Following on from my post about Cumbria’s DIO (Done It Ourselves) community, The People’s Supermarket again demonstrates an alternative way of getting stuff done. In a way that perhaps is more realistic and more humane, where once again people, and community, and commerce can be more equal partners. Arthur Potts Dawson, who was behind London’s environmentally sound, award-winning Acornhouse restaurant, the mission statement is “for the people, by the people” which in practice means a not-for-profit co-op. Pay a £25 membership fee and sign up for a four-hour shift once a month and you become a part owner, have a say in how it’s run and receive a 10% discount on your shopping.
There is a C4 programme on its way to a TV/iPad/laptop screen near you in April.
MP for Penrith and The Border Rory Stewart, tells an important story of [1] what the ‘Big Society’ really means, [2] why in many way what we face is a design problem [3] that community is still situated and can be a powerful force for transformation. He does this in How Cumbria’s village halls are pioneering a hi-tech revolution (An internet revolution driven by tiny rural communities is giving the telecoms giants a run for their money)
The area that Rory represents is vast, communities can be small, as he says the problems are distance and isolation. This means broadband companies are reluctant to lay the cable to deliver broadband – not cost efficient. But as we know connectivity makes commerce possible. And without connectivity, communities dwindle even further for social as well as commercial reasons.
Broadband would allow our businesses to follow our local fishing supply shop, which does £1m of sales a year out of the door but £7m online. Farmers could fill forms online; Lake District B&Bs could market themselves in Japan; and “creative” industries that depend on fast internet speeds could grow. Parkinson’s patients could talk to their neurologist by videolink without leaving home (and grandparents could talk to their grandchildren in Canada); children could take classes which they couldn’t find in the district. Village shops could collaborate online to increase their purchasing power; village halls could share bookings; medical teams could exchange emergency calls more efficiently. People might decide again to work and bring their families up in villages.
£100m has been invested in broadband in Cornwall, but Cumbria is twice as big, with geographic challenges. This where the design challenge comes in – an intractable dilemma. Commercial companies say ‘non’, based upon their criteria, which has real social and commercial consequences. So what happened next?
But our Eden communities may have the solution. In Great Asby, one volunteer discovered there was already fibre, paid for by the taxpayer, for the school. The school let him splice off the fibre to a cabinet that he calls a “parish pump”. From that he ran a wireless network, with transmitters in the church tower and one, powered by solar panels, on a dead tree to reach the outlying farms. He has persuaded 70% of the village to sign up and is making enough money (as an unpaid volunteer) to upgrade the network. Local farmers have agreed to lay the fibre, at a fraction of the commercial cost. This is not a just impressive technology, it’s astonishing community action. And it suggests a model for rural Britain. The 130 activists who drove to Great Asby are now aiming to replicate it in 100 more villages. They have established a new website – though some of them have to drive to Penrith to log on. Libby, in Kirkby Stephen, is photographing and mapping all existing telecoms cabinets. Freddy, in Morland, is exploring alternative technologies from microwave transmitters and wireless hubs, to laying fibre in sewers. Five out of six farmers around Crosby Ravensworth have offered to forego wayleave charges and help dig trenches. Kate, in Stanwix, is training people to get online. Daniel, in Alston, is piloting medical tests from homes.
This is what happens when communities are empowered, when they are driven to create something for themselves. Traditional orthodoxies don’t need to apply. And of course the economics of community run networks is different, because communities can sign up well over 70% of a village to use broadband, they are much more attractive economic propositions. But if companies don’t invest, communities will bypass them entirely and build, own and run their own networks. The market orthodoxy wants us to behave in a certain – for their benefit. The Eden community demonstrates that designing a different solution, means they can change the rules and deliver a service that probably is more sustainable.
A two-day conference at the Eden Project exploring the emerging trends driving business change and revealing new opportunities for design practice. It will happen from 2nd – 3rd March 2011
Intersections 2011 will bring together a powerful mix of leading industry figures to discuss the issues that will shape the future of business and the economy.
Gain insights on innovation and design from the likes of IDEO, Think Public, Elmwood, More Associates, Forpeople and Thomas Matthews as well international perspectives from groundbreaking individuals and practical viewpoints from CEOs of inspiring organisations at the vanguard of change.
This is an inspiring event for me as I am arguing in my No Straight Lines project that what we face is a design problem, from successfully migrating from a linear world to a non-linear one.
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:
Practices in the open source software community offer a model for encouraging large-scale scientific problem solving.
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.
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.
New models of venture funding is something we most also explore. Here I discuss the worlds first venture fund, funded by a global community: GrowVC GrowC represents a different type of eco-system, and approach to venture funding, it seeks to replace current approaches to funding with a viable alternative. And it is a viable alternative that we all seek.
Following only 4 months of service from its launch in Spain on 1st September, Qustodian, (Background info @dotopen) a new interactive mobile marketing channel that sends commercial messages and offers to users based on their consumer preferences, ended the year with 50,000 users and having published more than 80 communication engagements from leading advertisers in their sectors, such as ING Bank, Ford, Iberia, Volvo, Adidas, Universal Music, Clarins, Mapfre, L’Oréal, Carrefour, Disney, Pepsi and Unicef.
Fernando Sánchez-Terán, Director General of Qustodian said: “We are very pleased with our launch results, especially with the number of users. Whilst these users were unsure at first, after trying the service the vast majority described Qustodian as verygood and very innovative. In fact, 95% of them would recommend our service to their friends presenting it primarily as a form of advertising for products and services that they would like.” He added:
Advertisers have equally welcomed the arrival of Qustodian to the extent that somehave used it as the reason to start to invest in mobile marketing. They particularly value this new medium for its rich formats (images, videos, links, coupons), user interaction (consumer feedback), detailed user segmentation and its focus in Return on Investment (RoI), with average message opening rate of around 70%.”
About Qustodian: Qustodian is a new, independent digital media company focused on providing next generation mobile advertising and marketing solutions using the mobile internet to communicate with mobile phone users.
Its goal is to provide a mobile marketing and advertising service that puts the user in control of what they receive, when and how. Members are offered the opportunity to create and manage a digital profile of their preferences so that they receive the financial and commercial benefits of the use of this data. This is in contrast to many large corporations who are currently collecting this profile data from us for their own benefit. This approach not only benefits the user, but also the advertiser, as the advertiser knows that the user has agreed and wants to receive communications from them.
Qustodian was founded in 2009 by Spanish and British professionals from the telecoms and media industries, including experts in mobile marketing, social intelligence and technical innovation. In 2010, Inveready Seed Capital invested in Qustodian. Qustodian are currently located in London, Madrid and Barcelona.
So here’s the thing – Man United a great club, great tradition, epic success, epic tragedy. In fact Man U is an institution. Friends of mine describe the place of worship “Old Trafford” as an extraordinary place, and whether you like or hate football, fussball or whatever language you want to say it in, we have all heard of the great Man U.
Loyalty, devotion, passion, community, are just a few words that shape peoples sense of the club. The great David Beckham, and Eric Cantona who are still icons of the modern game, plied their trade in the red shirt. Man U in part defines Manchester – it is a key part of its identity.
FC United beat Rochdale
Despite all that, the club found itself selling to the wonderful Glazers from the US, who loaded it with debt. Toxic debt. FC United: A punk football fairytale is a story we should all listen to,
Since 2005, Manchester United, previously debt-free, has paid out hundreds of millions of pounds to service the debt of the Glazer family. Levels of investment in players have dropped markedly and ticket prices have gone up by around 50%. Last season, the green and gold protest campaign, sponsored by the Manchester United Shareholder’s Trust (Must), prompted tens of thousands of United fans to wear the original colours of the Newton Heath club that was the forerunner to the modern Manchester United. “Green and gold until United are sold” went the slogan.
writes Julian Coman. For me this is representative of just how far people will go for their own greed and gain. I am sure the Murdochs and the Glazers are great friends. I am personally not a great footballing fan but my deep fascination is what happens when devotion is ignored, community ridiculed, and passion pimped and prostituted for higher and higher ticket sales.
But this season, the Glazers are still here. Or rather over there, in the United States. The family cannot freely walk the streets of Manchester for fear of attack. Meanwhile, among those who chose to give up their Old Trafford season tickets, in some cases after decades of attendance at matches home and away, something remarkable has happened: a club formed out of a sense of revulsion at the Glazer takeover, and run on the basis of one member one vote, has become the focal point of a strangely wonderful, slightly bonkers, always passionate football community.
FC United represents culture that Raymond Williams described as ordinary and everyday. And I think the Glazers represent something that we do not want – avarice.
Discontent with the way United was being run had been growing for some time. In 1995 the Independent Manchester United Supporters Association (IMUSA) had been formed to represent fan’s views in the wake of a Tannoy announcement during a crucial game ordering fans to sit down. It was an instruction that led to the immediate birth of the chant: “Stand up for the champions!” as the majority of spectators stood in protest. Stewarding became increasingly heavy-handed. The Stretford End, the famous former terrace and locus of United’s most passionate supporters, was renamed the West Stand and its first tier filled with executive seats. A generation of fans felt that the whole experience of attending football matches was being transformed, and not for the better. For a younger generation, the escalating price of tickets meant that going to the match increasingly signified going to the nearest pub that carried games on Sky television. For the rebels, FC were to be the antidote to “modern” football (ticket prices today are £8 for adults, £5 for over-60s and £2 for under-18s).
What were they thinking? Not the fans but the Glazers!
We know that, where we once thought our future to be certain, the only certainty we now face is uncertainty. The question is then how to deal with uncertainty?
Now is the time when we need a way of evaluating of what comes next, when we face a world having gone in a very short period of time from seemingly simple, to complicated to, complex, and, chaotic. Chaotic complexity is concussive, it disorientating effects surround us, resulting often in more fundamentalist worldview reflexes and perspectives that are dangerously corrosive And yet, this world seems to be if anything, accelerating. At this very moment, great debates are raging, the spanners are in the works defined by 911 (we now talk about asymmetrical warfare), the near collapse of the world banking system (and its asymmetrical impact on every single one of us), and the fever pitched exchanges going on all levels of society in every country on this planet over wikileaks and its asymmetrical deep impact. Bruce Sterling writes a great post in Underpaid Genius These are defining ideological battles exploding and imploding at the same time and they arrived in a single decade. Importantly, these dilemmas are highly interlinked and interdependent, consequently a one-size-fits-all command and control approach just wont do. Simply put, there are no longer simple problems, what we face are complex dilemmas.
We are in part renegotiating a whole plethora of power relationships and of course this happens in unexpected and sometimes unwanted ways.
Over 10 million people bought a Kinect in the first 10 days of launch, a reward ($1000) was offered by Adafruit, for Hackers to get Kinect to run on alternative operating systems. Microsoft announced it would bring in the legal beagles were this to happen. Adafruit upped the prize money to $2000.
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
Alan has addressed, radio, television, and conference audiences globally. His book and his articles have been published many respected magazines, journals and newspapers globally.
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