Category Archives: innovation
First Raspberry Pi Meetup
Debating the Digital Economy and the Creative Industries
Beyond Text
Connected Digital Economy Catapult
The Technology Strategy Board is consulting widely about the Connected Digital Economy Catapult – “to address the challenges of maximising the economic value of the growing digital economy to UK businesses”.
This is an area of great interest to my colleagues and me at the Centre for Creative Collaboration and we have been involved in previous discussions (in the days of the ‘Technology Innovation Centres’).
On Friday last, I went to the Information Day held by the TSB as part of the process. Here’s some thinking in the form of an audioboo, based on the Storify summary I produced. My previous post has a liveblog made during the meeting which combines notes and collected tweets from the CDEC hashtag.
Connected Digital Economy Catapult – Liveblog
Here’s the Liveblog from the #CDEC meeting on 16 March 2012
Software for musicians – the art of engineering art
“There is no versioning – there is just the now” says Robert Henke; likening the true expression of digital music-making to the elder days of analogue mixing.
As tools and instruments overlap, what does that mean for how we generate music in the digital age using software?
He spoke insightfully, introduced by Gerhard Behles, another of the co-founders of Abelton, who also joined in the question session at the end of Robert’s prepared remarks.
And it was good thought-provoking stuff. But not one single musical example – which no-one seemed to find odd; and no examples of code or approaches to coding; ditto.
And a very interesting way of thinking about the issues – an expression of the psycho-philosophy of making music through coding – the constraints and complexity; inevitable compromises and how to code music without losing the point in the programming and the process.
Liveblog:
But where’s the Jet Packs?
When I was a kid – programmes about the future always had Jet Packs. But Sunday’s Home of the Future programme didn’t have any – though it does reduce one family’s energy use by 40%.
Working with Amplified, Christian Payne (@documentally) and I were asked to see whether we could help to generate conversations and wider interactions around a TV show, and more particularly to see whether we could help to add more members to and raise awareness of an innovation challenge which is sponsored by E.On the giant energy services company. The challenge, E.ON Innovation is about finding new ideas to help the UK save energy. It’s based around a Channel 4 TV programme “Home Of The Future”.
Amplified is a Not-for-profit; a social business, we have a network of freelancers (me included) who use social media to ‘cover’ events aiming to enable and encourage community participation around events, conferences and public conversations.
We are independent. We do loads of events, mostly for Charities or 3rd sector organisations; sometimes for big public organisations; occasionally for big companies. Our experience with bigger organisations, especially public companies has varied. Bluntly, if it’s about PR spin and ‘control of the message’ then ‘we’re out’ (as they say…) if it’s about conversation, good intentions and opening up then we’ll have a go.
We did our due diligence. The opportunity came through a conversation between Roland Harwood and Steve Lawson of Amplified on Twitter – actually they were talking about Jazz, I think, and then the idea of Amplified helping with the E.ON Innovation project came up. Amplified has worked with Roland and his 100% Open business a number of times before and he helped with Amplified getting started while he was at NESTA. Christian pinged his various networks asking about E.ON – you can read his post about it. I got stuck in to the websites.
I spent time on the Home of the Future website, read the background on 100% Open’s involvement and spent more time on the E.ON Innovation website and I read the Terms and Conditions. The Ts&Cs were interesting (bet this is the first time you’ve read that!).
You can submit your ideas on the “Open ideas track” where they can be seen by the members of the site and they can be openly discussed and voted on – with obvious impact on any potential rights you may have – and you’re eligible for the prize. There’s also a “Private venture track” and the document says “Private submissions are suitable for those who wish to enter into a business relationship with E.ON. You won’t be eligible for a prize.” If you go this route – 100% Open becomes your Agent; you can sign them up to a confidentiality agreement and your idea doesn’t get seen by E.ON until both you and 100% Open agree. The site makes it clear that you need to think carefully and take independent advice. In other words, you need to be a grown up about this stuff!
I like this approach. It’s completely transparent. And the other thing is – there’s no shortage of ideas; getting them to turn into something tangible is the difficult bit. As early stage and Angel investors often say “Ideas are easy; execution is hard”. Sometimes, collaboration and involving others can be a way to move things on; and you always have the option not to share stuff. For well developed ideas or businesses that have an existing product or service then you can opt for the private track.
We agreed terms of reference for Amplified’s work; we’d Tweet, do a liveblog, have editorial independence and use the same protocols we have developed in our other work on events. We’d use our judgement. The liveblog would focus on the programme and we’d have conversations around it and the E.ON innovation ideas. Then we’d review it – see how it was and have a chat with 100% Open about it – which is what we’re doing this week.
It was an odd experience – but fun. Normally with Amplified we are at an event, working as a team and there’s a lot of interaction; side chats and banter. And we’re in the same physical space as the participants at an event. This time it was all online; and it was fast and furious. The time really flew by, I watched the programme with my family; hearing their comments and following the timeline on both hashtags and monitoring the liveblog. The show itself is very ‘wow gadget’ and a bit light on implications – it’s entertaining. The fact that they’ve reduced the family’s energy consumption by 40% even with 3 electric cars and all the gadgets is impressive. I watched it again on C4+1 as my lot went off to do other stuff. As I’d seen the programme once already, I had a bit more time to look at Twitter and see what other people were saying.
We talked about it over a family dinner. Someone had tweeted (Christian, I think?) that it’s when you see programmes like that and other people’s responses to it – you realise that not everyone is an early adopter! My kids thought that it was only a bit in the future – and we talked about how difficult it is to see what might happen. We all know that we have to look hard at ways to save energy.
We also talked about all those programmes when we were kids – Tomorrow’s World, Horizon; and that we were promised jet packs. We were certainly promised jet packs!
Here’s the Liveblog – let me know what you think, especially if you have views about Amplified’s involvement:
TurningPoint Newcastle
The Lean Startup
This event marks the publication of Eric Ries new book The Lean Startup as part of the LSE’s public lecture series.
“Most new businesses fail. But most of those failures are preventable. The Lean Startup is a new approach to business that’s being adopted around the world. It is changing the way companies are built and new products are launched. The Lean Startup is about learning what your customers really want. It’s about testing your vision continuously, adapting and adjusting before it’s too late. Now is the time to think Lean.”
I liveblogged the event – and here are my notes.
The Lean Startup
Eric Ries
Linda Hickman says the book has started a whole movement; there is some controversy about his thinking. Started as a software developer, founder of IMTU and on the board of startups and working with HBS. The contentiousness of his approach is related to his reflective practice – it’s not about the ‘Great Man’.
Ground rules – don’t want anyone to be disconnected on his account. Use your mobiles.
Public policy-makers are keen on ‘entrepreneurialism’ – v exciting.
Startups are difficult and boring – and product improvement meetings don’t make good movies. The stuff that’s important is ‘too boring to be in the movies’.
A startup is a human institution designed to deliver a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainly.
“A startup is an experiment – can we build a sustainable organisation”.
- Most startups fail
- Some get bought – by big companies.
- Some enter the Land of the Living Dead
“We can build anything we can imagine”
Entrepreneurship is management. He blames Taylor – “In the past, the man was first. In the future, the system will be the first.” (1911). Fred Taylor’s scientific management gives the wrong signals – we needed more stuff; it was about building it; not thinking about whether is should be built.
We are dealing with ‘extreme uncertainty’
It’s about “The Pivot”
Pivoting is a core concept – a change in strategy; not a change it vision. Pivot sooner. Expands the runway without raising more money.
Achieving failure = successfully executing a bad plan.
Forecasting ad planning only works in a stable environment.
Which activities (from the perspective of the customer) add value and which don’t.
Pivot for him was throwing away 6 months worth of code development. But learning is the excuse to justify failure. “Learning is our most valuable asset” as entrepreneurs.
Validated learning is about how we achieve the learning with minimum effort. Need to minimise the total time through the loop. Build – measure – learn. The point of continuous deployment is implementing features very rapidly – but as experiments. Need to make the “Minimum Viable Product”.
Innovation accounting. [Cites the Toyota Way]. Need to hold entrepreneurs accountable. Normally the metrics are ‘vanity metrics’.
“They can’t [VCs] tell whether you’re on the brink of success or whether you’ve spent the year ‘goofing off’.”
You need to:
- Establish the baseline
- Tune the engine
- Pivot or persevere
“It’s better to have bad news that’s true than good news that’s made up”.
“When experiments reach diminishing returns; it’s time to Pivot”.
Questions
Q – re leadership of the business; why don’t you mention the directors?
A – masses of advice on that. It’s more about the process and the environment that they work in.
Q – re e-commerce; what does MVP look like?
A – inventory is about satisfying demand. Building up inventory in advance of a sale is not a good plan. Start with a very small number of early adopters. Apologies and take pre-orders.
Q – why should I listen to this – what have you built that’s successful?
A – argument by case study. The point of a framework is that it makes predictions – start with one concept and see what happens – make predictions and test. Do it for yourself and see what works.
Q – re scaling. How do you implement a MVP?
A – take one idea; try to get a competitor to steal it. ‘We should be so lucky!’. Big companies have plenty of ideas – but they can’t implement. If you can’t out iterate them – shame on you.
Q – stuff gets released that people don’t really want.
A – it’s about batch size. Think manufacturing. Apply it to software development. Cluster immune system.
Q – re Investors and their attitudes. How do they react?
A – Not easy to sell to investors. It’s difficult. We pivoted to a better product. A few of our investors understood what we were trying to do as a micro-scale experiment. And we knew what the inflection points were caused by. It’s a tough sell. “Don’t pitch the buzzwords – pick the results.”
‘There is zero penalty for shipping the MVP too early.”
Q – from a big company guy from an established brand. What are the challenges of getting big companies to change their ways’
A – The challenge is to get them to change the accountability. Start something that doesn’t need the corporate brand. Reverse the thinking – needs to come down from the top. Middle managers get paid to ‘make the quarter’ – and they kill innovation.
Q – What are you going to do next?
A – I have no idea. Something to do with the short term nature of public markets. Targets are part of the problem. We need a long term stock exchange. Needs full-on ecosystem reform.