Civic Wisdom Quote: Don't be a star, be a galaxy

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"Don't be a star, be a galaxy."

- Peter Gloor, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
Chief Creative Officer and Founder, Galaxy Advisors
Boston & Switzerland

I-Open Civic Wisdom Quotes are practical points shared by leaders in research and business to advance competitive industry advantage in Open Source Economic Development.

In a connected world driven by innovation and technology, the value of becoming part of a larger web of collaborative networks quickly yields unexpected, unforeseen opportunities.

You can learn more about Peter Gloor's work in swarm creativity, coins-collaborative innovation networks, and coolhunting in this video interview contributed to I-Open research.

You can learn more about I-Open Interview and Conversation Research at I-Open on Scribd. If you would like to contribute an interview about your work, please send us an email at info@i-open.org 

Images by Alice Merkel on Flickr.

Material is Copyright 2010 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 and contributed to The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open), a not-for-profit educational economic organization.

Civic Wisdom Quote: the length of our vision is equal to the depth of our passion

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"The depth and clarity of our passion is equal to the length and diversity of our vision."

- Jack Ricchiuto, Designer and Writer, DesigningLife.com, Cleveland, Ohio

 

I-Open Civic Wisdom Quotes guide the investment strategy of business leaders in Open Source Economic Development.

Quotes are taken from I-Open research, a library of instructive interviews contributed by leaders in civic, government, academia, and business.

Narratives and images share the story of wisdom in the Civic Space, the area outside the four walls of any organization.

Each quote offers guidance to us as we seek to earn trust and respect in our conversations and collaborations to build social and economic capacity.

You can learn more about I-Open Interview and Conversation Research at I-Open on Scribd. If you would like to contribute an interview about your work, please send us an email at info@i-open.org 

Images by Alice Merkel on Flickr.

Material is Copyright 2010 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 and contributed to The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open), a not-for-profit educational economic organization.

Civic Wisdom Quote: We each have our own thread to weave

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"I think the best stories show weaving together while never losing sight of the fact that we do each have our own thread to weave."

- Gwen Fischer, Retired Psychology Professor, Hiram College
Fulbright Scholar - University of Zimbabwe, 2001-2002
Rotary University Teaching Award
Hiram, Ohio

I-Open Civic Wisdom Quotes guide leaders in Open Source Economic Development.

Quotes are taken from I-Open research, a library of interviews contributed by leaders in civic, government, academia, and business.

Narratives and images share the story of wisdom in the Civic Space, the area outside the four walls of any organization, helping us to build trust and respect in open economic networks for new conversations and collaborations.

You can learn more about I-Open Interview and Conversation Research at I-Open on Scribd. If you would like to contribute an interview about your work, please send us an email at info@i-open.org 

Images by Alice Merkel on Flickr.

Material is Copyright 2010 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 and contributed to The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open), a not-for-profit educational economic organization.

Civic Wisdom Quote - Gloria Ferris, Civic Leader and Blogger

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"We need to know that as we move forward in the twenty-first century of work we have to collaborate, support, and affirm each other."

- Gloria Ferris, Northeast Ohio Civic Leader and Blogger

I-Open Civic Wisdom Quotes guide civic leaders in Open Source Economic Development.

Quotes are taken from I-Open research, a diverse library of interviews contributed by leaders in civic, government, academia, and business for sharing.

Narrative and images share a deeper, wider story of wisdom in the Civic Space - the area outside the four walls of any organization - where we are affected equally.

The wisdom of the Civic Space helps us to act in ways that build trust and respect, cornerstones of agile, entrepreneurial cultures.

You can learn more about I-Open Interview and Conversation Research at I-Open on Scribd. If you would like to contribute an interview about your work, please send us an email at info@i-open.org

Images by Alice Merkel on Flickr.

Material is Copyright 2010 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 and contributed to The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open), a not-for-profit educational economic organization.

Transforming the University's Role in Regional Engagement

Ed Morrison, Economic Policy Advisor, Purdue Center for Regional Development, and I-Open Co-Founder, outlines how collaborations between universities accelerate regional economic transformation. 

The presentation points to a new model developed by Purdue University, Penn State University, and the University of Akron to create a network of practitioners focused on advancing regional transformation. This important multi-university collaboration is an example for leaders to replicate, connecting knowledge and place-based legacy assets to economic development. 

Ed developed Strategic Doing - a simple, yet disciplined process to foward ideas to action quickly - with the I-Open team while working at the Center for Regional Economic Issues, Case Western Reserve University 2003-2005, and has continued to apply the process to advance innovation in regional networks. 

The I-Open Civic Forum process, also developed at that time, builds the open, neutral spaces and sophisticated communications introducing Strategic Doing to business, government, and academic leaders accelerating transformational initiatives and projects.

Strategic Doing has been adopted by the U.S. Department of Labor and many other large funded organizations, government, and academic entities to advance national economic prosperity in regions.

You can learn more about Strategic Doing at I-Open on Scribd.

Learn how Civic Forums and Strategic Doing intrinsically generate economic prosperity in the paper, I-Open Civic Forums Strengthen Entrepreneurship and Business Development in Network Economies. 


Hub Contributions to COINs2010: Hub MILAN on Vimeo

The three founders of The Hub contributed video interviews about their work to the COINs 2010 community in celebration of the COINs 2010 Conference hosted by the Savannah College of Art & Design located in Savannah, Georgia, October 7-9, 2010.

Alberto Masetti, founder of Hub Milan, shares an interview with us about Milan's creative space and talks about the spread of collective intelligence.

Hub Milan is an example of investing in Quality, Connected Place - one of five areas of innovation investment in Open Source Economic Development.

Hub Milan is one of a network of 27 Hub models, each a distinctive example of how to   identify and connect place-based interests and assets.

Founders of Hub Zurich and Hub Sao Paulo also contributed interviews and we'll be posting them to this blog subsequently.

You can learn more about Hub Milan at this site. 

Learn about COINs 2010 at this site. 

COINS 2010 “Lybba - Unleashing swarm creativity to make open-source healthcare a reality”

In his opening keynote, Jesse Dylan, award winning director of the Obama campaign video "Yes we can" and Peter Gloor, MIT Research Scientist, talk together about Lybba - an open source approach to knowledge sharing and caring - is helping give life to the open source healthcare movement.

Lybba's mission is to connect people with the community, information, and resources they need to take care of themselves and one another. Lybba creates online environments, media campaigns, and social experiments that forge meaningful relationships between hospitals and schools, doctors and patients, researchers and policy-makers. The organization takes an ethical and ecological approach to every challenge it faces. It combines media, design, science, and technology to make a difference, free for all, free of commercial interest.

Jesse's ultimate goal is to bring together every patient looking for answers and provide a platform so that every stakeholder in chronic and rare diseases has a voice to create a community where innovation, empowerment, and compassion flourish.

Conversations such as the COINs 2010 Opening Keynote, are examples of sharing knowledge to advance creativity and dialogue widely for global industry competitive advantage.

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Trustees Theater, beautiful restored theater and Savannah College of Art & Design facility, site of COINs 2010 Opening Keynote Conversation.

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Ken Riopelle, Ph.D., Conversation Moderator and Research Professor, Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.

 

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Jesse Dylan, CEO and Creative Director, Lybba and Peter Gloor, Research Scientist, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence in conversation with the audience about the future of open source health care resources.

Images by Alice Merkel

 Dylan is a filmmaker and CEO and creative director of FreeForm, a full-service  production company with a focus on corporate social responsibility and social media. In addition, he is a prolific director behind some of the most successful campaigns in commercial television, print and interactive advertising. Dylan has created award-winning commercials for clients, including the Barack Obama administration, Nike, Nintendo, Motorola, American Express, the National Football League and MTV.

I-Open, with Galaxy Advisors, was a co-sponsor of the COINs 2010 Conference.

The New "Cluster Moment": How Regional Innovation Clusters Can Foster the Next Economy

From the report:

What explains clusters’ renewed popularity?  To be sure, some of the concept’s new and bipartisan relevance owes to its sound non-partisan concern with the mechanics of value-creation in local economies, whether metropolitan or rural, high-tech or manufacturing.  And it’s true that as a matter of policy action clusters—ranging from the famous Silicon Valley technology cluster to the Vermont cheesemaking cluster—are all about synergies and efficiencies, and don’t tend to cost too much.
 
But what is most timely beyond all that may be the possibility that the new prominence of regional innovation clusters reflects something deeper: a positive interest in locating a more grounded, realistic way to think about the economy and development efforts so as to put both on a more productive footing.  
 
In this setting, the new cluster discussions redirect attention, analysis, and policymaking to the more grounded, day-to-day interactions by which real companies in real places complete transactions, share technologies, develop innovations, start new businesses—and yes, create jobs and locate workers. To that extent, clusters—whether of airplane manufacturing in Wichita or cleantech in Colorado or biomedical innovation in Cleveland—represent an antidote to the nation’s recent economic history of bubbles and consumption and also a framework for recognizing and bolstering the real-world variety and dynamism of regional economies.  Hot spots of productivity and collaboration as well as competition, clusters are the locations most likely to deliver a new economy that is export-oriented, lower carbon, innovation-driven and so opportunity and prosperity rich...

In sum, cluster thinking and cluster strategies have the potential to accelerate regional economic growth and assist with the nation’s needed economic restructuring, but they are more a paradigm than a single program. In that sense, the opportunities that a cluster policy framework provides for delivering impact, clarifying economic priorities, and coordinating disparate programmatic efforts will only grow more important in the coming era of intensified competitive pressures and tightened resources.

I-Open Civic Forums generate the open economic networks necessary to strengthen early cluster development in Open Source Economic Development.

Learn more at I-Open on Scribd, "I-Open Civic Forums Strengthen Entrepreneurship and Business Development in Network Economies".


Marketing Can Do Better - Umair Haque - Harvard Business Review

An important article describing how to shift from scarcity minded marketing to new opportunities in values centered engagement and strategic branding.

Why are so many marketing campaigns brand-destroyers and money-losers? Why is "branding" becoming a devalued asset, whose returns are dwindling (witness Google building the world's mightiest brand with barely a penny of orthodox marketing expenditure)? Why do people and communities exact steeper and steeper discounts, price-cuts, and margin-crushing concessions from the beleaguered, besieged companies once known as the masters of the universe?

The half-life of companies is shrinking and the weary practice known as "marketing," adding little to no real value, seems powerless to help.

The unvarnished truth is that the fundamental assumptions behind "marketing" haven't changed for decades. Though you may be using slightly more efficient channels (like "social media"), more "creative" ideas, or more productive mechanisms (like pay-per-click), it's still a militaristic, adversarial school of thought that's largely about cramming "product" down the already overstuffed gullets of "consumers" by "targeting" "messages" jam-packed with illusory, imaginary benefits at them, in grand "campaigns" that make overblown promises ("See this beer? It's going to land you the girl of your dreams!!"). I'd argue that marketing as we know it is, still, largely about talking down. And that's not nearly good enough to send this Great Stagnation packing.

Marketing can do better. Here's how: Instead of talking down, start listening up.

Here is what I don't mean. Listening up doesn't mean surveilling your customers, and then discovering slightly cleverer ways to trick them (yet again). Listening up doesn't mean holding five thousand focus groups a year, and then price discriminating the daylights out of hapless customers. Listening up doesn't mean delving into mines studded with billions of seams of "data" about "consumers." Listening up definitely doesn't mean techno-stalking people in creepy, weird, and slightly sinister ways.

Here's what I do mean by "listening up."

  • The "up" is the really important part. It means having dialogues about what elevates and betters people, what raises them up to higher standards of living, doing, having, and being, what really makes them better of in meaningful ways that matter — and then igniting a movement to make it happen. When Wal-Mart talks to stakeholders in its ground-breaking value networks — as much as you or I might not like Wal-Mart — it's beginning to listen up.

  • Listening up means spending time actually talking to your customers, about not just their "wants" and "needs" but about their hopes and fears, their opportunities and threats, their greatest achievements and biggest regrets. It's not just about sating immediate desire with lowest-common-denominators, outsourced from the lowest bidder — it's about learning to help people achieve long-term fulfillment, in inimitable, enduring, resonant ways that rivals can't. Facebook's making many mistakes, but perhaps the biggest is slanting its platform heavily towards lightweight, subprime — and low impact — stuff like Farmville, and away from services that produce lasting, meaningful, high-impact gains.

  • Listening up means empowering as many people inside your organization as possible to spend time talking to your customers to have those conversations, and empowering them to talk to one another openly. To get there, it probably means rethinking the shape of your organization, from tall, to flat, to networked, meshy, and circular. Ask yourself: why is it that the only person you ever really talk to at most companies is either a powerless cashier or an even more powerless customer service rep, five billion layers of management removed from the boardroom? Because most companies, as much lip service as they might pay to the latest hip management idea, are still talking down.

  • Listening up means letting your fiercest critics rip away at you — and hearing them. It means empowering people to be heard, instead of just trying to shout them down or drown them out. It means responding honestly, instead of dissimulating and misdirecting. Here's my favorite example of just how much companies feel they have to misdirect and dissimulate. Why is it that customer service reps, in an act of farcical bureaucracy so awfully absurd it's worthy of Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition, have to fake their own names, and call themselves Bob, Steve, and Jim — when you know and they know their real names are probably Anup, Priya and Bayani? Because most companies can't deal with even the simplest, most basic level of human truth.

  • Listening up means investing not just in "market research" but in people. Relationships aren't just idle promises: they're patterns of mutual investment. Essential to the art of listening up is making those investments, so people can be heard. Pepsi Refresh is a simple, tiny, limited, imperfect example of investing in people, a small step beyond merely conditioning them to buy, buy, buy more self-destructive stuff (yes, Pepsi's in the sugar-water business — but at least a tiny chunk of its marketing bucks aren't anymore).

  • Listening up means asking questions that matter — and then being tough enough to hear that, just maybe, yes, you really, honestly do suck at having real, tangible, lasting benefits. No company's made it this far — yet. But you know who's getting a bit better, faster than others? Oddly, it just might be Steve Jobs — now notorious for responding to random emails about Apple. Hey, he might never admit he's wrong, but at least he responds to, well, people. How many other CEOs do you know who do that?

Listening up is the emergent, complex, and unpredictable joint creation of shared values, that build common cultural foundations and let customers and companies feel like they're part of a shared movement. It is more than a commitment to transparency, it is a deep dedication to real dialogue (as opposed to this). Yes, it's the lofty ideal — and no company I can think of has gotten all the way there, yet.

But there are some wise elders, young firebrands, and revolutionaries on the frontier. In recent history, I'd trace it back to the Cluetrain Manifesto gang. Today, Doc Searls' VRM is a giant leap towards building an economy where organizations listen up--instead of shout down. Jerry Michalski, with understated elegance, has been listening up for years. Philip Kotler's masterful Marketing 3.0 is in large part about moving from shouting down, to listening up (with emphasis on the way, way up). Jennifer Aaker's insanely, tremendously awesome Dragonfly Effect is an ode to doing meaningful stuff that matters — by listening up.

Getting from where we are to where we need to be is going to be more like a climb, and less like a stroll.

But here's what you might get in return. Instead of merely discovering the next "feature-set" for your latest, greatest snoozer of a product (yawn — It got copied by approximately four hundred different factories in Shenzhen, Da Nang, and Johor Bahru even before I finished this blog post) you might discover how to change the world. You might gain a little bit of empathy. You might smoke out your own weaknesses and limitations. You might discover what more abiding passion, bigger purpose, and steadfast perseverance really mean — and can do. You might just learn how to topple the status quo. And if you keep at it, you might even be able to ascertain how to, in your own tiny way, sow the seeds of prosperity.

If you can do that, the people formerly known as "consumers," the hard-working folks who've gotten a raw deal in this Age of Austerity, the ones who are inured to the cries of buy, buy, buy, the folks who have been tuning you out, well — they probably won't just be grateful. If you can actually help them flourish and prosper in meaningful ways that matter, well then, maybe, just maybe, they'll start to respect, admire and even love you a little bit for it.

Strategic branding has succeeded marketing.

COINs 2010 Conference Survey

(Post updated 10-21-10)

We've posted a COINs 2010 Conference Survey to the new Facebook landing page Collaborative Innovation Networks: COINs Conference. 

Help us to improve your access to knowledge and innovation at future COINs Conferences by responding to the survey questions below:

1)    How did you learn about COINs 2010?

a.    Facebook

b.    Twitter

c.    Friend or colleague

d.    Other

2)    What did you like most about your COINs 2010 Conference Face2Face and Online experiences?

3)    Who would you like to connect to at COINs 2011 who you are not?

4)    What would you like to see happen at COINs 2011?

5)    Is there anything you would like to add?

6)    If you have any photos from the COINs 2010 Conference that you would like to share, please send them to coinsconference@gmail.com

Updtated on Tuesday ·Oct 21, 2010 to Facebook

Please add your responses in the comment window located below this post.