Real Estate Relativity » innovation

User participation in a QR quirky world

Eric Bryn — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 17:30:22 +0000

This video, The World Park Campaign, illustrates an excellent use of QR to not only drive a marketing result but reward users’ participation with something delightful. The focus of the campaign was an immersive marketing experience to drive wider participation and learning within a NYC park.

Similarly, read about what Bjork is doing to take participation with music to new levels. What Bjork has done is create a way to interact with her music via an app; for example:

Bjork fans with iPads or iPhones (there’s no Android version yet) can download a main app for Biophilia that’s free. You tap on it and open up to a black background with white, glowing starlike objects. Using your fingers to swipe and tap, the universe expands and turns, and bits of music and songs emerge.

Each song has its own star. You tap on it, and you can buy its app for $1.99 from the iTunes Store. Each one has essays about music and science, and each interacts with its song in a different way. Take “Thunderbolt,” whose arpeggiated bass line you can change by tapping on a lightning icon.

“You change the speed of the arpeggio, or the range,” Bjork says. “Basically, you’re like this crazy lightning bass player.

It’s the participation economy. Participatory media is the message (visit here for reference point).

Disruptive technology and its impact

Eric Bryn — Wed, 07 Sep 2011 21:14:45 +0000

The research article Demystifying Disruption: A New Model for Understanding and Predicting Disruptive Technologies (.pdf) delves into several topics related to understanding and predicting disruptive technologies. An interesting facet of the article is how it outlined three domains of disruption: technology disruption (when a new techology outperforms a dominant technology), firm disruption (when the market share of a firm leveraging a new technology exceeds that of the largest firm using a previously dominant technology), demand disruption (when the total share of products in the market based on a new technology exceeds that of products based on a previously dominant technology). The authors also focused on the method of attack:

A lower attack occurs when, at the time of its entry, a new technology performs worse than the dominant technology on the primary dimension of performance. An upper attack occurs when, at the time of its entry, a new technology performs better than the dominant technology on the primary dimension of performance

The authors tested the following hypotheses:

Technologies using a lower attack (potentially disruptive) come primarily from entrants
Technologies using an upper attack (sustaining breakthrough) come primarily from incumbents
Technologies using a lower attack (potentially disruptive) are priced lower than dominant technologies at entry
The hazard of disruption is higher from an entrant than from an incumbent
The hazard of ﬁrm or demand disruption is higher if a new technology uses a lower attack
The hazard of disruption is higher if a new technology is introduced by a small ﬁrm
The hazard of disruption is lower if a new technology is introduced by a small ﬁrm
The hazard of disruption is higher if a new technology is lower priced than the dominant technology at entry

What the authors discovered is that contrary to popular belief, incumbents in certain markets drive disruption as frequently as new entrants. In fact, in their study the authors found that:

only 8% of all technology disruptions and 25% of all ﬁrm disruptions were caused by entrants using a lower attack

- and -

although 47% of all technologies adopt a lower attack, only 16% of all technologies cause technology disruption and only14% of all technologies cause ﬁrm disruption via a lower attack

Interestingly, the authors note that a firm’s internal culture is responsible for undertaking an attack, rather than responding to an external threat. That’s why creating a culture of innovation and creativity is a key factor in successfully introducing a sustainable disruptive technology.

Google+ Integrated into Google Apps, Huh?

Eric Bryn — Sat, 06 Aug 2011 15:37:11 +0000

This morning I envisioned a headline on Mashable that could, someday, read: “Finally…Google+ Integrated into Google Apps”. The Enterprise Google Apps community has been waiting months for this to happen.

Surf with Google+

And still…we…wait. Once this happens, though, here are some ways Google+ will rock my business world:

Allow me to use one network (rather than several networks) to communicate with nearly 2,000 sales associates. This necessarily will increase my personal productivity. And with this productivity increase I’ll have more time to focus on providing more value to these 2,000 sales associates.
Give these nearly 2,000 sales associates one network to use (rather than several networks) to collaborate, share ideas, and help each other. They are THE community. Google+ in Apps will further unleash the collective brilliance of this community.
Leverage the Google+ social nervous system to achieve several business objectives by aligning fundamental community management concepts, principles, and processes within a social business ecosystem (as brilliantly illustrated by @davidarmano).

The tectonic plates of Google’s product development teams need to align and unleash the Pangaea of a social business platform for its Enterprise clients. Sooner rather than later, please, Google. Opportunity awaits us both.

Photo credit: gordontarpley

Creating a culture of participation while leveraging a culture of creativity and innovation

Eric Bryn — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 16:41:06 +0000

Previously I wrote about creating a culture of creativity and innovation. The salient points to remember in such an initiative are: foster a high level interaction, discussion, debate and have a leadership team that nurtures such an idea generating ecosystem.

Related to this topic is a fascinating research article I found that focuses on creating a culture of participation (.pdf). The article discusses collaborative design projects (as in architecture, landscape design, etc), but the premises are transcendent to many industries:

Creativity is an inherently collaborative and social activity and social-technical infrastructures facilitate such by organizing people around shared concerns as opposed to shared location
Diversity (as facilitated by shared concerns) promotes new ideas, insights, etc, by building bridges between local knowledge sources and exploiting “conceptual collisions” (related to Von Hippel’s studies in innovation at MIT).

The article elaborates on a couple of case studies and points out the following areas for further exploration: (1) the role of curators—as supported through technological infrastructure—to organize “living information repositories” (see related article on how the BBC uses data mining principles to enable more informed curatorial choices) and (2) enhanced tagging mechanisms that support heuristic knowledge discovery activities.

Additionally, there are two blog posts that relate to the themes raised above, courtesy of Daniel Rothamel and Rob Hahn respectively, essentially “create, then debate” and “embrace your inner auteur“.

Photo: Håkan Dahlström

Research from CISCO, innovation in business intelligence services, and predictive Web data mining

Eric Bryn — Fri, 06 May 2011 16:25:24 +0000

Below are three articles discussing emerging analytical theories on the nexus between Web+Social+Mobile:

Executive Primer: CISCO CIO Summit (.pdf): Excellent primer on how The Cloud, generally, is affecting enterprise IT strategic direction. Two gems: Chapter 6 “Together, the Customer Is Everywhere and Everyone” and Chapter 10 “Scenario Planning: Are You Ready?”.

Business Intelligence 2.0: Are we there yet? (.pdf): Excellent paper focusing on innovation in business intelligence; includes and excellent benefits analysis chart.

Toward Emerging Topic Detection for Business Intelligence: Predictive Analysis of ‘Meme’ Dynamics (.pdf): This is for analytical geeks only (:-D). The paper discusses the problem of monitoring the Web to spot emerging memes. Essentially, using predictive algorithms to tease out future memes, which would be useful to brand managers in terms of seeding current campaigns with flavors of the future as dictated by the algorithm. The risk is that it can get a bit tautological.