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Looking for help....

I’m organizing a couple of innovation related workshops at ITU World Telecom on 27 October in Geneva, Switzerland at the Palexpo venue next to the airport – you can find out more about World Telecom at world2011.itu.int and the agenda is here.

These workshops are not presentation-based – they’re about interactive participation by delegates. We want to together tackle specific challenges in hands-on action-based workshops.

Each session lasts 90 minutes. A maximum of 30 delegates to Telecom World 2011 will come together to share experiences, lessons learned, emerging best practices and to network with peers from around the globe. Together you’ll co-create potential solutions to the outlined challenge and formulate co-created recommendations that will feed into the Telecom World 2011 Manifesto for Change.

Open Innovation Workshop 1: The Challenge: Innovation for Development – and how ICTs can help?

09:00-10:30

We can sum up the goal of innovation for development as discovering new ways of creating opportunity for those in developing countries to meet their aspirations for a better life. How can ICTs be best used to foster innovation for development? Innovation rarely comes in big leaps – it takes the form of what Steven Berlin Johnson calls ‘slow hunches’ – small tweaks and refinements to what already exists. That’s why virtually every new idea or advancement often has several originators – the time and conditions for emergence were just ripe. What are some of the big ideas in the innovation field currently being discussed that are perhaps “ripe for emergence” and how can we use ICTs to apply them to development challenges?

You may or may not know that I co-direct a year-long course on social media and online communities. There are still a few places left, but be quick -- registration closes on Friday and the course starts on September 21st. I think this might be of interest to some of you in the Lift community.

The course is in Lausanne and in French. It's 20 days between September and May (5 4-day modules) and includes doing a personal project on a real-life case for the exam.

Participants leave the course with a solid grounding in all things social media, equipped to take informed strategic decisions, plan social-media related projects, and also be active "in the field". We cover social media marketing, community management, online communication strategy, and also practical use of social media tools like blogs, google docs, facebook, twitter... and probably Google+ this year ;-)

The course is aimed at a diverse audience: communication managers in big or small companies, marketing agencies, web people who want to move to social media, consultants, journalists, non-profits, schools... One of the great assets of the course is the network the students leave with, which ensures that they are connected enough within the field (and with a whole class of peers) to stay on top of things once the course is over.

Here's some online information about the course

I have recently been selected amongst 20 other international Artists to be part of a Science/Art residency in the Arctic Circle, on a Biological research station. I am already thinking about John Carpenter's THE THING and 30 days of night... brrrr-.

But in the meantime i'm looking for technical gears and clothes sponsors, because it is going to be quite cold there. I have already received support from various companies and brands, but if you like Art, Science, Exploration and Sustainable Design, you are welcome to contact me at hello(at)benipi.com. People in the solar energy business, i would enjoy to try your products in the arctic Circle!

Have a look at the Tumblr blog dedicated to this project on benipi.tumblr.com.

I will of course publish some photos and stories about this great and weird experience sooooon!

Indicators are a kind of technology, a product, which governs behaviour and develops in response to user needs. But what are the social impacts of their development?

Could innovation indicators be used to help poorer countries catch up? Is the EU on the right track in terms of monitoring and encouraging innovation? For the answers to these questions and more, click on the link below for the latest podcast from United Nations University-MERIT.

UNU-MERIT website: http://www.merit.unu.edu/permalink.php?id=584
Profile of Professor Fred Gault: http://www.merit.unu.edu/about/profile.php?id=679

Leveraging the diversity and expertise of the participants, they were asked to sketch innovative services emerging from the accessibility to public data.

1. Connecting the different actors of the region (local authorities, public services, entrepreneurs, associations, citizens) around a common theme of "open data" in order to share visions and values.
2. Illustrating the emerging opportunities based on the accessibility to 3D and mobility data.
3. Launching internal initiatives within the public administration or foster external ones to encourage the exploitation of data as a new source of urban services.

The methodology applied during the workshop favoured transversal thinking and design, illustrated by the 5 services developed by participants. These ideas are evidence of the opportunity to co-produce innovative urban services.

The scenarios presented stressed the necessity for the public administration to be at the center of the dynamic around the use and exploitation of urban data. Digital technologies can indeed play a role in involving citizens and other regional actors in the design of services, integrating their visions and wishes in the decision process. To move forward, it seems inevitable that data needs to be more accessible and that projects based on citizens with the support of the multiple actors of the region need to be promoted.

The report of this workshop "Des gisements de données à la base de services urbains à Genève" (in french) is available under a Creative Commons license on the Observatoire Technologique web site (PDF 1.7MB).

Michel and Juliette presented this workshop, which had 16 participants. It focused on the governance of open collaborative projects as often practiced in the IT industry. Our discussion was centered on practical and legal issues surrounding such projects.

We started with a short theoretical explanation of these issues followed by discussions with attendees. Two use cases namely; Wikipedia and a book by a professor and his doctorate student were presented. The book was also co-authored by several experts from 45 countries. However these co-authors did not have the right to claim this work. Even though this was unacceptable to lawyers as Michel Noted, it actually did work.

These issues arise as a result of the fact that most often people who work on these projects are often located in different countries. They use collaborative networks to share the result of their input. They usually communicate and work informally (without going into contractual agreements). At a later stage when
the project is successful or requires more funding from investors, the question of legal ownership national governing laws arise.

Without theses agreements at the early stage, it is difficult to know which country’s laws apply to the project; thus leaving room for vague interpretations.

During the workshop, we realized that even though they are laws and agreements meant to protect and govern collaborative projects, it’s really difficult to define binding agreements with absolute certainty.

Thank you guys for this wonderful insight.

Hosni Mubarak, a Swiss industrialist, or a media mogul whose paper just went bankrupt are all faced with the same confusion: trying to plan for the future while being utterly confused by the present.

In the pre-digital era, nations were defined by distance. Distance creates both borders: we’re “here” and you’re “there”; and a sense of belonging: I’m me because I am from here, you aren’t like me because you are from there. The digital age changes the game and our sense of belonging is no longer defined by the space we occupy. We no longer have the most in common with our neighbors or even our family, because we are able to seek out and maintain relationships with those who have similar interests, and this in all four corners of the world.

The pre-digital vision of the world also leads to certain ideas of hierarchy no longer applicable in the digital age. Our societies were defined by a vertical distance: Pyramids. Neat little societies with a leadership hierarchy and borders, both in politics and in business.

Digital natives are brought up in a world of networks: Sheets according to affinity and interest. People who didn’t grow with hierarchies have no concept of what a hierarchy is. Conversely, people used to a world of distance and hierarchy lack what Hammersley calls a cognitive toolkit necessary to understanding a world of networks and sheets. The reality of the post-digital era is that distance is dead!

We took Lifters on a journey into their future usage of professional social networks.

We started from their present usage by concentrating on current use cases. By sharing the results of our own study at Swisscom, we also allowed Lifters to compare their own behavior to that of our study's 45 lead users. Finally, we asked Lifters to project themselves 3 years into the future and imagine what they personally would, or would NOT do on social networking sites.

And so what did we learn?

1. No new actual use cases: we confirmed that our study's use cases remain accurate and relevant.
2. Future use cases: Lifters want improvements like more specialized SNS. They also voiced their frustration about the tension between private and professional on SNS - they are looking for ways to control one’s content publishing better. When publishing, they would like to decide and control the visibility of that information (for whom is it going to be visible).
3. There was consensus on the fact that the business model around soc. networking sites is still not there. There is no clarity about how to monetize them and according to what incentive mechanisms.
4. Communication culture in large companies is one of the main issue for the adoption of SNS. Changes of management, restructuring of departments can be a good opportunity to grasp to change a communication culture.
5. It is very difficult to get people to think about the future, even though we asked them to think about their personal usage in 3 years.

Want to join the debate?

Come talk to us at our Rezonance First on Thursday March 10th.

The goal of this workshop was to introduce a new contextual framework for thinking about how the financial services industry might be more optimally structured in the future. Based on this framework, the group explored innovative approaches to providing and delivering various financial services.

Thanks to workshop participants, the following points emerged:

Want to know more? Watch the Financial Reformation Trailer or check out the workshop presentation.