Dec 8, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation
The formula for risk analysis of innovation could be written as:
Likelihood of failure X Cost of failure.
Therefore, in a traditional hierarchical organisation, there is an ingrained reluctance to take risks and perhaps fail because of the financial cost, whereas in an open system where there is no apparent cost of failure, the restriction of the usual organisational and transaction costs are largely absent.
This does not reduce the incidence of failure, but it removes the financial costs, leaving the personal incentive to succeed, rather than focusing attention on the financial ones.
It is the personal drive to succeed, to do something useful, that makes lives easier, richer, more fulfilling, which is the source of most really original innovations.
Dec 7, 2011 | Collaboration, Management
Currently, I am in the middle of a project that seeks to find a way to motivate a collaboration between a group of industry and government bodies on a pressing problem. None of these bodies have a culture that welcomes external collaboration, they often seem to have trouble even internally.
In the process I came up with a list of “must haves” that the proposed co-ordinating body must take on just to get the prospective collaborators to the table to talk about it.
Any comments, and additions would be welcome
- Independence,
- Transparency
- Plays a catalytic role in the collaboration
- Ensures the governance of the collaboration is robust and consistent.
- No self interest beyond the role to facilitate the collaboration
- Serves as a co-ordinating body for activities,
- Serves as the communicator, but without any exclusivity
- Serves as the “warehouse” for codified IC
- Acts as the dissemination mechanism for IC, and contributions to the process.
- The body needs to have the confidence of all stakeholders.
- Dispute resolution mechanism
Dec 6, 2011 | Collaboration, Innovation
An idea is the outcome of all that has gone before, resulting in the “eureka” moment, the equivalent of the singers overnight success after 10 years of work in obscurity, playing smokey bars, gaining experience and honing skills.
Usually, ideas emerge from relative chaos of all the commercial equivalents of those smokey bars, places where problems, experiments, stories, left field solutions and all the richness of human interaction meet.
Makes you think that perhaps all this time around the water cooler is not really wasted, so long as the culture is tolerant of the ideas that will be thrown up, and enables something to be done with them.
Dec 5, 2011 | Leadership, Management
Respect is a word bandied about a fair bit, but what does it really mean in an organisational sense?
It seems to me that respect is rarely built by an avoidance of conflict, rather by the willingness to meet it head on with three behavioral characteristics:
- Using facts and data when available on which to base a view, not relying on personality and position.
- All assumptions made are absolutely transparent, and any relevant data is available to all for analysis and debate.
- “Due process” during the discussions is clear, all parties have ample opportunity to put views, particularly dissenting ones, on the table for discussion.
By contrast, the easiest way to destroy respect is to allow personal stuff to intrude.
Dec 2, 2011 | Customers, Marketing, Social Media, Strategy
How do you calculate the value of an investment in social media?
Any investment attracts the need to try to quantify the returns, both to measure the success of the investment when it is too late to do much about it apart from ensuring the same mistake is not made again, and to prioritise competing investment options against a limited pool of funds available.
Accountants love the discounted cash flow, and real options type analyses that prevail, but how do you do these on an investment in media, social or otherwise?
It makes sense to start to consider “data chains”.
Cause and effect;
Influence and action;
Believable and buy;
These are all examples of the chains of connections that are on the surface largely subjective, but lead to an outcome that can be measured. The task of measuring the return on the exposure that can accrue from a presence in Social Media, and even conventional media, is fraught with challenges, but with systemisation of the pools of data generated from your sales, customer retention, prospect identification, web analytics, and all the other data collection options now available, you can start to see the patterns emerging that can be used to calculate a return, even if there is a “fudge factor” present.
At some point you simply have to acknowledge that behavioral patterns are not easy to quantify, and even harder to predict, but by explicitly acknowledging the chains of cause and effect that exist, you can start to anticipate, if not predict, the returns
