Tapping the Network to Facilitate Innovation

by Venessa Miemis

A few weeks ago, I entered a contest to receive a free entry to the Social Business Edge conference coming up in April in NYC, and a chance to share the idea on stage. I just found out my entry is one of four that was selected. I'm copying it here, but I'd love to build it out with you:


How can the power and scope of social networks, combined with a human capital inventory, be used to facilitate shared creation and innovation?

It wasn't that long ago that society was a byproduct of an industrial era, characterized by assembly lines, processes, and efficiency. Like the machines they operated, people were not expected to think, but to conform and become a cog - a replicable, interchangeable part of a machine. The problem is, humans weren't designed for mechanization. We were designed to create.

With the rise of social tools, we've been publicly reclaiming ourselves - publishing blogs, joining social networks, and connecting and sharing information with each other on a global scale. As a result, a shift in values is underway, where privacy, gatekeeping, and the preference for information silos is being replaced with new expectations of publicy, openness and transparency. We're still exploring the implications of this transition both for our personal identities and for the role of the business organization, but there's the potential to redesign the system in a way that's fair, participatory, and human.


But how?

A part of it is in understanding the composition of our social networks, and the skills, strengths, and relationships that are embedded within them. At the organizational level, knowledge is often separated by department, and at a larger scale it's separated by the notions of producer verse consumer. These barriers no longer make sense. In order to take advantage of hidden insights and innovative ideas, there needs to be a way to understand who's who and how to get the information flowing through the proper channels.

A tool that would map the connections within a network combined with a 'human capital' assessment could aid in this process. By mapping the network, one would understand the relationships between individuals and groups, how knowledge flows, and spot areas where communication channels could be opened and new connections made. A human capital inventory would be like a resume, but with context. It might show an individual's past experience and affiliations and skills, but also include things like social capital, sphere of influence, reputation, inherent strengths, and personality type. This information would give clues as to how to create dynamic teams and at what stage of a process an individual's skills would be best applied.

By creating transparency and open channels, a social learning environment is created, where managers become leaders and facilitators and everyone else becomes participants. This is opposite to being cogs in a machine - rather it encourages creativity, collaboration, and shared creation. It's become apparent that a vast amount of knowledge exists within the structure of the network itself, and by creating the proper conditions for information to be shared and built upon, we can devise solutions that are better than zero-sum. Approaching problems with this mindset would have an amplifying effect that would scale beyond the limits of the organization.


Taking the Idea Further

So there's the premise. The ideas are not new, but seem to exist currently in different places in different stages. For instance, the idea of measuring influence is currently being tested with services like Klout, and Tweetlevel. The Whuffie Bank is trying to devise a currency that's built on reputation that could be redeemed for real and virtual products and services. And I was just alerted to a new startup, Jostle, that's trying to help companies "harness and engage their human capital."

On the other side, you have the people who are trying to understand how knowledge flows within an organization, and how the learning process works. I've picked up a lot of ideas about social network analysis from Valdis Krebs, the concept of Wirearchy from Jon Husband, and ways to bridge the gap between a networked enterprise and social learning from Harold Jarche and Frederic Domon.

Plus all the people doing work in Knowledge Management, (David Gurteen and Dave Snowden come to mind), Design Thinking (Arne van Oosterom), Social Business Design (David Armano, Peter Kim, Jeremiah Owyang), and the 'big shift' that's impacting business strategy and innovation (John Hagel & John Seely Brown).

Plus all of you who make this blog worth visiting by adding your insights and comments to every post. I feel like all the pieces are out there, we just need to imagine how to bring them together. I've been throwing out this idea on Twitter, and getting some interesting thoughts, but 140 characters is too short, so I wanted to put it here to see where we could go with it.

I'm imagining some kind of a social tagging system that would travel with you, like a "live" version of your resume - which is currently a static and vague document that lacks the rich context that tells what you're really all about. What would this look like? Could we somehow have a 'human capital inventory' that would list some of those inherent strengths that we possess? Descriptive words like adaptive, flexible, catalyst, playful, critical thinker, methodical, etc. Or some way to tag the contributions we made to specific projects or initiatives at work? And then could that be combined with a visualization of our social connections, both strong and weak ties, and the value we add to those various networks? And along with that, recommendations or compliments or testimonials, or some way to have individuals give you props.

How would this look? We've gotten so good at tagging the world around us, of creating folksonomies to understand everything around us. Isn't it only a matter of time before we start tagging ourselves?

Related Article:

• Why a Networking Culture is Important

Don't miss an article - Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

---

Venessa Miemis is a Media Studies graduate student at the New School in NYC, exploring what happens at the intersection of technology, culture, and communication. Connect with her at www.emergentbydesign.com and on Twitter @venessamiemis.

Picture - Trends for the 2010s

by Venessa Miemis

Here are a few recurring themes that have been popping up on my radar.
(click to enlarge)



Enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

---

Venessa Miemis is a Media Studies graduate student at the New School in NYC, exploring what happens at the intersection of technology, culture, and communication. Connect with her at www.emergentbydesign.com and on Twitter @venessamiemis.

What is Design Thinking?

by Venessa Miemis

If you're a businessperson or someone interested in understanding how to facilitate innovation, you've probably heard of "design thinking" by now. Coined by IDEO's David Kelley, the term refers to a set of principles, from mindset to process, that can be applied to solve complex problems. I've seen articles lately ranging from those that highlight its potential, [Design Thinking for Social Innovation, How does design thinking give companies a competitive advantage?] to those that warn of it's impending failure as a practice [Why Design Thinking Won't Save You , The Coming Boom and Bust of Design Thinking]. I've been eager to enter into the conversation, especially because some of the arguments around the topic don't make sense to me and I wanted to know why. Change by Design, written by IDEO's CEO Tim Brown, was on my winter reading list anyway, so I decided to finish it before bringing in my own perspectives.

I just got through the book a few days ago, and feel like I "get it." So I've spent a few days reflecting on it and rereading some innovation articles, and think there is a bigger picture at the essence of design thinking that is being lost on some. I'm going to provide a brief summary of the book (from my interpretation), and tie in some other areas that brought me insights into these ideas.

Design Thinking as a Path to Innovation

Though the subtitle of the book is "How Design Thinking Transforms Organizations and Inspires Innovation," what Brown is actually proposing in this book goes far beyond offering advice for keeping your business on the leading edge of innovation. He's talking about a new ethos in how we operate as a society. That concept feels pretty big, so it's packaged as a business innovation book instead in order to overcome the challenge of getting you to open it. Not that you're being tricked - it IS about innovation, but it's extended beyond the scope of designing products and services to encompass the way we design the systems in which we live. After seven chapters of explaining design thinking as it relates to your organization, he gets to the meat and potatoes with chapters titled 'The New Social Contract,' 'Design Activism,' and 'Designing Tomorrow - Today.'

He begins to frame this within the opening pages of the book:


"What we need are new choices - new products that balance the needs of individuals and of society as a whole; new ideas that tackle the global challenges of health, poverty, and education; new strategies that results in differences that matter and a sense of purpose that engages everyone affected by them."


He goes on to identify three key spaces of innovation, which function as overlapping stages of a process: inspiration, ideation, and implementation. You can read a more thorough explanation of these stages in this article, but here's the short version:


Inspiration: the problem or opportunity that motivates the search for solutions
[this stage involves sketches, mock-ups, and scenario-building]

Ideation: the process of generating, developing, and testing ideas
[this stage involves building prototypes & exploring the balance between practical functionality and emotional appeal]

Implementation: the path that leads from the project room to the market
[this stage involves clearly communicating the idea and proving/showing that it will work]


It's a simple enough of a framework, one that shares many components with any well-devised design or research process. As he explains the approach, he highlights that innovation must occur within a set of constraints, such as economic viability, and that a traditional business-minded rational/analytic approach must be maintained as well. I mention this because some of the articles I've read that bash design thinking seem to complain that the approach is an abandonment of good 'business thinking.' For instance, here's a quote from an article in Harvard Business Review titled "Why Design Thinking Won't Save You":


"Design thinking is trotted out as a salve for businesses who need help with innovation. The idea is that the left-brained, MBA-trained, spreadsheet-driven crowd has squeezed all the value they can out of their methods. To fix things, all you need to do is apply some right-brained turtleneck-wearing "creatives," "ideating" tons of concepts and creating new opportunities for value out of whole cloth."


I'm kind of surprised by the statement, because Brown never makes a statement that sounds like "all you need to do is..." He actually repeats many times throughout the book that there needs to be a combination of the intuitive/emotional with the rational/analytic, a "balance of management's legitmate requirement for stability, efficiency, and predictability with the design thinker's need for spontaneity, serendipity, and experimentation." If anything, he's calling for a holistic interdisciplinary approach to business that breaks down the rigid silos of standard organizational structure that, in its very design, impedes creativity, collaboration, knowledge sharing, and in turn, innovation.

Tools for Design Thinking

The design thinker uses a set tools and skills that inform and facilitate the innovation process, from visual tools like sketches, mind maps and prototypes to mental processes like brainstorming, building on the ideas of others, and creating scenarios. They operate on principles that encourage collective ownership, like "all of us are smarter than any of us," and adhere to 'rules' that promote organizational creativity, like having permission to fail, experiment, take risks, and explore the full range of their faculties. They rely on their "ability to be intuitive, to recognize patterns, and to construct ideas that have emotional meaning as well as functionality." But these practices and techniques are not unique to the design thinker.

As I commented on Bruce MacGregor's article "How does design thinking give companies a competitive advantage?," the principles of design thinkers are also those used by futurists. (A good introductory article to Futures Thinking was written up by Jamais Cascio in Fast Company, found here.) Though the terminology is different, the process is very similar. Again, I mention this because there is some argument around design thinking which seems to be coming down to semantics - "it's really just social science," or "it's just futures thinking repackaged."

So, what is design thinking then?

The strategies and tactics reviewed so far are probably familiar to you if you've read literature on creativity and innovation. You can pull up the innovation sections of the major business management publications, and find that the articles will give you a similar flavor as what's mentioned above. So how does design thinking make this any different?

Whether it's called design thinking, lateral thinking, right-brain thinking, systems thinking, integrative thinking, futures thinking, or my own term of 'metathinking,' from my perspective, the concept itself is rooted in a capacity to understand the world and our relationship to it, and within it, in a different way.

Design thinking is a "human-centered approach," and for me that means truly getting down to the core of what we think it means to be human, of what it 'should' look like, and how we want to experience life. When we see the word "design," we may immediately think of just products made by a snooty designer; items we see displayed at a museum that bear no resemblance to something we'd find in our home, artwork that makes us somehow feel stupid because we don't understand why it's so special, or architecture that is said to make "a statement" but feels completely alien in the way it impacts us. That is not the same design that is being proposed by design thinking.

When I started my blog, I knew I wanted to write about emerging trends at the intersection of technology, communication, and culture. Many of the posts lately have been focused around social media technologies and how they're allowing for a many-to-many communication structure that's never been possible before in human history, and what the implications of such a thing could be. But really, those explorations are laying a foundation for a bigger question; namely, where do we go from here?

My research brought me to systems theory and complexity theory, and I've been particularly interested in complex adaptive systems theory. It proposes that the world is full of systems; from the ecosystem in which we live, to the social systems we've constructed via civilization, to the online social systems we're creating as we develop a network culture. It broadened my perspective on the way culture works to think of it as a complex series of interactions, full of meaningful patterns that shape our society whether we're aware of them or not. It made me think about the many systems around us that are currently collapsing, from global economic systems, to governments, to educational institutional models, to healthcare.

The talk about massive change is pervasive today, and many suggest we need to undergo a complete paradigm shift in the way we operate if we're to survive in a fashion that's desirable and sustainable. The good news is, that shift can be made with intentionality and choice. We're citizens in an increasingly participatory culture, and I realized that that was the essence of what I wanted to write about - our ability to influence how we shape society. So I titled my blog 'Emergent by Design.'

My posts have evolved to become a kind of storytelling and connecting the dots, and the comments sections have become conversation areas. We are engaging in a process of collectively inventing what we want, how we'd like to interact with it, and what we can do to make it happen. In my mind, this is at the heart of design thinking.

In a previous post, What is Social Media [the 2010 edition], I briefly covered the definition of "media" and illustrated how our entire manmade environment is a collection of media that act as representations of some other thing or idea. From convenient functionality,



to casual ambiance,



to childlike fantasy,



to shared wisdom and personal histories,



to a better ability to meet basic needs.



None of these examples happened by accident - they were done by design. They create a context that affects the reaction of the person experiencing them. So design is not just about the end product or service itself, but also the process of the interaction and the emotional response and intrinsic value that it provides. In that vein, design thinking is about the interaction between feasibility (what is functionally possible within the foreseeable future); viability (what is likely to become part of a sustainable business model); and desirability (what makes sense to people and for people), with an emphasis on the people for which the product or service is being designed.

Synthesis

So whether you hope to employ design thinking to restructure the culture of an organization or to innovate a new product or service, it's important to remember that it's more than a set of simple tactics that can be implemented overnight. It's more like a new ecology of mind, that takes time to grow, adapt, and evolve. It still requires an adherence to sound business decision-making, but also a commitment to challenge one's own beliefs about "the way things work," and to keep coming back to a human-centered approach by focusing on addressing people's unspoken and unmet needs.


Enjoy this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and join our Continuous Innovation group!

---

Venessa Miemis is a Media Studies graduate student at the New School in NYC, exploring what happens at the intersection of technology, culture, and communication. Connect with her at www.emergentbydesign.com and on Twitter @venessamiemis.

Why Education Needs Social Media

by Venessa Miemis

I read an article the other day on John Merrow's blog, titled 'Technology in Schools: Problems & Possibilities.' In it, he outlines three fears he has concerning the implementation of emerging media technologies into education:

1. The digital divide (gap between people with access to technology and those without)


2. Schools will resist innovation and become irrelevant


3. Schools will not use technologies in a strategic way

I spend a lot of time thinking about social technologies and the role they're playing in our lives now and into the future, and I feel that though John's fears are justified, they may prove to be unfounded as time progresses. Here's why:


Fear #1: The Digital Divide

I agree that access to technology may be an issue (for now), but the barrier is continuing to drop. Frame it in terms of Moore's Law or Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, but either way, the rate at which technologies become more powerful and robust continues to increase, while the costs associated with producing them goes down. Based on this, the question of whether an individual from a lower income bracket can gain access to technology may become a moot point.

And I don't think that means that all of a sudden everyone is going to have a computer at home. But what it could mean is that the 'have-nots' will get on equal footing via technological leapfrogging. As upcoming mobile technologies continue to transform cellphones into portable, handheld computers, it's not hard to imagine that there will be a segment of the population that goes straight from no access to having smartphones that keep them fully connected. If you take a look at the latest Mobile Metrics Report by Admob, you'll see that the mobile web has been experiencing massive growth globally. (ReadWriteWeb summarized the report nicely here).

So, in my mind, we don't have to be in fear of a growing digital divide - if anything, we're going to see it exponentially shrink.


Fear #2: Schools Resist Innovation

Yes, I certainly agree with this. Schools, like governments, are institutions that are notoriously slow to adopt new practices and adapt to change. By resisting integration of some technologies and blocking access to others, schools are creating the potential for a huge shake-up in the trust and validity we put into them.

Social Media isn't a wild animal that needs to be caged and trained before it's allowed to be pet by the neighbors. Social media is a paradigm shift in how humans communicate. If schools stop teaching students communication skills, we're in trouble.

I don't know if this is a case of 'innovate of die,' but if educational institutions don't wake up, there will be a groundswell, and 'the people' will create solutions that are not dependent upon traditional learning structures.

I'd argue that in many ways this is already happening just in the act of participating in the social web. There's so much to be said on that idea alone, I'll save my expansion on it for an upcoming post.


Fear #3: Schools Embrace Technology Incorrectly

Like any project that is pursued with enthusiasm but without structure, trying to integrate social technologies into the classroom without a framework will fail. There are many, many individuals and organizations busy developing guidelines and best practices for how to teach 'new media literacies', so I will just provide a few examples as a reference. The MacArthur Foundation launched a $50 million digital media and learning initiative a few years ago, and has funded many great projects already. One that immediately comes to mind is New Media Literacies, a project pioneered by Henry Jenkins and the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, which has a wealth of information to help educators effectively integrate new media into the classroom.

There will be a learning curve, especially since best practices are still being established, but fear cannot be the determining factor in whether technologies are implemented or not.

(BTW, for any 'social media expert' out there who wants to devote some time to learning how to apply their craft to the educational setting and do some consulting, there's a huge opportunity there for a lucrative business model.)


Final Thoughts

I think this whole conversation requires a reorientation of how 'social media' is approached. Defining it as something that can exist separately from education is simply misguided. Information is coming at us at a dizzying pace, and social technologies are tools that help us filter the flow. They allow us to share, discover, and grow. We can digest information together, collaboratively refine our thinking, and restate ideas in new ways to help make sense of it all.

In essence, social media is a mandatory 21st century literacy, a set of communication skills that MUST be learned if we want to prepare today's youth to be able to participate effectively in the global marketplace.

---

Venessa Miemis is a Media Studies graduate student at the New School in NYC, exploring what happens at the intersection of technology, culture, and communication. Connect with her at www.emergentbydesign.com and on Twitter @venessamiemis.