My point is, anyone can innovate any time, anywhere. You can do it in small increments so no one will notice. A method I’ve heard here is that you innovate and change in small ways over a long period of time. At the end of your journey, everything is completely different but everyone thinks of it as something that needed to be done and they look back at the old way of doing things and scoff.
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Throughout the two-day think tank, many important themes continued to rise to the surface: community journalism, user customization, paperless/mobile, engaging/fun content.
Below, I want to describe some of the observations I made about the process and the people as well as briefly critique each prototype. Then make some kind of inspirational statement about what happens next.
It was very difficult for us all to break out of our comfort zones. I likened our first day to us playing Pong, tossing the same ideas back ‘n’ forth inside of a box. Many of us came prepared to talk about our areas of interest or our own ideas but IDEO does not work on a predestined premise. Their approach is meant to create ideas from scratch based on everyone’s knowledge.
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Our group identified two major problems: the disappearance of local journalism institutions and a public disconnected from journalists. So we wondered, “how might nomadic journalists work and how would community life continue to be successful?”
This idea builds on Group 2 (inadvertently), mixes Spot.Us, Innocentive.com, OhMyNews.com, uWeb/iTunes/iNews and other journalism movements: public journalism, citizen journalism, etc.
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This group wanted to develop a point system on a news website. For every activity users do, they receive points. People receive more or less points depending on their level of engagement. For example, commenting on a story nets maybe 2 points, but writing your own story is worth 10.
The site basically becomes a customized delivery system with an incentive to participate in democracy. [...]
They wanted to create a news experience around a physical public space, likened to town halls of Benjamin Franklin’s day. So they chose to partner with places like Starbucks, Wal-Mart and other congregation areas within communities.
In doing this, you create a cohesive community that centers around news, interest-based conversations and tasty merchandise.
As a business model, you’re giving incentive to companies to participate and encourage participation with the news and other media companies. This allows journalists to go where the people go instead of forcing them to come to the news, enforcing a beat system and community-driven content.
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The rest of the day was spent identifying a series of problems in journalism. I unfortunately can only speak for my group but I think these were important points:
With these and other problems, we must ask “how might we do X?” This is the part where we get to be wild and crazy. Here you come up with questions surrounding these problems.
On day two we get to brainstorm ways to solve these how might we questions. For these we thought of a few ideas:
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IDEO has a particular approach they use to invent or redesign products. They are a design firm with clients ranging from Bank of America to bicycle stores to cleaning companies.
Here is part 1 of a video about IDEO’s process. You can find the rest on YouTube:
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My brain is absolutely dead right now. I’ve been asked to be on another panel but I really just want to take a nap. So I leave you with this: a pivotal scene in the final episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that absolutely relates to what we are supposed to do with the IDEO process.
PS. People in the room next to me are still discussing the panel (which I will eventually write about and post a video of).
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but what you can do for SND