Outside Innovation

National Instruments Takes the Next Step in Capturing Hearts and Minds of Budding Scientists and Engineers

Those of you who have read Outside Innovation will recall the story about the partnership between LEGO and National Instruments (brokered by Dr. Chris Rogers who promotes engineering in elementary/primary school curricula, catalyzed by a kids’ robotics competition in Austin, Texas, and cemented during a rain-soaked soccer game). As a result, Dr. Truchard, (“Dr. T”), National Instruments’ founder and chairman, authorized an innovative partnership to embed NI’s $2,000 LabVIEW software platform into the software that would be sold as part of a $200 Mindstorms NXT kit to kids and teachers.

Photo by: usfirst.org

On April 17th, National Instruments took a further leap in extending its market to the younger set. They announced a partnership with FIRST to provide the robotics controllers (hardware and firmware) to be used in the robotics kits for the FIRST Robotics Challenge (FRC)—the robotics league for High School kids. This is a multimillion dollar in-kind donation.

So now National Instruments is providing hardware as well as software, and it is extending its reach from 8-year-old engineers through to high school age kids.

The benefit to the kids is that this new platform will be less expensive, reducing the cost of the kits from approximately $15,000 down to closer to $2,000. (Each team has to raise the money to purchase the robotics’ kit they’ll need each year.)

Web 2.0: Time to Tackle BIG CHALLENGES

The theme of the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (April 22-24, 2008) is “let’s harness our global brainpower to change the world.” I find this even more exhilarating than last year’s focus on the Programmable Web. During the opening keynotes, Clay Shirky and Tim O’Reilly laid down the challenge: it’s time to step up to the plate, harness our collective intelligence, and use it to change the world. Scott Berkun put the punctuation mark on this discourse by reminding us, amid a backdrop of social networking gadgets and icons, to “think about what PROBLEMS you’re trying to solve.”

Clay Shirky’s keynote was the most profound. Clay said: It all started with gin. At the outset of the industrial revolution, when everyone came off the farm and started working together in factories and living in cities, humankind dealt with the enormity of this change by drinking gin. That’s right. The only way to cope with the enormity of the change in culture was to numb ourselves through alcohol for almost a generation. Then, humans figured out how to create new ways of coordinating and interacting that made us more productive and prosperous. The changes in media and global communication had the same effect on humankind. We couldn’t deal with the enormity of the societal changes, so we numbed ourselves down with television. Gilligan’s Island and other Sitcoms became the anesthesia that Baby Boomers grew up with. Now, we’re waking out of that stupor, and we’re ready and able to participate with the interactive media environment that we’ve created. We also have a huge collective cognitive surplus to devote to working on really important things. Where does this cognitive surplus come from? We are reclaiming a few of the hours we used to spend numbed out watching TV.

How to Design Your Products (and Business) to Be Customer-Adaptive

        Here’s an update on one of the companies featured in Outside Innovation. CohesiveFT is a software company. Their products are digital. But I believe that some of the patterns we’re seeing as customers create their own digital products hold up well for physical products or for hybrid physical/service products.
       
         In fact, I’m writing this post from St. Louis, the center of the Bio-Belt, where the products that are sold—seed for growing corn, soybeans, fruits, and vegetables—are designed and packaged in ways that are surprisingly similar to today’s hardware and software. As Monsanto's CIO, Mark Showers, explained to me, what’s going on in bio-agriculture is that there’s an increasing split between the hardware (the seed or germ plasm) and the software (the traits) of a plant. Advanced bio-technology has made it possible to optimize the traits at each layer of the seed stack (below ground/roots; ground-level/weeds and pests; above ground/leaves, flowers, fruit). In fact, today’s hybrids come in triple-stacks—soon there will be 4 to 6 stacks—of optimized traits. Farmers select the traits they need in their seeds based on the soil conditions, pest patterns, weather patterns, and their expectations of what the growing season will hold. (Then they hedge their bets through commodities trading where they make their real money!) While farmers don’t CONFIGURE the optimal seed traits at each layer today (that’s done in the lab and on the manufacturing farms), they do SELECT seeds with optimal traits at each layer for different sections of their farmland. It’s a very sophisticated and complex set of choices. Much of the value of the seed resides in the intellectual property involved in optimizing each layer of the stack for the precise conditions required and in the ability to mix and match these traits to meet the particular requirements of a particular strip of farmland in a given micro-climate. Companies license the intellectual property—the traits—to one another.

Microsoft Opens XBox Gaming, O/S and Office APIs

The "new" Microsoft  (Ballmer/Ray Ozzie combo) is opening up in a variety of ways! This week, Microsoft made two significant announcements that will foster outside innovation. The first one that really grabbed my attention was this one: Xbox 360 Becomes First Video Game Console Ever to Invite the World to Create Original Games and Share Online With Millions.

Awesome! I can't wait to see what happens as the geeks who have already flocked to XBox contribute their coding skills to creating games for the Xbox platform. It's not yet clear to me how truly "open" this platform is, e.g. whether game developers will be able to extend each others' games. The image at the right is from "Culture" -- one of the seven user-created games developed bt Hidden Path Entertainment using the XNA platform that Microsoft featured at the Game Developers Conference.

Here's the description included in the official press release:

"An Xbox 360 community game created using Microsoft's XNA Game Studio software and XNA Creators Club membership will be able to be submitted for distribution on Xbox LIVE. Each community-created game must then undergo a thorough peer-review process and be evaluated for accuracy in representation and appropriateness. Community game developers will be able to beta test the process this spring and will be able to distribute their games on Xbox LIVE by the end of this year."

I look forward to learning more about how "open" this environment is.. Of course, Microsoft hopes to attract millions of budding game developers. The official release goes on to say:

"Xbox 360 once again broke new ground by introducing a new, open distribution service for games created by the community and soon playable by its 10 million Xbox LIVE members. Community-created games on Xbox LIVE will quickly double the size of the Xbox 360 game library. By the end of 2008, Xbox 360 owners will have access to more than 1,000 games, making it the largest, most creatively diverse library across all next-generation platforms."

At the Games Developer Conference this week,

"Chris Satchell, general manager and chief XNA architect at Microsoft, announced that seven games created using XNA Game Studio 2.0 would be available immediately for Xbox 360 owners to download from Xbox LIVE Marketplace."

In reading through some of the heated discussions among participants at this week's Game Developers' Conference, the "consensus" seems to be that Microsoft is releasing a true "Game Developers' Platform" and creating a marketplace in which game developers can strut their stuff, whereas Spore (coming in October 2008) and LittleBigPlanet (LBP) are "content-creation systems inside of a game."

The second "opening up" of Microsoft this week is of course the announcement that Microsoft will finally publish open APIs both to its OS and to its office applications.

Uganda Rural University for Women Podcast

A discussion on an amazing story of grassroots innovation, learning celebration, and community empowerment: http://podcast.oregonstate.edu/

New Platform for Customer-Innovation?? IPhod/IPhone, New Safari Browser & User-Generated Widgets

When Steve Jobs first announced the Apple iPhone, it spurred a lot of conjecture.

Two of “Patty’s Pioneers” got into a spirited online debate about whether it was going to be “good enough” as a phone or a PDA. Pat Kerpan explained:

“I think reaction depends on whether you are using a microscope or a telescope. ‘What is is’ vs. ‘what it means’…First and foremost: This is an iPod that makes phone calls. The whole success of this product will be driven by the fact that it is not a business product. Business products suck. In fact, Generation D will likely evaluate jobs by access to consumer technology vs. business technology.”

So you shouldn’t compare the iPhone to a phone. You should compare it to an iPod. It’s a portable music player that is also a phone and an Internet access device. Wow! Eric Castain agreed, when you think of the iPhone as an iPhod, it is a very seductive device.

Then they got into the “is it open or is it closed?” debate. Here’s what Pat had to say:

“Closed? More closed than my lame phones? Can't be for long - not with a real Web browser. Not with widgets. Not with a universe of hackers out there. One of my best friends rails against iTunes because it is closed. If selecting a set of AAC drm-protected songs in iTunes and clicking the ‘convert to mp3’ button in another application is closed - then I will take closed in the Apple Reality Distortion Field over any product shipped to date by Sony, Nokia, Ericsson, or Microsoft.”

Several others of you weighed in as well on subjects ranging from “will it work without a keyboard” and "is it really an open platform?"

This week, Steve Jobs announced that the first customer shipments of the iPhone will take place by the end of the month. He also launched a new Safari browser that’s pretty nifty. Here’s a browser that’s designed to work really well on a small form factor screen, with a minimum of point and click. You can swivel it and zoom it. You can poke at it with your finger and zoom in. Take a look! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHB1VSQk1Tc

The new Safari beta is also available to run on Windows. That’s a great move! Making iTunes available on Windows increased iTune’s marketshare dramatically. Making the Safari browser available on Windows will expand its footprint and give all of us another great toolset for interacting online and sharing our creations.

And, best of all, users can create widgets that can sit on their desktops and download those widgets to carry around with them on their iPhones.

According to Robert Mullins’ article in InfoWorld, Apple's iPhone open to software developers:

“Developers will be able to create applications for the iPhone by using Web 2.0 programming tools such as AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and taking advantage of the full version of Apple's Safari Web browser incorporated into the devices. A separate, special software developer kit is not needed, Jobs said.”

In the development community, the lack of an SDK has spurred some consternation. O’Reilly Radar’s Mark Hedlund has a good post [Xul Runner for the iPhone] on the topic of whether you can really write useful apps using browser-only development. He alludes to the increasingly popular XUL Runner plug in from Mozilla.

“The problem is this: what capabilities do you want in an Internet-age application platform?

I'm a big proponent of XULRunner for desktop applications. It's my opinion that many of the applications we all want to write and use these days need to consume a wide variety of content from the web.

And yet, I've argued very strongly for third-party apps on the iPhone. I was left a little befuddled by this week's iPhone news, unsure whether to cheer with my friend Jason Fried, who calls the move 'bold' in his piece, 'iPhone SDK: It's called Safari,' or to be dismayed like Jesus Diaz at Gizmodo, who writes a righteous condemnation of the announcement in, 'No iPhone SDK Means No Killer iPhone Apps.'

As with all things Apple, we'll just have to wait and see. I'm inclined to agree with Jason that Apple has made - for whatever reasons, expedient or prescient - the right philosophical decision about how iPhone apps should be developed. Building apps on top of a web browser is the right call for all of the reasons described above. iPhone apps are going to want all of the capabilities that Safari can provide.

On the other hand, just HTML and JavaScript is too little, for all the reasons Jesus mentions. An "application" which is just a web page with a home-screen button that acts like a bookmark isn't really an application for the iPhone - it's an application for the web. And here's where the wait and see comes in; what interfaces, if any, will the iPhone Safari have to the rest of the phone? It sounds like making calls is one of them, which is great. What else? What else will people want? I suspect that the real and right desire is to connect all of the capabilities of the iPhone to the Internet. That's not going to be in the 1.0 release, I'll bet, but I also bet that by opening this door, Apple is acknowledging the demand, and from that can come a lot of good.”

"Bring the web to whatever device I'm using. And then bring the device to the web. That's the mantra for the web application development platform debate - no matter the device. I'm encouraged by XULRunner and encouraged by Apple's move, and I think the common solution these two imply is the right one.” 

 

My bet? I’m betting that Apple’s many lead users will quickly demonstrate the power of developing Apple Desktop Widgets and distributing them via RSS on Safari.

So, a hearty welcome to a new platform for consumer-led innovation: the iPhod!

 

THE WEB 2.0 WAVE--WHY IT’S NOT A FAD

This week, I attended the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. It was a great conference--meaty sessions, thousands of smart people, great logistics--all the things that matter were well-orchestrated and unobtrusive. I continue to be impressed by the O’Reilly organization and its many partners (in this case, CMP). “Spreading the Knowledge of Innovators” is the O’Reilly motto. If you want to know where lead customers are taking us--this is the place to be.

The Web 2.0 Culture: Loosely-Coupled Innovation

The Web 2.0 Culture isn’t a youth culture. There weren’t a lot of kids at this conference (although admission to the keynotes and exhibits was free or $100). In fact, most of the Web 2.0 Expo attendees have kids. The 10,000 participants ranged in age from mid-20s through 60-somethings, definitely skewed towards 30-somethings. There were seriously optimistic business/technology strategists (like me), corporate IT renegades, seasoned architects, professional developers, marketing and design professionals, lots of entrepreneurs--some on their second and third ventures--and venture capitalists, as well as plenty of professional bloggers and reporters.

The mood was optimistic. There are no evil empires that can stop innovation. Anything is possible. It’s a culture of DIY, roll your own, solve your own problems, invent a new toolset, secure in the knowledge that:

• Whatever you invent will plug into and interoperate with everyone else’s innovations
• The simplest approaches are the most elegant and valuable
• It doesn’t really matter if someone else has done something similar before
• Esthetics count--clean, crisp graphical UIs are in

WHAT’S BEYOND WEB 2.0 AND ENTERPRISE 2.0? BIZ 3.0!

Align Your Business Strategy Around Your Customers’ Processes And Outcomes

Before you build upon the principles of Web 2.0 to craft an Enterprise 2.0 strategy for your firm, take a moment to reflect on what’s coming next. Remember that Consumer Web 2. isn’t really about technology enablement. It’s about consumer participation. Enterprise 2.0 isn’t really about supporting rich user interfaces, blogging, tagging, RSS feeds, and social networks for your employees. Enterprise 2.0 is about customer and employee empowerment. Tim O'Reilly refers to this as "the architecture of participation" in his compact definition of Web 2.0.

What are the Benefits from Web and Enterprise 2.0?

The bottom line benefits of both Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 accrue when you empower your consumer and/or business customers to participate in shaping their online experiences with your company and with one another. Empowered customers are more engaged and more loyal. They cost less to serve and they contribute value by adding their own “spin” to your Web sites, your products, and to your brand experience.  Your firm profits from the network effects that result as customers interact electronically around your products and your business. Web 2.0-enabled customers become designers, contributors, consultants, guides, and promoters to other prospects and customers.

COMMUNITY 2.0-Leveraging the Wisdom of Crowds

Crowdsourcing 2.0

Kathleen Gilroy, Otter Group
Sylvia Marino, Edmunds.com
Michael Sikorsky, Cambrian House

Kathleen:
Wikipedia definition: relies on a combination of volunteers and low-paid amateurs who use their spare time to create content and/or to solve problems.

Examples of crowdsourcing:
Zazzle I use it to generate stamps as presents for my nephews and nieces.
Goldcorp -- Took its data and made it public and encouraged people to analyze the data and suggest mining opportunities for a reward. (Written Up in Mavericks at Work.)
Threadless--T-shirt design

This notion of earning credentials from crowdsourcing is great.

ARE YOU LEVERAGING CUSTOMER-GENERATED CONTENT?

As we move towards the close of 2006, you should be asking yourself "How can we take better advantage of user-generated content in 2007?" I recommend that you convene a brainstorming session before the holidays to consider this topic, let ideas percolate over the holiday period, and come back to work in January 2007 with at least one pilot project to implement in the first quarter. To get your creative juices flowing, here are a few pointers as to what others are doing.