Professional thoughts

What could be the number one idea of social innovation?

Any thoughts about what the world is going to need the day after tomorrow?

A sustainable lifestyle?

New renewable energy forms
Less traffic and more distance work
Even distribution of wealth and health
Ways to growth without increased consumption
Recycling and smart ways to use garbage and waste

Are you able to make changes?

Enthusiasm, passion, engagement, risk-taking, the ability to think differently and to transform thoughts to action are essential personality ingredients for innovators and change makers.

The big challenge is always to get started with innovative processes; to overcome friction and inertia. It’s so easy to get tired and de-motivated. Those who make new things do always face opposition and down-right hostility. Change makers are regarded as trouble makers, revolutionaries and unpredictable eccentrics.

Innovators and inventors need endurance. A network of like-minded people supporting change and invention might be a helpful in situations when the fight for what is right is getting though.

Natural iTraining in Finland as a spin-off of innovaatiojuna

I’m learning the logic of the Google Buzz. The iTraining emerged as a result of the innovaatiojuna / innovationtrain.

The new challenge is how to continue a process that started in September 2009.

Social Collaboration is seemingly a very instantaneous process but I think that we can foster some long term projects and goals as well.

Innovaatiojuna was an important self-organizing project and was manifested in the January 13. 2010 journey Helsinki – Oulu – Helsinki.

From Innovation Train to Loviisa next week

The Helsinki – Oulu –Helsinki 13.1.2010  innovationtrain / innovaatiojuna experience isn’t over yet. We’re returning back to Loviisa January 18, 2010 and there is plenty of work to do.

After the trip, there are hundreds of photographs and videos that have to be analyzed. We learned a lot about open innovation and self organization of events.

A traditional seminar can only provide a fraction of the experience economy this trip provided the participants.

Followers are jumping on the train after the trip to follow the digital footprint. Blogs and feedback powerpoints are covering the experience. OpenJournalism will lead to several printed media articles.

Innovaatiojuna is changing the digital landscape in Finland. We’re only witnessing the very first transformations three days after the journey. There is a lot of information that has to be analyzed and the learning process continues.

Self Organized groups is a big challenge to traditional top-down managed activities. We’ve to tell people that the Father Christmas exist. Many outsiders think that the innovationtrain experience is too good to be true.

Thos who participated know that it was more than real! And it was great fun as well.

The pace of innovation

The pace of innovation will accelerate when we move out from the recession.

This is both a challenge and an opportunity to enterprises.

• Managing innovation
  
  
• The process of creative destruction
  
  
• Tastes and market demand change more rapidly

Global Collaboration

I decided to publish some historical material from wikispaces to see what progress has been made in collaboration and the use of Web 2.0 and Virtual Organizations tools since we started to experiments with blogs, wikies, podcasts, webcasts and Social Media.

In the global economy, collaboration within groups of geographically dispersed knowledge workers is quickly becoming the focus of creativity and innovation.

Advanced Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) that enable e-Collaboration enhance group work, especially when teams must share information, and make decisions across business and national boundaries, provide numerous new ways of networking on a global level.

• Collaborative environments are needed to co-ordinate and orchestrate interaction within networks of workers, partners and customers to boost creativity and innovation.

Using Wiki

"Well it’s finally here. The site that We’ve been working on and hinting at for months, now, is finally started and ready for your to see. But come back often while the content changes on a daily basis." I wrote this two years ago.

It’s been a lot of fun to test wikispaces and I’m glad to get one of this ideas development platforms ready for collaborative use.

Using Wikis as a core component of a collaborative effort was an experiment for all of us in the beginning. Some of the analysis and recommendations in these pages will surprise you. I wrote this information a few years ago.

• We want to gain competitive advantage through effective and strategic collaboration on a global scale with local, national and international partners.

It took us years to learn to use the "easy to use tools". The fundamental change has to happen in the organizational mindset. We don't get much further with new and fancy Web 2.0 tools if we don't succeed in getting people to use them. Knowledge management is all about people.

Wikispaces

After looking at potential means of hosting the digital villages collaborative development, we chose to use wikispaces as one of them.

This choice was influenced by the clean interface and rapid learning curve in editing, ability to track and monitor individual networking partners changes, ease of administration and maintenance and ability to have protected, private and ad-free spaces, when so wanted.

• We engage and enable our clients through technology to drive collaboration and cost savings in global communications

Language

Die Sprache des Forums ist Deutsch und Englisch. Aus diesem Grund bitte in Deutsch und English publizieren. Wir möchten von möglichst vielen Menschen verstanden werden. Danke für Ihr Verständnis.

• Transform your relationships from transactional to strategic through effective supply network development

News

We have some very exciting news of our own to announce. We started The Business Planning Tools development on the Web several years ago.

It's a continuously updated service with news exclusives, maybe nearly up to the minute analysis (at times) and, of course, smart summaries of the best, most important and relevant business news for our partners and clients from around the Web.

This site is available to readers for free at this digitalvillages wikispaces.

• Watch the stream of potential customers passing by your web site
• What could be done to increase their interest in your offer?

Remarkable

In marketing being remarkable is truly an exceptional trait. We all notice the new and different product. A new color or fragrance adds interest. If it’s worth noticing or exceptional we’ll pay some attention. We may even buy the product or service.

But what about people who have lived remarkable lives? Entrepreneurs and innovators. People who have stood out as unusual or exceptional. Can we live a life that is remarkable? Whould you like to know more about them? KB Project.

• E-collaboration technologies will supply seamless connectivity to allow work anywhere and anytime.

Contacts

Digital Villages is looking for contacts in the fields of

1. Bioetech Process Designers
2. We are doing a radical change to appeal to new customers
3. Some of the content has been on the web since 1998
4. The new content evolution continues on a daily basis

Innovation

We are heading into some very new and challenging Innovations. Thomas Edison would not give up. He kept trying things one after the other. His friends and family called him crazy. He would work tirelessly toward a goal.

He had the innate gift of seeing the impossible and bringing it to fruition. Persistence and overcoming failure were hallmarks of this man’s incredible life. When others would quit he was empowered to keep going.

1. We welcome submissions that address issues associated with e-collaboration involving creativity and innovation processes.
2. Design of effective e-Collaboration enabled creativity and innovation processes
3. Measuring the impact of e-Collaboration technologies on team innovation and creativity
4. E-collaboration technologies to support innovation and creativity
5. Knowledge activation in creative teams
6. Creative collaborative environments responding to users' demands
7. P2P creative collaborative environments
8. Knowledge worker role in creativity and innovation
9. Diversity and e-Collaboration to foster creativity and innovation
10. E-Collaboration technologies and techniques for human-robotic teams.
11. Creativity techniques for decentralized teams
12. Creative leadership and governance of e-collaborations
13. E-collaboration technologies for cross-cultural innovation
14. Computed Aided Innovation (CAI)
15. Professional virtual communities and innovation
16. Creative problem solving processes for e-collaboration
17. Creative ICT support for collaborative decision making and negotiation
18. Trust in virtual teams

Great cities

This service has been setup in Porvoo. Matkailun Tietotori Please, go in here and continue with your comments. Up till a couple decades ago, geography was destiny for cities. All great cities were located on waterways, because cities made money by trade, and water was the only economical way to ship. Now you could make a great city anywhere, if you could get the right people to move there. So the question of how to make a silicon valley becomes: who are the right people, and how do you get them to move? You only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub:

• rich people and nerds
• they're the only ones present when startups get started

Nerds on the move

What nerds like is other nerds. Smart people will go wherever other smart people are. And in particular, to great universities. Bureaucrats by their nature are the exact opposite sort of people from startup investors.

If you go to see Silicon Valley, what you'll see are buildings. But it's the people that make it Silicon Valley, not the buildings. If you want to reproduce Silicon Valley, what you need to reproduce is those two or three founders sitting around a kitchen table deciding to start a company. And to reproduce that you need those people. Read about Hello Dream Team.

Email

Email is still a work horse. I sidelined my hotmail account and got me a gmail account. I still use hotmail for signing up to newsletters, ebay transactions and anything that doesn't involve ''real'' people.

Gmail might become my exclusive email account, which I don't use except to talk to real people. It filters out all the unnecessary email guff. And of course you can tag conversations in Gmail, so I can further ''filter'' out personal and not business related stuff.

Despite all this noise and all the technical solutions that allow us to construct digital walls between us and other people, I have become convinced of the importance of being present and truly listening to others.

Freewriting

One technique that I just discovered through a blog that is really helping is using a timer to get my creativity going. The process is called ''freewriting'' and it actually works really well. It works like this:

1. Open your word processor or wikispace on your computer
2. Write the topic of your freewriting at the top of the page
3. Set a timer (egg timer works well) for 5 or 10 minutes
4. Write down whatever comes to your mind about your topic
5. Continue writing until the time runs out
6. Do NOT stop until that time.
7. Do not pay attention to typos or grammar
8. Incomplete sentence… keep going
9. Dead end… write the same thing over & over
10. Time over… circle items of interest and key phrases
11. Start on your first draft using these items

Amazing

This process is amazing. The timer is the key and I find the ideas come quickly. Next time you have writers block try this technique. With this procedure I have numerous articles ‘in process”.

With the weekend coming I should be able to find the large block of time and be able to put it all together. If you have any trick or tips in the writing process please leave a comment. I would love to hear your ideas to make this “writing habit” an easier one. KBProject

Community

We all respond to other people based on what we believe about ourselves and about them. To change what is not working for us, we have to change what we believe.

I'm listening to a podcasting and making some notes for myself:

The sense of community is huge

• It is amazing how young the podcasting is

A fully dedicated expo for podcasting and mobile media

• There has been smaller local podcasting expos around the country

The podcasters network is expanding all the time

• We are looking into advertising models

There is something going on

• You're coming from a business ridding side

How can we leverage this

• Expand your mind and think about all the amazing ways to use this media

How is podcasting changing traditional radio

• The purpose of this panel

Podcasting

Podcasting is a blanket term used to describe a collection of technologies for automatically distributing audio and video programs over the internet via a publish and subscribe model.

Podcasting enables independent producers to create self-published, syndicated "radio shows," and gives broadcast radio or television programs a new distribution method.

Podcast will be one of the themes:

1. This page is covering how to do business with podcasts
2. Link to wikipedias podcasting page
3. Innovation - go to the page

Setup

Microphone drivers and setups: The Getting Started Guide - Microphone Setup. This part of the guide will show you how to set up the microphone for use in MME sound programs, such as Sound Forge, and programs such as Teamspeak.

One of the most common problems mentioned in the Project Forums is that the microphone does not work in a given program. This section of the guide is designed to help you make the microphone work. Project form Lugosoft

Popular podcasters

Most of us, including me, have spent so much time learning how to “multitask”, and we’ve put such great value on being good at it, that we’re pretty uncomfortable with just sitting and listening to podcasts.

I can listen to radio and or television without doing anything particular, but the podcasts are different. I often use some kind of platforms to write down the central ideas presented in the pods. Looking forward to doing business with you.

Social Commerce

Social Commerce. Ebay is experimenting with disruptive innovative models. The basic idea is to do what LinkedIn.com does. Ultimately, whereas LinkedIn.com does the matchmaking in a talent seeking/offering context and eBay wants to offer the matchmaking in a commerce context.

New titles have been created. Meet Max Mancini. Although he's not a newcomer to the eBay family, he does have a new title at the commerce giant: Senior Director of Disruptive Innovation.

• Read this blog
  

Beyond Conventions

More often than not, there are lots of companies that don’t try and push beyond convention. Its those few companies that do push the edge that are the ones that last a long time, and make a significant impact in our world.

iPone in Helsinki

About the iPhone in Helsinki

We had a meeting at the Helsinki Airport. The expert was a little late. I was reading e-mails and blog posts. “Some of the smaller details make the iPhone more impressive,” someone wrote. “The 3.5" wide screen ratio screen with the highest resolution yet for an iPod. It has wireless and EDGE for Internet, using a fully-featured Safari.” I read and scratch my head. “Is that going to be enough?” I find myself thinking.

“From partnership with Yahoo it uses Yahoo search and Yahoo IMAP email. From a partnership with Google, it uses Google search and Google Maps (with built-in GPS).” The report informs.

• It supports Widgets. “What is / are Widgets?” I asked myself.
  
  
• It has an accelerometer to orientate the screen as portrait or landscape. “What is that good for?”
  
  
• It has a sensor that knows when you put the phone up to your ear to turn off the screen and any music you are playing to take a call. “I guess that is a cute little feature.”
  
  
• The phone capabilities, like voice mail and conferencing, have an interface to make it easy to use--skip to your fifth voice mail without listening to the others. “Voice mail is a new world. It’s very important to have the ability scan the voice mails.”
  
  
• The battery has five hours of battery life, stretched to 16 hours for music. “OK, I get it. Big screen and four hours of battery life when phoning and 16 hours for music. Not bad. It means half a working day. I need to get it plugged before lunch. But I don’t call people all the time. The battery will last for one or two days. Maybe a week.”

"Hello," he said. "Sorry for being late. There were some problems at the airport in Paris."

I said, "No problem, I'd some time to look at the iPod features. It will be interesting to get your opinions." We were walking to the parking area.

As we got into the car he started talking about the new design features available for future phones. "What do you think about LG Prada mobile," he asked me. "It will be available in Europe before iPhone."

"I know, the high-end designer phones are going to change the market. First the phone's got slimmer and slimmer, smaller and smaller. Now the race is changing. The YouTube generation wants phones that are good for viewing."

"You're so right!" He said. "We tend to think that a phone is used for phoning. Yes, that's true to some extent. The multimedia aspect is so new that we can't grasp it yet. People on the move have time to listen. Here the iPod feature comes into the picture."

"We have been thinking along the same routes." I responded. "Bloggers will not have to write their blogs in the future. I think we will make photoblogs and videoblogs. We can send videoreports to our partners. Complex things can be described with short video clips."

"Yeah, that's a good point." He said. "Mobile workers can write the things they need to write when returning to the hotel or to the office."

"Another thing," I said. "Maybe we will see a renaissance of the secretaries. We can send podcasts to call centres where they are typed and edited. We get professional report writers. They can be located anywhere on the globe," I concluded.

IST 2006 Helsinki

Dear Madam/Sir, The Finnish Government Information Society Programme, in cooperation with the European Commission and the Center for Knowledge and Innovation Research (CKIR) of the Helsinki School of Economics, has the pleasure of inviting you to the Finnish Presidency conference:

Launching of the European Network of Living Labs: A Step towards a European Innovation System. Date: 20 November 2006. Venue: TKK Dipoli, Otakaari 24, Espoo, Finland. The conference focuses on boosting European competitiveness through innovation. It discusses the European innovation strategy and consequent dynamic structural, financial and institutional changes needed to improve Europe’s global competitiveness. With the launch of European Network of Living Labs, Finland’s EU Presidency lays a foundation for broad-based co-creative open innovation process in Europe.

The European Network of Living Labs is an undergoing structural and institutional change that promotes European global competitiveness through public-private-citizen partnership (PPCP) in research for innovation. Many EU member states already have several Living Labs and, in a few years time, the network will consist of 50-100 Living Labs.

Living Labs are open and user-centric real-life contexts for research and innovation. They improve and accelerate the transfer of R&D results into new products, services, markets and even industries. They also stimulate societal innovation by mobilising the collective creativity for innovation. The conference is a part of the official programme of Finland’s EU Presidency.

Among the distinguished speakers are:

• Mr Matti Vanhanen, Prime Minister of Finland (tbc)

1. Mr Esko Aho, Chairman of the Expert Group (Hampton Court Report)
2. Mr Hans-Ulrich Maerki, Chairman of the Board, IBM EMEA
3. Mr Ulf Dahlsten, Director, Information Society and Media DG, European Commission

The conference programme contains also presentations of concrete Living Labs cases from various European countries. Attendance is by invitation only . There is no conference fee, but participants will have to cover their own travel and accommodation expenses. As the number of participants is limited, early registration is necessary via an on-line registration form:

http://www.tietoyhteiskuntaohjelma.fi/lomakkeet/en_GB/1160131538149/. We kindly ask you to register as soon as possible. You will find the conference programme on www.infosoc.fi (events). You are warmly welcome to attend this interactive conference.

Yours sincerely,

Matti Vanhanen
Prime Minister of Finland

Katrina Harjuhahto-Madetoja
Programme Director, Information Society Programme
Prime Minister’s Office