Category Archives: Innovation

Digital Identity Tour Part-4: Austin–Munich–Toronto

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This post is a fourth in a series on personal digital identity. Part-1 “The unpolished diamond was published here in August 2010 and Part-2 ‘The Digital Identity Tuner” was published here in September 2010. Part-3 “Personal Data Something” was published here in December 2010.

The journey continues. Now we move into Austin for TEDxAustin and SXSW Interactive.

You can follow the livestream here. It’s a fascinating way to spend your week-end and get inspired.

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Gary from CLOUD is on stage today 19 Feb 2011 at 4pm Austin time.

Some time ago, I teamed up with the folks of CLOUD, Inc. (www.cloudinc.org), a non-profit technology standard consortia founded in March 2009 and based in Austin, Texas. “CLOUD” stands for Consortium for Local Ownership of Use of Data. I am on their Strategic Advisory Board, together with Charlie Hoffman, Director of Innovation, UBMatrix, a leading provider of XBRL software, Anthony J. Barrett, Senior Vice President, Integration, Walgreens, and Dan Walker, former Chief Talent Officer for Apple and GAP.

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The power of people. Connected.

If you have read my previous post on team dynamics, then you may have noticed a pattern developing in my thinking. With kudos to co-thinkers Verna Allee from Valuenetworks.com and Mela from the SWIFT Innovation Team. We had a great synchronicity chat in London, and what emerged was a model for organizing our thinking for Innotribe at Sibos 2011 along the theme of the Connected Economy.

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Suddenly, it all made sense. One could zoom into the Connected Economy into different facets such as:

  • our connected companies: this is where we could talk about company culture and new organizational models that do away with the silo construction of most companies
  • our connected teams: how we create healthy team dynamics, how we collaborate, how we realize full potential with social cognition
  • our connected self: acting from our authentic strong self, this is more about personal and corporate values for the next decades. This is also about our Digital Identity/Footprint. The power of people. Connected. What CLOUD is all about.
  • our connected value: new thinking about capitalism, social currencies, financial inclusion, P2P networking, money vs. value, the accounting for intangibles

What we want to do at Sibos and our Innotribe Events is to create ongoing conversations, with the rigor around these conversations, focused around sense-making. But let the future emerge.

 

The art of the half finished

 

Where the event is the middle of a process, not the end-point. Leaving enough room for others to fill in, for ideas having sex. Where humans can get inspired by something else than logic.

CLOUD has been featured as a keynote speaker at SWIFT’s annual Sibos conference in October 2010 in Amsterdam and will be speaking at TEDxAustin on February 19, SXSW Interactive on March 14 and leading a panel at XBRL22 in Brussels the week following the European Identity Conference.

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For the Munich KuppingerCole conference, Gary submitted a speaking slot by CLOUD and Co, and we just got the news that the proposal was accepted. I let you enjoy what Gary put together:

In March of 2010, SWIFT’s Innotribe hosted last year’s European eID Interoperability Conference. Peter Vander Auwera, Innovation Leader at SWIFT, and former colleague of Kim Cameron has said this about CLOUD, Inc. in his post on Identity Rights 3.0: "I repeat myself by saying that this CLOUD vision goes way beyond the web of pages, goes way beyond the early thinking on Semantic Web. It is in essence proposing an identity architecture for the Internet. Because the internet is broken. It was never designed with identity in mind."

CLOUD sees the issue of identity as one that goes far beyond log-ins and enterprise management. The issues of identity, privacy, security, data portability and governance are not separate issues but simply separate axes of the same problem.

CLOUD sees the answer to these issues coming from a new language for the Internet, so as to extend the revolution started by TCP/IP and accelerated by HTML. CLOUD’s CTML (contextual markup language) is a language for people. however and not another language for web pages, like HTML.

CLOUD also sees the answer going beyond current approaches like OpenID, which assumes the web paradigm in its log-in approach. Even with the same log-in, my ‘identity’ could change over time.

CLOUD also believes that a multi-dimensional approach is vital. WHO I Am™, WHAT I Am™, WHEN I Am™ and WHERE I Am™ are all axes of my identity and vital to a new language for people and "the identity architecture for the Internet" as Peter said about CLOUD.

Our goal is not to replace other standards nor displace for-profit initiatives but to instead put a new foundation in place for the Internet that makes the approaches to privacy, security, data and identity consistent and architecturally-driven.

We would see our thought leadership keynote (and/or panel) outlining what this paradigm would mean to the future of the Internet and how this new language would not only change the approach to identity but will transform industries from banking to health to education. Our recent post on the WHO I Am™ dimension would provide the foundation for our comments and panel: http://cloudinc.org/?/ecosystems/article/cloud-dimensions-who-i-am.

Suggested Panelists:

  • Gary Thompson, CEO CLOUD
  • Peter Vander Auwera, Innovation Leader, SWIFT
  • Kaliya Hamlin (@Identitywoman), Founder Internet Identity Workshops
  • Kim Cameron, Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and Chief Architect Identity 
  • Vint Cerf or Bob Kahn, Founders of TCP/IP

Some people say we try to boil the ocean. I don’t think so. Why would we limit ourselves to a narrowly defined vision of identity being a federated authentication issue ? Identity and Digital Footprint are much more than that and so important for our being as human beings in a permanent digital reality.

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That’s why I am so proud that this advanced vision now get exposure at TEDx Austin, at SWSX Austin, at the European Identity conference, at XBRL, at the KuppingerCole conference in Munich. And we will bring it back to Innotribe at Sibos 2011 as part of the connected self. As part of some new work we just kicked off last week in London.

Some folks give me pushback. They are warned: I am at my best when constrained. My innovation juices then flow at full debit. Then I want to think and work out-of-the-box, no – even better – I want to burn the box.

 

the optimist in me

 

The times of being mister nice guy are over. Of being a mediocre optimist, or pessimist, or realist.

We can’t live

with mediocrity

anymore

 

Who is going to stop us ? The better question is: who is a believer and wants to support us? Are you ? Then join is on this digital identity journey and

 

be your digital self !

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Farsight 2011 Highlights: what explosion of information really means

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Have a look at a couple of the excellent videos on this wrap-up site about Farsight2011.

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I could spent days and days in this space. All my favorites, including Hedge Fund Manager and PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel, Recorded Future co-founder and CEO Chris Ahlberg, journalist entrepreneur Esther Dyson, and many more in one big long session about long term future. Yammy – Yammy !

Search is no longer the simple act of typing words into a text box. New user interfaces and mobile devices are expanding the web into all aspects of daily life, and even changing the way we think. An explosion of innovation has allowed us to dream big about the role of robotics and Artificial Intelligence. And yet the future of search is fraught with challenges. The stakes can’t be higher. Is the search industry locked in a race to the bottom or are conditions ripe for a breakthrough? This question took center stage at a gathering in San Francisco on February 1, 2011 which was streamed live on BigThink.com.

 

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(Peter Thiel at Farsight 2011 in “How to end the Google monopoly”)

Some quotes from Thiel:

  • You need a 35% market share in search to make break-even
  • The core problem is how to cut down the massive fixed costs
  • Until you solve the fixed cost problem, you have a natural monopoly
  • Underestimating fixed costs is a mistake that I intend not to make twice
  • I am not so much focused on the revenue side, as I am on the cost side
  • Everybody can do the front-end and the revenue with it
  • 5-10B$ yearly cost is the barrier to entry
  • Microsoft is probably the only company with the capital resources that can compete with Google at this moment in time.

Or have a look at Salim Ismail, Executive Director, Global Partnerships, Singularity University, talking about The Future of Privacy.

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  • Computing is getting exponentially faster, smaller, cheaper, better
  • Our assumption is that these new technologies can scale at global level
  • Turning our lives more and more into an information property
  • From Discover to Aggregate to Process
  • Retrospective vs. Prospective search
  • Quantified self, Health Data, Sensor Networks, Internet of Things
  • Total explosion of information

About total explosion of information: I also invite you to watch the video of Hasan Elahi’s talk at the Lift11 Conference this Feb 2011 in Geneva, at about the same time as this BigThink Farsight 2011 Summit. The title of his talk is “Giving away your privacy to escape the US Terrorist watch list”;

he is in essence explaining that

by releasing

an explosion of information

about his where-abouts

he makes it impossible

for these authorities

to make sense

out of this massive set of data

 

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The intro is a bit long (but worthwhile to set the scene) but if you are short in time, jump in as from minute 8’30…

  • To be formally cleared, you need to be formally charged
  • A very unbalanced relationship: I give and I give and I give, and I don’t get anything in return
  • They have the ultimate authority, I knew who was in power, and you turn to very animal primal instincts of survival
  • And in my case, survival meant co-operate
  • And I decided to put everything public

Here is where the video gets mind-blowing: as from minute 12’30

  • I wrote a little code that would track me all the time
  • It’s kinda bizar seeying yourself as a pixel
  • Every flight I have been on since birth
  • I am ok with giving you every bit of my data, but you have to do some work to digest it
  • My financial records are public
  • All my calls
  • There is an independent party (bank, phone company, etc) that is verifying that yes indeed I was there…
  • I have taken this to a level of absurdity, of detail, that I leave such level of detail about my life, that I live a rather private life.
  • After you do the analysis of all this detail, you actually get very little in return.
  • Having a little information about somebody is very dangerous as it can be mis-contextualized
  • You can’t delete, but you can bury it in an explosion of information
  • Or to conclude:

This is another way

of getting back into control

of your identity

Innotribe Special Session at SOFA: The new thinkers

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SOFA stands for SWIFT Operational Forum Americas, a yearly event targeted at a typical operational audience. This year’s SOFA is on 8-9 March 2011 in NYC. The theme for SOFA 2011 is “Defining the next generation of financial services”.

 

marriot marquis NY

 

Innotribe is SWIFT’s innovation initiative. Innotribe’s mission is ‘Enabling Collaborative Innovation’. Part of our activities includes events: existing SWIFT events like Sibos and SOFA, third party events like CPA in Canada and EPCA in Europe last year. It usually translated into a “special” session, with lots of professionally facilitated interactivity.

 

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With Innotribe events we have the ambition to “unpack” stereotypes, myths and hypes. These Innotribe Events are an energizing mix of education, perspective, collaboration and facilitation. Our success factors for this new type event are organized along the following three axes of “opening-up” our traditional ecosystem: audience, content and brand recognition.

So, what’s up at SOFA this year ? We have two things going on:

  • At the end of day-1, yours truly will give the presentation “How to make babies” a strong metaphor for SWIFT’s Innovation Framework. Prezi version of this presentation is here. Tip: set sound “on”
  • At the end of day-2, our innovation team will animate a Special Session “The New Thinkers”

Building on the Innotribe @ Sibos tradition of exploring “Tectonic Shifts”, this Special Session will be an energizing mix of education, new perspectives, collaboration and facilitation.

Our goal is to stimulate the generation of new ideas by bringing together a powerful mixture of audience members and by enabling freedom of discussion – allowing the conversation to take the participants into any and all areas that open up on the day.

 

We believe strongly in the potential

of unexpected encounters,

and the magic that can happen

when people from

different background

are brought together

 

So the innovators and change agents of our industry will be invited to join the SOFA audience (and also to join us in Toronto for Sibos 2011 in September), and we hope this will foster exciting new discussions between them and the traditional SOFA attendees.

 

skyscraper lunch

 

Ideas do not typically come out of the blue. Rather, they are usually variations of existing ideas. Sometimes, simply looking at a familiar idea from a different perspective can spark a new idea or the combination of existing ideas to achieve new goals and create radically different value propositions. All the topics we propose to discuss during this Innotribe Special Session at SOFA are also potential subjects to explore in Toronto – but we are looking for your feedback to tell us if these are the right ideas to stimulate your creative thinking!

Presentations from five great modern thinkers will culminate in an interactive exchange between the SOFA audience and the speakers, led by Innotribe facilitation champ Mariela Atanassova. The audience will be able to drive the discussion according to the themes that most interest them – ensuring everyone will have an opportunity to collaborate in the innovation we hope this session will stimulate.

Here are The new thinkers:

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Venessa Miemis (http://emergentbydesign.com/about/): Free agent, Master in Media Studies at the New School, NYC, futurist and digital ethnographer, researching the impacts of social technologies on society and culture and designing systems to facilitate innovation and the evolution of consciousness. Venessa will update us on The Future of Money project (world premiere at Sibos 2010) and The Future of Facebook, a new research project sponsored by Innotribe as Corporate Patron.

 

 

rushkoffbiosm

Douglas Rushkoff (http://rushkoff.com/bio/): thought leader and provocateur. Author of best selling books Cyberia : Life in the Trenches of Hyperspace,  Life, Inc, and Program or be Programmed (all Amazon Affiliate links). Doug will give a talk about New Capitalism, and introduce his latest project on a Summit he is organizing in NYC on 20 October 2011 called “Contact”. Contact Summit will seek to explore and realize the greater promise of social media to promote new forms of culture, commerce, collective action and creativity.

 

 

brianzisk

Brian Zisk: organizer of the Future of Money & Technology Summit in San-Francisco (www.futureofmoney.com). Brian will summarise the findings of the Summit that took place on 28 Feb 2011. Psssst ! If you still want to go to Brian’s event, go the the registration page at ttp://futureofmoney.eventbrite.com/ and use the discount code “Innotribe”.

 

 

stoweboyd

Stowe Boyd (http://www.stoweboyd.com/ ): probably THE authority on Social media, Stowe is a Social Philosopher and Webthropologist from NY. His work focuses on social tools and their impact on media, business, and society. In 2011, Stowe is focused on a new line of research: Social Cognition. This research is co-sponsored by Innotribe, and we hope to share the final results at Sibos 2011 in Toronto.

 

 

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Kevin Slavin (http://about.me/slavin): also from NY, Kevin is founder of AreaCodeInc (recently acquired by Zygna, the undisputed leader of Social Games). Kevin will talk about the New Future and “Those algorithms that govern our lives” – including our personal finances!

 

 

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(picture from Dave Gray’s blog)

For the interactive part, we will organise the session around the organic growth aspects of cities. I have written about this before in my post “How to make babies”, and recently there was a fantastic post by Dave Gray on “The Connected Company”.  We invited Dave to SOFA as well, but he unfortunately could not make it.

Dave’s post is a fantastic post – and as far as I am concerned – one of those game changing post already for 2011, and I will definitely come back to it later.

Dave for example says:

And today, thanks to social technologies, we finally have the tools to manage companies like the complex organisms they are. Social Business Design is design for companies that are made out of people. It’s design for complexity, for productivity, and for longevity. It’s not design by division but design by connection.

He is also author of “Gamestorming, A Playbook for Innovators, Rulebrakers, and Changemakers” (Amazon Associate Link)

 

 

Looks like the book is very much about the principles that our team applies for interactive session design.

And gamestorming

is exactly what we’re going to do

at SOFA

during this special session

 

What: Innotribe Special Session at SOFA 2011, NYC

When: From 2-5 pm on 9 March 2011 at SOFA (http://www.swift.com/events/2011/SOFA/index.page

Location: Marriott Marquis, Broadway, NYC

Future of Money and/or Value

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If you’re interested in discounted tickets for one of the coolest Future of Money conferences of Q1 2011, bear with me and read till the end of this post.

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As most of you will remember, SWIFT’s innovation initiative “Innotribe” was one of the Executive Sponsors of Future of Money video production.

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The Future of Money from KS12 on Vimeo.

The video is in my opinion a milestone. Not only for it’s content and the way it was produced (co-funding), but the whole movement that followed.

It is only now that it became clear to me that the event – in this case Sibos – is not the end-point in a process, but the middle. The post-event discussions and dynamics are at least as important, if not more important. Just check-out for example the animated discussion on Chris Skinner’s blog in November 2010 on “Why banks and socials agree to disagree”.

“Social” – as in Social tools, Social Currencies and Social Capitalism – is in my opinion a very strong force to take into account in our long-term thinking about financial services. It is one of the suggested topics we have in mind for Innotribe at Sibos 2011.

  • I am preparing another blog post “The Long Direction” on this subject and some other deep understreams that are going to change fundamentally how we think about corporations, banks and economy and corporate culture in general.
  • With Innotribe will sponsor a new research on Social Cognition by Stowe Boyd, the most important Social Philosopher and Webthropologist at this moment.

The Future Of Money crew produced post-event the following interesting infographic. I love the sharpness and detail of their analysis. In one view, you see how Creation, Storage and Access of VALUE intersect and how these intersections are each interesting opportunities to be taken up by start-ups or modern capitalists. Some indeed have taken their chances already: see the bottom of the chart with a number of start-ups in this space.

I would like to emphasize that the intersections in the infographic do NOT talk about the Future of MONEY, but about the Future of VALUE. More about this as well in the upcoming “The Long Direction” post. At this stage it’s enough to point you to Umair Hague’s latest book “The New Capitalist Manifesto: Building a Disruptively Better Business” (AmazonAssociates Link).

But I divert… Here is the Future of Money infographic (you can also download a nice PDF version of this by clicking on the graph below).

FOM_infographic_540x764

What an impressive list of start-ups and new contacts ! Indeed,  one of the biggest wins of our Innotribe initiative is the network of people we connect with.

This network is a very powerful force. Here is another example of this network-effect:

Given our work on Future of Money at Sibos, Mike Sigal  – Founder and CEO of Guidewire Group and part of our start-up judge panel at Sibos – introduced me recently to Brian Zisk, founder and organizer of the Future of Money and Technology conference in San-Francisco on 28 Feb 2011.

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When looking at the conference program and the list of confirmed speakers, I thought “Wow” and two days later I was on a confcall with Brian. Besides being the Executive Producer of this Future of Money & Technology conference, Brian Zisk is a serial entrepreneur and technology industry consultant specializing in digital media, web broadcasting and distribution technologies.

brianzisk

Brian wanted us to speak about Innotribe and Future of Money at Sibos 2010, but unfortunately, given to some other commitments and plans, none of our team could make it to San Francisco on that day.

But we both quickly spotted the possible synergies – wouldn’t it be great to get a subset of these speakers to Sibos into the Innotribe stream for example – and we came to the following pragmatic agreement.

  • I was going to write a blog about his event, and in return my readers could get some discounted tickets for his show. And he would promote our Mumbai and Toronto events later that year. Yes, it can be that dead-easy. No strings attached, pragmatic. Piece of cake if you share the same passion. If you want such a discounted ticket, see the end of this post.
  • But we kept on talking… It suddenly crossed my mind that only 2 weeks later, SWIFT was organizing its SWIFT Operational Forum Americas on 8-9 March 2011 (SOFA). As we had an Innovation slot in the Special Session on day-2 of that event, why not ask Brian to come over and give a wrap-up of his conference ? Btw, watch this space on the Innotribe activities at SOFA: we are working on an impressive list of speakers for this Innovation Slot on 9 March 2011. Will be subject of another post.
  • And why not continue in this direction and see what we can do together for the first stand-alone Innotribe event in Mumbai, later this year on 1-2 June 2011 ? This event – hopefully a first in a long series, will be titled “Unpacked” and this Mumbai edition will focus on Mobile Payments. More on that later as well.
  • And then let the whole movement culminate to a climax at Sibos Toronto from 19-23 Sep 2011 ? I have a first meeting with the Sibos 2011 organizing committee in 2 weeks. Yes, we start early °-)

So how to get a discounted ticket for the Future of Money & Technology conference on 28 Feb 2011 in San-Francisco ?

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Digital Identity Tour Part-3: Personal Data “something”

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This post is a third in a series on personal digital identity. Part-1 “The unpolished diamond was published here in August 2010 and Part-2 ‘The Digital Identity Tuner” was published here in September 2010.

Today’s post is not reporting about the tour we did in June 2010, but rather some reflections based on a number of serendipitous encounters during the last two months.

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I am a strong believer in serendipity or the power of encounters by accident and the resulting idea shifts that can be generated during such meeting of different expertise.

My first encounter was with Azeem Azhar, CEO of Peerindex.

One day I was at a conference, and one of the speakers asked the audience “I would like to know what sort of application you guys want me to built”. It was one of those conferences where folks twitter a lot during the sessions, and I posted a tweet saying: “I would like you to develop my Digital Identity Tuner”.

It got re-tweeted, and in the end got picked-up by Sean Park from Nauiokaspark (he was one of the Innotribe Leaders at Sibos Amsterdam, and he is also an investor in Peerindex), who introduced me to Azeem.

Peerindex helps you understand and benefit from your social and reputation capital online. How much is your online reputation worth ? PeerIndex is a web technology company that is algorithmically mapping out the social web.

The way we see it, the social web now allows everyone endless possibilities in discovering new information on people, places, and subjects. We believe that the traditional established authorities and experts – journalists, academics, are now joined by a range of interested and capable amateurs and professionals. As this locus of authority shifts, many new authorities emerge. PeerIndex wants to become the standard that identifies, ranks, and scores these authorities — and help them benefit from the social capital they have built up

Btw, my Peerindex is 60. That’s based on my digital footprint on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and my blogging activities. It is obvious to see that this number “60” may one day translate into some virtual social currency.

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There are similar services like this: Klout is well known. Same principle. Some trend toward social currency of your personal platform. It’s also obvious that this capital will become very important for recruiters to find the people who have real on-line influence and reputation.

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Like Peerindex, Klout also offers some more drill-down features, showing you influence “style” for example:

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As you start drilling down in these data, this starts to smell quite a lot like some of the zooming in/out ideas I elaborated on in “Digital Identity Tuner”.

Azeem and I will continue talking about this. What Azeem liked in the “Tuner” were the ideas of control of what pieces of my profile I want to share with whom in what context.

 

My dream is that we have a prototype/mockup

ready by Sibos Toronto in September 2011,

where we probably will have

an Innotribe theme on Digital Identity

My second encounter was with Phil Windley, CTO and Co-Founder of Kynetx

One day – it was a day after a conference has ended – I was going to have breakfast just before checking out from the hotel and flying back home. At the table next to me, I see a guy working on his PC. I see a big sticker “Kynetx” on the PC. I had heard the name of the company several times before, so I said “good morning” and quickly introduced myself. It happened to be Phil Windley.

 

image

 

Kynetx is a private company that provides the first Context Automation Development Platform. This platform, powered by Kynetx Network Services (KNS), provides easy-to-use development tools to create context-sensitive, cross-platform apps that help build relationships between app owners and users.

I would describe it as

an event based integration engine

in the cloud

 

So we made contact, and once back home we arranged a Webex demo session.

Boy! What I saw really blew me away from my socks ! I saw a demo with a credit card vendor who used Kynetx to establish a new direct channel with the credit card holder, completely disintermediating the banks. I saw another demo with really very deep integration of DBS360 into Salesforce.com

I knew he had something to do with identity, and back home I found out that Phil Windley also co-founded and co-produces the Internet Identity Workshop with “identity woman” Kaliya & VRM-guru Doc Searls.

Phil has a great blog called Technometria

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He has a great perspective on the key differentiator between today’s social networks and Personal Data Ecosystem the emergence of the personal data store where individuals control their own data.

This is of course very relevant to our eMe winner project of Sibos 2009. As I mentioned already many times before, with hindsight the eMe premise of a single or even distributed Personal Data “Store” or “Locker” is flawed. On Windley’s blog I finally found a good discourse on why it is flowed.

Check out the following two posts:

Like always, there is nothing such convincing like a demo.

The video below shows a conceptual demo illustrating the opportunities that are available for automating the contextual activities that people undertake every day. At the heart of the demo is a personal data store and Kynetx. The interactions are all done using real Kynetx applications that are plumbed in a realistic manner. The scenario uses 5 different APIs and a dozen individual rulesets in the Kynetx system.

In the scenario, Scott Phillips gets bad news from his radiologist: he needs surgery. You’ll see that a personal data store and a collection of loosely coupled Kynetx apps automate the frustratingly disjointed activities associated with Scott’s bad news and focused his attention so he can complete the tasks with the least amount of effort.

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Kynetx and Personal Data Services from Phil Windley on Vimeo.

 

My third encounter was with nobody less than Esther Dyson.

She was talking at the last Defrag conference. She was doing a fantastic talk “On Exploration”. It was about “exploring yourself”, “discovering yourself”. With my Leading by Being background, I was super concentrated.

As part of her talk, she showed her personal DNA generated by 23andMe, one of the companies she is investing in.

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Btw, one of the other investors in 23andMe is Anne Wojcicki, who is married to Sergey Brin of Google. She has an active interest in health information, and together she and Brin are developing new ways to improve access to it. As part of their efforts, they have brainstormed with leading researchers about the human genome project. "Brin instinctively regards genetics as a database and computing problem. In a recent announcement at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, Sergey Brin said he hoped that some day everyone would learn their genetic code in order to help doctors, patients, and researchers analyze the data and try to repair bugs.

23andMe indeed offers a genetic testing service that provides information and tools to understand your DNA. With a simple saliva sample they’ll help you gain insight into your traits, from baldness to muscle performance. Discover risk factors for 92 diseases. Know your predicted response to drugs, from blood thinners to coffee. And uncover your ancestral origins. These days the promotional rate for such service is 99 USD !

Here is how it works:

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The system generates personalized reports on your health status, your disease carrier status, your disease risk, your drug response and your traits. In other words,

 

there is no place to hide anymore

 

You see the impact of your lifestyle on your DNA. You can change something to your lifestyle, or you can continue to live in a state of denial. As Esther was explaining “its all about motivation” albeit a different motivation than the one meant in Daniel Pink’s latest book “Drive”.

What Esther Dyson was describing was a DNA-version of the Quantified Self, a movement of people who measure all sorts of things about themselves such as heartbeat, blood pressure, time usage, sleep patterns, etc and who put all that information in the cloud.

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Obviously, it would be great if also these folks would have a Digital Identity Tuner so that they could control in a more granular what what aspect of their identity/footprint they want to share with whom in what context.

For example, you may want to share your heartbeat with your insurance company to get better insurance policy and rates, but maybe you do not want to share this with your bank.

At the end of Esther’s talk, I observed that what she was describing were actually body listeners, sensors about your human “engine”, “machine”. I wonder if there are no similar implementations about the other side of “me”, namely about my mind, my consciousness, my feelings.

I asked Esther Dyson if she was aware of any such consciousness-as-a-service in the cloud thing. She thought it was an interesting question, but that she did not feel ready yet to share all that with the world.

I love the “Know Yourself” theme:

  • From the one hand it takes quantified measurements from the human body, the “engine”
  • On the other hand, it could take quantified (?) measurements from the human mind, the “capabilities” such as social cognition, or capability to be happy, etc

 

Both will drive status

Both in place and time

 

Status is all what it is about these days. And being able to share it. And participate to it. And engage with it. What Clay Shirky called “Cognitive Surplus”. What Stowe Boyd calls “Social Cognition”.

So many reasons to start thinking of a Digital Identity Tuner that lets you control status.

Digital Identity, Digital Status, and Digital Footprint start to converge into a personal data “something”. Some started calling the “something” a “store” or a “locker”. Others think more of a “service”.

Others are aware that our vocabulary is very real-world inspired, often based on physical concepts like “storing”, or “location”, or “posting”, etc… They prefer to wait until an appropriate terms pops up and call it “Personal Digital x” with the “x” standing for “something”. I called it Digital Identity Tuner.

 

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It is clear that this sort of identity is much more than a card, token or PKI certificate.

There is a role for a

neutral, non-for-profit, trustworthy

organization to offer

an identity and trust service

for the financial industry

Who could that be ?

 

Sean Park’s presentation at next week’s SOFE (SWIFT Operational Forum EMEA) will introduce you to a financial services framework, with trust and identity as foundational services. That’s on 14 December 2010 at 9am in Conference Centre Dolce, close to Brussels.

A number of the above ideas should be part of a Digital Identity Research incubation project that we will probably kick-off at SWIFT in the second half of 2011.

Let the comments flow.

How to make babies ?

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UPDATE: the Prezi version of the SOFA presentation mentioned at the end of this post is now available here.

 

image

 

Sibos 2010 is over! It was one of the best ever. After that week I felt completely exhausted. Empty. Because I gave my full self. Went deep. Gave and received loads of energy.

This week, it’s time for reflection. For chilling-out. Took some days off: late breakfast, some power naps. A walk here and there. Still lots of reading. Lots of tinkering. Some up-moments, some down-moments. Flowing.

And the future starts to emerge again.

Soon we have to go back to the salt-mine. Soon the treadmill starts all over again. But it does not have to be a copy-cat.

Soon we have SOFE (SWIFT’s Operations Forum Europe), running from 13-15 December 2010 in Conference Center “Dolce” in our home town La Hulpe (close to Brussels).

I have been asked to organize the Innovation Plenary on 14 December. So, here we go again!

Sean Park from the Anthemis Group will be there as well.

He was one of our VC-coaches and Innotribe Leaders for Cloud at Sibos. He will do a keynote during the plenary (a great Prezi presentation on “Platforms, Markets, and Bytes”) and a viewing of his trailer video on “Financial Reformation”. And he will help us run an Innotribe Lab on Cloud computing. Yammy !

Also for me it’s a great opportunity to refresh/reboot. I will do the second part of the innovation plenary armed with

 

a brand new presentation titled

 “How to make babies”

 

It will be one of those presentations that have been breeding in my head from some while, and suddenly materialize. Like a painting on a canvas. Like poetry on a sheet of paper. Like joy and harmony in music. Suddenly, it’s there!

 

clip_image002

 

“How to make babies” will bring together numerous thoughts collected during many conferences visited this year and ideas distilled from the books I have been reading recently. If you are interested in the books I am reading, I am inviting you to subscribe to my GoodReads.

In essence my story will start with the collision of two ideas.

The first idea was seeded in my brain by Geoffrey West (Distinguished Professor at the The Santa Fe Institute) in a presentation titled “The Secrets of Scale” delivered during the Techonomy conference in June of this year.

 

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Geoffrey West is a theoretical physicist whose primary interests include elementary particles and their cosmological implications; the theory of companies, cities and global sustainability; and biology, including metabolism, aging and sleep. He served as the Santa Fe Institute’s (SFI) President from 2005 to 2009.

It happens that the folks at Techonomy just put up all the videos, including Geoffrey West’s presentation:

It also happens to be the story that opens chapter one of one of the latest books that made a great impression on me: “Where Good Ideas Come From” by Steven Johnston.

clip_image004

At Sibos, we reflected on the Long Now. In the first chapter of “where ideas come from”, Steven Johnson talks about that vantage point the long zoom.

It can be imagined as a kind of hourglass:

 

clip_image006

Several years ago, the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West decided to investigate whether Kleiber’s law applied to one of life’s largest creations: the superorganisms of human-built cities

And

the quarter-power law governing innovation was positive, not negative. A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative; it was seventeen times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative.

The essence of Geoffrey West’s story is that cities are intensities. That cities never die. That cities are the ideal womb for idea generation, incubation and execution. That innovation scales differently than the size of the city.

 

Because

the information and the ideas

flow freely and in high intensity.

 

But how does one create a culture of intensity, of innovation? How does one create the vibrancies of cities within the walls of a castle?

Here is some additional video material featuring Steven Johnson’s ‘”Where do ideas come from”.

And a TED talk on the same subject:

 

It brings me to the second idea in the collision: the one of incubators.

clip_image008

Incubators at the Maternity Hospital, Port Royal, Paris (Maternité de Paris, Port-Royal). An engraving by Eugene Froment (1844-1900) from the Illustrated London News, 1884.

Incubators were invented by Stéphane Tarnier in 1880, and documented by Auvard in the historic 1883 article De La Couveuse Pour Enfants. Incubators help us grow babies. Physical babies. What I am talking about are ideas. Baby ideas that need to be prototyped. And then incubated. Many incubator models for ideas and start-ups exist.

Probably one of the more famous ones is MIT Building 20. Building 20 was designed differently. With flexibility in mind. A bit like the Value Web walls that allow you to create spaces of intensities. And when the job is done, you disperse and build new spaces, new teams. Disperse and re-group. A different composition for each new project. Get rid of the one size fits all.

 

clip_image010

Old Building 20, Vassar Street facade, 1997.

clip_image011

New Building 20 at MIT

The point I am trying to make here is that physical environment is equally important to have a free flow ideas. Ideas will not flow in a castle with long corridors and closed offices.

Once incubated, you need to scale. Which brings us back to Geoffrey West and “The Secrets of Scale”. You need to create intensities. As I already mentioned in a previous post:

Intensities and intentions. City intensities. Platforms of intensities. Physical or virtual. Almost requires an architectural purism and surroundings to make it work. Has to be physical.

I want to create these environments. Where small groups of intense people can meet. Can radiate. Can nurture and inspire each other. Where one hunch leads to another, and ideas cross-fertilize. Where we play the Medici-Effect for 100%.

We need to build some sort of city, some platform of intensities, some sort of campus. Not a “chalet” next to the castle.

 

Think big

Think scale

Think city

Embedded in the social and economic fabric of our industry. Where experts can meet and weave the next generation solutions.

Where we not only have a fertile environment for funding “only”, but where we also thought about physical housing, novel resourcing models like dedicated teams combined with shared staff from the castle. Or in-residence programs as another way to resource and bring fresh blood.

Where we have a shared infrastructure for support, project management and IT. And where we nurture a culture of experimentation. Where we have reverse-mentorship of our bankers BY the Gen-Y generation.

Venessa Miemis hit us all hard in the face at Sibos:

There is a class of young, intelligent, creative people who are disillusioned with the debt-based monetary system, and are busy building the infrastructures for a commons-based economy, which is emerging, right now, in parallel to what currently exists. The foundation of this economy is built on trust… and transparency…. and the ability of distributed networks to self organize. And using the Web as a grounds for experimentation, we’re learning more effective ways to link unmet needs with unused resources, innovate, generate wealth, and build resilient communities.

This is the prototype of the future. This is where the opportunities are.

I hope that during the Innotribe sessions the remainder of the week, we can explore ways to create bridges between these two worlds and ways of thinking, and co-evolve the next global economy.”

Venessa & friends already followed up post-Sibos with the idea of an in-residence program for bankers. To understand and connect with the new class of young, intelligent, creative people. To learn their language and adapt their values. Yes, you got it right: the bankers get mentored by Gen-Y.

I think it’s a fantastic idea. To think wealth instead of money.

 

With trust as the currency

of the 21st century

 

Where we create bridges in a strengths-based society instead of a problem mindset.

 

We are in a different Zeitgeist,

and most of our bankers

haven’t noticed yet.

The realization that most senior executives in finance (or elsewhere for that matter) would be completely at a loss – “sans moyens” – faced with an articulate and intelligent Gen-Y as personified by Venessa.

Things like this residence program idea: that’s the sort of babies we need to create. That’s the sort of family harbor we want for our children. And when babies become adolescents and adults, when those ideas have matured into successful companies in their own strength, keep thinking about our off-spring. As it never stops.

And despite big hopes from the singularity movement, there is a fair chance that all who read this in 2010 will die sometime. But as Geoffrey West pointed out and proved mathematically:

 

Biological beings die

Cities never die

 

The big “contours” of my SOFE presentation are drawn. This post-Sibos holiday & chilling season is ideal to let it mature. To perfect the visuals. To come to the essence. To get to its full purity. To be different by less not more. So that you can feel the full intensity. So that each of you can realize his full potential.

Let’s practice making babies !

Breaking: Lazaro Campos opens Innotribe @ Sibos 2010

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Drop everything ! Get up early ! THE session not to be missed at Sibos this year is the Opening Innotribe Keynotes. Be there at 9am on Monday 25 Oct 2010 in Conference Room #1.

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Lazaro Campos (CEO SWIFT) will open this session and participate to the following interactive Q&A with the speaker panel.

Matteo Rizzi (Innovation Leader at SWIFT and your master of ceremony) and Kosta Peric (Head of Innovation SWIFT) will guide you through the Innotribe program of the week. Knowing Matteo, he for sure will have some humoristic gimmicks in his sleeve to keep you energized that morning: it will start already when you come in, as you will be “bugged”. More details on-site 😉

Five speakers, thought leaders in their respective domains will thrill you with their latest perspectives on the tectonic shifts that underpin the topics of the rest of the week at Innotribe @ Sibos. Each of them will give a 15 min presentation:

  • John Hagel, Director, Deloitte Centre of the Edge, will follow with “The Power of Pull”, or how business models fundamentally change in our hyper-connected world, and how passionate he is about passion. “The Power of Pull” is also John’s latest best-selling business book.

 

  • Nova Spivack, CEO, Lucid Ventures is the world-renowned “guru” on Semantic Web. He will entertain you with a talk on “The Present is the Future”, how real-time and “Nowism” is permeating everything.

 

  • Stephen Ellis, EVP, Wholesale Banking Group, Wells Fargo, will fire you up with his views on tectonic shifts in Banking.

 

  • Venessa Miemis, Graduating Student NYC, Emergent by Design will speak on “The Future of Money”. Her talk will be spiced-up with a video she produced exclusively for this event in Berlin. We already blogged and twittered a lot about Venessa here

 

 

For early birds, there will be a couple of copies of the books of Peter Hinssen and John Hagel.

After these keynotes, Matteo will pick another trick from his sleeves to make sure the audience participates interactively in a short interactive Q&A with the speakers. He will wrap-up the session with the highlights of the Innotribe day and week, and will give you a call for action to keep you engaged with us throughout the week.

Both in content, quality of the speakers, and format of this session, this will be THE not-to-be-missed session on Sibos Monday. We are convinced it will set the bar for any session for the upcoming week.

Innotribe is organized by SWIFT Innovation with the support of financial institutions, vendors and innovation leaders. In the true spirit of less push and more pull, we encourage you to engage in a true dialogue with the Innotribe team.

We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam.

The Innotribe team

www.sibos2010.com 

www.innotribe.com 

www.swiftcommunity.net/innotribe 

innotribe@swift.com 

innovate@swift.com 

Twitter: http://twitter.com/innotribe

Innotribe @ Sibos 2010: Here are the finalists of the Innotribe Start-up Competition !

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As you know by now, Thursday 28 October 2010 is our Innotribe Grand Finale day where everything comes together!

After the “Pitch your Lab” session (9-10:30 am) and the “Open Innovation Best Practices” session (11:00 – 12:30), we launch for the first time a true “Start-Up competition”.

Make sure you book this high-energy session in your agendas!

The competition will start on Thursday 28 Oct 2010 at 12:30 in the Interactive Workspace : a rollercoaster of 11 five-minute pitches by start-ups in front of the full audience and a judge panel of real Venture Capitalists (VCs).

After the pitches, there will be a short Q&A with the judges, and a voice-of-the-public using our latest “high-tech” applause meter.

The winner of the Start-Up competition will be announced in the final Sibos Closing Plenary at 16:00 later that day.

Finalists have been selected based on their professionalism and fit with the one or more of the four themes of Innotribe 2010: Cloud, Mobile, Smart Data, and Long Now.

Here is the list of 11 finalists (in alphabetical order):

• AcceptEmail (www.acceptemail.com ): E-Billing and Payment via e-mail (**)
• BehavioSec (www.behaviosec.com ) : Behavioural analysis of keyboard/ mouse usage (***)
• Canatu (www.canatu.com ) : Printable devices based on nano-technology (***)
• Collibra (www.collibra.com ) : Business Semantics Glossary for Data Management (S)
• Cumulate: Mobile payments based on Cloud and Semantic Web (*)
• Hypios (www.hypios.com ) : Semantic web for finding experts (***)
• Kinamik (www.kinamik.com ) : Data Integrity and in-stream archiving (***)
• MiiCard (www.miicard.com ): Identity and dematerialization of bank account creation (S)
• MyWOT (www.mywot.com ) : My Web of Trust (***)
• FX Capital Group  (www.fxcapitalgroup.co.uk ): The Currency and Payments Platform (S)
• Smartlogic (www.smartlogic.com ) : Semantic analysis of contracts/legal documents (***)

(S) Spotted by our own SWIFT innovation scouts during the year
(*) Winner of the Innotribe Lab at CPA Conference June 2010, Vancouver
(**) Winner of the Florin Award competition at EPCA Conference March 2010, Paris
(***) Selected from Innovate 100 Pitchslams (www.innovate100.com ) sponsored by SWIFT.

All finalists will have the opportunity to get a G/SCORE assessment : a standardized, scalable methodology for the incisive analysis and transparent assessment of startups’ commercial viability, execution, team and business model.

This methodology has been developed by Chris Shipley and the Guidewire Group, the organizers of www.innovate100.com

And here are the VC Judges:

• Jennifer Schenker, Founder and Editor-in-chief – Informilo (www.informilo.com ) with focus on Mobile
• Oren Michels, CEO – The Mashery (www.mashery.com ) with focus on Cloud Computing
• Nova Spivack, CEO – Lucid Ventures (www.lucidventures.com ) with focus on Smart Data
• Guido Jouret, VP CTO Emerging Technologies Group – Cisco (www.cisco.com ). Best Practice Incubation.
• Mike Sigal, Co-Founder, President and Chief Development Officer – Guidewire Group (organiser of Innovate 100 –www.guidewiregroup.com ) and G/SCORE methodology to score start-ups.

The prize:

There is no other prize attached to this competition other than visibility towards the financial community and a group of experienced VC’s who have their own networks with Business Angels, VCs, and Investment Funds.

We run this competition for the first time this year. As such this is an experiment, where our main ambition is to expose the Sibos audience to the typical high-energy dynamics of such a competition and the start-up mindset in general.

Let’s start the conversation:

In the true spirit of less push and more pull, we encourage you to engage in a true dialogue with the Innotribe team and the Start-Up finalists. We look forward to seeing you in Amsterdam.

The Innotribe team

www.sibos2010.com
www.innotribe.com
www.swiftcommunity.net/innotribe
innotribe@swift.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/innotribe
Hash tags: #innotribe and #sibos

Innotribe at Sibos 2010: Gen-Y and The Future of Money

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Matteo may have been a bit over-enthusiastic when he declared his session "probably the best session at Sibos 2010" . I guess he may have been unaware of something very special that is happening in the context of the Innovation Keynote Sessions of Monday 25 Oct 2010 at 9am .

What’s going on there is so unique , that i suggest you doublecheck your travel plans to ensure you can be there at 9am Monday morning !

What’s up ?

One of our keynote speakers is Venessa Miemis, a brilliant 28 year old Graduating pursuing a Masters in Media Studies at the New School in NYC. Venessa has a fantastic blog called Emergent by Design  and you can follow her tweets @venessamiemies  where she is leading us in a fascinating way through a collaborative effort to explore the emerging Network Culture and ways in which we can collaboratively build human intelligence and raise consciousness.

Some months ago, i asked Venessa to do a 15 min keynote on The Future of Money as seen through the eyes of Gen-Y. We occasionally kept contact via mail, twitter and skype, and in the spirit of her blog tag-line "emergent by design", and did not give and further instructions and trusted the process and the smartness of young people.

Great was my pleasant surprise when Venessa published her outline some weeks ago under the title "The Future of Money Begins !" .

futureofmoney

The keynote will be on "large scale shifts in cultural values and the impact they’re having on our relationship with money, our perceptions about ourselves as humanity, and how we are redefining what ‘true wealth’ means." For more details on the content, see the link/picture above.

What is really cool is not only the content of this keynote, but also they way how Gen-Y people like Venessa approach such task .

Without corporate structural constraints, Venessa told me very early in the process how she wanted to do something special: she wanted to produce a video as part of her keynote.

And in a true on-line collaboration Gen-Y way, she was going to produce this video with a company in… Berlin. For Gen-Y, they are truly no geographical boundaries anymore.

But to produce such video will require some money. No problem, how do Gen-Y approach this ? They ask their on-line communities for support.

So she launched the Future of Money Website  – and Emergence Collective "creating innovative momentum" with a fundraising via PayPal .

You can determine for yourself what degree of support you can muster to help. It starts at 5$ and can go up to 1,000$ if you want to be Executive Producer of this video.

At the time of this writing, the counter stands at 470$ ! I made a small calculation:

  • if each of the 10,000 readers of this swiftcommunity.net blog contribute 1$, will be able to make come true their full blown dream.
  • if each only 1% of the 10,000 readers donate 100$, same !

I don’t think it should be so difficult for our banks, partners, employees to find between 1-5$ to help support this really cool project.

  • For $5,000: They will create a beautiful and useful visualization of all the companies, initiatives and organizations we’ve been tracking in their research. Right now this research is a tangled mind map but with the skills in their team they have the ability to transform it into an informative and elegant visualization. This would include an overview of peer-to-peer lending platforms, open money protocols, emerging virtual currencies, microfinance platforms, and social currencies.
  • For $10,000: They’re going to be conducting a bunch of interviews very soon. Typically interviews will run between 10-30 minutes. However the video they’re producing will be between 3-5 minutes when it’s finished. Obviously they’re going to have to leave some stuff out. With this level of support they’ll be willing to edit each interview on its own and release it as its own video.

So let’s see what happens. The offer is made. The deadline is Venessa’s presentation on October 25, 2010. It’s up to you to decide if these expanded aspects of the project are worth your money and our time.

The result of this work – the video and the presentation – will be given away under a creative commons license.

Even just a small amount will go a long way towards helping us cover our time and expenses on this volunteer effort. And of course it couldn’t hurt to tell your friends   via your blogs and tweets.

To show the example, we just sent via PayPal some encouragement from the SWIFT Innovation budget to kick-start the process.

Very curious to see where this goes.

And Matteo, no offence, but i think this session will probably be the best attended session at Innotribe @ Sibos 2010

Innovation in/out the Castle ?

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As member of the Innovation Team of our company, I try to stay up-to-date on innovation thinking and therefore I try to read +/- one innovation book per month. I also read other stuff, and if you’re interested in my readings, please check-out my GoodReads Shelf. I found that sharing the books one reads is a good way for connecting with people. Interested to hearing what you read.

I just finished a fantastic new book on innovation. It’s called The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge (Harvard Business Review) by by Vijay Govindarajan and Chris Trimble.

 

 

As the title suggests, this book goes way beyond the idea-generation phase of your innovation efforts. It’s about making ideas happen, especially if you are an Innovation Leader responsible for innovation WITHIN an existing organization.

Many models have been tried, but most stay stuck in idea generation:

The innovation = ideas + motivation formula can generate thousands of small initiatives, but does not support projects requiring resources beyond a few people and their spare time.

The innovation = ideas + process model can efficiently crank out innovation after innovation, as long as each initiative is mostly a repeat of prior efforts

Castle[3]

The books goes in great detail into the causes for tension between the “castle” (in the book referred to as the Performance Engine) and the Innovation Team.

Business organizations are not built for innovation; they are built for efficiency.

The authors also offer many solutions to solve this tension. The basic premise is that the Castle is organized for efficiency: to create as many as possible predictable processed and make them as efficient as possible. That’s where initiatives like Lean and Six Sigma found their origins.

An innovation initiative is any project that is new to you and has an uncertain outcome

Indeed, every innovation project is an experiment, always based on not-so-precise assumptions, and with continuous learning in order to change those assumptions in more precise decision foundations.

By definition, innovation is neither repeatable nor predictable. It is exactly the opposite—nonroutine and uncertain. An innovation initiative, even a major one, is just an experiment.

The castle loves planning (basically building upon the planning models of previous years), and comparing past actuals vs. plans. Innovation is fundamentally different, as it is about comparing current assumptions with future potential. The comparison also happens much more frequently in a rapid learning context. It’s exactly what the Castle hates.

This tension often leads to frustration with the innovation leaders. At first sight, the job of an innovation leader seems like a dream job. It is not. The aspiring leader has been set up to fail. He just doesn’t recognize it yet. In frustration, he goes a step further, fashioning himself a rebel and a subversive. He fearlessly, or maybe even recklessly, flaunts authority. One person against “the system” is an extraordinarily bad bet. Why is it that innovation leaders so often feel that their biggest enemy is not the competition but their own company? There is a simple answer. Organizations are not designed for innovation. Quite the contrary, they are designed for ongoing operations. Innovation and ongoing operations are always and inevitably in conflict.

But the break-all-of-the-rule

mantra

while understandable

and widely shared

is poison

First, innovation leaders need the Performance Engine. Most obviously, it is profits from the Performance Engine that pay for innovation. Innovation leaders, take note: antagonizing the Performance Engine is a really bad idea.

This is nothing more

than youthful fantasy

at work

Another eye-opener for me was that the innovation team must be distinct from the Performance Engine, but that the innovation team must be just as disciplined as the Performance Engine.

The authors also propose that the Innovation Leader is NOT part of the execution team. The execution of each innovation project is trusted to a “Dedicated Team” and “Shared Staff”. The shared staff comes from the Castle. And this is done for EACH individual innovation project !

The split of work between the two teams is based on the work relationships required for the innovation project: these work relationships have three essential dimensions—depth, power balance, and operating rhythm.

For the Dedicated Team, the authors have a very clear recommendation:

 

hire outsiders !

 

There is no more powerful antidote to organizational memory than outside hires. If you want to change the culture, change the people.

At least 1/4 of your Dedicated Team should be made of people from outside your organization. If not, you easily fall into the trap of the The Risk of Organizational Memory.

Experience is usually an asset for advancement within the Performance Engine, but it can be a liability for a Dedicated Team. Innovation initiatives are, by nature, deliberate departures from the past. The lessons of experience are therefore less relevant.

If everyone on the Dedicated Team has been shaped by the same lessons learned from the same victories and defeats inside the Performance Engine, then the collective instinct will be even harder to escape.

A couple of words as well on the role of the Executive Sponsor – correction – the Supervising Executive:

sponsor

By the way, we have deliberately chosen the term supervising executive instead of the more commonly used term sponsor. We dislike sponsor because it makes the job sound easy or even trivial. A sponsor just provides occasional support. But the supervising executive has a critical job. Few innovation initiatives succeed without a deeply engaged one.

The supervising executive should not only be there when the yearly budget of the innovation team is approved. He should be deeply involved throughout the year to coach the team and help them overcome the tensions with the castle.

If not innovation initiatives are looked at as “second class”. In the overall picture the innovation budgets are a fraction of the budgets for technology renewal of the castle for example.

 

The importance of innovation

should not be based

on the size of the budget

but on the size of it’s potential

 

If not innovation will end up as 5 lines in your company strategy papers, CEO reports and Annual Reports. The innovation leader should NOT content himself with just a mention of the word innovation in these reports.

At the end of the book, the authors really make you re-check your assumptions by listing their

 

10 myths of innovation:

myth

  • Myth 1: Innovation Is All About Ideas
  • Myth 2: The Great Leader Never Fails
  • Myth 3: Effective Innovation Leaders Are Subversives Fighting the System
  • Myth 4: Everyone Can Be an Innovator
  • Myth 5: Innovation Happens Organically
  • Myth 6: Innovation Can Be Embedded Inside an Established Organization
  • Myth 7: Catalyzing Innovation Requires Wholesale Organizational Change
  • Myth 8: Innovation Can Happen Only in Skunk Works
  • Myth 9: Innovation Is Unmanageable Chaos
  • Myth 10: Only Start-ups Can Innovate

The book also makes reference to some outdated books and consultants on innovation, that unfortunately are still used as the oracles in defining today’s modern innovation initiatives.

Chris Zook has recommended that companies take only small steps outside their existing business. Their conclusions, however, are based on studies of what organizations have accomplished in the past, not what organizations might deliver in the future. Their research is akin to someone studying all the aircraft built through the mid-1940s, collecting voluminous statistical data, and claiming, on the basis of all available evidence, that traveling faster than the speed of sound is impossible.

This is a great book on innovation. Doing away with a lot of the Bull Shiitake of Innovation.

Read it. Internalize it. Apply it.

 

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