interviews with horses

Kathy Sierra (who crossed swords for a while with Chris Locke, the co-author of the magnificent Cluetrain Manifesto, of which more later) talks a great deal about innovation. Here's a piece from a blog of hers:

'Professionals' in any field come in two flavors: Knowledge Sharers and
Knowledge Hoarders. The hoarders believe in the value of their 'Intellectual
Property'(IP). The products of their mind must be carefully guarded lest anyone
steal their precious ideas. But let's face it - if our only 'strategic
advantage' is our ideas, we're probably screwed. Or as CDBaby's Derek Sivers put
it in this post:

'It's so funny when I hear people being so protective of ideas. (People who want
me to sign an NDA to tell me the simplest idea.) To me, ideas are worth nothing
unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions.'

Yes, there are some crucial exceptions, but for most of us, It's our
implementation, not our idea that matters. Even those who create something
revolutionary are still synthesising... still drawing on the work of others, and
making a creative leap. But even a big-ass gravel-hauling leap is still a leap,
not a physics-violating idea that shimmered into the universe from nothin' but
air.

It's how we apply those ideas.
How creative we are.
How useful we are.
How brave we are.
How technically skilled we are.
How we anticipate what our users will love.
How we learn from the ideas and work of others.
And from our (my co-authors and myself) perspective, it's not about
our ideas, it's about what the ideas can do for our users.
Even if we are the only ones to have a specific new and protectable 'idea' (unlikely), the moment we reveal it, everyone else will have it too. The barrier to entry today
is way too low to use 'intellectual property' as a main advantage. And all too
often, we think we have a unique idea only to find that others are-independently-doing the same things.

In spite of the very public fight she had with Chris Locke, Kathy talks much the same language as him. They speak of changing the way corporations do business, of interconnectivity, of the way that the Internet can unlock creative thinking and liberate people to think wildly. And a great deal more. Chris started the ball rolling by interviewing a horse at length and ended his very first post on what might have been just about the Internet's first blog, with the immortal opt-out box:

[ ] From time to time we offer to share our list of subscribers with
door-to-door aromatherapy salespersons and ritual ax-murderers. If you would
prefer that your data not be used in this way, please check the box.

Back to the point. Knowledge Sharers and Knowledge Hoarders.

Project Red Stripe walked this tightrope nervously.

They started very openly, blogging everything. Their website described what they were doing, how they were recruiting team members, where their offices were. (Indeed, Joanna observed early on that the blog was too close to an introspective diary rather than being one that highlighted issues and ideas. Curious this, when she was probably the member of the team most likely to introspect publicly.) Their webcam was always on.

Then they got the ideas in.

They got a little cagey.

Acknowledged lots of the ideas.

Got involved in some rather public wrangling about whether a six-month subscription to The Economist was a suitable reward for someone who gave them a multi-million-moolah (please can someone invent a universal term for currency for occasions like this when it doesn't matter what currency you're talking about, except the Zimbabwean dollar) business idea.

Received a shot across the bows from people who are paid to worry about customer perceptions at Economist Tower.

Realised that they couldn't be too public if they were going to develop their idea far enough to be able to surprise and delight the GMC.

Were told that they shouldn't have gone quiet.

Went public again about Lughenjo, but cautiously so as not to upset the NGOs they were talking to.
Went quiet for the switch to HiSpace.

Then announced the switch just as they were closing Project Red Stripe.

The way I've described it sounds harsh. But look at it from the other end of the telescope. The Economist is a big brand. The magazine doesn't interview imaginary horses and has opt-out boxes that don't mention axe murderers. Red Stripe had to pay attention to these things. Getting closed down or massively alienating the Chief Executive or their readers wouldn't have helped them get a result. They could have spent more time on internal PR to make their case, but that wasn't their job.

Perhaps Project Red Stripe needed its own PR department. Perhaps they should have hired someone. But they'd still have had to agree an approach, brief the PR daily, have more meetings. Cul de sac? Another reason for stopping the blog was that it simply took too much time. I watched Ludwig, turned sideways from the desk, writing his blog of 13th March for the entire afternoon. It was, in essence, a defence of the terms and conditions attached to their request for ideas and a response to some of the criticism they'd received from Slashdot. It needed writing. But it didn't need writing.

On the subject of PR, and if you're not in the business, check out the emerging idea of Open PR, which, in the stress it places on the trustworthiness of employees and the need for honesty in business, could be the brainchild of Christopher Locke and Cluetrain but is actually an emergent property of Web 2.0 and Wikinomics.

At the other end of the telescope, Red Stripe was adapting and adapting fast. The team were open when they could be, closed when they had to be. At times they were just reacting (although that's been a bad word in business for a long time, it's what we all need to do to stay alive). What Linnaeus called Meteorici adjust their opening and closing times to suit the weather conditions. Seems as good a model as any for an innovation team - or maybe I just couldn't resist an opportunity to quote the proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society.

Dilemmas:

Be completely open on principle? Be secretive sometimes? Be secretive on principle? Wait till an idea is 'well-enough' formed that it won't get shot down. Invite discussion and analysis from the outset?

If you're going to be very public, delegate the PR job to one of the team? Share it out? Hire someone?


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Credits:
Flower clock: Athanasius Kircher Society
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open innovation

Dr Henry Chesbrough had a good idea about innovation and wrote a book about it. In fact, the idea was so good that he wrote three books, several articles and launched a website about it. Along the way he interviewed hundreds of people who confirmed his hypothesis that there are two sorts of innovation: open innovation and closed innovation. These can be given capital letters thus: Open Innovation and Closed Innovation. Both can also be followed with the word paradigm, for good measure.

To save time, I'll use his own summary of the Open Innovation paradigm:

Open Innovation is the use of purposive inflows and outflows of knowledge to accelerate internal innovation, and expand the markets for external use of innovation, respectively. [This paradigm] assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as they look to advance their technology.

Dr Chesbrough's idea is described as 'pathbreaking' on the jacket of his book, where several wise people are quoted fulsomely endorsing his idea. Scott Cook, Chairman of the Intuit Executive Committee, goes so far as to say that the book is both seminal and practical and 'provides the how-to for revving up your innovation engine for leaps of profitable growth'. I'm hopeful, confident even, that no-one will describe the present book/blog/Brain in that way.

On the strength of all this, I bought the book and read it on the train back from a birthday party in Oxford. At the party, important people like Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Ian Blair, Professor Robin Grove-White (former head of Greenpeace UK and Director of the CPRE) and Professor Richard Macrory, who was appointed by the UK Cabinet Office to lead a review on regulatory sanctions, talked about important things. I thought 'this is the sort of place where change begins really'. Surely it has to be as much about people as paradigms?

Anyway, in the Closed Innovation paradigm, a company uses insiders to have ideas, some of which it develops and commercialises in-house, using the profits partly to fund further research and idea-generation in-house. In the Open Innovation paradigm, in case your attention drifted during the bit about purposive inflows, the same company gets ideas from wherever it can and takes them to market through a combination of internal and external channels.

Red Stripe used a combination of both paradigms: insiders drew ideas in from outside, but then had their own idea, which they discussed widely with outsiders, before setting about commercialising it internally. It could, of course, have done any of those things differently. I don't have a view on whether it should have (though Dr Chesbrough does). I just think that innovation teams may find it useful to think carefully about this question at the outset.


Mike Seery's own conclusion was similar:

Some people had thought that our public call for ideas would yield the
killer idea. Others thought that they had it already. And the rest thought that
a decent dose of inspirational brainstorming would be needed.

Learning by doing ~ learning while waiting

But another thought in Dr Chesbrough's book caught my attention. In the foreword, John Seely Brown talks about two sources of learning: learning by doing and learning while waiting. John Seely Brown clearly likes this idea too, because he's put the whole of his foreword on his website, which is indicative of the closed loops in which this kind of discussion takes place. But it's another revealing thought for an innovation team. Certainly the Red Stripe team found and had ideas while they were waiting to decide which idea to take to market and while they were soliciting ideas from outside. But their Bavaria/Lughenjo idea evolved considerably in the course of 'doing' the business plan, talking to partners and getting ready to make their formal presentation to the GMC. It's from this 'doing' process that the final HiSpace idea emerged.

I think it's fair to say that some of the ideas that emerged from doing were more practical and practicable than many of those that emerged from the earlier waiting process. So, there's perhaps a case to be made for 'doing something', even at the outset, because it may reveal ideas of a different order.

Once again we can view the Red Stripe approach as a combination of the two. But the outcry (scroll down when you get there) that greeted their decision not to publish the ideas that were submitted by outsiders (and which was generally speaking based on an objection to a private company soliciting money-making ideas and then keeping them to itself) may have concealed a more important issue - namely that if they had allowed the 'world' to kick around and discuss the ideas that were submitted, they might have found that much of the process of evaluation, sifting, analysis and development of those ideas could have been done for them by people who, collectively, knew more about their viability than the Red Stripe team ever could.

But then, of course, the problem remains that Red Stripe would never have actually owned any of the ideas.

The Delphi Technique

While we're on the subject of learning while doing and the team's conversations with NGOs and other experts who were likely to be involved in the Lughenjo idea, I should mention the Delphi technique. I was alerted to it by a Harvard Business Review article called The Wisdom of (Expert) Crowds by Robert Duboff. The technique, which is not unrelated to scenario planning, is rather like an amplified focus group. You recruit two dozen or so experts on a particular topic and ask them to evaluate possible developments/trends/outcomes in a chosen business or technology area. (There's a lot more to it than that - an independent facilitator then summarises their thoughts and they have another round. And so on. There are lots of rules, which necessitate the hiring of expensive consultants to oversee the process.) I suppose it's also related to the Prediction Markets idea, which the Red Stripe team had discussed at the outset and were encouraged to pursue during their idea harvesting process.

As I've said elsewhere, involving the experts eventually led Red Stripe to reject Lughenjo and it's possible that the earlier, formal involvement of such a group might have helped them home in on a workable idea. But, of course, that would require that they had first decided which mountain they were going to climb. For sure, Red Stripe were in the lucky position, as an Economist team, of being able to get the attention of experts whom others might have found it more difficult to talk to.

Cathedral and bazaar

Before we leave the Open Innovation paradigm, I'd like to mention another way of thinking about all this that's been around a lot longer. In 1997, Eric Raymond, talking about the open source software movement, came up with the term 'the cathedral and the bazaar', which is constantly evolving into a book. The former represented the conventional method of using a group of experts to design and develop a piece of software (though it could apply to almost any large-scale creative or innovative work). The bazaar represented the open source approach. This idea has been amplified by a lot of people, notably Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams in their book Wikinomics and on their website and blog of the same name. Wikinomics, being the commercialised arm of The Wisdom of Crowds, of course has its opponents and detractors. It's not a panacea and plenty has been written about the foolishness of crowds. Bruce Schneier's essay on the psychology of security is one elegant example of this. But Eric Raymond himself is also quoted in a compelling article by Nicholas Carr as saying that 'one cannot code from the ground up in bazaar style. One can test, debug, and improve in bazaar style, but it would be very hard to originate a project in bazaar mode.' In the same vein, Raymond is also quoted as saying, 'The individual wizard is where successful bazaar projects generally start'.

Project Red Stripe had six fine individual wizards, unsure of how far to trust their own wizardry and how far to turn to the wisdom of the crowd.

Dilemmas

Open vs. Closed. You can use insiders or outsiders; your own ideas or other people's; your own money or other people's. With the latter, there's always going to be less ownership and less control. But more room.

Thinking vs. Doing. Trying to implement one idea may inspire other ideas, but settling on an idea too soon may close down other options. Time-tabling is important.

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Credits:

Paradigm bottle: Michael Calore

Innovation Camp: Theis Kofoed Hjorth

Innovation mosaic: Roland Tanglao

Delphi: Jay Galvin

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