Beyond Creativity

Open Media Business - John Buckman in Tampere

John Buckman is a serial entrepreneur, a musician, an Open Media evangelist, a marketeer, a CEO and a great personality. It was to great to meet!

First, Herkko (Hietanen) and Katri Lietsala had arranged a meeting with John here at the Hypermedia Laboratory, University of Tampere.

With John, Herkko, Katri, Tere (Vaden), Jarmo (Viteli) and Heljä (Franssila) we discussed about the future of Open Source. Additionally, we discussed about Web 2.0 business models and research we do in the Parteco Social Media Research Project by Tekes. I had a chance to ask some questions about open innovation. It takes too many lines to describe, so I just say: Open Innovation topics we discussed were related to openness, transparency, reputation and (social) responsibility. I and Heljä were especially interested how a company can open up it's R&D processes and how to motivate both it's employees and customers in this new innovation environment.

Secondly, John was the speaker at the OpenMind conference on Wednesday 25th October. His presentation covered open source and open innovation topics both in BookMooch and in Magnatune. Magnatune is an example of of utilising Creative Commons licences, integrating various web services to create mash-ups and empowering users/artists. UPDATE: Check, how Magnatune cleverly utilises Creative Commons licences and what is has to do with the business model.  Bookmooch is an example how to make a community transparent and self-organising. I am sure Amazon and all those big record companies are carefully watching John's actions ;-)

Are you interested in other opinions in the OpenMind conference? Head to the OpenMind social networking area.

Thirdly, on Wednesday evening, 25th October, we had a Open Media Business Roundtable at Telakka restaurant, arranged by Katri. With venture capitalists, StarWreck people and music business people people discussing what social media means. Social Media by John Buckman = Culture can be re-used and this re-use is non-prohibiting.

I and my colleagues here in Tampere wish you John best of luck in your projects :-)

Creativity, flow and coding - OpenMind, Tampere

The OpenMind conference in Tampere is full of people who seem to have a very open attitude. This leads me to Carl Rogers and his Openness to Experience -thinking and how coding (programming) can be a flow-like experience.

"It has been found that when the individual is "open" to all his experience, then his behavior will be creative, and his his creativity may be trusted to be essentially constructive. (Rogers, 252,1954) Good news for those who are worried about ethics of an hacker ! Let's hope that there will be more and more open-minded ones ;-)

Abraham Maslow speaks about self-actualising people. Actually, he found it necessary to distinguish "special talent creativeness" from "self-actualizing (SA) creativeness. But...what does this SA creativess mean? Maslow explaines:

"All my subjects were relatively more spontaneous and expressive than average people. They were more "natural" and less controlled and inhibited in their behavior, which seemed to flow out more easily and freely and with less blocking and self-criticism. This ability to express ideas and impulses without strangulation and without fear or ridicule turned out to be an essential aspect of SA creativeness." (Maslow, 136, 1968)

We are getting to the flow concept of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. I earlier went through some indicators of flow, like disappearing self-conscious and autotelic activity. Within OpenMind conference, I have been interested in flow in coding. Benno Luthiger has some classical findings related to Open Source programmers. In Dublin IADIS Mobile Learning Conference I met Daire O'Broin who has studied Java-programming and flow-like experiences within it. Measuring these experiences is not simple, interviews and observations of subjects are not necessarly reliably. Csikszentmihalyi developed the Experience Sampling Method (ESM) to measure flow. ESM is like a questionnairy that user fills in randomly and reports his/her flow levels. Daire and Siobhán Clarke made a mobile artefact (tool) of this ESM and I still think that their research is remarkable! One of their key finding is:"In order to get a good match between the challenges of the task and the skills of the student most of the time, the (Java programming related) task repository needs to be extensive". Check their research paper here.

To my understanding, flow is also linked to reflection and meditation.

Finally, almost every city in the globe has a 'Creative City Program'. To me, their topics and agendas are very abstract and high level. These programs are rarely based on creativity research or touch subject like flow (in programming). I wrote about these dilemmas in the local Aamulehti newspaper, discussing about the Creative Tampere (Luova Tampere) Program (article only in Finnish, sorry).

I hope that some day there will be an extension or a sub-conference to OpenMind, focusing on creativity and open innovation. Perhaps with educational and psychological 'Open to Experience'  and flow topics :-)

Any comments about the connections of flow, creativity and coding?

Google for Educators + Mass-Customisation Conference article

One part of this Open Innovation phenomenon seems to be crowdsourcing and providing addictive user experiences.

In that sense the latest opening of Google was interesting:

Welcome to Google for Educators

In their own words: "We are inviting teachers to share your best ideas for using Google technology to innovate in the  classroom."...." The Google Teacher Academy is a pilot program designed to help K-12 educators get the most from innovative technologies."   

This is actually nothing new, for example Microsoft has had similar programs: Partners in Learning. Still, I see that Google's invitation is more addictive, just look at those teacher interviews behind every Google tool. Still, this kind of integration of business, teachers and kids is not an easy topic. I wonder what Professor Nigel Thrift would say/write about this? His latest article "Re-inventing invention: new tendencies in capitalist commodification" is worth reading.

C-o-n-n-e-c-t-i-o-n : I am currently writing with Maria Antikainen and Marko Mäkipää an article for The Second Finnish Mass Customization and Personalization Forum - MCPF 2006. Our draft title (not a final one;-) "What Motivates Customers to Innovate and Participate for Free
- Web 2.0 Communities and Mass-Customisation". Perhaps Google for Educators will be one of the cases we will present?! We are not in a hurry, the article will be out in January 2007.

Any comments about the Google for Educators? Do you see the link with mass-customisation superficial ... or realistic?

Openmind - Question about Free Revealing and OSS 2.0

Open Source / Open Content \ Open Innovation

This is how OpenMind-conference announces it's areas of interests. There will be a Developer Day (Chris DiBona: Google, Brian Chan: Liferay, Jarkko Laine: Ruby on Rails etc) and a Business Day (Markus Rex: Novell, John Buckman: Magnatune, Eirik Chambe-Eng: Trolltech etc). My colleague,  Tere (Vadén) will have a talk as well.

I am glad that open innovation plays such a central role in the Openmind conference (thanks, Petri (Räsänen) and COSS folks :-). I am eager to participate. Within open innovation, one central topic is Free Revealing. What????

I let the experts define it: "When my colleagues and I say that an innovator “freely reveals” proprietary information, we mean that all intellectual property rights to that information are voluntarily given up by that innovator and all parties are given equal access to it—the information becomes a public good" (Harhoff, Henkel & von Hippel 2003)

Why on earth should anyone reveal their innovation for free? Von Hippel replies: "When benefits from free revealing exceed the benefits that are practically obtainable from holding an innovation secret or licensing it, free revealing should be the preferred course of action for a profit-seeking firm or individual." (von Hippel, 2005, 81)

To me this idea of free revealing separates Eric von Hippel's view from Henry Chesbrough's view, at least when we are talking about open innovation!? (In my previous posting I described those Chesbrough's interesting elements of Open Innovation).

In the open source context I recommend the latest MISQ article about Open Source 2 (OS 2.0) from Brian Fitzgerald. This article is called: "The Transformation of Open Source Software". It explains  how commercial companies set up and support open source projects and why OS 2.0 is nowadays far away from the activity of hackers and enthusiasts (only)!

Disagree or agree: Free Releaving and Open Innovation? Any comments about the Openmind confence?

Rise of Intermediaries - Open Innovation

Henry Chesbrough discusses in his newest book, how open innovation paradigm is different from 'old' closed innovation paradigm. He illustrates following 'features' for Open Innovation:

I am curious about this "Rise of Intermediaries" area. These intermediate markets alter the incentives for innovation, and also condition the mode of entry of new technologies and new firms into an industry (Gans, Hsu & Stern, 2001). For a researcher like me the definitions and classifications of intermediate markets are somewhat blurry. In addition, I am not sure what role social media and Web 2.0 play in this development.

I have found following sub-categories within intermediate markets:
- Commercial Innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) Marketplaces (like NineSigma, http://www.ninesigma.org)
- Idea competions - loosely organised (like Open Tuesday, http://www.opentuesday.org) )
- Idea competion system providers (like Ideacrossing, http://www.ideacrossing.com)
- Crowdsourcing blogsites ( like N91, http://n91.wordontheblog.com/ )
- Outsourced innovation & design providers (like Ideo, http://www.ideo.com) 

Is this categorization realistic? Would you recommend additional categories?