innovation

Take your chance, the Global Business Service (GBS) organization of Procter & Gamble, the world leader in consumer-goods products, is searching for innovative IT startups to collaborate with them on new IT solutions and services.

P&G would like to meet startups during the Lift12 Conference which will take place in Geneva from 22 to 24 February 2012.

If you are interested please respond according the Need Briefs below, and your startup might be selected for a pitch with the P&G managers, and maybe have a chance to count one of the world's largest and innovative companies among your first clients!

This is the second edition of the P&G Lift start-up call, after the success of the 2011 edition, when some of your fellow startups have had a chance to run a Proof of concept with P&G.

This call for responses is focused to one of the 4 following areas:

• Alternate Share Reporting
• Next Generation visualization
• Ubiquitous work space solutions
• Win at the Zero Moment of Truth

For further information on each of these subjects, please click on each link above to see the detailed briefs and expected responses.

Please send us your responses by the 9th of February. The selected startups for attendance will be confirmed by the 15th of Feb.

We are awaiting your submissions!

What happens when barriers to use of technology are lowered? What can we learn from the Ushahidi open source community and the technology landscape in Africa about the opportunity and the limits of open innovation? In her speech, Juliana Rotich answers these questions, based on her experience as director of a African non-profit tech company which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation.

Open Prosthetics is a movement and a community that looks to find economically feasible ways of producing medical devices for underserved medical populations and to give patients a way to participate to (even large and sophisticated) projects that develop technologies in their name. By facilitating the exchange of knowledge, Open prosthetics has allowed projects to develop that make prosthesis more available, while others focus more on new possibilities that would never find a market before that (such as specialized, customized, or even fancy replacement limbs), or even new ways of producing high-end research (lego hands for prototyping...).

The current disruption in healthcare corresponds to the fact that patients can access tools to gather information, aggregate data, act, and see results reflected in real-time. In his speech, Paul Wicks presents the consequences which can be listed as follows:
- Medicine: Patients are more engaged with managing their own illness, receive better outcomes / resistance from medical community in some quarters
- Research: Patients can find out about clinical trials going on anywhere in the world and participate online or even carry out their own research programs - increasingly being viewed as credible in the peer-reviewed world
- Business: Payers want to pay for improved outcomes, not transactions. The pill must be shown to be more effective than existing alternatives in the real world, not just a placebo in a controlled trial.
- Safety: Patients can submit their own safety events in real-time and enter in to a dialogue with manufacturers about how to improve their products.

This talk explores some of the issues that emerge around networked information-collecting objects in our public spaces, and to frame a taxonomy of such objects from the unobjectionable (due to local effect and a clear public good associated with them) to those that ought to be causing us significant concern (no public benefit, global impact, pernicious second-order effects).

Adam is a long-time friend of Lift, he shared his work with us on several occasions in Geneva, Marseille and Korea. Watch his previous Lift talks:
"Everyware: Further down the Rabbit Hole" Lift07
"The read/write City" Lift Asia 07
"The Long Here, the Big Now" Lift Asia 08

A leading researcher on globalization, global cities and new technologies Saskia Sassen discusses the current hype around smart cities. She reminds us that “It is the need to design a system that puts all that technology truly at the service of the inhabitants—and not the other way around.”

Want to get more information? Check these related articles:

A propos de S. Sassen et de « l’urbanisme open-source » sur Technogéographie (in French)

An interview with Saskia Sassen about "Smart cities" by Nicolas Nova

Steve Portigal is the founder of Portigal Consulting, a a bite-sized San Francisco Bay Area firm that helps clients to discover and act on new insights about themselves and their customers.

How do people seeking to innovate address what customers want or need? Steve will discuss methods for exploring both solutions and needs (same notion on opposite sides of a lens). He will also explore how an understanding of culture (yours and your customer’s organization) can drive innovation.

Steve Portigal

Principal (USA)
Portigal Consulting
» View Lift11 speakers

Nicolas Nova: The approach you adopt is based on a careful engagement with the field and people: observations, interviews, etc. But beyond the data collection techniques, how can one turn the material you collect into something that is relevant, meaningful and perhaps useful for innovation?

Steve Portigal: The naïve approach to field research is to treat it as a literal exercise, akin to scooping up requirements. If field research is used to gather individual observations that literally impact the design of a product or service, then there’s not much you can do except sort and prioritize.

But if you use field research as an opportunity to understand people’s lives (their activities, motivations, successes, expectations, mental models, etc.) then you can take a much richer pass through the data. At the highest level, our process is to work individually with individual data “nodes” (say, a transcript of an interview) and pull out the bits that seem interesting, then work collectively to tell stories about those interesting nuggets and aggregate them into strong points of view about people.

Those points of view become areas of opportunity that we feed into brainstorming and ideation.

Being also involved in similar activities, I am always fascinated by people's creativity and their tendency to find solutions for their own needs. Is this something you rely on when studying people and providing insights to your projects/clients? To what extent these solution can be preferable to other problems?

I think the phrase “their own needs” is a crucial part of your question. Often we are asked to study people where we’ve been given a basic hypothesis of what people’s problems are, or even what the solution is going to be. Often what we end bringing back is some perspective about where our client’s products and services fit – or don’t – into people’s lives.

Our clients are trying to innovate in spaces where people aren’t paying much attention, and while that’s challenging, it does help focus the problem a great deal! I’m continually fascinated by two different archetypes with people’s own solutions: the first is a massive tolerance for a non-optimized situations. People are comfortable with satisficing – choosing a “good enough” solution where the effort to create a better solution is more than the inconvenience of the current approach. Look at anyone’s drawer of obsolete remote controls and chargers; it’s easy to decry this as a failure of technology, design, business, etc. but people are pretty tolerant of those sorts of “failures” – this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to solve it, but we should be wary of what we’re going to ask of people in order to deploy this solution.

The second archetype is a massive investment for a customized solution. Even when we don’t sample for “lead users” in a study, we’ll always find ourselves absolutely amazed. I tend to think of these solutions less in terms of their creativity and more in terms of the dedication that they require. The insight is often “Look how important this is to people given the effort they are willing to put in to make this happen.” The details of the solution may not be as relevant as much as the passion they reveal.

Discovering "new needs" is very difficult, especially because needs fluctuate over time. For instance, certain behavior can shift from acceptable to less acceptable (say... driving a SUV while Peak oil is coming) and new needs emerge (having a car that requires less gas). How can field observation help the research for these near future needs?

Someday I’d love to get a social scientists to riff on this because no doubt somewhere in the literature is something called (I’m making this up) Rankoff’s Fundamental Life Profile that identifies the static needs across times (and cultures?).

I mean something that goes beyond Maslow and talks about the specific activities that make up our lives. I know there’s the Activities of Daily Living and other ways to come at it. But really what I’m getting at is that I’m often bouncing back and forth between two very different views – that things are fundamentally the same and don’t change and that things can change really rapidly.

From a business, product, and service point of view, the latter is definitely true. But from a customer and culture point of view, is it? Recently while visiting Rome, I was wandering through the narrow cobblestone streets of Trastevere. I was carrying my iPhone, but avoiding doing anything that would lead to the infamous international data roaming charges. I found a restaurant in a small alleyway, and after giving our names, decided to see if there was WiFi nearby. Amazingly, there was. So I “checked in” on FourSquare, and sent a tweet out to our followers with the name of the restaurant I was at. About 20 minutes later, a friend who was also visiting Rome came around the corner to find us, and ended up joining us for dinner. This was a moment of amazement.

Intellectually, I understood how these things were possible, but emotionally there was a strong feeling of excitement as something new – or at least previously out of reach – was enabled. And when that happens, I do realize that fundamentals of how I socialize are dramatically changed. But I digress!

To finally respond to your question, things don’t change overnight, so you can look at vectors. You can recruit participants who are a little more leading edge in their behavior (say, users of FourSquare). You can talk to people about where they’ve been and where they are at now and how they got there. And you can talk to people about where they are going (even if they aren’t good predictors of the future, answers to those questions are great at revealing today’s mental models and expectations). You can go back to people over and over again and look for the changes. Or you can introduce those changes by asking people to change their behavior (say, by becoming an active FourSquare user) and then reflecting on the experience.

An innovation created by two Norwegian physicists allows to zoom on conversations inside a crowd. Great for TV coverage of sport game, but worryingly precise if you start seeing this deployed in a surveillance context...

Squarehead’s new system is like bullet-time for sound. 325 microphones sit in a carbon-fiber disk above the stadium, and a wide-angle camera looks down on the scene from the center of this disk. All the operator has to do is pinpoint a spot on the court or field using the screen, and the Audioscope works out how far that spot is from each of the mics, corrects for delay and then synchronizes the audio from all 315 of them. The result is a microphone that can pick out the pop of a bubblegum bubble in the middle of a basketball game, as you can see in this video.

Link

We are now publishing the Lift France 10 videos: Check out Ivo Gormley inspiring speech about the relationship between social innovation and digital technologies.

Ivo Gormley "Us Now" (Lift France10 EN)
Hochgeladen von liftconference.

The BBC just featured a short clip on one of Ivo's project, the good gym.

Ivo Gormley is a filmmaker and anthropologist working as head of media at Think Public, an award-winning agency focused on using design to improve service experiences in the public sector. In 2009 Ivo released Us Now, a much acclaimed film that demonstrates how mass collaboration online is changing the way we organise our lives and relate to other people.

Ivo's latest movie Playmakers explores the emerging area of pervasive games, the implications of reclaiming play into the public domain and the possibilities offered by new technologies.