Hutch Carpenter
VP of Product at Spigit. Father of two young 'uns who misses running marathons. Living in San Francisco, CA, Hutch blogs @ I'm Not Actually a Geek.
Email’s New Freight – Posting to Social Sites
This post is a test of something I have not yet tried with wordpress.com: posting by email. It’s meant to be mostly an experiment. But it’s also a realization that in a mobile world, email has a new found importance. Delivering social content payloads. In a separate effort, I’m trying to get things done (GTD!) [...]
Social Software – What Is Your Intent?
Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson wrote a post titled Social Layers and Social Intention. In it, he asked why the simple, 140-character maximum Twitter has succeeded, while the more ambitious FriendFeed ultimately failed to make it big. His answer…
Beyond Social CRM: The Open Innovation Revolution
The idea of bringing customers into the process of defining the products and service of your organization is one that is gaining a lot of steam. One manifestation of that is the increased interest in Social CRM. In this scenario, companies engage their social customers for feedback and marketing purposes. Taking it a step further, [...]
25 Definitions of Innovation
In a recent blog post proposing a definition of innovation, I noted that innovation means different things to different people. It ultimately is what you think it is. What’s a useful definition for you won’t work for others, and vice versa. I asked for people’s definitions on several LinkedIn groups, and the community came forward [...]
Why would anyone give their intellectual capital to a company for open innovation?
Jack Dahlgren wrote a good post, Cisco I-Prize and Spigit – Innovation Competition. In it, he examines some of the dynamics surrounding the recent Cisco I-Prize, and open innovation contests in general. He raises a good question in this part of his post: If your organization is filled with people so steeped in the company [...]
How Much of a Relationship Do Your Customers Actually Want?
On the Harvard Business Review, Matt Dixon and Lara Ponomareff wrote a piece that caught my eye, Why Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You. Consumers increasingly prefer self-service, and the authors speculate: Maybe customers are shifting toward self service because they don’t want a relationship with companies. While this secular trend could be [...]
X PRIZE Takes on Oil Spills with $1.4 Million Open Innovation Challenge
The BP Gulf Oil spill has unleashed somewhere on the order 150 to 200 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. Thankfully, much of this oil has been eaten by bacteria, reducing its damage. But much of it is hitting the Gulf coastlines, and scientists know that a disaster of that magnitude will [...]
Three Reasons Ideas Are Killer Social Objects for Enterprise 2.0
Social objects. Familiar with that term? If you’re steeped in social media and Enterprise 2.0, you probably are. If not, here’s a good description by Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb: Social objects are objects that connect people with shared interests. Social objects are the core of any social software. They define the experience, the basis for [...]
Definition of Innovation
At the recent E2.0 Forum, I described a particular dynamic I’ve found: there is no set definition of innovation. It’s a concept where everyone has an intuitive sense of what innovation is, but would have a hard time formalizing a definition. Much like the way U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart described pornography: I shall [...]
When Should Management Push Enterprise 2.0 Adoption?
After the Boston edition of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, IBM’s Rawn Shah wrote a great follow-up post outlining ten observations from the event. A couple points that I found myself agreeing with wholeheartedly were: Adoption is about transforming human behaviors at work – More folks are starting to recognize that it is not trivial to [...]
3 Cs of Innovation 2.0 – Crowdsourcing, Competition, Collaboration
At the E2.0 Forum in Milan (June 9-10, 2010), I had a chance speak about innovation. Specifically, on the latest advances in leveraging communities to advance innovation. The title of my keynote was: “3 Cs of Innovation 2.0 – Crowdsourcing, Competition, Collaboration”. The presentation is provided below: 3 Cs of Innovation 2.0 – Crowdsourcing, Competition, [...]
Should BP crowdsource solutions to solve the Gulf oil spill?
Clifford Krauss of the New York Times reports on BP’s latest effort to cap the oil leak, called “top kill”. He notes the following: The consequences for BP are profound: A successful capping of the leaking well could finally begin to mend the company’s brittle image after weeks of failed efforts, and perhaps limit the [...]
Diversity and Innovation – Improve the Person, Improve the Idea
A key aspect of the next generation of innovation is the ability to tap a much larger set of minds in pursuit of valuable ideas. This draws quite heavily from the realms of Enterprise 2.0 and crowdsourcing. The historic method of innovation relied exclusively on a designated few. Now we’re seeing companies recognizing a missing [...]
Foursquare Check-in Etiquette
Anyone remember the early complaints about Twitter? That people were posting updates about what they’re eating for lunch? Robert Scoble noted this phenomenon in a blog post from last September about Twitter’s rise: It tells me that Twitter isn’t lame anymore. Remember those days when Twitter was for telling all your friends you were having [...]
It’s Not Idea Overload. It’s Filter Failure
At the recent Front End of Innovation conference, Wells Fargo’s Michael Duke presented in a session devoted to innovation metrics. He opened with a slide that asked attendees: Which would you rather have? – 1,000 ideas; or – 20 working prototypes With a setup like that, what do you think the general response was? Of [...]
