using my head

Because NESTA is all about innovation, I do a lot of reading about the topic. I recently read Suw Charman’s post about the sources of innovation, and republished/summarised the key takeaways on my work blog:

Innovation does not have a size…it can be a small change that helps solve a big problem.

Innovation is not in a vacuum, and anyone might have a solution, including young people and customers.

Innovation will succeed in business when the business accepts innovation as part of their corporate culture.

It’s important to stay connected to technology and what’s going on in the outside world and new media if we want to really be innovative.

And finally,
“Innovation is not a buzzword to be repeated in meetings, it’s an action, a culture, a day-to-day activity.”

I had my own additions and amendments to these, which you can find over here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>

Today I feel like getting out some placards, flying across the pond and picketing the streets of Washington, D.C. The US government could potentially lift the ban which currently prevents greedy ISPs from charging people for the amount of bandwidth they use, instead of a flat fee. Here’s my somewhat disgruntled post about it from the NESTA blog, which highlights the serious implications this could have on the way we live & work online:

Not only is this a backward step for consumers (remember dial-up?), this clearly has societal implications, allowing only the moneyed classes to readily access high-bandwidth content such as video, or to stay online for long periods in Second Life or MMORPGs. But there’s so much more at stake than missing out on YouTube or online games. The entire economy of the internet would change. Would you do your banking, grocery shopping or check-in for flights online if you had to pay extra to do so?

The rise of cheap broadband also opened the door to exponential growth in online social networks and collaborative tools such as Basecamp and Central Desktop, not to mention online meeting tools and VOIP. There are millions of people online every day, collaborating on projects and ideas, sharing knowledge in ways that weren’t possible before, and just plain getting things done… Taxation such as that being debated could kill these kinds of online collaboration.

Read the full post & comment here on the NESTA blog >>

A little comment I wrote on the NESTA blogs about the constant stream of mixed and confusing messages we are bombarded with these days:

Two stories which resonated with me this morning…

1) A colleague forwarded this nugget from popb*tch:
An avatar in Second Life has a larger carbon footprint than the average Brazilian

2) Slashdot commented on the world’s biggest digital dump, where Chinese locals harvest the gold, copper and other valuable parts within discarded PCs from the West.

How should I feel about these things? It’s a confusing state, as both coins have 2 sides…

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >> 

A post for NESTA which comments on the recent political adoption of things like YouTube as a campaigning tool.

Today French politics joined the USA in adopting ’social web’ media as a platform for running political campaigns & debates - only the French are using Second Life instead of YouTube. And here on these shores, David Miliband has once again posted video onto YouTube about climate change, his third such video.

Is all of this a sign of the times, a clear indicator of the burgeoning role the social web will play in our lives?

Read the full post & comment here on the Making Innovation Flourish blog >>