reading - Jimmy Breeze on Diigo

And so it is with innovation: it comes in many flavors, and the ability to discern those flavors and proceed accordingly is a foundational of skill of individuals and organizations who are able to achieve innovation outcomes on a routine basis.
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- Three different flavors of innovation are defined by these quadrants:
  
  Incremental Innovation: you seek to deliver improvements to offerings you already sell to people who you understand fairly well. Your capabilities as an organization are designed to deliver these offerings to these people.
  Evolutionary Innovation: one aspect of your offering (either unfamiliar people or an unfamiliar offering space) is changing as you seek to bring new something to market, forcing you to evolve away from what you know. Your mainstream organization will be only partially equipped to successfully innovate here.
  Revolutionary Innovation: the proverbial blank sheet of paper. Everything is new, as you don't have a history with the offerings, nor do you understand the people here. Your mainstream organization not only is not equipped to innovate successfully here, it won't even see the value in innovating here.
- There is no value judgment being applied across these three flavors of innovation. Though "revolutionary" innovation is the flavor which captures the imagination of the public, incremental innovation is what keeps the lights on and your brands relevant in the short term. But revolutionary innovations are what lead to breakthroughs that build value for the future. In reality, a healthy organization must maintain a portfolio of innovation initiatives across this landscape if it wants to stay healthy for the long haul.

10 Apr 09

this is effectively a great reading list - the courses that trebor scholz teaches at the eugene lang school (part of the new school) - great stuff on democratization, the public sphere, networks etc etc

www.collectivate.net/courses - Preview

learning education essential reading

We will study excerpts from texts by Jürgen Habermas, Yochai Benkler, and Michael Warner about the changing nature of the public sphere. For questions about labor in relation to the Internet we will read sections from books including Andrew Ross’ No-Collar, Ellen Ullman’s Close to the Machine, Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code, and Adam Arvidsson’s The Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy as well as essays by Nicholas Carr, Trebor Scholz, and Olga Goriunova. Our discussions about the history of the Net and World Wide Web will be based on Timothy Berners Lee’s Weaving the Web, Fred Turner’s From Counterculture to Cyberculture, Richard Barbrook’s Imaginary Futures, Robert Cailliau’s How the Web Was Born, and Katie Hafner’s Where Wizards Stay Up Late.
This course will examine activist projects from outside the United States and Europe and discuss texts books including Digital Media and Democracy: Tactics in Hard Times, edited by Megan Boler, Baghdad Burning: A Girl Blog from Iraq by Riverbend, We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs by Nasrin Alavi , Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi by Salam Pax, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering by Brian Holmes, A Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark, We the Media by Dan Gillmor, Zero Comments by Geert Lovink, Cyberactivism: Online Activism in Theory and Practice by Martha McCaughey and Michael D. Ayers, and the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-Dissidents by Sylvie Devilette, Anne Martinez-Saiz, and Nuit de Chine.
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- Balancing face-to-face discussions with online exchanges, we will draw on readings including Paolo Virno’s Grammar of the Multitude, Ted Purves’ What We Want Is Free, Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, Armand Mattelart’s The Invention of Communication, Tiziana Terranova’s Network Culture, David Weinberger’s Everything is Miscellaneous, Mark Andrejevic’s Reality TV, and Ray Oldenberg’s The Great Good Place.
- “Democratization and the networked public sphere” will focus on various arguments for and against this central claim by examining historical and present-day understandings of the public sphere, ranging from theorists such as Jürgen Habermas and Alexander Kluge to Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler.

29 Mar 09

Oxford Internet Institute - Research - Publications

fantastic resource - all the OII working papers freely available

www.oii.ox.ac.uk/...publications.cfm - Preview

internet research free reading

09 Mar 09

"Social Media is Here to Stay... Now What?"

go danah

www.danah.org/...MSRTechFest2009.html - Preview

socialmedia web2.0 blogging reading

For the technology crowd, Web2.0 was about a shift in development and deployment. Rather than producing a product, testing it, and shipping it to be consumed by an audience that was disconnected from the developer, Web2.0 was about the perpetual beta.
For the business crowd, Web2.0 can be understood as hope. Web2.0 emerged out of the ashes of the fallen tech bubble and bust.
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- For users, Web2.0 was all about reorganizing web-based practices around Friends.
- Web2.0 reworked all of that by allowing users to connect in new ways. While many of the tools may have been designed to help people find others, what Web2.0 showed was that people really wanted a way to connect with those that they already knew in new ways. Even tools like MySpace and Facebook which are typically labeled social networkING sites were never really about networking for most users. They were about socializing inside of pre-existing networks.
- There are triggers that drive early adopters to a site, but the single most important factor in determining whether or not a person will adopt one of these sites is whether or not it is the place where their friends hangout
- Friendster didn't understand network effects. In kicking off users who weren't conforming to their standards, they pissed off more than those users; they pissed off those users' friends who were left with little purpose to use the site. The popularity of Friendster unraveled as fast as it picked up, but the company never realized what hit them. All of their metrics were based on number of users. While only a few users deleted their accounts, the impact of those lost accounts was huge.
- Network effects should be extremely important to most of you.
  
  Marketers know all about stickiness, but how many of you measure network density? You purchase all sorts of data from Nielsen and comScore that tells you about uniques, but do you know anything about the cluster dynamics of the users? Are you able to see when the network graph is reaching a sustainable point or, more importantly, when things are starting to fracture?
- We're all developing nice new social technologies for the mobile phone. And people even want those technologies. But they aren't taking off. Why? There are no cluster effects. If you use IE and I use Firefox, we can still both get to Facebook. If you use Windows Mobile and I use an iPhone or you're on Verizon and I'm on AT&T, the chances of us being able to do the same things with our devices are pretty limited, especially when you take into account the limited nature of data plans. We can't role out cool new technologies if we can't get cluster effects. We don't just need network effects to get things to spread; we also need to think in terms of complete clusters. And we need to design with this in mind.
- Adults, far more than teens, are using Facebook for its intended purpose as a social utility. For example, it is a tool for communicating with the past.
- Social media continues to be age-graded. Right now, Twitter is all the rage, but are kids using it? For the most part, no. It's not the act of creating and sharing social nuggets that's the issue. Teens are actively using Facebook status update, MySpace bulletins, and IM away messages to share their views on the day and their mood of the moment. So why not Twitter? While it's possible to make Twitter "private," the culture of Twitter is all about participation in a large public square. From the digerati seeking widespread attention to the politically minded hoping to appear on CNN, many are leveraging Twitter to be part of a broad dialogue. Teens are much more motivated to talk only with their friends and they learned a harsh lesson with social network sites. Even if they are just trying to talk to their friends, those who hold power over them are going to access everything they wrote if it's in public. While the ethos among teens is "public by default, private when necessary," many are learning that it's just not worth it to have a worrying mother obsess over every mood you seek to convey. This dynamic showcases how social factors are key to the adoption of new forms of social media.
- Policy makers in this country are hell-bent on "solving" the safety problem, but what they're trying to fix is not what's really happening. Yet, in trying to address public fears, they run the risk of putting more kids in harm's way AND forcing companies to build technologies that would help no one.

Capitalism Beyond the Crisis - The New York Review of Books

www.nybooks.com/22490 - Preview

capitalism economics society health policy reading

I would separate out three questions from the many that can be raised. First, do we really need some kind of "new capitalism" rather than an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of institutions chosen pragmatically, and is based on social values that we can defend ethically?
The second question concerns the kind of economics that is needed today, especially in light of the present economic crisis. How do we assess what is taught and championed among academic economists as a guide to economic policy—including the revival of Keynesian thought in recent months as the crisis has grown fierce? More particularly, what does the present economic crisis tell us about the institutions and priorities to look for? Third, in addition to working our way toward a better assessment of what long-term changes are needed, we have to think—and think fast—about how to get out of the present crisis with as little damage as possible
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- All affluent countries in the world—those in Europe, as well as the US, Canada, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Australia, and others—have, for quite some time now, depended partly on transactions and other payments that occur largely outside markets. These include unemployment benefits, public pensions, other features of social security, and the provision of education, health care, and a variety of other services distributed through nonmarket arrangements. The economic entitlements connected with such services are not based on private ownership and property rights.
- an economy can operate effectively only on the basis of trust among different parties. When business activities, including those of banks and other financial institutions, generate the confidence that they can and will do the things they pledge, then relations among lenders and borrowers can go smoothly in a mutually supportive way.
- When the people of any particular country have such confidence in the fortune, probity, and prudence of a particular banker, as to believe that he is always ready to pay upon demand such of his promissory notes as are likely to be at any time presented to him; those notes come to have the same currency as gold and silver money, from the confidence that such money can at any time be had for them.^[1]
- The most immediate failure of the market mechanism lies in the things that the market leaves undone.
- The moral and legal obligations and responsibilities associated with transactions have in recent years become much harder to trace, thanks to the rapid development of secondary markets involving derivatives and other financial instruments. A subprime lender who misleads a borrower into taking unwise risks can now pass off the financial assets to third parties—who are remote from the original transaction. Accountability has been badly undermined, and the need for supervision and regulation has become much stronger.
- The insufficient regulation of financial activities has implications not only for illegitimate practices, but also for a tendency toward overspeculation that, as Adam Smith argued, tends to grip many human beings in their breathless search for profits.
  
  Smith called the promoters of excessive risk in search of profits "prodigals and projectors"—which is quite a good description of issuers of subprime mortgages over the past few years.
- the cumulative downturn that we are observing right now, which is edging us closer to a depression, has clear Keynesian features; the reduced incomes of one group of persons has led to reduced purchases by them, in turn causing a further reduction in the income of others.
- One economist whose current relevance has been far less recognized is Keynes's rival Arthur Cecil Pigou
- Pigou focused particularly on the need to unfreeze the credit market when the economy is in the grip of excessive pessimism:
- Despite huge injections of fresh liquidity into the American and European economies, largely from the government, the banks and financial institutions have until now remained unwilling to unfreeze the credit market. Other businesses also continue to fail, partly in response to already diminished demand (the Keynesian "multiplier" process), but also in response to fear of even less demand in the future, in a climate of general gloom (the Pigovian process of infectious pessimism).
- The contrast between Pigou and Keynes is relevant for another reason as well. While Keynes was very involved with the question of how to increase aggregate income, he was relatively less engaged in analyzing problems of unequal distribution of wealth and of social welfare. In contrast, Pigou not only wrote the classic study of welfare economics, but he also pioneered the measurement of economic inequality as a major indicator for economic assessment and policy.
- Since the suffering of the most deprived people in each economy—and in the world—demands the most urgent attention, the role of supportive cooperation between business and government cannot stop only with mutually coordinated expansion of an economy. There is a critical need for paying special attention to the underdogs of society in planning a response to the current crisis, and in going beyond measures to produce general economic expansion. Families threatened with unemployment, with lack of medical care, and with social as well as economic deprivation have been hit particularly hard. The limitations of Keynesian economics to address their problems demand much greater recognition.
- (Pigou too contributed to this subject with his emphasis on the "external effects" of market transactions, where the gains and losses are not confined only to the direct buyers or sellers.) This is, of course, a long-term issue, but it is worth noting in addition that the bite of a downturn can be much fiercer when health care in particular is not guaranteed for all.
- For example, in the absence of a national health service, every lost job can produce a larger exclusion from essential health care, because of loss of income or loss of employment-related private health insurance. The US has a 7.6 percent rate of unemployment now, which is beginning to cause huge deprivation.
- Smith and Pigou have the reputation of being rather conservative economists, many of the deep insights about the importance of nonmarket institutions and nonprofit values came from them, rather than from Keynes and his followers.
- Since the Chinese dropped universal health insurance in 1979, Kerala—which continues to have it—has very substantially overtaken China in average life expectancy and in indicators such as infant mortality, despite having a much lower level of per capita income. So there are opportunities for poor countries as well.
- The present economic crises do not, I would argue, call for a "new capitalism," but they do demand a new understanding of older ideas, such as those of Smith and, nearer our time, of Pigou, many of which have been sadly neglected.

05 Mar 09

Wall Street on the Tundra | vanityfair.com

according to Dani Rodrick this is an excellent article...I need to read it!

www.vanityfair.com/...iceland200904 - Preview

finance economics reading

04 Mar 09

The Groundswell Video by Charlene Li | LizAzyan Research

www.lgeoresearch.com/oundswell-video-by-charlene-li - Preview

web2.0 research internet video reading

03 Mar 09

Noah Brier's Brand Laboratory - BusinessWeek

really interesting guy...1) should read Linked by Barabasi and 2) need to learn how to build elementary web pages and PHP

www.businessweek.com/...id2009029_151561.htm - Preview

inspiration people socialmedia marketing reading

Brier learned how to build elementary Web pages as a 13-year-old middle school student in Connecticut. Later he taught himself PHP, the scripting language for building dynamic Web sites. He makes it clear that his level of expertise is, at best, basic. But the point is that when he gets an idea, he can try stuff.
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- Not all of it is in the digital world. Two and a half years ago, Brier and a friend, Piers Fawkes, founder of trends company PSFK, decided people weren't mingling enough with other interesting people outside their jobs. Brier asked on his blog if people wanted to get together one morning in Manhattan for coffee. That was the birth of LikeMind. It's a monthly gathering that has spread from New York to 50 cities worldwide. "These are hosted by random people around the world who just ask us," he says. In each place, the dynamic is different. Like much of what Brier creates—and much of social media—it starts off with an idea, and people take it where they will.

01 Mar 09

An iPod Has Global Value. Ask the (Many) Countries That Make It. - New York Times

www.nytimes.com/...28scene.html - Preview

economics statistics trade Japan business reading

25 Feb 09

Guy Kawasaki on Innovation and the Myth of Lightning-Bolt Inspiration - CIO.com - Business Technology Leadership

www.cio.com/..._of_Lightning_Bolt_Inspiration - Preview

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