Changing relationships: are you prepared?
In this “dear brands” letter, Jermiah Owyang tells his favorite brands that the relationship he has with them has profoundly changed. And if you want to keep doing business in the future, you better read this closely, because it’s not just mr Owyang who feels this way.
Tags: #business, #innovations, #newBiz
Sleep to change the world
Getting enough sleep is important in keeping on the top of your game. Not sleeping enough, has a similar effect on your performance as drinking a lot of alcohol. So, if you want to change the world, be sure to get enough sleep, says this HBR post. Also interesting, is the identification of influencers in this article. Especially for marketeers that are looking for the right influencers to influence.
Tags: #business, #sleep, #success, #marketing
How fair will you play
Two examples of Fair Play popped up in my social media channels this week. The first one was from women’s football in France, where the ladies of Olympique Lyonnais won a match in a penalty shoot-out. It appeared that their opponents had scored in regular time, but the goal was not acknowledged by the referees. After no other goals were scored, the match eventually went to a penalty shoot-out. The ladies from Lyon feel they did not deserve the win in this way, and offered a replay.
The other example is actually from December, but it popped up in my FB stream. A Spanish runner showed a wonderful example of fair play and honesty by not taking advantage of a mistake from the Kenyan runner in front of him.
Next time you can cheat, think about these examples. Are you really winning when you steal victory?
Tags: #sports, #FairPlay, #honesty, #winning
What’s your advice?
My friend Ana Canhoto sent a message to her students, with a very valuable piece of advice in it. It was not directly related to the topic she teaches, more an advice about life. Not only does she show how good teachers care about their students, but the post on her blog also illustrates that a great educational institution goes beyond just transferring knowledge: it also should have a system to support students in their transition to adulthood and working life. And to get the best results possible. So, here is Ana’s advice, what’s yours?
Tags: #education, #life, #advice
The last step to make aid work
Why won’t Babu move? Well, because we know what’s good for her, but don’t know (and don’t invest in) what really moves her. In this open blog post, the World Bank illustrates a key success factor for international development.
Do you know your characters?
In this lovely, informative video, Ben Barret-Forrest explains the history of type. Now that we are able to create our own, or simply pick a font from a big list, I think it’s valuable to know how it all evolved out of hand writing.
Humanizing immigration
There’s a debate going on in the US about immigration. To come to a proper law on immigration, the Senate has hearings, in which experts give testimony. One of the experts invited is VC Jeff Bussgang. He published his planned testimony on his blog, and I think it’s worth reading, because it gives another view on immigration than the view we often hear these days, especially in Europe. Not all immigrants are the profiteers they are made out to be by prominent politicians.
Tags: #politics, #immigration, #innovation, #entrepreneurship
The Start-up Vibe of Central and Eastern Europe
Do you still think Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) are former communist states from which the populations can’t wait to get their hands on benefit money in Western Europe? Think again. Places like Tallinn, Riga, Vilnius and Sophia are now the vibrant tech start-up scenes that many European countries would like to see. In this post on Sparksheet, we see how several Silicon Valleys are sprouting in the CEE.
Tags: #innovation, #entrepreneurship, #Baltics
New stalks are already sprouting on our rhubarb plant
Having a garden is a lot of work: mowing the grass, trimming the trees, taking out the parasitic weeds that want to ruin everything. But, it’s also a great joy. What I always thought of, when thinking of living in a house with a garden, was to have at least some edible things growing in it. So, when we made our trip to one of those garden centers recently, we bought several herbs to plant. And some strawberries. The herbs I can use already, the strawberries we have to wait a bit for. Fortunately, there were already some plants growing in the garden, that are meant for consumption. One is a sage bush, that was placed in a not very nice looking pot sort of thing, and I replanted in a small sunny patch of the garden, right next to the rhubarb. Now, we used to have rhubarb in the garden when I grew up, and my mother used to make all sorts of things with it. I just never liked the taste of it. Still, after replanting the sage (and smelling the scents of it), I felt I could try to make something that combined the sage with the rhubarb. There were quite a few stalks growing from the red thing already, and the smell of the few branches of the sage bush that broke off during replanting somehow made me think this could be a great match.
What can businesses learn from social movements?
In this article for the Rotman Magazine Paula Goldman and Suzanne Gibbs Howard show how social movements are helping for-profit companies to thrive. They share a variety of cases to illustrate their four main points that any marketing manager must know about. The article can be read here [pdf].
Tags: #social-media, #marketing, #community-management
From horse and carriage to Apollo 11
To really innovate, and change the way we think of transport from horse and carriage to rockets that bring people to the moon, you need to think laterally, argue Ian Gonsher and Deb Mills-Scofield in this Harvard Business Review blog post.
Tags: #innovation, #design-thinking
Shift perspective, find possibilities
We continuously frame what we see, hear, feel, do. The framing helps us interpret the world around us. But it also limits the things we see. And therefore it limits the possibilities we see for finding solutions. In this great article, Tina Seelig shows us what reframing means, how it helps to unlock innovations, and even gives us some exercises to practice shifting perspectives.
Tags: #innovation, #reframe, #understanding, #management
Are you responsive enough on social media?
One thing we tend to forget about technology, especially in the social media sphere, is that it should support human behaviour. And I believe that social media technologies are basically doing that, and increasingly in a way that facilitates what we humans want to do. Share photos with our friends, tell your followers what you think is interesting to read, or simply chat. And all that preferably in real-time. Joshua-Michéle Ross from O’Reilly Media argues, in this first post in a series, that one thing companies should do is design their social media efforts to be responsive.
Tags: #social-media, #management
Start your new work week inspired on Monday, and find some time to read these posts this weekend.
Driving innovation
In this post on the HBR Blogs, David Duncan from Innosight shares how they helped a children’s hospital in Canada to drive innovation: Driving Front Line Innovation in Health Care.
Tags: #innovation, #healthcare
Conversations on air travel
Finnair and Helsinki Airport ran two ‘seasons’ of the Quality Hunters project, in which selected travelers flew around the world to find opportunities for service improvement. It was a wonderful, and award-winning, way of doing open innovation. Now, they’re continuing the Quality Hunters project with a new way of discovering improvement opportunities, with an open platform. Join the discussion, for example in this discussion about planning your travel.
Tags: #travel, #open-innovation
Analyse your competition
Justice Mitchell outlines a great tool to help organise the analysis of the social media activity of your competition. And he gives some great sources to get data from as well. The tool is there, now you just have to use it: Data touch points in your social marketing audit.
Tags: #analysis, #social-media
2013 Time 100
For the tenth time, Time releases their list of the 100 most influential people. Always interesting, and inspiring. Who are the ones leading us, who are changing the way we do business, learn, play, be entertained? Time magazine says it’s these 100 people. Who has inspired or influenced you most this year?
Tags: #leadership, #management
Four themes of disruption you should be aware of
Altimeter group does great open research on the impact of new technologies on business. In this post, they describe four disruption themes, and the trends and technologies that are going to rock our world in the next few years. Be sure to stay on top of these themes, trends and technologies.
Tags: #business, #management, #digital, #innovation
Recently, I was selected as the End Atrocity Challenge Community Champion on OpenIDEO. Some of you might have read some of my previous posts here about the OpenIDEO platform, and those of you who follow me on Twitter might have seen quite some tweets the last weeks referring to the platform. So, I thought it would be a good time to share a bit about my passion for this open innovation platform here, by answering five questions you might have.
1. What is OpenIDEO?
As the tagline says it on the website, OpenIDEO is a place ‘where people design better, together’. This designing is done in challenges, that each follow the Human Centered Design principles of IDEO. Every challenge aims to look at a social issue, formulated in a central question, and find solutions for it. Sometimes, these challenges are quite specific in terms of locality, but even then the users are asked to come up with ideas that can be used anywhere.
Some examples of challenges are:
How can we raise kids’ awareness of the benefits of fresh food so they can make better choices?
How might we improve maternal health with mobile technologies for low-income countries?
How might we increase the number of registered bone marrow donors to help save more lives?
How might we restore vibrancy in cities and regions facing economic decline?
2. How does it work?
The nice people at IDEO have made a great video about that, which answers this question better than I ever could.
3. What is your involvement with it?
I am an entusiastic user of the site. I joined during the healthy food challenge in August 2010, and have participated in most challenges. In some more than others, of course, depending on the time I could spend. Currently, as mentioned above, I was selected as the Community Champion. This is a volunteer role, which takes me about 4 hours per week. One of the things I do as the Community Champion, is making video blogs with challenge updates and a bit of ‘how to’ information on use of the platform.
4. Who can join?
OpenIDEO is a true open innovation platform, which means everybody can join in. And that is exactly what happened. I suspect that a large part of the almost 50.000 users are from the US and Western Europe, but there are also users from South America, Asia, Africa and Australia and New Zealand. There are men and women, most age groups are represented (although I think it’s mainly 20 and up, I have seen teenagers join in), and there’s a plethora of occupations. OpenIDEO is currently also used by several schools and universities to teach classes, so many students are also taking part. In short: OpenIDEO is a vibrant, multi-demographical community. And you’ll fit right in!
5. What happens with the concepts and ideas?
In true Open Innovation Style, all contributions to the platform are in the public domain. That includes the Ideas for solutions. Anybody can take one, or more, of these Ideas and Concepts and start implementing them to solve a social issue. One quite fresh example is the Made in Lower East Side, or miLES, project, that was contributed as a concept to the site, and then implemented by the team behind it. Another example is the MyFailTale website, which aims to help (young) entrepreneurs to learn from the mistakes from others. Recently, Tim Brown, the president and CEO of IDEO, shared the story of a Doctor in Colombia, who is taking all winning concepts from a challenge, and implements them to improve healthcare in underserved parts of his country.
By now, after almost three years, OpenIDEO has become a repository of wonderful Ideas, that are waiting for people to take them, implement them and have real impact on the world. You could be one of them.
A Säulenheilige used to be a person who would go up on a pole, and sit there to contemplate and pray. But that was a long time ago. These days, in Düsseldorf, the Säulenheiligen are statues placed on top of advertising columns. There are, as far as I can tell, nine of them; made by artist Christoph Pöggeler. You might not have noticed them, while walking through Düsseldorf, because of their elevated position, and maybe also because they seem to be regular people doing regular things you do in a city. Here are six of them
The first one I noticed, was the photographer, who is making a nice photo of the main station.
Taking pictures of the Hauptbahnhof
One that I like for her cheerful attitude, is the lady dancing through the Altstadt.
Dancing lady in the Altstadt
Then there is the couple taking in the view of the Rhine from the Burgplatz.
Taking in the sights
But you can also take a cue from this sweet couple, and make Düsseldorf a place of romance.
Romantic kissing couple
Or, you can do like this lady, who is enjoying the sun, and, if you look at her from the right angle, seems to be looking up to the Rheinturm. Her name is ‘Marlis’.
Marlis enjoying the sun
A bit hidden away, close to the Rhine, there’s this mother with her child.
A mother and her child
Slightly out of central Düsseldorf, a bit in the northern part of town, there’s this guy who’s ready for a swim.
Ready for a swim
Have you seen any of these Säulenheiligen? Or maybe one of the other three? Which one did you like best? Let me know in the comments.
In the final years of my secondary education, in one of those summery periods in which students are more occupied with parties than studies, I came across a song of a German hip-hop band that I liked very much. The tougher style of rap and hip-hop was taking control of the airwaves, with types like Public Enemy, NWA and Tupac. I liked that, but also liked the currents that included Beastie Boys and Arrested Development. Then, as said, I heard this crazy song by German group Die Fantastischen Vier (the fantastic four). And I was sold. They made me laugh, and even though they were German (which was not a good thing in The Netherlands of the nineteen-nineties), I really appreciated their music, and the way they played with language in their lyrics. And the story telling. Continue reading →
Let me start by saying that selling food means that you have to be clear on what it contains. If you claim your lasagna or burgers or whatever are made of beef, they should contain beef. And not pork or horsemeat. In light of the scandal recently uncovered in Europe, I think the sellers of ready-made meals are responsible for making sure that what’s in the product, is declared on the packaging. I also think that relabeling one type of (cheaper) meat to another (more expensive one), to make an extra profit, is fraudulent and criminal.
But in this horsemeat story, it’s not just the complex food supply chain, or the actors in it that carry all the blame. Nor are, as one former UK official tried to make us believe, the EU regulations culpable. I think we also have to aks ourselves the question: why do we allow ourselves to know so little of such an important factor in our lives? Now that we’ve climbed Maslow’s pyramid, we seem to pay less attention to the bottom of it. Our basic needs have become less important to too many of us. We think they should be fulfilled by convenient and cheap means, and that opens up opportunities for things like the horsemeat scandal to happen. Another question we could ask ourselves is ‘how did we let it get this far?’
There’s actually an even more important question that should feature in our minds prominently now: how can we take control of what we eat again? Sure, not all of us are top chefs, or even able to cook more than an egg and some water for tea or instant soup. But that doesn’t mean we can’t take charge of what we put into our mouths to fulfill that basic need of nutrition. We can care more, and know more, about the food we put on our plates. To help with that, I would like to point out three wonderful places on the internet.
First of all, I’d like you to take a look at the OpenIDEO local food challenge. In 2011, this open innovation platform focused on connecting food consumers to food producers. As is the norm on this platform, many wonderful ideas were generated, that are available for anybody to implement. Now, there are stories available of how people are doing exactly that, and working on enabling food consumers to be more connected to their food. Go check it out and see if you can be inspired.
The OpenIDEO local food challenge: www.openideo.com/open/localfood/
The second thing you should visit is the home of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution. The celebrity chef is a wonderful champion of using real food. In schools, but also at home. From food knowledge to easy recipes, this place provides you with all you need to start taking control of the food you eat.
Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution: www.jamiesfoodrevolution.com
The last one I’d like to share is nothing more than a collection of 30-minute recipes from a great variety of sources. Preparing food doesn’t have to be difficult or time-consuming. And it’s certainly worth investing your time in. And if you use real ingredients, at least you know that you’re not eating something you don’t want to eat.
30-minute recipes on Yummly: www.yummly.com/recipes?q=30+minutes
Recently, I watched the movie Wall Street again. Apart from it being a great and interesting movie (interesting enough to spend a university session on watching it during my Business Studies), it’s also one of those movies that’s a nice documentation of the zeitgeist in the period it was shot. Watching it this time, I couldn’t help but notice a remark the main character Bud Fox makes to his father. At one point they’re sitting down in a bar, and father Fox complains about his wife’s spaghetti. Bud Fox tells him that it’s called pasta these days.
Probably, at that time in the mid 1980s, this was indeed the going term for it. Using the word pasta meant you were evolving beyond the sophistication of the generation before you. Pasta, and probably many other words, were like a badge of honour. Using them meant you’ve stepped up in the world, were climbing the social ladder. Of course, now we all understand all too well that pasta is the umbrella-term for the staple including spaghetti, fettucini, macaroni, penne, ravioli and the likes. Now most, if not all, of us are able to distinguish between them. Or simply say we like to eat pasta, because we like all or most of the types it includes.
These days we might look down or ridicule the arrogance of Bud Fox a bit, when he tells his father to use pasta. Because now we know better. But without the arrogance of his generation, we might not have come to the collective level of sophistication in which we are able to distinguish correctly between the different types of pasta. It’s all part of going through the motions in a globalising world; of understanding a cultural artifact that’s going viral.
