Innovation feeder


So what exactly is an unconference?

The wiki defines it as : An unconference is a conference where the content of the sessions is created and managed by the participants (generally day-by-day during the course of the event) rather than by one or more organizers in advance of the event. The term is primarily used in the geek community.

So where did it come from?

It all began one rainy day in the USA around 1984 with the first unofficial Hackers conference. In techland they have a regular conference called “Foo camps” where geeks get together & geek out over whatever they’re into at that moment. The problem is, Foo camps were always invitational which meant that there was an element of exclusivity around who was able to attend & who wasn’t. Thus, the idea of Barcamps was born. Barcamps began as a reaction to the exclusive elitest Foo camps. The idea was basically that people with a strong interest would publicly post their passion in meeting other like-minded folks and then the interested parties would self-organize a gathering. where everyone was welcome. Unlike the Foo, Barcamps were open to anyone & everyone & represented one of the very first unconferences.

Basically an “unconference” is everything a normal stuffy suity type conference is not - it’s open to anyone, anyone can come & anyone can speak. It disposes of the podiums, the rigid structure, the exclusive & polished speakers and the formalities in favour of a more democratised process where even the great unwashed may share their passions with the rest of us. (more…)



Gamers enjoy dying in first person shooters

In his blog CollisionDetection, Clive Thompson who writes for Wired and the NY Times has posted a great piece about about the pleasure and release MMORPG [massive multiplayer online role playing gamers] feel when they get killed  [as opposed to when they kill others]. His findings are based on a  study by Niklas Ravaja at MIND Labs, who wired up a bunch of gamers with biosensors and found that they gave off strong pleasure signals whenever they died in the game Super Monkey Ball.

The rest of his post is here and if you haven’t checked out his blog, it’s worth a look in:

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The Digital Curator in Your Future

A great post borrowed from Steve Rubel who writes Micropersuasion

Credit: Met by jesst7Content: it’s everywhere. Content is in your inbox, your feed reader, outdoor media, your living room, your pocket and, increasingly, on every web site you visit. It also increasingly resides on sites built and managed by your favorite brands, which are bypassing the media and going direct.

The democratization of publishing is without a doubt a revolution. When we’re all dead and gone, the 21st Century will be remembered as a Digital Renaissance - one that rivals the original that preceded it by 700 years.

The Internet has empowered billions of people and is distributing their creativity across millions of niches and dozens of formats. Quality and accuracy, of course, can vary. However, virtually every subject either is or will be addressed with excellence - by someone, somewhere.

However, the glut of content as we all know also has a major downside. Our information and entertainment options greatly outweigh the time we have to consume it. Even if one were to only focus on micro-niche interests and snack on bite-sized content, demand could never ever scale to match the supply. Content is a commodity. The Attention Crash is real and - make no mistake - it will deepen.

Enter the Digital Curator.

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Looking for innovation superstars?

I had brekky with a friend of mine this morning & amongst other things, we were talking about finding talent. He’s always on the lookout for people, I’m on the other side of the fence & always on the lookout for new freeelance opportunities. There’s a lot of people hunting for innovation consultants, innovation talent, researchers etc at the moment in Sydney. The market is abuzz with movement. People are moving around, everyone wants to know who’s free, who might come where & who’s looking for what. Anyway, this friend & I were talking about how innovation companies themselves are often not that innovative [ironically] when it comes to hiring. How they can talk innovation & have theories on innovation but when it comes to hiring practices, recruiting talent & looking for new blood, often their approach can be anything but.

As I was pondering this post-pancakes, I came across a couple of articles that speak to this topic brilliantly. So rather than bang on & paraphrase, I’ve just posted them here. Enjoy.

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Take me to your feeder

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Whether you work in advertising, marketing, innovation or new product development, one of the most difficult things is having to come up with new ideas & perspectives all the time. There’s often a mad scramble to find innovation examples, social commentary or macro trends when we have pitches on or a presentation due, but the reality is that this kind of information is most useful & valuable when it’s applied consistently throughout the entire working process.

When we’re exposed to a bunch of different points of view, different modes of thinking & different models of expressing that thinking, we approach things differently from the start. We interrogate the client’s brief in more detail, we set the boundaries for the strategy more decisively, we look for creative & strategic stimulus in places others may not necessarily have thought of & think outside the intellectual systems & structures that we would normally fall back on when we just ‘use what we have’ or even worse, ‘what we’ve done before’.

So why don’t companies take this kind of role more seriously? My guess is because it seems like a role that anyone could do & everyone should do. And they’re right. Except that nobody does. The reality is that every advertising planner or innovation strategist can read ten blogs a day, keep up to date on general social trends & emergent media & keep abreast of what the trendy trendspotters like to call ‘contemporary cultural zeitgeist’ but they don’t. It’s human nature to get bogged down in the projects piling up on our desk & the whoosh of the deadlines as they go rushing past. To jump from one mindset to another in normal day-to-day work is extraordinarily difficult. Of course it can be done, by any smartie pants in fact, the difference is that the state of mind needed to write clearly defined project presentations, manage clients & the creative process is quite different to the open-ended permanently curious & steadily expanding mindset of the researcher or the information geek. It’s almost as if one mindset is about connecting the dots (those who have a
formal planning or strategy role), whereas the other is about drawing new dots, which take a while to be connected, sometimes if at all.

The definition of a “Feeder” is one who stimulates people’s minds with a constant supply of new trends & ideas. At least that’s how the big cheeses at Business Week define it. So how can you get around this in your own company?

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Hands up if you hate Microsoft

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Flickr users are making their opinions known about the potential takeover by Microsoft. Check out the visual protests by users here. Thanks for the tip Charlie.



Thinking blogging by a thinking blogger

From One Thinking Blogger To Another
Every day I check my site stats, I love to see how many people have visited & had a read or left a comment. It’s always exciting when someone links to your blog, especially if you’re a relatively new blogger like me. Not only is it interesting to see what appeals to people (and also what doesn’t) but it’s the ultimate procrastenation tool. It’s also a real buzz when you connect with people online who share your love of similar (or very diverse) things, you make you think differently, who are attracted to different kinds of content than you normally would be, and who broaden your horizons on a regular basis.
Gavin Heaton from Servant of Chaos has nominated me as a “thinking blogger” [original post here] and said some very nice things. Gavin has been really supportive of Innovation Feeder ever since I started which has made a big difference to me. I read his blog regularly & it’s really nice to have someone who takes an interest in what you do so thank you Gavin.
The way it works apparently is as follows:
  1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think
  2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
  3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote

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So here are my nominations:

Max Lenderman - Who twists my brain a little every now & then with his blog on Experiential Marketing
Miel Van Opstal - Because when I need another juicy little insight or example for a workshop or presentation he always comes through with the goods
Erin Middleton - Offers great discussion around strategic planning amongst other things, puts a bit of buzz uptop
Katie Chatfield - who bite sized beauties I often flick through when I need a little pick me up
Laurel Papworth - Whose blog on social media & online communities is worth its weight in gold


What people are doing online

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I tend to take in information best with my peepers, I’m not great at listening [although I try very hard] and I really like to see things mapped out rather than a huge truckload of words. Which is why I love a good model, a good graph, schematic display - anything which represents information in a stimulating visual way. So here’s another one. This one comes courtesy of Business Week, spotted by one of Max’s colleagues & posted on his blog Experience The Message in the middle of last year. It’s a stormer for presentations & workshop stimulus so eat up friend.

You can check out Max’s original post here

The original Business Week article can be found here



Beta goes meta: From innovation to trend in a heartbeat
beta cultr

The idea of being in beta has become a broad cultural phenomenon. Many new products never make it beyond trial stage, and the trial and error beta-approach that helps Google and other alpha innovators to out-fail and thereby out-innovate the competition, is as much an attribute of successful organizations as it is a sign of our time.

But it’s not only analysts and conference organizers who are switching instantly from micro to macro, picking up nascent trends and elevating them to a must-deal-with core competence that transcends the current fad (just see all the Facebook conferences that are mushrooming right now). What I find even more interesting is how the media and blogosphere deal with it. If everything’s in beta, the public doesn’t have the patience anymore to wait for the alpha. As the media are increasingly forced to immediately widen the scope and view every innovation in a larger context as it occurs, the boundaries between reporters and commentators, bloggers and industry analysts are fading.

Some examples: Not too long ago, Twitter was all the rage, and it was stunning to see that just shortly after the initial coverage during SXSW in March, reporters were already elaborating on the concept of micro-blogging, wondering what the new “radical transparencymeant for business. Nowadays, there is a great chance that you will stumble upon a Facebook story when you open just about any publication: It’s Facebook vs. MySpace, the implications of social networking on the borders between work and personal life, reflections on the “Facebook economy,” Facebook vs. iTunes, and maybe a philosophical piece on Facebook “as a post-modern book” or the future of social networking, which, for TIME, equals the future of the Internet. It is only a small step from MySpace to the “MySpace generation,” and from Facebook to the “Facebook generation” and then to the “Fakebook generation.” Similarly, the recent buzz around Radiohead’s “pay what you want” online release has instantly led to the coining of a “Radiohead Generation” and praise for the band “as a pioneer of the digital revolution.” And there are hundreds of articles discussing if Radiohead’s decision ushers in the definite end of the record industry. The stories about the radical distribution model appear to eclipse the actual music on the album–in this case, too, the reviews are in before the story is told.

Evidently, the media need to cope with the current while also putting forward a vision for the up and coming. The time between observation and conclusion, between description and prediction, however, has shrunk to almost zero. There are no more lapses between news, analysis, background story, industry trend story, and intellectual dissection; they have become one and the same, at the same time. Not only is beta the new alpha–beta has gone meta.



My Media Week

Gavin tagged me (thanks Gavin) on the current meme sweeping the sphere - ‘My Media Week’ - the meme that gets you thinking about your own media consumption rather than everyone else’s. So here goes:

Reading

I have one red paperclip on my night table which a friend loaned me. It has been there for quite some time (sorry Kes) but doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. i.e. It’s certainly no closer to getting in bed with me & a cup of tea than you are. I love the idea of someone who swaps a red paperclip for something else, then swaps that for something else, yada yada, you get the picture. Eventually this guy gets a house. I like the idea of the story, I’m just not loving the story so much.

So what I’m actually reading is “How would you move Mount Fuji : How the smartest companies select the world’s most creative thinkers” by William Poundstone. It’s basically a commentary on Microsoft’s notorious grueling interview process which has been copied by companies everywhere who are seeking to separate the most creative thinkers from those who are merely brilliant. It’s got a bunch of puzzles & riddles throughout which are generally making me feel reasonably uncreative, let alone brilliant. Lucky I’m not trying to get a job in the valley I suppose.

I flicked through my usual monthly Futures magazine yesterday but I don’t think you could call that ‘reading’ with any integrity. They come in the mail, I flick through them & then make them at home in my bottom drawer. You see, I don’t have to actually read them, just knowing they’re close is enough. Oh and I read Who Weekly to get the update on Britney Spears’ fight for child custody. Are we supposed to omit the trash consumption?

 

 

TV / Video

 

The other night I watched a documentary on Australia’s most feared creatures, followed by an episode of “shark attack : I shouldn’t be alive”, both served to reinforce the threat of swimming at any beach in Sydney as one could be taken by an animal of the sea at any time. I’ve also been following the US election coverage with interest together with my usual diet of cable news & Sunset Tan when it’s on. (Sunset Tan is a top quality show on cable which follows the lives of people who manage a chain of tanning salons in L.A. It’s no West Wing but gee it’s close). Again, should I have omitted that?

Music

 

On iTunes play during the last week was Joan as Policewoman, Josh Rouse, James Blunt & a bit Pink for the angry woman moments. There have been plenty of those this week for no particular reason other than my computer has been rather temperamental.

Next Up

Next up I tag Erin aka Dora the Explorer :) who is on my daily Google Reader , Amanthaville to encourage you to start posting again!, Coolz0r whose blog is always jam packed with great examples & analysis, Katie whose site I love reading regularly for a brain top up, Weird from Slacker Nation whose blog is always an incredibly good read & Greg at Grassroots Innovation which I also check out regularly.