a working class hero is something to be

Who would you say is the most new-media savvy politician in the UK?  My money is on John Prescott (JP) the former deputy leader of New Labour, who retired from the House of Commons in 2007.  He may no longer occupy a  central place in the physical political sphere, but he is leading the way in showing others how to maintain an involvement and influence in the virtual political space.

He is an active contributor to Facebook, claiming 1800 friends on the site, and is using it as a campaigning device.  It is here that he is petitioning against the bonuses being paid out to senior employees by the Royal Bank of Scotland.  He is also a founder member of the campaign to get New Labout re-elected for the forth time and has a Facebook group supporting this.  

But it was on Friday last week that I was most impressed by his use of new media.  His quick reaction to a breaking story gave him national coverage in the traditional media.  An environmental campaigner had thrown green coloured custard at Lord Mandelson, the Business Secretary, as he set off for a low-carbon conference in London.   This was reported on the Today programme on BBC Radio Four on Friday morning and it featured a comment about this incident from JP.  The programme had not contacted him.  He had posted this on YouTube and their editors had picked it up. 

Perhaps they are among the 1300 people who follow him on Twitter.  He announced at 5.11 AM (just about the time the Today editors were finalising the stories for the programme?):

"I've just posted a vlog on Peter and today's attack - they should arrest her"

So there we have it.  He might be retired and drawing a pension.  But by actively using Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, he is able to retain an influence in politics.  An influence noticed by the Today programme and the much-sought-after younger voters.

If you think another UK politician is a worthy contender for the tile of most new-media savvy politician, I would like to hear from you.

Note
The  image is courtesy of  Steve Punter on Flickr at  http://www.flickr.com/photos/spunter/639740500/sizes/m/

Spotify - You don't know what you've got til it's gone

I only registered with Spotify on Monday.  Since then I've become hooked.  Records that have been boxed under the stairs for a couple of decades are being played again courtesy of this virtual jukebox. How could I live without the Faces' A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse or Joni Mitchell's Ladies of the canyon?

Then today it was reported this record streaming site had been hacked, with personal data of thousands of its users being stolen.

A Spotify spokesman explained the extent of the data taken.

"Along with passwords, registration information such as your email address, birth date, gender, postal code and billing receipt details were potentially exposed," Spotify said. "Credit card numbers are not stored by us and were not at risk."

According to John Lister:

"The attack affects the estimated 10,000 accounts which were created on or before December 19 last year. Spotify found and fixed a security bug on that date, but has only just discovered people were able to exploit it."

This story highlights the importance of website users being aware of the potential for hacking of their data and the need for them to avoid using the same password on every site they use.  However, we should also expect companies, and particularly those that only operate online, to make appropriate information security arrangements.

According to the latest UK Government Information Security Breaches Survey (2008), companies still have a way to go in taking information security seriously. For instance, 52% do not undertake formal security risk assessments; 48% of disaster recovery plans are not regularly tested and 21% of companies spend less that 1% of their IT budget on information security.

Of course, users should be careful in their selection of usernames and passwords, but we should be able to expect better than this from digital media companies.

A few years ago now, the UK bank Smile was able to boast that it was "the first UK online bank to be accredited with the ISO27001 Information Security certification. That means we have an extremely secure Internet Banking service."  

It is about time that all online businesses woke up to the importance of information security and put in place the safeguards required to gain ISO27001 accreditation.

Spotify - the business model for recorded music?

Once upon a time, computer software companies developed software packages (such as Microsoft Word) and made their money be selling copies of their software to users to run on their own computers.  Then along came companies like Google who changed the underlying business model.  As we are all aware, Google doesn't charge for use of its products.  And users don't download them to their personal machines.  The applications (such as the Google search engine and Google docs) are run on Google servers.  Google's income comes from the selling of advertising space to organisations.  In 2008 quarter 4, it reported income of approximately $6 billion, up 18% on the previous year.

The music industry has been in need of a new business model for some time.  The British Phonograph Industry (BPI) and the major record labels have suffered loss of income in recent years as many music consumers have used peer-to-peer networks to obtain copies of songs rather than purchase them from record shops. The BPI estimates the industry has lost £1 billion of income in the past three years.  The online record stores, such as i-tunes, have had some success but these are still based upon the 'outdated' business model.

Now we are starting to see in the music industry a similar development to that which occurred in the software industry several years ago.  Sites such as LastFM and Spotify are streaming music for free and making money from onsite advertising.  A proportion of Spotify's income is distributed to the music companies.  It is currently experiencing a dramatic growth.  In just six months since it launched, Spotify now has more than one million users.

Will this new model work?  Will it provide sufficient income for the music providers and will it tempt customers to convert from illegal downloading to streaming instead?

The SCAMPER creativity technique

At i-camp, the problem we will be trying to solve is:

How might I commercialise our final year project?  

You will be looking at your projects from the enterprise perspective.  There are a wide range of projects in the final year group: games, animations, compositions, computer systems, strategies, etc.  Your mission in this module (starting at i-camp) will be to come up with ideas about how to develop it, change it, pitch it at a particular market as a means of making a living from this activity.

One technique that you might use to generate ideas for this is SCAMPER.  This technique allows a group of people to brainstorm alternatives and decide on potential answers.  In its way, I suppose, it is the problem solving equivalent to a group of musicians jamming their way to a new composition.

"Each letter in the acronym represents a different way you can play with the characteristics of what is challenging you to trigger new ideas:

S = Substitute
C = Combine
A = Adapt
M = Magnify
P = Put to Other Uses
E = Eliminate 
R = Rearrange (or Reverse)"(2)

If you would like to give this approach a try, the site LiteMind has a SCAMPER random question tool, which is fun to use.

Let's run through an example and explore how SCAMPER provides triggers to get our ides flowing.  Take one of last year's projects.  This project was to produce a social networking site for university students.   Let's use a few SCAMPER questions, chosen using the random generator, to help us to brainstorm ideas.

(Substitute) Can I use this idea in a different place?

The project was aimed at UK university students.  Could we target an overseas market?  This might be young people living abroad - one of the group was from Hong Kong and keen to apply it to that market.  

(Adapt) Whom could I emulate?

My favourite musician, Sir Paul McCartney, sometimes uses this to begin writing a new song. For instance, on Chaos and Creation in the Back Yard, he tried to emulate the late George Harrison on  Friends to Go  and on Anyway he composed the piece trying to sound like Randy Newman.  It seems that thinking about how someone else might carry out the task can be a spur to even the most creative of individuals!

(Magnify) What can be magnified or made larger?

One student in this group was from the International faculty, taking Spanish.  He had the idea that the 'budying' aspect of this could be amplified.  This led him to explore how it could be turned into a system for foreign students at Leeds Met to buddy up with home students who are studying their language.

(Put to other use) What else can it be used for?

The project brief was to develop a social networking system for university students.  One of the students was very interested in fashion in Hong Kong and had the idea of putting the project to this use.  He evetually settled on the idea of a social networking system for those planning a wedding in HK.

(Eliminate) What features could I understate or omit?

Under this heading the students might have discussed whether removing some of the features might have altered the project and made it more saleable or usable in a particular market.

(Rearrange) What if I try doing the eact opposite of what I intended?

What if they turned the project on its head and instead made it a system that was a networking system about students but not for students' use?  Perhaps it could be a means for tutors to contribute to an online reference for students.

I trust you now can see how one group might have used SCAMPER to generate ideas for  turning your final year project into an enterprsie.

There will be plenty of time for this verbal jamming(3) with your project team and a range of different people at i-camp.  

Notes

(1) The image of the drummer in the band Scamper is taken from
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike-burns/129226539/sizes/m/

(2) Source: Passuellio J (2008) Creative Problem Solving with SCAMPER http://litemind.com/scamper/ [Accessed 5th February, 2008]

(3) I hope your jamming  is more tuneful than this rare footage of the Beatles jamming!

Innovation in the public sector

How innovative are our local councils?

Text books tend to look to  the private sector for examples of innovation.  The public sector usually only gets mentioned when its large-scale technology-based projects misfire. Recent examples include the NHS patient records system and the national identity card scheme.

In reality, there is quite a lot of council innovation taking place.  The Beacon scheme, for example, is an award scheme that celebrates innovative practice by councils.  This particular scheme highlights key differences between public and private sector innovation.  Firstly, in the public sector, innovators are encouraged to share their knowledge with others.  Councils awarded beacon status are expected to devote time to diffuse their innovation throughout the sector. A second distinguishing feature of public sector practice is the complex mixture of process and product innovation present in service improvement.

To take one example.  Staffordshire Moorlands established a project to improvel access to its services in rural areas.  This innovation comprised of some new products (eg information kiosks, e-bus) and some new processes (eg a joint visiting service along with the Pensions Agency and the County Council Social Servces Department).

Most local authority innovation is what Christensen  calls 'sustaining technology'. These innovations "improve the performance of established products, along dimensions of performance the mainstream customers in major markets have historically valued." (Christensen, 1997, pp. XV).  In a future blog we shall consider an example of council innovation which might be considered to be a 'disruptive' technology.

Notes 

The image at the top of this blog represents Warhol's Light Bulbs - source http://www.flickr.com/photos/zetson/3036254720/ 

If music be the food of love, play on!

Forty years ago this week, on 31st Jan 1969, the Beatles gave their final live performance on the roof of the Apple building at 3 Savile Row, London (1). For those walking by in the streets below, taking a break from the office, on a shopping trip, or sightseeing, this must have been the ultimate free music download.

Musicians, like many others involved in the creative industries, often feel that they are driven by artistic desire, playing for love, rather than being motivated to be enterprising. It was interesting then to read an article in last Friday’s Times (2) which illustrates the innovative way in which some musicians are tackling the commercialization of their music product.

To finance their music, a new band would have traditionally approached the AR departments of the large music companies. But nowadays, faced by falling record sales and the credit crunch, music labels are not signing the number of acts that they once did.  Sellaband is a Web 2.0 website which introduces a new business model for commercializing music. Bands post their music on the site and fans are given the option to invest in them. When sufficient investors have come forward to support the music of a particular artist, the company behind the site will produce and promote the record. The band and the investing public also receive a share in any profits generated. However, not everyone is convinced that this new business model will succeed.

In a second example mentioned in the Times' article, duo Honey Ryder recognized that aspiring musicians need more than just good music, they also need a business plan. Honey Ryder took theirs to the annual music industry conference in Cannes last week looking for 100 investors to buy shares in their business.

So was Shakespeare correct when he wrote “If music be the food of love, play on” ? (3)  May be, but as the examples above illustrate, today's musicians also need to use their creative skills to explore new ways of financing their artistic endeavors.

Footnotes:

(1) It was at this performance, after playing the song Get Back, that John Lennon famously uttered the comment: "I'd like to say 'thank you' on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition!"

(2) Sherwin A (2009) Forget autographs, what about shares in a favourite pop star? The Times, 23rd January 2009

(3) Twelfth Night

The first internet wedding

It's Valentine's Day this week so we need a story that links love and innovation.

How about the first internet wedding? It happened in 1848. At that time, the world was getting used to a disruptive innovation. This was the telegraph. The continents were becoming joined together for the first time by cables laid under the oceans to form a networked society. Before the telegraph, information travelled over land at the speed of a horse, perhaps 40 miles a day. So news from London would probably take four days to reach Leeds. The telegraph enabled information to be transmitted from one place to another in a matter of minutes. The network gradually extended across Europe, over to North America, on to India, Australia and beyond. The world must have felt like a global village, with information travelling so quickly from any place on the network to any other place, however near or far. The diffusion of this innovation is described more fully in The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (384.109 STA in the library).

In this book, Standage tells the story of a wedding that was conducted using this Victorian internet. The bride was the daughter of a Boston businessman who had fallen in love with one of the clerks at her father's business. Her father was unhappy with their relationship and wanted her to marry someone more 'appropriate'. To prevent the marriage, he sent the clerk to England on business. Of course, at this time transatlantic travel was undertaken by ship. Its first port of call was New York.

The enterprising young woman sent a message to her intended, asking him to go to the New York telegraph office, accompanied by a magistrate, at an agreed time. She was in the Boston telegraph office at that same time. The magistrate then conducted the marriage ceremony over the wires, with the bride and groom being assisted by the telegraph operators who translated their vows into Morse code.

It is hard to believe, but the marriage was deemed to be legal.

We sometimes state that innovation is socially shaped. The artefact alone is not the innovation. Here is an example of an artefact (the telegraph) that was devised for one social purpose being adapted to be used for a completely different purpose.

Some of our students are exhibiting a similar degree of creativity in their studies on the Innovation & Enterprsie module. These students are taking the product being developed in their project module and showing how they now might use it as the artefactual basis of an entirely different innovation.

Happy Valentine's Day!