The Innovators Dilemma

Listened to this on Audible books commuting to Menlo Park for a Social Media for Nonprofits #SM4NP Conference. Good foundation, classic text on disruptive innovation and business.

Basic premise is not really that new and is pretty straight forward . . . "We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them." Einstein

In other words, the very business practices that make a company a success and enable it to grow are the ones that limit its ability to develop and sustain a new disruptive technology. Therefore, if a company is interested in maintaining its current scale and success as well as engage in developing new disruptive technologies it will need to to do so by acquiring or spinning out a small, flexible, independent, organization who's sole purpose is to focus on the disruptive technology and who's small scale matches the small scale of the new markets that will be "early adopters" of the new disruptive technology.

The three elements of a business: Values --> Processes --> Resources are very different in large, successful, established organizations that focus on incremental change vs. small, entrepreneurial organizations that focus on disruptive change.

Citizenville, Gavin Newsom

... How to Take the Town Square Digital and Reinvent Government.

Just barely started this one so no comment yet. Going to see Newsom speak at Dominican University on March 7th. More on this later.




6-21-13 While I don't always agree with Newsom, I found the book quite provocative in its indictment of our current governmental systems as bastions of Luddite driven bureaucracy, certainly not capable of engaging 21st century Gen X citizens. Citizens (and government officials) need better access to information. Government 2.0 is about improving constructive and well informed public engagement through enhanced digital access to information that is...

• Searchable & Indexed (not in static pdf docs!!!)
• Accessible via any device or platform through open source systems (Device Agnostic)
• Share-able - not limited by onerous copyright restrictions (an alternative would be to use Creative Commons licencing agreements); not locked down with restrictions that  impede re-use of the information - should be "remixable" or "mashable" via opensource API's (Application Programming Language); connected to public feedback systems (blog comments and other social media tools)
• Free - the government should not charge for access or licence sole rights to the information to a third party distributor that can charge for access.

A few additional resources in this arena:

• 2009 White House Open Government Directive http://www.whitehouse.gov/open/documents/open-government-directive
• Open Government Foundation
• Sunlight Foundation
• Knight Foundation's Community Information Challenge
• Open Government Platform
• Open Government Data

Open Government Data Videos