Technology At City University of Seattle

One of the new research arms not just in academia, but in business as well is a model that can predict the outcome of innovation, who has it, how do they use it, how can we harness it for personal or corporate advantage/gain. The problem is that innovation economics requires humans, and humans are messy, prone to fail at critical moments, or in many cases, need to know what is in it for them first long before they will do much of anything.

Had an interesting talk with Dan over at the Ingenesist Project who is working on a way to turn the innovation economy into a quantifiable process that we can measure, review and in some cases predict events or work within the confines of innovation. Many of the early adopters like Louis Gray, Robert Scoble, Mike Fruchter, and many others all are quite innovative. They naturally see a process, system, innovation as an end point solution. They get excited about it, talk about it, and others tend to naturally follow them. Robert, Louis and Mike have a very large following because of how they are perceived, they are the human filters, they can tell us what they think is cool. Not everything that Robert, Louis or Mike I find value in, but that is because my priorities are different.

Predicting what Mike, Louis and Robert will find interesting is somewhat quantifiable, by looking back at the projects/systems/people they have already engaged with. You can then take out the statistical outliers, and predict which systems/people/processes they are likely to engage with in the future. The math on this one is also interesting in that the math also needs to know what role people play within the process. With Building 43 Robert has a personal stake, with BurnURL Louis has a personal stake and so on, you measure and compute those personal stakes as skewing the results, and fork them into different channels the more you know about what they are up to. Fortunately Robert, Louis and Mike all live fairly public lives, it is easy to work out what they like, what they don’t like, and where they work or what they have a personal stake in.

The problem comes in with a normal top down or middle down hierarchy in a standard business. How much about you does your manager really know? If you are like most employees you try to keep your employer at arm’s length, you run into what I call the CP3 problem. Culture, people, personality and politics that govern all human social interactions, which you can see easily in an organization, but not necessarily so easy when it comes to the social web because we are hanging out with people we know or we like what they say. Work is the only time in our lives that we are hanging around with people who in some cases we would never allow into our regular lives. It becomes much harder to work out innovation economics with the standard class hierarchy of an organization. There are pockets of innovation or innovative people, but the relationships they are building with each other are transitory business relationships, not deep personal predictive relationships unless the people involved do something somewhat rare, make friends or make a personal connection with the people they work with. IT people, programmers, security engineers by using a broad brush stroke are not social. They might have great ideas, but have problems communicating those ideas.

Business managers then have to work out a predictive model of the people they have as employees, who are innovative enough that they can take an idea, translate it to business goals, and execute on that idea to the gain of the company and the person. The currency that must be used is the personal relationships, not necessarily dollars. The “WIIFM” (What’s in it for me) of all this is how to appeal to personal gain while allowing people or providing people the opportunity to be innovative within the organization. Not an easy task when people within the organization might not have a clue what someone is talking about, even harder when the innovation cannot be quantified into a solid business goal with a business gain.

Corporations also do not engender trust broadly across the board. Two major busts since 2000, the dot com bust, and the current bust we are living through now impede the process of innovation within a company. Companies go into survival mode, fire employees, create a climate of fear, and generally build a high level of distrust and in some cases anger/angst towards the company/managers/supervisors. Innovation economics requires trust in the system to provide value/gain, when companies do not provide a trusting environment; innovation within that company will suffer or eventually fall off the map. Survival mode is a bare bones existence; people are lower on the Maslow hierarchy, and worrying about security rather than actualization. The innovation economy fails within the company.

The more interesting part to the innovation economy is that people with a good self esteem, good ideas, who have entrepreneurial skills, might take their ideas with them and go start a company. Any potential gain to the old employer is gone, there is a new company in town that may or may not make it in the regular day to day economy. Tales of successful entrepreneurs dot the landscape from Silicon Valley to Seattle to Boston. They had great ideas, worked out a way to make them happen, and are now highly successful. But like any circular process, they get big, they kill innovation internally, people move out to prove or disprove their idea in the common market place.

Innovation economics relies on the process of great ideas moving out of large companies, with a set of people who can work well with each other, share a common vision/dream. The new web communications environment means that I personally have access to the same resources that Microsoft has (honestly I can hire 10 outsourced programmers and have them program some of the things I think would be cool) as long as I can afford or find a way to afford hiring the right people to help me realize my dream.

Interesting concepts, you can learn more about this line of thinking over at the Ingenesist Project; this is going to take days to digest.

Reposted from Techwag with permission.

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