I’m not sure if it’s because I was recently asked to chair a panel on “driving innovative thinking through podcasting” or because I’ve been reading/listening to a number of innovation-related blogs and podcasts lately, but I’ve been reflecting a lot on Getting ETech Support and also thinking about driving innovation and creativity in business organizations (particularly in the medical/scientific fields).

Whatever the case, one of the most inspiring things I heard was the May 17th episode of the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders podcast, which features Marissa Mayer (VP, Google), who talked about Google’s well known philosophy/culture of allowing engineers to use 20% of their time to “to pursue projects they're passionate about.”

Apparently, they did an analysis of all the product/feature launches in the last six months of 2005 and discovered that 50% of everything Google launched during that period came from the 20% of time that people used for their own projects. Marissa then went on to say:

When you take really smart people [and] give them really good tools, they build really beautiful, amazing things that are really exciting. And they do it with a lot of passion and momentum, in such a way that you actually see 2.5 times the output of what you would expect, given the time…It’s that license to do whatever they want that really, ultimately fuels a huge amount of creativity and a huge amount of innovation.

What a great statement and testament to the Power of Fun! This insightful comment also aligns well with the whole idea of Kathy Sierra’s posts on Brain Death by Dull Cubicle and Brain Death by Micromanagement: The Zombie Function, as well as Rod Boothby’s post on Micromanagement, which states “The way people work has changed dramatically, but the way their companies are organized lags far behind.”

In support of this, Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google) was
also quoted as saying the following in Business 2.0 (NOV’2005):

Virtually
everything new seems to come from the 20 percent of their time engineers here
are expected to spend on side projects. They certainly don't come out of the
management team.

And similarly, one of the funniest replies to a
post on Knowledge
Management is Dead simply says: “Hooray! It was the
management bit that killed it.”

So,
where are we going with this? Is Google the only company that can benefit from
this model of success and innovation?

Well,
though there has been controversy, praise
and even speculation
of a review of Google’s 20% model, there’s probably nothing that speaks
louder than real world examples. And, as a matter of fact, Atlassian and JotSpot—both
enterprise wiki companies—have implemented similar models with great success.
Atlassian calls it “FedEx Day”
(because of the “we deliver”
slogan) and JotSpot calls it “Hackathon;”
but whatever you call it, one thing is clear: they love it and it works!

Here’s
what Joe Kraus (CEO, JotSpot) had to say:

It's
unbelievable what you can get done in a day with a focused, motivated and
creative team. When you give people the time to do the thing that always seems
“just out of reach” people's creativity cracks wide open…What was particularly
cool was the energy it brought to the team. People felt invigorated and
recharged. In fact, one of our engineers was so excited he exclaimed (during
the presentations) “Dude, I just want to crawl into my hole [his cube],
grow a beard, and build shit!”

And
knowing full well that one model won’t fit every business, Joe goes on to
dispense some good advice about adapting the Google model:

Google does
something like this with their “20% of people's time is supposed to be on
projects that aren't related to what they're working on” but for us, in a
startup, we found that allocating time is not the same as taking it.
Essentially, we would allocate time but it would get taken up by something
urgent that came up at the last minute. Making an event out of it added
enthusiasm, anticipation and stupid antics that make this kind of thing fun
(air-horns, stupid hats, lots of pez, etc).

So what’s the lesson to
be learned from all this?

Well,
it appears to be an emerging trend among companies—particularly, the smaller
Web 2.0 companies— to steer away from the “old
corporate culture”, plagued by micromanagement and dull,
repetitive, monotonous work, which stifles creativity.

Instead
we should, IMHO, be moving towards a culture of “creating
passionate workers” (to put a twist on the blog title)
and put some fun and freedom back into the daily grind, in order to bake
innovation and creativity back into the system!

After all, all work and no play makes us very dull people!

Related Resources:

- Google's
“20 percent time” in action
- Google
20% Time
- Managing
Google's Idea Factory
- How
Google Innovates
- The
70 Percent Solution
- Knowledge
Workers - academia and the Google 20%
- Transition
to The Creative Economy

Beyond the Playlist: Driving Innovative
Thinking Through
Podcasting
Track 2: Podcasting as a
Business
Instructors: Shwen Gwee, Kathleen
Gilroy
Room: Ballroom A
Description: Developing innovative ideas for new products or services
within an organization is a complex task when your team is already
inundated with information and day-to-day operations. Podcasting–with
it's ease of distribution and updates, portability, “time-shifting”
capabilities, and copious amounts of content–can ease the burden of
the daily grind and directly or indirectly facilitate creative thinking
and drive innovation. In this session, you'll hear from experts in
e-learning and corporate training who will discuss using new media to
spur innovation and “thinking out of the box” in any
organization.

I'm very excited to
be part of the expo this year  (I also attended lthe first one
last year) and look forward to the opportunity of meeting many of you
there.

Don't forget to book accomodations early–there are limited numbers of
“conference rate” rooms.

Check
out all the new tracks they have this
year!

Microsoft
PowerPoint would probably be considered as more of an emergent technology rather than emerging
technology these days. And unfortunately, since its introduction in 1990,
most of the upgrades/updates to this ubiquitous presentation software seem to
have been more evolutionary rather than revolutionary.

So, you may
ask, why am I writing about an almost 17 year old application when people are
talking about Windows Live and
Vista? Well it’s because,
while PowerPoint hasn’t really changed that much since it’s inception, it still
has become the most widely used
presentation tool in businesses and other organizations—though it’s probably
lost some market share recently to Apple’s elegant Keynote—but more importantly,
many third-party vendors have developed new and innovative add-on’s that truly
enhance and extend the use of PowerPoint “beyond bullet points” (to quote Cliff Atkinson).

For
example, I have to highlight two of the coolest, most-innovative
PowerPoint-enhancing tools (IMHO) that I’ve seen so far: (1) Turning Point’s ARS solution and (2)
Impatica’s BlackBerry
applications…

Anyone
who’s ever used an Audience Response System (ARS) will know what a powerful
tool it can be for audience interaction, identifying knowledge gaps, and
measuring learning. However, it can also be very cost-prohibitive to contract
specialized ARS vendors to run even a small event. So, something like this DIY
solution that integrates directly with PowerPoint could really open up this
option to a much larger market and have significant impact on ROI and ROE (Return
on Education).

And as for
the ability to (re)view and project a PowerPoint presentation via a
BlackBerry—well, I think that needs little explanation or justification. What a
great backup for times when the laptop goes south!

Anyway, a
recent article in the May 2006
issue of INC. magazine, “Making Your
(Power) Point,” features several applications “…that can help make your next presentation less of a snooze and more of
a blockbuster.” So following that lead, I thought I would mention a few of
these PowerPoint-augmenting technologies in this post and also add a few more that
I believe deserve a mention in this category as well.

Good
Resources
- Indezine
(a comprehensive list of add-ons, including reviews)
- Presenters University

Hardware/Projection Add-ons
- DigiSlide
(Miniature Projection Technology)
- Impatica: Viewing and delivering PPT via
BlackBerry
- Turning Point (Audience Response
System)

Converters
for Online Distribution
- Adobe/Macromedia Breeze
- Articulate Presenter
- Camtasia
- Impatica for PowerPoint

Charts/Graphs
- GlobFX Swiff Chart
- Fusion Charts
- Rich Chart
Builder

Presentation Management
- Freepath by Grassroots (presentation
manager)
- Ontra (PPT file management
system)

Others
- Ovation
(including Timekeeper
and Teleprompter)
- Thermometer (“progress bar”)

One other thing to keep in mind is that all the technology in the world still
cannot help a bad presentation/presenter. So here are some resources that
address the issue of delivering good presentations:

- Beyond Bullets
- Presentaiton
Zen
- “Stop your
presentation before it kills again!” (by
Kathy Sierra)
- The Work
of Edward Tufte
-  Why Bad Presentations Happen to Good Causes

As a quick follow up to my last post, here is
a great “real world” example of how to use Google Trends for measuring marketing
and PR efforts: Dissecting
Windows Live PR with Data.

In fact, Steve Rubel—who also recently posted “25 Things I
Learned on Google Trends”—admits that he’s hooked
on Trends and says:

“Why am I so ga-ga? Because Google
Trends is an invaluable tool for building, tracking, selling and measuring
the impact of any PR program, especially a product launch. The key is to use it
in concert with other existing analytic tools—BlogPulse, Technorati and Alexaholic (which charts Alexa
data)—so that you can also track the conversation and traffic trends. All of
these tools by the way are free.”

On a similar note, here's another example of “real world” use from InternetNews.com:

“A company
like Lexus can run an ad campaign in New York or Los Angeles for a new
car and then look at the queries and literally see how much interest
there is…Or think what a political campaign can do with this.”

For those who haven’t heard, Google
announced several “new” products at their recent press day (May 10^th,
2006): Google Trends, Google Co-op, Google Desktop 4, and Google Notebook (to
be launched next week).

I was wondering what happened to the much
anticipated announcement of a Google “health channel”, but I guess that was
rolled-up under Google Co-op and the hype was simply blown out of proportion by
the blogosphere.

Anyway, Google Trends
appears to be a very interesting tool that could be directly applicable to many
businesses, particularly for market research and trend analyses. Especially in
this day and age, where blogging and web-based marketing plays such a big role,
this could also be a major competitive intelligence tool.

Essentially, Google Trends
allows you to enter up to 5 terms and compare how frequently they have been
searched for over time. It also generates info on geography/regions, time
frames (dates), languages, etc, with the ability to limit these to your
specifications. It even has specific “markers” that link to major news events,
which could help explain spikes/dips in the graph. Google says:

“Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how
many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total
number of searches done on Google over time. We then show you a graph with the
results — our search-volume graph… Google Trends makes it possible to find
overarching trends in search and news. Our graphs are based on aggregated data
from millions of searches done on Google over time.”

Several great resources for info on Google Trends include:

- Google’s “About
Google Trends” section
- Steve Rubel’s Micro
Persuasion blog
- Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch
blog
- Google
Blogoscoped’s coverage of Google Press Day and examples
- 23World's brief overview

As mentioned in my last post, Polycom and Skype recently announced their “love child,” the Polycom Communicator. I mentioned that the release of the Communicator “…will take Skype to a whole different level (i.e. for business users) and put it into consideration as an affordable alternative to expensive teleconferencing devices and costly per-minute phone charges.”

Well, I’m sure it’s no coincidence, but Skype has now released SkypeCasts—a free application that allows moderated teleconferences for up to 100 users, including such features as the ability for the host to mute or eject participants, etc. Here’s a quote from Skype Journal:

“Skypecasting is about groups, about public. About conversations: moderating, facilitation, sharing. Skype is about global connections and exchanges. Skypecasting is your village, your pub, your community. Live, real-time, now.”

More info:
- SkypeCast Homepage
- CNET report by Felisa Yang
- Skype Journal: brief “preview”, developer view, and more info
- Alec Saunders on Skype 2.5 and SkypeCasts