Back in the mid-80s my first foray into interactive multimedia was as assistant to a charismatic maverick called Patrick D. Martin, who’d bought a group of multi-skilled people together as QNet to develop new systems to realise the Roboshow. I’d mentioned this involvement in the early days of interactive and video art to Mike Stubbs, [...]

Fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) tend to be everyday items with a low financial risk for consumers. However they also tend to have low conversational currency – when did you last get inspired to recommend a toothpaste, lolly, or vitamin tablet to your mates? Our latest article for Admap presents new research that illuminates how businesses [...]

As mentioned in our influencer re-think post,  the rebooting our site coincided with some analysis of the results of a series of product trials we’ve run in Australia for major brands on our Yooster panel that challenges conventional wisdom about customer loyalty and the effective spread of word of mouth, particularly for FMCG/CPG brands. We’ve [...]

A recent article by Dr Paul Marsden in Contagious Magazine positions crowdsourcing as a recession proof strategy. The basic theory is that you get better informed product development and product enhancement with crowdsourcing, as well as better aligned supply and demand through online customer collaboration. The promise being that you can introduce your brand to [...]

One of the areas we looked at in our research into collaborative innovation with Dr Alain Samson at the London School of Economics on behalf of NESTA was the difficulties surrounding the more ‘intangible’ aspects of managing innovation e.g. where accountancy doesn’t prove to be particularly useful. Many large organisations claim to have excellent and [...]

As mentioned in my recent so what’s the big society story post, I’ve caught up with social reporter David Wilcox recently to discuss all the confusion surrounding the Big Society. David and I worked together on a research project that looked at collaborative innovation for NESTA. We specifically looked at the social impact assessment of [...]

Back in 1999 a set of 95 theses were put forward by a small group of web commentators and early bloggers as a manifesto, or call to action, for all businesses operating within what is suggested to be a newly-connected marketplace: A powerful global conversation has begun. Through the Internet, people are discovering and inventing [...]

When Forrester Research’s Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s Groundswell book came out last year I couldn’t help comparing their ladder of engagement with Sherry Arnstein’s ladder of participation from 1969. Arnstein’s ladder is a powerful model for thinking about how much influence people have in public programmes in terms of the actual participation processes, which [...]

As part of our extended research for NESTA last year we’ve briefly looked into strategic management innovation. It was one of the horizontal categories of their Connect arm’s Corporate Open Innovation (COI) Framework. One school of thought represented by the likes of London Business School’s Management Innovation Lab has focused on strategic management innovation from [...]

Last year we carried out a pilot research project on behalf of NESTA. The project was prefaced by the following quote from General Patton: If everyone is thinking the same thing, someone is not thinking! Our point being that there’s a danger of getting caught up in a vortex of self-affirming opinion when developing a [...]