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The TopCoder Business Model: Collaboration by Competition
When Dan Pink first introduced the concept of a free agent nation back in 1997, I wonder if he imagined a world where testosterone-driven, competitive collaboration would be the engine for a new free agent business model.
BIF-3 storyteller Jack Hughes is the founder and president of TopCoder, a Connecticut-based company founded in 2002 that has institutionalized programming competitions. These software competitions are a novel way to both showcase programmers from around the world for companies seeking top-flight talent, while at the same time develop computer applications for blue-chip clients who recognize TopCoder’s ability to tap a global talent pool.
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Posted January 08, 2008 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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Multidisciplinary Innovation: It's Time to Throw the Shackles Off
Irving Wladawsky Berger has become my new favorite blogger. Yet another insightful post this week from the semi-retired VP of Innovation at IBM. This time around he's writing about multidisciplinary innovation.
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Posted November 16, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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eg2007 Conference Discount Offered to BIF Community
If you attended BIF-3, you might recall Richard Saul Wurman talking about the eg 2007 conference. EG stands for "Entertainment Gathering" and has been called a celebration of creative enterprise, and a great swirl of inspirations. This year's event is designed and directed by Michael Hawley (a renowned technologist, educator and pianist). Michael has graciously extended a discount ticket offer of 25% to members of the BIF community. The conference takes place on December 2-4, 2007 at the Getty Center in Los Angeles.
Our own Saul Kaplan attended last year's event and called it an incredible 3-day dinner party.
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Posted November 05, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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The Hidden Tyranny of Transparency
"Every truly great accomplishment is at first impossible," said U.S. Homeland Security Under Secretary for research and development Jay Cohen to an audience of innovators at BIF-3 on October 11th. Prior to his post with Homeland Security, Cohen was head of naval research. His directive was very clear: make the navy more innovative. "When I took over naval research, it was an organization with 232 years of tradition unhampered by progress," he said.
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Posted November 02, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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More on the Near Death Experience
BIF-3 storyteller Irving Wladawsky-Berger has written a follow-up piece to the story he shared at our summit a few weeks ago. To quickly recap, Irving was questioned whether any company can truly reinvent itself without having a near-death experience. Irving said no.
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Posted October 30, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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BIF-3 Video Transcripts Now Available!
Alas, our dinner party has come to a close. The BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Summit succeeded in its goal to let great people tell great stories. Now everyone can share that experience. With the help of BIF member Tango Pix, the video transcripts of all the storytellers are now available at our Innovation Story Studio.
More than just an archive of cool videos, interviews, audio and narrative pieces, the Story Studio is our platform for helping our innovation community learn from each other, share their wisdom, and revel in the outcomes of our experiments, whether they succeed or fail. Take a look. Take a listen. And, if you have a good story to share, let me know. We're in the process of developing a community-generated area within the studio.
Go the Innovation Story Studio
innovation/
Posted October 24, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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The Wisdom of Crowds Unhinged?
BIF Research Advisor Bill Taylor wrote a provocative piece on Xconomy asking a very simple question: How hard (bordering on impossible) it is for companies to keep new products simple and to focus their innovations on simplifying existing products?
His question stems from Jason Fried's story at the BIF-3 summit a couple of weeks ago. Jason's business advice: do less than your competition, spend less money, hire fewer people, work fewer hours and, offer fewer features.
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Posted by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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BIF-3 Wrap-Up: People & Stories Take Center Stage
We certainly caught a glimpse of author William Gibson’s famous line "The future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed" at BIF-3 this year. For two days, the future seemed more apparent. It wasn’t just the stories or the emotive storytellers—it was the purposeful random collisions among BIF-3 participants that produced the magic.
There were so many ideas and connections that emerged at our third annual Collaborative Innovation Summit. Co-hosted by Wall Street Journal technology columnist Walt Mossberg, Mavericks at Work author Bill Taylor and our own chief catalyst Saul Kaplan, we welcomed 24 storytellers and some 350 participants to Providence for a two-day conversation about creating innovation and driving change.
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Posted by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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Innovation as a State of Mind
IBM Vice President of Innovation Irving Wladawsky-Berger really hit a nerve at BIF-3 when he questioned whether any company can reinvent itself without having a near death experience. Our co-host Bill Taylor was certainly affected and wrote a good blog entry about it at Harvard Business Online.
From Bill's blog:
But one of everyone’s favorite presenters was Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president of technical strategy and innovation at IBM, who has been behind so much of what’s gone right at the company over the last ten years—its enthusiastic embrace of the Internet, open-source software, and innovation on so many fronts.
What made his presentation so memorable was the fact that he was so candid. Yes, IBM had engaged in a deep-seated transformation. But to this day he wonders whether Big Blue would have made such big changes had the company not walked to the edge of the abyss. “Can a company reinvent itself,” this legend of corporate transformation asked, “without going through a near-death experience?”
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Posted October 22, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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Made to Stick Follow-Up: The Stickiness Aptitude Test
I stumbled across the Stickiness Aptitude Test this morning while doing some follow-up research on the Heath brother's book Made to Stick. It was developed by Guy Kawaski and the folks at Electric Pulp. It's a little hokey but follow through to some of the 'unexpected' questions and I guarantee you'll take a moment to think about how you present your own ideas.
Example:
Hollywood script-writers and great science teachers keep us on the edge of our seats by identifying mysteries or gaps in our knowledge (Who murdered the rock star? What are the rings of Saturn made of?). In your last presentation you:
# Used knowledge gaps to keep people wanting to hear your next point (+ 2 points)
# Told people your next point and hoped they wanted to hear it (- 2 points)
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Posted October 18, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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Books that Matter: BIF-3 Storytellers Share Their Inspiration
I asked several of our BIF-3 storytellers which books were influential to them in helping build their companies, inspire new ideas or frame their way of thinking. The result: Our fall reading list. I'm really digging this list because it's off the beaten track - much like the stories we heard at this year's summit.
If anyone would like to take the lead on reviewing one of these books, let me know. We'll be conducting several online book chats and invite each of our storytellers back (as well as some of the authors if I can finagle it) to participate and talk about their recommended book.
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Posted October 17, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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Mind-Mapping the BIF-3 Summit
My thanks go out to Jeff De Cagna who created a series of mind maps from last week's BIF-3 Summit. For easy access, I'm consolidating Jeff's blog entries into this one. Jeff used an online mind mapping application called MindMeister to create two mind maps of Day 1 and Day 2 stories. You can see a smaller image of the maps below. The links below each image will take you to the Mindmeister site.
If you would like to edit these maps, please e-mail Jeff at jeffpi1@gmail.com and he'll send you an invitation. This is like a big online brainstorming session - I encourage everyone to participate and add their own thoughts, ideas, connections or links.
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Posted by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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BIF-3 Day Two Mind Map
by Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder, Principled Innovation LLC
My sincere apologies that it has taken me a few days to post the Day Two mind map from BIF-3. You can view it below or you can access a direct link beneath the embedded version.
BIF-3 Day Two Mind Map
If you would like to edit this map or the Day One map, please e-mail me at jeffpi1@gmail.com and I will send you an invitation. Your contributions are very welcome!
Posted October 15, 2007 by Jeff De Cagna | Permalink
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Thoughts on the nature of innovation.
There were two things that really struck me over the last two wonderful days of BiF.
The first was that innovation is more often than not intensely personal. Most of the stories were about individuals, and individuals who had got to the stage where they were so hacked off with the status quo that they were prepared to have a go at changing their world. To do so they invariably had to face considerable forces of resistance or at least disapproval.
This leads to the second thing that struck me. Innovation is disruptive by its very nature as it means doing things differently. For many in organizations doing things differently means at the very least accepting change and often having to accommodate an entirely new world view. They don't tend to do this without a fight.
This leads to the instinct in organizations to sanitize innovation - to set up committees or dedicated innovation departments. The trouble is that in doing so they risk removing the personal nature of the desire to innovate and disperse the passion that gives it the energy to happen.
Posted October 13, 2007 by Euan Semple | Permalink
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From BIF-3: The Social Innovation Experience
By Adrian Chernoff (www.adrianchernoff.com)
This year’s 2007 Business Innovation Factory conference was a whirlwind of content, dialogue, and innovation experiences. The content built up from speaker to speaker and session to session where the random interconnections from people, projects, and ideas lead to the realization that opportunity is abundant. The conference demonstrates that we all have the ability to create and the fact others have done so or are in the process of innovating was an encouraging message to current and future innovators.
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Posted October 12, 2007 by Adrian Chernoff | Permalink
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How innovators think: asking new questions
Asking insightful questions is clearly one of the traits of successful innovators. When explaining how they got into a new area, or hit on a ‘aha” large or small, almost all of the storytellers at the Business Innovation Factory Collaborative Innovation Summit talked about the questions they asked.
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Posted by Lois Kelly | Permalink
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BIF-3 - Thursday Recap
Day 2 at BIF-3...
The second day began with an outstanding morning session. And the first storyteller of that session was Irving Wladawsky-Berger, VP of Technical Strategy and Innovation at IBM and visiting professor of Engineering Systems at MIT.
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Posted by Steve Hardy | Permalink
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Finding the words for new concepts
One of the challenges in getting people to believe in a new business concept is having the right words to describe the concept. At the BIF3 Innovation Summit CEOs Robin Chase of GoLoco, Jack Hughes of TopCoder, William Herb of Linear Air, and BIF3 co-host Bill Taylor talked about the importance of messaging to be able to talk about business concepts in ways that resonate –with employees, customers and investors. Without that messaging, it’s difficult to get people to believe in the idea.
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Posted by Lois Kelly | Permalink
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Mark Cuban and Walt Mossberg close out BIF-3
An extra camera appeared when Mark Cuban took the stage to join Walt Mossberg for the last session of BIF-3. After a little joking about Dancing with the Stars, Walt asked Mark why he wants to buy the Cubs. Mark replied that there's tremendous opportunity in picking up an iconic brand and finding ways to use it in this age of widespread digital media. Although Cuban is often associated with online sports broadcasts, he mentioned that what's not as well-known is that his company streamed all kinds of other things back then, such as shareholder meetings. Mossberg asked if video (like Youtube) is a destination, or just another datatype; Cuban chose datatype, saying "bits are bits."
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Posted October 11, 2007 by Brian Jepson | Permalink
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Reinvention Requires A Near-Death Experience
by Erica Driver, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, Chairman Emeritus, IBM Academy of Technology, was speaking from experience this morning during his interview by Wall Street Journal Columnist Walt Mossberg. By a near-death experience, Wladawsky-Berger was referring to what IBM went through when Bill Gates founded Microsoft and the PC took off. Wladawsky-Berger said that near-death experiences open up the mind to new experiences – they “clean the brain.” These experiences force people to think in new ways and look for new opportunities.
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Posted by Erica Driver | Permalink
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Keep the business edge: near-death and 12 year-olds
At the BIF3 Innovation Summit Irving “Irving Wladawsky-Berger, vice president, Technical Strategy and Innovation, IBM, suggested that the only way a big established company can reinvent itself is having a near-death experience, much as IBM did.
When Wall St. Journal columnist and BIF co-host Walt Mossberg asked Mark Cuban about whether he thought a near-death experience was the only way to keep innovating, Cuban had a different perspective.
“Every day I wake up knowing that there is a 12 year-old out there somewhere that’s trying to kick your ass. If you don’t pay attention to your business your ass will be kicked.”
Near-death or waking up and thinking someone could disrupt everything? The latter sounds like a better route.
Posted by Lois Kelly | Permalink
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Ellen Levy: Ask the Right Questions
Ellen Levy, a Silicon Valley veteran who has worked at companies like Apple and Softbank Venture Capital, built her new firm, Silicon Valley Connect, on the principles she learned while Director of Industry Collaboration and Research at Stanford's Media X. Media X is an industry affiliate program that liaises between industry representatives and the university.
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Posted by Josh Catone | Permalink
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Transcripts from First Session Day 2
Some more live note taking.
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Posted by Rachel Clarke | Permalink
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Take hope: innovators at work on aging, healthcare and education
While the headlines are bleak and the politicians’ campaign promises bland, I was made hopeful a the BIF3 Innovation Summit that ways to address some of our most critical problems – education, healthcare, aging – will be found and realized. And sooner rather than later.
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Posted by Lois Kelly | Permalink
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Clayton Christensen: Apple vs. Nokia
Walt Mossberg continued his conversations on day 2 of BIF-3, bringing storyteller Clayton Christensen up on stage. It was refreshing to see Christensen say that the cell phone is poised to disrupt the personal computer because I'm a firm believer in that, too. What was really fun for me was the conversation about Nokia vs. Apple. If you've gotten a coffee or a beer in me, you've probably heard me rant on and on about this, but never as articulate as Christensen and Mossberg. Now you're all in trouble, because I think I can speak more lucidly and loudly about this.
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Posted by Brian Jepson | Permalink
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Irving Wladawsky-Berger: The Future of Collaboration
Thursday kicked off with BIF-3 co-host Walt Mossberg joining storyteller Irving Wladawsky-Berger on the stage. They began by reflecting on IBM's great rise followed by a "near death" as the PC rose in dominance; IBM failed to innovate in this space and left it to its competitors. Wladawsky-Berger thinks that you need the near-death experience to drive the kind of innovation that IBM has done since: embracing the Internet, Linux, grid computing, and more. After some backs-and-forth about the differences between how Microsoft and IBM approach research (Wladawsky-Berger asserted that IBM is more "out in the field" in the ballgame of research, while Microsoft does it all from the dugout).
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Posted by Brian Jepson | Permalink
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Day 1 Transcripts
I spent yesterday liveblogging the the talks, as far as possible taking down what was said in each session. Here's a rundown and links to the from the first session.
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Posted by Rachel Clarke | Permalink
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BIF-3 Mind Map: New Link
by Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder, Principled Innovation LLC
Apparently some BIF-3 attendees who clicked on the mind map link I posted last night were asked for login information. I'm not sure why, but such is the nature of innovation: the unexpected sometimes happens! So, here is a link that I think should take you there without the need to login. Sorry about the confusion!
http://www.mindmeister.com/maps/show_public/2580798
Posted by Jeff De Cagna | Permalink
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BIF-3 - Wednesday Recap
So, first, some background to set the scene. BIF is hosted at Trinity Rep Theater, a cute little 300-or-so seat repertory theater in downtown Providence. Each speaker - or as they are more commonly referred to here, storyteller - is alloted about 20 minutes to make their presentation. Some choose to use powerpoint as a visual aid while others wing it on words alone. The audience is seated in a semi-circle and many of the presenters stick around, sit in the crowd, and mingle during the generous inter-session breaks. Basically, it's rapid-fire ideas.
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Posted October 10, 2007 by Steve Hardy | Permalink
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Check out the BIF-3 Day One Mind Map!
by Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder, Principled Innovation LLC
Live blogging is not something I really enjoy or at which I excel, and so I'm glad that other bloggers posted throughout the day. Rather than do straight reporting on what storytellers say, I prefer to reflect on their ideas, make sense of them and then share some of my own thoughts. I also find value in exploring themes and their implications for individual innovators, organizations and our society.
So, today, instead of feverishly trying to post my fragmented observations to the blog, I worked on something else. Using an online mind mapping application called MindMeister, I created a mind map for the first day of BIF-3 sessions. You can see a smaller image of the map below. There is a link to the map on the Web beneath it.
BIF-3 Day One Mind Map
Wherever you see a plus sign on the map, it means there are additional branches with notes. Just click any of these plus signs to expand all of the branches, and click it again to collapse them. The notes aren't comprehensive across the board, so I'm hoping that other BIF-3 attendees are interested in contributing to the mind maps. (I'll have another one for tomorrow.) Please consider yourself invited to join in the collaboration! Send me an e-mail, and I will send you an invitation.
Let me know if you find value in the mind maps as a resource. Please post your comments below!
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BIF-3 Day One Podcasts
by Jeff De Cagna, chief strategist and founder, Principled Innovation LLC
It was a great first day at BIF-3, and I have a couple of podcasts to share with everyone. I'm not 100% satisfied with the sound quality (which is why I only did two), but they're pretty good. Just click the links below to play or download.
Podcast interview with Colonel Dean Esserman, chief of Providence Police Department (6:35)
Podcast interview with Jason Fried of 37signals (9:14)
I'm going to work on improving the sound, but either way we'll have some additional podcasts tomorrow. Please share your comments!
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BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Notable Quotes
Some interesting food for thought from the first day of today’s conference:
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Posted by Lois Kelly | Permalink
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Beyond 911: innovating police forces, bringing back neighborhood beats
Dean Esserman, chief of the Providence, RI police force, reflected this morning at the BIF3 about the six years that have past since 9/11. Six years since Bin Laden promised to take down 100,000 American children. “He’s a man of his word,” said Esserman. “But we’ve done it for him. Over the past six years 100,000 young Americans have been murdered. We’re a land that buries it young. That’s the face of violence in America.”
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Posted by Lois Kelly | Permalink
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Walter Mossberg and Jason Fried: Why are we stuck with bloated software crap like Outlook?
That was Walt Mossberg’s opening question to 37 Signals founder Jason Fried at today’s BIF-3 Collaborative Innovation Conference. “I’ve never seen a software company figure out how to deal with feature creep,” said Mossberg. “Even Quicken has become a complete mess because a small percentage of enthusiasts keep demanding more and the software companies listen to them.”
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Posted by Lois Kelly | Permalink
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Dan Heath: Think Inside the Box
Take a sheet of paper and write down everything you can think of that's white. You have 15 seconds, go. Done? Good, now take 15 seconds and write down everything that is or could be in your refrigerator that's white. Finished? Raise your hand if had better luck with the second list.
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Posted by Josh Catone | Permalink
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Serendipity: A Critical Innovation Success Factor
by Erica Driver, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research
As part of the run-up to the Business Innovation Factory summit (BIF-3) currently going on in Providence, Rhode Island, attendees participated in an online social network. On the social networking site, the most common one-word answers to the question “What are 5 keys to innovation?” were rolled up into a tag cloud. Words that rose to the top of the list included creativity, collaboration, and passion. These are all good.
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Posted by Erica Driver | Permalink
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Matt Mason: Don't Tase' Me, Guys
Matt Mason came to tell us stories of illegal activities he's been engaged in. He first took a look at the directions in which information usually flows. It used to flow one way, downward to the eyeballs. But now, it flows both ways between consumer and producer. Matt is a former pirate radio DJ, and he's written a book called the The Pirate's Dilemma. He'd look for high places (showed a slide of tall buildings) where he could broadcast from to reach as many people as possible. In the UK, pirate radio has a good-sized chunk of the "market". However, pirate radio is outside the market in an important way: while mainstream radio keeps playing the same songs over and over, pirate radio plays things that are outside the market.
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Posted by Brian Jepson | Permalink
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Dan Heath: Thinking Inside the Box
Dan Heath started out his story by asking us to write down as many things we can think of that are white. Then he asked us to write down the things in our refrigerator that are white. His claim is that the second is easier, because you can get more done inside the box; that the box is more liberating than we usually give credit for. He gave the example of high-concept pitches: Quebec City (Like France, without the attitude); Atoms (Like the solar system, but really small). Even though this level of specificity seems constraining, Heath says that it's not. Consider Alien (Jaws on a Spaceship). Before Alien, most movie spaceships were immaculately clean, with everyone running around in lycra. But that wouldn't have worked for Jaws on a Spaceship: even though the pitch frames the concept, the framing is what gives rise to the innovation.
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Posted by Brian Jepson | Permalink
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Steven Johnson: The Ghost Map
Steven Johnson began telling his story with a recollection of his four years at Brown. Although he never set foot in Trinity (this was his first time!), he mentioned that he spent a lot of time at Haven Brothers. He told the story of his first experience with the immediacy of online publishing back in 1996. He was racing against the clock to get a new design for his web zine, FEED, posted before the inevitable rush of visitors (driven by a review of web zines written by Walt Mossberg). As his 28.8k modem slowly updated his site, he watched as a couple dozen, then a couple hundred new subscriptions to FEED's email alert came in. By morning, he'd have a lot more subscribers.
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Posted by Brian Jepson | Permalink
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Chris Benedict: Getting More for the Planet within Budget
Chris Benedict is an architect who has been able to deliver extremely energy-efficient projects without adding extra costs to them. To do this, she crunches the numbers she uses to model the building. She showed a slide of a giant spreadsheet and remarked that while we may see columns and rows of numbers, this model lets her see the "life" of the building. What's amazing is that she can build energy-efficient (a recent project uses 85% less energy than standard designs) that cost the same to build as a standard design. You can find photos and more information on Chris' work here.
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Posted by Brian Jepson | Permalink
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Jason Fried: Say No More
This is my first BIF event, and so far I've been impressed. Even the storytellers that were speaking outside of my area of direct interest were, well, interesting. One storyteller who was speaking within my area of expertise was Jason Fried, founder and CEO of web application company 37Signals. Fried sat down with Wall Street Journal technology writer Walt Mossberg for an informal chat about Fried's business and design philosophies at the end of today's first session.
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Posted by Josh Catone | Permalink
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Lessons in Enterprise Web 2.0 Adoption From The BBC
by Erica Driver, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research
I am at the first day of the Business Innovation Factory conference ("BIF-3") in Providence, Rhode Island. Sitting around me are 350 people who came together to share stories about collaborative innovation in business. One of storytellers this morning was Euan Semple, who up until about 18 months ago was the head of knowledge management for the British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Now he's an independent consultant. Today, the BBC has 23,000 bulletin board users, about 4,000 wiki users, and 400 to 500 people who are blogging. The company is getting enormous value out of this, but it didn't happen overnight. The BBC has been experimenting with Social Computing for a long time; they built internal networks using forum software before blog tools came to be. Lessons learned at the BBC:
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Posted by Erica Driver | Permalink
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Dean Esserman: Connecting Police with the Community
Dean Esserman, the Chief of Police for the City of Providence told his story at BIF-3 about community policing. He talked about how 911 was supposed to connect people directly with police and emergency services and massively reduce crime. But instead of connecting police and community, 911 made law enforcement anonymous and even further away; Chief Esserman likened that situation to finding yourself in the emergency room and meeting your family doctor for the first time.
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Posted by Brian Jepson | Permalink
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Matt Cottam: An Actor Prepares
Matt Cottam is an innovator who I've been crossing paths with on and off recently, but who I'm only meeting for the first time today at BIF-3. He and I first got to know each other when I learned he's a big fan of a gadget that's near and dear to my heart. Matt is an Adjunct Professor of Industrial Design at RISD, but I think of him as a Physical Computing pioneer, someone who is making devices smarter, more fun to interact with, and easier for people to build on their own...
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Posted by Brian Jepson | Permalink
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BIF-3 Takes Flight With a Few Natural Themes
For BIF-3, we actively recruited storytellers from all walks of life. And while diversity is the name of the game, there are a few natural themes I've noticed during the course of profiling our innovators. Two are timeless, the others are relatively new:
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Posted October 09, 2007 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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Innovation is less not more
The biggest challenge facing organisations is not so much coercing people into being more innovative as getting themselves out of the way when people try to innovate.
Innovation almost always comes out of frustration with the status quo and is almost inevitably disruptive. If you don't let people find fault with how you do things currently or begin to disrupt your perfect systems then you are unlikely to experience innovation.
Ironically IT, who have the greatest potential to innovate at a very exciting time in their industry, are often the group worst at getting out of the way of both the innovators in the businesses they serve and amongst their own ranks.
Dennis Howlett writes today of a frustrated Barclaycard employee whose situation is a perfect example of the problem:
I was struck by the profound sense of frustration experienced by this person. Geeks invent stuff. They solve problems. They love puzzles. Stifling the ability to engage in those activities is anathema. It’s like sucking out the oxygen they need with which to thrive. Any time organizations do that to anyone, productivity plummets.
Posted October 06, 2007 by Euan Semple | Permalink
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When Dan Pink first introduced the concept of a free agent nation back in 1997, I wonder if he imagined a world where testosterone-driven, competitive collaboration would be the engine for a new free agent business model. 
