A recent article by Don Norman brings up some valuable and provocative questions about the value of design research. I read it as an extension of his previous shift in thinking about the value of usability analysis, where he concluded that it was vital for good to design, but it didn't lead to great design. In this new article he argues that design research has not led to breakthrough innovations or products, but is better suited for improving existing products and technologies.
I actually agree with much of what he says, though I see the definition of design research he's using as overly narrow. More on that in a moment.
He starts the article with:
I've come to a disconcerting conclusion: design research is great when it comes to improving existing product categories but essentially useless when it comes to new, innovative breakthroughs. I reached this conclusion through examination of a range of product innovations, most especially looking at those major conceptual breakthroughs that have had huge impact upon society as well as the more common, mundane small, continual improvements. Call one conceptual breakthrough, the other incremental. Although we would prefer to believe that conceptual breakthroughs occur because of a detailed consideration of human needs, especially fundamental but unspoken hidden needs so beloved by the design research community, the fact is that it simply doesn't happen.
He then goes on to list a number of breakthrough products (actually categories of products) that design research didn't have a hand in:
- The Airplane
- The Automobile
- The Telephone
- The Radio
- The Television
- The Computer
- The Personal Computer
- The Internet
- SMS Text Messaging
- The Cellphone
Design research did not exist in its current form when any of these technologies or products came about, so of course it did not have a hand in their development. However, the reason these ones took off was because someone recognized a user need, and shaped the technologies to address that need, adjusting the form of the technologies as the need evolved. So it was not formal design research, but it certainly was an attentiveness to understanding how the technology would be used, which is a key element of design research.
Invention and Innovation
We have to be careful about distinguishing between technological invention and innovation. Technologies are invented all the time, many of which--as Don notes--are not immediately very useful, and that need refinement before they can become appealing to the mass market. This is often where innovation plays a role, and where design research can help shape the rough technology into something that people will actually want and be able to use. I don't see any shame in design research not being present at the moment of invention--it still has a valuable role to play.
Design research takes place when design happens, and design is a downstream activity from scientific and technology invention. So it's not surprising that it has not launched new-to-the-world technologies. Could it do so in the future? Sure, it's early days yet. To have that kind of impact it would need to move more upstream, and to an extent that process is already underway.
But I do agree with Don's basic point that gaining a deep understanding of user needs does not in and of itself necessarily lead to a reframing of a technology or a business problem. This touches on something that we have been talking about a lot at frog recently--the pendulum has swung so much toward doing user research that we (as a profession) risk losing the magic that comes from conceptual thinking. The seductiveness of evidence and insight that comes from design research can push inspiration, intuition, hypotheses, hunches and nonlinear thinking to the sidelines. Analysis overwhelms creativity.
Good design researchers are keenly aware of this of course, and seek to provide the appropriate balance for each project, making analysis and inspiration as sparring partners. An unscientific survey of colleagues and blog posts indicates that others are recognizing the issue and working to push the pendulum back the other way to a more balanced position.
Design research is not (just) user research
This brings me to my last point, one where I do have a disagreement with how Don sets up the article: he equates design research with user research.
Design research has many definitions, but within the product cycle, it consists of studies aiming to understand the activities, desires, and needs of the people for whom a product or service is desired. Design researchers use a wide variety of methods, but all of them, whether it be ethnographic observations, systematic probes, or even surveys, questionnaires, and focus groups aim at one thing: to determine those hidden, unspoken needs that will lead to a novel innovation and then to great success in the marketplace.
This is a very typical definition, but one that I reject. Design research can be, and should be, much more than user research. It should include research into technologies, brands, macro trends, retail settings, competitors and comparatives, and a company's own IP and capabilities. In my book I refer to this as multivector research--where we examine multiple vectors of data types simultaneously, and seek insights by finding the patterns across the vectors, not just within a single vector (e.g. user research).
As every design researcher knows, users can be myopic in their expression of needs, and we do everything we can to get at the underlying needs. If we expand our vision to include these other vectors then they can give us a better view into needs and--importantly--opportunities, than going by user needs alone.
Design is not solely about creating products that users want--design, like politics, must balance many requirements. Users are of course a very important stakeholder in those requirements, but designers are tasked with also working with the requirements of engineering, manufacturing, brand, technologies, costs, etc. Likewise, design research does itself a disservice if it only looks at user needs--its scope needs to match that of design itself.
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disfruteconpoco)
I attended the Trendforum in Munich last week, a two-day conference that gathered European innovation, marketing, and R&D executives to explore emerging technologies, social trends, and innovative business models. The program was eclectic and the content mostly of high quality. I was particularly intrigued by the opening session that intersected macro-economic forecasting with geeky trend evangelism as well as a humanistic pledge for meaning-driven business (in fact, the other sessions didn’t even come close, including special guest Ray Kurzweil, whose remote keynote, given by way of 3D-holographic projection, remained utterly flat).
As the first speaker, Markku Wilenius, senior vice president of economic research and corporate development with Allianz SE, set the framework by introducing overarching future themes, key challenges facing mankind, from climate change to water scarcity to demographic developments. Forecasting the economic development over the next two decades, he predicted redefined notions and metrics of both societal progress and individual success, and heralded “true-value accounting” that would ultimately “decouple consumption from growth.” In 10 years, he argued, easy and seamless sustainable choices would have become the norm, as would have “smarter systems.” Wilenius identified four key consumer trends, all to be filed under Consumer Empowerment: Downshifting (simplicity -> value for money, price sensitivity, discounts); Transparency (clarity -> open communications, clear essence); Selfness (control -> self-governance, tangibility); and Age of Less (substance -> long-term thinking, lightness). Despite the daunting challenges in these times of crisis, his outlook remained optimistic: “Material scarcity always creates an abundance of ideas.” If that is true, we can look forward to innovative times in which creativity will not only become a crucial skill but an existential means of survival.
Christine Woesler de Panafieu, founder of CoSight, an international trend research and marketing consulting firm in Paris, picked up the ball and described how the macro-trends Wilenius had pinpointed would alter the lives of consumers. She argued that we were moving from "post- to ultramodernity," resulting in a renaissance of the renaissance: “the man as measure of all things.” This neo-humanistic mindset would bear a new spiritual quest--“an individual, open-path-seeking direct resonance with the sacred,” as she put it. The number of pilgrimages is indeed on the rise, as is the number of new religions (and meta-religions such as the recent Charter of Compassion or the portal Beliefnet). “The 21st century will be spiritual or it won’t be at all,” Woesler de Panafieu said, quoting a French philosopher. Morality is in high demand, but doing good is shifting from convention to conviction, from a humanitarian to an empowerment approach. For brands, this means they need to become the “right thing to do.” And one only has to look as far as Foursquare to see that converting social currency into real value will the business model of the future.
Nils Müller, founder and CEO of TrendONE, a trend research firm, finally took the audience on a riveting tour de force through much buzzed-about emerging tech trends, envisioning the future in 2020 as a seamless blend between the real and virtual worlds, dominated by location-based, real-time, and social computing applications that turn the Internet into an "Outernet" and “every interface into a surface”--from printed electronics to face recognition to augmented social shopping. He depicted an evolution from “lean back” to “move forward” to “jump in” to “always-on” to “plug in” media. And he showed tons of videos: the "Siftables" (see picture above); the inevitable Microsoft Natal clip; a demo of brainwave-based voiceless communications (theaudeo.com), and a clip on augmented vision enabled by eye chips (tat.se). Their common thread: technology in disguise, with front ends that are becoming touchable, intuitive, and human-centric. Mueller coined the term “Shytech” for this phenomenon: technology that can afford to be nonintrusive because it is fully immersive.
In the concluding panel discussion, Woesler de Panafieu was asked what’s left to do for designers when everything was immersive and one great computing cloud. “Designers’ task will be to make the invisible visible,” she said, “creating the new interaction codes of our societies.” That again alluded to the big mega-trend of Good Computing--without Computers. Designers are the ones who can translate data (and meta-data) into meaning and make morality tangible amidst a flood of information. As they visualize the dematerialization of products and services, how long will it take before the dematerialized world becomes the ideal one?
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Victors & Spoils)
It's always good to be the first, and while crowdsourcing, the trend, may have jumped the shark, a fully crowdsourced creative agency is a bold creative experiment and still news. Two Crispin Porter + Bogusky alums, John Winsor and Evan Fry, together with Claudia Batten, the founder of Microsoft-acquired video game advertising shop Massive, have launched Victors & Spoils (V&S), "the world's first creative agency built on crowdsourcing principle."
V&S says it will "provide businesses with a better way to solve their marketing, advertising and product-design problems by engaging the world's most talented creatives." The press release promises that "perceived crowdsourcing flaws will be addressed through world-class creative direction delivered through the use of the reputation-ranked Victors & Spoils crowd" but stays mum on how exactly the crowdsourced creative department will operate.
In any event, V & S is eating its own dog food. The first line you notice on its web site (after the humble "Welcome To Victors & Spoils. Let's Change An Industry") is "Why does this site look so plain, Jane?" and the answer is: because the site design, the look and feel, and even the logo are being crowdsourced.
Whether crowdsoucing yields better creative results, who knows? It certainly is a differentiator. V&S COO Claudia Batten twittered that she got calls from five Fortune 200 CMOs in the first five days since launch. We will follow this one closely.
Forrester is about to release a new report on “Adaptive Brand Marketing: Rethinking Your Approach to Branding in the Digital Age,” in which it proposes replacing “brand managers” with “brand advocates.” Advertising Age provides a sneak peek at the ‘new 4 Ps of Marketing’ presented in the report: permission, proximity, perception, and participation. Other core elements include: “embracing an expanded role for consumer intelligence, focusing on strategic brand platforms, and empowering a federated organization."
A fervent advocate of marketing as a cross-organizational catalyst for change myself, I wholeheartedly agree with BBH Labs which believes the Forrester report points to a potentially larger opportunity for the discipline: “It’s not just the marketing organization that needs to reorient itself given the now normal digital age, but the company itself should consider how it reorients itself around its marketing organization. In most progressive companies, it is the marketing function that has most quickly and deeply engaged with the new interactive toolkit.”
This view is really becoming a groundswell, and you will be hard pressed to find anyone these days who would deny the profound change social media presents for all customer relations; the new need for openness, agility, and hyper-sociality; as well as the call for “networked” (or “federated,” as Forrester calls it) organizations. David Armano from the Dachis Group (“Social Business Design”), Francois Gossieaux (Beeline Labs), or Charlene Li and her Altimeter Group are just some of the pundits who have very succinctly articulated these themes.
Further reading:
HSM Interview with Amazon’s former Chief Scientist Andreas Weigend on the four P’s of marketing
Ogilvy and Acision white paper on advertising in 2020
Jones and Bonevac: "Should We Be In the Advertising Industry?"
Dave Evans: "Social Business: the New Black"
Forgive me but I have to plug something my company (Frog Design) is involved in. I'm only doing this because it is such a neat event: In collaboration with Frog, NPR will host a unique Digital Think In this Friday in our offices in San Francisco, bringing together 60 thought leaders at the intersection of media and technology to explore new approaches to content creation, distribution, and funding for NPR and NPR member stations.
Hosted by NPR CEO and President Vivian Schiller and Digital Media SVP and General Manager Kinsey Wilson, the Think In will harness the collective expertise and creativity of an exceptional group of entrepreneurs, executives, and innovators. Participants include leaders at the leading edge of technology and media innovation from academia, venture capital, internet design, public media, social media, and research. Notable participants contributing to the day-long brainstorm include: Craig Newmark, Founder of craigslist; Reid Hoffman, Chairman and co-Founder of LinkedIn; Roger McNamee, Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners; Chris Beard, Chief Innovation Officer of Mozilla; Krishna Bharat, Principal Scientist and creator of Google News; and Sue Gardner, Executive Director of Wikimedia Foundation, among many others.
The Think In will explore five main topics that are significant to NPR's ecosystem and its future: social media and connection to the audience, the organization's national network of more than 800 stations, the potential of its open API, expansion of platforms, and its diversified revenue model. After an NPR overview and an opening session, participants will break out into small groups to develop concepts that NPR can incorporate into its organizational roadmap.
The event will be live-blogged and the Digital Think In micro-site will feature live video streams of the opening and closing sessions. In addition, attendees will be tweeting the event throughout the day using the hashtag #nprthinkin. NPR's Andy Carvin will be posting to YouTube and Flickr under "nprthink," and updating NPR's Facebook page.
I've just returned from the IDSA conference in Miami, and I'm both convinced that, in ten years, there won't be an IDSA conference to go to - and that isn't a bad thing. I don't mean this in a disparaging sense; I enjoyed the conference, caught up with old friends, made new friends, and learned a bit. But a trend that I've observed at past conferences is only more evident this year, and it's patronizing to continue to skirt what is becoming increasingly obvious: the IDSA has served a valuable role in the evolution of design as a professional discipline, and has helped advance the field to a point where the IDSA is now essentially irrelevant. Design has outgrown “Industrial Design”, and a professional organization cannot exist only in the form of self-maintenance.
I'll explain, as I realize this may come across as both pretentious and self-righteous (and I intend it to be neither).
The discipline of industrial design has had a long history of form giving, and the creation of objects and artifacts that relate to the incidental parts of life. Industrial designers make stuff, and the making of stuff is a commodity - a profession differentiated only by cost. That is, there are a huge amount of capable industrial design firms in the world (and increasingly in Asia), and these firms are only differentiated by the cost of their services. A commodity market affords only limited growth and only limited market share, and can never truly sustain itself in any meaningful manner.
The other major capability industrial designers are able to bring to a project is their understanding of, and abilities with, materials and manufacturing/development processes. This is advancing in the opposite direction of a commodity - it's becoming increasingly specialized, increasingly intellectual, and incredibly complicated. The complexity associated with new material introductions and advances has such deep tacit knowledge, and such strong connections to fundamental issues of chemistry, that it can't continue to be "owned" by designers - it needs to be managed and coordinated by scientists (which was the implicit point of Dr. Andrew Dent from Material Connexion, in his excellent keynote presentation at this very conference; I feel the irony was lost on much of the audience, unfortunately). In this way, while material sciences will absolutely not become commodities, they also will soon be out of the grasps of designers.
In addition to these changes in skillset, there is a trend towards the inclusion of digital components, controls and networked services in products that have traditionally been isolated, single artifacts. These less tangible aspects of the products need to be designed, too, and so the designer who was typically responsible for developing a form and function for an item must now concern themselves with systems, services and more complicated - and arguably, more intellectual - facets of design. The major corporations that are embracing design as a true innovation catalyst realize that differentiation requires specific attention to the design of these systems and the utilization of networked services.
And so we’ve reached a point in the history of technological culture where the IDSA has served its purpose, and is now obviously struggling to define what to do next. This is evident in a program filled with discussions of rendering techniques and in an exhibitor hall full of plastics and injection molding vendors; it’s obvious in powerpoint presentations that struggle with basic concepts of human behavior and interaction, and in hallway conversation of designers who aren’t sure how they can ensure they have a job in the “new economy” of the future.
Steve Portigal summed up my feelings nicely, in a blunt - but absolutely dead on - way. "The IDSA is the recording industry or car industry of professional societies". He's referencing a long history of positive contribution, but an increasing lack of relevance, and a desire to hold on to how things used to be - a feeling of tradition, and a celebration of an industry. IDSA, like GM, is struggling to evolve, but with many of the same leaders at the helm and with many of the same traditional viewpoints of how design should be.
Yet there's no shame in celebrating the past and simultaneously building a new, and very different future. The organizational body of IDSA is not the appropriate organization for shepherding the massive change required in industry and education, and that's OK, as they've already done the hard work of laying the groundwork upon which this massive change will come. I look to other professional organizations to lead the way, and I hope those who built the IDSA – and the field of mass-produced artifacts – can look happily at the fruits of their labor, and allow the organization to proudly retire.
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London Design Festival)
Several colleagues of mine are in London this week to unveil the special TEDGlobal issue of our design mind magazine in a very special TED Salon on Monday, with the title "More Substance of Things Not Seen." The event will be co-hosted by frog design and TED, and moderated by Sam Martin, editor-in-chief of design mind, and Bruno Giussani, European director of TED.
It comes in handy for the frog delegation that this is also the first week of the magnanimous London Design Festival, an eclectic assembly of design-related programs, exhibitions, and parties all over town. ... Read more
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Sustainable Life Media)
The Social Capital Markets (SOCAP) Conference, a landmark gathering of top business and government leaders creating market-based solutions for social impact, is taking place September 1-3, at San Francisco’s Fort Mason Center.
SOCAP brings together a unique mix of the world’s leading social innovators--traditional investors, impact investors, social entrepreneurs, philanthropists, new media, NGO’s and non-profits, wealth managers, development agencies, venture capitalists, MBA students, and other groups interested in the growing opportunities of social capital--who are catalysts of change across the globe.
Last year’s conference gathered more than 650 leading global investors and entrepreneurs from 26 countries. This year’s conference from September 1-3 in San Francisco is sold out again and features speakers from the Skoll Foundation, Participant Productions, Food Inc, GRITtv, LINKtv, Invisible Children, Global Giving, the World Economic Forum, Virgance, Kiva, Change.org, Ushahidi, McKinsey, The Economist, and many others. The opening keynote will be given by Sonal Shah, director of the White House Office for Social Innovation.
“SOCAP09 is the premier event that puts the flow of capital to social good into a context,” says Founder Kevin Jones. “In these turbulent times, social innovators in the public and private sectors, from foundations to social venture funds to development agencies to grassroots Web 2.0 activists, are working together to build a new economic foundation for the world. With our expert speakers, high-impact sessions, and exciting networking events, SOCAP09 is an essential gathering for anyone interested in the burgeoning field of social capital.”
We will be there, too, and will report back. You can also follow the conference online via:
Twitter: @socap09,#socap09
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INDEX)
To help expand the global conversation about design to improve life, INDEX:, a global nonprofit network organization based in Copenhagen, is partnering with Facebook to promote the online voting for the INDEX: 2009 People's Choice Award and enable an online discussion during the live stream of the awards show on August 28.
Worldwide voting began online on August 20 through www.designtoimprovelife.dk, and on-site in the Danish capital on August 21. During the People's Choice competition, everyone can vote for their own personal INDEX: favorite to win the People’s Choice Award. On August 28 at 6 p.m. GMT, INDEX: will be using Facebook technologies to let visitors watch the awards show on a live stream from the Danish National Broadcasting Center. Remote viewers will also be able to chat with their friends on Facebook while watching the award ceremony.
The winner of the People's Choice Award will be announced at the INDEX: Award Ceremony on August 28, along with the juried winners of the INDEX:Award 2009. The winner of the People's Choice Award 2009 will receive "The Egg," a chair designed by famous Danish designer Arne Jacobsen in 1958 for the Radisson SAS hotel in Copenhagen. All 69 design finalists will be on public view at the INDEX: Award Exhibition, as well as on the INDEX: website.
Full disclosure: Among the INDEX: finalists and candidates for the People’s Choice Award is frog design’s Project Masiluleke--a HIV self-test kit that combines existing, low-cost diagnostic technologies with mobile support services.
To make your vote, visit: www.designtoimprovelife.dk
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Noisy Decent Graphics)
Never let a crisis go to waste! Inspired by the transformative impetus of the economic downturn, we’ll soon be starting our series about “Meaning-Driven Business” that invites leading business thinkers as well as C-level executives to discuss alternative ways of doing business and creating value. The series is based on the assumption that the current crisis is also a moral crisis, a fundamental crisis of trust in business leadership. According to the Chicago Booth/Kellogg School Financial Trust Index from April 8, trust in business has reached unprecedented lows, with only 10% of Americans now saying they trust large corporations. The “future of capitalism,” it seems, is at stake.
All this serves as a clarion call for business as unusual, and new ideas and values are in high demand. We believe this is an important conversation, and with “Meaning-Driven Business” we would like to provide a forum in which our guest contributors (some of them our clients) can present their ideas – from different backgrounds, different industries, and different corporate functions. Obviously, we‘re not the only ones exploring new horizons for business, nor are we the first. Some distinguished scholars and thought leaders have staked the claim and produced some great thinking around this topic.
Let’s start with an unlikely expert: the Catholic Church. The New York Times reports that Pope Benedict XVI is worried about global capitalism going awry. In “Charity in Truth,” his first papal encyclical on economic and social matters, he posits that Roman Catholic teachings can help reign in Western economics by encouraging social justice (which always means solidarity with the poorer and weaker) and closely regulating the market. In the same article, the Times cites German archbishop Reinhard Marx, a close advisor to the pope, who has written a best seller titled “Das Kapital” (“The Capital”), in a not so subtle reference to his more famous namesake. Obviously inspired by the success of the German post-war model (and the European welfare state philosophy in general), the archbishop calls for a universal “global social market economy” but is prudent enough to acknowledge its limitations, quoting Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg: “I approve of the notion that Europe sees itself, unpretentiously, as a model for the world, but the consequence of that is that we would have to constantly change that model because we are not the world.”
Like the pope and his archbishop, economist Umar Haique argues that we need to re-boot capitalism. And like Reinhard Marx, he focuses on a re-definition of “capital.” His concept of “constructive capitalism,” however, is more radical than the social market economy solution Marx proposes. Haique demands that 21st century economics fundamentally rethink “what capital isn’t – and what capital really is.” “The value equation of industrial-era capitalism was toxically imbalanced. Why is industrial era business so destructive – why does it slash and burn rainforests, endanger entire species, vaporize culture and community, marginalize the poor and disadvantaged, and erode our health and vitality? Because none of those have value in an industrial economy: none are capitalized. So the bean counters of the world are free to plunder and ruin them – because, economically, they actually don't exist. 20th century capitalism, in other words, marginally valued pure financial capital too highly, while marginally valuing human, natural, social, and cultural capital at zero – or, at the limit, negatively." One example of the “capital deepening” Haique envisions are carbon assets: “Once they're capitalized, they become next-gen assets: assets that can be traded, hedged, remixed, tweaked, open-sourced, or shared. The difference is that they're assets with intrinsic, durable, human value – not the lemons Wall St was in the business of hawking. It is only by capitalizing the things we really value that the spark of value creation can be lit again.” As another example of really valuable capital Haique refers to Rypple, an ad-hoc social network that provides simple, direct, anonymous, and ongoing customer and employee feedback: “Rypple’s economic engine is powered by human and social capital – Rypple taps the connections people have with friends, colleagues, bosses, and mentors, to help them get smarter and more productive.”
Former Harvard professor Shoshana Zuboff would agree with Haique. She is the author of The Support Economy: Why Corporations Are Failing Individuals and the Next Episode of Capitalism, and in her recent BusinessWeek article “The Old Solutions Have Become the New Problems,” she proposes companies charter what she calls the “i-Space”: “Business is no longer just about the product. Now it’s about solutions for the individual. Economic value is hidden in consumers’ unmet needs and is released by providing people with the means to fulfill those needs. But in order to release new value, you need to get out of organization space and into the subjective space where individuals live. I call it ‘I-Space.’ This means shedding the ‘us-them’ mentality. Now everyone is an insider.” To succeed in i-space, companies “must federate and collaborate to compete:” “You can't do it alone because the needs of individuals don't conform to existing organizational and industry boundaries. This means learning how to manage what you don't control or own. These economies of trust are becoming even more important than economies of scale. (…) Amazon’s marketplace and eBay's webs of buyers and sellers are early prototypes of these federated networks. Apple and Facebook are struggling to understand the rules of engagement that should govern relationships with their applications developers. You can see them climbing a new learning curve through trial and error as they figure out how to build and sustain economies of trust.” Zuboff is wary of the old paradigms still taught in business school and calls all previous “compasses” obsolete: “You're in a new place. The bad news: There are no maps. The good news? You are the mapmaker.”
Similarly, Jeff Jarvis' concept of the "Share Economy” and Chris Anderson’s notion of the “Free Economy" are both based on the assumption that there is no viable business in markets in which information and content are abundant (i.e. the news industry) unless you add the value of aggregation, create artificial scarcity, or give away those abundant assets (i.e. music recordings) that drive attention to assets that are truly scarce (the live concert experience). Or as Kevin Kelly puts it in "Better than Free": "When copies are free, you need to sell things which cannot be copied."
Richard Edelman from Edelman PR believes we are entering a new era of “Mutual Social Responsibility,” in which “people (formerly labeled as ‘consumers’ by marketers!) contribute to society’s sustainability and well-being in partnership with business, government and non-governmental organizations. But they demand a seat at the table and real voice in the discussion.”
Noah Robischon from Fast Company coined the new, chic term “Ethonomics:” “We live in a world that's resource-constrained but ingenuity-rich. So an upstart generation of entrepreneurs – and innovators within the world's biggest companies – are founding businesses that are good for the world as well as the bottom line. They are practicing social change through urban revitalization, sustainable agriculture, green IT, alternative energy and online community-powered investing. Any business that claims to be truly sustainable and innovative should be increasingly efficient with energy and natural resources, transparent and accountable, and good on balance for people and other living things.”
Speaking of social, there are many who would argue that the future of social is indeed the future of business. This trend even extends to the world of finance – arguably the one industry sector that has suffered most from excessive short-term innovation and is in greatest need of real transformation. Social innovation platform Volans calls for a "WeBank" and asks: "Are people replacing institutions?" As an example of alternative micro- and real-time financing models it refers to Zopa, the world’s first online social finance company:”With no middlemen, less overhead, improved rates for lenders and borrowers, and a sense of transactions between ‘real people,' it creates trust and shared interests between lenders and borrowers.”
Peter Kim, together with Jeff Dachis, David Armano, and other partners, has launched “the first social business firm,” Dachis Corporation, and developed a "social business design framework" for "understanding and applying social constructs to business.” Social business design is “a mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive way of considering how a corporation, business unit, or project can create and capture value from today's emerging technologies and evolving operating environment. The social business design framework captures ecosystem (community), hivemind (culture), dynamic signal (collaboration), and metafilter (content). Putting these into play creates improved business outcomes as well as emergent outcomes. Measurement provides the backbone to the entire framework, as driving change requires proof.” The most interesting archetype of Social Business Design to me is the Dynamic Signal, “the concept that every activity and action is recorded and made available, that every piece of data goes from being a database entry and is instead an event. An event which can be managed, shared and collaborated on by all of those in the organization,” as Dachis partner Jevon MacDonald explains. This concept resembles the familiar vision of the “Real Time Enterprise.” Rypple – mentioned before – offers real-time, ongoing customer and peer feedback, acknowledging that “Real-time business is inherently social – there is no real-time without social."
Yet the accelerated transactions and interaction cycles on the Real-Time Web need to be balanced with sustainable thinking. Quick decisions are easier to make if they’re grounded in a long-term perspective' agility requires stability; and the prerequisite for openness is a strong (and tight) community. It is it ever-more important that companies have a stable foundation, rooted in a set of shared of values and beliefs. At least that’s Charles Handy thinks: “....what enables a corporation to succeed in the longer term is a wish for immortality, or at least a long life; a consistent set of values based on an awareness of the organization's own identity; a willingness to change; and a passionate concern for developing the capability and self-confidence of its core inhabitants, whom the company values more than its physical assets. I suggest that those conditions are best met when organizations live up to the literal meaning of the word company –‘the sharing of bread’ – and regard themselves as communities, not property.....in time, the laws governing corporations will change to reflect (this) new reality." ("Looking Ahead," HBR September 1997).
For former Procter & Gamble chairman and CEO A.G. Lafley “Balancing present and future” is one of the key responsibilities of CEOs: “Don't allow the short-term interests to take precedence over the company's long-term objectives," he warns in a recent article for the Harvard Business Review (“What Only the CEO Can Do”). He describes the CEO as the only person in an organization who can link the external with the internal perspective. “It’s a job that the CEO must do because without the outside there is no inside.” You could argue, of course, that the real-time, hyper-transparent social web has made that distinction obsolete anyway: Inside and outside are congruent; they are one and the same.
There are numerous other thinkers that envision a faster and yet more sustainable, social business as the future of capitalism, and you can browse through articles and blogs post without end. Some recurring themes emerge though the more you read: On the organizational, delivery side, these themes are "social,” “real-time,” and “micro.” And on the cultural, the leadership side, they are “authenticity,” “generosity,” and “empathy.” If you combine the two layers, you get an interesting matrix – let's call it the "Meaning-Driven Business Matrix.” This is the playing-field in which all product, service, and business model innovation will take place from now on – but that’s a topic for a whole series (coming soon).
