How did this crowd get in my office?

Posted on November 23, 2011 by Ari

A few weeks ago in our Measuring Social class, we had a panel exploring issues around crowdsourcing.  This was just a terrific panel.  It had a lot to do with the panelists who participated which included:

Crowdsouring or drawing on the wisdom from a dispersed community has been around for a long time, it’s just no one thought to put a nice wrapper around it until Jeff Howe coined the term.  I use a quote from the famed economist Friedrich Hayek in one of my lectures. He said the following in 1945, (yes 1945!):

“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess. The economic problem of society is … a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality”

Pretty astonishing the clarity of insight into what companies are now just beginning to discover.  There are plenty of examples to see how this was used in practice, for example the Chicago Tribune building (did not know that one).  One of the panelists, Peter, provides some great examples of these “crowdsourced” initiatives in his blog post “Crowdsourcing isn’t new only the word is”

The general sense from the panelists was that crowdsouring is similar to where ecommerce was back in the late 1990s; everyone knew it was going to be important but most are struggling with how to harness collective wisdom and implement successful initiatives. From my point of view, I find it fascinating that this practice is not limited to a niche market with narrowly defined interests, but rather there are a plethora of examples of both large and small companies/organizations/communities in different industries attempting to harness crowds for a wide variety of uses.

crowdSPRING and Quirky are great examples of small companies that have taped into a need to work with creative folks around design and product development.  P&G is a well known company with 24 brands that have over a billion in net annual sales.  They have successfully leveraged crowds to help in the co-creation of new products through their open connect initiative.  I always find it interesting that a large company like P&G can latch onto this concept early, create top down leverage, aggregate a large motivated community and especially work out all the IP hurdles.   But they are not the only large company focused on harnessing collective wisdom; examples are plentiful from Starbucks “MyIdea” to IBM’s “IdeaJam” to Intuit’s “Brainstorm”.  Even Government agencies such as NASA and DARPA are experimenting with crowdsourcing initiatives.  During the panel, we discussed some interesting trends around crowdsourcing including:

  • Vetting the crowd or leaving it open
  • Commoditized (repetitive) tasks vs. creative tasks
  • Price erosion for similar services
  • Greater prevalence of crowdsourcing platforms, such as Mturk and associated implications
  • Gamification, Monetization and/or Peer Recognition as a motivator to participate
  • Subjective vs objective tasks
  •  Ability to scale platforms/initiatives effectively
  • Limits on what can or should be “crowdsourced”

Each of these issues would be interesting to explore in their own right (perhaps a source of future posts…) but if I piqued your interest, catch the replay of the panel online.

Posted in Crowdsourcing, Social Media Class | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Drowning in social data, better find a statistician….

Posted on July 7, 2011 by Ari

Two weeks ago, I had an opportunity to co-host a virtual roundtable with The Center for CIO Leadership founded by IBM.  The topic focused on social data and the challenges/ opportunities for CIOs.  To prepare for the roundtable, we put together a laundry list of issues from enabling enterprise 2.0 initiatives to security around storage/transferring data.  Since we only had one hour, we decided to focus on key issues involving data driven decision-making, success metrics and resource needs.  We began with a discussion of the challenge this new data source presents and how CIOs can leverage it for insight across the organization.  We also spent some time on the demands put on the CIO and staff to incorporate social data into existing processes from business intelligence to customer segmentation. One of the takeaways was that the different characteristics of this data (i.e. unstructured, voluminous, readily available) as well as how its generated, collected, stored and integrated will require new skillsets and perhaps even a different orientation to the traditional IT role.  So, what might be important skillsets for this next generation of data analyst?  I thought I would take a crack and put together some ideas….

Curiosity – The adage “you don’t know what you don’t know” is very appropriate when mining, analyzing and integrating social data. When I was a graduate student developing my thesis, experimentation was essential to develop unique findings.  This needs to be enabled and even encouraged within a corporate setting to find how this data can add value to different strategic initiatives.

Comprehensive mentality – Collect everything (within reason) since you never know what might be important for a future campaign or initiative.  However, keeping track of what data is collected, where it is stored and how to access it is key.  Data does have a finite shelf life and data sitting unused in a silo adds no value.

Global mindset while acting locally – Social data can be used to target market segments but there are always gaps in defining a complete understanding of customers (habits, trends, history).  Accessing data from individual campaigns, communities of interest, social platforms is useful; but only if implemented strategically. What is important, how do you build a holistic view, what are the ethical implication, how do you ensure proper adherence to security? These all need to be included in the mix…

Bridge builder – Increasingly, social data is used throughout the enterprise.  However, is it focused on brand awareness, internal collaboration and innovation, engagement with active online communities etc.?  These are all markedly different strategies, impacting various departments and warranting their own set of success metrics.

Statistical orientation – This attribute fits in with experimentation.  There are many different analysis tools for the social space, however sometimes you need to resort to good old fashioned sampling of data to find out whether there is statistically significant correlation.  We use several applications in my class at Carnegie Mellon but often need to resort to collecting data and doing analysis using primary research methods.

Rapid iteration mindset – Sometimes ideas need to be “thrown over the wall” to see what resonates, pulled back in, optimized and redelivered.  This is common in the consumer social space as new platforms try to find a balance between value, member concerns, resource limitations and speed to market.  How can this be fostered but tempered for a corporate setting?  Perhaps using an internal community as a test bed?

Investigative reporting – Think about what a good reporter needs to do – retell a story, verify facts, corroborate sources, etc.  The same thing hold true for social analysts.  Data is simply qualitative or quantitative variables.  It is up to the person analyzing it to be able to explain what is important within the data orally and visually.

Right brain orientation – I think tapping into creative thinking is also important.  All this information is ineffective unless it can be communicated.  In my class, I bring in Dan Byorski who is faculty at the school of design @ CMU to discuss communicating  data form and function as well as meaning visually. Dealing with complex data is difficult.  Communicating its importance to different groups is equally challenging.

Community instead of process driven – Don’t get me wrong, processes are important but unlike other data stores that fit nicely into processes, social data is continuously evolving.  Imagine an ERP system that relies on a common database, which has been defined and clearly articulated.  Now think about a campaign around social listening where variables can change readily based on new external inputs.  Think of it as a shift from taxonomy (process) to folksonomy (dynamic and largely derived from the community.)  You have to adjust your analysis accordingly.

What are your thoughts?  Are there other characteristics that need to be included in the mix?  Will we see the development of a competency center across the enterprise focusing on social data?

Posted in Social Data | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Stop asking the same bleeping questions…

Posted on April 27, 2011 by Ari

Recently, I had some service done on my Prius, BTW: if there was ever a car company and model embracing the social space, it has to be the Toyota Prius.  Their new campaign is designed around crowdsourcing innovation using components from the car.  Basically teams are breaking down the car and using various components (solar sun roof, brake system, hybrid synergy drive, etc.) to re-configure them around unique innovations.  I think this is brilliant and has interesting implication as you can see with our local ambassadors of innovation, DeepLocal - (but more about that later).

I had a fairly standard service completed.  Lost my smartkey, so they had to order and reprogram a new one.  Apparently, this is more involved than it seems.  You cannot just order one from eBay, jailbreak it and program it yourself, much to my dismay.  Well, I’m sure there are ways mere consumers can do it but that’s beyond my limited capacities.  You need to order it from Toyota and have your dealership program it with specialized equipment.  It went smoothly enough after I made this realization and then I was confronted with the after service survey.  Not by one or even two but by three different groups.  Yes, the dealership wanted to know about my experience but so did Toyota Finance (I’m leasing the car) as well as Toyota Parts.  In fact one of them kept calling almost every night right around the time I was putting my kids to bed.  Finally, I answered the call and it was the same bleeping questions as the other surveys.  In fact they were all pretty much similar i.e. how satisfied were you with the service and if not, what could we have done differently.  Some were more involved and drawn out asking round about questions that basically wanted the same fundamental information.

This annoyed me to no end but I understand the justification.  In our hyper connected, real time, socially engaged world, organizations more than ever want to reconnect with consumers to assess customer experience, collect data and improve satisfaction ratios.  But this was not the way to do it.  One of the aspects we discuss continually in my social analysis class is sharing of data, collaboration across geographies, departments, skill sets, demographics, etc.  This seems simple enough.  Why couldn’t these three groups collaborate on a simple survey?  Why can’t my survey answers be available somewhere in the cloud where I can grant access for other to view them – sort of like profile portability which is still not available despite lots of work in this area (yet, another blog post).

Organizations need to understand that consumers are not a point in time, an incident that occurred or a piece of data that needs to be recorded.  Along with the trend toward consumerism, there needs to be a holistic view of customers, which in this rudimentary example includes the fact that I have already answered the survey and willingly provided the necessary information.  I spoke about this in one of my first blog posts entitled “Little Help Over Here” Unfortunately this will only occur when companies realize that there is value in sharing data much like all of us who are involved with and get value from online social communities.  However, with legacy systems and policies around data collection and distribution as well as security and privacy concerns, I don’t think this will change quickly.  But I would love to see one day a company ask me after conducting a survey would you mind if we shared your responses with X, Y and Z?

Posted in Consumerism, Innovation, Social Media Class | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

South by So What….

Posted on March 23, 2011 by Ari

I had a great opportunity to finally get down to Austin for SXSW.  I only spent a day and a half down there but immediately figure out that this was a much different sort of conference than I have attended in the past.  SXSW is a multi-industry conference-taking place every March in Austin and covering Interactive, Music and Film.  It sort of struck me when I was sitting in a lobby waiting for a meeting and saw both Rainn Wilson (Dwight from the Office) and Reid Hoffman within a the same ½ hour, you know you’re not in Kansas anymore…

It was interesting to watch the ennui from the faithful on how commercial the conference has gotten.  It seems like it is in some ways suffering from its own success.  In fact, it’s compounded by the fact that they stretch across three major industries.  NPR did an interesting story on the music side and whether it’s even worthwhile for bands to make the trek.  Both sides were represented.

Now some of the backlash has been down right hysterical, a perfect example is Hitler weighing in on SXSW. Others provided a humorous and satirical look at segmenting out the typical types you will find at the conference.  It also encapsulates one of my favorite quotes “ We’re Twitter meets Zynga with an API that transforms the social graph” – Nice job from the folks at Software Advice.

I have no context as this was my first trip down but I have gone through many different conference evolutions as they have tried to serve a wider audience and weather the storm through recessions and over-exuberance.  I used to be heavily involved in the telecom space and saw the changes from Supercom to Globalcom to Nextcom.  I also recall the changes in CTIA from a conference predominantly catering to wireless carriers and equipment manufacturers to opening up the stage to media professionals and eventually brand marketers.  I stuck to the interactive side, but to me there was a vibe/feel that I was hoping for – smart people passionate about technology and looking to make a difference.

In terms of interactive there is one other archetype which will keep me, coming back and that’s the social innovator.  These are the folks that understand the power of the medium and are using it to affect change either in their community, industry, region etc.  I saw Social Innovation alive and thriving at SXSW even taking up a greater percentage of time and mindshare of entrepreneurs focusing on social platforms, technologies and communities.  Even though there was no Twitter or Foursquare that consumed everyone’s attention, there was an undercurrent of how do we leverage these initiatives for good.  I attended a few sessions (especially crowdsourcing) where the discussion was focused on

  • People – not just disadvantaged communities but peers trying to break into new careers or get projects funded/started
  • Place – sustainable business practices, innovation in the workplace and how the environment is affecting livelihood of people across the globe
  • Policy – how can social be used as a change agent for bringing to light unjust regimes/policies, transparency into open gov, fixing serious infrastructure issues (e.g. transportation)

Winston Churchill once said “The Price of Greatness is Responsibility” or for you comic book fans Uncle Ben from Spider Man said “With great power there must come great responsibility”.  I like that there were attendees from companies, organizations, universities and the like that resonated with this theme.  Being able to harness and extrapolate insight from collective human knowledge is a very powerful thing but careful attention needs to be placed on how we wield it.

So I’ll be back at SXSW next year that’s for sure.  Would I say no to grabbing a beer with Rainn Wilson, no way, but I’ll be just as happy to sit and chat with several entrepreneurs, students and technologists who want to address social technologies, societal issues and affect change …

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Posted on February 23, 2011 by Ari

I’m actually not a DR, I just play one online….

In our social media analysis class at Carnegie Mellon, we have been putting a lot of thought into the evolution of the social space and what our project sponsors should consider when making major investments in this area.  It is always interesting to see where we have come from.  I have spent some time evaluating the mechanics and social interactions of discussion boards and forums especially as it relates to privacy.  In the past, anonymity was an important item so individuals could not target community members directly.  Yahoo had several groups geared toward different discussions and of course folks could sign up, mis-represent themselves and game the conversation.  In fact, there was nothing preventing folks from creating several identities and monopolizing a conversation.  With stronger community policies and self-policing capabilities, this was reduced but still continues.  You might recall when the CEO of Whole Foods wrote anonymously on Internet financial forums that a smaller rival Wild Oats Market was overpriced prior to Whole food buying the company for $565 M in 2/2007.  You might also remember the Steve Job’s heart attack hoax when a teenager posted a false report on ireport.com causing Apple’s stock price to plummet 5% over the course of a day.  Several organizations, including the SEC, started investigating how they can prevent this practice in the future

With the advent of modern social networks, identity became critical.   Friendster, Myspace, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. rely on members to provide their actual name.  This puts an extra onus on users to provide factual information and not mis-represent themselves especially when it relates to their credentials.  Its one thing to be incur a low ranking from the community, it’s another thing to be called out by connections especially business networks.  In addition, I don’t need to read “coolguy 101”’s content or follow them over a period of time to connect.  Rather, I can simply get a friend request from Jane Doe who I went to High School with or worked with at a previous company to feel comfortable in connecting with her.   This allows for acceleration of connections.  It also provides greater self-identification of information.  If I want to get noticed by other members of the community, I will place in additional information regarding my works history, education, preferences, demographic information, etc.  This provides greater possible ways for folks to connect and shows stronger correlation between community members.  Stronger correlations possibly allow for tighter bonds, which ensure staying power.  Weaker links create fragmentation and dissociation (IMHO).  In fact, it is my theory that these stronger correlations ensure a comfort level that ensures the delivery of content, which is the lifeblood of any social network.  Without the generation of content, status updates, microblog entries, photos, videos, links etc. that keep people coming back over and over again to see what’s new and interesting.  In David Kirkpatrick’s book, The Facebook Effect, (BTW, Highly Recommended) he writes that transparency of information and identity of community members was an essential part of Facebook’s game plan and was a key contributor to their success even to the point where personal and business identities are combined.  Privacy controls are in place for the user to decide what they wish to share with which community.  My personal belief is that transparency will continue to increase as companies disclose more information about targeted advertising, collaboration becomes a mandate around innovation within the enterprise and the social norms change around full disclosure online.  As I keep telling clients, students and anyone else that bother to listen to me, it’s about education in terms of what you want to disclose, what value you reap from disclosure and what are the potential pitfalls with all this information availability….

Posted in Social Media Class | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Welcome, now please fill out the following 10 items…

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Ari

Wow, has it really been since Oct. that I have posted anything.  Nothing like a gently reminder from my 9 yr old to get my act in motion.  Hopefully, I can sustain this…

Recently, BusinessWeek published a chart on how not to embarrass yourself while doing business in Germany.  Here is a link to the graphic.  There were several common sense items but some struck me as somewhat excessive.  Now I understand that there are cultural differences and social norms that vary from one culture to another but it got me thinking about social communities.  Specifically, how formalities can manifest themselves into barriers to adoption and engagement.  My thinking was that when you have a highly formal country with particular etiquette required to conduct business, does that translate to online barriers/hurdles leading to diminished use of social networks, potentially even community collaboration?

I used to do quite a bit of consulting in the telecomm space and the general rule was that the more steps a user needs to go through to get value from an application the less likely they will be to use it.  This is exacerbated by the fact that mobile users have a limited attention span due to small form factor for viewing, connectivity issues and in most cases they need information quickly.  By placing hurdles between the user and accessing information you diminish value.  These steps might be placed in due to bad UI design or they might be put in as part of a formal process to extract information prior to delivering value.  Either way they lead to lower utilization.

It also translates into the online community space. I worked for a financial services firm developing an online community for investors.  We wanted to drive adoption but the legal team wanted to make sure that perspective members were aware of the user terms of service.  In most cases, users simply check off a box and they are in which has probably precipitated much of the angst around privacy – Read the agreement and really understand what social networks can access and eventually monetize, but that’s another blog post.  At the client, after much consternation we appeased legal and actually displaying the agreement in front of users.  By looking at conversion ratios, we saw a significant drop off in registrations based on displaying the agreement.  This formality created a barrier to adoption.

So, getting back to my original theory that a society with a more formal structure to conducting business results in lower adoption of social communities, there is some anecdotal evidence.  RWW (one of my favorite sources for all things web/social) did a piece on how Germany is behind the rest of the world in terms of online social adoption. Link here.  It’s an interesting read regarding the German blogosphere, absence of social news and the lackluster social start-up scene. There are some bright spots, of course, but StudiVZ which was once hailed as a potential German version of Facebook is not achieving the growth patterns seen in other social communities that are country specific.

In the corporate world, German companies are blocking access to social sites citing security concerns, as well as lack of productivity. Link Here.  There are of course several examples to the contrary.  I have worked with a few German based companies who are embracing online social communities and viewing it as a way to accelerate collaboration and innovation both externally and internally.  Whichever way you might be leaning on this issue, I do think that there is merit in research examining a correlation between formalities in society and diminished utilization of social networking even evaluating community-based collaboration.  I guess the proof will be in the data, smells like an interesting research project to me…

Posted in Social Media Utilization | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

Mine, Mine, Mine….

Posted on October 15, 2010 by Ari

We had an interesting class last week on Enterprise 2.0 and the adoption of social oriented tools for companies and organizations.  It was interesting to do some research on the transition from focusing on technologies, platforms and workflows to enabling innovation, collaboration and processes centered around people.  This adoption, of course, is being accelerated by the widespread use of consumer focused social technologies.  The new work force is not asking for the adoption of these tools and humbly waiting for their incorporation, they are demanding them and if they are not available, well, there is always options like your competition.  New technologies are being built from the ground up around collaboration (sort of a social DNA).  This is driving the legacy vendors focusing on document and content management to become more social.  The space is getting increasingly fragmented and confusing with IBM’s Lotus Connections and Microsoft Sharepoint layering on collaboration and social networking features, the social platforms like Telligent and Jive offering a suite of tools and sophisticated analysis around collaboration and content while the more point  oriented solutions like SocialText and Yammer are deepening and extending their offerings.  There is even a whole slew of pundits focusing on development in this space. Dion Hinchcliffe now at the Dachis Group is doing some pivotal work in getting enterprises ready for the wave of new collaborative tools and work processes.

With all this momentum around application enabling innovation and collaboration, a majority of companies are adopting these technologies at glacial speed.  One answer could be the relative maturity of the industry. A continuously changing landscape does not make for rapid decision-making and deployment.  Another answer might be in the metrics.  We know this very well from our social media analysis class at CMU.  Companies are trying to understand how to effectively measure consumer focused social media campaigns to provide the necessary justification to allocate required budgets and resources.  The metrics and timeline for evaluation differs significantly from previous campaigns so there is a paradigm shift happening.  Within the enterprise, the metrics to evaluate success (innovation, process improvement, resource reduction, etc) are also being re-evaluated associated with a more collaborative organization.

I believe one of the primary reasons these enterprise tools are not getting adopted rapidly is not based on the availability of tools, integration timeline into current platforms or collaboration/social processes but the shift in focus around individual effort and achievement.  Let me explain.  In many companies, tacit knowledge is viewed as an asset, tightly controlled by individual employees since it provides accolades, control and staying power.  “We can’t fire Bob because he is the only one who knows how to successfully run the work process”: hence Bob has job security.   Also, Bob gets rewarded based on his accomplishments to a large extent so there is little motivation for Bob to share his knowledge and a disincentive for Bob to spend a great deal of time on collaboration.  This type of thinking (culture of I, greed is good, whats mine is mine, whatever) needs to change to a culture of sharing for collaboration to firmly gain ground and it all starts with compensation.  Whether we like it or not, this is the biggest motivator.  You can want employees to “do good” for altruistic reasons till the cows come home but ultimately it won’t be put into practice until it directly impacts compensation.  What this means is a change in placing collaboration activities into an employee’s job reqs and reviewing an individual not on how they finished a project on time and under budget but how they used the community to achieve it.  Social oriented compensation schemes need to reflect a person’s contribution to their immediate groups/teams.  Perhaps the next generation of social software will directly spit out reports that managers can review reflecting a person’s collective contribution and then this will be used for assessment.  Once this gets put into lace we will see more widespread adoption of these practices and collaborative tools…

Posted in Enterprise 2.0 | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Oh no, here come the haters…

Posted on September 30, 2010 by Ari

On a recent project, I saw an unusual anomaly through social media.  It was very much akin to a good old fashioned smear campaign with the ultimate goal to embed a negative image of the company.  Unlike targeted messages, these mentions were broadcast to anyone available to try and achieve the greatest reach possible.  The same messages and themes were delivered routinely and they were sent out anywhere usually from 6-72 hours after either a public announcement from the company or a mention of the company (positive and negative) by traditional media.  The interesting thing was that a) the same folks kept issuing out identical or slightly altered messages and b) they would double up their efforts after any positive mention about the company or its activities.

It became fairly clear that here was a market segment that was in no way interested in engaging in a dialogue with the company on a level playing field.  As opposed to others who were interested in what the company was doing to mitigate any negative impacts on the environment and society, this group viewed the company as evil (not even a necessary evil) and wanted nothing less than to see them out of business (conjecture on my part).  Hence, we termed them the “haters”.  Trying to take down a company is a daunting challenge especially when you are faced with a multibillion dollar global conglomerate.  What they were attempting was to try and erode consumer confidence and shape public sentiment in a piecemeal fashion.  This may not be a concern in a traditional (non-digital) campaign but we live in a hyper connected real time society where the internet has infinite memory and old messages become new once again when different communities discover them and disseminate them to their followers/friends/fans etc.  In addition, you have the ease of aggregation in a globally connected always online society.  That means that a group in Asia who might never know about similar concerns/issues/tactics of another group in the US can find and connect with them through SEM, social media analysis or any number of ways groups connect online and with the rush to translate content they can now collaborate, aggregate negative views and provide a unified front.  So what was before a singular volley or campaign directed at a company now becomes a global coordinated campaign.  This can become a difficult thing to get past no matter how much the organization is trying to impart positive change.  In our social media class, we take a look at the Greenpeace/Nestle case study, where Greenpeace launched a campaign to affect policy at Nestle around responsible sourcing of materials.  This was a global well orchestrated campaign that in a short amount of time rallied a community to implement new policies and procedures at one of the largest CPG companies in the world.

So what’s a company to do about the haters?  Well, you can’t ignore them and you can’t marginalize them and you can try, but it probably won’t be successful, to engage them.  You can spend a great deal of time, energy and cost to try and get them to understand your role and the societal benefit of your actions but it will most likely fall on deaf ears.  The opportunity cost associated with these actions can become huge.  The haters are ‘dug in” and they have sent a good chunk of their time and effort propagating negative messages.  They are not going to suddenly give up and come over to your corner with some well crafted messaging.  So, focus on the markets that want to have a discourse making sure that you do it on a level playing field not trying to cram down top down messaging.  Develop advocates with a deep understanding of your industry and the associated challenges realizing that some will resonate with your messaging be it around good corporate citizenship, health and welfare of society, sustainability and resource conservation, etc.  Others will be continuous skeptics and influenced by the haters.  Build your community of stakeholders, both with you and on the fence, by engaging with them on topics that are relevant in an online fashion where they aggregate to discuss.  Understand their vernacular and social norms so that you don’t come across as the 800 lb elephant that just entered the room.  Yes the haters will come out on mass but the only way to counteract negative sentiment is by building your voice and community awareness around the positive.

Posted in Social Media Class | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Innovation Happens, Commercialization is a Grind

Posted on September 6, 2010 by Ari

A few weeks ago, a friend and I, put together an event on Innovation.  The goal was to develop greater levels of interaction and networking opportunities between 2 groups – start-ups and established corporations.  We put together a pilot event that had three components:

  • A speed demo (much like speed dating) where start pitch their technology and value proposition to companies, organizations and invited guests in a 6 min quick pitch
  • A panel where reps from the corporations can discuss innovation, piloting new technologies and hurdles/challenges associated with adoption of new processes
  • And, of course, the much needed drinking and socializing

The speed demo phase was designed to help start-ups continuously refine their pitch as different groups shifted from one start-up to the next.  No time for questions just setup the idea, show them the good stuff and get ready for the next wave.  The panel was designed to focus on a specific subject du jour; in this case we picked collaboration and how to foster a culture around sharing.

The interesting themes that came out of the evening included the disassociation between a start-up’s perception of its utility and the corporate viewpoint, the innovation continuum, and the challenge associated with collaboration in regulated and process heavy environments.

Start-up technology companies live and breathe their value proposition continuously and that can be both a good and a bad thing.   Good in the sense that you want to convey an air of confidence in that you can solve challenging technical problems and associated business challenges.  Bad, in the sense that that there needs to be a modicum of humility regarding what you know and what you don’t. See my earlier post on “It Takes a Village..” The companies at the event where interested in new ideas and technologies but tend to view start-ups as a potential liability.  For example: what happens if the company goes under – is there a contingency plan, what happens if the company’s products and services don’t scale to meet demands, will the product or service by compliant with any industry wide regulation, what about data redundancy security, interoperability, not to mention ongoing support and service.  A successful start-up will continually think of ways that they can mitigate risk rather than endlessly extolling all the benefits associated with their hopeful deployment.

I find the innovation continuum interesting in that start-ups, universities and accelerators foster continuous and unfettered innovation.  As a professor, I am utterly amazed at how much innovation occurs within the University.  The problem is trying to get these innovations simply out of the ideation phase.   There are very few truly innovative companies; the vast majority are trying to figure out how to create a culture of innovation.  What they do have is expertise in processes and workflows needed to move ideas to commercial grade products.  So why not develop more interaction between the 2 groups where start-ups (I would also include Universities) work on the innovation side and companies work on developing products for market.  Along the path, some group needs to be responsible for market assessment, prioritization and filtering, perhaps a shared endeavor.  We are seeing this being done to some degree with open innovation communities.

The last theme centered on innovation in regulated and process heavy environments.  This is tough nut to crack.  Companies in industries such as finance, healthcare, chemical etc. always have to content with how innovation will impact regulations and agencies/authorities.  In other markets, where innovation takes place at break neck speed and goes through rapid iteration, innovation in these industries feels like it moves at glacial speed.   I think this can also benefit from increased interaction with start-ups and universities.  I know several examples where programs and technologies are being designed with experts who know how to address these challenges if and when they arise.   If you are selling into the financial space, have experts available who understand rules like Reg FD and legislation like Sarbanes Oxley to see what impact your product service on these issues and how to address it.

I think these themes are fairly common but also very addressable and interactions like this event can accelerate home grown innovation.  According to the feedback the event was pretty successful.  Enough so in that we will continue and improve upon the pilot potentially open up further sessions to themes around energy, healthcare, robotics, etc.

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It Takes a Village….

Posted on July 16, 2010 by Ari

Back in January of 1996, Hillary Clinton went on tour to promote her book “it takes a Village, and others lessons children teach us” The book was pivotal in drawing attention to the fact that individuals and groups outside the immediate family unit affect a child’s well being drawing attention to a child’s development needs.

I was recalling this quote as I was putting together text for the i6 challenge.  The i6 challenge is an innovation competition administered by the Economic Development Agency (EDA).  The goal is to fund ideas to drive technology commercialization and entrepreneurship in regions throughout the US.  I think this is exactly what we need to get teams of individuals and organizations focused on innovation.  I work quite a bit with Carnegie Mellon University and am always impressed with the activity around innovation.  Unfortunately, enthusiasm and energy around innovation does not always lead to commercialization.  There are several challenges these technologies and inventors face in making the leap from the lab to the market including:

  • The sheer volume of ideas warrants that not all can have the attention they deserve.  A queuing theory based on prioritization can be appropriate but some of these technologies are very time sensitive
  • Oftentimes, these technologies are often incredibly complex to assess.  They can be based on many years of advanced research and combine several disciplines into the end result
  • Gap funding to help make the transition from government to private funding is difficult.  This is the beginning of what some folks call the “Valley of Death” where companies need to operate on private funding until they can subsist on their own.
  • More inventors are commercializing technologies rather than just licensing.  This might have something to do with the economy, the visibility of successful start-ups, the attraction of autonomy, etc.

In research on social communities, one of the drivers is the ability to provide assistance to other community members.  I discussed this in one of my earlier blog posts.  If a University worked to create an infrastructure that would allow alumni and other stakeholders to “connect” with early stage technologies either within the University environment or freshly spun out, it might provide relief from some of the challenges mentioned above.  We are all familiar with forums, wikis and “semi-gated” communities.  Universities can leverage these technologies not only to broadcast interesting inventions and developments but also to provide some of the following:

  • Harness the collective energy of the extended community to assess inventions from a technical and market based perspective
  • Provide advice on markets, regulations and target industries
  • Create a repository of digital information based on interaction between community members and inventors that can be used for better targeting, planning and resource allocation
  • Identify and connect with suitable management and advisors
  • Even provide much needed funding either through direct financing or connection to appropriate private funding sources

During some of my research, I heard from many alumni that the only time a University connects with them is when they need a donation.  If the value proposition becomes more bi-directional and Universities provide an easy mechanism for alumni (and others) to connect and work with University based technologies, they might find that they don’t need to continually try to find and reach out to some of these individuals.  Rather, they are already well entrenched within the University innovation community.  Micro-financing, much like what is taking place with Kiva.org, might also be in place to provide necessary gap funding required to get technologies to a phase where they can be spun out and go after other forms of financing.  Of course, this does not help pay for new buildings, build the endowment, pay for scholarships, etc but it does provide a need resulting in greater interaction and satisfaction, which makes for more engaged individuals.

Now some Universities naturally develop this interaction – technologies are continually introduced to the extended community and quickly charted along a path.  Others, have a much more difficult time with this activity in part due to separation (physical and psychological) between possible community members and the University, inability to disseminate information on technology development, lack of attention to business development and relationship building between departments, etc.  My belief is that social media and expert communities can be the great equalizer and Universities should be wielding these initiatives as strategic weapons against the Valley of Death and spurring their engines of innovation.   Another fact is that most Universities have Technology Transfer Offices that are mostly collegial and continually discuss viability of technologies, licensing opportunities, new commercialization’s process, etc.  This provides a perfect bridge to connect different networks together, increasing the reach any one University might have to find the necessary and interested resources to help move the technology to the market.

If you are interested in learning more about this space, you can check out the following resources:

  • CMU has built an expert community to accelerate technology commercialization http://www.cmu.edu/cttec/
  • UMich. does a great job in broadcasting technologies and aligning interests of their community with start-ups http://www.techtransfer.umich.edu/
  • They are doing great things at Columbia through their Tech Ventures group http://www.techventures.columbia.edu/
  • Bob Nidever from UCLA has compiled a fantastic resource for immersing yourself in the world of early stage technology commercialization.  You can see his list on Twitter @bnidever/techtransfer
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