society per se. As John Kay wrote, “Capitalists, are capitalism’s worst enemy – and particularly the market fundamentalist tendency which has been in the ascendant for the last 20 years”. And yet many in the finance and banking world cannot accept even though they were bailed out by states around the world paying millions in bonus’s is fair. In the same way Ann-Marie suggested the starving in the streets of Paris ‘eat cake’, the financial institutions has become detached from understanding their role in the wider society (read here for a selection of posts that explores these issues). So change is gonna come,

Ross believes,

While we supposedly live in a capitalist society, the potential is for new and more open structures to create far better use of capital than we have today. A more fluid form capitalism could transform business and how individuals create value.

The Wall Street Journal,

Federal securities regulators are weighing demands to make it easier for fast-growing companies to use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to raise money by tapping thousands of investors for very small amounts of shares. The Securities and Exchange Commission is looking at adapting its rules to encourage Internet-age techniques for small companies raising capital. The issue is part of a wider review by the agency into whether to ease decades-old constraints on share issues by closely held companies.

The use of “crowd-funding” techniques has spread in recent years from artists looking to fund creative works to entrepreneurs trying to expand their firms. In a typical example, a company looking to raise $100,000 would use an Internet site to invite investors to buy as much as $100 of shares each.

If all goes well, small companies can raise cash relatively cheaply, while investors get a stake in an innovative business with limited downside risk. The SEC is now considering calls to relax its rules to make it easier for companies to use crowd-funding without having to undergo the full panoply of disclosure and other legal requirements required by the securities laws for share issues.

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

This was never a tech revolution in the same way Gutenberg’s printing press was a tech rev – it was like in Tunisia, Egypt, Libiya, and throughout the western world; a revolt against power, corporate power, political power who has it and who wields it – its interesting to note that Umar Haque although working for Havas struggles with the ethics of living in a world which is unfair. He is I believe representative of many. But the powerful are now beginning the pinch of the powerless, where people sick and tired of the same shit, are learning to get what they need from each other – institutionally American Government has failed, business are failing and we need a new literacy in which people know how to create new and better things. The fact was nobody was really prepared to listen not until it was too late.

Communities Dominate Brands is six years old and yet people still tell me from RIM, to Disney, to startups that it is still mandatory reading. I don’t do it very often but hurrah for us.

You can buy it HERE

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)

There is No ctrl + z

Not that you would believe it – the roll call of companies, and even industries that lined up to be deniers, defenders, accusers, litigators, jailors even, were emphatic. Yet the transformation (or the emergence of transformative cultures, enabled by communication technologies) of nearly society on this planet cannot now be ignored. I argue we are in a process of renegotiating what kind of world we want to live in. Something Richard Sennett believes is a return to the Enlightenment but on terms more appropriate to the world we live in today. The spectrum is extraordinary, those that embrace what this new non-linear world can bring and those that wish it dead, like a Parrot in a Monty Python Sketch. The end is inevitable for companies premised upon a linear world – that refuse to embrace a new world view. But how are they going to transition? How are they going to get stuff done?

Pragmatism in these times is always a worthy companion, and so I commend to you a book and project by Dave Evans called: Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement. (“The Next Generation of Business Engagement” shows you how to apply collaborative, social technology to business, shortening the innovation cycle and building stronger relationships with your customers, partners and suppliers.) I met Dave Evans two years ago in Austin Texas @sxsw, via Andy Hunter. Dave struck me from day 1 as a unique person, low key and modest but it was quite clear he had a clear perspective on the world. We connected and although approaching the world from different perspectives, I felt we had arrived a the same place.

Dave’s new book is a true ‘how to’ in a sea of hyperbole, it speaks of how to tack your organisational mainsail as the turbulent end of the 20th Century goes on around you. I asked Dave where he had come from and what has changed for him on the journey he has undertaken. Our conversation will be episodic.

I was thinking where you started with social media and hour an day to this next project.

“Social Media Marketing: An Hour a Day” was a starting point for two ideas, important for both marketing–where I’ve spent about half of my career–and for business in general, which is where I’ve spent most of my time. It became clear to me (and of course a number of others) that the Internet, and the web in particular, had changed the context in which businesses operate and as such changed in a fundamental way the mechanics and many of the truisms of marketing. The leveling of the playing field between those with information (sellers) and those who needed it to make smart choices (buyers) for example underwent an upheaval as the web made the spread of information nearly frictionless. So, my first book focused on how a marketer might make sense of this–shifting thought patterns from “talking” to “listening” for example–and then, once that mindset was adopted, to how this new form of media may be incorporated into the existing planning models and measures that guide business marketing.

This necessarily led to the second book: “I’ve got my head around this, and I’m actively participating on the consumer-facing social web. Now what?” My second book, “Social Media Marketing: The Next Generation of Business Engagement” tackles the “now what” and asserts that the same technologies that connected consumers in the marketplace can be used to connect entire businesses with their supply chains, with their influencers, with their employees and of course (in even stronger ways) to their customers.

The result is an holistic look at the relationship between businesses and their marketplaces, and a redefinition of the concept of engagement as it is used in a business and marketing context.

Here is the presentation that I gave.