Six Factors in Emergent Innovation
In discussing employee-driven innovation, having a technology platform to deliver on objectives is a key part of a company’s strategy. Hard to get everyone tuned in when you rely only on email and conversations with your cubicle mates. But that’s just one factor. There are many other considerations for companies seeking to vault to the [...]
Crowdsourcing for a Billion Dollar Business – Cisco I-Prize
Crowdsourcing continues to grow in popularity and importance across a number of industries. Tac Andersen, at the South by Southwest Interactive event in Austin, took in the buzz there, and notes that crowdsourcing is heating up. Digital strategy, marketing and design firm Last Exit called crowdsourcing a top digital marketing trend for 2010. With that [...]
White House expands Gov 2.0 with landmark crowdsourcing directive
On March 8, 2010, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) issued guidance to Federal agencies strongly encouraging the use of…crowdsourcing (link to pdf). Specifically, using crowdsourcing to further the objectives of "creating a more transparent, participatory, and collaborative government." Yeah, that thing that Cisco, Pepsi and Unilever are doing. This is big. [...]
Is Crowdsourcing Disrupting the Design Industry?
This is an issue that I simply cannot wrap my head around. Spec work appears in the design field infinitely more times than any other industry. It absolutely floors me that people think that it is even remotely ethical to build their businesses by tearing down ours. Mark Hemmis’s comment on AIGA policy statement on [...]
Who Are Your Positive Deviants?
The future is already here – it is just unevenly distributed The famous William Gibson quote above is generally considered in the context of advanced technologies. Makes sense, seeing as he is a science fiction writer. But I’d like to bring the concept down to a more tangible, prosaic level. One that has value for [...]
Study – Distributed Idea Generation Outperforms Team Brainstorming
This has significant managerial implications: if the interactive build-up [of team brainstorming] is not leading to better ideas, an organization might be better off relying on asynchronous idea generation by individuals using, for example, web-based idea management systems. That quote is from a report by three researchers from the INSEAD and Wharton business schools. They [...]
Crowdsourcing Is the New Collaboration
Collaborative networks can develop superior products more quickly than the old “closed-loop,” one-company model “because the community is wiser than one individual.” Knowledge@Wharton Borderless Innovation: Stretching Company Boundaries to Come Up with New Ideas The value of accessing a collaborative network outside the company walls is nicely articulated in the quote above. Well, why not [...]
Four Models for Competitive Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing is heating up in terms of corporate interest. Pepsi’s decision to skip the Super Bowl in favor of a crowdsourced ideas initiative – Pepsi Refresh – is an example of the interest in the market. Digital strategy, marketing and design firm Last Exit called crowdsourcing a top digital marketing trend for 2010. Contests are [...]
ComMetrics on Crowdsourcing Innovation: You’re Doing It Wrong
ComMetrics is a social media analytics company, a division of CyTRAP Labs GmbH. ComMetrics is well-known in the industry, including its FT ComMetrics Blog Index. The company published a useful piece, Crowd-wisdom fails businesses. The basic premise is that crowds do not innovate. It’s useful, because it contains both truths and misconceptions about the role [...]
Mixing SaaS and OpenSource, A Case Study…
One of my favorite posts was written over two years ago, back when I was still trying to tie down this SaaS thing. In my post I called for an approach by SaaS vendors to recreate parts of the OpenSource ethos in order to build their customer base and even their product. I said in [...]
How Should Tweets Be Ranked in Search Engine Results?
Anyone remember when Loic LeMeur had the temerity to suggest Twitter rank its search results by the number of followers people have? His post, with 109 comments and reaction from Michael Arrington, Robert Scoble and many others, clearly struck a nerve. Fast forward to the past couple weeks. Both Microsoft Bing and Google announced deals [...]
United Nations Embraces OpenSource and Agile… Not!
I read the other day that the United Nations is currently embarking on a project with the aim of overhauling its ERP systems. This project apparently has a USD300 million budget and according to the tender document; presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to equip the organization with twenty-first century techniques, tools, training and technology The UN [...]
Crowdsourcing Ideas: Apparently Marijuana Is All California Needs
California has several big issues that need to be tackled. Our state budget seems to perpetually be in deficit mode, with drawn-out battles for resolving the red ink. The education system, once a shining jewel in the world, now produced some of the low test scores in the country. The state infrastructure must be upgraded [...]
Virus Security By Leveraging Community And Clouds
We have discussed about anti-virus on the clouds here at Cloud Ave earlier. As I had pointed out in my earlier post on Panda Security, there are some distinct advantages in using anti-virus on the clouds. They are Much lower resource consumption on desktops by leveraging the processing power of the clouds Better deployment and [...]
CrunchPad: a Netbook Sans Keyboard
I admit I was skeptical when Mike Arrington first announced he wanted to build a lightweight Web Tablet. Skeptical partly because I had just witnessed Ismael Ghalimi of the Office 2.0 fame feverishly work on the Redux Model 1. I had been doubtful about his effort, too, but his energy level was just radiating, he [...]
