Category Archives: Think Tank

Every morning I wake up angry

Posted on by
4

crash

It was triggered in me for the first time when I was watching the movie “Crash” featuring Sandra Bullock. She plays a rich wealthy healthy good looking woman that has everything. Has a great job, good family, fancies the better restaurants and clubs.

But she is spoiled and disconnected with the real world. She lives in an ivory tower.

It gets as bad as her saying during a morning breakfast discussion:

“Every morning I wake up angry”.

 

Angry

That emotion that was so present during (and after) the 18 month personal development program Leading by Being that a ended about a year ago now. The 23 Feb 2009 coming-out of that program also resulted in this blog.

My angriness this morning is basically triggered by an argument I has last night with my lovely wife about something really stupid. Nothing spectacular, but the feeling remained during the night. So, i had a bad night.

The trigger is pulled when i recognize that feeling of not living my full potential. When i feel swimming in syrup. What i feel i don’t progress anymore. Status-quo. It’s protest. It’s rebellion. It’s Anger.

In one of my previous posts i was writing about the holy fire. This time it’s maybe the devil’s fire.

This fire is also burning like hell, but the burning is one like

acid

 

It’s a lot of negative energy. It’s the devil inside me. The Hannibal Lector with his own (melo)-drama, showing himself as the complex persons as that suits him well, and does not force him to show his true (empty) self.

image

I went back to my notes of Leading by Being, “refreshing” what caused my angriness. This is what i found back:

image

It’s this feeling that i can do so much more but am standing in my own status-quo. Since the coming-out on 23 Feb 2009, there is not much i have done with all the nice resolutions i wrote down at that time.

It’s the feeling that you know very well what to do/change in your life to be your true self and not the self that you imagined for yourself. And being angry for not applying in any way all the great lessons you have learned in this program or in all the great books you have been reading in your life-time.

And feeling deep inside that something “big” is on your life-path, and that you seem to have missed it consistently or avoided it on purpose. The thing that Huge McLeod calls “You have to find your own shtick”

It was the fact that somehow playing around with something new, suddenly they found they were able to put their entire selves into it. Only the did it become their “shtick”, their true voice, etc. That’s what people responded to. The humanity, not the form. The voice, not the form". Put your whole self into it, and you will find your true voice. Hold back and you won’t. It’s that simple.

I have also been reflecting on this blog. I read quite a lot. Books. And I spent quite some time reading postings via my Google Reader. 2 hours per day is not uncommon (my wife loves me for this).

It really would not be difficult to post 3-4 new posts per day linking to other stuff i found interesting. And i discovered the trick that if my blog post title contains “Google”, or “Android” or… I get a lot more hits. But do those hits also mean impact ?

If so, it’s mere quantitative, not qualitative. And even when that happens, what does that do ? Make myself interesting and exposing how smart i think i am ? It is not satisfying. Anymore. Like others, I am in search for more

depth

 

I enjoyed much more the postings like holy fire. They’re more “authentic”. I know it is a big word. Maybe i should now share what stuff i am reading at this moment. Puts it all more in context.

I am in 4-5 books at the same time: re-read Seth Godin’s “Tribes”, devastated by Hugh McLeod’s “Ignore Everybody”, the disappointing Nick Carr’s “The Big Switch”, Howard Gardner’s “Five Minds for the Future”, Joel Garreau’s “Radical Evolution” and – in Dutch – Rik Torfs “Wie gaat er dan de wereld redden ?”  (translated: “And who is then going to save the world "?).

Those guys really inspire me.

I am inspired by what Howard Man, entrepreneur and the author of Your
Business Brickyard, has to say:

I’m continually amazed by the number of people on Twitter and on blogs, and the growth of people (and brands) on Facebook. But I’m also amazed by how so many of us are spending our time. The echo chamber we’re building is getting larger and louder.

More megaphones don’t equal a better dialogue. We’ve become slaves to our mobile devices and the glow of our screens. It used to be much more simple and, somewhere, simple turned into slow.

We walk the streets with our heads down staring into 3-inch screens while the world whisks by doing the same. And yet we’re convinced we are more connected to each other than ever before.

Multi-tasking has become a badge of honor. I want to know why.

I don’t have all the answers to these questions but I find myself thinking about them more and more.

In between tweets, blog posts and Facebook updates.

That’s why I’d like to write more about the real life. My life. Yours. My colleagues.

And not to show fear but

vulnerability

 

And to inspire others to dream.

Google Chrome: who is right and who is wrong?

Posted on by
1

All over the tech websites last week: Google previewing their Chrome OS and releasing it’s code to the open source community.

Planning, pre-viewing and releasing an OS is a big thing. Especially if everybody is looking at you as the provider of THE cloud OS.

It stroke me that some of the comments are so diverging. Some examples. Who is right and who is wrong ? With – as usual – some additional thoughts and spices by yours truly.

Negative

When the title says “Why Chrome OS will fail” you know what to expect.

However, it also inherits that platform’s (Linux) many warts, including spotty hardware compatibility.

It’s a move born of desperation. Google knows it can’t possibly establish a viable hardware ecosystem and still meet its self-imposed release deadline of "mid-2010”.

…no surprise that the primary interface to the Chrome OS is … Chrome, as in the Google browser. Unlike a traditional OS, there’s no desktop. The "applications" running under the Chrome OS are really just interactive Web pages,…

The bottom line is that while there is virtually nothing that you’ll be able to do with the Chrome OS that you won’t be able to do equally well with Windows, there are literally millions of things that you can do with Windows today that you’ll likely never be able to do with the Chrome OS.

It should come as no surprise that this is the article that is tweeted around Twitterspace with great and almost malicious pleasure by current Microsoft employees. Still loyal to their employer.

But think twice when you use the word loyalty in this context. See how fast the love can turn into competition when the company does not treat its ambassadors rightly (Don Dodges 180° love/hate turn around after being hired by Google)

See also James Gardner on the “Evidence of the (Microsoft) chip (in Microsoft employees)” and the introduction of a new term:

the Borgocrat

Fake Steve Jobs, one of my favourite blogs on the internet, summarised the whole thing very nicely I thought, in a post where he calls Don a Borgocrat (Fake Steve refers to everything Microsoft as the Borg), and compares previous posts Don has made with his new position on products for the company.

If this isn’t evidence that the “chip” still exists, I don’t know what is.

The more a read those opinions of some of head-in-the-sand Microsoft opinion makers , the more they are irritating and even not credible.

What to think of a Microsoftie making fun of Google Gmail being down, when their Hotmail has been down and hacked so many times.

But it’s a more general irritation.

What to think of traditional network vendors making fun of some cloud outages, knowing that their legacy technology is 30 years old, and the cloud players are doing relatively well, if you would add an adoption ratio of number of users and the incredible short time to market for users to take up.

That sort of arguments are so passé,

so old game

Neutral

Starting with a safe “Personally, I think it’s too early to tell.” The more interesting part in this posting is the effect that “geeks” can have on mainstream.

Yes, the "geek" audience is without a doubt a niche market. So it’s easy for Microsoft or Apple to write off Chrome OS. But that’s a mistake. As John Gruber wrote in his excellent piece, "Microsoft’s Long, Slow Decline":

People who love computers overwhelmingly prefer to use a Mac today. Microsoft’s core problem is that they have lost the hearts of computer enthusiasts. Regular people don’t think about their choice of computer platform in detail and with passion like nerds do because, duh, they are not nerds. But nerds are leading indicators.

Microsoft’s losses to Apple aren’t based on "regular people" choosing the Mac. Rather, these "regular people" were encouraged to do so by the geeks in their lives who had made the switch to a Mac years ago. Consumer technology vendors can ignore the alpha geek niche at their peril.

Positive

Louis Gray has a long term view.

Google’s preview of the Chrome OS was more than a product release. It was a milestone in a vision of a Web-centric world, one in which we are increasingly living.

For the vast majority of my own activity, I am online, not using software. I intentionally use some applications, like Microsoft’s Office suite or Adobe Photoshop, quickly, and then close them just as quickly, as to not slow down my computer’s performance. Google’s Chrome OS is the latest development in a vision that says our activity will be online, our data will be stored in the cloud, and applications that have traditionally been desktop software will make their way online.

Under no uncertain terms, I agree with their vision. This is happening and it is happening fast.

Robert Scoble (an ex-Microsoft himself) has as usual a more documented insight on his blog.

Google is playing a different game. Google Chrome OS is NOT about killing Microsoft or Apple.

What is it about? Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

This reminds me of the famous video where Steve Ballmer cheers up the developer’s audience in the good old days. It looks however – like pointed out in the neutral article above – that Microsoft has lost its’ “clout” with the developers at large.

It’s even getting worse: last week at PDC, Ray Ozzie was saying that apps won’t be a differentiating factor on smart phones. Sounds a bit arrogant to me when you know that iPhone Appstore has 100,000+ apps in store, and Android Marketplace building up fast.

Scobleizer continues:

I have not seen a single thing demonstrated on stage yet that won’t run on Google Chrome OS.

This is a winner, but on a new field

Innovation at the Core and beyond the core

Posted on by
7

If you consider yourself as an innovator, I guess you all want to create some Edison effect. So that when you launch your innovative solution, you can refer to the old days as “how could we ever live like that ?”

1878_initialspark_530

The fundamental premise of this blog post is that organizations need a two-speed strategy for innovation.

  • One for innovation in the core, which is more about creating efficiencies in the core.
  • And one for innovation beyond the core, where you basically look for the next xxx Million EUR/USD new business stream (*).

*(Fill in the xxx based on the type of business you’re in). Think twice: by filling the xxx, you already frame your innovation to relative small innovations or real bold disruptive ideas.

Beyond the core you can NOT apply the same traditional core principles, decision criteria, mantra’s, etc.

Even more importantly, you need different governance and funding mechanism to succeed in innovation beyond the core. You also need a tail of your innovation process.

You need a governance that is not based on consensus (or even worse, on the principle of pleasing or obfuscating the no-Sayers), but on

the power of the believers

Team up with the believers.

You need a funding model where for each project – aka read new revenue stream of xxx Million EUR/USD – you have a FEW share/stakeholders, so that decisions are fast and don’t get watered down by yet another consensus process.

Because you want to make decisions on change of direction fast. You do not want to go through a lengthy consultation process with all sorts of stakeholders. In this sort of innovation beyond the core, often you take entrepreneurial decisions, that is taking decisions without knowing all the elements of the equation. In other words, their is some risk taking involved.

And when you take risk you can fail.

Fail wisely

And make corrections as you go.

For that you need fast assessment of the situation and fast decision taking to change course.

a06_20612883

In this innovation beyond the core, you probably don’t ask customers what they expect from the next problem, as they are probably framed in the existing core products and probably think in extensions of existing familiar products. When Apple launched the iPOD, do you really think they asked their MacBook customer base what they expected of a portable music player. Do not think so.

They probably would have ended up

with a cassette-player in the cloud

It took the nerve and courage of a visionary with – euh, a vision – and then execute very well on that vision.

You need to define a radically new and very clear tail to you innovation process. That tail must be agile, with few to decide and fund, to move fast before your competitor gets there. If not you end up with a number of cool ideas that never get further than prototype. And you create a big illusion and disappointment with all those who spent often a lot of their free time to come up with ideas and work them out into prototypes and initial business cases. (not everybody has the Google luxury to dedicate 20% of your work-time to innovation). And you loose the “clout” of your innovation team/work. See more about clout at the end of this blog post.

If you still need to be convinced of this principle, please read on and see what a number of very smart people have to say on this.

I found inspiration for this blog post in two great recent articles on Innovation by Adam Hartung in Forbes and one other on his great blog. Reader subscription mandatory if you do something in innovation in real business. Adam is author of Create Marketplace Disruption: How to Stay Ahead of the Competition.

image 0811_adam-hartung_170x170

First article was in Forbes in October about the myth of efficiency.

Most organizations embrace the creation of new ideas and the fun exercises that surround "ideation." Then they hope they can somehow develop the momentum to roll out those ideas. As if that were what organizations do.

We all know that organizations are not designed to create and implement new ideas. To the contrary, they usually exist mainly to manage legacy businesses, to defend and extend them.

Organization leadership focuses on order and control. Thus a recent spurt of articles across the business press bemoans the problem of business "inertia," as the management expert Gary Hamel calls it.

When you take a hard look at efficiency, you can see that it’s never a good source of higher returns.

As appealing as cost cutting sounds, it can’t improve returns except within the shortest time frame. Why? First, most cost cutting is easily matched by competitors, thus offering little or no competitive advantage. Second, most cost cutting is simply distributed to customers through lower prices, in a fight to maintain revenue and stay ahead of fast-moving competitors. Price wars break out as a business spirals into lower margins and declining growth.

We know that the return on innovation is very high

As I mentioned earlier, it has been shown in many industries that investment in new products and services creates substantially higher returns. Why? Because real innovations are harder for competitors to match and keep up with, especially the more radical or disruptive they are. Also, genuine innovation prompts more customers to buy, increasing sales. Innovation grows a business. And since it leaves competitors behind, it generates higher margins.

Second article also in Forbes a couple of days ago. About Innovation beyond the core.

album_large_2317911

Few businesses are any good at innovation. For all their brainstorming exercises and "open innovation" programs,

they mostly just come up with reformulations of existing products,

new pricing plans and basic updates

the same old things just a little cheaper, faster or better

Businesses ask their "strategic customers" where to innovate and get little advice. Those customers are usually strategic only in that they are large, not because they have any particular market insight. They too just want more, better and cheaper, which are hardly recommendations for true innovation.

The criteria are developed by reviewing "core technologies," "core markets" and "core capabilities."

"Leveraging the core"

becomes a refrain

All of which just increases the likelihood that what comes out will be remarkably non-innovative, like reducing the dirt-removing strength in Tide, slapping the word Basic on it, lowering the price and calling the result an innovation.

This leverages the "core brand" while extending its reach to more low-price customers, but how much can it possibly increase company revenues?

Even if you get that far, and have some form of Innovation evangelists in your company (i hate the word Innovation “Manager” as innovation has to come from everywhere inside and outside your company) that is in no way a guarantee for success and often a source for cynicism.

As ideas are developed, they get pushed through the wringer. Managers try to add value by applying a critical eye to them. With little more than their own past experience to guide them,

they cut out ideas they fear

won’t work technologically,

won’t be accepted by distributors,

might cannibalize existing product sales,

could require entering unknown markets

or otherwise are disruptive.

The number of ideas quickly shrinks.

Why is failure the norm? Defending and extending the business is what we’ve trained our business leaders and managers to be good at. They know how to remain close to "core" by staying "focused." They work on improving "operational excellence" and seek the "low cost position" while striving for "customer intimacy" with the biggest customers (encouraged by Michael Tracy and Fred Wiersema, the authors of The Discipline of Market Leaders).

Third article on his own blog just before the week-end. Referring to another great article by Andrew McAfee, in essence about the management illusion of (brand) control in this Web 2.0 world.

album_large_2355746

Executives who feel like

they have "control" of their business

are under an illusion in 2009. 

And that has been demonstrated time and time again as this recession has driven home a plethora of market shifts.  There are many things managers can control.  But many of the most important things to success are completely out of management’s hands. 

Thus, the ones who succeed aren’t trying to control their brand, or business. 

Instead they are building organizations that have great market sensing and are quick to react. 

Just compare GM to Google and you’ll see the gap between what worked in 1965, and what works 45 years later.

Fourth and last article is from James Gardner.

6a00d83451f8b769e200e554046d3d8833-150wi

James Gardner is a Director in Corporate Information Technology at the Department of Work and Pensions in the UK, where he is accountable for innovation, architecture and strategy. Before that he was Head of Innovation and Investment & CIO Technology at Lloyds TSB. For quite some time he is writing about innovation in Banker’s Vision. His latest post is about innovation backlash and innovation clout.

Consider this scenario. You use the tools of innovation to create a pile of new thinking that results in new prototypes or experiments getting built. Everyone is excited, and loves the new approach. New things start happening, so everyone declares the exercise a success.

But the situation is illustrative of something that you always see when you send an innovation team into the wild: the new ideas getting created threaten someone’s interests, no matter how well the innovation team influences those around it.

You get a backlash that is as inevitable as it is hard to manage. In fact, I’m not certain it is possible to manage it.

If you’re about changing the status quo and you don’t ruffle some feathers, it is surely inescapable that you’re not really changing anything at all.

My conclusion is that you have to invest your innovators with sufficient political clout that they can – in their own right –

protect themselves

from the backlash when it happens. If the clout is invested via proximity to a powerful senior figure, then so much the better.

There is a downside to giving innovators clout, of course. The downside is they then have the ability to disrupt strategy and “get distracting”. My own view, though, is that a strategy that doesn’t know how to deal with the new stuff without falling apart isn’t very much use anyway. It’ll only be current in the short term.

Try this: give your innovators their head and protect them from harm.

You’ll be surprised as the results you get.

This sounds very much like the Red Monkey story from Jef Staes, already mentioned elsewhere on my blog.

Summary: Innovating in the core or beyond the core is fundamentally different.

PS: of course, this blog post was written during my free personal time.

Web Wide World

Posted on by
1

 

“The web is transforming society”

m04_20979625

“Web Squared: how the web transforms the world”

web2009_websquared-cover

“Web Wide World” transforming “World Wide Web”

image

Several very interesting publications and postings over the last couple of weeks, all confirming that something very profound is happening with our core systems, our core values, and how the collective intelligence of the web is gradually but surely transforming our value kit for the nearby and long term future.

First, i would like to point to 2 very rich and profound postings by Nova Spivack.

250px-Nova_spivack

On Nov 4, Nova posted The Web Wide World — The Web Spreads Into the Physical World.

A world in which every physical object, everything we do, and eventually perhaps our every thought and action is recorded, augmented, and possibly shared. What will the world be like when it’s all connected? When all our bodies and brains are connected together — when even our physical spaces, furniture, products, tools, and even our natural environments, are all online? Beyond just a Global Brain,

we are really building a Global Body

Even more profound and more elaborated is his posting What after the Real Time Web ? This supposes that you already have an idea what Real Time Web is all about. It’s a very long posting, but worth every minute/word of it. Some highlights/bullets with some personal comments:

About Web Attention Deficit Disorder: You can experience this every day if you are a Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader user. It’s about having tools to filter out the noice and focus on the essence

About Web Intention Deficit Disorder. Great “bridge” from attention to intention. I was thinking in terms of moving from “Crowd-Sourcing” towards “Crowd-Targeting”

About Messaging. Messaging as we know it for 20 years is going to change 180°. In these days it is somewhat insane that we still send messages from A to B, whereas with today’s technology it’s more about having something stored centrally and collaboratively participate to this "information object in the cloud”. Google Wave is a powerful trendsetter.

About Semantics. What can i say. It should be clear by now for any semantic standards setting organization like SWIFT, like GS1, like… that their knowledge to deal with semantics in “messages” can now have a ten-fold impact in a “semantic web” world, where we now can automatically semantically tag any form of information, whether that information is already structured, or not (like in Word, PDF, images, digital information footprints, etc)

About Attenuation. About helping someone focus their finite attention more efficiently on the things they care about most. This makes me think of Generation-M (see elsewhere on this blog). The generation that cares about things that Matter.

About The WebOS.  I like Nova’s statement that “the winning WebOS is probably not going to come from Google, Microsoft or Amazon — rather it will probably come from someone neutral, with the best interests of developers as the primary goal.”

About Decentralization. “By this time the Web will be far too vast and complex and rapidly changing for any centralized system to index and search it”. It becomes increasingly clear that “central control” or “central policing” does not work in this Web Wide World. Definitely not if you don’t add value in the middle.

The intelligence is moving

to the edges

About Socialization. There is no escape. No hiding possible anymore. The future is for those who can share. That will be rewarded in new “currencies”. See elsewhere on this blog about the Whuffie Bank.

About Augmentation. Just today i was reading another post about augmented reality eye-lenses. And about Google Latitude now offering historical tracking on your whereabouts. Nova is mainly talking about real-time augmentation. Adding the historical tracker to all of this is pretty exciting.

About Collective Intelligence. Just quoting here: “This collective mind is not just comprised of humans, but also of software and computers and information, all interlinked into one unimaginably complex system: A system that senses the universe and itself, that thinks, feels, and does things, on a planetary scale.”

About Social Evolution. “Existing and established social, political and economic structures are going to either evolve or be overturned and replaced.” This has been my thesis since the beginning of my blogging. Stronger, it’s the raison d’être for my blog. If all this happens, what is the 2020-2030 impact on our core systems, on our core corporate and personal values. How will our companies, countries, world systems going to be organized and how can we prepare for the day when “Top-down beaurocratic control systems are simply not going to be able to keep up or function effectively in this new world of distributed, omnidirectional collective intelligence.”

About Physical Evolution. In essence, Nova describes the age of the Singularity, when our human brains will  be complemented by the collective and give leeway to a different type of human being.

The environment we will live in will be a constantly changing sea of collective thought in which nothing and nobody will be isolated. We will be more interdependent than ever before. Interdependence leads to symbiosis, and eventually to the loss of generality and increasing specialization.

This must sound as music in the ears to my friend and coach André Pelgrims, who is fighting the sort of societal and corporate change management that is often not more than a big illusion, because the company has been focusing on aligning (not event fusing) of departmental silos, and was not able to descend to the level of person-to-person connection and enlightenment.

These are just some of the changes that are likely to occur as a result of the things we’re working on today. The Web and the emerging Real-Time Web are just a prelude of things to come.

The last element i’d like to ask your attention for is the existence and activities of the Web Science Trust.

image

The Web is the largest human information construct in history. The Web is transforming society. In order to understand what the Web is, engineer its future and ensure its social benefit we need a new interdisciplinary field that we call Web Science.

Have a look at some of the big names behind the Web Science Trust: Tim Berners-Lee, etc. Also very good to see that some European (UK) universities are starting to take the lead.

Most interesting is to look at the Research Roadmap. Just look at the research perspectives, and it gives you an idea of the deep profound impact of the Web Wide World:

  • Computational perspective
  • Mathematical perspective
  • Social Science perspective
  • Economic perspective
  • Legal perspective

And the integrative research themes:

  • Collective Intelligence
  • Openness of the Web
  • Dynamics of the Web
  • Security, Privacy and Trust
  • Inference

I took the effort to download one of the students research reports. Oh boy, how interesting how these young people study, research, reflect, analyze. I’d love to be back at university 🙂

Here is one sentence about the WebSci’09: Society On-Line Conference:

Thanks to the support of the Web Science exchange bursary, I had also the opportunity to participate in the WebSci’09: Society On-Line Conference, which was held in Athens, Greece from 18th to 20th March 2009. The conference was actually a very special one, as it was the first conference I have ever been to where I had the chance to exchange ideas with not only computer scientists but and legal studies.

I believe it is key that

we start building companies

made of the “hybrids”

Not only computer-scientists, but people with cross-fertilizing expertise. Like “experts of other areas including social science, humanities and legal studies” and bio-engineering and nanotechnology.

All the above is very close to the suggested scope of our Think Tank on Long Term Future.

Traveling on Light

Posted on by
Reply

Great article in NYT. You can find full article here.

image

The article is so inspiring. Anything is possible when you let yourself inspire by your dreams.

The next break came when Dr. Friedman was talking about the LightSail to a group of potential donors. A man — “a very modest dear person,” in Ms. Druyan’s words — asked about the cost of the missions and then committed to paying for two of them, and perhaps a third, if all went well.

After the talk, the man, who does not wish his identity to be known, according to the society, came up and asked for the society’s bank routing number. Within days the money was in its bank account.

My dream is to get our Think Tank on Long Term Future kicked-off in 2010. In the next 2 weeks, i will be speaking on this Think Tank to a group of potential interested captains of industry.

My purpose is “To Inspire Others to Dream”.

Natural Language Interface Microsoft Research

Posted on by
Reply

With thx to xstof for spotting this one. Looks like i cannot embed the video, so please go here or click the picture below.

image

It turns out 2019 is getting closer every day. At the moment, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officerCraig Mundie is doing the rounds at a number of prestigious colleges in the States showing off Microsoft’s vision for technology to solve the world’s biggest problems. Of course, one must use the latest in natural user interfaces for this task.

A feature of this year’s tour appears to be a next-generation computer – one that docks and undocks from a transparent glass display and allows for not only pen and voice input as you’d come to expect from natural user interfaces, but also incorporates touchless gestures and eye-tracking to interact with the information at hand.

Getting closer to the Minority Report type of interfaces 😉

No Belgian University in WW Top-100

Posted on by
Reply

The Academic Ranking of World Universities just got published.

image

Not a single Belgian University in the Top-100. Leuven comes in at 102 and Ghent at 106.

I found this resource via Eric Drexler’s blog, which was focusing on Asian Universities.

The “Academic Ranking of World Universities” (ARWU) is widely regarded as the best objective, international measure of university quality, and the ARWU says that excellent universities in Asia are scarce.

This seemed to me to be out of line with reality, and on further investigation, I concluded that the ARWU has a strong negative bias as a measure of the current quality of rapidly advancing universities.

In examining a paper on the ARWU methodology [pdf], I found that its scores place great weight on numbers of Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals won, to publications in Science  and Nature , and to publications listed in the Science Citation Index. The problem is that, as a consequence, the scores are weighted toward cumulative numbers, which are poor measures of rapidly rising institutions, such as the leading universities in China and India. For example, if an identical twin of Harvard materialized in Somerville or Beijing today, its rank would be abysmal for years to come.

In summary, the much-cited Academic Ranking of World Universities is very much a lagging indicator of quality.

Although that nuance may be good for the Asian universities, this is bad news for the Belgian universities.

The university of Leuven was founded in 1425 ! That’s almost 600 years ago. So if the ARWU is measuring (lagging) current quality of universities, that’s really bad news for Leuven.

Also, the omni-presence of US-universities should be of some concern to our society – the European in particular. This is also reflected in the number of innovation think tanks that exist in the world. Most are from US origin. Most of their analysis have a very US domestic focus.

That’s why our upcoming European based Think Tank for Long Term Future will try to change that, and start from the rich and diverse European culture and history. We’ll have our kick-off meeting with a number of passionate creatives and local captains of industry on 24 Nov 2009.

However, regional or anti-regional focus should not be the focus. And we do not want to start from a laggard’s position, as a catching-up strategy is always a loosing strategy.

In our inter-connected world, we are moving towards a new world order, based on collective intelligence and collective intention, inspired by transhumanism. I am preparing a separate post on that.

The focus will be on ensuring that our next generation is well prepared for a new world order. Preparing those who will be our leaders in 2030 is the focus.

Stay tuned.

The Future by Chris Anderson

Posted on by
1

 

Big Think Interview with Chris Anderson

Chris_anderson

CHRIS ANDERSON

Editor-in-Chief, Wired

A conversation with the Editor-in-Chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail and Free: The Future of a Radical Price.

October 29, 2009  |  In Business & Economics, Science & Tech, Media & Internet

You can see the 36 min video here.

The full transcript is also available. Some extracts and quotes (red highlights by me)

On “free”:

What happened with the Internet is that it took computers and storage and bandwidth, silicone chips, spinning metal platters, and fiber optics and put them together. It turns out that Moore’s law falls in price 50 percent every 18 months. Storage and bandwidth fall in price every 14 and 12 months, each by 50 percent and they’re accelerating their race to zero even faster than Moore’s law. You put all three together and you have this general rule that anything you do on the internet, whatever it costs today, it will cost half as much a year from now. This has relatively profound consequences. First, it makes zero – It makes free not really a marketing gimmick but kind of an inevitable price. Not to say that everything is going to be free. The greatest misunderstanding of free is that everything’s going to be free.

At the same time, they have iTunes, a very successful way to sell music. In that case, what they’re selling is convenience, not music.

On “infinities” (see also Peter Hinssen’s Innotribe Keynote on “exploring the limits.”

I think the most profound thing about turning products into digital products from my prospective is that price becomes arbitrary. In the traditional world, there’s a pretty strong correlation between the cost of a product to make and the price you can charge for it. You charge something that’s slightly above the cost and the more competition there is, the less you can charge. It tends to drive prices down to the marginal cost. In digital products where the marginal cost is zero, the price can be anywhere from zero to infinity.

On “Cloud Computing”:

We talk about lowering the barriers to entry but you also want to lower the barriers to exit so that people don’t feel like they’re risking everything.

Open ID and open apps are two examples. I think we’re seeing these two battles play out and although Jonathon is absolutely right, that this is a risk, I perhaps have more confidence in the power of the marketplace to sort this out. I think that the one thing we’re sure about in this era is that we have choice, lots and lots of choice. If Facebook gets it wrong or if Twitter gets it wrong, there are a thousand other companies in the wings just waiting to get it righter. Knowing that, I believe –and so true for Google the elephant in the room on this– I think knowing that their hold on the consumer is not permanent, it’s not cast in stone and is only permitted as long as they serve the consumer better than the obvious alternatives, I believe, will keep them doing the right thing.

About “monopolies”:

I can only hope that the regulators move slowly because I don’t think the answers are clear and any answer we give today will be wrong tomorrow. I mean, today, isn’t it sort of absurd the fuss we made over Microsoft, now, in retrospect? Now Microsoft looks like the underdog right? We were so worried about their monologist abuse of the desktop. I mean, desktop, when was the last time you even saw your desktop?

About “going after small or big business (the next 1B$ business):

That model distributed innovation. Letting the community sort of invent products, try them out at small scale, figure out the bugs, whether there is real demand, and then use the big company’s power to scale them up to mass markets. That feels about right.

See also my yesterday’s blog post about Failure is NOT an Option.

On “what upcoming technology will disrupt the industry ?”

The simple answer to your question is the most disruptive thing I can see right now is the fact that you and I are carrying GPS chips in our pocket. If you have an iPhone in your pocket or any other smart phone, you’ve got a GPS chip. Now we’re not doing much with them right now but we have, for the first time in history, the capacity to link our physical world, the world we live in, to the virtual world.

I think GPS and the internet combined is a game changer. Now I’ll add just one thing on top of that. The fact that your phone is not just GPS and internet connection, but also other sensors, accelerometers, it has proximity sensors, light sensors, things like that. It could have other sensors. You know, we’ll see what we do with that. To what extent could that be used for health care? To what extent can that be used for, sort of, environmental monitoring? I don’t know but we now have nodes. We have smart nodes in people’s pockets, in their hands, spread all around the world, connected to each other and the internet that know where they are. I think that’s a big deal.

Anderson is also mentioning a company called 37Signals. Ever heard of them ?

image

37signals is a different approach in that they are relatively lean and targeted. They are not trying to become Microsoft. They know who they are. They were kind of born on the web and, as a result, the products sort of feel organically web centric.

And finally, on “Small is the new big”

Lower transaction cost was the advantage of the firm. Now we’re in an era where it’s completely reversed. Now big companies have bureaucracy. They have red tape. They have long procedures. They have certain profit requirements. The transaction costs are actually higher inside the walls of a big company than they are outside.

Bill Joy famously said that the smarter people in the world for any given project don’t work for you. That’s a problem if you can only work with people that work with you. I mean, why are you working with this guy? Is he the best person in world?

No, he’s the closest person in the world. Now it’s incredible easy to find the best person in the world and to get them to work with you. The internet has provided a sort of global lowering of transaction and so we can now, it’s often more efficient to look outside your company and, you know, I’m joking on some level. The idea of finding the right person via Elance versus your internal HR is actually often easier to go outside and get things done. What that’s done is that it’s said we have a diseconomy of scale with big companies. The bigger they are, the harder it is to get things done. Small companies are nimble. They’re focused. The cost base is lower. They don’t need big markets so they can target more narrow opportunities.

Open source software, hosted solutions, all this cloud stuff, those will lower the cost of starting a company. The internet has lowered the barrier of reaching products. These global markets of talent have lowered the cost of finding people the right people to work on your project. All of it is really creating an army of competitors to the large company model. Large companies are still great at mass but there is a long tail. And large companies are bad at the long tail. Small companies are perfect for the long tail. And we’re not going to see a battle between the two.

Failure is NOT an option (you don’t know until you try)

Posted on by
4

A couple of weeks ago, i was attending the Web 2.0 Summit. Actually, it is the Web² Summit (read as Web Squared).

If you want to stay up-to-date a little bit, a must read is the Web Squared Whitepaper. You can read it online here or download it here.

web2009_websquared-cover

One morning, i was taking the elevator to have breakfast. In front of me in the elevator was somebody i never met, but he had a conference badge. So i started a chat. By the time we got to the ground floor, i understood i was chatting with Don Dodge, Director Business Development Emerging Business Team at Microsoft. UPDATE: just learned via Don’s blog that he has left Microsoft

6a00d8341bf9da53ef00e550076d788834-150wi

I identified myself as part of SWIFT’s Innovation Team, we got connected, and Don invited me to join him for breakfast.

We chatted about innovation cultures and where we were coming from. About our deep DNA of FNAO (Failure is not an Option), and how people in such culture usually feel reluctant to come up with idea of dare to take risks.

Don told me i gave him inspiration for a new blog post on The Next Big Thing.

Never thought he would do this, but hey ! Today i received from Don a mail with a link to his post. I have copied it here below in it’s entirety. Don’t hesitate to comment on this blog on on Don’s blog.

BTW: i have invited Don to be part of our Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam in Oct 2010 :-). Hope he accepts.

PS-1: I am not an “Exec”. I am just part of SWIFT’s Innovation Team.

PS-2: “Make a mistake and you are fired” is of course a metaphor to indicate that an FNAO culture does not promote taking risks and being innovative. Sometime to the contrary. But that metaphor does not change anything to the important message Don has for big and small companies trying to innovate.

+++ start Quote from Don’s Blog

Failure is NOT an option – Why this can be a bad strategy

An exec at a large European financial company recently told me his former CEO believed “Failure is not an option”. Great, I thought. This means they will do whatever it takes to succeed, try five or ten different approaches until it works, get the whole company focused on the goal, etc. No, he told me. What it means is “Make a mistake and you are fired.” Wow! Another example of the difference between startups and big companies. I have worked most of my career in startups where you are always pushing the envelope, taking big risks, where there are no obvious answers, and you just keep trying until you find the combination that works.

Poker ChessStartups play poker, big companies play chess – This “failure is not an option” discussion reminded me of the huge differences between startups and big companies. Success is not easy in either case, but the approaches are radically different. Using a game analogy, startups are more like poker players. They take big risks, they bluff, they make quick decisions, change direction constantly, and they keep their competitors off balance. Poker is an aggressive game where if you play your cards right you win big, and win fast. If you lose a hand you can come back and double your money in the next hand. There is no time to wallow over a loss. You did your best. Move on and your luck will be better next time. Chess is a different game. Both require incredible skill and talent. A great poker player is rarely a good chess player.

Big companies think long term. Like chess players they think four or five moves (years) ahead. They protect their assets, play defensively, think strategically, and carefully consider the options before making a move. Big companies have a lot to lose, while small companies don’t. Big companies leverage their assets (conservatively) and flex their muscles where they can. They go for incremental improvements in position. Big company CEOs, like chess players, work a long term strategy. Each short term move plays a part in a longer term strategy that is not visible to the casual observer. In fact, their strategy is often kept secret, and they take care to make sure their short term moves don’t reveal their long term plan. Strategy is a competitive advantage.

There is another interesting topic on how to make the transition from startup to successful big company, but we will save that for another day.

Fail Fast – If you are going to fail, do it fast and move on to the next thing.More in depth thoughts here. The only thing better than a “Yes” is a quick “NO”. When you are raising money, selling a customer, or trying to get a deal done, it is the long drawn out process that never ends that will kill you. It is the same thing with startups. Being successful is always the goal, but if it is going to fail…Fail fast.

Bill Warner, founder of Avid Technologies, Wildfire Communications, etc, said recently “Some of you guys are so smart you turn what should have been a one year failure into a five year death march.” Entrepreneurs are resourceful, smart, and have that indomitable spirit that doesn’t allow them to quit. This can be good and bad. Sometimes it is better to “fold” and move on to the next game.

Hold ‘em or Fold ‘em? – “You got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away, know when to run.” Kenny Rogers. The toughest decision any entrepreneur makes is giving up on a company. It just isn’t in their DNA to do it. In fact, they rarely decide to do it, it is the investors who finally make the call. How do they decide? It is really about passion and commitment – from the founders, investors, employees, and customers. If the passion is lost in any two of the four groups…it is probably time to “fold” and move on.

Fine line between success and failure – There are no easy and obvious answers. If it were easy everyone would have already done it. Timing and luck play a big part in success…bigger than most people will admit. There are four key elements to success in any business; great people, great idea, great timing, and luck. If you don’t have any two of the four…you are probably going to fail. I have seen startups with great people and a great idea that were too early (timing), or had bad luck on things they couldn’t control. They failed. The same idea tried five years later succeeded. Timing matters. The market needs to be ready to adopt your ideas. The answer is never obvious. You don’t know for sure until you try.

+++ End quote

Energy from Passionate Creatives

Posted on by
1

Fantastic blog by Hutch Carpenter about The Passionate Creatives. His blog is always quality. Always new content. Feeling deeply the pulse of the Enterprise 2.0 wave.

0990783

A lot in Hutch’s blog post reminded me about the book – The Cultural Creatives – How 50 million people are changing the world. By Paul H. Ray & Cherry Ruth Anderson.

418MH0BC23L._SL500_AA240_

In his recent blog entry, Hutch talks about “Passionate Creatives”.

Especially about passionate creatives at the edges.

Passionate creatives are everywhere among us, but they are not evenly distributed. They tend to gather on the edges where unmet needs intersect with unexploited capabilities.  Edges are fertile seedbeds for innovation.

Or also

Companies are best-served by allowing employees who are attracted to these changes to pursue innovative ways to address them. Why?

They get energy

They get an experimenter’s mentality. They get a happier workforce. Let employees exercise some form of self-organization to accomplish this.

The alternative may be incumbent staffers who have fallen into routines, or

have reason to protect

the status quo

This does not help companies address rising levels of volatility. Free the passionate creatives!

Makes me think of Red Monkey story by Jef Staes. I use it a lot. In every presentation about innovation. It’s where my audience does NOT loose me on my trip to the future.

Book_Wordcloud

Let me make another connection here. Just like Hutch, i would like to refer to  A Labor Day Manifesto for a New World by John Hagel.

John Hagel founded the Deloitte Center for Edge Innovation. And is having a fantastic blog The Big Shift. I had the honor of meeting John Hagel in person during the last Web 2.0 Summit. We had a brief chat on his possible participation to next years Innotribe @ Sibos 2010 in Amsterdam.

Have a look at the whole Labor Day Manifesto, and more specifically at the last paragraph:

Stop and think about the last truly great person who left your organization. First think about what made that employee great. We bet you name such characteristics as action-oriented, driven, passionate, fun, and genuine.

Now think about where that worker went. Chances are, to a position with a perceived promise of putting his or her talents to better use—moving into a role with greater challenges and opportunities to learn and make a difference. It wasn’t about money.

What a great test for each organization !

And there is also the interesting innovation blog from Stefan Lindegaard. In his 5 oct post Job Opening- Senior Innovation Manager he describes how difficult it is to find a senior innovation job:

I am sad to say this is just not the time to seek such a job. I see this in the networks I facilitate where many innovation leaders have lost their jobs in the past year. I have been in touch with several of them discussing their options and trying to help them move on. Actually, last year some of them got a new job pretty fast, but this is not happening now. It takes longer – if at all.

Just to give you an idea of how bad the job situation looks like: There are less than 20 companies on Monster.com in the U.S looking for senior innovation managers and offering interesting challenges.

Somewhere in the middle there is a great advice for people wanting to work with innovation:

So my advice to all the people working with innovation right now is this: If you really want to work with innovation, then

your current job

is most likely the best chance to do this.

My dream scenario is that – in these times of crisis, with efficiency programs cutting out the best when focusing solely on efficiency and allowing managers to settle old bills with team members that took the risk to innovate – that the group of passionate creatives on the edges of every company will stand-up, claim their space, and fight to destruct the cynicism that reigns in some many companies.

The root cause for this unbearable cynicism are usually power-games between silos. These power games are putting a major barrier to success to any CEO shouting “change” at the top, as the change – or desire thereto – does not permeate into the lower echelons of the organization, and therefore remains nothing more than

a big illusion

This is the difference between old and new game.

In the new game, we don’t shoot at Red Monkeys, we don’t fire the guys who have the courage to take risk. On the contrary,

we protect them,

expose care, and

channel the energy

for the better of the company

I met a couple of those passionate creatives recently:

what an energy !

If only we could turn the negative cynicism energy into a positive creative energy.

Who feels energized by this ? Let’s join forces. Let me know who you and where you are.