Nick Jankel, Collaborative Innovation Pioneer, Media Philosopher and CEO was one of the provocative speakers at The Big Rethink. His session was titled: HOW TO COLLABORATE TO SOLVE BUSINESS’ BIGGEST PROBLEMS
Nick talked about how technological and social trends are opening up new possibilities for companies to solve problems, and why in his experience, this will breed new species of competitors. You can find the slide show that he presented at The Big Rethink conference at this link: http://www.slideshare.net/NickJE/thriving-in-the-collaborative-age
Here is my summary (liberally borrowing language from Nick):
He thinks that power is shifting virtuously and that traditional hierarchies are being subverted – for example,
Peer Powered media – audience gets the news before CNN, e.g. Hudson plane
Peer Powered politics – Obama campaign
Peer powered science — new ways to create, produce and evaluate science from NASA’s collaborative data projects to the emerging collaborative ways of generating validity and citizen science
Peer powered creativity and consumption – how we share, borrow, cut and paste on the web
Nick is encouraging businesses to think about…
- Empowering edges—people inhabiting the “fringe” are becoming actors and agents, replacing middle-people
- Dissolving boundaries – just think about all the open source opportunities
- Co-creating the unthinkable – Google’s Lunar X Prize – sending a robot to the moon for a $30million prize http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/
- Re-designing business models – a big theme of the conference, e.g. Amazon’s mechanical turk — https://www.mturk.com/mturk/welcome — an on-demand, scaleable workforce
- Peta-byte intelligence – as our network grows exponentially – we can crunch billions of bits and bytes, like Wolfram Alpha the computational knowledge engine making systematic knowledge immediate computable by anyone http://www.wolframalpha.com/
- Augmented reality – using networked info
- Web to the world – the amazing powers of google earth
And he believes that culture creates change – and that we should be pursuing these cultural traits:
- Nurture collaborative natures – our instincts lead us to collaborating
- Radically Open – creativity comes with openness and collaboration
- Embrace ambiguity — have the courage to tolerate the unknown
- Listen receptively — be in receptive mode as much as analytical mode
- Heed intuition – too much info out there to process everthing – to some it is biz noise, to another, it is a new paradigm
- Cycle between node and network– scale/context change/macro-micro
- Celebrating mavericks at the edge – tolerate dissent
- Think digitally — think in multiplicities, in parallel, embracing contradictions and noise – in digital and no longer in analogue
- Trust peer leadership — hierarchical leadership fails in the face of networked realities. Encourage inner motivation moving away from the traditional rules and regs – bonuses and so on
- Share transparently — share ideas and info broadly
- Mission-motivated – mission, purpose, values
My favourite comment from Nick was about how you liberate collective magic and he gave the example of the jazz band and how they go off on their own but continually come back to the group – and we feel the magic.