- Posts tagged innovation
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the new wave is open collaboration
A recent article in MIT Sloan Review has posed the question whether one's firm should embrace it or not.
What, though, I admired most about the post was that the authors, Bougreau and Lakhani, addressed the topic of business models.
What's the Business Model?
Whether a company's product is a computer operating system, a social network, a motorcycle, a kitchen appliance or even a board game, the decision to open it to external innovation means that the product will be transformed into a platform. And to generate revenues from that platform, executives need to think about the nature of the accompanying business model.
I could not have said it any better. This is a question that is rarely neither confronted nor thought of by the recent Social Media scene.
I think we all do agree that there is no question that leading firms undoubtedly do adopt some form of open innovation, the article tackled however how to best position oneself in deciding which type of open innovation to select, whether it be " a collaborative community or a competitive market"
The answer however "... depends on three crucial issues," the article concluded.
disruptive innovation
A couple of years ago I first heard the story of Markus Frind, the founder of dating website PlentyofFish.com who, it was said, worked about an hour a day on his site and was making $10,000 a month. That was annoying enough. Now, a recent profile of Frind in Inc. magazine says Frind works an hour a day and brings in $10 million a year. I bring this up not to annoy you, but to point out that Frind has built his fortune mainly by following the disruptive playbook. His “blueprint,” as he described it to Inc.: “Pick a market in which the competition charges money for its service, build a lean operation with a "dead simple" free website, and pay for it using Google AdSense.”
experimenting and innovating in a new online society
The allowed possibilities of cheap communication tools and Google are ever more becoming an inconceivable paradigm shift to how we express ourselves and conduct businesses – at least for me.
It is horrifying however to imagine that some CEOs of large corporations and head of governments do not posses the slightness notion of this metastasis. Creativity has gain new meanings. It is an age of talent abundance. One may experience this with just one video of Youtube, a platform where every minute 10 hours of video are uploaded. Yet it seems the people who make important decisions that affect us all are afraid to experiment. To quote leading innovation author Scott Berkun of HBS:
Experiments fuel creativity and change. Experimenting means you are intentionally going off the map and pushing beyond the status quo: you are doing something for which the outcome is uncertain, and doing it on purpose. It's that uncertainty that creates the potential for big positive change.
The problem is that most business managers hate experiments. They want guaranteed returns. Predictable profits. Introducing uncertainty works against what they're trying to do. The comedy is that whatever profits they're talking about protecting originated from the founders of the company doing a huge experiment: starting a new company.
Experimenting leads to the risk of not knowing what the outcome will be. It is a learning process that ushers creativity and innovation and which displaces us from the norm.
I believe creativity has always been part of us. We now have however a public audience and we can be assured that our work will be made permanent. Despite other’s reluctance to embrace innovation democratization, I remain steadfastly with the belief that the future society will be govern by rules which ourselves have no control over. Jeff Carvis explains:
…a new society… [with] the rules of that society, built on connections, links, transparency, openness, publicness, listening, trust, wisdom, generosity, efficiency, markets, niches, platforms, networks, speed, and abundance.
