best wii game ever

I ordered "Boom Blox", the Steven Spielberg/EA Wii game, after reading the Ars review.

Best. Wii. Game. EVAR.

Go get it, especially if you have kids.

two books worth reading

How to foster and sustain disruptive innovation has been on my mind a lot lately. I've been coalescing my thoughts on how I would do it and reading up on other approaches. To that point, I recently read two books that apply.

The first came via the 37 Signals blog. "Maverick", by Richard Semler, is the story of how the Brazilian firm Semco reinvented itself during the early 1990's. Semco is a diverse 3000 person firm that has units doing everything from industrial mixing units to property management. What makes Semco interesting is that it is run in an incredibly democratic fashion, including groups and individuals setting their own wages, virtually nonexistent hierarchy, and limited management. Having helped craft and drive Linden's culture, it was a fascinating read to look at what it meant to take many of our ideas farther, but also gave great insight into some of the basic differences.

Semco's business units -- by virtue of their extreme diversification -- operated almost independently of each other, allowing different groups to generate high communication rates within the group without flooding other business units with excess information. Much of Semco's business revolves around improving on existing engineering processes, and their model works remarkably well for that. In order to generate more disruptive innovation, Semco adopted a model somewhat akin to the Skunk Works model I described, with rotating participation in a team of outside the box thinkers. Semco also discovered, as I would have predicted, that an organization without structure is vulnerable to politics and rumors, so transparency -- all the way up to Richard Semler as CEO -- was critical to making it work. In addition, great people management and rigorous feedback and reviews -- great people process -- was absolutely required to make it all work. Finally, different parts of the company organize differently, so some teams and groups are hierarchical within Semco's less structued whole.

So, empower employees, build interfaces between different units, support (embrace) differences between how groups function, and make sure that people are well managed. Lots of companies experiment with this, but Semco makes for a great case study in going all the way.

The second book came via Jon Taplin, "The Dream Machine," by Mitchell Waldrop. This amazing book covers the entire history of the personal computer, from the early work of Norbert Wiener at MIT (who's history is told in equally good "Dark Hero of the Information Age"), through the WWII advances in computers, the impact of ARPA, the breakthroughs at SRI and PARC, and the subsequent creation of the personal computer. The story is tied together through the life of J.C.R. Licklider, who's career is touches nearly every aspect of the emergence of the PC and the Internet.

From an innovation standpoint, what makes "The Dream Machine" such a remarkable read is how crushing a blow it provides to anyone who wants to argue that incubators don't work or that it isn't possible to foster disruptive innovation. The story of the silicon revolution shows again and again the importance of allowing ideas to cross polinate and remix, of supporting knowledge and experience collisions in ways that preseverve the ideas and allow later thinkers to riff on them. It details the kind of management structures and support innovation needs to thrive. Young and old turks alike need impossible challenges to inspire them, but then the freedom and resources to overcome the challenges.

Both books feel timely. Larry Page had a recent interview in Fortune talking about these issues. What's interesting is that it still doesn't feel like he's really looked at the history. Google's 70/20/10 goal is a good one, but what is the unit of time it operates on? If 10% of Google's workforce focused on disruptive innovation, where would Google be in 5 years? After all, many of the breakthroughs in "The Dream Machine" were years or decades in the making. Is Larry sure that we're so much smarter today that we can get the same results in our spare time? Or, consider Microsoft. Rather than buying Yahoo! to gain some market in what is most profitable online today, why aren't they leveraging their phenomenal resources to create what will be profitable in 2015? $40 billion could support a lot of disruption.

Enjoy both books and let me know what you think!

apparently i'm not the only one rethinking innovation

There's a great article coming in the New Yorker by Malcolm Gladwell looking at the myth that big ideas are rare. It looks at Nathan Myhrvold's attempts to engineer innovation and dovetails rather nicely with my recent post on innovating innovation. While I don't necessarily agree with patents as a measure of innovation, his results are very impressive. By bringing together bright people from disparate fields and allowing massive cross polination, disruptive ideas emerge. The challenge is figuring out how to do it in a more scalable way that Nathan has.

technology awareness

Yesterday, Jon Taplin asked me to give my future of virtual worlds talk to his COMM 306 class, "The Communications Revolution, Entertainment and Art." His class was initially slow to ask questions, but once they got rolling it was great fun. Especially in an extended Q&A after class, they had very good queries about the impact of technology on privacy and culture.

They were quick to work through the implications of always on, mobile devices. Jon asked them whether they would consider life logging, or streaming the world around them to their friends. Initially it was the usual "hell no" but as they built on each others answers and started thinking through the implications, it didn't take long to get to "it's a natural extension of blogging", "I'd share it with my friends", "I'm bad at remembering names", and "I do it with Flickr already."

It was also a chance to sample a group of college juniors about technology. (It's a fairly large class, although predominantly communication and comm management undergrads, so obviously there are biases.)

Approximate percentages who had heard of or used the following (as measured by the incredibly scientific method of asking the audience questions and counting hands):

• Cell phone: 100%
• SMS: 100%
  
• Digital music/media: 100%
  
• Facebook: 95% (ie, almost everyone)
  
• Instant Messaging: 95%
  
• MySpace: 80%
• Regularly update something online: 75%
  
• LinkedIn: 40%
• Second Life: 25%
• Blog: 20% (lots of people who updated their MySpace page did not consider it blogging, hence the something stat, above)
  
• Online games: 10%
• World of Warcraft: 10% (and great reluctance to admit it)
  
• Twitter: 1 person (!)
• Knew about RSS or used it: 0%
• Had heard of Spore: 0% (!)
  
• Had heard of Sony Home: 0% (not as surprising as Spore, but still...)
  

As we think about games, virtual worlds, and technology -- rants aside -- it's easy to forget the differences between adoption rates and awareness.

To first order, everyone has a cell phone, listens to music, wants to be connected to their friends, and uses the web.

Good lessons as we think about the future.

innovating innovation

One of the best parts of the Second Life experience was its impact on how I think about innovation. From the first conversations with Philip about how to build Linden and our embrace of user-generated content to ESC and Rivers Run Red, innovation has been central to the process. And I do mean innovation – the commercialization of knowledge – not just invention – the creation of knowledge. It’s not enough to come up with interesting new ideas; those ideas need to be taken to a market.

As I zero in on what to do next, innovation is once again a central discussion, so I wanted to write up my thoughts on how I would approach creating an environment to maximize innovation. To maximize the commercialization of knowledge.

(nota bene: “Commercialization”, in this context, doesn’t necessarily mean “for profit.” It means that it has been released into a market. Case in point would be a new standard or piece of open source code released for free in order to create later opportunities.)

Innovation is very much a random walk. As much as we want innovation to be like throwing darts at the bull’s-eye, particularly in disruptive innovation it is extremely difficult to recognize a priori that an idea will be good. Moreover, most disruptive innovation emerges at the intersections of (largely) disjoint communities of practice and of different social networks.

These two realities – no certainty of direction and the need for heterogeneity – have implications if you want to maximize innovation. First, it means you want to create situations where you are able to try lots of different ideas. Second, you want as much diversity as possible in how and who tries. Third, it means you want to recycle ideas as the people and expertise around them changes.

Some of these implications are easier to leverage than others. Y Combinator, for example, does a very good job of optimizing for the first one and a reasonable job on the second. By drawing from a large set of submissions and then pushing participants through a short development cycle, Y gets to do a lot of experimenting and draw from a broad set of people. By focusing on such junior, hungry teams, Y creates massive incentives for those teams to bring a project to market in order to get funding or to be acquired.

However, there are tradeoffs. The micro scale of the funding means that participation is biased towards younger, more junior entrepreneurs. The cyclic approach of not being an incubator means that projects are strongly incented to succeed enough to get the next round of funding, rather than having the opportunity to fully explore an idea, decide there are better options and start over. Finally, Y doesn’t directly participate in funding projects at the next level or supporting more expensive experiments, constraining the exploration space.

(None of these are criticisms of Y, by the way. Paul, Trevor, Jessica, and Robert have adopted a specific strategy that is generating lots of interesting ideas, is clearly a blast, and may end up being financially successful.)

It simply may not be an optimal strategy for innovation, so there are a few aspects that I would approach differently.

You need greater diversity of participation, particularly of experience, temperament, and expertise. You want to be able to build teams that can blend years of expertise with youthful fire, impetuousness with wisdom. Filtering participants down to only those who can dispense with income, health insurance, and non-Ramen caloric sources robs you of the ability to leverage this diversity. Instead, I would argue to make them employees, to give them the scaffolding and support -- salaries, health care, vacation -- required to take huge risks, to experiment freely.

(Of course, this adds cost. Worse, it risks creating a comfy environment without innovation, but I think you address that through cultural and other means.)

Innovation needs a high failure rate. Paul et al are justly proud of the incredibly high percentage of Y teams that reach demo day with a product and that later to go on to achieve funding. However, what if the incentives that drive this performance – the Y team picking projects likely to launch in 3 months, teams not having an easy second chance, tight finances – mean that they are also more risk averse than they should be? If you change those incentives and support greater failure, the initial project ideas can explore a far larger set of ideas, resulting in more failures, but also more learning. Philip had a great saying about the benefits of “noble failures” which I think was dead on. You need to celebrate failures, capture the experience of them, and then preserve that information so that a later group can decide to riff of the failure, to build knowledge and try again.

About now, some readers will be commenting that this looks like an incubator and that all incubators are failures. Yes and no.

This does look like an incubator, but an incubator in the Bell Labs, ARPA, PARC, or Stanford grad school sense, not the modern “will trade space for equity.” Existing teams don’t need incubators, so the idea of providing a home to a set of them doesn’t seem like a good one to me. However, incubating ideas – where you bring bright, motivated, diverse, interested people together, give them challenges, and then get out of the way – has a long history of producing world-changing innovation. So, historically incubators weren’t failures, it’s just that we’ve changed what we mean when we talk about them.

The downsides, of course, are cost and comfort. If you have to employ everyone, to give them competitive salaries and benefits, you have a much higher burn rate. Worse, you must ensure that employees take great ideas out of the incubator to go start them. On the comfort side, you need appointments, contracts, or term limits, combined with a culture that your goal is to join startups. You can probably incent this as well – unpaid parts of your contract get transferred to the startup so startups recruit people, greater ownership of startups you helped launch if you also launch one, etc – but transparency and experimentation is needed here.

The cost is still a challenge, especially if you insist – as I think you should – on focusing the value generation on the launched ventures rather than the incubator. The incubator builds knowledge and expertise but should not be trying to IPO itself, since this strongly misaligns incentives with maximizing innovation.

Because of this, an attempt to innovate innovation may require very different – dare I say innovative? – approaches to funding in order to have enough runway to have a chance to succeed. It might be best applied within a larger company rather than as a stand-alone incubator. Consider a large company with a need for disruptive innovation but suffering from the “raising mice in elephant cages” problems common to large corporations. Rotating employees through a Skunk Works – and potentially letting them mix ideas with academics, outside experts, or interns – might form the kind of catalyst needed to break out of the innovator’s dilemma. As employees came and went from other groups and divisions, a Skunk Works would act as an innovation virus, spreading innovation processes and ideas throughout the organization. More importantly, by committing to experimenting with innovation, funders or the supporting corporation can avoid the micromanagement and hyper focus on short-term gains so deadly to innovation.

When we think about markets or technologies that seem moribund and unable to change, disruptive innovation is probably looming. The challenge is how to avoid Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma" and drive that innovation rather than letting it happen around you. The answer may be to look backward -- to PARC, to Bell Labs -- in order to reinvent a path forward.

apoc week 13 aka the future of virtual worlds

This week was the 7th, and final, of my Annenberg faculty lectures. It was by far the most challenging and most fun of the lectures to put together. A look into the future. My guesses as to where this all is going. While I posted some of my early thoughts on Monday, the full talk goes quite a bit further.

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The trends fit together rather nicely, I think, and expose some of the false dichotomies that currently limit our thinking. Rich, always-on, networked, wearable sensors are a natural extension of bluetooth headsets, combined with cracking the mobile display challenge, mean that divisions between "mirror world" and "fantasy world" or "life logging" and "game" crumble. Accurate location and pointing information in a head-mounted display combined with crowd sourcing and filtering makes augmented, blended, and alternate realities basic parts of communication, collaboration, work, and play.

This is going to happen.

It's only a matter of whether Microsoft, Nokia, Google, or some startup is going to demonstrate it first.

the futures

This week, both in class and in my faculty seminar, I'll be speaking about the future of virtual worlds. It's been a topic on many people's minds of late, including Trevor's great thoughts, Raph's riffs on those, the open source panel at VW08, and Mitch's 3D camera demo. I'm putting my talk together today and will post on it when done.

But in organizing my thoughts, there are a few things I think I think:

• In thinking about virtual worlds -- especially in the R&D and innovation sense -- we need to try to see 5-10 years into the future. Projects seeing 1-3 years into the future are already underway, so if predictions are to have value, we need to take a longer view. We need to think about what happens when Moore give us 8-64X more transistors, so either a similar gain in speed, reduction in cost, reduction in power requirements, or a blend between. 5-10 years means wearable or portable displays of some kind, ubiquitous mobile broadband, ever increasing GPS accuracy, vast sets of local search data, and new generations of mobile input devices.
• As much as I have argued that 3D is a fundamentally different experience than 2D or text -- different, not better -- 3D is not a solution to all problems. It enables different mechanisms for trust building, perception, data organization, etc, but these mechanisms are only useful if they are leveraged as part of larger decisions about what the goals are. Want to sell books in 3D? A 5fps tour of a bookstore that takes an hour to load is a bad use of 3D. Want to enable the power raters on Amazon to give you a personal tour of their favorite books and you have a client that runs on most computers with an easy interface? Maybe that would be a good use of 3d. Want to let people put their data into a 3D memory palace to help them remember and correlate data? Maybe a good use, but text and well indexed search might be better.
• In my opinion, usability is not appearance. Craigslist is not pretty, but it does an excellent job of loading quickly, running on any browser or computer, and letting you find what you want now. Games and MMOs do a much better job than virtual worlds of answering the "what do I do?" and "why am I here?" style of questions. Virtual worlds in the future will need to do make those answers easy to find. "You can make money" or "you can go listen to music with your friends" are compelling answers, but they're hard to discover -- and compounded by hardware requirements -- today.
• Attempts to strongly separate "play" and "work" virtual worlds will stunt the growth of both. Communities that play together work together better. And vice versa. While different applications will need to find proper balance between play and work, being able to do both at a distance is a big part of why virtual worlds are so interesting.
• Future virtual world will obviously play nice with the web, but more than that, they will have to integrate well with browsers. Raph has a post up about 3D and the web, but it's more than 3D. Virtual worlds share a need for features common to many applications that are moving into browsers -- seamless online/offline operation, strong collaboration and sync features, "use anywhere" mindset, painless (or not) installation -- that are at least as important as 3D.

These are just a start. More later today or tomorrow as the presentation comes together.

why i like data

The Easterlin paradox is a bedrock of social science and pop culture. Roughly, it argues that beyond a certain level of wealth, happiness no longer increases because you just end up wanting more stuff. It emerged from research in Japan in the 1970's and it tells a nice story, that we're more attuned to relative wealth and "money doesn't buy happiness." There are a host of reasons to want it to believe.

However, according to a story in the NY Times today, it might not be.

Feel free to read the story, but be sure to check out this graph:

Sure looks like a tiny bit of a trend there.

apoc week 12

Jason Kirk, VP for MySpace TV, was our guest. I had never looked at MySpace TV, but was tickled to discover an extensive Top Gear section. It seems like MySpace has an interesting opportunity to explore how best to blend various media forms with user creation, although the fact that MySpace TV is somewhat separate will make that harder. The quality level of submissions is steadily increasing, and Jason spoke about the importance of better production and editing going forward.

(It seems like a very obvious combination would be for them to acquire one of the many web 2.0 collaborative video editing/sharing products out there...)

Consider the ways you could combine MySpace TV and MySpace Celebrity, for example...

They currently are US dominated, with 73 million unique viewers from the US, but are looking to become more international. Jason was very focused on their position as an internet company, not a media company, which makes it easier for them to remain creator focused. It also work well with his philosophy that he wants MySpace TV to be a storytelling platform, using video as the catalyst.

Another interesting -- and obvious in hindsight -- point was that user-generated video was very character driven, given the need to be relatively short. Recognizable, repeatable characters help build out the brand, relate to niches, and are transportable to other parts of MySpace and the Web.

In class, because we were behind on time, rather than the normal short presentations from the students, we bounced around the room playing "tell me one thing I don't know." I found this to be incredibly interesting and gave a glimpse into how good all these students are going to be after they graduate. They all bring such interesting prior experiences and interests that when they start making assertions combining their domain expertise and course material, those assertions are worth listening to. I look forward to visiting in 6 months to see their final projects.

If you are an Web focused company in LA or San Diego, you should really start reaching out to these students, because you'd be lucky to get them.