Posted on

What is Open Social Innovation and why we need free/libre recipes

In this article I describe Open social innovation, a new intellectual framework to facilitate the sharing of social practices.

Although the concept described here has been proposed from a network of french social innovators, there are many many groups around the world who are already thinking along the same line. These groups don’t recognize each other because the lack a common framework and vocabulary. This article hopes to propose such a framework and open the discussion.

Continue reading “What is Open Social Innovation and why we need free/libre recipes”

Posted on

Case study: how to co-create a co-creative event

A case study presenting the organization of #MousTIC, a co-creative event about open cooperation and social innovation.

mousTIC is an event about open and collaborative models for social innovation. In 2013 the event took place in Montpellier, a city in the south of France, and gathered over 200 participants for 3 days to discuss, share, exchange about collaborative tools and practices, but also to co-create tools and methods. The participants came from very different backgrounds: non-profit organizations, urbanism, ICT for development, free/open source software, social &solidarity economy, journalist, students, artists,  …

The following presentation details the various co-creative formats that were used during the event and the organizational model behind it.

This is part of my open research on co-creative events patterns

Continue reading “Case study: how to co-create a co-creative event”

Posted on

Meet Valve, the company “managing without managers”

Business Insider has published a small article about Valve a 16-year old company that has no corporate hierarchy whatsoever.

Valve’s basic approach to “managing without managers” is:

  • hire only incredibly self-motivated people
  • give them full autonomy to decide what project to work on
  • teach them to spot valuable projects, and to understand what value they can add to those projects
  • allow team structure to happen organically – teams self-select, leaders are chosen by their peers
  • encourage people to acknowledge and learn from mistakes quickly to move forward
  • make everyone responsible together for the success or failure of projects

and finally (and most critically):

  • determine the value and compensation of each employee by peer review

Read the full article to learn more

Posted on

The collaborative Economy – Key Take-Aways

Respected Analyst Jeremiah Owyang has produced a crystal clear talk about a movement that’s been growing in the past few year and has come to light under the name “collaborative economy“. Although is don’t like the term “collaborative economy” (I think networked or P2P economy is more appropriate), this name has crystalized a lot of attention on this movement and helped bring it to public attention.

Here are the key take aways from the talk:

The crowd turns to each other to get goods and services bypassing corporations

The sharing revolution is an unstoppable movement

Solution: embrace the collaborative economy value chain:
Company as a service
Motivate a Marketplace
Provide a platform

 

Posted on

Open value networks, serendipity, and the future of work

The notion of serendipity is not new to business thinking. The importance of unexpected conversations and knowledge exchange in innovation has been noted in the management literature for many years.
What is new is actually building a business – a machine – that systematically facilitates serendipity. This is what Seats2meet.com has achieved.

 

Continue reading “Open value networks, serendipity, and the future of work”

Posted on

Fail smartly to innovate: Invest a little, learn a lot

Every successful entrepreneur talks about how they kept trying (and failing!) until they found what worked for them and became successful. In this process, failing can be seen as a part of the innovation process. The trick is to fail often to be able to test ideas and quickly get feedback. But the cost of failure has to be low so it doesn’t threaten the entire project.

Here are some tips on how to innovate and fail smartly. (Excerpts from the book Mastering emergent strategies (Harvard Business Press) Continue reading “Fail smartly to innovate: Invest a little, learn a lot”

Posted on

Peer production and governance, commons and value creation in the collaborative economy

Michel Bauwens is a Peer-to-Peer theorist and an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture and business innovation.

I already talked about Michel Bauwens’s work when discussing the revolution brought by open source and peer production models.

Here is another great video  where Michel explains what are peer-production, peer governance and how people use commons to create more value (the Wikipedia and Linux model). This work and organisation processes are fundamentally different compared to the traditional top-down models and Michel explains the characteristics of this new distributed models. Continue reading “Peer production and governance, commons and value creation in the collaborative economy”

Posted on

Clay Shirky on open source and democracy

Clay Shirky is one of the sharpest mind with a very deep understanding of the implications of the changes brought up by social media and the web.

In this TED talk he discuss the changes brought by the web and how citizens can copy open source programmers to build a more open and ditributed democracy. Worth noting, the presentation of Github a distributed versionning system initially built for programmers and now used to follow on legal texts.

Continue reading “Clay Shirky on open source and democracy”