Innovation and FTC... a business?
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Greetings all, and apologies for not being around much lately. Life is busy!
I wanted to ask if there is an appetite to run certain aspects of our community like an innovation business. We breifly discussed before about creating some kind of ‘venture capital’ system, or crypto Kickstarter, where users can invest their FTC or votes into helping the community choose the projects they want to see developed; alas I lack the technical know how to make it happen.
Nevertheless, my recent academic field of study has been Innovation. What is it, where does it come from, and how can an organisation foster it? Allow me to place a broad analysis over FTC, and how I think we can improve innovation across the community.
Firstly, innovation is defined by MIT as Invention + Commercialisation.
This is an important statement, as I belive we have plenty of invention within the FTC community, but not enough commercialisation. If we were to run FTC in the same model construct as a business, these inventions would be scoped out and realised on the basis of their potential ROI. However, where do we find a market for a cryptocurrency, outside of traders?
Secondly, I would like to add Passion, to the above equation. Innovation = Invention + Commercialisation + Passion. This is what drives an individual, more than anything else, to engage, often without recompense. In order to successfully innovate, we need people with passion in charge of their projects.
Thirdly, in my personal opinion we need, as a community, to measure what matters. Focussing on ROI (ie. profits) does not drive entreprenureal behaviours. In this regard, I would like to recommend agreeing some kind of community metrics for each theme lead. Things like, number of ideas submitted this week, or prototyped converted to live projects, FTC articles written and shared etc. What we need, is public accountability of projects, to ensure transparency, and candour. I belive this will drive engagement, and therefore amplify the already positive culture we have here.
Continuing the orgasnisational paradigm, in order to grow any business, there are 4 main options:
- Improvements - Improve processes, policies, products (aka reduce waste).
- Innovations - New things, positive but disruptive changes, inventions.
- Scaling - Building on the success of small beginnings, to drive repeatable business, and user engagement. Could be hiring new people.
- Strategic acquisitions - This is usually buying up parts of the supply chain, or the expertise to reinforce your growth strategy.
Lets apply these concepts to our community. Please feel free to comment below, though I will give you my opinions here:
As a community, we need to engage passionate people in the things they love. We need to issue standard reports with metrics that matter. We need to collaborate relentlessly, communicate transparently, and above all, celebrate success.
Hopefully, some of what I’ve spewed up here makes sense :). This does not detract from the awesome work already being done; I merely hope to add some strategic focus and direction.
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You put words on what need to be done in such a brilliant way! Your knowledge about this is needed, that’s for sure.
As a community, we need to engage passionate people in the things they love. We need to issue standard reports with metrics that matter. We need to collaborate relentlessly, communicate transparently, and above all, celebrate success.
I’m interested in the metrics side of this. I understand the importance of visualizing metrics that matter in a good way, but do you have any suggestions or pointers as to how we decide on what’s important? :) I mean, in my line of work it’s easy to measure. We’ve got costs and savings to deal with, we either turn out red or black in the numbers (a tad simplified to make a point), this however is something completely different and I stand absolutely clueless :P
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Heh, thanks :)
Usually they are split into three categories, and each include an input and output metric:
- Return on Investment Metrics
- Organisational Capability Metrics
- Leadership Metrics
There are a few examples which are more directly applicable to a business environment, things like:
- Input - % of capital invested in innovation activities such as submitting and reviewing ideas for new products and services and developing ideas through an innovation pipeline.
- Output - Royalty and licensing income from patents/intellectual property.
These are useful when you have a budget, revenue, and all manner of business related financial support. To try and apply these to our community will be difficult, as people are mostly working for free, hence why passion is so important!
Essentially, what gets measured, drives behaviour; and I think this can still apply to us. The question is, what kind of behaviours do we want to encourage?
Some metrics which I think we could apply are:
- Number of active projects
- Number of ideas submitted by community members,
- Number of completed projects
- Number of new competencies - i.e. skilled community members filling roles
- Number of potential opportunities/projects needing resource
- FTC donated to support growth activities
- If we get one up - FTC payments from the mining pool
I’m sure there are many more, or better ones people can think of; perhaps things would speed up, if everyone colloborated on one project at a time (voted by the community), to push it though? What we don’t want though, is too many metrics…this would cause an overload and disenfranchise people.
Importantly, these metrics are never static… they are constantly in a state of evolution to drive the most effective behaviours for the given strategic direction/future capability. Plan, do, review, improve.
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Zommercialization is a band-aid where one is unable to communicate the heart of one’s passion. I don’t need a reward to innovate. That’s a secondary concern.
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That depends on your definition of Reward (though I’m not sure I was suggesting we should?). Simply being a part of something, or learning a new skill can be considered equally as rewarding as financial gain (which is what I assume you mean as reward)?
Can’t say I’ve come across Zommercialisation… could you expand on what you mean Zero? I’m a little sluggish this afternoon :(.
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Zommercialization is a band-aid where one is unable to communicate the heart of one’s passion. I don’t need a reward to innovate. That’s a secondary concern.
Zomgwtfbbqmercialisation, or just plain old Zommercialisation ? :P
​Love of what you do will get you much further than monetary reimbursement, well said
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I’m having a little fun at the expense of words we tend to floss over.
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Ah right, ok :). When I googled it, I got a whole bunch of French results :-
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Great discussion. How do we innovate in the open source environment?. An area worthy of innovation.
