Curiouser and Curiouser! on innovation

Let's all not sing along

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 10:18:51 +0100

In his famous speech at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in July, Lawrence Lessig framed the same point as a four-stanza refrain for a song:

Creativity and innovation always builds on the past.
The past always tries to control the creativity that builds upon it.
Free societies enable the future by limiting this power of the past.
Ours is less and less a free society.

[Via LinuxJournal]

Water - Slush - Ice, and a slice

Tue, 08 Oct 2002 10:33:16 +0100

The metaphor describes how innovations go from ideas to implemented projects. Here's a diagram that illustrates this process:

Weblogs are an excellent example of a "highly networked community that encourages innovation." The water to ice metaphor describes a way to move these ideas from interesting conversation to successful projects.

Interesting piece from back in July by Andy Chen [Kumquat's musings]

» I'm not sure yet whether idea management is a leaky pipe, but if it is then knowledge logs are, as Andy says, a very good way to handle the water-slush-ice transition.

Andy's weblog is new to me, but chock full of interesting ideas and insights. I'll be reading more.

P2P companies or 'loosly coupled business'

Thu, 31 Oct 2002 14:16:57 +0000

Loosely Coupled Business Practices Remember my ramblings about p2p companies? Well, when I wrote that piece I wanted to use the "loosely coupled" metaphor, but then for some reason I didn't. This article gives a some very interesting perspectives on the idea. You should also read the white paper. [Paolo Valdemarin: Paolo's Weblog]

» I'll be reading this article later on. John Seely-Brown is one of it's authors so I have high hopes.

For now here is a 250 word summary:

Collaboration can only generate economic value when it is firmly anchored in specific business processes that span across enterprises.

Three core business processes meet this requirement: supply chain management, customer relationship management, and product innovation and commercialization.

Li & Fung provides a powerful example of a new kind of sophisticated orchestrator coordinating a very broad process network.

More fully developed process networks typically represent an expanding group of companies organized by an orchestrator to execute tailored business processes extending across multiple stages of activity.

For ts and to motivate every orchestrator, then, there will be a growing number of companies known as service providers.

Another aspect of Cisco's operations receives relatively little attention -- its development of an innovative process network to enhance the performance of its customer relationship management process.

The differences between tightly coupled and loosely coupled business processes explain fundamental differences in the economic value creation potential of each type of business process.

The early examples of loosely coupled business processes have all emerged within existing generations of information technology.

Web services are the technology analog to loosely coupled business processes.

Another key challenge in this stage is to build the appropriate information feedback loops to accelerate the ability of s improve their performance in supporting the process networks.

Few companies will evolve to the third stage where they shed their traditional core business and become pure process network orchestrators.

Success requires migrating towards a much more flexible business architecture supported ultimately by a more flexible technology architecture.

First outing for People Centred Knowledge Management

Thu, 22 Apr 2004 13:04:12 +0100

City Information Group April seminar - A trip to t .... City Information Group April seminar - A trip to the virtual world - 27 April 2004 - London, UK - Roger Brown from GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), will describe the dramatic transformation of the GSK libraries from physical to virtual, focussing on the implications for their information vendors. Matt Mower, partner in Evectors Software, will discuss exciting new developments in people-centred knowledge management. He will focus on "social software" including weblogs, aggregators and instant messengers [Feedster.com Results For: evectors]

I shall be speaking on April 27th to the City Information Group. I am presenting the first fruits of the work that Paolo and I have been doing over the last couple of months. I'll be presenting our theme: People Centred Knowledge Management, talking about issues such as collaboration, innovation, and trust, and illustrating how social network tools from weblogs to wikis to IRC combine to address those issues in a way existing tools cannot.

Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium

Wed, 19 May 2004 07:27:36 +0100

Yesterday at various times around the world we held an IRC chat in the #kmtalk channel to get started organising an event in London in July (July 12th it now transpires). The working title is 'Social Tools for Enterprises' and the event is aimed to be a practical get go for CxO's in Enterprises as to how social tools & methods can help them with problems like insufficient collaboration, low innovation and unmanaged risk.

This first session was really a chance to ensure that everyone had a similar vision of what we want to achieve and to get some vital details like the date sorted. Over the next couple of days we'll be working on the programme and there is another chat planned for Friday (details will be on the wiki soon).

Everyone with an interest is welcome to join the next IRC chat and get involved.

Getting my head shifted

Tue, 25 May 2004 09:29:09 +0100

Had a very nice lunch with Lee Bryant of HeadShift yesterday. We met in #kmtalk talking about the Social Tools for Enterprises Symposium I am helping to create.. Headshift are based in Butlers wharf, right on the river, which is a great setting for a meet up.

Over spinach & ricotta parcels and some Staropramen we chatted about: social software, the challenges facing organisation and employees, the central importantance of people at all stages of collaborative/KM projects, the roles of blognets, projects they are working on, FOAF (esp. how we need to be careful with what we infer from the data), metavalues, LinkedIn, Dave Snowden, K-Collector, ENT 1.0, BlogTalk 2.0, the BlogWalkers, Vienna, services vs. products, and a host of other topics.

I look forward to talking to Lee & co. again in the near future.

Innovation in the UK

Wed, 09 Jun 2004 09:38:39 +0100

I've been looking at the site for Demo 2005. It's been on my mind to wonder whether there is room for such an event here in the UK. The US seems well served with this kind of stuff. Are we interested?

Innovate '06

Wed, 26 Apr 2006 13:49:01 +0100

Graham and I will be attending Innovate Europe '06 in Zaragoza May 15th - 17th.

We had hoped to attend the pitch camp workshop that runs on the Sunday and Monday before the conference starts but it was too great a time commitment with all we've got going on.

If you're going to be attending this event please get in touch, I'd love to hear from you.