Facebook provides business important lessons for innovation and experimentation
Submitted by: John Warner on Apr 08, 2008 at 11:43 am
Tagged with: Innovation, Open Innovation
Source: Swamp Fox
Leave your comment on this discussion below, including whether you'd be willing to meet informally with others interested in discussing the topic.
An interesting BusinessWeek article is creating buzz in social networking circles, Life on the Edge: Learning from Facebook
The fact that Facebook has 66 million users is enough to get anyone's attention. The authors include an interesting list of what the business communtiy can learn from Facebook.
- Create more edges.
- Provide better ways to connect at the edge.
- Demographic edges are fertile grounds for business innovation.
- Experiment and iterate rapidly.
- Social, technologic, and economic are inextricably intertwined.
Facebook is not the answer for business collabration. We're in a Cambrian age when lots of new online models are being created. Facebook is one of the early life forms, and we'll see if it survives the brutal evolutionary pressure the world will place on it.
These two authors also co-wrote another article on open innovation that has had a profound impact on my thinking that I highly recommend, Creation Nets: Harnessing the Potential of Open Innovation.
If you'd be interested in getting together to discuss where this world is heading, I'd be very interested so please let me know below. We'll start with a small informal group at first as see where we go from there.
| Organizations | Swamp Fox |
|---|---|
| Source | Swamp Fox |
| Submitter | John Warner |
| Tags | Innovation, Open Innovation |
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i'm in on that.. it's the egomaniacal nature of social networking that may closely relate to game theory in economic terms. We may be interacting with our 'facebook' pages in a much less altruistic manner and under more ubiquitous circumstances so that the outcome is sure to be similar to the prisoners dilemma in which we are forced to cooperate. That's good news for SwampFox community since it encourages the co-opting of ideas and networks.
Great post, John. Love to get together to talk, schedules permitting. Social networking web apps have a lot of potential. The question is whether the "communities" created can be stirred to take action. It seems to be happening politically. How much success are any of us having, using the same apps for business development?
I'd definitely enjoy chatting about this with others who are interested. The "long tail" or "mining the edges" has a particular appeal to smaller firms like ours who work with and want to create that Big Co's (Google, MS, even Yahoo!) keep invading.
Finding an edge to mine is not just "what's left" it may actually prove to be more fertile ground than the dominate start of the curve.