If you’ve ever watched a road bike race like the Tour de France, you know the peloton is the big group of riders that cluster together during the race to reduce drag. It’s a great example of collaboration in action. But let’s face it: the people in the middle of the peloton may go faster than they would otherwise, but they don’t win the race.

When it comes to creating and innovating, most companies (and employees) are in the peloton. They are doing enough to survive, but they are stuck in the pack. And if they stay in the pack too long, they lose.

Escaping the peloton is tough. Often, you see a cyclist break away, sprint for a while, only to get sucked back into the main group over time as the pressures of making a go independently prove too much.

You’ve probably felt this way at work. You come up with an amazing idea, one that will change the company forever. But little by little, people—even the well-meaning ones—chip away at its soul, until the idea goes from being amazing to, well, average. You end up being sucked back into the peloton.

After this happens one too many times, you may feel like you want to stop collaborating and try to make things happen on your own. Don’t do it. Even Lance Armstrong could rarely break away from the peloton without his teammates’ help.

Instead, here are three tips to help you escape the creativity peloton without giving up on collaboration.

[Read the rest of this post on opensource.com]

In the discussions around some of my previous articles, I’ve noticed a trend: we seem to be focusing on cultural changes that need to be made for the open source way to be effective in contexts beyond technology. One cultural context I think could really use some help is politics.

I read an interesting post last week by Morton Hansen (author of Collaboration: How Leaders Avoid the Traps, Create Unity, and Reap Big Results) entitled Obama’s Five Collaboration Mistakes. In the comments below the post, some folks interpreted his words as an attack on the Obama administration. Me? I’d probably interpret Hansen’s words more broadly. Perhaps something like:

Politicians are pretty darned bad at collaborating a lot of the time.

I think many folks would agree with this statement no matter where they sit politically. No matter where they live around the world.

In fact, the word “political” has become almost synonymous with anti-collaborative behavior in many contexts. Certainly in the business world.

But there is a lot a stake here. The economic downturn has hurt our businesses badly. And this has affected many of us in even more personal ways. Jobs. Homes. Security.

We need innovation in the political world to help solve the problems of the business world. Which means we are going to need better collaboration across political boundaries, both inside and between our countries.

Could we open source folks help?

[Read the rest of this article on opensource.com]

Earlier this week some colleagues and I attended a fantastic gathering of business and political leaders called the Emerging Issues Forum. The theme of the forum—interestingly enough for a bunch of business folks—was creativity, and speakers included some of my favorite thinkers/authors who analyze the future of business:

Roger Martin, Dean of the Rottman School of Management at the University of Toronto, and author of The Responsibility Virus, The Opposable Mind, and a new book on design thinking called The Design of Business.

Tom Kelley, General Manager of legendary design firm IDEO, and author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation. IDEO’s CEO Tim Brown also has a book out on the subject on Design Thinking, called Change by Design, which my friend Jonathan Opp wrote a nice review of here.

Daniel Pink, bestselling author of A Whole New Mind, a book that has been extremely influential in my thinking about how the left brain and right brain can play nice in the business world. Pink also has a new book out, called Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us.

During their talks, I couldn’t help but notice all three touched on a similar thematic: the crucial role that inspiring creativity plays in driving innovation.

[Read the rest of this post over at opensource.com]

Today I spent a great day at the Emerging Issues Forum, where I’m proud to say my home state of North Carolina attracted some of the top business minds in the world (the Twitter stream is going crazy here). This morning featured two Dark Matter Matters all stars, Roger Martin and Tom Kelley (who I have written about previously here and here), but there was also an incredible lunch session where Charlie Rose interviewed husband and wife creative geniuses Nnenna Freelon (the 5-time Grammy nominated jazz vocalist) and Philip Freelon (architect extraordinaire), and plenty of other enlightening stuff.

The theme of the conference is Creativity, Inc., and from what I can tell from many of the attendee and host comments, the theme of this year’s event is very different than years past. But the undercurrent of many of the comments from this morning seemed to take a clear point of view on this theme.

My interpretation? For years the business world has been waging a war against creativity… and creativity is beginning to fight back.

It’s about damn time.

Read the rest of this post at Dark Matter Matters.

Lately we’ve been working with the public sector on some community building efforts. In a recent session we introduced a team to open source principles, general use of collaborative web technologies, and the latest on-line civic participation work. Then, we asked them to do some searching on their own for public sector platforms or campaigns for participation.

Here’s what they came up with during the short span of time. You may have seen most of these sites, and many more are out there. The team was quick to point out that some organizations are definitely doing it better than others. If you have stellar, or not-so-stellar, examples share them.

Open Government Innovations Gallery
Santa Cruz Budget
Wikified Army Field Guide
CDC IdeaLab
Regulations.gov
Apps for Democracy
Massachusetts Open Data Initiative
Data.gov
Kansas Transportation Online Community

Clearly, it’s no longer groundbreaking. And, as people make that necessary switch from evangelist to practitioner, the question should be: Are we paying attention and doing things as effectively as we can?

Not all these efforts have the same aim, and with the ever-maturing taxonomy of all things open it’s important to know what model is best suited for the situation. But, what we’re interested in is community building. The most basic distinction we can make is the difference between the two often-thrown around terms crowdsourcing and open source, as David and Chris each wrote here and here, respectively.

This is where the real work and next frontier for practitioners exists. It’s not just technology, press releases, or prize money. Rather, it’s the overall strategy, design, and message of the platform (loosely defined) constructed and carried out as a coherent method for creating and engaging a community.

There are some things to pay attention to here. They might be brushed off as questions and challenges, but more importantly they’re opportunities to do things well.

-Is what we’re asking of the community in line with interest and ability?

-Are there clear goals; ones either agreed to or developed by the community?

-Is this platform reinforcing or improving a representative democracy and all that comes with it, rather than replacing or detracting from it?

-How sustainable is the community, should it be a short-term or a long-term effort?

-Do we have a way to measure the health of the community and the know-how and tools to guide it when needed?

-Are the legal and technical dimensions set appropriately so that innovation happens within and external to the community?

-Do we bring the right physical world characteristics, attitudes, and norms that we want and maybe discourage the ones we don’t want?

-Do we have an idea of even what this “we” means and where that “we” should fall on the spectrum from free-for-all to facilitator to despot?

These are just a handful of the things we work on and pay attention to daily (along with my collaborators at Georgia Tech). Anyone embarking on a community building or participation project, especially in the public sector, needs to be, too. Community building like many things will always be more of an art than a science, but with the growing examples out there we need to do a better job generalizing knowledge from both successes and failures.

Tinkering with a brand, whether public or private, and requesting the participation and precious time of others, is not something where you just roll out a platform and hope. We can and should get to the point where there is a degree of certainty in practice. And, of course, share the knowledge.

New Kind Parter and Chief Design Officer, Matthew Muñoz, has been selected as one of 30 participants in this year’s U.S. National Design Policy Summit on December 1 in Washington, DC. At the Summit, Matt will be collaborating with leaders from professional design, design education, and government organizations to develop and set strategic priorities for the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative.

The U.S. National Design Policy Initiative represents the governmental plan of action to support design as a means of increasing U.S. economic competitiveness and improving democratic governance. The philosophy that design is imperative in the process of governmental innovation isn’t a new one. President Jimmy Carter wrote in 1978, “Good design can help us meet our commitment to improve the efficiency of government…and reaffirm our concern for the human side of government.” And how do we ensure good design? Design policy. The National Design Policy Initiative seeks to make this happen.

Muñoz and his fellow 2009 Summit participants are tasked with: 1) developing the strategic priorities for the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative; 2) finalizing the membership of an American Design Council; 3) gaining a sense of the priorities for design from the U.S. Department of Commerce; 4) engaging the wider design community in national design policy; and 5) developing a set of case studies that demonstrate the value of design.

Muñoz participated in the 2008 Summit as a researcher and facilitator.

If you’re interested in following along, the Summit will be broadcasted live via UStream.tv. You can also keep abreast on Youtube, Facebook and Twitter.

We can talk about creativity and innovation all day long, meld the culture, design the space, set up the infrastructure, and have a repeatable process for bringing ideas to market; but, the ultimate constraint and arbiter — making all other efforts useless — is the legal system.

Protecting something as intellectual property is about balancing returns to society and compensation to a creator. We want society to benefit from a creator’s creation, but enough incentive must compel creators to do their thing.

Enough being the key word and one big, gray space. If a government misses that mark of protection in either direction, society can lose out on innovation. The issue is this mark changes based on the type of intellectual property. Business methods, when protected, have a different balance of returns to society and creator, than software, and pharmaceuticals.

Not that everyone views it that way or the law treats it that way, which is why a current Supreme Court case is important to watch.

Monday, the Court heard Bilski v. Kappos, a case that brings business method patents to the forefront. Previously, the Federal Circuit ruled Bilski’s business method wasn’t patentable because it wasn’t “…tied to a particular machine or apparatus, [nor did it] transform a particular article into a different state or thing.”

Bilski is calling into question the efficacy and legitimacy of what’s called the “machine-or-transformation” test. By telling Bilski his business method wasn’t protected, the Federal Circuit may have invalidated existing patents for business methods.

But, bringing into question the machine-or-transformation test may also have implications for the software industry. At one end, since source code must be run on a machine to do anything, it could be interpreted all software is patentable.

Or, in the view of the Software Freedom Law Center, source code is simply an algorithm we can comprehend, and algorithms themselves aren’t patentable.

Additionally, there are economic arguments that creativity and innovation in software just doesn’t really work that way. Allowing patenting of software led to significant societal inefficiencies like patent thickets, bloated legal departments, patent trolls, and risk-averse companies—all wasting money and limiting innovation.

Just thinking about business methods, does having a legal-based incentive to come up with a new way of doing business increase the rate of new business creation or improve the quality of innovation?

Without the protection, does the effect of essentially forcing businesses to compete on other aspects (really, compete at all), rather than just on who did it first, outweigh what we would gain from preserving/expanding business method patents?

(Of course, this is the economic view, and potentially only figures into a portion of court decision making.)

Leaving the issue of software aside, the Justices showed quite some skepticism of Bilski’s claims yesterday:

“Let’s take training horses,” said Justice Antonin Scalia. “Don’t you think that some people, horse whisperers or others, had some … insights into the best way to train horses? Why didn’t anybody patent those things?”

“I think our economy was based on industrial processes,” responded [Bilski's lawyer].

“It was based on horses, for Pete’s sake!” said Scalia.  “I would really have thought somebody would have patented that.”
(Joe Mullins Reports in American Lawyer)

It’s predictable, but still interesting to see who lines up on each side, or who actively doesn’t choose a side in the amicus briefs.

For a longer treatment on the economics of innovation, check out this book.