1 – Conversation (Vs Broadcast)
The shift from a mere broadcasting of content to a dialogue driven multicast is most profound as at its core broadcast means to cast at literally everybody without knowing who picks up the cast. Just consider, how will mass-customization work when you broadcast or how are you going to profit from the long-tail effect when you broadcast? Broadcasting circumvents direct feedback loops. By broadcasting you fail to record the feedback leaving you without data on the feedback process and thus no means of analysis of this process. It is true that there are ways to gather feedback broadcasting has caused, such as Mishne and Glance demonstrated with predicting movie sales from Blogger sentiment but these forms of feedback are despite the choice for broadcast (in here movie trailer) and not because of it.
By building on conversation tools and dialogue forms, insights can already be obtained on the demographic information of internet users. Xerox filed a patent for example aiming at carrying out customer segmentation solely on the usage patterns of the web pages, while Microsoft Research Asia demonstrated to predict the sex with 80% probability and the age with 60% probability of users purely on the basis of usage patterns. The important point here is, that already from recording how the communication takes place, valuable information can be generated and patterns identified, which lead to altering future communications and emerging structure based on those patterns.
2 – Bottom up (Vs Top Down)
There are a variety of innovation methods available but for now I would like you to point at the fuzzy front-end of innovation once again. The table on page 6 of the paper holds key aspects on the nature of the work, which is described as “Experimental, often chaotic. ‘Eureka’ moments. Can schedule work—but not invention” In other words at the front-end work is serendipitous and not structured. It is a bottom up approach introducing structure and measures along the way to transform the idea into an invention and, finally, into an innovation.
The important point here is having a maximum amount of variety at the beginning. In a bottom up scenario you start with the lowest level holding the largest quantity of the least common denominator. In other words, you have the maximum amount of variety that can interact in a meaningful way through a shared context. Concentrating on and supporting bottom up approaches lead to increased heterogeneous views on a problematic situation (that is, when you haven’t uncovered the root cause of a problem yet). Effectively you amplify the variety of your organization to attenuate the variety of the problem, e.g. market, research, products (slide 11 and following explain this concept from the school of managerial cybernetics).
3 – Reputation (Vs Hierarchy)
Another fundamental aspect in the participatory culture imported from the internet is the concept of Reputation. In Enterprise 1.0, the job title embodies the status of the employee within the company. This concept is substituted in the internet culture with Reputation, i.e. the quantified assessment of the contribution of the individual by his peers. (Ceciiil)
To understand why this statement is so important, it's noteworthy that we have in the vast majority of cases solely digital connections when communicating with each other. Yet, these can be replicated and distributed instantly at virtually no transaction cost. So the platforms we already have continue to grow and become ubiquitous, i.e. a daily companion in our work. In this context what we know from each other, is only what we can consume from each other. If someone fails to leave an online trail to follow, one has no mean to apply this method of personal evaluation and validation, which we see already serving some of us well.
4 – Emergence (Vs Structure)
Emergence signals a property that is more than the sum of its parts. An emergent property of a car is the ability that it takes us from A to B. Disassembling all car parts, we no longer can travel from A to B proportionally to the size of the individual part. The prosumer of the web 2.0 causes structures to emerge over time giving us the possibility to evaluate both a) the building process, as well as b) its relative degree of change over time.
5 – Folksonomy (Vs Taxonomy)
A taxonomy is generally a bad idea when thinking of translating the world of each and everyone let alone putting semantics to it, since it means that there is a predefined structure of a concept, while in reality each person has her/his own weltanschauung/world view. The translation of experiences into concepts has to be done by the user herself of such taxonomy-driven systems - instead of just noting what has been perceived. Yet, when we tag we note thereby providing context and time codes at the same time. Through tagging we build individual structures as well as structures of collaborative focus. We perceive those over time and can analyse them as they emerge providing us with more opportunity for serendipity at the same time.
6 – Agility (Vs Bureaucracy)
Again we see a shift of perspective of de facto outsourcing the translation process of systemic long-term processes. By removing bureaucratic structures we remove the "process taxonomy". And this allows us deploying creativity. Consider we have to create the taxonomy before we really know what we are up with at each stage of a long-term systemic process.
A rigid structure allows only for a certain amount of change before its structure is falling apart. With agility we focus on domains and let the structure emerge over time. This makes it much more economical to produce ideas for the bin (i.e. those that seem to have no immediate added value) and leave them as building blocks for future structures to follow.
7- Transparency (Vs Security)
Web 2.0 demands transparency in what we do - not who we are. By doing so we communicate what we do and inevitable other people put that into categories about who we are. The latter is a logical consequence of human behaviour. Therefore the security elements should be used to protect from misuse of transparency instead of preventing it altogether.
8 – Intertwined Networks (Vs Silos)
According to Andrew McAfee we can use intertwined networks to gain access to sources of information our close network ties usually have no immediate access to. McAfee points to the onion layer of network relations:
1) strong ties – network connections we share intensive exchange with and good insight on each others knowledge domains
2) weak ties – network connections we share occasional exchange with and little insight on each others knowledge domains
3) potential ties – network connections we do not share any productive interactions with, but are topically relevant
4) none – network connections we will never tie but who provide information through market participation
In this way intertwined networks contribute towards organizational innovation efforts as they are a sound method to bridge knowledge gaps and/or organizational silos such as communities of practices.
9 – Simplicity (Vs complexity)
Twitter is a great example demonstrating what can happen when simplicity reigns over complexity. Through reducing the length of a post to 140 characters an amazing development kicked in. We now see with Twitter a starting point for an overview of people’s skills, interests, knowledge domains, etc. Short profile bios, one picture and link-rich short messages demonstrate a sufficient reduction in complexity while providing users with space of meaning. The twitter feed is the product of the simplicity in this realm meaning production.
10 – User-oriented technologies (Vs IT Governance)
User-oriented technologies and applications take away the hassle to learn how to operate applications and enabling the user to get on with the tasks straight away. Posterous http://posterous.com/ is a great application example of how to lower the barriers and thereby reaching a new set of audiences, since for setting up a blog all that is needed is to write them an email containing the text and pictures for the blog entry. The rest – leave it to Posterous. With Moblin, Intel introduces an operating system for netbooks that follows the user-oriented paradigm in a manner we haven’t seen before. Moblin focuses on the tasks of the user and not on organizing the applications of the host machine. And this is the core message: to focus on the tasks of the user at hand without causing friction but instead demonstrating active support in getting them done.
11 – Trust (Vs Control)
When there is a sound level of trust, commitment is triggered. Commitment means following down or supporting a route of decisions. When we trust we let loose the ropes of control to some degree and use trust as a reference mechanism to validate actions and ideas against it. Valdis Krebs points out that "In the connected economy, each network actor is embedded in a larger economic web that affects each participant and, in return, is influenced by that participant. In such a connected system we can no longer focus on the performance of individual actors – we must focus on system outcomes. The key is performance of the connected whole."
Trust is a major contributor for node exchanges to follow appropriate lines. Now, managers have to focus on the system outcomes and have to control the parameters fostering the building blocks of trust. It is their job to pull those triggers (i.e. control) which keep the network they manage trustworthy.
