“Innovation” means different things to different people but, generally, it involves the application of novel ideas, products or processes for some purpose. But even if we can agree on “what” it is, do we understand “how” innovation happens?
Managing 'bright' ideas
There is a significant change taking place in the way that the process of innovation is understood. We can put this in the context of developments in the manageability of other areas of business activity in recent times. Read more of this Post
The technology of communication devices, systems, services has changed hugely over the years. There have been lamps, telegraph, telephone, radio, television, and a variety of others (I suppose we should also include smoke signals!).
A replical of a Morse code transmitter of 1844
The characteristics of each technology have dictated the behavioural model of the systems and the services available to users.
With the advent of the Internet, systems have tended to emulate traditional models: bulletin boards, post (email), with the web (world wide that is!) being based on a well-known “request-response” model until relatively recently.
But, now, the gloves are coming off! People are building software-based communication services to provide whatever behavioural model they choose; consider, for example, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed and there will be many, many more.
So far, their matching of the models to any specific requirements has been very loose. They build something and then figure out what people use it for!
There is an opportunity to get serious now: to decide whatever experience we want users to have; to design it and build it. Then to iterate models based on live tracking of actual scenarios. This is potentially very big … and keep half an eye on “augmented reality”.
Learning from Dogs 