Beyond Creativity

Open Innovation and Strategy - Focus on Communities

Remember Porter's Five Competitive Forces?

1. Rivalry
2. Buyer power
3. Supplier power
4. Substitutes
5. Barriers to entry

Nowadays, if a company only focuses on them and misses communities, it may be counter-productive.

In the latest CMR article Henry Chesbrough and Melissa Appleyard point out:

"All of the tradional views are based upon ownership and control as the key levers in achieving strategic success. All focus largely within the firm, or within the value chain in which the firm is embedded. Non take much notice of the potential value of external resources that are not owned by the firm in question, but may nonetheless create value for the firm"

To illustrate the difference between Open and Closed Innovation, they differentiate Value capture and Value Creation in a company and in a community:

"The lingering questions for the business strategist are: Who actually is capturing the value created by open invention and coordination? How are they doing it?"

Finally, Chesbrough and Appleyard introduce a new concept, Open strategy.

"Open strategy balances the powerful value creation forces that can be found in creative individuals, innovation communities, and collaborative initiatives with the need to capture value in order to sustain continued participation and support of those initiatives"

After all this, I welcome you to take also a look at Michael Porter's newest work, " The Five Competitive Forces that Shape Strategy" from HBR, January 2008. A miss-match?!?

Architectural innovation - Simple things save money and environment

Architectural Innovation is often a re-configuration of existing  components.

Question: What is the most efficient way to save energy (and money) in houses with electrical heating in Nordic countries?

Answer: 2 components are needed for this:

A Heat Pump

Soapstone fireplace/oven.

Explanation: Soapstone is one of the best materials to trap heat. Heat pumps are used to circulate energy from outside and from the soapstone fireplace. So elegant and simple ;-)

View Larger Map

Good to know: One of the largest soapstone deposit in the world is visible on the map. This deposit is close to village Melalahti, Paltamo county, Finland. It extends 10 km north and 1 km south from the road 22.  Additionally, this deposit it unopened, next to railway(!), waiting for Tulikivi or some mining company to figure it out ;-)

European Innovation Scoreboard (EIS) - What is missing?

In Galway, Ireland, I participated an excellent innovation seminar by director Dr. Willie (William) Golden. Discussions with him made me think about innovation measurements in the global and European scale.

There is an index called the European Innovation Scoreboard.
This scoreboard is actually an evaluation paper prepared for the European Commission.

The following input- and output indicators are listed in the EIS Scoreboard (Please, click the image to enlarge it):

Decision makers will most likely consider this EIS paper as de facto in their work. Our economies and our work will be mostly measured by those indicators, at least in Europe.

This index is not complete. The missing elements are partly noted in following papers. Especially I liked the additions of Anthony Arundel and Hugo Hollanders from Merit (Maastricht Economic Research Institute on Innovation and Technology).

What would still I add?

- The measurements of Open source activity in economies (see the writings of Rishab Aiyer Ghosh in First Monday).

- Innovation in Services and their measuring (Please, check the Service Blueprinting )

- Business model innovation (Please, check the Open Business Models by Henry Chesbrough)

One citation from the report: "Sweden, Switzerland, Finland, Denmark, Japan and Germany are the innovation leaders, with SII scores well above that of the EU25 and the other countries.".

Hmm, if service innovation and business model innovation could be measured in the EIS index, would these countries be innovation leaders any more?

Creativity and Television - Part 2 - Joost in focus

Remember how sceptical I was about digital television and it's effect on creativity?

Some months ago I was invited to test Joost - a Web-TV.

15,000+ TV shows, 250+ Channels . With image and sound quality that is better than I expected.

And I got hooked. How embarrassing ;-)

Maybe my style of watching TV made curious about Joost. I like to watch TV when I can, not when a program is scheduled to run. I also like non-mainstream programs and Joost is full of them. Like Atlantis Science Fiction Channel, Western Channel and History Channel. So, the ability to select the shows that others don't watch may be advantageous to my creativity. (What a weak explanation ;-)

Joost provides also community features (who is watching the same channel at the same time etc.). Interacting with other Joost watchers might be better than watching traditional TV passively. Remember, emotionally engaging tasks and work has a positive effect on creativity, as pointed out by Christina Ting Fong. Question: When will users be able to produce directly programmes to Joost's channels?

After my positive comments, Joost deserves a word of warning:

- Commercials. When you start watching a show, a 10-20 s. ad of a sponsor is broadcasted. I can understand that. But, this is not all. Thereafter may pop up a widget or a questionnaire on top of  your screen. And it hard to get rid of them :-\ After about 10 minutes starts another commercial in the middle of the show. Without warning. And you need to watch it before the show continues. A tip for Joost: users would be willing to do customer support and extra free work just to get rid of those commercials popping in the middle of the show.

- Security. Joost is founded by same people who brought us Skype. So, your machine is mostly connected with a closed client, not an open source one. Luckily, Joost does not use peer-to-peer networking but it may suffer from bandwidth problems. Therefore, I never leave Joost idle or minimized in the Windows taskbar. Maybe I am too suspicious here?!

- User interface. It is not intuitive. I have difficulties in remembering how to mark my favourite channels or how to switch from one programme to another. Basic stuff, but so clumsy. Check yourself below.

- Addiction. With over 250 channels there is always something interesting going on. This kind of Web TV may be even worse than traditional TV for our health, eyes, body and weight. You can spent many ours just hopping from one channel to another.

What am I complaining here? I get a Web-TV for free, right?

Any comments about creativity within Web-TVs?

MindTrek - Open Innovation meets Open Source

MindTrek is a high-profile conference about:
- Open Innovation
- Open Source
- Social Media etc.

This conference will take place in Tampere, Finland between 3rd and 4th October 2007. Please, check the program, this year MindTrek is truly worth participating!

Selected topics:

- MindTrek starts with OpenMind, the top open source happening in northern Europe.   The atmosphere in MindTrek/OpenMind is ...amazingly open. Last year I wrote about openness, flow and coding.

- Jaiku micro-blogging service will be demonstrated on Wednesday 3rd October in the Social Media track by its founder, Jyri Engeström. I still can not fully understand that service, so I will definitely be listening ;-)

- My colleague Katri Lietsala will talk about StarWreck movie production community with Atte Joutsen. Motivation to participate in a movie community will be ... multi-faceted!

- I will be interviewing Ruben Robert and asking questions concerning FellowForce as an intermediary.

- In the evening, on Wednesday 3rd October, there will be an  Open Innovation Round Table as an invitation-only event. If you are interested to participate this, please, let me know.

- Update: On Tuesday we had a seminar on blogs and wikis, more at  Juha-Matti Arola's blog.

I expect that Open Innovation will mean different things for different people and creative friction is ready ;-)

Please, book your seat before the conference will be full! Join also the Facebook community of MindTrek.

The 5+ Questions You've Been Avoiding

Remember when I blogged about the animation movie "Eight Irrisistible Principles of Fun"? Now there is a sequel.

This Flash-movie is called "The Five Questions You've Been Avoiding". Once again, it is thought provoking, visual and funny at the same time.  The idea is to make you think about those innovative opportunities you don't normally recognise. (A detail: I did not digg the muzaki (music) in the animation but you can always turn it off ;-)

In overall, I like this operation model and business model of Gus Stanier & Michael Bungay Stanier & Co.  Their team shows expertise by providing excellent stuff for free. I therefore encourage you to use their commission-based consultation services as well.

Fellowforce - Evaluating a New Innovation Intermediary

I received a request from Ruben Robert to evaluate their new intermediary service called Fellowforce. This service is an intermediary, acting between innovators and companies (or 'solvers' and 'seekers'). (Updates: August 8th 2007)

Fellowforce - How does it work :

- First you will create a profile and you will be asked about your "professional area of expertise" and "industry of experience"

- After you sign in, the "My Challenge Alerts"-area will be immediately visible. I was curious to test this service and I responded to one of these challenges. Making a response or "pitching" was an easy and a comprehensible process.

- The service and especially "My Challenge Alerts" is cleverly built. Although there are currently only few challenges, Fellowforce looks very alive ;-)

- In the "Innovation Box" you can pick up a company from a list and propose them an innovation. I intend to do that. I will get back to this feature later on.

Fellowforce - Things to improve:

- Collaboration. Users of Fellowforce have no chances to communicate with each other. There is no "collaborative problem-finding and problem-solving". (Update: Fellowforce is working on that) What a pity! Those responses ('pitches') to challenges would be much better quality if there were more participants. (A dilemma in Ahonen&Lietsala's earlier paper). Of course, users ('solvers') are worried that their ideas are 'stolen', but the service could be built so that you can ask your colleagues to join in to solve problems. The reward would be automatically split by the number of solvers.  Additionally, Fellowforce could act as community that creates new kind of consulting business!! + + + I am curious about those HR dimensions of Fellowforce ;-)

- Sign-in. Your Fellowforce user id is your e-mail address. (Update: Fellowforce is working on that) Convenient? Perhaps, but your e-mail address will/may be visible for external marketeers and spammers as well :-(  For this reason, I selected my second, non-significant e-mail address as my user id. Fellowforce administrators should inform their users in the sign-in, how users e-mail is used/made visible.

- Terms and Conditions could be more easily visible in the hierarchy.

- Getting your reward. If you will not check you e-mail constantly, you will not receive your possible reward ( see the item 2D in previous "Terms and Conditions").  That is ... not fair! (Update: Fellowforce is working on that)

- Only E-mail. Fellowforce is too much e-mail centred. As a user of that service I would wish to receive the most important messages by SMS or by snail mail.  However, in your profile, there is no address field or no mobile number field, only e-mail!! (Update: Fellowforce is working on that, telephone/ cellphone  number can be added to the profile)

- RSS. For notifications, the service could use RSS, not only e-mail. This way, I  could monitor my challenges with my mobile phone  and it's RSS reader. I welcome the administrators of Fellowforce to look at Rok Hrastnik's RSS Diary (the blog and the book).

In overall, I have a very positive view on Fellowforce and I intend to intend to continue my experiments with the platform. Earlier my intermediary platform favourite was Ideawicket but Fellowforce is more intuitive to use. The slogan of Fellowforce is also great " This is Wikinomics in practise ". The challenge of Fellowforce is to get enough 'solvers' and 'seekers'. Let's see.

What is your opinion about Fellowforce?

Highlights - Innovation in Services -conference

All the papers and presentations of 'Innovation in Services ' conference are now available at:

http://www.tekes.fi/berkeleyserviceinnovation/program.htm

My favourites:

- Rich Mironov: Issues in Shifting from a Product-Based Business Model to a Service-Based Model --> Software business is changing. Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) infrastructure is emerging. Rich nicely illustrated those changes in marketing and innovation. I also found the  Toolset resource valuable.

- Mikko Välimäki,  Nina Helander, Marko Seppänen, Mikko Puhakka & Juha Laine: Building SaaS Business on Top of Open Source - Economic and Legal considerations. Since I have been working in the ASP (Application Service Provisioning) business before, this presentation was truly interesting. Who is responsible for those mash-ups and services that are like collections of services? Who is able to define the SLA (Service Level Agreement)? I liked their point: "None of the widely used OSS-licenses contains special ASP/SaaS-related clauses." Mikko Välimäki's work is also connected to our Parteco Social Media research project and the Community Created Content -book.

- Mary Jo Bitner, Amy Ostrom and Felicia Morgan: Service Blueprinting: A Practical Tool for Service Innovation --> I have not seen many good evaluation instruments for services. The Service Blueprinting tool has been developed and tested many years by researchers at the University of Arizona. Additionally, Mary Jo was a skillful chair in my session.

- Stephen Ezell: Customer perspective on Services innovation -->  Companies design experiences  from an operations-centric perspective.  BUT,   customers experience services through a different lens. Empathy -  Reliability - Responsiveness - Assurance - Tangibles.

My previous posting tells about our (Ahonen&Lietsala) innovation communities contribution ;-)

Did anyone of you participate the conference?  - - or - -  Do you have comments about the service innovation in overall?

Miss Helga and Wolfgang - Creativity in Marketing by Alex Osborn

Sometimes it is difficult to recognise an add when you see one.

One of the most succesfull examples is the Miss Helga and Wolfgang - Unpimp Your Auto.

Well, the link above leads to a fancy MySpace Area. So what?

[Check the link before you continue to read more!!! A spoiler is coming!]

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?

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This MySpace area is actually a Volkswagen Golf GTI commercial! I find it an interesting mixture of reality and fiction. Even though I do not exactly belong to the target group (18-30 years old male, single, no family to transport, sport cars enthusiast), this site got me hooked. Okey, (virtual) Miss Helga is s-o-o-o attractive and demanding at the same time ;-) Those Rice-Rocket-Smashing videos are great entertainment :-) Not to mention the test drive sessions :-) In German I would say... reizend :-) Just lately, the commercial won an award in Cannes. This Add-Like-A-Myspace-Area is a typical example of viral marketing = how to facilitate and encourage people to pass along a marketing message. Just check at those enthusiastic MySpace member comments and tags!

Remember Alex Osborn? He was the father of the CPS (Creative Problem-Solving) Techniques and Applied Imagination. At the same time, he owned one of the biggest advertisement agencies ( Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn) in the United States. The Miss Helga commercial was done by an agency called Crispin, Porter & Bogusky, there is a funny story about them in the BusinessWeek called "The Crazies Add Guys in America". I am almost sure that Crispin, Porter & Bogusky have done their homework and utilised the ideas and techniques of Alex Osborn. Alex Osborn left an interesting heritage for creativity research: 1) each year there is the The Creative Problem-Solving Institute - a large creativity conference, 2) there is the creativity research database at the University of Buffalo and in Hong Kong and 3) there is even an organisation supporting educational topics, the Creative Education Foundation.

I am getting more and more interested in the connections of marketing and creativity. The Web 2.0 and virtual reality brings another dimension to it, let see what kind of adds will show up in the Second Life by Linden Lab !

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 :-)