CPH127

Few weeks ago the online version of the economist included the following figure on membership growth of facebook. It appears that growth rates have somewhat peaked.

Do you agree, do you see the same movement? I my self got my FB-profile 5 months ago, and I must admit that I got one because of curiousness, and because a few clients asked me about the potential. Do you have a FB-profile? Why?

DesignLondon will develop, research and deliver radically new practices, tools and processes to transform the way businesses innovate, and translate their creativity into commercial success.

- Simulator - Teach - Incubator - Research

This new venture combines creativity and expertise in design from the Royal College of Art, engineering from Imperial College’s Faculty of Engineering and the business of innovation from Imperial College’s Tanaka Business School. It was established following the Cox Review: Creativity in Business that highlighted the need to stir together the scientific, engineering, business and creative design communities to enhance business and public sector innovation. Design London has four main pillars: creating new teaching programmes, conducting top-level research, incubating new business ideas and pioneering the next generation of innovation technology. It will deliver integrated design and business programmes for MBA and Masters of Engineering students at Imperial College, as well as for the MA students at the Royal College of Art.The innovation triangle blends design (represented by the Royal College of Art), engineering and technology (represented by Imperial College Faculty of Engineering) and the business of innovation (represented by Imperial’s Tanaka Business School). It has initial funding of £5.8 million from HEFCE and NESTA.

Read more at DesignLondon. Via. Royal College of Art News

Last week I went to a course on Complexity, Knowledge Management and future Innovation - gosh it was interesting. Maybe you already know Dave Snowden - a real thought-leader in that specific field. And he knows…

Nevertheless Dave and Cognitive Edge is on the track of something “new” and VERY interesting. The Cynefin-framework is outstanding when it comes to some sort of explanation of what is happening in the intersection between traditionel Knowledge Management, Technology and future growth and Innovation. As a true believer in proper use of Social Technologies - aka Web2.0 - internally in companies, I strongly believe that the flow of information between people is THE way to enhance innovation capacity, not by putting everything into a rigid data structure on a server.

Dave describes the development by setting up opposites:

Interesting - in Wemind we see that every day and try to advice our clients to move away from the old paradigm of thinking. It’s a tough call, a mental journey for most people.

Last week I was educated as a Accredited Practitioner in The Cynefin framework and I would love to have a conversation with you on how to cope with complexity in an internal organizational setting an still manage to make positive bottom lines.

If you are interested in further reading - and in Dave Snowden’ thoughts - you may be interested in these podcasts:

KM Australia 2007 Keynote
Jon Husband interview with Dave Snowden on Web 2.0
KM World 2007
KM Asia 2007 Keynote
Oil & Gas Exchange Houston September 2007

or the blogsposts:

Reporting on sin…
sense-making & path-finding
Safe-fail probes
Whence goeth KM?
Natural numbers, networks & communities
Volunteer not conscript
If the world is flat, seek out the bumpy bits
Good judgement comes from experiences. Experience comes from bad judgement
Confusing story telling with narrative

How to you see the challenges in management of today - is the cure to find in the books written around the time of the industrial revolution or is there by any chance new insights hidden in areas where we haven’t looked, yet? What do you think, and which implications does that have on our view on how to conceive business and companies?

Almost three years back the crew behind this blog - Jacob, Magnus & I - asked you who you are. It was a great exercise and gave us tremendous insights on who read the blog, what backgrounds the readers have, reader expectations, new ideas a.o

So, why not repeat that?

Who are you? - I would love to know more about you, please tell…..

Inspired by talks I’ve had with Silje Kamille Friis over the last years combined by thinking grounded in complexity science, sociology and innovation, but also views developed on our team at Wemind, we’ve developed a framework where we create tools for Mind Shift, Skill Shifts & Culture Shifts in organizations to cope with new strategy and business development. One of our observations, which we try to teach our clients is about a new currency in organizations, in knowledge processes - Generosity

Recently I surfed Kevin Kelly’s site and read his piece on “better than free“. Marvellous, and spot on on our own view on different and new drivers in knowledge processes and value creation.

His point - in short - it that the super-distribution system has become the foundation of our economy and wealth. The instant reduplication of data, ideas, and media underpins all the major economic sectors in our economy. Our wealth sits upon a very large device that copies promiscuously and constantly.

Yet the previous round of wealth in this economy was built on selling precious copies, so the free flow of free copies tends to undermine the established order. If reproductions of our best efforts are free, how can we then keep going? To put it simply, how does one make money selling free copies?

Kevin has two answers:

• When copies are super abundant, they become worthless.
• When copies are super abundant, stuff which can’t be copied becomes scarce and valuable.

So, a major question must be; What can’t be copied?

Consider “trust.” Trust cannot be copied. You can’t purchase it. Trust must be earned, over time. It cannot be downloaded.

…trust is BTW on of the major “ingredients” in Social Capital which we have examined in a newly published whitepaper in Wemind….

There are a number of other qualities similar to trust that are difficult to copy, and thus become valuable in this network economy.

Kelly describes them like generatives - he lists Eight Generatives Better Than Free:

Immediacy – Sooner or later you can find a free copy of whatever you want, but getting a copy delivered to your inbox the moment it is released — or even better, produced — by its creators is a generative asset. Many people go to movie theaters to see films on the opening night, where they will pay a hefty price to see a film that later will be available for free, or almost free, via rental or download. Hardcover books command a premium for their immediacy, disguised as a harder cover. First in line often commands an extra price for the same good. As a sellable quality, immediacy has many levels, including access to beta versions. Fans are brought into the generative process itself. Beta versions are often de-valued because they are incomplete, but they also possess generative qualities that can be sold. Immediacy is a relative term, which is why it is generative. It has to fit with the product and the audience. A blog has a different sense of time than a movie, or a car. But immediacy can be found in any media.

Personalization — A generic version of a concert recording may be free, but if you want a copy that has been tweaked to sound perfect in your particular living room — as if it were preformed in your room — you may be willing to pay a lot. The free copy of a book can be custom edited by the publishers to reflect your own previous reading background. A free movie you buy may be cut to reflect the rating you desire (no violence, dirty language okay). Aspirin is free, but aspirin tailored to your DNA is very expensive. As many have noted, personalization requires an ongoing conversation between the creator and consumer, artist and fan, producer and user. It is deeply generative because it is iterative and time consuming. You can’t copy the personalization that a relationship represents. Marketers call that “stickiness” because it means both sides of the relationship are stuck (invested) in this generative asset, and will be reluctant to switch and start over.

Interpretation — As the old joke goes: software, free. The manual, $10,000. But it’s no joke. A couple of high profile companies, like Red Hat, Apache, and others make their living doing exactly that. They provide paid support for free software. The copy of code, being mere bits, is free — and becomes valuable to you only through the support and guidance. I suspect a lot of genetic information will go this route. Right now getting your copy of your DNA is very expensive, but soon it won’t be. In fact, soon pharmaceutical companies will PAY you to get your genes sequence. So the copy of your sequence will be free, but the interpretation of what it means, what you can do about it, and how to use it — the manual for your genes so to speak — will be expensive.

Authenticity — You might be able to grab a key software application for free, but even if you don’t need a manual, you might like to be sure it is bug free, reliable, and warranted. You’ll pay for authenticity. There are nearly an infinite number of variations of the Grateful Dead jams around; buying an authentic version from the band itself will ensure you get the one you wanted. Or that it was indeed actually performed by the Dead. Artists have dealt with this problem for a long time. Graphic reproductions such as photographs and lithographs often come with the artist’s stamp of authenticity — a signature — to raise the price of the copy. Digital watermarks and other signature technology will not work as copy-protection schemes (copies are super-conducting liquids, remember?) but they can serve up the generative quality of authenticity for those who care.

Accessibility – Ownership often sucks. You have to keep your things tidy, up-to-date, and in the case of digital material, backed up. And in this mobile world, you have to carry it along with you. Many people, me included, will be happy to have others tend our “possessions” by subscribing to them. We’ll pay Acme Digital Warehouse to serve us any musical tune in the world, when and where we want it, as well as any movie, photo (ours or other photographers). Ditto for books and blogs. Acme backs everything up, pays the creators, and delivers us our desires. We can sip it from our phones, PDAs, laptops, big screens from where-ever. The fact that most of this material will be available free, if we want to tend it, back it up, keep adding to it, and organize it, will be less and less appealing as time goes on.

Embodiment — At its core the digital copy is without a body. You can take a free copy of a work and throw it on a screen. But perhaps you’d like to see it in hi-res on a huge screen? Maybe in 3D? PDFs are fine, but sometimes it is delicious to have the same words printed on bright white cottony paper, bound in leather. Feels so good. What about dwelling in your favorite (free) game with 35 others in the same room? There is no end to greater embodiment. Sure, the hi-res of today — which may draw ticket holders to a big theater — may migrate to your home theater tomorrow, but there will always be new insanely great display technology that consumers won’t have. Laser projection, holographic display, the holodeck itself! And nothing gets embodied as much as music in a live performance, with real bodies. The music is free; the bodily performance expensive. This formula is quickly becoming a common one for not only musicians, but even authors. The book is free; the bodily talk is expensive.

Patronage — It is my belief that audiences WANT to pay creators. Fans like to reward artists, musicians, authors and the like with the tokens of their appreciation, because it allows them to connect. But they will only pay if it is very easy to do, a reasonable amount, and they feel certain the money will directly benefit the creators. Radiohead’s recent high-profile experiment in letting fans pay them whatever they wished for a free copy is an excellent illustration of the power of patronage. The elusive, intangible connection that flows between appreciative fans and the artist is worth something. In Radiohead’s case it was about $5 per download. There are many other examples of the audience paying simply because it feels good.

Findability — Where as the previous generative qualities reside within creative digital works, findability is an asset that occurs at a higher level in the aggregate of many works. A zero price does not help direct attention to a work, and in fact may sometimes hinder it. But no matter what its price, a work has no value unless it is seen; unfound masterpieces are worthless. When there are millions of books, millions of songs, millions of films, millions of applications, millions of everything requesting our attention — and most of it free — being found is valuable.

I think these eight generatives are interesting, but are they the only pillars in a new “value-creation-model”?

Maybe you already know the blog “Creating Passionate Users” which from time to time have some fantastic blogposts on how to create better learning, how to create great Architecture of Participation - AoP, and great user involvement in general.

Kathy Sierra tells in this interview with Tim Oreilly how to create “flow”-moments by using cognitive seduction. Interesting how you as a business leader can learn from these principles, how you as a facilitator of social

community networks can create vibrant conversations and everlasting relations.

How do you create the right Architecture of Participation? Please share your insights.

Larry Lessig tells here three stories about how the web has primed the return to a participative culture as opposed to a broadcast-passive consumption culture; and how the culture of control still holds on to control, contrary to common sense. Lessig argues that ownership and use of content on the web, and intellectual property is directly relevant to the adoption of participative knowledge use in organisations – and the resistance to that adoption on the basis of a need for control. Well, he discuss it

What do you think, is it?

Just to let you know - some plumbing is going on in the next days….