The Fourth Revolution is a great opportunity. Social networks are fantastic communication and creation tools. As with all powerful tools, social network can be used the wrong way.
A new literacy for the Fourth Revolution is needed; it will without doubt be widespread in a few years time. Let’s just remind us of some rules that need to be followed when it comes to using social networks.
Be careful of groups you join (groups are not more private)
Make your acquaintances as close as your friends
Be leery of platforms with open APIs (they give third parties access to the data)
These are already advanced rules, beyond some obvious ones: don’t put your address or phone number, don’t post all your personal data like social security number or bank details…
Some schools start discussing these rules with children. When will they be part and parcel of all basic education?
In high-tech, breakthrough technology appears to be negatively correlated with R&D expenditure. In this amazing article, how Apple disrupted its market on a shoe-string R&D budget, we see how R&D expenditure (relative to the revenue of the company) does not correlate at all with market breakthrough, on the contrary.
R&D as percentage of net income for technology companies
Here is the curve given in the post. Other examples are developed in the post itself like Microsoft – high expenditure, low results.
We know that with the Fourth Revolution looming, the conventional R&D system is broken. The “R&D factories” that were created during the Industrial Age can’t produce the disruptive output we need to make a difference in the world.
As an other example, pharmaceutical companies are also suffering from the obsolescence of the former model where pumping money in R&D would automatically deliver a blockbuster later on.
What is the appropriate new model for R&D and breakthrough innovations?
A first part of the answer could lie in the ‘lean startup’ movement which is currently very trendy. What is the concept about? It says, basically, that prototyping is cheap today. Don’t spend years developing a perfect product you believe the market wants. Come out as soon as possible with a workable product, test your product as soon as you can on the market, and iterate like mad. Apple does exactly that: their products are always missing something that will come in the next iteration. And in the meantime they get plenty of feedback on what to improve.
A second part of the answer will lie in “Open Innovation” or “Crowd Innovation” as soon as it will have found an effective model.
Here is the conundrum: effective R&D (in the sense of market breakthrough) costs 10 times less and is 10 times more effective that what you think.
Should you do more of what you’re doing now or seek a new model for R&D, a model that will bring you through the Fourth Revolution?
Did you hear about Kaggle.com? It is one of the most innovative startups of 2011 according to Business Insider. Agreed, it is an improvement on the model of “Open Innovation” developped by Innocentive or Ninesigma, but unfortunately it still misses the point of collaborative innovation, or Crowd-Innovation.
Kaggle is bringing together scientists (mainly data-scientists) to participate in collaborative competitions to solve difficult problems. It boasts a network of 17,000 PhD-level people.
Are you ready to contribute on Kaggle.com?
Have a look at their sites and the different possible competitions. The most well known is the “Heritage Health Prize” with a prize of 3 million US$: Can you predict who will turn up at the hospital next year based on people’s medical history / historical claims data?
Of course that’s the outlier; most competitions have a prize of 10,000$ or less, and are mainly rewarded by community recognition among the world’s best data-crunchers, or free trips or the ability to present in a well-known conference. You can help to improve prediction of insurance claims, rating of pictures, or help NASA bring evidence of dark matter!
It appears that Kaggle brings something more than Innocentive or Ninesigma, who also bring together the problems of large companies and a worldwide network of passionate problem solvers. Kaggle develops the concept of competition where people can see the result of others in real time, which is a form of deep motivation. Yet Kaggle still stops short of where the power of the Collaborative Age lies: collaboration between participants.
The right format of “Open Innovation” is still to mature. Will it be through companies, foundations, non-profits? How is real time feedback given about the performance of other competitors? How can we develop a spirit of true collaboration between the participants above and beyond competition, a tight community to solve the hardest problems?
The value of “Open Innovation” needs to be unleashed completely. Actually “Open Innovation” needs to be transformed into “Crowd-Innovation” because it is just that we want to achieve: getting people to collaborate meaningfully on a problem they are passionate about.
What will become of our Industrial-Age huge and rigid research organizations? They’ll have to open to the crowd or die.
Even Innocentive, Ninesigma and even Kaggle still need to go one step further or they will struggle to continue. Who will find the right concept, allowing cooperation between participants to develop?
I see a trend where companies will first develop internal social networking tools. It’s less scary. This will greatly enhance internal global communication and demonstrate the power of social networks in terms of effectiveness.
Yet the main value will be when stakeholders and customers can be enrolled in a conversation spanning beyond the limits of the organization. Only when organizations will have the guts to move into this realm will they fully benefit of the value of the Fourth Revolution. And not many will do it. I guess that we’ll see a few of them try in 2012. Stay tuned!
It became a social media event, using a twitter account that broadcast the card’s balance live.
Here’s an extract of the card balance curve.
Jonathan's Card refills
See, people almost never refill before it goes to zero. But then they refill with a large amount.
Would we tend to use FREE until there is no more, but then be generous as we are in fact participating to a social event?
This pattern is often identical when people that know each other share a single resource and need to refill sometimes. What is astonishing here is that it happened with people who did not know each other. Yet they must have had a sufficiently strong emotional connection through their participation to the social network.
It just shows that communities that are emotionally connected over social networks behave like communities that are face-to-face in real life. Over considerable distances, community behavior develops. Social networks really break the distance factor!
Moving to the Collaborative Age is simple… but not easy!
Many organizations just touch collaborative tools from far, sometimes just using them as another broadcasting tool.
The thing is, organizations need to dramatically change their approach to be able to take advantage of all the value made available by the Collaborative Age.
This excellent post by Amber Naslund, The Ripple Effect: Why Social Business Isn’t Simple, is an excellent summary of some tactics organizations can adopt if their strategy is truly to move into the Collaborative field.
Still, whatever the techniques and tactics, something is required first. It is a deep commitment of the organization, at the highest level, to engage with the social community. Engagement means a two way conversation and emotional exchange. Engagement has a cost. It requires continuous maintenance. It requires emotional work and vigilance. Yet it can lead to fantastic stories and experiences.
Like everybody, you want to jump into the Collaborative World. Still – are you really deeply ready to engage emotionally with your network, with your customers and your entire ecosystem?
Should multiple identities be allowed for a single individual on the internet?
The debate rages. Facebook and Google+ try to force everyone to show a single identity. Still, since the beginning of internet, geeks often like to have different identities for different purposes. A good reference is this blog post about the views of a typical geek, Chris Poole.
Showing different identities in parallel is extremely difficult in the real physical world. The few exceptions like a husband having several wives in different places, unbeknownst to the others, are strange enough to be good topics for Hollywood.
who will you be today on internet?
On the internet, however, it is quite easy to have several identities in parallel. And even if Facebook and Google+ try to force us into a single, lifetime identity, it is relatively easy to circumvent those controls – sharing networks is only more difficult, and having multiple identities is not practical for everybody.
Still, we all have multiple identities already. We don’t send on our corporate emails the same messages to the same people than from our personal email. We don’t network with the same people and discuss the same topics on Facebook and on LinkedIn.
This debate is thus futile. Yes, we have, and we all manage different identities. They are more or less consistent. But they are different. And the number of identities we will have will grow, and become more deeply different.
As the Fourth Revolution book argues, while the population on Earth might reach a plateau, the number of identities on internet will continue to grow tremendously. And this will create more value for everybody.
Don’t freak out. Maintain and develop your different identities on the internet!
Several examples in this paper show how consumers can influence company decisions, sometimes decisively. While most of the examples are negative (social networks impede organizations to do something), no doubt that with experience, those contributions will be leveraged positively by successful organizations.
Some quotes for thought from the paper:
In this new world of business, companies and leaders will have to show authenticity, fairness, transparency and good faith. If they don’t, customers and employees may come to distrust them, to potentially disastrous effect.
When confronting social power, you might as well jump in with both feet, because you just can’t hide. […] For one big company it recently turned up 60,000 different social media pages where employees mentioned or discussed company matters. (Not to mention the thousands of employee profiles on LinkedIn.)
Accepting social power as inevitable can significantly change the kind of products you design.
Says Microsoft and Lotus veteran Ozzie: “All this was unstoppable from the moment somebody installed the first network—this steady march toward reducing friction and reducing transaction costs faced by individuals. And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
So, when do you start opening your organization? It becomes every day more urgent! And soon it will be too late!
I have had some requests for a quick digest of the Fourth Revolution book.
So, here is ‘The Fourth Revolution’ in 10 points:
the Fourth Revolution changes the world as we know it fundamentally: our society, our institutions, the way we live… as much as society was transformed between the Agricultural and the Industrial Age;
The Fourth Revolution root cause is cheap long distance interactive communication capabilities; that’s new and unprecedented;
the Fourth Revolution will take a few decades to spread completely, yet it changes our world quickly already, and we need to change ourselves now to thrive through it;
The Fourth Revolution development will be difficult and possibly painful at times. Yet overall, the development of humankind will allow more people to contribute to our collective cognitive capability, changing the world ultimately for the better;
The value creation capability of the Collaborative Age is orders of magnitude higher than Manufacturing or Agriculture, the latter activities will become subsidized;
The organization will become open and fluid – open to the influence of the outside, to a network of followers, a turbulent succession of temporary projects;
The prevailing leadership style will be ‘mutual learning’ leadership. The leader is not any more the person who knows the way, he is the one who catalyzes the group;
The leaders of the Collaborative Age will be the nomad K.E.E.Ns (Knowledge Exchanging Enhancing Networkers). They will drive their own career, and are fully nomadic;
It is possible to be happy being a farmer or working in a factory. It is a choice. The worst is not to make any choice. Choose now whether to lean or not into the Fourth Revolution;
On an unprecedented scale, each of us can change the world. The world can shaped the way we want, let’s do it now!
Of course each of these bullet points warrants a full development, which is exactly the purpose of the book…
The idea is dead simple but only the Fourth Revolution would allow it. Based on Google’s now huge and unprecendented database of scanned books, researchers have setup a tool that looks for the frequency of words depending on the date of publication.
The 5 million of books they use as a basis is quite a representative sample (4%) of the 129 million books ever published.
Not only that, but the tool is available online at http://books.google.com/ngrams, an interactive tool that lets you test your own words or combination of words, and look at how they evolve over time. I can testify that you can spend some time playing with it (and that’s an understatement). I just put here three examples I have done myself – all graphs range from 1800 to 2008
In the first example, using the frequency of the words “farmer”, “worker”, “employee”, “servant” and “slave”, we see how the concept of servant (yellow) disappears over time, while “workers” (red) and “employees” (green) are newer concepts.
n-gram from servant to employee
In the second example, with the words “spiritual”, “intellectual” and “emotional”, we see how the frequency of “spiritual” diminishes after 1860, while “emotional” is quite a new word growing through the 20th century.
n-gram from spiritual to emotional
In the third example, we just watch the Fourth Revolution ignite, with the words “collaborative” and “networking”:
collaborative networking chart
The incredible thing is that you can yourself do your own research, because the data from the 5 million books (approximately 500 billion words!!) is there, at the reach of your mouse, anywhere in the world.
I write about the Fourth Revolution but that does not mean I am not WOW’d by it regularly. WOW! Try it yourself on Google n-grams interactive site. And watch – the more this tool will become known, the more people will use its graphs to illustrate historical tendencies. Private people will do their own research. Humankind’s collective cognitive capability will be unleashed.
What a better illustration of the Fourth Revolution? This would have just been impossible 2 years ago. WOW.
As the Fourth Revolution grows and spreads, giving up control is inevitable.
Leaders cannot any more control everything that is being done in the organization. Organizations cannot control any more their market as they used to do (for example, spending millions on advertising and measuring a constant return on investment)…
Charlene Li mentions the 3 levers of change – the 3 levers of the Fourth Revolution, pushing unavoidable change:
there are more and more people online
social networking sites usage is becoming extremely widespread
sharing is a rising habit
To that we need to add that with mobile technologies, employees stay connected to their own virtual world even when they are in office.
Do you want your organization to create more value? So, give up control! Stop barring access to social networks in the office! Real valuable work is anyway today not any more just dumb repetitive production, it is Creative, Emotional Work. Just allow it.
Mitch Joel in his blog post “keep yourself alive” reminds us about a few:
