BIF Speak

New Book by BIF-3 Storyteller Dave Balter: The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II

As consumers, we are all word-of-mouth marketers. We buy a product, love it and share our opinion with a couple of our friends. Conversely, if we hate the product, well we don’t keep that view to ourselves either. Either way, what we say can have a dramatic impact on a company’s bottom line.

Of course the difficulty for marketers is creating the right kind of buzz with enough momentum to carry it over the tipping point. Dave Balter, founder and CEO of BzzAgent and his network of 450,000 volunteer “agents” believe they’ve figured out a way to crack that code.

We first met Dave last year when he spoke at the BIF-3 summit last fall. He brought his artist-in-residence, Seth Minkin in tow. Dave has just published a new e-book called The Word of Mouth Manual, Volume II.

If you saw Dave at the summit, then you know he's an open and transparent kind of guy. Which explains why he's opted for a different sort of publishing route by offering his book for free download through several thought leader sites. (Thanks to Dave for considering BIFSpeak one of them - you can download your free copy here.)

BzzAgent CEO Dave Balter presenting at the BIF-3 summit while artist-in-residence Seth Minkin paints. The bee is an older painting.

Since 2001, Balter has been creating a different type of loyalty model which organizes massive groups of people to share their opinions around products and services and then, rewards them for doing it. With his company BzzAgent, he's developed a system that organizes, manages and measures word-of-mouth. CRM systems, he says, are filled with insane amounts of data. They’re knowledge platforms. “I wanted to create a ‘people’ platform of opinion and insight. I see word-of-mouth becoming a media channel that companies repeatedly tap into for everything from ideation to innovation.”

Now Balter wants to share with the world his secrets to word-of-mouth marketing. Here's how he describes his new book:

My new book, The Word of Mouth Manual: Volume II, is an embodiment of Word of Mouth itself. Every aspect of it was conceived as an illustration of how to get people talking. There are dozens of elements of WOM in action which will become entirely obvious once you see it, read it and hold it. For example, the title begs people to ask, "Where's Volume I?" which is as good a way as any to get a dialogue going. The same goes for the monkey on the cover (and how that guy eats bananas, of course).

For Balter, what began as a “lifestyle” business—he told me last year that "BzzAgent was intended to be a nice, small five-person company”—is now a firm with more than 70 employees and a big time dream. When I asked him where he wants BzzAgent to be in the next five years, he answered: “Like TV networks or cable companies are the distribution platforms for advertiser’s commercials, I’d like to be known as the media channel in anyone seeking to engage the power of people’s credible opinions. If you’re going to do anything in word-of-mouth, you need to tap into the Bzzagent network.”

If you want to learn how to manage your own word-of-mouth, check out Dave Balter's new book.

Related BIF Content
Download a full (and free) copy of the book here.
Watch Dave Balter's BIF-3 video here

Other Content
Dave spoke with Guy Kawaski recently about his new book. Read the interview here.
BzzAgent's artist-in-residence Seth Minkin is becoming famous in his own right. Check out his recent segment on CBS Sunday Morning.
Learn more about BzzAgent

Meet BIF-4 Storyteller Debi Brooks: Medical Research Change Agent

Benjamin Franklin said if you don’t watch your workers, you might as well leave a bag of money in their midst and walk away. Applying this principle of oversight to a group of scientists from esteemed institutions is surprisingly unconventional,. And that's exactly what Debi Brooks, co-founder of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research is trying to do.

Brooks will be a storyteller at our upcoming BIF-4 Summit in October where she'll talk about the "shockingly unmonitored" medical research funding process and the new model MJFF has created during the past eight years, positioning itself as a “strategic intermediary” between science and its funders — private philanthropists as well as industry — in an urgent effort to find a cure for Parkinson's disease.

Since its creation in 2000, MJFF has funded $120 million in research on a disease that experts think will take a billion dollars to cure. In the process, the foundation has become a critical thought leader and action driver for the entire Parkinson’s field. Its involvement in a given PD research project or undertaking has become a ‘stamp of approval’ that other investors use as a factor in their own funding decisions.

Pace, Brooks realized early on, is crucial. The foundation uses an accelerated grant system to make award decisions within two months of receiving research proposals. The duration of a typical award is two years, and MJFF money is significant — most awards are in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and some programs offer multi-million-dollar funding.

But arguably even more importantly than speed and award size, scientists are held accountable for the money MJFF invests in their research. Every award is milestone-based and every awardee is required to meet with the foundation at the midway point to report on progress. In the Foundation’s early days scientists balked at this requirement, but they soon began to see the benefit of sharing their work with peers and getting constructive feedback while their work was in progress.

“The more conventional funding approach is to write the check and walk away, hoping your awardee does what they’ve promised to do with your money. We didn’t like that status quo. We wanted to understand the productivity of our capital, and if a project stalled we wanted to know why. Was it a need for more money? A flaw in the hypothesis? How could we help get the work back on track? Or was it time to abandon that project and go another way?” ~Debi Brooks

Of course the people who feel the greatest pressure to find a cure for PD are those afflicted with the disease, and the diffuse goals of science and business do not necessarily prioritize patient outcomes. MJFF’s “patient-driven capital” is directed toward a cure—a goal that confounds the logic of traditional market forces.

With the patient in mind, the foundation takes a top-down view of both research and the market. This is what Brooks calls being “in the catbird seat,” or seeing the whole process and helping shepherd the most promising ideas from one stage to the next.

“Look, we’ll never take anything over the goal line ourselves because we don’t have the expertise or the kind of capital that requires—we’re not a pharmaceutical company. Admittedly, compared to government and industry funding, our resources are a drop in the bucket. But we’re targeted and strategic in how we allocate them. That’s why we believe our model makes PD therapeutics development more efficient and ultimately will have a hand in speeding up the delivery of new treatments to patients.”

It is impossible to measure how close the foundation has come to reaching its goal of finding a cure. “The more you know, the more likely you’d be to give up,” Brooks told us. “But we’ve gotten smarter about it. We’ve kept up our tenacity and our sense of urgency and I believe we will reach the finish line.”

Don't miss Debi Brooks at the BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit on October 15th and 16th. More information about the summit and our lineup are here.

Congratulations to BIF-4 Storyteller Jacqueline Novogratz

BIF-4 storyteller Jacqueliine Novogratz was named one of the 73 biggest brains in business by Portfolio magazine. Novogratz is the CEO of Acumen Fund, a private equity company she founded in 2001 that has invested in 32 entrepreneurs who are building systems to bring affordable basic services to low income people in India, Pakistan, Kenya and Tanzania.

By applying business metrics to philanthropy, Novogratz is changing the model for catalyzing change in developing countries. She does not treat the poor as passive recipients. Instead, she sees them as customers and uses the market to understand their needs and preferences. For instance, she's learned over the years that people don’t want technology per se; they want services. Understanding what services are in demand requires an accurate perception of the people who will use them—even if they are poor.

Shifting business practices to accommodate unconventional venues means injecting a little creative disturbance into the marketplace, searching for serious innovators who cross sectors, locating the right entrepreneurs and the gutsiest local talent. By creating systems that are not dependent on random good will, Novogratz is taking the lessons she's learned about design and ultimately influencing government, corporations and private manufacturers to take her projects to scale.

One recent success highlighted in the Portfolio profile is A to Z Textile Mills. The Tanzanian company makes insecticide-treated mosquito nets to protect people against malaria. Acumen Fund invested $325,000 to entrepreneur Anuj Shah to help the company set up a factory which today employs some 5,000 people and produces 8 million bed nets a year. And the investment? Acumen Fund got it back.

Here at the Business Innovation Factory, we believe that the best value-creating opportunities are found in the gray areas between disciplines, functions, and sectors. Jacqueline Novogratz is an innovator who has created a new system level solution with an interdisciplinary approach. Her business model came from bringing unusual suspects together and connecting new capabilities in a purposeful way. I particular like this quote from Jacqueline from her recent blog entry:

"(I try) to live more fully the idea that we can hold the discipline of the market and deep compassion at the same time. I’ve worked harder to emphasize the dignity of work."

Don't miss Jacqueline share her story at the BIF-4 Summit on October 15th and 16th. She'll be joining more than two dozen other innovators from all walks of life. Register now for this unique 2-day conversation.

RELATED
Learn more about Acumen Fund
Read the Acumen Fund blog

BIF Bookshelf: Putting Disruptive Innovation to Work

It's no small feat to add to the body of work created by BIF research advisor Clay Christensen. It's been more than 10 years since Christensen changed the innovation landscape with his seminal work on disruptive innovation called The Innovator's Dilemma. Since then, he's published two additional books on the subject and co-founded a successful consulting firm Innosight.

Now, three members of Innosight - Scott Anthony, Mark Johnson, Joseph Sinfield - and Elizabeth Altman of Motorola have written a new book called The Innovator's Guide to Growth which takes Christensen's theories and puts them into practice. Through frameworks, tools and templates, the authors provide an accessible roadmap for transformation that any corporate manager or entrepreneur can follow.

How do you reliably build growth businesses and create innovation capabilities? Clay Christensen's disruptive theory will tell you to plug growth gaps and routinely surprise the market. The Innovator's Guide to Growth breaks down that process into four parts:

Identify Opportunities
Chapters 2 through 4 cover how to spot opportunities to create novel growth businesses. It bucks the conventional approach to innovation that targets demanding customers and instead the authors show different approaches to tapping into customers who can not, will not or do not consume your product or service.

Formulate and Shape Ideas
Chapters 5 and 6 demonstrate how the normal process by which companies evaluate and shape opportunities is often the wrong one. The authors' approach is based on the concept of pattern recognition - specifically the fundamental pattern of disruptive innovation. These patterns transform existing markets or create new ones by "trading off raw performance in the name of simplicity, convenience, affordability or accessibility." (page 121, The Innovator's Guide to Growth)

Build the Business
Chapters 7 and 8 offer a framework for turning a great idea into a profitable business as well as forming a team to initiate early-stage activities. The authors offer simple steps for mastering the emergent strategies necessary to significantly improve the odds of success which include identifying critical areas of uncertainty and executing smart experiments.

Build Capabilities
How do you organize to innovate in a repeatable and routine fashion? Chapters 9 and 10 delivers structures and processes to facilitate the continued creation of new growth initiatives as well as a set of innovation-friendly metrics.

All told, The Innovator's Guide to Growth is a solid contribution to innovation research and a wonderful extension of Clay Christensen's disruptive theories. As business grapples to meet today's global challenges, this book will help any leader deal effectively with finding new growth opportunities.

Related
I had the opportunity to interview BIF research advisor Clay Christensen a while back. Learn more about his disruptive innovation theory: download pdf

Learn more about Innosight

Buy the book The Innovator's Guide to Growth

Learning Outside the Classroom: The Medici Effect in Singapore

Frans Johansson is doing really well these days – “phenomenal” in fact, he says. When I spoke to him a couple of weeks ago he was headed to Singapore to launch a program to 60,000 Singaporean kids based on the concepts outlined in his wildly successful innovation book The Medici Effect.

Frans is a good friend of the BIF community. Many might remember his story from the BIF-2 Summit or his workshop “Diversity Drives Innovation.” His guiding philosophy is that innovation happens at the intersection where ideas from different fields and cultures meet and collide, “igniting an explosion of extraordinary new discoveries.” In The Medici Effect, he digs into how some of the world’s greatest innovators typically linger and learn at the intersections of diverse disciplines like biology, math, business, art, politics.

Since the publication of his book back in 2004, Johansson has traveled the globe, giving speeches and delivering corporate workshops. That travel has put him in the middle of a variety of intersections which is where he came to find himself one day at the offices of the Singaporean Minister of Education. Also in attendance were Singapore’s head of economic development and Lim Chin Wah, founder of Genesis Education Holdings, a cutting-edge educational services company. They wanted to talk about developing a new curriculum targeting junior high, high school and junior college students based on creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Fast-forward eighteen months and the Innovation Strategy curriculum was launched May 28th when Johansson gave the keynote address at the annual Teachers' Conference to over 2000 educators. Imagine instituting a program like that so quickly here in the states. Johansson says it’s a reflection of the Singaporean government’s commitment to infuse all aspects of society with creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship.

Johansson partnered with Lim Chin Wah and Genesis Education and spent about six months breaking down the corporate teachings of The Medici Effect in order to rebuild them for school age kids. The end result: a 3-day program which takes kids out of the classroom and into the real world.

Johansson says the program gives kids the chance to think beyond standardized testing rituals – a path Singapore is trying to break away from. The Innovation Strategy curriculum offers an opportunity for students to both develop and execute new ideas by placing them in various "intersections" outside of school. It also gives them the chance to be curious and build intrigue, trust, and teamwork. Although experimentation rules, Johansson says it’s the kinetic element of the program that’s most critical: “In Singapore, they have a philosophy that you can improve learning if you move outside the walls of your classroom.”

What I find so compelling about this project, beyond the guiding philosophy of The Medici Effect, is both the stunning speed that it was introduced and that it’s not the first time Singapore has brought these new forms of curriculum into play Their entire educational foundation is based on experimentation. Johansson says that quick hit programs like this are introduced in the school system all the time. Some make it, some don’t. In the end, the most successful ones get integrated into all the schools.

Johansson is passionate about this new road he’s on. Reaching 60,000 kids during a school year can have massive impact. Already, he’s received eager calls from places like Mexico and India. So of course I had to ask him, what about the U.S.? “Frankly,” he said, “it’s more exciting when someone is actively pulling you in than trying to push in. And no one has asked me.”

The United States is the most innovative country in the world. I do believe that and so does Johansson. But it’s clear that our edge is shrinking and it’s shrinking fast. Time and again, Johansson says he’s experienced a raw hunger in some parts of the world for that innovation edge. Singapore sees it in places like neighboring Thailand and Malaysia. “Complacency is not an option for them” he said.

It shouldn’t be for us either.

Congratulations to Frans ~ we wish him success on this new endeavor.

Related BIF Content

Watch Frans Johansson at the BIF-2 Summit
Read my recap of Frans' workshop
Watch Clay Christensen speak about education reform at the BIF-3 Summit
Watch Dennis Littky at the BIF-1 summit. Dennis is one of the most successful school reformers in the country. His education model is based on the belief that schools must be personalized, educating every student equally, one student at a time.

Other Related Content
BIF Research Advisor Clay Christensen's new book on education called Disrupting Class : How Disruptive Innovation Will Change How The World Learns was just published. This review by legendary education innovator Howard Gardner says it all: "After a barrage of business books that purport to ‘fix’ American education, at last a book that speaks thoughtfully and imaginatively about what genuinely individualized education can be like and how to bring it about.” Can't wait to get my hands on it.

Meet BIF-4 Storyteller Cat Lainé: Disruptive Innovator in the Social Sector

When I first spoke with Cat Lainé a few months ago I was so impressed with her passion and conviction. She doesn’t shy away from the underside of life, a personality trait that led to her decision to leave academia, where she was studying infectious disease epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. A self-described “autodidact,” she prefers to be in the field, analyzing problems and creating solutions from the ground up. Today, she’s trying to solve some of our world’s most pressing problems. We knew she had to be a BIF-4 storyteller.

As a kid she “devoured” her Rand McNally science books, Omni magazine, and her older brother’s biology text. Because her father was a medical doctor, her family had nudged her in the direction of medicine. Her father was also a political exile from the Duvalier dictatorship that ruled Haiti from 1957 to 1986. He died when she was very young, but she absorbed enough of his experiences to comprehend the fragility of human rights in a chaotic world.

A graduate course in infectious disease opened Lainé’s eyes to some of the starkest needs of the world. Here, she learned that much of the steep decline in infectious disease mortality since 1900 was due not to antibiotics or vaccines, which surfaced in the forties and fifties, but to improved housing and infrastructure that created more sanitary living conditions and reliable supplies of clean water. This revelation sparked her current story.

As Deputy Director of Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group (AIDG), Lainé works to bring renewable electricity and solar hot water to families and agricultural workers in developing countries. Simple infrastructure projects like these have a dramatic effect on quality of life.

She’s learned to approach problems from multiple angles—from the fields of science, business, art, or mathematical modeling—all in an effort to solve big time problems in the world. She says we are “on the forefront of social entrepreneurship,” a growing movement that she admits is “a bit trendy, but incredibly powerful.” She intends AIDG to provide an open, transparent platform for the designs and specs of its projects. There are no business secrets here—if AIDG produces an efficient biodigester or a windmill for under $100 (a current venture with Engineers Without Borders), then it will gladly tell the world.

With AIDG, Lainé attempts to stretch the goals of a traditional NGO by throwing savvy “business acumen” into the mix. She brings her own scientific background to the table when the group spearheads a new project, but she also knows the value of a good old-fashioned sales pitch. Bringing new technology to such communities is a matter of gaining trust and demonstrating a need for the product—the same challenges faced by large corporations looking to tap into emerging international markets.

One in 3 of us - roughly 2 billion people - don't have basic services such as electricity, sanitation and clean drinking water. Creating the environment where small businesses can manufacture, install and repair simple infrastructure technologies for people living between $2-4 a day is the ultimate in collaborative innovation. We’re thrilled to welcome Cat Lainé to the BIF-4 stage to share her story.

RELATED CONTENT
The BIF-4 summit takes place on October 15th and 16th in Providence. Early registration ends August 15th. Learn more about how you can hear Cat Laine's story and many more.

BIF Research Advisor Clay Christensen has been researching how to apply his disruptive innovation model to the social sector. He co-wrote a great piece called Disruptive Innovation for Social Change. Download it here.

Learn more about Cat’s organization AIDG.

Register now for BIF-4: Meet Mark Ecko, Jason Fried, Tony Hsieh, Bruce Nussbaum, David Yaun and many more

Last year's sold out BIF-3 Summit hosted 300 participants from 174 organizations for an intimate 2-day conversation about collaborative innovation. This year, we will meet again for our fourth annual Summit taking place on October 15th and 16th in Providence, Rhode Island.

I am so excited about this year's lineup. We're bringing together many of today’s most compelling innovators, business model renegades and true transformers who will reveal their secrets of success through personal storytelling.

The BIF-4 line-up includes:

John Abele
As a leader of the Grunion expedition, Abele recently rediscovered the WWII submarine his father disappeared on in 1942. Abele is also the retired founder and chairman of Boston Scientific Corporation.

Ruby Bridges
In 1960, six-year-old Ruby Bridges Hall became the first African American child to desegregate an elementary school. Today, she continues to keep the spirit of tolerance and diversity alive through the Ruby Bridges Foundation.

Steve Bendt & Gary Koelling
Founders of Best Buy’s Blue Shirt Nation, an in-house social network with 20,000 employee participants.

Deborah Brooks
Brooks is co-founder of The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. She is reshaping the pace and logic of research devoted to curing Parkinson's disease, funding over $90 million in research grants to date.

Kathy Cloninger
Cloninger is the Chief Executive Officer of Girl Scouts of the USA and leading the organization to fulfill its mission to build girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.

Curt Columbus
Columbus is artistic director of Trinity Repertory Company. His adaptation of Dostoevsky’s "Crime and Punishment" was awarded a Joseph Jefferson Award for best new adaptation and is published by Dramatists’ Play Service.

Joseph F. Coughlin
Coughlin is founder and Director of the MIT AgeLab - the first multi-disciplinary research program sponsored by government and business to understand the behavior of the 45-plus population as decision-makers, consumers, patients, caregivers, advisors and technology users.

Marc Ecko
Ecko’s passion for impacting youth culture is today represented in everything from publishing to multimedia, and from fashion to philanthropy.

Jason Fried
Fried is the founder and CEO of 37signals. Fried is a passionate leader in the field of simple, clear and elegant web-based user interface design. He spearheaded the concept, design and development of Basecamp, 37signal’s web-based project management tool for designers, freelancers and creative services firms.

Jeffrey Hollender
After his tenure as president of Warner Audio Publishing, Hollender acquired a small mail order catalog of energy conservation products, Renew America, which eventually blossomed into Seventh Generation.

Tony Hsieh
Hsieh is the CEO of Zappos.com. Under his leadership, Zappos has grown gross merchandise sales from $1.6 million in 2000 to $840 million in 2007 by focusing relentlessly on customer service.

Cat Lainé
As Deputy Director of Appropriate Infrastructure Development Group, Lainé is helping people in developing countries get environmentally sound and affordable access to energy, sanitation and clean water.

Jacqueline Novogratz
Novogratz founded the Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to solve the problems of global poverty, proving that small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor.

Lewis Gordon Pugh
Pugh was the first person to complete a long distance swim in every ocean of the world and over a period of 20 years he pioneered more swims around famous landmarks than any other swimmer in history.

Richard Satava
During his 23 years of military surgery Satava has been an active flight surgeon, an Army astronaut candidate, MASH surgeon for the Grenada Invasion and a hospital commander during Desert Storm, all the while continuing clinical surgical practice.

Clay Shirky
Shirky is a writer, consultant and teacher who has spent years talking about the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University’s (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP).

John Wolpert
Wolpert headed IBM’s Extreme Blue, an incubator for talent, technology and business innovation. Most recently, Wolpert has been working with YET Lab bringing together early-stage business investors, an elite recruiting organization and an accelerator lab for high-intensity business innovation projects.

Richard Saul Wurman
Wurman is an information architect with a singular passion for making information understandable. Presently, RSW is working on his latest project 19.20.21, an attempt to standardize the information available on 19 cities that are expected to reach 20 million inhabitants in the 21st century, giving readers tools to easily compare and contrast them.

David R. Yaun
Yaun directs the IBM Corporation’s worldwide internal and external communications programs related to innovation and technology leadership. He is the lead executive responsible for the company’s annual Global Innovation Outlook program; manages the company’s ground-breaking global “InnovationJam” program; oversees the Genographic Project, a joint research program with the National Geographic Society; and serves as an executive sponsor for IBM’s “ThinkPlace” idea generation program.

Fast Facts about the BIF-4 Summit

Co-hosted by BusinessWeek Assistant Managing Editor Bruce Nussbaum and “Mavericks at Work” author Bill Taylor, BIF-4 will connect you with innovation leaders and change agents from across the country.

Storytellers have only 15 minutes on stage to share a personal story about how they turned an idea into an innovation.

The BIF Summit doesn’t pay storytellers or hosts to participate.

Held at the historic Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I., BIF-4 is limited to 300 participants, making the Summit the place to exchange experiences and ideas in an intimate, relaxed and informal location

Early registration ends August 15th. (Don't delay! Last year' summit was sold out.)

Learn more about how you can participate at this year's summit. Full registration details here.

IBM’s David Yaun Joins BIF Research Advisory Council

I'm thrilled to announce that David Yaun has joined our research advisory council. He will also be a storyteller at the BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit in October.

David is Vice President, Corporate Communications at IBM and directs their global internal and external communications programs related to innovation and technology leadership. He’s also the lead executive responsible for the company’s annual Global Innovation Outlook (GIO) program. Launched in 2004, it was under David’s leadership that IBM took the unprecedented step of opening up their annual technology and business forecasting processes to the world. By gathering the company’s top researchers, consultants and business leaders, and arming them with the latest insight on emerging technical trends and socio-economic shifts, GIO is a platform upon which IBM’s entire ecosystem joins together to surface new and unforeseen opportunities for innovation.

In addition to GIO, David also created IBM’s ground-breaking global “InnovationJam” program. A classic example of cross-discipline, collaborative innovation, the jam is the largest online event in IBM history. Back in 2006, more than 150,000 people (which included IBM employees, family members, universities, business partners and clients from 67 companies in 104 countries) logged in for two 72-hour sessions. In the end, IBM CEO Sam Palmisano agreed to invest $100 million in the 10 most promising proposals. (I'll have a follow-up blog entry shortly which talks about where the money was invested as well as the status of some of the projects.) Interestingly, IBM is now selling the jam methodology and technology that it created for itself.

In his spare time, David also oversees The Genographic Project, a joint research program with the National Geographic Society. It’s an ambitious attempt to help answer the fundamental question of how our species migrated out of Africa and around the planet. The five-year study is compiling one of the largest collections of DNA samples ever assembled to map how the Earth was populated.

I'd like to extend a big welcome to David as he joins our RAC and BIF community. If innovation is the execution of a great idea, he is truly the sand in the oyster. Accepting that no one person or organisation has all the answers is a basic tenet of innovation. Yet knowing how to effectively cross boundaries is a whole different matter. David understands how to build practical interventions for collaborative problem-solving. His track record of innovation within an established company is remarkable and I know his experience will benefit us greatly. Welcome aboard David!

RELATED
Learn more about IBM’s Global Innovation Outlook and Innovation Jam
Learn more about the Genographic Project
And of course - learn more about the BIF-4 Collaborative Innovation Summit and how you can register. Our 2-day conversation starts October 15th.

BIF Research Advisor Bruce Nussbaum on the need for a national innovation policy

BIF-4 co-host and BIF research advisor Bruce Nussbaum writes about America's need for a national innovation policy. In Time For a National Innovation Policy. McCain And Obama Need To Get Real Bruce challenges his readers - and our presidential contenders - to start a conversation in earnest on the need for a policy that goes beyond federal government support of technology, math and science.

Here at the Business Innovation Factory, we believe our entire nation must compete in an increasingly complex, global economy where innovation and knowledge are the primary drivers of growth. It is not technology that is getting in the way of progress in the areas that matter most: like health care, public safety, education, and quality of life. It's people. Humans and the organizations we live in are stubbornly resistant to change and do not know how to work and play nicely together across boundaries. What else are we missing? A roadmap for systems level experimentation.

What we need is a safe environments to experiment with new business models - particularly networked business models that cut across organizations, industries, and the public and private sector. Rhode Island has a unique opportunity to be an innovation hot spot by turning its small size into a competitive advantage. For organizations interested in developing new business models – specifically models that require the networking of capabilities across industries and disciplines – Rhode Island’s place power presents a unique opportunity for innovation. We can more easily develop an integrated understanding of an entire system and also provide an independent, neutral platform for experimenting with new systems. That's why we created the non-profit Business Innovation Factory - to deliver on this proposition

Getting back to Bruce's blog post, if you think he's on the right track, I would encourage you to also read John Kao's book Innovation Nation. Personally, I believe a great starting point for debate is understanding what other countries have successfully done in the recent past to claim their innovation edge. Kao's book is chock-full of such examples. (I also interviewed John earlier this year as part of our Research Advisor series. You can read it here.)

Read Bruce Nussbaum's post

BIF Research Advisor John Wolpert's Top Three Innovation Books

During the course of a recent conversation, BIF research advisor John Wolpert offered his top three innovation books of all time:

1. Open Innovation by Henry Chesbrough
2. Radical Innovation by by Richard Leifer, Christopher M. McDermott, Gina Colarelli O'Connor, and Lois S. Peters

and, probably most intriguing:

3. Orbiting the Giant Hairball by Gordon MacKenzie. John calls it a "beautiful little book on innovation." Written by a Hallmark Cards executive, Orbiting the Giant Hairball is a first-person account of the continual tension between creativity and corporate inertia.

RELATED
Don't miss John Wolpert share his story of innovation at BIF's annual Collaborative Innovation Summit on October 15 and 16, 2008.

Friday Linkage from our BIF community

Following are a few noteworthy blog entries from members of our BIF community reflecting processes of innovation which I don't think get enough attention these days: talent and trust.

BIF-4 co-host Bill Taylor writes about Zappos.com CEO Tony Hsieh. The online retailer founded in 1999 is unbelievably successful and if projections hold true, will reach the $1 billion in merchandise sales mark by the end of the year. (Up from $70 million five years ago). In Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit—And You Should Too Bill profiles Hsieh's obsession with customer service. From simple things like a 365-day return policy and free shipping both ways for customers to paying potential employees in their four-week training program a whopping $1,000 to leave the company, Hsieh emphasis on delivering value to the customer through a talented and well-trained staff has turned Zappos into an online retailing phenom.

(Side note: Tony Hsieh will be a storyteller at our upcoming summit in the fall. His personal story is not to be missed.)

Some of the most successful innovations come from creating environments where your talent (both internal and external) can work together collaboratively. All too often though, companies just don't make the time. Former BIF-3 storyteller Irving Wladawsky-Berger writes about a couple of such platforms in Innovation 2.0. "I have become convinced that most highly talented people, - especially those destined for high management and technical positions, - are essentially ambidextrous when it comes to their work. They are able to do their day jobs with flying colors, while simultaneously participating in innovation activities," writes Irving.

And finally, John Wolpert, newest member of our research advisory council and BIF-4 storyteller wrote a great post called “Us” is all of us. “Them” is none of us. Trust-building is overlooked in most innovation conversations these days. Similar to the points made in the blogs above, collaboration isn't simply a matter of providing the right tools and technologies. In this entry, John shares a great example from a Japanese silicon chip consortium in the 1980’s and its four-year effort to break down silos for major breakthrough.

Innovation and Collaboration: The BIF Way

An interview with BIF Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan is posted on Steve Hardy’s Creative Generalist blog where the two talk about everything from Rhode Island’s position as a national innovation hot spot to the real world innovation lab BIF is developing to what it takes to really drive systems change.

If you’re looking to break down silos and cross boundaries, this sample from the interview extols the necessity for thick skin:

Steve: What skills/training/experience do you personally rely on most to span such silos and to foster collaboration?

Saul: Very thick skin, a strong belief that there is always a better way, the ability to thrive with ambiguity, actually enjoying steep learning curves, and did I say very thick skin. Everyone loves innovation until it impacts them. I used to think that we could enable large-scale change and create more innovators by proselytizing. Innovation rhetoric is everywhere and yet we still don’t seem to be progressing beyond the buzzwords. I now believe in sorting the world to identify the innovators across every imaginable discipline and silo and then finding ways to connect them in purposeful ways. I think we will make more progress that way. That is what BIF is all about.

Read the interview

Thanks to the Men and Women Who Serve

Memorial Day is an important day of reflection for me. Baseball and barbecues aren’t bad either. I am grateful that so many American men and women choose to serve our country by serving in the military. We owe each of them our gratitude, respect, and support. I recently had the opportunity to see the amazing dedication and heart of our U.S military up close and personal. I was asked to participate in the Joint Civilian Orientation Conference (JCOC 75). It was an experience I will never forget.

JCOC is a U.S. Department of Defense civilian outreach program that that has been run 75 times since 1948. I was invited to participate in JCOC 75 which brought together 48 civilian leaders from across the country for a week of total immersion in U.S. military operations. And total immersion it was.

When we arrived at the Pentagon, prior to the start of JCOC 75, the only information we were given was that our host would be the US Southern Command led by Admiral James G. Stavridis. All we knew is that we would be visiting military installations throughout Central and South America. For security reasons we were not given specific details on where we were headed and what we would be doing. Try packing for that! It promised to be interesting given the recent news coming from the region including: Hugo Chavez, Guantanamo, the Columbian Free Trade Act and, a huge possible oil discovery off the coast of Brazil.

The mood was set immediately upon arrival to the Pentagon with a visit to the reconstruction site where 284 individuals lost their lives on September 11, 2001. While our group had yet to create the personal bonds that would strengthen over the course of the upcoming week, we all shared a common sense of excitement and anticipation as our itinerary for the week was revealed.

JCOC 75 * April 18-26, 2008 * ITINERARY
Pentagon, Washington DC
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba
U.S.S. George Washington (off the coast of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Bogata, Tolemaida, and Cartegena. Columbia
Sota Cano Air Base, Honduras
Key West and Miami, Florida
Andrews Air Force Base

It was immediately obvious that this was no boondoggle when the wake up call arrived at 3:00 AM and we boarded a C-17 military cargo plane that would be our home base throughout the week’s journey for a direct flight to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Talk about diving right in to the pool. I am a news junkie and have followed a lot of the policy and political rumble over Guantanamo. Our early wake up call was soon forgotten with the riveting experience of touring two of Guantanomo’s prison facilities and visiting with American men and women who serve our country in Cuba. Regardless of your political views and the policy debate going on far from this U.S. military base, what I observed were dedicated and hard-working U.S. soldiers serving all of us in a difficult and stressful prison environment. These soldiers who are away from their homes and families for extended periods are subjected to abuse from prisoners every day and carry out their jobs with integrity and pride. I now view Guantanomo news coverage with a new appreciation for what I observed going on there.

With Guantanamo still on our minds we boarded our C-17 for an all night flight to Rio de Janeiro where we planned to meet up with the USS George Washington in transit nearby. It isn’t every day that you get the opportunity to visit an active aircraft carrier out at sea. Luckily I was in a small group of a dozen JCOC participants that were delayed in visiting the ship and by the time we were able to board the C-2A Carrier Onboard Delivery (nicknamed COD) to take us out to the ship deck we were told that we would be spending the night on board the carrier and coming back to shore the next morning. We would get to see night flight operations from the deck of the GW - an experience we were told that is rarely available to civilians. Wow! I will never forget that night and the opportunity to spend time with many of the enlisted men and women assigned to the GW.

The visit began with the COD flight and arrested landing on the GW deck. We have all seen film clips of fighter jets being caught by a wire on the short runway of an aircraft carrier. The film clips do not do justice to the actual experience. I am glad to have done it once! Imagine sitting backwards while strapped into the COD and then with little warning and no visual cues to orient yourself you experience a bone-jarring stop when the plane catches the wire on the ship’s deck. After I caught my breath I was thankful for the wire and a talented pilot. Later that evening I stood on that same deck and watched an exercise where F 18 fighter pilots practiced catapult take-offs and arrested landings. It was incredible to see the after burners of the F 18s light up the horizon off the deck of the GW and the choreography of the entire flight operations team made me think of a high tech and high stress ballet. I am glad that our country continues to invest in this important strategic military capability.

The GW is a city with 5000 on board and everyone that I spent time with was dedicated to his or her mission and had a great personal story to share about how they joined the military and how much they missed their homes, friends, and families. The other day I read about a fire on board the GW and I immediately worried about the soldiers that I had met on our visit. I hope that they are alright.

From there we left for Columbia and I was reunited with my luggage in Bogata for the first time since leaving the Pentagon. In Columbia our military plays an important advisory role to help the Columbian military strengthen its capacity to defeat the FARQ and other insurgent groups that finance their military efforts primarily through cocaine trafficking. Most of the world’s cocaine originates in Columbia and ends up on our streets in the United States. I was impressed by the progress made by President Uribe and the Columbian military to both combat drug trafficking and to support the development of an economic future that isn’t dependent on the drug trade. We visited Columbian military installations at Tolemaida and on the coast in Cartagena.

Next stop, Sota Cano, Honduras. Here we visited a humanitarian project where our military was beginning a project to build a new school in an impoverished Honduran village. I had the opportunity to help distribute school supplies to many of the students in the village. Being there and looking directly into the big brown eyes of these children really hit home and I was proud that our military plays a supporting humanitarian role in Honduras.

After an exhausting and eventful week it was back to U.S. terra firma. We visited a Coast Guard installation and the Joint Interagency Task Force in Key West, Florida. JIATF is a good example of collaborative innovation where seemingly, every silo spanning military and law enforcement services comes together for the common purpose of slowing the flow of illegal drugs coming across our borders. I was impressed by their use of technology to enable collaborative intelligence sharing and interdiction operations.

We celebrated the conclusion of our journey at dinner with Admiral James Stavridis in Miami who shared a compelling vision of a strong Southern Command with deep collaborative relationships across the entire region. I am grateful to the DOD for making the JCOC experience possible, to the Southern Command for hosting our visit and making me more aware of this important region, to my fellow JCOC participants who were all interesting and made the journey special, and most of all to the men and women who serve our country in the U.S. military.

Thank you for your service. Happy Memorial Day

~ Saul Kaplan

Changing Business Models: Clay Shirky on why media is a triathlon

Last weekend I was watching Costas NOW on HBO and heard a tirade against blogging like no other. Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights unleashed a fury against Will Leitch, editor of the popular sports news site DeadSpin.com. From bloggers' writing skills, to their ethics deficiencies to their lack of credentials, Bissinger believes our moral fiber is in jeopardy because of the dearth of consumer-produced sports media. “I think blogs are dedicated to cruelty, they’re dedicated to dishonesty, they’re dedicated to speed,” Bissinger said.

To his credit, Leitch managed the attack with grace and dignity but he didn't hit a homerun with his response. He had a chance to address mainstream media's genuine fear and suspicion of the blogosphere's influence. What he needed was a dose of cognitive surplus.

I just watched BIF research advisor Clay Shirky's talk at the Web 2.0 Expo. In his speech, titled Gin, Television and Social Surplus, Shirky nails it when he says “media that’s targeted at you but doesn’t include you, may not be worth sitting still for.” And like it or not, Shirky's conclusion includes sites like DeadSpin.com.

From Shirky's speech: This is something that people in the media world don't understand. Media in the 20th century was run as a single race--consumption. How much can we produce? How much can you consume? Can we produce more and you'll consume more? And the answer to that question has generally been yes. But media is actually a triathlon, it 's three different events. People like to consume, but they also like to produce, and they like to share. And what's astonished people who were committed to the structure of the previous society, prior to trying to take this surplus and do something interesting, is that they're discovering that when you offer people the opportunity to produce and to share, they'll take you up on that offer.

There's a lot of complexity right now in the media world but Clay is clearly on to something when he says that business models which don't include consuming, producing and sharing will not make it in the future. As he says in his speech, "this isn't the sort of thing society grows out of. It's the sort of thing that society grows into." That's a motto for systems changes anywhere.

RELATED
Clay Shirky will be sharing his story at our Collaborative Innovation Summit on October 15 and 16. Learn more about how you can register.

You can also listen to my podcast with Clay where he talks about his new book, Here Comes Everybody.

Design and the Elastic Mind

Follow-up to a blog entry a couple of weeks ago about the innovation and design exhibit at MoMA. Paola Antonelli, the exhibits curator, appeared on the Charlie Rose show last week. Antonelli is an Italian-born, self-described "generalist." Watch the interview and you'll realize quickly how insightful she is too. During the hour-long talk, she descibes the bridging of science and design (developing comfort and trust between both parties is key) as well as the changing face of scale in 2008, the relationship of architecture and nanotechnology and the need to push designers toward "pragmatic intellectualism."

Couple of notable quotes:

“Some people say that designers can revolutionize and change the world. Yes and no. That’s not their job – their job is to help us change the world. They’re the interface.”

“What is scale today? Philosophically, it's changed considerably. From realizations about the universe to realizations of the genome, it isn’t about dimension anymore. It’s about complexity.”

Antonelli is a great communicator. Her philosophy on design in the 21st century is fascinating. Watch the video

(The website designed for the exhibit is crazy cool too.)