Blog by Paul Golding

Keep in mind that despite having worked with operators all over the globe, I have been one of their fiercest critics when it comes to innovation and understanding the developer mindset, not that I deem to represent that mindset. Actually, it's more like mindsets. To O2's credit, they hired me as a consultant with a two-word job description: "Be disruptive."

That's where the O2 incubation scheme comes in and how it should be understood. This is not really about O2 following a chapter from the corporate manual. This is not a standard corporate play for them at all. It is not part of a grander plan, nor is it, as one developer suspected, just a cheap way to get some funky web stuff done. It's mostly an experiment, but one that O2 is seriously prepared to back.

The essence of the story is that O2, with its significant marketing expertise and customer base, has some insights into user behaviours and needs. Here, we're talking about SME customers. When I sat down with Simon Devonshire, who heads up SME marketing (and inventor of 'One Water'), he told me that he had been trying to get an idea off the ground that would enable SMEs to network with each other and their customers using the web.

My response was simple - O2 can't do this. It's too "webby" and needs a crew who understand how to innovate on the web. Sure, there are some potentially great cross-over points with telco and more traditional services, but it's essentially a web play. So I tossed in the idea of incubating a start-up, leaving them to innovate using the language of web innovation that a telco can't speak. And so the incubation scheme was born.

Those (few) developers who have ever worked with an operator will know what a flip this is on the more usual and restrictive supplier arrangement. This really is O2 stepping back to let the innovation happen at the speed of "internet thought" and only lending a hand where it makes sense. The incubation process is deliberately vague because it hasn't been finalised - that will happen in open discussion with the finalists and over the next month. The principles of offering money, support and a potential big pay-off are all there, but the emphasis at the moment is on finding serious talent who can make things happen in code, unhindered by a big corporate breathing down their necks with requirements and project charts. It is truly intended to be a win-win situation for the winning start-up and O2.

The opening launch is seeking entrepreneurial coders who can innovate around this theme of networking for small businesses - a kind of social marketing tool designed for small businesses. However, there are other themes being considered, some in them in really exciting consumer spaces.

O2 has taken a step towards trying a new way of innovating. Elsewhere, I am leading another project to use completely Internet-like paradigms and architectures to build a new service (by re-inventing an old telco one). I got together a group of internal and external talent, including some seriously cool UK web talent (from the Ruby gang) and some Hadoop experts, and I told them that we're going to run this like a start-up. In other words, if there's a "start-up way" versus a traditional "telco way," we're gonna pick the former. This is serious out-of-comfort-zone for some people, but that's how change happens.

I hope to put this project together with the start-up program, which will hopefully grow, and mix it up with some of the other cool stuff that we're plotting behind the scenes of O2 Litmus - watch out for some fantastic developer events that are totally beyond the conventional telco boundaries.

Seriously cool stuff is going to happen in 2010 (my zeitgest commentary coming later - thanks for the reminder from Martin Smith - @mjs1.)

Mobile Augmented Reality and Mash-Ups

One might be forgiven for having suspicions about this "design fad." It seems like people who have a "design background" are positioning themselves as the new vanguards of business innovation. It is possible to read some of the books and come away wondering what the point was. One is left thinking that "design" is some secret sauce that only the initiated understand. 

Roberto Verganti's book more or less says as much, referring to "circles of the initiated" and the "design discourse," which is some mysterious activity carried out by the gods of design, an elite crew who understand what design is really about. Presumably, because we - the lay readers - are not part of the initiated, this is why we might fail to grasp the point of the book by the time we hit the end. We get a sense of excitement and thrill, but come away none the wiser. It's a bit like listening to a coffee taster refer to the "tones of fruitiness" and "waves of acidity" that rise from the swig of espresso, whilst we only taste coffee. We stare at the cup wondering if we're missing something.

At the other end of the spectrum, we hear a lot of people talking about "User Experience," often as if they've invented it. The term is used interchangeably with user-centred design (UCD) and the new god of the user. "We must have participatory design," we are told. It's part of this thing called Web 2.0, where we "co-create" with the user. Isn't it? There are so many variations on the theme, so many experts to go with it.

Is this the culture of design that Verganti is writing about? Is this design-driven innovation?

No, it certainly is not, because, as Verganti relays to us from many of his Italian design contemporaries, radical designers ignore the market (i.e. the user) and simply "make proposals" - i.e. they propose products to it. To the UCD enthusiast, this is perhaps a sin. "What? Ignore the user?"

Let's be clear what Verganti means, although I think he fails to spell it out in his book.

When he talks about designers proposing ideas to the market, he doesn't mean a product designer sitting in the lab whose job it is to make sure that the buttons are usable and the base looks nice whilst supporting the weight of the screen. That might be part of the product process, but it isn't part of the innovation process. To understand Verganti, we should think about artists and art.

When a great painter or sculptor sets about creating a work, they don't set up a focus group and ask "the market" what it wants. They create what they are compelled to create and then propose it to the world. Can we imagine Damien Hirst sending out a survey: "What kind of work would you like: a. picture of flowers, b. a colourful vase, c. a sheep in a tank?"

Great innovators use design to propose their ideas to the world. They bring new meaning to ideas. They transform book cases into works of art, per Verganti's example of the Bookworm. They transform console games into physically charged family experiences, per Nintendo Wii with its MEMS technology.

In effect, they are proposing a new language around with product proposals. With the Bookworm, we are not interested in its capacity to hold books. We are interested in how we might configure it (the worm can be shaped into any curve that the user likes), which books to display and what their combined statement will be about the user e.g. "I am a traveller," for the one who displays a well-thumbed collection of travelogues.

This idea is not too dissimilar to our exploration of culinary languages in a previous post about the different types of chef.

Radical innovators concern themselves with proposing new ideas. They are concerned with meaning. Design is a tool to convey the meaning that the designer wishes to give to the product, service or business. This is the essence of what many of these "design of business" books are trying to tell us. They are not about the process of designing products and how they look. After all, how the Wii looks is of little meaning. What it does, what it enables and what it means to the (mostly) families that use it is what really matters.

My talk was a state-of-the-nation view of location technologies and their intersection with the web, including augmented reality and indoor proximity possibilities. It was interesting to visit some of the Iranian exhibits beforehand to observe a 17th century astrolabe, which must have been one of the earliest location-finding instruments (based on star navigation).

This is why museums are so important. One can absorb different cultural, artistic and scientific perspectives and enter into other streams of thought and design discourses beyond the immediate realms of one's own experiences, especially mobile. This kind of intersection is important in order to foster alternative design perspectives that can lead to radical innovation. As a former silicon chip designer, I'll never forget that one of the key breakthroughs in molecular beam epitaxy (i.e. defining circuits on silicon) came from an engineer whose passion was oil painting. The art of layering and scraping oils led him to new insights for silicon deposition.

Mike Ellis invited me to talk at the museum, himself an inspiring provocateur of new ideas in mobile. He is a museum computer geek, having led the Science Museum's online project. It is no surprise that someone who spends much of their time in contact with a vast wealth of exhibits will have a different take on life, including mobile life. How else would one coin new terms in their presentations, such as "Everyware?" 

Mike set up a QR code project for us all to try during the event, using QR codes printed on our name badges and the One-Tag website. I won't explain it here, but rather send you to Mike's blog post about the event, which is well worth a read if you're at all curious about how to use QR codes at your next event.

What I will mention is how my three kids (ages 7, 10, 12) came home from the event and produced their own QR code treasure hunt around the home without any encouragement or intervention from myself. It is a proof point that many of these 'exotic' technologies really are child's play for Digital Natives.

Situational Web