The Million Dollar Idea Inside You

Interesting article over at Harvard Business Online about open source innovation.

While what BIG is doing may seem exciting at first, it's not until the comments that you see how they've gotten it wrong. To quote Phil Meyers' (from TunedIn Blog) comment:

Interesting stuff. I'll have to pick up Michael's book. Our research found that the best innovations didn't come from inventors looking for big ideas but practical folks looking to solve a problem that they found a bunch of people had.

That's what so many of these crowdsourcing/open innovation/open invention plays seem to be missing - Engaging the crowd is only innovation 1.5. Having the balls to let the crowd lead your innovation process is Innovation 2.0 (of course OneEyeDeer will be Innovation 3.0 ;)

Why do so many people find it so difficult to get over this company-centric view of the world?

Secrets of online advertising

Interesting Panel the other day at Microsoft Mix08.

Duncan Riley made has posted a video over at Techcrunch.

Featured in the panel and video is Frank Arrigo (Microsoft), Bryan Biniak (CEO Jacked), Tim Kendall (Facebook), Loic Le Meur (CEO Seesmic), Chris Saad (Particls).

Quote of the day? Must go to Tim Kendall of Facebook with :

“Facebook believes the best ads are the ones users don’t know are ads”

Hold on. If what he means by that is that traditional advertising is broken and that companies are going to have to find new ways to engage the people that choose to use their products and services, then that's what Umair over at Bubblegen has been saying for ages and is a great step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, what he probably meant is that the best ads are the ones that trick you into thinking they’re something else. Just another example of the the other thing Umair has been speaking about a lot lately - i.e. Facebook's impending demise because of the inherent evilness of their DNA

haha - nice job demonstrating why Facebook will eventually fall back to earth, Tim.

Other than that, props to Chris Saad. Definitely the most interesting guy on the panel.

We're back!

Time for us to start blogging again.

Same focus with a little more info on how we're progressing with our startup

It's good to be back.