NESTA Goes Open Source

NESTA hosted events with two smart open source chappies this week.  Yesterday evening there was a presentation from Prof Eric Von Hippel, MIT Professor and author of Democratising Innovation and this morning a breakfast chat with Karim Lakhani from HBS.  I spoke to the Prof about the backlash against user-generated campaigns and the disappointing quality of content they produce.  He made a great point that what was missing from these campaigns was any type of community mechanic to encourage the process, add some competition through peer review, create fun, and to act as a quality filter.  In effect the current crop of brand-led user generated campaigns are just competitions.  Or, in the Prof's words, it's like getting everybody on slashdot to send you their thoughts about something and being surprised when a lot of it is rubbish!  It's only the community mechanic that makes the site of any use.  Pretty interesting I thought.  Certainly the user-gen campaigns that work have been very serious and intelligent in their approach to community, not paying open source lip service.  Repeat after me : process first, product second. 

Comments

[Roland Harwood]

process first, product second :)

...or a slightly different take on same concept: first who, then what (which I think is from Jim Collins' book Good to Great).

The whole thing with more open collaboration mean the filters need to be sharper and better than ever. We are trying to learn through Nesta Connect what constitutes a good filter but mass peer review is definitely a big part of it. Currently reading a book called that is very relevant called 'The Difference' by Scott Page which is all about how diversity of thinking, experience, cultures etc creates better groups, organisations and societies - and refreshingly (though it is a little heavy going at times) it is very well researched and logically argued.

Glad you enjoyed the Nesta events and good to meet you properly at last. You might be interested in our Howard Rheingold/Mark Earls event in September on the 11th.

[James Cherkoff]

Thanks Roland, I really enjoyed both events last week. See you on the 12th!