Outside Innovation

Private Searching on Your Phone: DuckDuckGo’s Mobile Apps

This week, DuckDuckGo launched its iPhone app, DuckDuckGo Search and Stories. Now you can enjoy the same anonymous, non-trackable, non-invasive, clutter-free search experience on your iPhone, Android, or Windows phone that many of us now use as our default Web search engine.

DuckDuckGo’s Private Search: Now Available for Mobile Phones

I’m not as impressed with the “stories” part of DuckDuckGo’s offering. (The home page shows you the most popular news stories.) But I love the search. It takes advantage of two capabilities I’ve come to value using DuckDuckGo: instant answers and !bang searches tightly integrated into my favorite sites.

Personalized Products—for People and Things I Care About

When does personalization increase the perceived value of a product or service? What’s the advantage to the customer of being able to personalize the products and services you offer? What is it worth to them? What is it worth to you to offer that service?

We’ve been tracking both personalization—personalizing the experience you have online, including the information you see and the offers you receive—and smart customization—the design of easy-to-customize and personalize products and services—for some time. A personalized product is really a customized product—it’s a product you can design or customize for yourself or for someone else.

Customized/personalized products are usually worth more to customers because they put a lot of themselves into the creation of the product. It’s a product that expresses a good deal about its creator. Sometimes a customized product is more valuable because it has the precise configuration that somebody feels they need (e.g., special shoe size, particular pockets in a purse or backpack, custom logo, etc.).

A Pragmatic Solution for Eldercare in the US—Designed by Elders for Elders

As many of you know, I now live year round on the coast of Maine. One of my local heroes is Chip Teel, who has been pioneering in eldercare for over two decades. He’s a local M.D., with a family practice of seven professionals. A large proportion of their clientele are elderly people. Chip, who has a specialty in geriatrics, served as director of the local nursing home. He has also been very involved as the Medical Director of a nearby retirement community.

Over the years, Chip’s elderly clients have been very clear with him about one thing: they don’t want to move out of their homes, no matter how frail they become. When their declining health and fragile mental states made it necessary for them to move out of their homes, they were often unhappy, and their conditions worsened. When Teel could figure out ways to keep them at home and provide the supplemental services they needed, they thrived. So he engaged with a group of his clients to try a couple of experiments.

How Should the Disclosures about NSA Snooping Change Things?

I can’t ignore Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing revelation: The US government is snooping much more than our US Constitution allows on the private communications of its citizens, residents, and even lawmakers. Not to mention the rampant electronic eavesdropping being carried out by our spies hacking Internet and phone systems in most other countries. This is not a good time to be an American in the world. It’s embarrassing to be living in a “democratic” country that has turned fascist since 9/11.

It’s not my practice to speak out on politics to my clients. But I can’t ignore the fact that my most loyal customers have been discussing these events quite volubly online since the news broke. Their consternation isn’t so much political as it is technical: it appears that the NSA’s snooping has actually compromised ALL of the certificate-authority based security provisions that our entire global economy depends upon!

There are two main consequences from these revelations that I foresee. But I also fear that PR spin, human nature (bury our heads in the sand), and apathy (I have other things to worry about; I don’t have time to worry about whether I’m being spied upon) will, once again, prevail.

Tackling a Wicked Problem: California’s Water Supply

How do you address an intractable and contentious issue that’s becoming more and more urgent? That’s the problem faced by California’s newly formed Delta Conservancy. The delta region and estuary formed by the Sacramento and San Joquin Rivers provide some of the most fertile agricultural land in the country, support hundreds of species of wildlife and provide drinking water for 60% of Californians. Yet the ecosystem is fragile and beset by both man-made and natural calamities. For decades, farmers and environmentalists and water companies have been at each other’s throats. Government regulation and intervention seems to exacerbate things. So, facing the rollout of a highly controversial development plan, the Delta Conservancy took an unusual approach. They solicited key stakeholders, including farmers, fishermen, residents, water company owners, directors of environmental organizations, and members of local, state, and federal agencies to build a shared understanding of the issues. These people engaged in a six-month series of site visits and civil dialogues in order to build a common mental model. Now they’re about to engage in Phase 2: Deepen that shared understanding to help plan the future of the Sacramento-San Joquin Delta.

Tackling a Wicked Problem: Water Issues!
How the Delta Dialogues Project Is Using Dialogue Mapping to Build Shared Understanding
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO & Sr. Consultant, Patricia Seybold Group, May 30, 2013

Jeff Conklin convinced the Delta Conservancy team that forging consensus around the future of the main California water supply was a “Wicked Problem,” and that it would be unethical for them to use strategic planning tools designed for tame problems on this much thornier, more complex, more socially fraught wicked problem. This triggered a unique 6-month initiative dubbed The Delta Dialogues, in which 19 passionate and interested people, representing most of the different constituencies impacted by water planning, agreed to engage in a prolonged dialogue to build a shared understanding of the issues surrounding the future of the Sacramento River and San Joquin River Delta area.

(Download the PDF of the entire article here.)