BC Business
The good news is, there’s a resource out there that is infinite and powerful. All that’s required are business leaders with the courage to tap it. Remember when consumers simply consumed? Our job was pulling out our wallets and spending. Corporations didn’t expect us to be creative, but express our personality by wrapping ourselves in the brands we loved.
Remember when consumers simply consumed?
Our job was pulling out our wallets and spending. Corporations didn’t expect us to be creative, but express our personality by wrapping ourselves in the brands we loved.
Then something funny happened. The great recession, sustainability and new media collided. For the first time in our lives, we had little money left over for shopping; we realized our consumption might not be good for the planet; and we broke the relentless grip of advertising, opting instead to tap into the more authentic messages of our peers.
It was as if we’d awoken from a long slumber. The thousands of hours spent watching commercials and shuffling around the mall suddenly seemed less interesting than activities that sparked our imagination. We exercised our re-discovered creativity, and found it filled a void consumption had not been able to.
What happened next was completely counterintuitive to traditional market thinkers. Using the power of new media, we began sharing our creativity with the world, without expecting anything tangible in return.
According to Clay Shirky, this explosion of altruistic creativity can be traced back to the abundance of free thinking time (or cognitive surplus) our modern economy has afforded us. But it took online tools, a consumption hangover, and a newfound awareness of environmental and social ills to give the whole thing focus.
True, cognitive surplus might still lead to things like worldwide postings of silly cat photos with captions. But it also led to Ushahidi, an open source platform that alerts communities to crises and violence. The point is, people are creating together like never before. And their creativity is starting to bear very innovative fruit.
Etsy.com could be called a permutation of cognitive surplus, or the world’s biggest church bazaar. You decide.
This “crafty cross between Amazon and eBay” is a social commerce website focused on handmade items, as well as craft supplies. It boasts tens of thousands of sellers, and five times that in buyer accounts.
Most significantly, it is a community of creativity. Each item sold is unique, not mass-produced. And while you may question the saleability of some items (yes, there are 7,293 search results for ‘macrame’), there is no denying the tremendous flurry of activity and enthusiasm. When was the last time you said that about your local department store?
Etsy.com is an illustration of how cognitive surplus can be harnessed to create an innovative twist on commerce. What’s truly exciting, however, is exploring how we can use this phenomenon to accelerate innovation.
That’s precisely what Chris Anderson has done. In an illuminating TED talk, Anderson says the rise of web video is driving a worldwide phenomenon he calls Crowd Accelerated Innovation.
The short story is, web video has enabled us to share our creativity with millions of viewers online. These viewers in turn absorb our creativity, and take it to the next level. What results is a hyper-accelerated pace of creation: dancers learn cutting edge moves faster, scientists validate new experiments faster, we all innovate faster.
Corporations like IBM have already tapped into crowd accelerated innovation. Since 2001, they’ve hosted regular Global Idea Jams – worldwide threaded discussions designed to draw out the best ideas the world can provide over a concentrated (normally 48 hour) time frame. What they get is incredible thinking that is outside the jar, fresh, and radical. Not to mention free.
If IBM’s continued commitment to these Idea Jams is any indicator, something big is afoot.
Cognitive surplus and crowd-accelerated innovation are being harnessed by a growing number of organizations in the sustainability space. They’ve compensated for their shortage of financial resources by tapping the vast wealth of human ingenuity. And it’s bearing fruit.
One example is the Story of Stuff phenonmenon – insightful films that sparked a movement to simplify and personalize sustainable behavior.
Blogs like Mouvment, meanwhile, are beginning to pop up – acting as aggregators of videos that accelerate change.
Finally, the brand new Smart Bubble Society Facebook movement is one to watch. The Society has challenged Facebook to funnel 10% of its profits to social causes voted on by the 500 million users. And how will they get the social media giant to listen? Use the point to crowdsource the most appropriate means of applying pressure.
Crowd-accelerated innovation isn’t like most innovation tools. If a corporation effectively taps it, their crowd-fuelled pace of innovation will accelerate with ever-greater momentum. It truly is a ‘first out of the gate, wins’ situation.
Sadly, most corporations are ill-equipped to harness this incredible tool:
• Their innovation model is in-house and closed. There is no mechanism for bringing in outside innovation – or even outside innovation experts! • Their innovation isn’t ‘owned’ by leadership. Instead, it is siloed or shared with no clear chain of command. • Their innovation is evolutionary (“New bottle, same great taste!”) Yes, this will keep current cash cows alive a short while longer. No, it won’t save them in the face of radical new developments.
Of course, these new tools aren’t an answer unto themselves. They need to be expertly applied. Without a powerful insight, they are unfocused. Without clear parameters around idea generation, they are irrelevant. And without great communication / commercialization strategies, they’ll lead to innovations that languish on the shelf.
The good news is, there’s a resource out there that is infinite and powerful. All that’s required are business leaders with the courage to tap it.
This article originally ran in Sustainable Life Media.