Outside Innovation

Nokia’s Design by Community Phone

Scott Jordan sent me a link to Nokia’s “Design a Concept Phone by Community” site. I’ve been following the traffic and the dialog for a couple of weeks. What Nokia is doing is offering a series of interactive design polls about different aspects of a new concept mobile phone. Here’s this week’s:

Each week you get to “vote” by moving sliders on a different aspect of the phone design:

• Display and User Interface

• Size and shape

• Materials

• Operating System

• Connectivity

• Camera

• Enhancements

Supporting Online Collaboration in Bandwidth-Challenged Areas

Have you noticed the ways that your work patterns have changed over the past five years? Instant messaging, tweeting, SMS, email, and chat, combined with smartphones has enabled us to be "always on." It's now easy to strike up a collaborative working relationship across organizational and geographic boundaries—by messaging, emailing, conferencing, and sending pictures and files back and forth.

Everyone is now reachable much of the time by mobile phone. The modalities of collaboration are becoming richer, and, at the same time, more ad hoc. You can get a quick answer via Twitter, SMS or instant messaging.

Having recently returned from rural Africa, I was amazed by my ability to stay in touch through my Blackberry email in the remotest locations.

For example, last week, I was sitting outdoors in a freshly-cleared area under some shade trees in a remote village we had reached using 4-wheel drive on abominably muddy and potholed dirt roads. I was listening to local Ugandan women describe what they had learned about land rights.

These 30 local women from three different villages had been researching Uganda's four different types of land ownership to discover that none of their families owned titles to the land they lived on and cultivated. Having uncovered what steps would be required to convert their property from absentee-landlord-owned land to freehold land and then to acquire land titles, they revealed that owning their own land had become so important to them, they had started earning and saving money. They had formed three separate Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations (SACCOs), and one group of women had already saved 1.5 million Ugandan Shillings ($750 U.S.) in just a few months. They planned to build up their collective savings and then lend money out to one another to buy their land titles.

These women gave credit for the establishment of their Savings Co-Ops both to the young women Rural Transformation Agents from the nearby African Rural University (ARU) who had jumpstarted this participatory action research project on land rights. They also specifically mentioned Dave Willett, a retired credit union executive who has been volunteering in this district to help the ARU students and the community members learn how to set up their own Savings and Credit Cooperative Organizations (SACCOs). I knew that Dave was in California and probably wasn't aware that these SACCOs had gotten off the ground since his visit in November 2009, so I quickly emailed him the news from my Blackberry. He promptly replied, asked some questions, and promised to send along some additional background materials for a community banking workshop the ARU interns would be attending this week. Sure enough, within a day, we received the new training materials from Dave.

This is a great example of the kind of ad hoc collaboration that's taking place all around the world, around issues of importance. What impressed me was how easy and seamless it was for us to coordinate, despite the fact that the only Internet access I had was via mobile phone and wireless modem.

This is one of the proud women who know owns the title to her property!

Children Are Driving Innovation in Rural Uganda

I am spending two weeks in Uganda at the Uganda Rural Development and Training (URDT.net) programme. My goal on this, my fifth trip, to this incredible hotbed of grass roots, bottoms up innovation, is to midwife a book. The working title for the book is, "It Takes a Child to Raise a Village," a play on the famous book by Hillary Clinton, "It Takes a Village to Raise a Child."

This week, I am working with the 236 girls from the Girls School to help them write their own book—a rebuttal to Hillary's. These girls—who come from families who live on $1 a day in rural villages with no electricity, plumbing, or running water—know that THEY can make a difference in the lives of their families. They have spent the last 10 years becoming change agents for their families' farms and businesses. These 13 to 20-year old young women have the poise, the know-how, the humility, and the quiet determination to help their families create a shared vision of how they want to improve their livelihoods.

Each one of them has a wonderful story to tell about how they mobilized their family members to improve health, nutrition, sanitation, income generation, and family cooperation and harmony in their households. They also acknowledge that they (even at age 14 or 15) have become role models in their communities. People come to seek their advice. They are truly changing the cultural norms in their villages and their families. And they and their families are highly respected because of the role the girls have played in improving their families' incomes while they are attending school.

In so many poor regions of the world, children have to drop out of school and work to support the family. At URDT's Girls’ School, thanks to this unique educational experience, the girls are increasing their families' income while they're away at school by teaching their parents what they've learned about organic farming, sustainable agriculture, nutrition, sanitation, health, and community development. They've also taught their families how to create a shared vision for what they want to achieve and an action plan for getting it done. This is truly remarkable for a group of wonderfully ordinary teenagers in a rural, backward society and a "women don't count" culture.

I feel privileged to be working with these young women! I look forward to sharing the draft of the book with you soon!

Google Android vs. Apple iPhone: Whose App Ecosystem Will Win?

 

The recent buzz about the Verizon/Motorola/Google (An)Droid vs. Apple/AT&T/et al iPhone has revolved around two customer-critical issues and one supplier-critical one (can you guess which is which?):

• Which device+network combo meets customers' usability requirements?
• Which brand evokes the most loyalty?
• Which ecosystem will attract the most apps?

As pundits review and early adopters swarm, I've been noticing a few patterns in the dialog. It's not about the device. Sure, everyone comments about display resolution, keyboard quality (or lack thereof), industrial design, and user interface. But there are also provocative wars of words (and maps) about network availability (in the U.S.—other countries have more pervasive mobile networks than ours). These are the initial barriers to adoption. Do I like it? Can I use it?

Local Motors: Reinventing the Car Industry from the Outside In

One of the most inspiring "stories" at the Business Innovation Factory's fifth annual summit, BIF-5, in Providence, Rhode Island was told by Jay Rogers, the founder of an innovative new American car company, Local Motors (www.local-motors.com). Jay is an ex-marine whose grandfather instilled in him a passion for cars. His grandfather owned, among other companies, Indian Motorcycles. Jay grew up in a car-mad family. His experience fighting in Iraq convinced him that the U.S. needed to shed its dependence on foreign oil. So he has invented a new kind of car company.

The cars are made out of easily assembled, lightweight composite materials to reduce fuel consumption. The car chassis is licensed from an existing mass-producer of cars (the first one uses a BMW chassis). The "proprietary open source" car designs are contributed by world-class industrial and automotive designers participating in open competitions on the Local-Motors Web site. The designs are submitted, evolved, voted on, and critiqued by car fans, designers, and prospective customers (customers' votes count more). The car designs are specific to each region of the country. The community also participates in the design-to-build phase through an open prototyping process for each new model. Each phase is photographed, commented upon and posted, with trade-offs discussed.

Once each local car model is in production in its micro-factory, each customer helps assemble his own car at this local sales/manufacturing facility/service location. (Think Build-a-Bear for cars!). As Jay Rogers explained: your car is the second most expensive investment most people make in their lives; why shouldn't you have an amazing experience and an amazing car?

How to Revolutionize Your Industry

If your business model is under siege, what should you do? That’s the question that Vikram Savkar asked himself a couple of years ago. At the time, he worked for a publisher of high-priced textbooks. He decided that among the reasons the textbook publishing market is broken are:

• Customers don’t choose what to buy -- the students who buy the books don’t get to choose which books to buy (their professors assign them).
  
• There’s no feedback mechanism for students to react to the material in the textbooks, nor to interact with the people who write them.
  
• There are no real alternatives to traditional textbooks, so publishers can’t tell what their customers would prefer.

So, when he got the opportunity to reinvent what he perceived to be a broken market, Vikram seized the opportunity. This week, we present the a case study on Scitable—the project that Vikram and his team at Nature Publishing Group’s new Nature Education division have launched. You’ll see that they are attempting to create an alternative to science textbooks and to come up with an alternative business model.

As I explored Scitable and learned how students and professors are using it, I noticed that a lot of the third-world students who are flocking to Scitable would probably not have bought $150 textbooks on genetics. So Scitable isn’t replacing something they would have bought. It’s replacing something they wouldn’t have bought. It’s providing a new value proposition to a new market. 

Google Wave: It’s "My" Design, but Will I Use It?

I'm pretty sure that I’m responsible for the design of Google's new Wave. I can't take full credit. There are millions of Gmail/Google Chat users like me who no doubt provided the pattern on which Google's new weird communications offering is based.

I haven't yet had the pleasure of trying out Wave. But thanks to early tester, Rafe Needleman's Hands-on with Wave: Weird and quite wonderful, I recognized, right away that I was probably at least partly responsible for the breakthrough design pattern on which Wave is based.

"Getting started in Wave: It looks a lot like e-mail..."

(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)

People Learn from People

Another pattern I noticed among our Visionaries was the various ways they connect people to people in the online world. As one participant said, “People don’t learn from information; they learn from people.”

On Visionaries’ Web sites, you notice that students can interact with one another, find experts, interact with their coaches and teachers. Customers can connect with other customers with similar issues as well as with their sales team. Consumers can glean tips and tricks from one another. Customers can see a product that someone else has customized and reuse those patterns to create their own customized product. Seekers can look at a graphical network of experts in a particular field and find the people whose expertise has been frequently published or patented. They can see who else is connected to those experts.

Most visionaries seem to feel that part of their job is to connect their customers with one another so they can learn from one another and share experiences. They also believe in connecting customers with internal experts and resources. They recognize that customers’ needs bridge organizational silos and pull employees and subject matter experts together across those silos. They realize that referrals, social networking, and viral marketing are the engines that drive customer acquisition.

Business Exchange: Good Example of Crowd Sourcing and Social Networking

Ron Casalotti is the Director of User Participation for Business Week’s Business Exchange. Ron’s understanding about how to encourage user-generated content comes naturally. He became addicted to AOL’s online communities in the 1990s. By day, he worked in the leasing business. At night, he would join live chat groups on topics he cared about. Soon, he found himself volunteering as a moderator for a number of AOL communities, including the really popular gaming chat groups.

After serving as a volunteer moderator in exchange for free AOL time, AOL made him an offer in 1997 to come on board full-time to run a number of their most popular communities. After over 10 years hosting and managing communities at AOL (weathering the Time Warner merger), Ron posted his resume on LinkedIn and was immediately tapped by Business Week to come and run customer-generated content at the new Business Exchange site they were planning. “Once I decided to leave AOL, I thought I’d be job hunting for a while, but I walked across the street, and settled into my new job in less than a week.”

LEVERAGE!! You can use your LinkedIn Profile, saving time so you don’t have to create yet another profile! And, when you post on Business Exchange you can have those posts syndicated out to your Twitter feeds.

Leveraging Business Users’ Existing Investments in Social Media

Use Your LinkedIn Profile. Before talking with Ron, I took a look at the site. What immediately tickled me about the Business Exchange site is the way that users’ profiles are “automagically” generated from the profiles we already have on LinkedIn. What a relief, I thought! I don’t have to create yet another profile to participate in this dialog! (You may recall my earlier post “Where’s Your Profile Online?”.) When you register for Business Exchange, you can use your LinkedIn Profile, saving time so you don’t have to create yet another profile!

Tweet Your Responses. Equally useful (for those of us who are overwhelmed by all the demands on our time and our new found need to strut our stuff in public), when you post on Business Exchange, you can have those posts syndicated out to your Twitter feeds. This is a really clever way to convince time-pressed business people that it’s worth their time to read and comment on Business Exchange. And it’s a great way to spawn word of mouth PR.

Contribute Your Content or Content You Value

Here’s the crowd sourcing part: Registered users can contribute articles on a variety or topics, and/or suggest new topics. Your contributed articles wind up right next to the Business Week articles that have been selected and added to the Business Exchange collection. The other thing that’s quite amazing about Business Exchange is how easy it is to add articles to it. These may be articles you’ve written, or articles you’ve found in other publications that you think Business Exchange readers would enjoy. You simply hit the submit button, enter the URL, and it will grab the title and abstract from the originating site, create a link, and all you need to do is comment (if you want to) and hit enter. You might think that this would lead to the site being cluttered with self-promoting junk. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Since you can only submit URLs, rather than blog directly on the site, all of the linked news items and blog posts seem to be of “publishable” quality. If it’s your own blog post, you publish first on your blog, and then submit it to Business Exchange. (It will post right away; you don’t have to wait for approval). If it’s a link to an interesting article or blog post from someone else, Business Exchange creates the links, includes the logo of the originating site and respects their copyright by simply linking to it on the original site.

What’s Missing: Threaded Discussions

Something I find odd about the current Beta version of Business Exchange is that it isn’t very easy to see others’ reactions to articles. Under each article’s abstract you can look at the “Actions” taken on that article, and see which users have saved or reacted to it and what their reactions were. But it’s hard to find. And, there’s no threaded discussion/blog commenting capability that lets you build on others’ reactions (yet). There’s no real discourse happening on the site. Just a lot of great content and interesting people.

When Customers Take You to Unexpected Places

This week I attended a series of panel discussions at Harvard University at the Education in Africa conference and the Kennedy School Bridge Builders program. There were two great stories that really struck a chord with me.

Girl Entrepreneurs

Viola Vaughn is the executive director of 10,000 Girls, a program she founded in Kaolock, Senegal in West Africa. Here’s the story she told about how that program started. Viola is a black American who grew up in Arkansas. She has a doctorate in education from Columbia and spent her career in education in the US and Africa. In 2001, Viola and her husband, Jazz musician Sam Sanders, emigrated to Senegal with their extended family. She said, “I was just planning to sit back and watch my banana trees grow.” But a little neighbor girl kept showing up at her house and asking Viola to teach her. Viola told her she was retired and didn’t do that anymore. Besides, she said, “I don’t teach, I educate.”

But the girl was persistent. She had heard that Viola’s granddaughter was being home-schooled. She wanted home schooling too. Finally, Viola went to visit the girl’s mom to find out why she wasn’t in school. The mother explained that her daughter was “too dumb to go to school.” Viola’s response was “well, she was smart enough to find me!” She relented and invited the girl to come over for lessons. When she arrived, she brought a bunch of other little girls—all of whom had dropped out of the local schools. (In Senegal, Viola explained, if you fail twice, you’re excluded from the public education system.)

Soon, the home-schooling program was outgrowing Viola’s home and she needed to hire more staff. She told the girls they would need to raise money if they wanted to continue their education. They responded by saying, “in America, girls sell cookies to earn money. Do you know how to bake cookies?” The next thing she knew, the girls had set up a bakery operation and were producing and selling enough cookies to hire a few teachers. Later in the story, she said the bakery led to a tea plantation. The girls found got someone to donate the land, and began planting and growing tea. When they applied for Fair Trade certification, they were originally denied because the Tea Plantation used “child labor” – the girls were working on the plantation after school. Viola explained to the officials that the girls weren’t the labor; they were the owners of the plantation. The money from the plantation went into their bank accounts. In fact, they hired young men to do much of the work. So they got their fair trade certificate.

Football; Not Roads

Jacqueline Akello, the program director at Uganda Rural Development and Training Programme (URDT), talked about the surprises that occur when you follow customers’ lead. Her URDT team went to a village that had invited them to help the community do some development work. As they arrived on site and got a tour of the village, it became obvious to the URDT staff that the thing the villagers really needed the most was an improved road that would let them get produce to market and to gain access to local healthcare. They had mobilized other villagers who wanted to improve their roads, so they were expecting that that would be the project the people in the village wanted. But when everyone started talking about their visions, the idea that popped to the top of everyone’s list was to be able to play football (what Americans call soccer). Their community hadn’t been able to field a team. They didn’t have a place to play. They weren’t participating in the district league. So, the villagers decided they would do what it took to get a football team off the ground. Soon, they had not only cleared a field, organized a team, and gotten uniforms, but they began to win some games.

Jackie reported that, within a season, many of the people in the village were socializing in ways that they hadn’t been before. The football club had created a missing social network. Soon, they began to think about improving the road so that visiting teams would have an easier time getting to their field to play. Sure enough, within a year, they mobilized community members to improve the road leading to the village and to the football field.

But they didn’t stop there, Jacqui reported, within two years, the same group of villagers had worked together to build a school which now houses 1200 students! The moral of the story? Let customers lead. They’ll take you on a surprising and interesting journey!