Social Innovation

It's funny how things intersect in life. I just ran into Chris Gammil's post New Era of Social Innovation where he describes it as:

The model takes the best of the OPEN model and pushes right out into the open, further distributing idea sourcing, team forming, development, commercialization and economic distribution.

What are some of the drivers?

• The social web is making it easier find people with similar passions for creation/innovation
• The social web is making it easier to find people with complementary talents
• Web 2.0 has driven modular, lower cost development models making experimentation easier
• Talent is hungry for opportunities to test ideas and work with other talented folks
• People are more open to contribution/gifting models of creation (understanding innovation is a numbers game

I recently posted about Social Media and Experimental Innovation : eLearning Technology. It's the same basic concept but from a different angle.

Malcolm Gladwell defines two types of innovators: innovators who come up with an idea quickly or those who need to iterate and experiment - the Experimental Innovator. Clark Quinn describes a helper to that kind of innovation - Innovating by Conversation. Clark tells us ...

Surowiecki’s Wisdom of the Crowds, Tapscott’s Wikinomics, and Libert & Spector’s We Are Smarter Than Me, are telling us to tap into the wisdom of crowds, and with lots of examples of how creating conversations with folks can spark new insights.

The thought this sparks is that experimental innovation can be accelerated through broader conversations. Thus, when it comes time to figure out a concept, iterate through it, having available networks greatly accelerates this process. Much of Gladwell's discussion of experimental innovation discussed innovation occurring over very long periods of time (10 years).

In many ways, this is exactly how I'm approaching my new venture Work Literacy. It's a big, hard problem. Get lot's of people together to foster discussion, innovation, experimentation.

Entreprenuer Questions

Chris Gammil and I just spent some quality time together with a new, private group that is advising start-ups in Los Angeles. The goal is to have start-ups learn from each other and from others who have been through the experience. So, far it's turning out great. The primary question we ask is:

What's Keeping You Up at Night

Chris provided a list of common issues:

• How much is enough? - how much 'traction' is enough for investors? and how much is enough to build solid traction to drive the right valuation to go for large money?
  
• Who should I get involved? - beyond the obvious 'more great engineers' who do I invite to the party and when - when do I need legal, when do I bring in complementary skill sets, how do I decide between employees vs contractors, which roles need to be core and what can be outsourced.
• What is 'good enough'? - when should I open the doors and let people in? how much product development is enough to get in the market and start getting feedback and what should I focus on in the early stages of the product?

These were certainly front and center yesterday for the primary presenter. Great questions Chris.

Start-up Advisors

Andrew Warner from Mixergy posted - Before Looking for Funding, Get an Advisor. He recommends that early stage companies get input from people who know the funding process, know the vertical, etc. That's great advice. Of course, it's sometimes hard to find advisors.

On the flip side, as a person who regularly advises early stage start-ups, I often have a hard time finding interesting start-ups. Like Christian Gammil (who I recommend as an advisor) working with entrepreneurs is something I really enjoy.

I've recently begun a round table that I'm hoping will help in a small way, but even there it's going to barely scratch the surface.

Maybe Andrew, Chris and I will figure out a way to address the friction around this. Actually, the friction is even higher trying to find a partner for a start-up. eHarmony for start-up / advisor relationships?

Social Networking Entreprenuerial Opportunities

Last Saturday, I was a panelist at the CalTech - Social Networks event. It was a really good event with lots of interesting folks in attendance. I would guess that there was about 100 people - on a Saturday in Pasadena. That shows some interest in the topic.

The presenters had some interesting things to say on a wide variety of topics. A post by Elrend Wilhelmsen discusses some of what was discussed.

My main points were:

Social Everywhere -

I work with a lot of different shapes and sizes of companies and it's interesting how each one has opportunities to leverage its users to form different kinds of communities, create connections, encourage contribution, etc. It is almost universal that there are opportunities around social networking. Generally these are oriented around:

Niches & Content Oriented Networks

You see all kinds of niche networks coming up. Outdoors, faith-based, etc. The current huge players (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) are broad spectrum. But the innovation right now is encouraging either segmentation within these larger players or via niche networks. Seeing what has happened on top of Ning is interesting. Lots of niches.

Content is often a defining mechanism to create these networks. Flickr, del.icio.us, YouTube all create social networks. However, this will also start to go into lots of niches around particular kinds of content.

Media & Brand Integration

There are also lots of interesting things happening where large media and large brands are trying to integrate with social networks. Obviously, there's a powerful combination when you can take a source of people (media) and combine it with an appropriate niche network and allow large brands who are interesting in reaching that audience. Lots of deals are going to be done in this way.

One of the examples that was discussed by one of the panelists was MyCoke.com. It was pointed to as an example of a social network. I am not that familiar with MyCoke, but I was bold enough to say that I thought "MyCoke got it wrong." My reaction to MyCoke is that they have some pretty good content on the site, e.g., some very listenable music, but the reality is that people are unlikely to really go spend much time in that destination as a separate island. Certainly, going and signing up for MyCoke is difficult. The destination should be something else with heavy integration of Coke branding. They clearly spent lots of time and effort, and the reward is just not going to be there for it. Which brings me to the other thing I discussed...

Big Challenge

There's a constant challenge that we continually face. We have a niche or content that we believe would inspire people (who are already out on social networks) to collaborate. Our choices for what we offer them all have major downsides:

1. Create a new destination

The big challenge whenever you create a new island that represents your community is that there's overhead for the people involved. It's is hard for people to justify the investment to integrate themselves into your community. Am I willing to establish myself again in this new environment? This barrier makes it hard to achieve critical mass.

2. Leverage an existing platform

We've created Facebook applications and used Ning. While this greatly reduces the effort for most users and gets you there more quickly, you don't really own this audience and it puts big limits on what you can do.

Certainly, what we are seeing with OpenSocial and DataPortability represents a possible future state where we can avoid some of this issue. If we could focus on building our "destination" on top of a set of open protocols that provide us with the social graph for users but that allows us to control our destiny, I believe that's the right model in most cases. It reduces friction for end-users and still gives us the leverage you want.

If you think about this abstractly, the goal is for all of us to provide grouping and content as a layer on top of a general social graph platform. Each of these destination represents a fluid grouping which is the most natural mechanism in a networked world.

The problem I have is that this isn't here today ... What do I do today? It's a big challenge...

Secret for Networking at Events - Prenetworking

I've never been able to walk into a large group of people and feel like I can "work the room." Sure, I've read various articles on this stuff, but honestly, I still struggle with meeting interesting people. I seem to be very adept at meeting financial planners, attorneys, accountants, etc. - and after 10 seconds of conversation, I'm at a loss. I can make small talk with them, but unless I'm going to see this person a few times or unless they have a tech specialization, ummm, not the best use of time or energy.

Luckily, I've found a GREAT way to make my time spent at events much better. It's probably no secret to anyone else, but I've only started doing it about 6 months ago and the results have been fantastic. What do I do? I call it:

Prenetworking

I spend about 30 minutes prior to the event going through the list of attendees and reaching out ahead of the event to suggest that we meet while we are there.

A few notes on this:

1. I try to do this roughly about 2-3 days ahead of the event. That way the list of people attending is fairly complete and there's still time for back and forth with the person.

2. I always make sure that there's at least 3 people attending that I want to meet prior to sending any notes. I had one situation where I sent a note only to find that was the only person I wanted to meet. Then I couldn't back out.

3. I have a right click option in my browser to search LinkedIn for anyone by name. I'm not even sure how this came to be, but it is a great way to get details on individuals when their profile is not detailed enough.

4. Many organizations, including a couple that I'm involved in, do not publish the attendee list ahead of time. I've generally stopped going to those events. There are enough events where I can prenetwork to 3-5 people who will be great to meet. Why chance going somewhere when I may not meet anyone that makes it worth my time.

5. Sometimes you can be creative to see a possible attendee list. Twistup3 is coming up here in LA, but doesn't appear to list attendees (btw, cmon Twistup, get with it). However, there's a Facebook group, a few presenter companies, that you can look through. You can also publish that you are considering going to the event on your Facebook profile and see if anyone comments on it.

For more discussions on networking and LinkedIn see Networking Events in Los Angeles and Southern California, Secret for Networking at Events – Prenetworking, Pre-network with LinkedIn, Local Event Organizers Need to Adopt Social Media.

Acting CTO Role in a Start-up

I generally am working as an acting CTO for about 3-4 start-ups or other companies at any one time. I was just talking with someone who asked me to define how that could work and what they meant. Great question.

I also found this interesting graphic of the changing needs around the CTO role in different size/type companies that somewhat echoes my experience. (Roger Smith)

This helps explain where I normally play. Most often I'm being brought in the early stage, Start-up or Expansion (as the company looks at new product lines). During Stabilization, often the focus is transitioning to a full-time CTO. My focus in this post is on the Early and Start-up stages - expansion is more of a consulting, focused project role and it acts different.

So, what is my role as an acting CTO? My role is to work as part of the team to (1) understand related technologies and technical opportunities, (2) understand and help drive alignment around a vision of where the business should go, and (3) mesh those together to help make disciplined, proactive technical decisions.

Basically, the role is to support both the business strategy and technical strategy.

Technical Strategy

I support the technical team to:

• review short and long-term technology strategies to help direct strategic technical decisions and help to ensure appropriate technology usage,
• help define needed technical research activities,
• assess new and emerging technologies to determine application to business needs,
• help determine resource needs within business constraints,
• review and influence business and technical processes to help balance competing needs and priorities.

Business Strategy

I support the leadership team to:

• provide input on short and long-term business vision, strategies and plans to help define business priorities,
• work closely with operational leadership to review and influence the product road map,
• review and provide input on some investor presentation materials, business proposals,
• participate in new business, partnership or investor meetings on a limited basis within time constraints,
• advise the leadership team on business practices that will help to derive greatest short-term and long-term value from the technical team and other resources.

Most of the time, my engagements start with an introductory meeting where I meet the team, understand the issues, etc. Then, we come to an agreement on terms. Then, I

• Review existing materials
• Business Plan
• Marketing Plan
• Marketing Materials
• Product Plan / Roadmap
• Current and Projected Financials
• Business Pipeline
• Team Member Bios / Resumes
• Current Metrics
• Roadmap

Normally there are crude documents for each of these areas that can be quickly read / scanned. If there aren't existing documents, then it means more time to extract the information.

• Conduct meetings to ensure understanding and alignment around market opportunities, business model, sources of revenue, immediate needs, growth, product opportunities, and ultimately to establish business and product priorities.
• Support operational and technical team to revise product roadmap
• Review and discuss short-term and longer-term technical strategy, define technical research needs

This gets me going. Normally, its a burst of activity at the start and then things settled down into a pattern with bursts of activity at particular times.

Many people ask how the acting-CTO gig can work out. I actually wonder the opposite. During the Early Stage or Start-up Stage, how can you have someone who can handle technical and business strategy AND have them hands-on? It's not a full-time CTO position, so they need to get work done. Instead, what you most often have is a person who is more hands-on who is doing their best at the strategy and there's a gap. You find that the non-technical CEO visionary has trouble directing the action. And the company is likely missing lots of opportunities and is a bit all over the map. To me, it makes a lot more sense to do part-time CTO (if you have some funding).

OpenSocial - Long Way to Go

I had already written about OpenSocial (OpenSocial and Facebook as Platforms) and frankly I was hoping for a lot more in the announcements and APIs.

I only have a cursory understanding of OpenSocial from reading various posts and from crawling through the API definitions, but it appears that OpenSocial has a long way to go before it's going to be useful for several of the applications we are working on. The problem with OpenSocial right now is that it:

only defines how you plug into platforms and grab the data, but it does not define the form and meaning of the data.

For example, if you want to match the people being returned as friends on one system and look them up on another system, there's no common identifier across systems. Until sites begin to agree on common patterns for objects like People, Groups, Activities then there's going to be a big barrier to doing a lot of the stuff that we want to do.

I'm sure this is obvious to Google and it's partners, but until this happens, don't get too excited about what interoperability means. It will make life better if you are developing applications that you'd like to play in multiple places (write once, integrate/debug everywhere). But it doesn't mean that I can share my social graph between LinkedIn and other sites any time soon.