The inside is the outside: The Möbius strip and Klein bottle as metaphors for the future of organizations

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In a number of my recent keynotes, including at Connected Enterprise and the CIO Summit, I have discussed the blurring of the inside and outside as a critical facet of the future of organizations.

The Möbius strip is a simple strip of paper folded once and pasted so that it has only one side. A Klein bottle is its (hypothetical) three-dimensional equivalent, where the outside and inside of the bottle are the one and the same.

This is a powerful and highly relevant metaphor for the successful organizations of today and tomorrow.
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Creating a better world through apps: the power of mobile in catalyzing networks for good

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I was recently invited to attend the presentations and awards for the Vodafone App Aid competition and to interview Guy Kawasaki, who was one of the event’s judges.

App Aid selected 10 charities who saw the need for a mobile app. App developers signed up for teams that developed apps from scratch in 48 hours for each of the charities. The winning teams received prizes to help them complete and launch their apps. The video below shows brief snippets from the winners.

What struck me while I was watching the charities’ presentations was that the underlying premise of almost all the apps was connecting resources to where they can do the most good.
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The global brain is like a child’s brain – let’s nurture it

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In my book Living Networks I wrote about how the networks in which we live are coming to life, making us all part of what we can quite accurately think of as a global brain.

I wrote an extended introduction to the book that went into this concept in depth. However this was not included in the final published book, so I later shared it as an article, Autopoiesis and how hyper-connectivity is literally bringing the networks to life.

One of the wonderful outcomes of that was that the film-maker Tiffany Shlain, who has long thought on very similar lines, reached out to connect.

Tiffany has just released a marvellous 10 minute movie, Brain Power: From Neurons To Networks, that reflects these ideas. Watch it below, preferably on full screen.


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The future of news: automated, crowdsourced, and better than ever

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ABC journalist Mark Colvin last week delivered the Andrew Olle Media Lecture, a prestigious annual lecture on journalism. Mark is a Twitter afficionado as well as journalist with over three decades of experience, making him a great choice for the lecture this year.

The full transcript of the lecture provides rich stories from the history of journalism in Australia, and an incisive view of the present.

On the topic of crowdsourcing, Mark says:
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Slides for Crowdsourcing for Media and Content workshop in New York

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Last Friday in New York, shortly before Sandy shook things up, I ran a Crowdsourcing for Media and Content workshop as part of the Crowdsourcing Week global series of events.

Media is one of the domains which has been the most impacted by crowdsourcing over the last decade, in a wide variety of guises. The intent of the workshop was to dig into the many ways in which crowdsourcing can be applied in creating media and content, and how to do so most effectively.

Below I have shared the slides used in the workshop. They were designed simply to provide some context to the flow of the workshop, and certainly not to stand alone as content, but they may be of some interest even if you did not attend.

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Excellent data on the state of global innovation: idea generation, idea conversion, and crowdsourcing

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Strategy + Business magazine has just launched its annual Global Innovation 1000 study, a deep analysis of the 1000 biggest spenders on innovation globally. As it happens I separately caught up with S+B editor Art Kleiner and Booz & Co Chief Marketing Officer Tom Stewart last Friday in New York (more on those conversations later), fortunately getting out before Sandy hit town.

Here is a good video of the highlights of the study:

The theme of the study this year was on the early stages of innovation, in generating ideas and then converting them to products and services.
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Slides for Crowdsourcing for Marketing Workshop in New York

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Today I ran a Crowdsourcing for Marketing for Enterprise & Agencies workshop in New York as part of the global Crowdsourcing Week series of events.

I was very happy with how it went and the response from the participants. There was a good mixture of brand and agency participants, and great discussion throughout. Little of the richness of the workshop and discussion is shown in the slides, but some of the frameworks might be of use to those who did not attend the workshop.

In particular we delved in some depth into the implications of crowdsourcing for the corporate marketing function and agencies. I will be spending more time on this topic, and creating more in-depth content. For now, the new chapter on crowdsourcing for marketing in the Second Edition of Getting Results From Crowds contains some of the new frameworks.

Here are the slides for today’s workshop.

Slides from opening keynote at Crowd Business Models Summit

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Yesterday I chaired Crowd Business Models Summit in San Francisco.

Here are the slides from my opening presentation, which provided an introduction and frame for the event.

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Insights on using crowdsourcing for marketing

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As I will be running a Crowdsourcing for Marketing workshop in New York this Thursday, I was keen to attend the Marketing session at CrowdConf today.

Here are brief notes from the speakers through what was an excellent panel discussion:
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The future of marketing: 7 critical applications of crowdsourcing

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On October 25 in New York City I will run a workshop on Crowdsourcing for Marketing in Enterprise & Agencies as part of the global Crowdsourcing Week workshop series. The following day I will run a workshop that is highly complementary, on Crowdsourcing for Media and Content.

Following on from the broad-based first edition of Getting Results From Crowds, one of the most important topics I have been delving into is the application of crowdsourcing to marketing. The New York workshop will go into the topic in detail, including the primary applications, extensive case studies, industry perspectives, analysis of crowdsourced marketing platforms, approaches to building your own crowds, effective strategies for creative agencies to tap the rise of crowdsourcing, and more.

Just as the field of crowdsourcing is far broader than most people appreciate (with 22 categories in our Crowdsourcing Landscape), there are many ways in which crowdsourcing can be applied to marketing.

There are 7 major applications of crowdsourcing to marketing:
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