Innovating within innovations challenges…

Joëlle Liberman (Égérie Research) and François Jégou (Strategic Design Scenarios) are hosting a session titled Innovaton Futures, Innovating within innovation challenges. This workshop is based on an European project titled Innovation Futureswhich is a foresight exercise on emerging patterns of innovation. From their introduction:

How is innovation changing and which challenges innovation will have to face in the coming future? INFU (www.innovation-futures.org) is an on-going European research project focusing futures of innovation, scanning weak signals of change in the current innovation landscape, extrapolating new patterns, discussing emerging visions, scenarios and implications for policy and practices.

At the start of the workshop we were put into pairs and given a “weak signal” that they have identified. Mine was: CoWorking Houses as Creative Hubs: “More and more of the nomadic knowledge workers from the creative class join CoWorking spaces. CoWorking houses offer an easy, flexible and budget workspace combining workspace with a creativty hub. One question to ask about these weak signals is what would happen if they would turn into mainstream which of course begged the question whether maybe in the future mainstream is that there is no mainstream anymore. Next up we were asked to imagine being at a board meeting of the Innovation Agency in 2036 (25 years from now). The agency is facing a couple of challenges and has to find a solution to these. Our table had to think about the following:

Thinking about the challenge — Thinking about the waste challenge

“Waste based innovation has taken off in the 00’s and a complete new range of new products definitions and production processes based on reuse of existing components instead of rough materials. The world waste stock exchange market is working very well, even too well inducing a perverse increasing demand for waste materials. The Innovation Agency is asked to propose solutions to avoid this bias.” ‘

Our initial thoughts were around whether this would be a problem that the market can solve itself or whether this would require some governmental intervention to solve. Could there be a tertiary market around waste credits to counter this? Should we require companies to deal with their waste locally, avoiding worldwide trade in waste materials?

I proposed that the cause of the problem seems to be that the consumer has been educated to appreciate recycled products. This signal for whether something is “good” is not working anymore and we should have an alternative. The obvious thing to do is to take more effects of a product into account when you decide to buy something: look at the total cost of ownership over the use-life of the product. Philippe Méda suggested that one way of doing this would be to focus on making sure that products have longer lifecycles. How do we know whether it is better to drive a very old but wasteful car, versus buying a new one with its environmental costs of production? Somebody suggested that maybe the idea of ownership is the problem and wasteful in itself. Instead of ownership you will start licensing/renting products. Proposing an alternative model to ownership based on sharing. Hopefully the current transaction costs for sharing will be made small enough in 25 years for this to be easier than it is today!

Each group had to present their ideas. Unfortunately this drained the energy out of the room. It seemed like each table had had a good discussion, but these discussions didn’t translate well to a presentation to the whole group. No deep discussions after each presentation. I do hope the output of each group will be digitised in some way and made available (the presenters promised it a link will be published here).

The one question I have after this workshop is about the methodology itself. I think there is a lot of potential in imagining yourself in a board meeting somewhere in the future, but not all the potential came out at this workshop. How could this be improved?

Memory Feed: Reclaiming a Sense of Place through Mobile AR

Introduction

Jie-Eun Hwang and Yasmine Abbas are leading a workshop titled: Memory Feed: Reclaiming a Sense of Place through Mobile Augmented Reality. From their introduction:

With Mobile technologies, Augmented Reality (AR) entered a whole new phase. Mobile AR promises to enable in-situ activities and kinds of communications that allow people to solicit memories of places. Nevertheless, a series of mobile apps that simply overlay bubble icons on the camera viewfinder rather limit our imagination for what we could do with this (possibly) innovative, necessary, and if not useful channel of communication.

This session is held in a small sweaty square room in a building that has the boring non-appeal that only municipal buildings can have. After a struggle with both the beamer and the Internet connection (for security reasons nobody can go on the network…) we manage to get going.

The group of participants is diverse: there are some people who consult around social media or around innovation (e.g. Merkapt), there is somebody working in the research department of an office furniture manufacturer and thinking about the future of work and the workspace, there is a student who is building a web platform for managing student events, there is the CTO of Evenium, the app that is used at the conference and there is somebody who has started an organisation focused on urban memory as a way to improve the perception of the suburbs.

Jie-Eun is teaching in the department of architecture in the university in Seoul. Yasmine is also an architect, writing a book a neo-nomadism. They both focus on how to integrate digital technologies in the urban fabric. They are currently focused on mobile technologies, mainly augmented reality. How we translate our memories into digital media. Can these technologies be used to regain a sense of space when travelling through the city as a nomad.

Mobile Augmented Reality

Jie-Eun is part of a team developing an AR management platform for the web titled Cellophane funded by the culture/tourism ministry. One part of the project is mapping cultural expressions (like movies, drama, pictures, drawings and advertising) onto the city. Imagine being able to watch a movie and seeing a place you are interested in. You would then be able to visit the place either virtually or in real life. It can also work in the other direction: what movies are shot in the area? The tool comes with a nice admin interface allowing you to match the cultural expression to the physical space with a simple point and click interface.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/22556755]

They have the ambition to push beyond the current capabilities of apps like Layar. They overlay some icons and text on the camera view. For some reason it is quite difficult to use and doesn’t have a very good user experience.

Use cases

What invisible elements can we reveal through this medium? What types of data would we like to get (that go beyond the obvious things like gaming and tourism). In small groups we prototyped a couple of ideas using a use-case template.

I worked with Catherine Gall, Director of Workspace Futures at Steelcase. We first thought about the potential for mobile augmented technology to help in never making the same mistake twice. This could be at the level of the individual, the organisation or maybe even larger concepts like cities. How come you make the same mistake on that tax form every year? Why do you go a second time to a restaurant that you don’t like. We reflected on how a sense of space could help you in memorize things. We finally settled on an idea titled Location based well-being analytics. Certain places (in the sense of locations, but also spaces), events and situations affect our well-being in a consistent matter (be it positively or negatively) without us necessarily being aware of that. Many companies our now designing little monitors that measure your body for things like activity/movement, calorie intake, blood pressure, temperature, sugar levels and more. In the future these devices might even measure some form of quantified emotional state. Some mobile technology could combine your (intended) location with the historical data of these devices to predict how the location will affect your well-being and give out recommendations. This could be useful for people with fragile health or people who are rehabilitating. Alternatively it could just help people become more aware of their own well-being and how the environment affects this.

Other groups had ideas like:

Moody community: in a community you would have a wall where you would be able to see the mood of the community as it is aggregated by individual “mood” statements by the residents of the community. This could actually help build a community. Who would use this data?
An augmented mirror that you can use to try on clothes in which you can easily change the colour or fit etc.
Supporting professional teams during crisis with incredibly relevant and targeted information.
Maintenance: the system would recognise the part you are working on and it would recognize the context of what you are trying to do. The system would then be able to overlay extra information on reality, including maintenance history, particular advice or the gesture that you need to do.

My personal open questions after the session

All of the solutions assume that you are connected to the net for them to work. Can we afford to make this assumption or should we still explore ways of having the data that augments locally? Might there be other models? Mesh networked? Where the device would get the data from the environment on demand?
Imagine a future in which everything you do is recorded in many dimensions (solving the problem of needing to capture your learned lessons). Would this help you in not making the same mistake twice? What kind of interfaces and experiences would be necessary to not only learn from your own mistakes, but learn from other people’s mistakes? How would you now a “lesson from a mistake” would exist? Would it need to be pushed to you?
For current mobile performance support technology we usually think about location, direction, and maybe some RFID technology as “cues” to match the virtual content to reality. What other cues can be used sensibly? Light? Sound? Temperature?
A recurring question for me in the last couple of years is whether we start lusting for a non-technology mediated experience of reality. Will we put a premium on experiencing something for “real”? Can you see a future where you have “Augmented Reality Retreat Zones”?

Lift France 11 in Marseille: Be Radical!

The next couple of days I will be attending the Lift France 11 conference, titled: “Be Radical!”.

I have high ambitions for the way that I will be reporting on what I see, hear and do. I read this excellent guide for conference bloggers which has inspired me to try to liveblog all the sessions that I am attending (or at least have a post up a few minutes after the session has finished. I will also be experimenting with two new pieces of hardware: a Livescribe Echo and Kokak Playtouch. I have zero experience with either of these things, so no guarantees for any decent results.

The conference itself is different from the ones I visit usually. It does have a track about the transformation of the way we work, innovate and learn (see: the non-learning professionals already know that working is becoming the same thing as learning!), but the focus in a broader sense is on how digital technologies are affecting society.

Check out the programme and let me know if there is anything you would like me to enquire more about.

IT From Liability to Asset

Arjen Vrielink and I write a monthly series titled: Parallax. We both agree on a title for the post and on some other arbitrary restrictions to induce our creative process. Nowadays IT is as ubiquitous in a working environment as water, electricity and a toilet. Unfortunately, this is why many managers interpret IT as a utility and often see it as a liability. For this post we studied 3 organograms which popped up after a Google search and describe in 500 words what is (probably) wrong or right with them in terms of the role and place of the IT department. You can read Arjen’s post with the same title here.

Peter Hinssen has written a book titled Business/IT Fusion. In it, he attacks the current focus on aligning IT and the business and proposes to truly integrate IT into the business: a fusion. In his introduction he writes:

So, cost reduction in IT typically enhances the stereotype of IT being a commoditized, non-differentiating function. [..] Alignment is like a slow-acting poison that initially shows no signs of having a negative effect, but which paralyzes an IT organization by inducting servant like behavior.

His website shows the transformation that he is advocating:

IT 1.0 and IT 2.0 from Hinssen 2009, page 17

Drucker wrote in The Practice of Management:

Because the purpose of business is to create and keep a customer, the business enterprise has two -and only two – basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.

I am a strong believer in IT as one of the drivers of innovation. Hinssen references a 2005 Harvard Business Review article by Nolan and McFarlan, Information Technology and the Board of Directors, in which they publish a IT strategic impact grid:

Click to Enlarge — IT Strategic Impact Grid (click to Enlarge)

If you believe that IT should be playing on the offensive side of the grid, then this should be reflected in your organizational structure. So let’s look at the following three randomly chosen organograms and see whether the organizations consider themselves to be in factory mode, support mode, turnaround mode or strategic mode and whether they show signs of fusion. One way of doing this is to try and see whether there is a separate IT branch or not and whether IT and business processes are in the same box.

First Hibernia college, an online college in Ireland:

IT seems to reside under the Chief Knowledge Officer (who reports into the director of Operations). An online course seems to need development, instructional design and learning technology (each has their own manager) and it seems pretty clear that technology is part of the core operations. This organization probably considers itself to be in strategic mode (makes sense for an online college!).

Next ONGC India, an Oil and Natural Gas Corporation:

This one is a bit of mystery to me. There is a chief “Infocom” who reports into a role that is called “…To be filled…”. I imagine that this company will have multiple IT perspectives. The director of Tech & Field Services will have to steer a lot of technology and will be well integrated with the business. The infocom chief will likely have a much harder time playing in the offensive space.

Finally Uniex Ghana Limited, a trading company and consultancy:

This is very traditional organogram. There does not seem to be a high level IT role (no CIO). There are two layers of organization between the Marketing & IT manager (one of the most important roles if we agree with Drucker and the CEO). I wouldn’t be surprised if this organization would consider itself in support mode.

My main conclusion from this exercise is that an organizational diagram is not a good indicator for the role that IT plays in a business. I do not seem to be able to parse these diagrams in such a way that I can really understand how IT is seen in the company. Is that my lack of competence? I do now realize I need to do some more thinking in this area.

Looking at your own organization, what mode do you seem to be operating in?

Privacy and the Internet – A Talk at the HvA

Bits of Freedom is doing important work (and are effective in the way they do their job). I am therefore honoured to ocassionally field some of their speaker requests. Today I presented at the Hogeschool van Amsterdam on Privacy and the Internet and had some good talks with the students afterwards.

I am not sure the slides make a lot of sense without the audio, but if you augment them with a visit to some of the links in this bundle, then you might understand a bit better in which ways the Internet’s permance, replicability, scale and searchability (thank you danah) should affect the way we think about privacy going forward.

[slideshare id=8031673&doc=110520privacyandtheinternet-110519151745-phpapp01]

You can also download the slides as a 8.1MB PDF file.