blog de notas de juan freire

…estamos realizando un esfuerzo para sintetizar de una forma global y analítica las nuevas oportunidades para las organizaciones del futuro. Este ejercicio verá la luz definitiva a finales de 2012 con ‘manifiestocrowd’ que publicará Alienta Editorial (Grupo Planeta).

Sesiones LABO para la preparación de manifiestocrowd y artículos publicados por Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí en Cinco Días.

Sesión 1: ESADECREAPOLIS (20.02.2012)
Manifiestocrowd: La empresa y la inteligencia de las multitudes (Cinco Días)

Sesión 2: EAE – MADRID (20.02.2012)
Crowdfunding: una alternativa al crédito (Cinco Días)

Sesión 3: EOI – Sevilla (17.04.2012)
Coworking: ecosistemas para la innovación (Cinco Días)

…  three types of work: “I work,” which requires expertise, concentration and focus; “You & I work,” which involves relatively simple collaboration among two people; and “We work,” which embodies the highest level of content and context complexity, from multi-disciplinary expertise to multi-location and multi-technology platforms.

… Organizations can address this problem by redesigning their workspaces around the following principles:

1. Focus on four main activities. Employees need to have areas for concentrated work (such as unassigned individual workstations), emergent social exchange (free-flowing hallways), learning (rooms equipped with technology and tools), and collaboration (group spaces for co-creation). The key is to make sure the different types of spaces are integrated with each other and open to all, so people can freely choose where to be based on what they’re doing.
2. Vary the size of workspaces, and the technology with which they’re equipped. Collaborative work happens best in spaces that accommodate a group of four to eight people physically or virtually or in a larger team space with multiple small pods where people can still see each other. It’s also important to give everyone equal access to on-line and on-site information.
3. Provide collaborative tools. Effective collaboration involves knowledge exchange, brainstorming, the inclusion of diverse perspectives, and scenario building. Companies must therefore provide tools like whiteboards that allow employees to record ideas and create a visual, side-by-side review of alternative solutions. Such tools are key enablers helping groups reach a shared understanding faster and more effectively.
4. Give project teams a dedicated space. The concept of ‘distributed cognition’ suggests that thinking processes are embedded in the physical work environment. A team room can provide “cognitive space” to hold ideas and experiences. Returning to the same workspace each day, keeping meeting notes on the board, and leaving work samples and half-finished prototypes on tables between meetings can help teammates maintain a shared project mindset, sharpening their focus and speeding up the collaborative process.

…

types of unintentional innovation assassins.

1. The Cowboy. Itching to create a corporate culture tolerant of creativity and innovation, the Cowboy says something along the lines of, “No boundaries! Just great ideas!” Of course, companies should continually evaluate and push their boundaries. But every company has a set of things it simply will not do. Saying innovation has no bounds when it does just leads people to waste time working on ideas that — honestly — have no hope of ever being commercialized.

Instead, consider issuing highly-focused challenges. For example, a few years ago Netflix offered a $1 million prize to any team that could improve the performance of the algorithms that determine which movies it should suggest to consumers by at least 10%. More than 250 teams rose to the challenge, and two actually exceeded the target. Focus is one of innovation’s best friends.

2. The Googlephile. Inspired by stories of how Google and 3M ask engineers to spend 15% of their time dreaming of new ideas, this executive asks everybody to spend a bit of time on innovation. Maybe carve off a half-day during the third Friday of the month for everyone to focus on innovation.This approach feels participatory and inclusive. But it rarely works, unless the company has sophisticated systems to select and nurture ideas. Too frequently these efforts lead to a long list of suggestions that never get implemented. Cynicism takes hold quickly, and more and more employees find excuses to miss Innovation Friday.

As an alternative, executives should ask a small number of people to spend a significant amount of time on innovation. Remember, most start-ups fail — even with entrepreneurs spending every minute of every day obsessively focusing on their business. One person spending all of his or her time on innovation often trumps 1,000 spending 10% of their time on it. The math doesn’t work — except for when it does.

3. The Astronaut. This executive invokes the United States’ ultimately successful effort to put a man on the moon by urging, “We need something big, people! What is our moon shot?” It’s great to think big, of course, but pushing for big ideas often leads to proposals with sink-the-company risk (remember Motorola’s Iridium?). That risk means that the idea must be carefully studied, and since it hasn’t been done before, it probably won’t withstand analytical scrutiny. The push-for-moon shots too often mean innovation efforts never even get to the launch pad.

Instead of shooting for the moon, executives should encourage what author Peter Sims calls “little bets.” Academics and entrepreneurs agree that the very best ideas emerge out of a process of trial-and-error experimentation. Hang up posters of Thomas Edison with his famous line, “Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.” Start sweating.

4. The Pirate. This swashbuckler says, “We don’t have a fixed budget for innovation — but we don’t need one. We find the money when we need it.” While that statement sounds entrepreneurial, it can make the innovator’s life a nightmare because it signals a lack of clear rules for obtaining resources.This often means endless meetings with a varying cast of stakeholders. No one quite says yes, and no one quite says no, either.

The best companies manage innovation in a disciplined manner. They have dedicated budgets for it, with clear rules for how to obtain funding. While many leaders think this kind of disciplined approach is anathema to innovation, it actually enables it…

Ernest J. Wilson III. How to Make a Region Innovative. strategy+business, issue 66 Spring 2012.

To foster economic growth, innovation clusters need to draw on the power of an interrelated “quad” of sectors: public, private, civil, and academic.

…

Tools and methods for capturing Twitter data during natural disasters, by Axel Bruns and Yuxian Eugene Liang. First Monday, Volume 17, Number 4 - 2 April 2012

Abstract: During the course of several natural disasters in recent years, Twitter has been found to play an important role as an additional medium for many–to–many crisis communication. Emergency services are successfully using Twitter to inform the public about current developments, and are increasingly also attempting to source first–hand situational information from Twitter feeds (such as relevant hashtags). The further study of the uses of Twitter during natural disasters relies on the development of flexible and reliable research infrastructure for tracking and analysing Twitter feeds at scale and in close to real time, however. This article outlines two approaches to the development of such infrastructure: one which builds on the readily available open source platform yourTwapperkeeper to provide a low–cost, simple, and basic solution; and, one which establishes a more powerful and flexible framework by drawing on highly scaleable, state–of–the–art technology.