New frameworks of 2011: Connected Success, Transformation of Business and Government, Crowdsourcing

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I believe strongly in visual frameworks as a way of communicating and engaging with complex ideas. I share these on the web, sometimes use them as central frames for my keynotes, apply them in strategy workshops, use them to shape my own thinking on the topics they cover, and sometimes create private custom visual frameworks for clients to define and articulate their strategy.

I will be shortly launching a more complete review of all the public visual frameworks I’ve created. For now, here is a review of the public frameworks I’ve created this year.

Success in a Connected World

I have used this in many keynotes and workshops this year to help individuals and small to mid-sized businesses to work out what they need to do succeed in a connected world, usually going into detail on the specific tools they can use in each area.

Success in a Connected World
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12 most popular posts of the year on the future

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It’s almost the end of the year, so I’ll try to do a few compilations of my most popular posts of the year. Today, on the general theme of the future, here are 12 (+1 for next year) that have attracted the most interest…

1. Zeitgeist 2011: anxiety, mobility, blending, indulgence, immersion, wrath, nudity and more

The spirit of the times for 2011

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The most contagious marketing memes of 2011

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Contagious Magazine has just launched its annual Most Contagious 2011, “reviewing the most innovative exercises in branding, technology, and popular culture,” taking a marketer’s perspective on what has succeeded this year.

The slides are below (you really need to view in full screen as it’s very detailed), or you can also see the Most Contagious website or the pdf version.

Most Contagious 2011

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As a brief highlight of the report, here are four of Contagious’ favorite promotional YouTube videos of the year. Great viewing! I particularly like Nissan’s Damned Ponies…
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PushStart launches new startup accelerator program in Australia

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The Australian startup scene continues to heat up. Arguably Sydney is already in the top 10 tech startup cities in the world, with activity rapidly growing through this year.

The latest news is that the mentor program PushStart (which I participate in as a mentor) is today launching its planned PushStart Accelerator program. I wrote about PushStart and the earlier startup accelerator Startmate at the launch of PushStart. Startmate’s first round of 5 companies has already had significant success, with shopping app Grabble already being acquired by Walmart and Bugherd quickly moving on to participate in the Silicon Valley-based 500 Startups accelerator program.

PushStart uses a very similar model, using the same legal structures as Startmate. There is unquestionably a deep enough pool of rising talent in Australia to fill both the Startmate and PushStart accelerator programs with high quality ventures, with plenty more left over. It will be great to see what comes out of this.

Here is the PushStart announcement:
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Why luxury defines our society and what to expect in 2012

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There are many themes and ideas threaded through our rich and complex times, so when I choose concepts to represent the heart of the year ahead, there is a lot to sort through and select. There were many dozens of ideas competing for the 12 themes I chose to represent what awaits us in 2012 (see slides below).

One of the most important themes of today that made the cut is ‘The New Luxury’ (Theme 8). I thought it would be worth expanding a little on what I wrote in the 2012 Themes on why this is important and what is unfolding in this space, following up on my post earlier this year on How is the culture of luxury changing?

2012: 12 Themes – What to expect in the year ahead

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How to make money from crowdsourcing: A framework for Crowd Business Models

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I think one of the most valuable aspects of our newly-launched book Getting Results From Crowds is the analysis of Crowd Business Models. While crowdsourcing is clearly a fantastic way for organizations large and small to get access to unparalleled resources and scale their operations, it is also increasingly central to many companies’ business models.

We have created a framework that identifies 7 fundamental crowd business models (plus non-profits), and done an analysis of the monetization mechanisms and success factors behind each one. These provide a broader framework for the 22 categories in version 2 of our Crowdsourcing Landscape.

The Crowd Business Models framework below aggregates these categories. Further details are provided in Chapter 22 of the book on Crowd Business Models. We have chosen to make all of these resources freely available, as we hope they will be useful for those building businesses that are relevant today. Go to the Getting Results From Crowds website for more free chapters and other resources.


Click on the image to download the complete framework as pdf
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Will your privacy completely vanish? It depends how we use facial recognition

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We recently launched our 12 Themes for 2012, shown below, in which the third of the 12 themes is ‘Privacy vanishes’.

2012: 12 Themes

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One of the drivers of privacy vanishing is the rise of facial recognition. As the 2012 themes document notes, while Facebook has prominently launched its facial recognition technology, Apple and Google have facial recognition capabilities that they have not yet launched. The landscape is now changing.
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The realities of intellectual property and crowdsourcing: don’t hold on too tight

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When you talk about crowdsourcing, consistently one of the first objections you hear is worries about losing valuable ideas and intellectual property to unscrupulous overseas contractors.

Our new book Getting Results From Crowds is designed to help people get the most value from crowdsourcing. Part of doing that is giving perspective on the challenges and opportunities of using crowds. In Chapter 4 on When to use crowds, embedded below, one of several free chapters available from book, we discuss Intellectual property and confidentiality and provide a ‘reality check’ on IP protection – see pages 24-25.

Getting Results From Crowds: Chapter 4 – When To Use Crowds
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Many sensors + Imagination = The Internet of Things

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Last week I gave a keynote at the National Broadband Network – what’s in it for me? conference in Bunbury, Western Australia, a town 2 hours south of Perth, the most geographically isolated city in the world. Not surprisingly the hunger for broadband in the region is enormous – you could feel it in the room.

My keynote on The Killer Apps of Connectivity roamed through through some of the killer apps of massive broadband, including work, health, education, media, and new business models. I also spoke about ‘Everything’, in which connectivity is applied to virtually everything around us.


Image source: Application of Cloud Computing to Agriculture and Prospects in Other Fields

One of the domains that is very relevant to the South West region where the conference was held is agriculture. The image above shows the dynamics of a study sponsored by Fujitsu that used rich sensor data to improve practices and yields in rice farming in Japan, while rich sensor data has also been used in wine making, where grapes are highly sensitive to temperature and humidity differences and changes.
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Want to buy drinks for a bunch of Sydney entrepreneurs?

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This is now the thirteenth year that I and some friends have organized the Annual Entrepreneurs and Self-Employed Xmas Drinks in Sydney. The reality is that many who are setting up companies, working solo, or running small businesses don’t have the kinds of Christmas parties that employees of big companies do. So we celebrate together, bringing our teams along.

This year we are running the event adjacent to a launch for my new book Getting Results From Crowds. In the end it wasn’t logistically feasible to run two separate events, and it made sense to do them at the same venue. The book is in any case highly relevant to entrepreneurs.

See the event page for full details, summarized below.
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