Global perspectives: Tim Brown and Seth Godin via India and the US
Neeraj of the ideas-innovation blog and I seem to be coming to the same conclusion — this is an exciting and vocal time in terms how individuals are seen to interact with innovation.
We’re in good company. As Neeraj notes “I feel there is a similarity between the Idea proposed by Seth Godin of people joining Tribes/communities for a meaning & being relevant & in Tim Brown’s Idea of Consumers becoming participants.”
I agree. Over the last week I’ve shown Tim Brown’s IdeasProject interview and Seth Godin’s TED talk in my Technology and Innovation Management class. My last post also focused on the Brown interview. Neeraj gives me the opportunity to continue the discussion here.
Here are the parallels:
On one level, you could argue that we all have to become design thinkers. It’s one of those social skills that we all need, that we all have to be able to figure out how to solve problems creatively and to participate, in order to be able to participate.
What exactly do the people who are watching this do every day? And I want to argue that what we do is we try to change everything…. we try to find something that’s itching to be changed, and we change it.
That’s what we do for a living now, all of us I think, is find something worth changing and then assemble tribes, that assemble tribes, that spread the idea and spread the idea…
Neeraj and I come to the idea from slightly different directions, but the key point is the same: technologies are giving people, all of us, the ability to innovate and participate in systems not broadly possible before. We all have to become systems designers to effectively engage with our work and social environments.
My plan is to keep this discussion going. We’re asking a lot of people to become systems designers on the fly. Not everyone has systems savvy. What are the capabilities we all need, and how can we get them?
TweetTags: godin, IdeasProject, IDEO, Innovation, TED, Tim Brown
2 Responses
May 26th, 2009 at 6:11 am
Hi Terri
Thanks so much for mentioning about my post & blog. Delighted to know that you also share my view point. As you have rightly mentioned, this is an exciting & vocal time in terms of how individuals are seen to interact with Innovation.
With Increased Consumers participation, we can expect more business model Innovations, new ways of how products & services being created. One of the drastic changes I foresee could be in the advertising services, which is traditionally based on Push model. With the new Participation model, the focus on Advertising may reduce as the demand will be based on Pull model, so we may end up having no advertising at all!
The other important point I think is that with consumers participating from the beginning, companies can reduce the risk of a product/service failure.
To an extreme end we can have a new level of Participation from the employee in an Organization (with the employee paying money to his company for using their resources & acting as an Intrapreneur) I had written a blog on this previously.(http://ideas-innovation.blogspot.com/search?q=pay+employer). This model may change the whole model based on which employees participates as well as reframe the Organizations as being resource providers to employees.
I also agree with you that technologies are giving people, all of us, the ability to innovate and participate in systems not broadly possible before. Companies like Nokia (through Idea project), Eli lilly (through Innocentive), etc are using technology to connect with customers, other stakeholders & even Competitors and allowing them to participate.
You have mentioned that what are the capabilities we need & how do we get them. Looking from a design thinking & from Seth Godin’s perspective I think there has to be a meaning attached to companies & its offerings. By ‘meaning’ I mean products & services should stand for something, be meaningful to people so that they can relate with that & want to connect with it.
Technology will be playing a very important role in helping people , employees, students(may be participating on global projects connecting with other) to participate, connect to like minded people & in the process create communities & sell products/services & experiences.
This Trend I think has already started with people talking about Co-Creation Activities. However I think the next big trend will be Consumer assuming a greater responsibility & increasing their level of participation.
Check out http://trendwatching.com/trends/CUSTOMER-MADE.htm highlighting examples from different companies on how people are participating & in what way.
Neeraj
June 9th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
[...] the kind of video it is important to support? Just as we are given the opportunity to be “accidental systems designers” by the possibilities of our technologies, now we are being given the opportunity to be [...]