broadstuff

Was invited to the Telco 2.0 Brainstorm on Thursday to hear about where we now are with digital media, and especially to hear Keith McMahon, my collaborator on our 2008 Web TV research, do an update on some of his research on the TV & Film industry's value chain. I felt the first 2 sessions gave the most insights (ie stuff readers of this blog may find new) so here is a precis:

First up was David Touve, Professor of Strategy, Williams School of Commerce - his talk was based around the 2x2 matrix above - initially Digital Media thought the Immersive experience (top right) was the "killer app" but it turns out we use all 4 quadrants to educate, inform and entertain ourselves as they have different capabilities. Increasingly for service providers the issue is "toggleability" between the service types. He felt the new smartphones (iPhone onwards) are a major step forward as they toggle well and are fast to use - and, of course, mobile so can be used more often

Next up Adam Smith, Global Futures Director, GroupM who confirmed something we noted 2 years ago - ie there is not enough Ad revenue on the planet to fund all the digital media services people want to build. He noted the revenue is being re-allocated into Social Media and away from pure search as other forms start to adopt "Cost per Action" pricings. One observation I liked is that Traditional advertising gets you to the door, digital advertising gets you into the shop - and they are not competing with each other, more complementary from an advertisers point of view - and the cost and effectiveness of Trad Ad is still way better than digital. Thus in fact the digital behemoths are actually spending increasingly more money in traditional Advertising (cf Google advertising on TV and on billboards).

Then Andrew Bud, Chairman, Mobile Entertainment Forum who argued that Mobile Digital Media is being transformed by 3 forces today:

Consumption Terminals
Mobule no longer means "phone", it means the car, laptop, game console, tablet etc are all now mobile consumption terminals. Power is moving to the owners of the terminal (the fourth and most downstream phase in the classic 4 box model of the media value chain ) from the content owner, aggregator, and distributor (the upstream elements in the 4 box model). Apple paved the way, others are following suit and this is driving new ecosystems.

MultiChannel Worlds
Bud argues that by 2008 it was becoming clear that "mobile" as a separate media business was doomed and its increasingly become all about multi-channel media relationships (cf "toggleability") (I'd agree, but in 2008 when we mooted this there was strong resistance)

Enablers
Bud believes a new layer has emerged - the Enabler - that is driving that seamless "toggleable" consumer experience, and that these are the new areas of value growth. Key rules are (wait for it....)

- Fast and Simple
- No Questions - Must know beforehand what you like, so needs previous input
- No surprises - like sticker shock on music downloads

If that sounds much like Planet Mobile 2005, I'm afraid its because it is. However, we now have a new tool (ta da) - The Enabler - to finally make it all happen. The MEF has projects looking at Enablers for Delivery, Billing (especially refunds), Handset context and Subscriber Insight. Again, 2005 redux methinks.

Well, you know our view of Planet Mobile - for any New Thing, halve the predicted value, double the time taken. We see no reason not to apply that to Enablers. I added this session if only to show that in Planet Mobile things the more things change, the more they are the same.

To be fair to Andrew, he did make the point that since Planet Mobile is moving so slowly it was highly likely that other over-the-top service providers - especially terminal makers - are likely to steal the game away (I had to smile wryly, I was immersed in all this in 2004/5 when we were trying to show Planet Mobile that the music market was going to be stolen from them)

Keith's talk was on the dynamics of the Movie market, and there was quite a bit of stuff on the problems with windowing (ie timing the release of a movie in cinemas' on DVDs, by country etc)- but I want to combine that with a talk given by Caroline Wiertz at our recent TEDxTuttle conference in a later post. For the purposes of this post, he listed a number of areas where studios need the help of the digital community:

- Data Mining
- Measurement across channels
- Reach
- Improved Content Discovery
- Optimising content 9especially Ads) across the User's profile
- Lowering Distribution Costs
- Simplify Transactions, but at the same time....
- Protecting against Theft, to...
- Get better value online

Tell me you haven't heard all that before

In fact, as Keith pointed out, what is interesting comparing now vs when we did our report in 2008, is just how little the mainstream media industry as a whole has changed its structure and concerns, despite its rapidly falling profitability.

The last 2 sessions were on Mobile Apps (if you read Techmeme and use an iPhone you know the state of the art) and Devices as a source of new business (see above, but in more detail)

I will leave you with an interesting little aside from the day - I can't recall who said it (notes are a bit awry) but one person showed graphs noting that if one looks at the total amount of Music Piracy over the 'Net 2000 - 2010 it is minute compared to say the total number of songs played over radio in the same period so the industry doth definitely protest too much. I will try and find them and reproduce them.

It was quite interesting watching the Twitterstream during the UK's 3rd debate between the 3 main parties. As always with Twitter it was a chaotic maelstrom of stuff - serious, scurrilous, funny and dull - leading Tweetdeck 's founder Ian Dodsworth to say:

90% of #leadersdebate search tweets are essentially moronic - this is pointless

My response to Ian is that we need a cr*pfilter to cull 90% of your twtstreams . But I must say it was - as always - a brilliant experience watching the realtime commentary as the event unfolded. We believe this is because it allows a broadcast media process to have a feedback element.

And of course, after the event the Spin Doctors come into the studio to try and tell us their man has won - and as usual the YouGov instant poll showed the Tory leader, David Cameron, in front (please note though that YouGov's CEO is a Tory MP candidate, but the Meedja never say that..... ) But the Twitterstream was clear - most felt the Mr Clegg (LibDem) and Gordon Brown (Labour) had edged it, typical twts being:

Also, an online poll - @youdecide2010 - "ITV Instant Poll Scores: Who had the best debate tonight?" showed (as of 1 hour after the debate) that was on Clegg 54%, Brown 39%, Cameron 11%.



Update (as of 8.30 am) - in fact, the whole polling question is becoming quite interesting after this debate, as there is quite a wide disparity among the polls. A quick summary looks like:

- The Tory press (ie Tory sympathetic papers , especially those owned by Rupert Murdoch, and Sky as well) have Cameron as a clear winner. This is being reported by the MSM media, with little analysis of where the data comes from

- Internet based "You vote" polls like the one above, on Facebook and those in the online sites of the newspapers (eg the Grauniad here) have Clegg a clear winner. These are largely being ignored by the mainstream media

- Most independent "mainstream" polls (and this interesting sentiment analysis) have it shaded between Cameron and Clegg to no great statistical benefit. These are being underplayed by much of the mainstream media - not clear why.

For the record I'm fairly apolitical on all this (I 've voted Green for 20 years fwiw), but it seems as if some sort of concerted effort is going on in the MSM to push Mr Cameron ahead - clearly in the hope that the Floating Voter gets the feeling that that is where all les autres are going. But I think they've missed the ark, I think a lot of the Floating Voters are on the Online media and are picking up different messages, or at least seeing the feedback loops o the rebuttals (see my article on this here)

The evidence - from what I can see at the moment anyway - is that the Floating Voters are more strongly Lib Dem in flavour right now, and the MSM organs are pretty much preaching to their own choirs.

Last night we launched the Big Potatoes Innovation Manifesto (main site here, summary of manifesto here).

For those who are not familiar with it, essentially we believe that "Innovation" today has often been watered down to not a lot more that "continuous improvement that won't rock the boats", and we need to do a lot better than that - and the view we can use today's technologies - to solve the problems today

from our point of view, the main thing is to create a debate, so we tend to the moer definite thought 0 ans ome of our views are counter intuitive and others are just plain provocative. Here are some of the interesting points that people made last night in response:

Additions

- The unmentioned "elephant in the room" in the manifesto is Organisational Behaviour - the reason Innovation is in trouble is due to the structure of modern institutions (cf The Corporation)

- Ethics: we are too light on ethics, in that not all innovation is "good" and we need to do more about that

Criticisms

- We are too rude about the Precautionary principle, tere is a place for it when the risks are very material

- Ditto the agreed level of Global warming science (our view is that its hubris to believe that the science is now settled and there is no space for further innovation, as the one thing history has proven is that the minute one believes the science is a done deal, along comes something that proves it isn't)

- We are also too rude about regulation. Our view is that it seems to always be either prone to creating the effect it was trying to avoid, or (and?) usurped by vested (usually traditional) interests

- We are not specific enough on defining the differenece betewwn Research, Development, Innovation, Invention etc. But then thsi person also said that Innovation is not risky if you know ewhat customers want and is all about making money - which is exactly the view of Innovation we object to - we unapologetically want to take Innovation back to what it meant up to 20-odd years ago, when it stood for change, and potentially creatively destructive, change.

- Intellectual Property laws are a big issue and we gloss over the ramifications of it on Innovation

- We are also too rude about Open Innovation (we believe it has distinct limitations and is not a panacea.)

- "Blue Sky" research needs to be aimed (we believe it is an option you play, investing a proportion of your resorce - and that any research doen to fix real problems is not wasted.
Observations

- Munita Mirza from the London Mayor's Office noted that "Creativity" has been abused and diluted in the Arts in a similar way that Innovation has in the enterprise world.

- Fewer potential MP's than ever before in 100 years have science or engineering a background in this election (I don't know if its true) so what chance has technology based innovation got vs the policy and regulation wonks

- The "Fetishisation" of youth and of lack of expertise today in popular society is a big problem, you have to know the rules to break them.

I'll leave you with this comment from afterwards.

"There is a deep disquiet in the population at large that current institutions, politicians etc can no longer deliver the srevices we need. People are recombining in new ways to solve this. You guys (ie Big Potatoes nnovation Mainifesto ) are not only a part of any solution set, but also and a part of this trend of people self organising to drive new ideas.

Now here's a surprise for you - Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg doesn't believe in privacy - Wired:

this came about: Not in a proper article, but in a tweet by Nick Bilton, lead technology blogger for the The New York Times‘ Bits Blog, based on a conversation he says was “off the record” and which he may have confused with “not for attribution.”

“Off record chat w/ Facebook employee,” begins Bilton’s fateful tweet. “Me: How does Zuck feel about privacy? Response: [laughter] He doesn’t believe in it.”

Ouch.

Zuckerberg’s apparent disregard for your privacy is probably not reason enough to delete your Facebook account. But we wouldn’t recommend posting anything there that you wouldn’t want marketers, legal authorities, governments (or your mother) to see, especially as Facebook continues to push more and more of users’ information public and even into the hands of other companies, leaving the onus on users to figure out its Rubik’s Cube-esque privacy controls.

As before...caveat emptor.

There has been a bit of a backlash this week on the use (or lack) of Social Media tools in the current UK election vs what was predicted, and a view that the mainstream media still rules. I'm not sure, and I offer three thoughts:

You see what you measure

The mainstream media is not really monitoring what is going on in social media, or at least is either misunderstanding it or choosing to ignore it. A good example of this is the #nickcleggsfault (see our article here) Twitterstream, which was a response to totally over the top "attack dog" reporting by the (mainly Conservative) MSM journalists attached to the parties. The respected BBC Newsnight program noted that the Twitter campaign forced the MSM to change their tune in hours (as we predicted, in fact) - so the impact was noticed by the BBC - but in the MSM newspapers the next day it was either hardly reported or dismissed as "Lib Dem supporters". It wasn't, it was a general riposte from a lot of the online public at what was felt to be totally OTT and unnecessary party political hackery.

Cognitive Dissoning

The same Newsnight programme made the point about "Blackberry man" vs "iPhone woman". Blackberry man gets emails from his superiors, telling him what to think. iPhone Woman uses the smartphone's social functions to chat to friends and test ideas - and respond in activities like #nickcleggsfault, or spread the word about sites like Count My Vote which tell you at a grassroots level what locals are thinking, rather than what pollsters tell you they are thinking. In other words, its the difference between a Following (Old Skool) and a Community (New Model). This is important, as study after study shows that many people tend to follow what they perceive as the majority opinion. Change the perception of what you think the majority opinion is by allowing people to see what's actually going on for themselves, and you change behaviour and attitudes. (Cf Death Knell for Strong AGW once real data weather emerged)

Which Choir are you preaching to?

The real point is this - of those who vote, about 30% of people will always vote Labour, about 30% will always vote Tory, about 20% will always vote Liberal Democrat. Elections are won, or lost, on who gets the other 20% - the "Floating Voter". These people's impact is massively amplified therefore.

The other thing is the Non Voter - these are latent Floating Voters, and the question is "what is going to get them off their arses"? The same old same old won't do it, so the only way to get new behaviour will be new mediiums

The question for the MSM Party Hacks is this - are their MSM stories getting through to these Floating Voters? I doubt it. As Adam Tinworth on One Man and his Blog notes:

I am a perpetual floating voter. I have political opinions, but no strong party loyalty - and I've voted for all the main parties and some minority ones in the elections I've participated in over the last couple of decades. There's a simple reason for this: I believe that the cut and thrust of discussion is at the root of politics, and the more tribal you are in your politics, the more likely you are to say "Party X must never get into power again", the less likely you are to engage in discussion in a thoughtful, intelligent way.

And this is a rather long-winded way of explaining why I've largely abandoned Twitter during this election campaign. Whereas most of my reading pre-election came from links on Twitter, now most of my stream seems to be filled with tribal posturing and links to "amusing" photoshopping of election posters. It seems to me, well, petty. And not a little childish.

Have I retreated to newspapers? No. The depressing predictability of the tribal voices on our national press has lead to precious little that inspires, informs or educates in them. Instead, I've found myself actively seeking out more intelligent and cogent debate on blogs (including, admittedly, some from national newspaper journalists) and sites specifically dedicated to political discussion like Talk Issues.

Ahem....my theory....

I have a hypothesis - firstly, we know that that the Floating Voter is the independent minded soul who who listens to a range of views and makes their own mind up. Secondly, we know they are swayable by many things but - I would argue - not by the MSM Party Press Megaphone anymore

So where is the floating voter, and who is talking to them, and who are they talking to? Here is my hypothesis - these are the people who participate in #nickcleggsfault, these are the people reading thoughtful blogs and writers, these are the people chatting on their iPhones and other social media vehicles.

I suspect that when the election is over and rational analysis returns, we will find that the MSM totally missed its Floating target, and that the new media was on to it to a far higher extent.

But the MSM Party Hackmachines can't see them because they aren't looking, and even when they do see - out the corner of an eye - they mislabel what's going on.

Must be #nickcleggsfault, of course.

Update - a few people have made the point about the impact of the TV debates being big drivers of change - I'm not disputing this, my point is more that the downplaying of Social Media's impact is because the MSM are discounting who are mainly using it - the floating voters - because they are not measuring it properly. In fact it's quite interesting watching the Twitterstreams during these debates

Your local friendly Eurocrat, in trying to nail Hedge Fund buccaneers looks like they have accidently nailed the EU VC industry - TechCrunch:

The AIDM Directive is part of wider moves by the European Commission to regulate the ‘riskier’ end of the financial system. But in seeking to impose greater transparency and accountability on hedge funds and private equity firms, like a cod trawler killing dophins, this drag net could destroy the early stage investment scene in Europe.

This is “catch-all” regulation stretches across hedge funds to venture firms, with very little consideration of how these vehicles operate. The trouble is that VC has been lumped in with things which pose a “systemic risk” to the financial system, when that’s not the case at all.

Under the proposed Directive, VCs will be required to disclose a lot more information, which is likely to cost as much as €100,000 annually per investee company. The Directive also imposes much greater capital requirements on venture firms, even as funds are shrinking to reflect the ease of creating startups now. VCs will also have to use outside depositaries (i.e. custodians) and independent valuation agents, again, adding cost and complexity.

The result is that successful start-ups from Europe like Skype, MySQL and Playfish would be less inclined to take VC money from European investors, because it will cost more.

Apparently 500-odd EU VC's have already signed up to a protest petition, but my view is that the VC industry - c 3% of the total "risky money" industry in the EU - needs to be aware that the EU have to regulate the Hedge Funds etc after The Crunch. They therefore need to make a carve-out proposal in my view.

The obvious thing is to have a materiality test - to lodge €100,000 worth of cost you need to be doing deals of €10m and above at least, so that would be a good cutoff and should cover nearly all VC activity..

What with Google, Facebook and Blippy et al in the news for scraping and flogging user data to turn a quick buck, Steven Hodson asks the question that is on many observer's minds - what exactly is social media now for:

After all when you hear a bunch of developers cheering [at the f8 Conference] because Facebook has removed a key user data protection element in their insatiable quest to control as much of the Social Web as possible you have to wonder just who is the Web for anymore.

When you hear terms like we’re doing this to improve the social experience; which if anyone decides to look past the warm and fuzzy buzzwords, it is easy to see that this is more about improving the company’s social experience and ability to monetize our activity on the Web. What it isn’t about is us saying what will make our experience better and when we raise questions we are either lumped in with the open web freetards (like it’s a bad thing) or we’re some sort of troglodytes.

Sometimes it feels like Social Media is nothing more than one great big social experiment to see just how far we can be made to shift our perception of what privacy is. It isn’t a shift that is truly benefiting us in anyway. Is it really that important to know immediately what some person who has followed you is listening to? Is it really necessary that we know what some person who has friended you has spent or bought.

But a few short years ago, Social Media was for YOU! Remember that time? Yet now its all for THEM.

This is no longer your web or my web but rather the pitched corporate battle ground where things like privacy are looked upon as the mutual enemy and that we need to be coerced into believing that these companies know what is best for us.

It doesn’t matter that the Web is slowly becoming one or two off/on switches that control our online identity which can disappear should be ever be perceived to have stepped out of line. Our identity has become a commodity, which in itself is depressing but further compounded by the fact we don’t seem to care that it isn’t us controlling those switches.

The common refrain the past few days is that Facebook is on a march to take over the social web. The only problem is that the social web has already been taken over. It has been taken over by corporations, their marketers, PR firms and Facebook, and as much as they would love to con us into believing it is all about the conversation the reality it is all about funneling us into things like Facebook, Twitter and any number of cool networks.

Or, as Umair Haque, who has written much on this Zombieconomy and the Zombies within it, paraphrased it:

the "social web", built by marketers to force-feed "consumers" more toxic junk.

Or, as I put it a bit more poetically, to sell cr*p to F8ckwits

Who would have guessed - share your financial data online and next thing you know your credit card is searchable on Google - Venturebeat:

Yesterday was a big day for social-oversharing site Blippy, which lets members automatically post their purchases to the Internet. The company announced $11.2 million in funding and was profiled in The New York Times.

Overnight, at least one Internet power user figured out a way to search for Blippy members’ credit card numbers on Google. A fairly obvious search for “from card” this morning returned 127 results that included full credit card numbers.

VentureBeat reporters deduced that all are Citibank-issued MasterCard numbers

Blippy, of course, say things aren't that bad......

“We take security seriously and want to assure Blippy users that this was an isolated incident from many months ago in our beta test, and doesn’t affect current users.

“While it looks super-scary and certainly sucks for those few people who were affected, and is embarrassing to us, it’s a lot less bad than it looks.

In the words of the immortal Mandy Rice Davies, "He would say that, wouldn't he". Maybe this is on the level, but its only a matter of time before it is the reality.

A fool and his money are soon parted, but he is parted even sooner from the data about his money.

Well, here is Yet Another Sign that Facebook is after invading your privacy. This is the latest, er, "feature" to emerge - "Instant Personalization"

I really can't be *rsed to analyse it, so much has been written about it already and its the same old Facebook wheeze in a new bottle - so here is the ever sharp Liz Gannes:

Three carefully chosen launch partners — Microsoft’s Docs.com, Yelp and Pandora — have access to what Facebook is calling “instant personalization.” This is a powerful, inventive and creepy tool that the company hopes to extend to other partners but is testing the waters with these three first.

......

Instant personalization means that if you show up to the Internet radio site Pandora for the first time, it will now be able to look directly at your Facebook profile and use public information — name, profile picture, gender and connections, plus anything else you’ve made public — to give you a personalized experience. So if I have already publicly stated through my Facebook interests page that I like a musical artist — say, The Talking Heads — the first song I hear when I go to Pandora will be a Talking Heads song or something that Pandora thinks is similar.

......

Users are also able to opt out entirely via a new option found at the bottom of the list on their privacy settings page. And further, if they want to prevent their friends from sharing their information with an instant personalization partner, users must block that specific application individually.

Ah yes, the good old "make it opt-out, and make it hard to do" gambit so beloved of Facebook.

What can we say that hasn't been said ad nauseam since Beacon's "once in a hundred years" emergence - if you use the Facebook system, your data will be systemically scraped and sold. Digital Sheep will be digitally fleeced - Caveat Emptor etc etc.

I have long believed that what many people these days call "Innovation" is often just "continuous improvement that won't rock the boat". Thus over the last year or so I collaborated with a team of talents - Norman Lewis, Nico Macdonald, Martyn Perks, Mitchell Sava, James Woudhuysen (we first worked together looking at the role of Innovation in the Great Depression for NESTA) - and we have authored Big Potatoes: The London Manifesto for Innovation

The Manifesto can be read on the Big Potatoes website and we want your responses to it - urgently. We are also on Twitter over here and on Facebook over here

We are going to launch it next Tuesday night from 6.45 at the The Royal Society (7 Carlton House Terrace, London - book here ) and over the next few months we will also be hosting public discussions and debates around the themes of the Manifesto in London and beyond. And during the forthcoming UK general election we will be challenging those who propose to lead us out of recession to respond to the Manifesto principles.

Later in the year we will publish an updated Manifesto, having determined the scope of the challenge we face and started to change the culture around and climate for innovation globally.

The link above goes to the main manifesto, but below is my precis of it:

1. Think Big

Innovation must set its sights high, and can never do things by halves.

Today, too much of what many people (especially in Corporates) call Innovation could instead be called “Continuous Improvement”. Business expenditure on research and development (R&D), taken as a fraction of GDP, and has been stagnant in America and Europe for 15 years or more. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development talks up what it calls ‘the central importance of non technological innovation’. We argue that it’s not enough – it’s essential to uphold the powerful improvements, above all in productivity, that both new techniques and technologies can bring.

2. Go beyond the post-war legacy of innovation

We believe that Innovation today no longer means what it did in 1909, 1949 or 1969.

Many people believe that today there is more innovation and more change than ever before. Our research shows that view is not true, however (see here). There was a huge spurt of innovation roughly 100 years ago that produced many, even most, of the innovations that still define our world today - electric power and motors, organic chemistry and synthetics, the internal combustion engine and automotive devices, aircraft, telephones, radio, organised labour, female and black emancipation, public health and universal education all emerged around 1900

World War Two and the Cold War period also drove huge levels of innovation, for example in aerospace, space technology and its multiple offshoots, operations research, information technology, The first moon landing and the first DARPANet (the internet) transmission were both in 1969.

Today Innovation too often means “doing things a bit better” at best, and at worst is a politically acceptable means of ensuring a comfortable lack of boat rocking as things slide.


3. Principles not Models

Innovation is based on new knowledge, or it is nothing.

Innovation cannot prosper without curiosity, serendipity, unpredictable outcomes, inspiring vision, and sheer hard work. But these things are principles, not models of innovation. Today’s over-focus on short term market forces limit innovation, it is too big to be placed on a hockey stick of initial loss followed by profitability, or on a tapering S-curve of market saturation.

Nor should the state insist that innovation fit into the straitjackets it lays down. In practice one model of innovation dominates today – that it’s wrong to focus on pioneering new technologies. For examples, Britain’s National Endowment For Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) tells us to emphasise ‘business innovation’, not the technological sort..


4. We’re For Useless Research

Innovation is nothing without unremitting curiosity and tenacious application.

The fundamental unpredictability of research nourishes new experimental methods, turns up new problems, and opens up fresh avenues of enquiry. As a result, research creates not simply incremental advance, but, in many cases, whole new industries.

What have we learned from the last 100 years if not that what may be thought ‘useless’ research today may, in two or more decades’ time, become profoundly useful.


5. Innovation is Hard Work

Innovation is not done in a day. It is a struggle uphill, one step forward for every two back, and there is plenty that is noble in that.

It offends contemporary sensibilities to say so, but what Thomas Edison famously said of genius – that it is one per cent inspiration and 99 per cent perspiration – remains largely true of innovation. But nor does innovation grow on trees. Serendipity is important in science, but as Louis Pasteur said,

In the field of observation, chance favours only the prepared mind’
There is no need to revive the moralism of the Protestant work ethic. But there is a need to destroy the myth that creativity is simply the playful re-combination of existing elements.. Innovation cannot just consist of combination; and anyway, combining the old takes a lot of hard work.


6. For success, expect lots of failures

In innovation, every failure is a success of sorts.

Today, innovation often feels called upon to apologise for the drain on resources it represents, and for the dangers it may bring. No wonder it just as often strives to portray itself as broadly predictable.

To gain support, it can pretend to be a smooth process, uninterrupted by false turns, intractable difficulties, personal clashes, or budgetary mishaps.

In fact, though, a single serious innovation is invariably preceded by multiple failures. There is no need to be sentimental about failure being a badge of honour in Silicon Valley, or to be fascinated by failure. Insights were gained by these “failures, that led to new successes”. In the future, separate innovations may help re-set this set of poor results, or that project stupidly terminated, in a brighter context.


7. Regard chance and surprise as allies

For Innovation, the concept of the unexpected deserves continued acclaim, for that shows confidence in human ingenuity.

In 1928, while on holiday, the Scots biologist and pharmacologist Alexander Fleming accidentally left a number of cultures of staphylococcus bacteria uncovered. He returned to find the growth of bacteria in one dish inhibited a growing blue-green fungus, Penicillium notatum. From the microwave oven through the Post-it note and on to the Viagra pill, serendipity – a random turn of events that proves fortuitous – has played a major role in the process of innovation.

Yet though 21st century managers always say they’re ready for ‘out of the box’ thinking, in practice many bridle at the idea of an innovation project moving sideways. Why should chance, tangential discoveries absorb researchers in the unexpected, the unfamiliar, the difficult, and the costly?


8. Take risks

We believe that we risk major difficulties today not because of too much innovation, but because of too little.

In 2005, China’s engineers and scientists completed a new railway. Splicing through mountains five kilometres high and underground rock formations where the temperatures run at -30°C, the new line stretches from Golmud in the province of Qinghai to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. No fewer than 1,142 km long, it was finished three years ahead of schedule. The railway is a triumph not just of engineering, but also of conscious risk-taking. Barriers thought very hard to overcome were proved surmountable.

But that sequence of events, in which risks are confronted, is a relative rarity these days.
For some years even before the credit crunch, organisations made the management of risk into a fearful obsession. Heaven forbid we should actually take a risk in Innovation.


9. Leadership

Innovation demands not further empathy, trust or Key Performance Indicators, but vision, commitment, brains and, yes, a little personal heroism too.

The more the cult of celebrity extends into everyday life, it seems, the more distaste grows for celebrating leaders of innovation. Yet for some years the trend in general management theory has been away from the charismatic leader and toward the servant leader or the self-confessedly incomplete one. Today, the leader is vulnerable or he is nothing. There are enough New Age experts on leadership today, too. Some believe that happiness and managing your energy levels are two of the five dimensions of leadership.
In fact what innovation needs now, if it is to be game-changing, unique and unexpected, is leaders with resolve, not managers with finely balanced scalpels and balanced energy levels.


10. Innovation is everybody’s responsibility

Innovation is not just a concern for private firms, large and small. In different ways, it is also for nations, public sector organisations, and for other, ‘third sector’ bodies.

If innovation is for every substantial body in society, it is not for everyone, sadly enough. After all, science and technology require specialisation, so that not every person can be an innovator. Anyway, innovation is, as we have said, bigger than science and technology alone. It encompasses changes in organisation. It can include changes in design.

The role of design and branding, however, is not to engage in special pleading that would make them a substitute for new technology. They should stop wringing their hands about involving users and saving the planet, and instead start taking seriously their role as the humanising handmaidens of technological innovation.


11. Trust the people, not regulation

The desire and energy to innovate come from neither the unconscious hand of the market, nor the restless malfeasance of the modern bureaucratic state. It comes from you, me, or someone yet more qualified

The Regulators do not trust the people, the people do not trust the Regulators. Partisans of innovation need to take the right side in this dispute. It’s time for them to state unequivocally that further state laws and regulations around innovation are in general likely to circumscribe it and slow it down, not enhance it. You don’t even have to be a believer in free market forces to agree with that.
The failures of regulation, its tendency to produce perverse results, its tendency to reinforce powerful interests – these things are much more given in regulation than they are in innovation. Right now, the world has too much of the wrong kind of regulation, and not enough of any kind of innovation.


12. Think Global, Act Global

Innovation needs to be internationalist in thought and deed.

The innovator should aim to benefit the whole world, not any particular purse or nation. He or she should know about and uphold the achievements of innovators abroad, and oppose all attempts to pervert or stunt innovation there.

Innovations come from people. That those people operate in corporate or government buildings should not be a restriction


13. The spirit of innovation knows no limits

Innovation must be open to anything and everything.

Since 1972, the self-evident fact that there is only one Earth has been repeated like a mantra. In 2008 the WWF introduced its state of the world report with the amazing observation that ‘We have only one planet’. It went on to argue that ‘by the mid-2030s we will need the equivalent of two planets to maintain our lifestyles,’ and today insists that ‘Humanity’s demands exceed our planet’s capacity to sustain us’. Similarly we see complaints that research in Space is wasted and would be better spent on the people.

These accounts do little justice to the role of innovation, which must mediate between human beings and the planet. Where, as with climate change, genuine environmental problems exist, innovation should never be underrated in its ability to deal with them.


14. By, For, With Humanity

Innovation is done by human beings, and not by nature or by machines.

‘Discontent’, Oscar Wilde said, ‘is the first step in the progress of a man or a nation’. Although not a force for democracy in itself, innovation has nevertheless assisted when it is done with the participation of more people. Innovation is for humanity.

In 1625, the philosopher Francis Bacon wrote an essay called Of Superstition. He held that the causes of superstition arose, in part, from what he called ‘barbarous times, especially joined with calamities and disasters’. This Manifesto is issued because humanity faces such times now.

This Manifesto is a call to arms. Let all those who agree with most of it stand up and be counted.

We are not advocating any policies… at this point. ‘What policies are you advocating?’ is always the battle cry of the impatient entrepreneur or government official. This debate is too important for it to become enmeshed in policy discussions. We need this debate in order to clarify the issues at stake, and to scope what needs to be done to reinvigorate a culture of innovation in contemporary society. Innovation is not something that can be turned on and off like a tap. It is a complex interplay between economics, politics and culture – from how we inspire and educate younger generations, to our attitude towards scientific discovery and risk-taking, from the arts to long-term thinking and investment – and pursuing it requires clarity of thought and purpose.

We hope BIG POTATOES will help inspire a debate that illuminates the scope of this challenge. Only then will it be meaningful and practical to talk about the policy implications of these insights.

So - come along next Tuesday evening. Speakers so far include Steven Cousins, managing director, Axon Automotive Ltd; Eliot Forster, CEO, Solace Pharmaceuticals; Norman Lewis, Chief Innovation Officer, Open-Knowledge (and BIG POTATOES co-author); Munira Mirza, advisor for arts and culture to the Mayor of London; Stefan Stern, management columnist, Financial Times; and James Wilsdon, Director of the Science Policy Centre, The Royal Society.

So, will you chip in to the Big Potatoes debate? Should be a good night, we think!