In 2013, bluenove will support its clients in the area of Social Innovation in order to make innovation processes compliant with the ISO 26000 standard  (cf. the article in French: Innovation Sociétale = Open Innovation + RSE + ISO 26000). To illustrate this positioning as a natural extension of Open Innovation, it will send its clients and partners a innovative card for this New Year 2013.

Thanks to the Reforestation.com service proposed by the French startup 5 Continents, each card sent by bluenove will enable a tree to be planted and the follow up of the evolution of the plantation on the ‘bluenove plot’ (located in Peru) on this link  or clicking on the picture below:

The card and the message sent:

midemlab is an international competition for the most innovative startups and app developers operating in the entertainment field, proposing digital solutions that help music executives, artists & brands to reach, engage and monetize audiences.

The sixth edition of midemlab will take place at midem, 26‐29 January 2013, in Cannes (France). midem is the international tradeshow where music makers, cutting-edge technologies, brands and talents come together to enrich the passionate relationship between people and music, transform audience engagement and form new business connections.

The previous editions of midemlab proved to be a real launch platform for many leading music startups – such as SoundCloud, The Echo Nest, Songkick, Next Big Sound, Root Music, Jammbox, Kickstarter, Ovelin, MPme.

bluenove will play a key role in midemlab by selecting the submissions received through the call for entry – together with Music Ally, the music business strategy company.

Finalists will then present their project in front of an international jury which collectively represents an international network of supporters for entrepreneurship, all at the top front of digital innovation and best placed to evaluate the most innovative business models. Jury members are successful entrepreneurs, senior executives from the entertainment sector, leading investment companies, representatives of influential media in the digital sphere and winners from previous editions.

Tech players who have built the next big solution to engage or monetize audiences can apply (here) until November 7th in one of these 3 categories:

• Music discovery, recommendation & creation
• Marketing & social engagement (social media, consumer analytics, geolocation, crowdfunding…)
• Direct to consumer sales & monetizing content (distribution, e-commerce, payment solution, ticketing…)

The finalists will:

• Get feedback from powerful & innovative decision makers and meet with potential business partners & investors
• Receive great exposure to the international press & audience
• Be recognised as one of the most promising startup in the entertainment field
• Gain insights into how to make their service even better in the entertainment industry
• Get personalised coaching from Microsoft BizSpark to prepare their pitch

Winners of each category:

• Pitch at Visionary Monday to more than 1,000 attendees
• Receive free access to all Reed MIDEM entertainment shows for one year
• Gain free legal advice (with Jeff Liebenson from Liebenson Law and President of IAEL)
• Benefit from free advertising on midem.com
• Get additional visibility during and after midem in midem communications tools (press releases, newsletters, interviews on midemblog, etc.)

bluenove ran a poll on LinkedIn in August 2012 to identify ‘What is the main lever to boost Collaborative Innovation ?’ among the 3 following ones:

1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

3) The Software Tools and Solutions ?

575 votes were registered and 56 comments were provided (we highly recommend you do read these comments here below and we would like to thank again the contributors)

Feel free to contact us at contact@bluenove.com for any information you may need to design and implement a ‘Open & Collaborative Innovation’ related project

Ranjith Nayar • For me, it is clearly collaborative tools. Leadership is 2nd and processes are third. Collaborative IT tools aggregate expert resources acrioss notional (yes, notional) borders, and help achieve the critical mass for innovation (and individual ideas) to reach the tipping point

> Voted for 3) The Software Tools and Solutions ?

Bryan McGlynn, LSSMBB Student • The sharing of ideas is what collaboration is all about. Innovation is created when a team takes one idea, builds upon it with one another’s ideas (team synergy), and then after everyone has a voice….the idea ready for presentation. This type of environment creates a new culture that helps foster human dimension and synergy provides a process of continuous improvement. In this case, knowledge and creativity is what will be constantly improving. If you just have a culture and human dimension, it may be bias and also, not standardized. The best way is to build is from the ground up! If you gather a team of peers to build a house made out of brinks, even if the blueprints (culture) are off, I bet that team builds that house as they create their own process. If you have the best blueprints in the world, but peers who have their own ideas of collaboration because they are used to a certain culture, your might find yourself behind schedule in building that house. Human Dimensions are based on creating, building, and leading, however, you need to know your people and how they collaborate first. Then create a process around that team whose work is standardized so the ideas keep flowing and at that point you have your culture/human dimension properly. Without any synergy, there is no culture and only individuals will be a part of your organization.

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Gerwyn Moseley • Intimidation.

Jeff Dunsavage • I see the human dimension and culture as a given — either it is there or it is not, and if it is not, there will be no innovative collaboration or collaborative innovation. If the human dimension and culture are supportive of collaboration and innovation, the most effective « lever » is process management, which can be done effectively with and without software tools. I’ve seen tons of money spent on software to little effect on collaboration or innovation, whereas I’ve seen small changes in process yield wonderful results. I think of it as a pyramid, with culture as the base and necessary precondition, process as an enabler, and software as a tool for refining and enhancing the effectiveness of process.

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Pascal Le Rudulier • 2 terms to take into account: collaboration and innovation. I’d supplement my vote of « The Human dimension and the Culture » with this: making sure one doesn’t overstep the other: giving credit to individual where credit is due, promoting collaboration and not systematic consensus.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Jogesh Limbani • In my experience, one of the hardest barriers to overcome collaborative innovation is « Trust ». Processes and tools are supporting enablers that structure, incubate and filter through the most promising ideas through the ideation process. As Bill Joy said: « No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else ».

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Darryl Reichelt • Without addressing the cultural factors of a business the probability of implementing innovation is low.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Roberto Chretien • Human factor ! As Daft Punk says, we are « Human after all »

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Alain Risbourg • If you d’on’t start with culture and Human Dimension, you will not foster collaborative innovation… Start, collectively, by answering the question : Why do I, the company, need to innovate? Why do I need to innvate collaboratively ? Is the strategic for the company or not? If you work only on process, systems or tools you won’t be able to change behavior, habits and culture…

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Michel Vandenberghe • Question implicitly is : What factor has higher importance knowing that factors depend on each other.? The real question is : Can we define a process in such way that it does not depend on « human dimension and culture » ( it can foster some human dimension and culture) ? In this later case, answer would be « process »). This explains why « Collaborative » is not well defined, because this process is not defined

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Igor Vujic • Hm, interesting point of view, that I am partially sharing. We can always find examples for everything both of us are stating. Here are my examples. I don’t think I ever said that tools are irrelevant if there IS an Inno culture but if there IS NOT. It is different. I won’t expose facts from my past, but even if 1, 2 or 10 employees are struggling to promote efficient management of Innovation, even if it seems to work, to initiate an Innovative spirit into people, if top managers are not willing to innovate and to transform all those ideas into real products, there won’t be any Innovation at all, let alone collaborative one. I hate generalizing: collaborative Innovation needs a mixture of all three ingredients, not only one. You can add pepper or spices into a soup, it will surely taste better. But the most important is that the soup is salty.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Olivier Goujat • The main level is the human dimension and the culture but you cannot « harness » and maximize them without a good process powered by a good tool

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Wim Soens • So Igor, what you’re saying is that if there is a good innovation culture tools are irrelevant, and if there’s no innovation culture tools won’t work. Kind of puts the collaborative software business in a dark corner, doesn’t it? Think about this: is web 2.0 (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube) just an answer to the needs of the ‘digital natives’ (Gen Z), or did it shape their very culture? When we go in for a new project, a cultural assessment is one of the first things we do. If the result is negative, we don’t back-up and say « well, you’d better call one of those change management consultants first. You have to get your culture straight before you can work with us. » Instead, we take these cultural flaws into account during implementation, and use the tool to create a new climate that will lead to a cultural change in the long term. Of course, I’m still curious to learn how the majority here would step in and boost collaborative innovation by changing the culture. Sounds like magic to me.

> Voted for 3) The Software Tools and Solutions ?

Igor Vujic • Dear Wim, What good of tools and processes if nobody use them? If people really want to innovate and if they are not afraid of doing it because of the current functioning of the company, they will innovate even with just a white-board next to the coffee machine… If « collaboration » and « Innovation » are not at all in the Culture of the company, the « collaborative innovation » won’t be easy…

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Wim Soens • Dear majority, being in the business for over 12 years I’m quite intrigued with this result. Now, this makes me wonder if we are all reading and answering the same question. So let me rephrase Martin’s question as follows: “What is the most important tool (=main lever) to jump start (=boost) a people-centric process to generate, share, enrich and validate innovative ideas (=collaborative innovation)?” If you are still convinced that the answer to that question is A, then I urge you to write down your secret sauce in a book. It will be a bestseller worldwide. Seriously, every practitioner here will agree with me that changing a culture doesn’t happen overnight. So there’s no way you can use it as a lever to boost anything. To me, the results of this poll are a better match to the question: « What is the holy grail of collaborative innovation? » Ah, yes, the human dimension and the culture. Definitely!

> Voted for 3) The Software Tools and Solutions ?

Martin Haigh • Processes are really important as it provides a framework and established mechanism but, of course, processes are developed by and operated by people. Humans get my vote.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Sercan Uslu • By all means, human is the very element of any organization that puts the flavor to its culture… It is the human element that drives the rest and therefore the most important resource an organization has…

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Valentina Di Gregori • human factor can be stimulated to new processes and tools ..not viceversa…but you need to work on cultures and ambitions in different directions and various purposes..

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Stuart Lewis (CTS, TCSA) • In my experience most companys investigate and deploy « New ways of working » in reverse order. Typically starting with looking into software & tools. They then try to figure out how and where in the business the tool can bring benefit and value with process orientated integration. Lastly, they try to access the cultural issues preventing adoption and service utilisation, as without this there is no benefit. – Start by understanding your organisational culture (the more hierarchical your organisation. The harder it is to change, to more open and collaborative ways of working) – Secondly work with departmental and business unit heads to investigate, where in a process you can save, time, money or drive innovation. – Once the above are understood, you can then work confidently and openly with your technology partner to identify the right solution for your business demands and objectives. « Business and Technology working as one »

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Mark Keller, M.S. • Answer A Every exploring innovative person has their own process(es), that have been developed through exploring and examining the interests, passions, ideas, and possibilities. Software and tools are by products of A then B

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Fatima Landin • The human dimension and culture are the creators of software tools that boost the Collaborative Innovation. So, the main lever here is definitely the human factor..

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Edouard SIEKIERSKI • I would use Roger Martin’s design of business steps to imagine that each lever must be used at different moments: – mystery : for innovation it would be similar to culture. It’s The beginning of the story – heuristics : similar to Process – algorithm : similar to Software (http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/rogermartin/DesignofBusiness_HK.pdf) To add few more cents, a tool don’t create the culture of collaborative innovation! In soccer for example, giving the best « tools » to the French Team wouldnt make these players a Team!

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Jean-Christophe Tisseuil • Mainly the 2 first for sure, but a company without an innvovation culture….

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Vincent Siveton • Human dimension and culture are the first step for a company, software tools are the next one.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Catherine Le Drogo Ferrari • The challenge is to turn ideas into high value propositions and to guarantee an excellent execution. Apple is a perfect example : they were not the first to propose applications or touchscreens but they have been the first to deliver it properly.

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Alberto Emprin • A good management of the innovation process and an appropriate software infrastructure & tools shared by the participants are required for any serious cooperative innovation project, but without the proper human resources, mindset and culture, there is no collaborative innovation !

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

David Simoes-Brown • Slightly counter-intuitively it’s tools in 100%Open’s experience. Culture is ‘what we do around here’ so changing behaviour through a cool new tool really get collaboration going. Try to train a whole organisation to be more collaborative and it will simply ignore you.

> Voted for 3) The Software Tools and Solutions ?

Dominic Pride • It’s hard to choose between the first tool. Successful innovation depends on organisationa culture. At the same time employees need to see a pathway and process for their ideas moving from bright idea to something which the company can sell or use. For that reason process management is a very close second. Software tools are only a means to an end, however attractive and user-friendly they may be.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Sumitha Nair • I would say all 3 in that order. A strong culture of collaboration comes first – it is critical to foster openness to internal and external knowledge. Lots of ideas,knowledge and creativity already exist in many organisations. The ingredients for powerful innovation often surface during brainstorming sessions – but the challenge has typically been how to organize, manage, respond to and evaluate these ideas – leading us to the importance of process management. Which brings us to the 3rd piece: Technology. Software tools and solutions facilitate this by institutionalising the innovation process.Technology is more effective if it enables you to include both internal and external networks. We have written a white paper at Affinnova on the 9 Hallmarks of Divergent Collaboration. Feel free to msg me and I will be happy to share. Thanks for the question Martin, a compelling topic indeed

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Wim Soens • Without any doubt innovation is all about people. So yes, the human dimension and the culture is the most important factor for sustainable innovation ecosystems, as most contributors here seem to agree upon. But is it ‘the main lever to boost collaborative innovation’? I don’t think it is. An innovation culture ingrained in your company’s DNA is the ultimate achievement in the journey towards innovation excellence. That makes it a long term objective, not a lever. We can’t change a company’s culture in the short term, but we can change the climate. Look how changing a CEO can effect the climate instantly. In a similar way, the introduction of collaborative or social software effects the collaborative climate, which makes it an ideal lever to boost collaborative innovation. Social software spreads like a friendly virus that carries important value genes like freedom, trust, openness, playfulness and humor inside an organisation. If the adoption is successful – it usually is if the management doesn’t fight it – the organisation will gradually adapt to these values and they will become an integral part of its own DNA in the long term.

> Voted for 3) The Software Tools and Solutions ?

Manny Max Amit • Humans + Process + Technology = Collaborative Innovation . You need all these key factors to innovate successfully. It is a winning combination.

Sylvie Brémond Mookherjee • The cultural habits have to be adapted to the new deal opened by the collaborative tools …tools are not the priority but they help for the mind and behavior change.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Michel Vandenberghe • 4) Other

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Fabrice Jarry • Innovation without method can’t exist. Human dimension is very important but not enought. Have a look  http://www.asit.info

> Voted for 3) The Software Tools and Solutions ?

Frank Wiesebron • Of course it is Human dimension and Culture, but this Culture has to be created by Management’s leadership in the Innovation Process.

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Françoise Thomas-Rantet • i think that Human dimension and Culture is the main booster for collaborative behaviour: process management will enhance, tools will facilitate.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Nitten Nair • Its mainly the human dimension and culture.. Many organisations tend to overlook the human factor in almost all their operations including innovation.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Michel Operto • Human dimension wins but tools can greatly facilitate or hinder the amount of sharing and collaboration.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Anil Pagar • As they say everything that happens to Human beings is what they aspire/desire, in essence its all mind game, the aspirations and desires are stimulated when incubated in the right culture… however methodical handling and management of idea life cycle encourages individuals to aspire and desire more… and what better than Software tools to seamlessly manage idea life cycle methodically to encourage individuals to ideate and be recognized… They are all important

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Michael Gumnor • My innovation is my breakfast.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Said Belhadj • Just as mind is over matter, it’s man over process and man over software tools. We cannot just create processes and software tools for workers to use. The processes and tools used must be understood, convincing, enmeshing with humanity to bring the desired value. The tools and processes must match the natural-ness of things humans ennjoy and can identify with: Are you pushing the process or tools? or are they being ‘pulled’ by your workers? Are they self-evolving, with builtin feedback?

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

David Lubowa • I truly believe its all within the process management of ideas because to drive an idea regardless of culture,creed or tool one has to cohesively manage his/her thought process to create, discuss and execute that which they think will work, checks and balances follow suit in which case you would have created a starting point for the collaboration environment.

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Hans Konstapel • About Collaborative Innovation: http://slidesha.re/eF8d2I

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Olga KURYSHKO • To me, the process management of ideas is vitally important, however, it has little value if the human dimension and the culture of innovation in general is missing. At the same time, more the culture of innovation is incarnated in a company, more the process management of ideas is needed.

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Vincent Lorphelin • As soon as you feel you create value for the private benefit of somebody else, you stop to contribute. A major issue will be to track all the contributions – and their usefulness – and reward every contributor on a pro rata basis.

> Voted for 3) The Software Tools and Solutions ?

El Mostafa Berjamy • I share the same opinion that Ms Caroline. the Human dimension and Culture are very importante. however, culture is not sufficient and man without process management of ideas can’t improve much things. Kindest regards.

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Jean-Philippe Doyen • a fool with a tool is still a fool

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Brian Monks • I believe more and more that you can put make all the tools available and have perfected the process but if the work-place culture isn’t in sync, all that will go for naught.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Alain Deza • They all go together: culture, process & tools. Culture is key as the two others will not survive in the long term without it. Process & tools are more enablers that will support and facilitate innovation but not foster it nor stengthen the DNA of the organisation like Culture will.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Mohammed Charki • interesting to see from preliminary results that the trend shows GenX to be considering the human dimension being more important than the Management Dimension as shows the trend for GenY and GenZ, i’d be very interested in getting the final raw data and push the analysis a step further based on background and experiences – the thing is that you can’t separate the managerial process from the human dimension but then the question is having right human resource without the right managerial process would be as or less effective than the contrary? part of the answer can be found in a start-up and other part in a big group

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Guillaume Ang • I voted human dimension but I am also fully in line with the idea of a Result driving innovation and empowering employees.

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Caroline GREMILLET • I hesitated between culture and process, but voted for process, because it has been a important part of my job to create one. Thus I can say with no doubt that if you don’t have a idea management system, you won’t get any idea after your first « open innovation » challenge, because you can’t evaluate them quickly and objectively enough for the creative people who suggested them to be encouraged to give another try without any feedback…

> Voted for 2) The Process Management of Ideas ?

Chris Marin • I actually believe it’s the results: identify the goal, market it to employees and empower them to drive business outcomes with collaborative innovation.

Chris Lee • I think ‘process management of ideas’ in the context of innovation is a surefire way to stifle creativity!

> Voted for 1) The Human dimension and the Culture ?

Tina Wilson • ‘from’…lo siento…

Tina Wilson • I will refrain form saying the obvious…

 The results on LinkedIn are available on this link : http://linkd.in/Lj5UCu

June 5 2012

Director of the Telecom-Innov+ incubator for more than 5 years, Ms. Phong will be an essential interlocutor to achieve your mission. She will put you in touch with the start-ups of her business incubator or with other innovators of her network.

With a promoting personality, Xi Lo Phong would appreciate if you put her under the spotlights and for sure will be more eager to help.

If you expect something from her, be smart and adapt your behaviour to her personality.

The presentation of InnovNation

The demo of the game here

President of Paranove for more than 10 years, he has also been advising the French President on Telecom issues for a few months. Very charismatic, the image of Paranove is associated to him every time.

As every person with such responsibilities he is overbooked and it is very difficult to meet him. One thing you need to remember about Mr de Marjorette is that you shouldn’t disturb him if you are going to present him a poor quality work. He is not interested by small details so go through the point to convince him.

The presentation of Innov’Nation

The demo of the game here

After completing her internship in the marketing department of Paranove, Maria was hired as a marketing analyst.

Do not hesitate to contact her for any intelligence request or to perform a market analysis. Hardworker and disciplined, she will be of great help. Moreover Maria is conscientious so when you have a request for her, try to come with a precise and well-defined query.

Last advise : Don’t neglect her contribution throughout your mission because she may be very helpful on marketing issues.

> The description of the Innov’Nation Serious Game here

> Watch the video and test the demo on innovation.eu

Director of the Consummer Protection Agency, 60 million of consumers, Roger is a strong advocate for abused customers. He has a keen sense of detail and he knows all numbers of satisfaction surveys published during the last 10 years. Very methodical and conscientious, he deals with many cases of dispute between consumers and businesses. Therefor, he is the obvious person to put you in touch with consumers and their issues.

If I can give you a little advise : Be specific in your comments when you’ll meet him or he will not grant you any credit.

Design and facilitation of exploratory workshops (mini-groups with end-users and developers, focus groups with web and mobile developers) to prepare the launch of an open API for an innovative service (leader in services): analysis of expectations of the developers community and elaboration of a strategic roadmap.

bluenove was a proud partner of the MidemLab 2012, a programme of selection of the most innovative startups for the Music industry organized by Midem in Cannes.

Here is an article based of an interview of Martin Duval about how open innovation is happening also in the Music industry …

2011 was again rich in projects and initiatives in the area of Open and Collaborative Innovation from Corporations, SMEs and public administration bodies.
Many new ways to innovate working and collaborating with the outside ecosystem of partners (start-ups, corporations from other sectors, research labs, universities, suppliers, customers, etc.) and boosting collaboration within organizations will emerge during this 2012.

Here are some trends and perspectives that I foresee happening in 2012.

1- More convergent outside-inside merging projects

The issue to get outside innovative ideas and projects to get processed through each step of an enterprise Stage & Gate innovation process until it really becomes an innovation in the hands of a customer does remain. More collaborative programmes and platforms dealing with innovative outside partners will tend to be merged with similar ones dealing with collaboration from employees within the organisation. And Stage & Gate processes will be reengineered to become more open and collaborative at some keys steps.

2- More hybrid online/offline mixed methodologies to support co-creation

As more collaborative software solutions are being implemented, the value of co-creation methodologies used in real workshops is also increasing as it does matter to get participants from multi-disciplines (engineers, designers, marketing managers, etc.) to deliver new concepts of services and products. As we already experienced in 2011, more Open and Collaborative Innovation projects will then include ‘online’ components mixed and organized with ‘offline’ ones in a coordinated and complementary way.

3- The appearance of meta-challenges & contests

In the area of idea contests and crowdsourcing challenges with outside contributors such as students, users, start-ups, developers, etc., an evolution may happen towards ‘meta-contests’ and events where few corporations get together to co-sponsor and co-organize bigger and more impacting initiatives. Their motivation would be to share investments and risks with other non-competitive partners and be part of a more impacting contest than if they would do it alone. The growing number of smaller contests may indeed at the end become counterproductive by diluting efforts and may weaken the level of contributions from the outside ecosystem.

4- Clearer selection of contributors in an idea management process and  or careful definition of rewards and incentives

After the fist wave of crowdsourcing projects, more care and focus will be given to the selection of contributors in the early phase of an idea management process in order to avoid having all contributors to work all the way until final selection: only the ones selected through a profiling process will then have the opportunity to contribute thus avoiding waste of time investment from the others. Also more care will be given to the selection of the right rewards and incentives. This also applies to innovation contest and challenges involving employees within a company or corporation.

5- More use of web 2.0 software platforms and new information technologies dedicated to Open and Collaborative Innovation

More Enterprise Social Network platforms will contribute to innovation project management. More of them will be launched within R&D and innovation departments to boost collaboration and best practices between researchers. New features will appear also in the Idea Management Software solutions as show by recent study (available for free on our OutOfTheBlue open discussion platform) to improve the profiling of the contributors or include gamification among others. I also believe that new IT tools will emerge to address new needs, such as our Serious Game InnovNation.

6- The acceleration of Open Data initiatives both in public administrations and enterprises

As demonstrated in 2011 by our Whiter Paper ‘Open Data: issues and opportunities for the enterprise’ (free to download on OutOftheblue in French and English), more Open Data related projects will be launched to boost innovation from developers and startups as show by the SNCF project http://data.sncf.com supported by bluenove. The need for new types of services and tools to structure, make available online, give access to, visualize, promote, integrate data and APIs will accelerate together with the community management of developers and open data users.

7) The current Intellectual Property models will be more challenged and new ones will emerge

Obviously, pressure is increasing on the intellectual property systems to better adapt them to new open and collaborative ways to innovate: for instance, in the area of Open Data with issues around issues of licence of use.
Intellectual property issues are not only related to co-creation with outside partners but have also to be taken into account with non R&D employees contributing to ideas of new services and products that have the potential to be patented. The bluenove label initiative is our contribution to tackle this issue.

8- More partnership programmes with start-ups, more Corporate Venturing structures and Incubators

One of the effects of the economic crisis is that more young graduates having a hard time to find a job will create their own start-up company. This trend will get corporations even keener to build proactive partnership programmes to develop business relations with these entrepreneurs and also create or reinforce their Corporate Venturing activities to invest in the most disruptive ones. Corporations will also create ‘Incubators’ in order to have the opportunity to support some of these projects providing within office space in addition to marketing resources, technical expertise and access to their customer base for trials of new products and services.

Come and discover the remaning perpectives and trends 9 to 12 and start an open discussion with the bluenove team and your peers about this topic on our OutOftheBlue platform at : https://bluenove.bluekiwi.net/space/in/INTERNATIONAL_GROUP/notebook/note?id=1939 

Let’s enjoy a busy Open Innovation year 2102 !

[1] Idea Management Framework by bluenove > available in our outoftheblue discussion platform

[2] Application Programming Interface

The White Paper « Open Data : Issues and opportunities for the entreprise ? » can now be downloaded for free by filling the following form.

Prefaced by the MIT Senseable City Lab director, Carlo Ratti, this white paper tackles major issues surrounding Open Data for the Enterprise and ends with a summary by bluenove’s CEO Martin Duval.

The « Open Data : Issues and opportunities for the entreprise ? » white paper is a bluenove project, in partnership with SNCF, La Poste Group, SUEZ ENVIRONNEMENT, POULT Group and based on bluenove – BVA’s online survey.

In case of downloading problems or to know more about our ‘Open Data Diagnosis’, please send us an email to contact@bluenove.com

Launch of the ‘bluenove  label’

(bluenove Research)

1. Overcoming the gap between Open Innovation (OI) and Intellectual Property (IP)

Research question: How to protect creativity and the value of knowledge based solutions? How to enable trust based models between partners in Collaborative and Open Innovation?

Faced with the growing tendencies in business toward openness and collaboration, companies are often confronted with the issue of Intellectual Property protection. Moreover, Open and Collaborative Innovation represents openness toward communities, partners, individuals, and even competitors that are exterior to the company. On the contrary, Intellectual Property rights are designed to exclude others from using their knowledge or inventions for a limited period of time. These two make it difficult to manage transactions in open innovation processes.

This study focuses on contracts that govern transactions within the flexible processes in Open Innovation via on-line platforms.

The aim of the study is to define contracting mechanisms in order to enable management of Open Innovation processes and their formalization with success. Furthermore, the objective is to identify and to minimize the possibility of opportunism that is always present in business and should be prevented by binding parties into cooperation with contracts (Williamson 1985).

The specific objectives are:

• to contribute to understanding of the Intellectual Property aspects of open innovation (including theoretical and practical implications),
• to define and to provide contracting mechanisms in order to improve the effectiveness of the meeting between seekers and solvers,
• to help Open Innovation actors (clients, partners, consultants, IP and OI practitioners, etc.) as well as to help realisation of Open initiatives : call for ideas, call for solutions, etc. (Innocentive, Brihtidea, CogniStreamer, etc.),
• to enhance the perceived value of sharing and collaboration in contrast to infringement of Intellectual property rights, most notably in China,
• to share a common understanding and agreement of fair rules to be applied when implement Open Innovation projects and programs through a label approach.

2. Research background – why contract?

Companies are developing different tools and mechanisms in order to manage their openness and coordinate different innovation resources. Research and literature on Intellectual Property has not produced many works in the Open Innovation field. Rather, the legal aspect of Open Innovation was associated with free and open source code development in the software industry and user generated content types (Lee and al., 2010, von Hippel and von Krogh 2003).

In this study, we follow the work of Fauchart and von Hippel who argue that in general, we can analyze two Intellectual Property systems to manage Intellectual Property rights: “law-based” IP systems and “norm-based” IP systems.

• Fauchart and von Hippel defined law-based IP systems as detailed bodies of legislation and case law spell out the rights an owner can claim to specific types of Intellectual Property, and procedures by which these rights can be claimed.  Specifically, patent grant, the copyright, right to protect trade secrets, the creative barcode, etc. are examples of law-based tools.
• An important question regarding the transactions in Open Innovation processes, from our point of view is related to the trustworthiness of the transaction network. This context is even more important when it comes to industries or cases where it is difficult or impossible to claim Intellectual Property rights on the knowledge (Lee, 2009) or when knowledge is co-created (Valkakori et al. 2009, Paasi et al. 2010). For convenience, Fauchart and von Hippel introduced norm-based Intellectual Property systems: they operate on social norms that may not be written down, but that are nonetheless widely known and viewed as valid by members of a community. (Fauchart and von Hippel, 2006). One example of the tool for managing this issue is the ISO 26000 International Guidance Standard on Social Responsibility, an International standard set by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Specifically, this standard is not  appropriate for certifications purposes or regulatory or contractual use (Clause 1).

To conclude, Intellectual Property law enables regulation of the question of Intellectual Property ownership over the knowledge (Lee, 2009). In contrast, it does not regulate how these rights may be coordinated or managed, in what hierarchy (Lee et al.). To do so, research and literature indicate that contracts are the best governance tools for managing transactions. (Wiliamson 1985, Lee et al., Lee 2009, Valkakori et al. 2009, Fauchert et al. 2006, etc.).

Our study addresses the research gap created between the Open Innovation and Intellectual Property law by providing a structure for optimal contract content.

3. Methodology

Methodology used for this study is analyses of ten online platforms and their IP systems that are managing their transactions via on-line sites, in order to compare the best practices. Also, we conducted several interviews with managers who are working on Intellectual Property aspects, somewhat in the context of Open Innovation. Expected result is an optimal content contract which gives the overview of general conditions recommended for building trustworthy relations with clients. This study does not tend to be exhaustive; rather it tends to enable a managing tool for Open Innovation transactions that can help to our clients and to other Open Innovation practitioners.

4. Contract proposition

The content of this contract aims to be applied when the company’s transactions are carried out via their on-line sites. Most notably, it can be applied to every on-line platform for Open Innovation.

The proposed contract represent the first version of the ‘bluenove label’. In fact, our objective is to enable its amelioration and development by opening presented research to Open Innovation ecosystem.

4.1. Structure:

4.1.1. Basic principals (trustfulness of information provided by Seeker/Solver)

• Limitation of liability and warranties
• Legal aspect of contract – related to the Web

4.1.2. Seeker’s aspect:

• Anonymity – optional
• Submitting a problem – exclusivity and it’s specification
• Selection
• Awards delivery
• Group of seekers on the same project

4.1.3. Solver’s aspect:

• Site  (profiles and data)
• Responsibility (that he has all the rights over the solutions or ideas that he is providing)
• Intellectual Property – over a proposed solution
• Confidentiality (considers the information provided by seeker)
• Group of solvers on the same project

4.1.4.  Additional: Aspect that considers solutions such as ideas, designs, etc.

In the table to download below, we detail more explicitly every lever of the contract.

bluenove label – table

Notice: If you share those values and if you tend to apply this basic contract principles in your Open Innovation practice, please use the logo herebelow (copy/paste the image) and linked it to this address. In this case you can self-declare that your approach is ‘APPROVED by bluenove’.

If you want a more detailed or updated version of the contract as well as if you want to move from APPROVED to ‘CERTIFIED by bluenove’, please contact us at contact@bluenove.com and we will propose a diagnosis for your company.

Please notice that this contract model represents the first version of the “bluenove label » that tends to be improved. If you are interested to contribute or/and to follow its advancement, you can join our group ’out of the blue’ (opening soon).

Thank you in advance for contacting us at the following email address to inform us if you tend to use this label: jovana.kovacevic@bluenove.com.

5. ‘Opening the science’ – Future development of the ‘bluenove label’

However, there is a certain number of limitations for the application of this label. We found that limitation that considers geographical location is most important limit, as the laws of one country apply only inside the boarders of that country. Also, some types of knowledge or industries may require more specialized approach and specialized or additional clauses to be defined in the contract.

Therefore, the ‘bluenove label’, based on comparison of number of best practices, represent the first version of this study. We are opening this research to the OI ecosystem in order to boost the debates that will help to better understand and consequently, to better manage the issues regarding the Intellectual Property Rights in Open Innovation processes. Researchers and scholars, companies, consultants, experts are invited to contribute to the spread and evolution of the ‘bluenove label’.

Jovana KOVACEVIC
Researcher at bluenove , and a PhD student at Université Paris-Dauphine (on-going Thesis on Open Innovation)
One of the ‘outoftheblue’ platform community managers.

and

the bluenove team

List of the programs and platforms that are ‘APPROVED by bluenove’ coming soon here below

Launch of the “bluenove”  label

bluenove Research

Overcoming the gap between Open Innovation (OI) and Intellectual Property (IP)

Research question: How to protect creativity and the value of knowledge based solutions? How to enable trust based models between partners in Collaborative and Open Innovation?

Faced with the growing tendencies in business toward openness and collaboration, companies are often confronted with the issue of Intellectual Property protection. Moreover, Open and Collaborative Innovation represents openness toward communities, partners, individuals, and even competitors that are exterior to the company. On the contrary, Intellectual Property rights are designed to exclude others from using their knowledge or inventions for a limited period of time. These two make it difficult to manage transactions in open innovation processes.

This study focuses on contracts that govern transactions within the flexible processes in Open Innovation via on-line platforms.

The aim of the study is to define contracting mechanisms in order to enable management of Open Innovation processes and their formalization with success. Furthermore, the objective is to identify and to minimize the possibility of opportunism that is always present in business and should be prevented by binding parties into cooperation with contracts (Williamson 1985).

The specific objectives are:

•  to contribute to understanding of the Intellectual Property aspects of open innovation (including theoretical and practical implications),
• to define and to provide contracting mechanisms in order to improve the effectiveness of the meeting between seekers and solvers,
• to help Open Innovation actors (clients, partners, consultants, IP and OI practitioners, etc.) as well as to help realisation of Open initiatives : call for ideas, call for solutions, etc. (Innocentive, Brihtidea, CogniStreamer, etc.),
• to enhance the perceived value of sharing and collaboration in contrast to infringement of Intellectual property rights, most notably in China,
• to share a common understanding and agreement of fair rules to be applied when implement Open Innovation projects and programs through a label approach.

2. Research background – why contract?

Companies are developing different tools and mechanisms in order to manage their openness and coordinate different innovation resources. Research and literature on Intellectual Property has not produced many works in the Open Innovation field. Rather, the legal aspect of Open Innovation was associated with free and open source code development in the software industry and user generated content types (Lee and al., 2010, von Hippel and von Krogh 2003).

In this study, we follow the work of Fauchart and von Hippel who argue that in general, we can analyze two Intellectual Property systems to manage Intellectual Property rights: “law-based” IP systems and “norm-based” IP systems.

• Fauchart and von Hippel defined law-based IP systems as detailed bodies of legislation and case law spell out the rights an owner can claim to specific types of Intellectual Property, and procedures by which these rights can be claimed.  Specifically, patent grant, the copyright, right to protect trade secrets, the creative barcode, etc. are examples of law-based tools.
• An important question regarding the transactions in Open Innovation processes, from our point of view is related to the trustworthiness of the transaction network. This context is even more important when it comes to industries or cases where it is difficult or impossible to claim Intellectual Property rights on the knowledge (Lee, 2009) or when knowledge is co-created (Valkakori et al. 2009, Paasi et al. 2010). For convenience, Fauchart and von Hippel introduced norm-based Intellectual Property systems: they operate on social norms that may not be written down, but that are nonetheless widely known and viewed as valid by members of a community. (Fauchart and von Hippel, 2006). One example of the tool for managing this issue is the ISO 26000 International Guidance Standard on Social Responsibility, an International standard set by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). Specifically, this standard is not  appropriate for certifications purposes or regulatory or contractual use (Clause 1).    
  

To conclude, Intellectual Property law enables regulation of the question of Intellectual Property ownership over the knowledge (Lee, 2009). In contrast, it does not regulate how these rights may be coordinated or managed, in what hierarchy (Lee et al.). To do so, research and literature indicate that contracts are the best governance tools for managing transactions. (Wiliamson 1985, Lee et al., Lee 2009, Valkakori et al. 2009, Fauchert et al. 2006, etc.).

Our study addresses the research gap created between the Open Innovation and Intellectual Property law by providing a structurefor optimal contract content.

3. Methodology

Methodology used for this study is analyses of ten online platforms and their IP systems that are managing their transactions via on-line sites, in order to compare the best practices. Also, we conducted several interviews with managers who are working on Intellectual Property aspects, somewhat in the context of Open Innovation. Expected result is an optimal content contract which gives the overview of general conditions recommended for building trustworthy relations with clients. This study does not tend to be exhaustive; rather it tends to enable a managing tool for Open Innovation transactions that can help to our clients and to other Open Innovation practitioners.

4. Contract proposition

The content of this contract aims to be applied when the company’s transactions are carried out via their on-line sites. Most notably, it can be applied to every on-line platform for Open Innovation.

The proposed contract represent the first version of the « bluenove » label. In fact, our objective is to enable its amelioration and development by opening presented research to Open Innovation ecosystem.

4.1. Structure:

4.1.1. Basic principals (trustfulness of information provided by Seeker/Solver)

• Limitation of liability and warranties
• Legal aspect of contract – related to the Web

4.1.2. Seeker’s aspect:

• Anonymity – optional
• Submitting a problem – exclusivity and it’s specification
• Selection
• Awards delivery
• Group of seekers on the same project

4.1.3. Solver’s aspect:

• Site  (profiles and data)
• Responsibility (that he has all the rights over the solutions or ideas that he is providing)
• Intellectual Property – over a proposed solution
• Confidentiality (considers the information provided by seeker)
• Group of solvers on the same project

4.1.4.  Additional: Aspect that considers solutions such as ideas, designs, etc.

In the table below, we detail more explicitly every lever of the contract:

Notice: If you share this values and if you want to apply this basic principles of a contract (on the Seeker and on the Solver side) in your Open Innovation practice please use our logo and linked it to the this address. In this case you can self-declare that your approach is approved by bluenove.

If you want the more detailed or updated version and you want to be certified by bluenove, please contact us and we will do a diagnose for your company.

Please notice that this model of a contract represent the first version of the bluenove label that tends to be ameliorated. If you are interested to contribute or/and to follow its advancement, you can join our group “out of the blue” (coming soon).

Thank you in advance for contacting as at the following email address to inform us if you tend to use this label: jovana.kovacevic@bluenove.com.

5.  “Opening the science” – Future development of the « bluenove » label

However, there is a certain number of limitations for the application of this label. We found that limitation that considers geographical location is most important limit, as the laws of one country apply only inside the boarders of that country. Also, some types of knowledge or industries may require more specialized approach and specialized or additional clauses to be defined in the contract.

Therefore, « bluenove » label, based on comparison of number of best practices, represent the first version of this study. We are opening this research to the OI ecosystem in order to boost the debates that will help to better understand and consequently, to better manage the issues regarding the Intellectual Property Rights in Open Innovation processes. Researchers and scholars, companies, consultants, experts are invited to contribute to the growth of the « bluenove » label.

Jovana KOVACEVIC

Researcher in bluenove , and a PhD student at Université Paris-Dauphine

(On-going these on Open Innovation)

One of the managers responsible for animation of the group “out of the blue” at bluenove

and

The bluenove team

Find out about Innov’nation, the serious game for distant training to innovative projects management! You will be interacting internally (collaborative innovation) and externally with an ecosystem of partners (open innovation). The result of a two-year R&D partnership between bluenove, Paraschool, INRIA and CEA, this serious game will be shown for the first time at LeWeb11. Come and test the game at bluenove’s booth! For more information http://www.innovnation.eu

Our study on “large French companies and open innovation” as well as the white paper on “Open data” will give you a perspective on essential innovation topics.

Come and discover your innovator profile, have a talk with our consultants to better understand bluenove and the 12 levers of Open innovation, win goodies…

Hypios and bluenove join their forces to propose an advanced new offer in Open Innovation

Paris, 26 October 2011 — bluenove and Hypios have signed a partnership agreement to offer clients a complete, single-contract solution for open-innovation adoption and open problem-solving.

Created in 2008, bluenove has managed more than 70 projects and supported more than 30 major clients, including corporations like Orange, Essilor, SUEZ environnement or Natura Brazil, on the best way to develop an open and collaborative mindset and culture to boost innovation.

bluenove has defined its own implementation framework and methodologies, ‘the 12 levers of Open Innovation,’ to leverage not only the creativity from the ecosystem of outside partners (players from other industries, startups, labs, customers, suppliers, etc.) but also the inside skills and expertise from all employees. One of these key levers is the ability to solve problems.

Since 2009, Hypios has been solving problems for a global clientele of medium-to-huge businesses. Hypios combines intelligent crowdsourcing, competency discovery technology, and human outreach to deliver an optimal open problem-solving service.

bluenove believes that Hypios, with its core proprietary technology and tested method,  is currently the best solution provider on the market.  “Seekers,” assisted by bluenove, post R&D problems to hypios.com, and select a deadline and a prize to be awarded to the successful “Solver.” Hypios draws from a network of over 800,000 experts spread across the globe and across diverse fields of expertise.

“Hypios will be a key asset and a great fit in our portfolio of open innovation services. Hypios’s proven experience and advanced semantic technology will help clients in constant need of faster and better means to develop their products,” said Martin Duval, CEO of Bluenove.

Hypios CEO Daniel de Segovia Gross believes that this partnership will be great for Seekers and Solvers alike:
“bluenove, the national leader in open innovation, is a dream partner for Hypios. The bluenove approach to open innovation is in line with our core belief in the power of collaborative networks. Because R&D problems are essentially human-resource problems, intelligent crowdsourcing and competency discovery services like ours are changing the way companies innovate.”

Websites: www.hypios.com and www.bluenove.com

Press contact for Hypios:

Saman Musacchio
Hypios
smusacchio@hypios.com
+33 (0)1 77 13 67 79

Press contact for bluenove:

Thomas Boullonnois
Rumeur Publique
thomas@rumeurpublique.fr
+ 33 1.55.74.52.29

We asked the following question on Quora:

Tim Berry, Author of Business Plan Pro (Palo Alto… I see two good answers here already by Ken and Domhall (plus some fascinating comments re the newt), but I’d like to add that a business plan is especially value when you are looking at something for which there is more uncertainty. The business plan can reduce the uncertainty somewhat, and organize it into levels of unknown, by breaking it into parts; and by connecting the interrelated parts. So there’s a hypothetical business model, and projected revenues and expenses that help take the assumptions into the real of « if this is true … then that would be true » so you can clarify, break it into steps, and get a better view of where you’re going. The more the uncertainty, the more the value of a plan, especially a real plan, live plan, one that will be tracked and reviewed and revised. It’s something like starting a journey into the unknown with a proposed route and destination, and having the good sense to modify as you learn.

PRESS RELEASE

bluenove and Inventta become partners and propose global Open Innovation services to develop R&D Partnerships between Brazil and Europe.

………… &……………

As the need for more innovation is rising in order to generate new growth opportunities, more and more companies are embracing Open Innovation strategies and looking at Research & Development of new services and products as an international challenge. More European companies are considering emerging markets and especially Brazil as a land of creativity and innovation, while South-American companies are keen to partner with Research Institutions and innovative companies in France and Europe. Because they share this common vision, bluenove, the French leader in Open and Collaborative Innovation services, and Inventta, the leading consulting firm in Innovation Management in Brazil, are partnering to offer Open Innovation consulting and services and deliver support at a global scale to their customers and prospects. On the one hand, bluenove and Inventta propose French and European companies from all industries a full range of services from scouting and detection of innovative Brazilian partners (Corporations, SMEs, Labs, Universities, Suppliers, etc.) to full support to implement local R&D operations and labs in Brazil. On the other hand, similar services are provided to Brazilian and South American companies willing to develop innovative partnership opportunities with European players and to set up a local R&D presence in France and Europe.

“bluenove is already supporting a leading Brazilian corporation to develop its Open Innovation strategy towards European partners and we believe Inventta is the right partner to offer a unique set of global services to both Brazilian and European companies willing to define and implement R&D Partnerships”, says Martin Duval, Founder and CEO of bluenove.

“In the past 2 years, Inventta helped 6 multinationals to structure their R&D centers in Brazil. We see the partnership with bluenove as an opportunity to extend our solutions to European prospects, and a way to add specific skills and expertise from Europe to South American and Brazilian companies wishing to operate there” , says Bruno Moreira Bianchini Melo CEO at Inventta.

More about bluenove and Inventta:

➢ bluenove (http://www.bluenove.com) is the French leader in ‘Open & Collaborative Innovation’ services. Founded in 2008 by Martin Duval, bluenove has delivered more that 70 projects to major corporations such as: Orange, SUEZ environment, Danone, Natura Brazil, Alcatel-Lucent, Essilor, SNCF, etc. bluenove has produced the first ever study ‘Open Innovation in France’ in 2011 and has defined its own methodology framework ‘The 12 levers of Open Innovation’.

➢ Inventta (http://www.inventta.net) is a consulting company specialized in innovation with operations in Latin America. The company has its offices located in Campinas (SP), Rio de Janeiro (RJ), Belo Horizonte (MG) and Bogota (Colombia); and teams allocated in a number of projects throughout Brazil. Inventta has stood out in the market due to its wide range of competences and solutions organized within the following major areas: strategy,  financial resources, culture and education, structure and processes, technologies and competences. Inventta is controlled by the holding Instituto Inovação.

midemlab is an international competition for the most innovative startups and app developers, proposing digital solutions that help music executives, artists & brands to reach, engage and monetize audiences.

The third edition of midemlab will take place at midem, 28‐31 January 2012, in Cannes (France). midem is the international tradeshow where music makers, cutting-edge technologies, brands and talents come together to enrich the passionate relationship between people and music, transform audience engagement and form new business connections.

The previous editions of midemlab proved to be a real launch platform for many leading music startups – such as SoundCloud, The Echo Nest, Songkick, Next Big Sound, Root Music, Jammbox or Kickstarter.

bluenove will play a key role in midemlab this year by selecting the submissions received through the call for entry – together with Balderton Capital, the leading venture firm, and Music Ally, the music business strategy company.

Finalists will then present their project in front of an international jury which collectively represents an international network of supporters for entrepreneurship, all at the top front of digital innovation and best placed to evaluate the most innovative business models. Jury members are successful entrepreneurs, senior executives from the entertainment sector, leading investment companies, representatives of influential media in the digital sphere and winners from previous editions.

Midemlab widen its scope this year to players proposing solutions not necessarily music oriented.

Tech players who have built the next big solution to engage or monetize audiences can apply (here) until December 4th in one of these 3 categories:

• Music discovery, recommendation & creation
• Marketing & social engagement
• Direct to consumer sales & monetizing content

Rewards for finalists and winners are:

• Finalists pitch at midem and network with VC’s & potential business partners
• Finalists get personalized coaching sessions from Microsoft BizSpark to prepare their most effective pitch
• Finalists receive great exposure to the international press & audience
• Category winners pitch at the Visionary Monday to more than 1 000 attendees
• Category winners receive free access to all Reed MIDEM shows for one year
• Category winners get free legal advice and additional exposure during & after midem

The Internationalization of R&D is about implementing a company’s R&D operations abroad. In the 1980’s, this local R&D presence was mainly happening as a consequence of mergers and acquisitions between developed countries.

Today, in a context of globalization and well established crisis in industrial countries, the internationalization of R&D is about opening to new markets and developing opportunities for more innovation. According to the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development) Policy Brief “Research and Development: going global” (2008), India and China are the most attractive destinations for investment in Research and Development. Following marketing and manufacturing, the R&D is now also moving to the BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China). The main reasons are skilled researchers with lower labour costs, lower risks and an R&D  that has more chances to meet the local needs of these high potential markets.

But there is more. Indeed, the internationalization of R&D represents an opportunity to foster disruptive innovation, to differentiate from competitors and to develop a network of new expertises and skills.

The internationalization of R&D is part of an Open Innovation strategy.

Last January, Procter & Gamble announced the opening of its new R&D center in Singapour. A $ 250-million investment for a state-of-the-art 32,000 square meters innovation center intended for the Asian market but also worldwide. This facility is scheduled for 2013, and will focus on all product development activities (formulation, consumers, new materials). According to Bruce Brown, P&G’s Chief Technology Officer, the opening of this center will allow the group to “merge its expertise and scale with Singapore’s positive innovation environment to accelerate and facilitate collaborations with external partners in this region.”

As Bruce Brown testifies, ‘the internationalization of R&D is a growing opportunity to tap into new technological trends worldwide and to benefit from scientific and technological skills, creating a virtuous circle for knowledge sharing between the foreign R&D centers and the parent company, but also to be part of a new local network with other companies and bodies, universities, public R&D centers through partnerships and joint-ventures’.

Such an plan is at the core of an ambitous open innovation strategy, enabling companies to open their innovation process to external knowledge, expertise and know-how.

P&G’s initiative is not the only one. The Company AstraZeneca for example, which has been the first pharmaceutical company to open an R&D center in Asia, has launched a Strategic Alliance in Asia in 2007, followed by a collaboration with the Guangdong hospital in China. In this win-win partnership, the hospital provided the researchers, laboratories and ability to test tissues, while the company provided the technical expertise and research fundings.

L’Oreal, which owns 18 R&D centers worldwide, has recently announced the Opening of a research center in Mumbai (India) by the end of 2011, which is meant to be the Company’s 6^th biggest R&D center. After the opening of its R&D center in Brazil in 2008, the group strenghtens its strategy to implement its R&D in emerging countries.

Even if the pharmaceutical and chemical industries are best in class in the internationalization of R&D, it applies to all types of businesses. The French group Essilor, global leader of corrective lenses and optics not only owns R&D centers in France and in the US, but also 3 research centers in Asia, one of them being a joint-venture and an other one a partnership. The Orange group, leader in Telecom, owns 18 R&D centers worldwide and notably one in China since 2004, taking “advantage of the dynamic and rapid telecom market growth and the huge talent pool in China.”

What about SMEs? In 2007, a German University surveyed 70 SMEs. Results proved their interest in the internationalization of R&D and highlighted the 2 following reasons: a willingness to adapt their products to local markets specific needs and to access local knowledge resources.

As for big companies, collaboration with universities or local companies through research partnerships seems to be the best option to enter the market and to build an innovative ecosystem. However, “over 25% of the survey did not know how to find a suitable academic partner abroad, especially in emerging countries”.

bluenove supports Companies in their Open Innovation strategy in France and abroad, from detection of potential partners (laboratories, universities, startups and corporations from other industries) to closing of partnerships, all the way to the implementation of local R&D operations.

> to find out more about bluenove services: contact@bluenove.com

bluenove is a partner of the Innovation Days 2011 conference

> Date: September 26-27, 2011

> Location : Cité Internationale Universitaire 27 Boulevard Jourdan 75014 Paris, France

Innovation Days 2011 Highlights:

> A networking community with over 600 attendees

> 2000 one-to-one meetings & 600 licensing opportunities

> Multiple Conferences and workshops

> 20 + Biotech companies presentations

On Monday 26 September 2011, from 9:30 – 10:15

Plenary session : New trends in the biopharmaceutical sector: the place of « open innovation »

Biopharmaceutical sector is evolving to answer to the growing need of moving towards the market quickly and with lower transactions costs. This trend leads to new partnerships’ configurations offered by the “Open Innovation” approach. To officially launch the second edition of this event, prestigious speakers from pharmaceutical industry will share their views and will discuss the concerns for making this new business model a success.

Panelists:

> DANIEL DE SEGOVIA GROSS, CEO, HYPIOS

> MARTIN DUVAL, CEO, BLUENOVE

> EMMANUEL LE POUL, CEO, ALOSTA

Definition and management of an internal innovation sprint to feed a strategic business line. In 3 months, 400 participants from 15 countries. More than 300 concepts (technical, marketing, IT, design innovations as well as disruptive business model).

bluenove is currently conducting a study for one of its clients about the ecosystem of mobile application developers in the UAE.
The study will try to assess and to understand aspects such as developers profiles, technical issues, relationships with Telecom operators, innovation opportunities based on APIs, etc…

bluenove, the leading French consultancy in Open Innovation services, is hiring a ‘Developer Community’ Project Manager for the following role and mission:

a position is available as IT/Telecom ‘Developer Community’ project manager to be based in UAE

> Location: based in UAE, most probably in Abu Dhabi (or Dubai)

> Date: mission starting beginning of september 2011 for a 3 year full time contract

Mission:

> bluenove’s end customer: a leading Mobile Telecom operator in UAE

> bluenove’s strategic and technical partner: Alcatel-Lucent / Application Enablement Services > http://www2.alcatel-lucent.com/application_enablement/

> Domain: Open Network Platform / Open APIs / Application Development / Developer Community Management

> Main objective: grow and manage relationships with mobile and web developers (freelance, entrepreneurs, students, IT/Telecom professionals, etc.) as part of an ‘Open API’ programme and Open Innovation strategy

Objectives:

> Support the end customer (leading Telecom operator) to deliver Open APIs (SMS, LBS, billing, etc.) to an ecosystem of innovative developers (freelance, entrepreneurs, students, IT/Telecom professionals, etc.) and enterprises

> Design, build, grow and manage a dynamic community of developers committed to develop innovative apps and services which use and integrate these Open APIs

> Propose, launch and manage initiatives to manage the developer community through both online activities (day-to-day content management, blogging, discussions, idea contest, etc.) and offline ones such as participating or organizing developer events, conferences, etc.

> Identify, qualify, select, support the most innovative and creative developers, startups and applications and enable ‘success stories’ and partnerships between the developers and our Telecom customer

Skills and experience required:

> good understanding of Telecom Network platforms, and ideally Open APIs and mobile application development

> good project management skills and experience

> a ‘partnership mindset’ to support successful relationships between the developers and our Telecom customer

> know-how in online community management: blogging, posting, online discussions, ideation, etc.

> awareness about issues and opportunities from both the application developers and the Telecom operator providing Open APIs standpoints

> ability to support the organization of developer events, bar camps, etc. and to present and participate at some key mobile/Telecom conferences

> mixing both technical knowledge (Telecom network and applications) and business focus to deliver successful API/Application business cases and developments

> Languages: Arabic (UAE), English and ideally French

Package:

> fixed salary: based on level of skills and experience

Training and support: thanks to our experience and references in similar projects for companies such as Microsoft (Developer Focus Groups and management of the ‘Pitch Your App to Steve Ballmer’ Windows Phone 7 competition in 2010), Orange (Open APIs and Orange Partner Connect), SFR/Vodafone (Community of Beta Testers), Colt (Colt Cloud 4 StartUps) , and participation to many Developer events such as the Mobile 2.0 Europe openIDEAS 2011, you will be trained during the first phase of the mission and supported by our teams all along as a key bluenove team member.

Contact us at : contact@bluenove.com

bluenove

I had the opportunity to moderate a panel about ‘Future of Mobile’ with Peter Vesterbacka ‘Mighty Eagle’ from Rovio Mobile, founder of Angry Birds at the Mobile 2.0 Europe OPENideas conference in Barcelona on June 16th.

I got very impressed by his vision and claim ‘We see ourselves as the next generation entertainment franchise’ while he was presenting the future development of the Angry Birds brand into books, a movie, stores, etc. Thus reinventing and challenging the business model of typical Hollywood production studios that are spending upfront hundred million of Dollars while Rivio goes ‘mobile first’ and deploys its brand from there on.

Considering the growth numbers he mentioned such as 1 million download … PER DAY at the moment and its aggressive development in the BRIC countries and especially China, i do believe that Angry Birds will soon have hit the 1 billion downloads and may very well become bigger than Facebook. This is why:

1) China will become the engine of Angry Birds’ growth and new developments while Facebook can’t even get in China where there are strong local competitors such as Renren and Qzone from Tencent. Same situation in Russia by the way as a potential for Angry Birds while Facebook faces a competitor such as Vkontakte.ru.

2) Thanks for being a game and a cool brand associated to it, they can target kids under 13 year old …. while a social network like Facebook is not allowed to.

3) Rovio/Angry Birds has quite a few business models and they are strong: selling their mobile App of course, but also brand royalties… and soon digital books. Beyond word of mouth, their advertizing is paid by media, telco companies and various partners using their birds and pigs characters to demonstrate new products and services. And the number of people with internet and mobile connexions is not even a limit, while it is one for Facebook, since they will even sell toys and clothes in real stores.

4) The ‘star’ reward system within Angry Birds will position them well to get into the virtual currency arena as they are reaching hundreds of millions of users

Ok ok ok… may be comparing Angry Birds with Facebook is a bit of a stretched exercice… nevertheless when you get to levels of growth of this speed and magnitude on both Angry Birds and Facebook sides and considering the similarity of the ’1 billion’ goal, i just thought i could dare a comparison.

Martin @bluenove

If you are interested in Open Innovation, check our study about ‘Open Innovation in France’.

You can access the different formats of the study (infography summary and pdf) on this link.

Open Innovation in France

Is it still possible for France to close the gap with the United States?

How can this be done?

An industry study designed and conducted by bluenove

May 2011

SUMMARY

France major industrial firms are now well aware of the stakes involved in adopting open innovation, but they are still lagging behind their American competitors

According to data gathered by bluenove[1], in 2011, major industrial players in France have taken the steps to integrate Open innovation concepts, that are today understood and being applied in all industrial sectors. This is a major evolution in corporate behavior and has had a positive effect on their operating modes (54%). On the other hand, behind the scenes, these same companies are continuing to question themselves on the concrete impact of Open Innovation. 55.7% of these companies do not expect to gain any short term benefit from an Open Innovation strategy and do not expect this to have an impact before a number of years. In this way they are addressing Open Innovation as a long term stake in the deep and sustainable transformation of French industrial culture.

In parallel to this, surprisingly these same companies show confidence in their Open Innovation programs. They know the risks involved in intellectual property rights, the eventual loss of control over innovation processes and the difficulties associated with integration and collaboration. With these risks now identified, measured and accepted, these major industrial players consider that they possess the means and the corporate culture necessary to overcome them and successfully embark on an Open Innovation program.

Today the actions applied by major French companies are primarily focused on the initial stages of open innovation with 41.2% stating that they are still in the very first stages of this strategy. This contrasts with an American study conducted in 2009, where 49% of the major American companies interviewed had already moved into development stages of applying open innovation practices and 40% were actually in the process of optimizing it. Whereas in France, only 21.9% of equivalent firms claim to be in this process of optimization.

Nevertheless, French companies are confident.  Almost two thirds (64%) of them consider that they are in advance or at the same stage as their competitors and peers in their practices. To show such a degree of confidence is probably the result of a lack of indicators and benchmarks, rather than a reflection of the reality.

Another indication that open innovation is still in its infancy in France is the number of new products and services that have benefited from an open innovation approach. Currently, in 86% of the companies interviewed, less than 20% of new products and services were the result of an open innovation approach. In the United States study this figure for companies with products benefiting from open innovation was 50% in 2009. With 20% of US companies claiming in 2009 that 20 to 30% of innovations were the fruit of open innovation whereas the equivalent category is only 8% in France and this two years later.

The bluenove analysis: four reasons for an obvious gap

The team of experts at bluenove has analyzed the data collected in this study and have reach 4 conclusions, both practical and concrete, backed by experience and projects in the field. They are presented below.

1. French companies are questioning their strategies of internal collaboration as much as they are the external collaboration

Today the majority of large French companies is going through a deep analytical process and is questioning the tools and practices involved in collaboration. This reflection addresses internal collaboration as much as exchanges with their entire ecosystem. Technological evolution and a willingness to be open are the two principal factors that feed this reflection and that maybe can be considered to have reached their conclusion or even be a past issue. Nevertheless, these collaborative tools have yet to be totally integrated into the culture and processes in these major industrial players. At this moment, as these companies embark on open innovation, the choice of the most appropriate and indispensible tools and the changes in company culture that they induce are at the forefront of these discussions.

2. The jury is still out about which of the different open innovation tools are most appropriate

bluenove’s experts are continually being questioned by large companies on the which tools for Open Innovation are most appropriate: idea contests and challenges, partnering with start ups, techniques to resolve problems or stimulate creativity, ‘beta tests’ with clients and users…… tools that are still misunderstood in terms of their application, their limitations and advantages and how they function and integrate in a global innovation program.

3. The major French companies are discovering that Open innovation is not reserved for one department

Open innovation is not reserved exclusively for an innovation department, or a research laboratory or particularly not the R&D top management. Each open innovation initiative should be systematically executed across at least 2 departments and preferably transversally: Innovation & Communication, Innovation & IT… The major French industries have rapidly adopted this mode of collaboration that is intrinsic to open innovation, but bluenove’s experts have also observed that the HR departments are too rarely implicated and only participate very rarely in open innovation initiatives.

4. Open Innovation is still considered as a tool, and has difficulty to be integrated as an Enterprise wide project.

Open innovation is not reserved exclusively for an innovation department, or a research laboratory or particularly not the R&D top management. Each open innovation initiative should be systematically executed across at least 2 departments and preferably transversally: Innovation & Communication, Innovation & IT… The major French industries have rapidly adopted this mode of collaboration that is intrinsic to open innovation, but bluenove’s experts have also observed that the HR departments are too rarely implicated and only participate very rarely in open innovation initiatives.

In major French industries, the concept of open innovation is known and accepted. Progressively, these concepts are being mastered and the tools put to use. But, it is rare today to find companies that have followed their American counterparts and truly embraced open innovation. Open innovation is not yet a constituent of a company strategy and often lacks the necessary and visible support from top management.

“The time of leaching and the evangelization of open innovation practices are past. The major French companies have now grasped and understood the potential of this approach and the obvious and beneficial outcome the can get from innovating through being more open and collaborative throughout their ecosystem. These companies are aware of the benefits that can be gained and the resources necessary to drive these new practices. Nevertheless, France is lagging behind the Unites States, where may be there is a more open, more collaborative culture and in turn, more innovative. Could this be a culture problem, a different mindset or even a strategic choice? In any case, it is no longer time for considering concepts but rather for pragmatic acts. This is what we have seen while working with over 30 major French industrial players over the last 3 years accompanying over 50 projects” stated Martin Duval, CEO and founder of bluenove.

The study in details

The French major players have a good knowledge of Open Innovation concepts

94.7% of the people who took part in this study gave a good and accurate definition of Open Innovation. : “The integration of new internal and external partners into the development of innovations”.

From the point of view of Human Resources departments, Open Innovation should be considered an integral part of personnel management. The majority of companies questioned considered it an excellent means to secure key personnel. 88.5% of the companies said that they were in agreement or were in complete agreement with this statement.

In addition, 85.3% of the companies found that it was “indispensible to mobilize all personnel in the company in a global effort of innovation”. Open Innovation is therefore intimately associated with participative innovation dynamics.

Almost the totally of the companies questioned (99.1%) stated that “their company can enrich their innovation projects through collaboration with the exterior world” and 90% agree that today, “intelligence is above all collective”.

81.8% of the study participants agree that Open Innovation is not (necessarily) synonymous with the loss of intellectual property.

A VERY POSITIVE VISION OF INNOVATION AND OPEN INNOVATION IN PARTICULAR

For the major industrial player in France, the capacity to innovate is by far the most important generator of value and leadership. 57.3% sited innovation at the top of their list, followed by collaborative culture (30.1%), brand management (5.8%), international development (4.9%) and cost control (1.9%). If we take into account the coherence of the replies above, with a corporate culture that is innovative, open and collaborative, then 87.4% of the replies are in agreement that innovation and collaboration have the greatest leverage in value creation.

The major industrial players in France show a perception that is both confident and positive towards the advantages that can be gained from Open Innovation.

• 76.4% think that Open Innovation will allow them to focus better onto their core businesses.
• 90.6% think that they would be able to innovate more efficiently because of Open Innovation. They see one of the strengths of Open Innovation as allowing the reduction to “time to market”.
• 97.2% say that, through Open Innovation, they can have access to new expertise, disciplines, competences, knowledge and technologies that can be identified worldwide.
• 97% benefit from contributions by players from other industries and stage of development (R&D of other groups, start ups, universities, clients, suppliers…).
• 96% state that Open Innovation allows them to group their forces with complementary partners.
• 86.8% see Open Innovation as a way to improve their actions and their flexibility.
• 76% think that Open innovation allows them to allocate scarce resources into strategic projects.

Even though French companies have both a realistic and pragmatic vision of the potential of Open Innovation, the majority (55.7%) think that an Open Innovation strategy will not have a significant impact on the transformation of their corporate culture before a number of years.

THE CAPACITY TO INNOVATE IS NOT ANYMORE LIMITED TO THE R&D BUDGET

78.2% of companies that participated in the study do not think that the R&D budget is the principal factor in a successful innovation program and for only 11.8% innovation was considered to be limited to R&D activity. If innovation is no longer viewed as exclusively R&D, it becomes urgent to define the new indicators that allow practitioners to measure their innovation effort and its results. Patent filing, percentage of turn over invested in R&D, the number of staff and their qualifications; are these really indicative and pertinent in measuring the capacity to innovate today?

OPENING TO THE OUTSIDE WITH A KNOWLEDGE OF THE RISKS AND HURDLES

In spite of significant signs in the evolution of French innovation management, 42.7% of the companies interviewed think that they must control their R&D processes more efficiently and across the board. This is induced by the concerns of the inherent risks of Open Innovation. Thus we see, 87.9% of companies think that Open innovation may expose them to conflicts, theft, working-round and reverse engineering of patents and intellectual property. These data should be compared with what was stated above, where 81.8% of replies agreed that Open Innovation is not (necessarily) synonymous with loss of intellectual property. Although there is an inherent risk associated with with intellectual property, the companies appear to be confident of their capacity to face and control this.

86.7% think that they will encounter problems, either probably or certainly, in the Open Innovation supply chain. Are they more dubitative of their capacity to implicate current and new suppliers, even with the help of their procurement departments, than their innovation programs?

• 69.8% site potential problems because of cultural differences.
• 58.8% see difficulties in assuring the management of their knowledge base.
• 70% have concerns about managing collaborators and teams at a distance.
• 74% have sited the lack of willingness to share ideas as a problem
• And potential unidentified problems of collaboration were sited by over 66% of companies.

Other potential problems in the development of Open Innovation were the following:

• Difficulties in implementing these concepts: what are the most appropriate tools to be put in place?
• Difficulties in measuring the creation of value: what indicators and dash board would be most useful in following and measuring the result of Open Innovation?
• Lack of top and intermediate management support: what are the tangible proofs that the management is really engaged in the process?
• Lack of professional training and qualifications: what back ground and training are necessary to manage an Open innovation program? How is knowledge shared and managed?

Finally, major French industries see Open Innovation as a major change in corporate culture. Being used to the challenges of culture change, they are addressing these problems of processes, training and measurement tools with method and pragmatism. Thus concerns about Open Innovation in large French companies have today largely superseded problems of intellectual property or even concerns of loss of control over putting Open Innovation in place.

THE MAJOR FRENCH INDUSTRIES ARE LAGGING BEHIND THEIR AMERICAN COMPETITORS

A study conducted in 2009 by Nine Sigma[2] has given us the possibility to compare the position of equivalent French companies against their American competitors.

In 2009, 49% of large American companies stated that: “they have put into place the first elements of their Open Innovation strategy”. Two years later, 41.2 % of the French equivalents are in this starting phase. More serious, in 2009 40% of the companies questioned in the United States were”optimising their Open Innovation programs”. This is not the case in France, where, two years later only 21.9% were in this phase.

In France, Open Innovation constitutes an important or very important challenge for 35.7% of the companies questioned. In 2009, this was the case for 67.3% of their American counterparts. In France in 2011, 85.9% of the companies who took part in the study consider that the impact of Open Innovation will only be visible in 5 years, comparable to the data from the United States (89.7%) gathered 2 years earlier

OPEN INNOVATION PROJECTS THAT HAVE DIFFICULTY IN IMPOSING

In France, in 2011, 63% of the companies questioned declared that less than 10% of new products or services had benefited from an Open Innovation contribution. The number of companies  where this impact was 10 % was a mere 3.3% in the United States in 2009, this low figure can be explained by the fact that the majority of American companies considered that the impact of Open Innovation was far superior than 10% ! In France 23 % said that Open Innovation had contributed to 10 to 20% of innovations. This can be compared to the United States where, two years earlier this figure was twice that of France today. Clearly, there is a significant gap between the two countries.

FRENCH COMPANIES LACK REALISM OR BENCHMARKS

Only 22.4% of French companies think that they are behind their competitors in Open Innovation whereas, in 2009, 36% of American companies saw themselves as being behind. When 64.5% of French companies class their Open Innovation program as being “average”, only 38% of American companies had the same judgment.

WHAT IS INNOVATION ?

French companies have a wide vision of innovation. For almost 100% of those interviewed, it is possible to innovate in services just as much as products. But interestingly, if disruptive innovations (the most important) are very rare, they are practically inexistent in services (the exception being Velib: the renting bike service system in Paris). The following were classed as disruptive innovations:

• Mobile phone (83.1%)
• Velib (68.4%)
• Digital photography (81.4%)
• Electronic chip cards (81.9%)
• Walkman (73.9%)
• Tetrapack (66.7%)

The following were sited as continuous or incremental innovations (with some surprises!)

• Freebox
• Electric car (surprising?)
• 3D television
• Microsoft Kinect
• Video on demand
• Wind energy

It would be interesting during a next study to analyze how Open Innovation has contributed in these examples. Often Open Innovation is attributed the quality of identifying disruptive innovations that are discovered generally in sectors and disciplines outside of the core business, or “out of the box” solutions: will this be the case?

See this infography summary:

The French version of this study was presented at a press conference on May 31^st 2001 in Paris and the English version was released online on June 7^th 2011 at the Word Innovation Forum in New York.

Available on line at: http://www.bluenove.com/en/publications-en/news/the-first-study-about-open-innovation-in-france/

For any questions regarding the study or suggestions, please contact bluenove by mail at: contact@bluenove.com

[1] Online self-assessment questionnaire with answers from 144 representatives from 60 major French corporations. Conducted from March 6 to  April 6, 2011.

[2] Open Innovation Practices & Outcomes Benchmark Survey – NineSigma, Inc. www.ninesigma.com

Helping a world leader in environmental services to manage an idea challenge : opening innovation to mobilise engineering students, designers and employees that redesigned a manufacturing facility in a place which blends well with its ecosystem (citizens, local economic actors, wildlife conservation, …).

Because we believe at bluenove that the development of Open Innovation is closely linked to the one of Social Networking, we like this great view of some of the key evolution steps of Social Media (more information on the Mashable article).

Hypios is a problem solving platform which provides the link between Seekers and Solvers.
Here is an explanation of how this platform works.

Have you recently started your own digital business? Are you having trouble growing it and getting the right guidance? Do you need some mentoring?

MidemNet+ is a digital business accelerator offering a personalised advice & mentoring solution for digital & music companies. One connection can change everything. MidemNet+ delivers game-changing opportunities to digital & music companies – by bringing together the people, ideas and solutions that can help you accelerate your digital business. Discuss hot topics, expand your network, gain personalized advice and interact with digital experts.

More on : http://www.midem.com/en/homepage/conferences-matchmaking/midemnet-plus/

See you in Cannes at MIDEM 2011 on January 23 and 24th 2011 !

Performed Telco and its partners’ product & services Beta Testers online community management. Coordinated teams in charge of beta tests with consumers community. Edited and published contents (beta tests, articles, ideas, surveys) on the dedicated platform (Drupal CMS).  Moderator of community manager’s avatar facebook profile.

Student challenge management on a SharePoint 2010 collaborative platform.
Definition of the challenge framework and students’team coching for the organization. SharePoint set up, animation coaching and award ceremony assistance. blueChallenge™ methodology.

Support to a Direction of Market watch and prospective for defining the needs and redacting the statement of requirements for a market watch collaborative tool. Introduction of the tool for the future key users.

During 7th edition of Le Web conference, Martin Duval had the opportunity to moderate one of the on-stage panels which theme was How to leverage social networking in your business with these panellists:

• Steve Apfelberg, VP, Marketing, Yammer
• Carlos Diaz, Co-Founder & CEO, blueKiwi
• Kevin Eyres, Managing Director, Europe, LinkedIn
• Jason Rosenthal, CEO, NING
• Peter Crosby, Chief Sales Officer, Viadeo

You can watch it again with the following video

Martin has moderated the ‘How to leverage social networking in your business’ panel at the LeWeb10 conference with Yammer, Viadeo, LinkedIn, blueKiwi and Ning

.

Dalhia Hagege from the bluenove team had the opportunity to give her views about open & collaborative innovation on Toolkits for Userdriven Innovation blog.

Extract:

Working with open and collaborative innovation is a process that runs in two parallel tracks. In one track, you work with building the community, understanding the people in it, their incentives and expectations and try to tap into the community rhythm, proving activities and frames for dialogue. In the other you build the pipeline from the community, based on the existing innovation processes in the company, you figure out which employees to appeal for and who to involve in the community so as to better give the right persons the right ideas and be able to implement new solutions.The impact of working in those two parallel tracks is that you can’t measure a project alone on how innovative it has turned out. There’s another scale in play as well, and that is the brand conversation that takes place between the company and the community. There are benefits to reap both in terms of better outcomes and better PR or mutual understanding.

You can read the entire article here.

A good way to describe Open Innovation in this graph (versus the typical innovation funnel…) from this article from the Financial Times: Another way to develop ideas http://bit.ly/9kIyNC

On Behalf of the Head of the company, strategic recommendations on a SharePoint 2010 deployment to improve internal collaboration (Knowledge Management). Use of the ICM™ methodology. 
Internal Community Manager’s training
Other thoughts on how to develop a new recruitment 2.0 strategy (based on social medias, in order to identify tomorrow’s workforce).

Beta testor’s recruitment.
Management of developer internal and external Friendly User Tests for the launch of a Telecom operator business platform.
Management of a developer Focus Group.
Platform’s Technical, ergonomics and content improvements recommendations.

As a major corporation, implementing an Open Innovation strategy is about changing the culture of the company so that people within the company feel ready and able to share not only about ‘what they know’ but also about ‘what they don’t know’.

It is first of all an internal issue: daring sharing ‘what you know’ within the R&D department, turning internal experts into collaborative champions, and beyond R&D involving all employees to contribute with new ideas tackles areas related to Knowledge Management, Collaborative Platforms, organizing Ideas Challenges, sharing Best Practises, Training, etc. Quite a challenge by itself.

Then it becomes another one to get involved in the goal of having experts and R&D people start admitting and sharing ‘what they don’t know’: meaning a problem they have identified and that they don’t know how to tackle or solve. How to get them daring doing it among themselves, within the R&D team, and with other colleagues beyond the R&D or Innovation teams requires a whole cultural change by itself.

When it comes to interacting with the external ecosystem of potential partners (startups, developers, academics, customers, suppliers if not competitors) it becomes of course even more of a challenge. If a company manager in charge of Scouting startups goes and presents what he believes is an innovative IT startup or a biotech one to his R&D expert colleague, most of the time this expert may not admit he does know not about them or even worse may say their technology is not that impressive to preserve his ‘expertise’ status. Quite human after all … so how to adapt organizations, processes and skills to change these contradictory objectives and behaviors ?

As a Corporation willing to implement an Open Innovation strategy, learning about how to dare telling ‘what you don’t know’ internally and externally becomes a great challenge.

But the opportunities are huge : the opportunity to create leadership through an ability to share what you don’t know because you are faster and more efficient (than your competitors) at implementing the value you get back from it !

Welcome into Open Innovation !

Why you should nominate bluenove in the Top 5 Open Innovation Leaders of the ‘Intermediary/Service Provider’ category!

1) because while many companies are starting to discover Open Innovation today, bluenove was created in 2008 and grew a great team of 15 people over the last 2 years

2) because we have now delivered and implemented more than 50 projects and missions related to ‘Open & Collaborative Innovation’ in France and Europe

3) because our customers are great major corporations from different industries : Orange, BT, Colt, PagesJaunes, Turkcell, Ubisoft, SUEZ Env, Microsoft, PPR, L’Oréal, SEB, EDF, etc.

4) because we have developed a set of unique methodologies such as our Audit O&C assessing more than 300 criteria to evaluate the ‘Open & Collaborative Innovation’ potential of a company

5) because we experience ‘Open Innovation’ for ourselves through the development of our InnovNation Serious Game R&D project to deliver the first ‘Open & Collaborative Innovation Serious Video Game’ in partnership with the INRIA Lab and the company ParaSchool

6) because we have great Software Partners to implement Open & Collaborative Innovation tools and user experiences

7) because we are very active at promoting Open Innovation at many conferences such as the Grenoble Innovation Fair, the i7-Summit, Biofit or LeWeb’10 and over our blogs (yes, soon in English too!)

Please put a comment about us on : http://www.15inno.com/2010/09/20/top5nominate/ or on Twitter with the #15inno and #bluenove tags

Thank you for your comments and votes !

Merci pour vos commentaires et votes !

Roadmap building for innovator community deployment. Training of an internal community manager and first users. Support during a test phase.

Biofit is a new, international event aimed at stimulating and facilitating technology transfer and collaborative projects in the life science sector. Academics, industry stakeholders and CEO entrepreneurs, together with practitioners in technology transfer, intellectual property and licensing will share best practices and know-how, and will maximize qualified alliances thanks to a cutting-edge partnering platform

Biofit highlights:

• Pre-screened one-to-one meetings between academia, start-ups, finance and pharma
• Conference to explore hands-on approaches to technology transfer
• Presenting technologies sessions: Licensing opportunities presented by biotech companies and academia

Already register : Abbott, Ablynx, AstraZeneca, Burrill&Company, Cancer Campus, European Commission, KPMG, Laboratoires  Servier, Royal Holloway University, Pfizer, UCB, Teva Pharmaceuticals

More information on : http://www.biofit-event.com/index.html

You can also contact Aurélie Valentin – T: + 33 1 40 09 68 72 – avalentin@biofit-event.com

Pilot phase launch of a programme to strengthen the relationships between a Telecom operator’s salesforce and partners. Communication kits definition to promote the new approach and encourage participation. Recommendation of a national deployment plan.

To browse similar cases taken from our Track Record, please clic here.

Here is a video tour of some of Windows Phone 7 key features, including the standard user experience. As it is mentioned at the end of the video: ‘available on holidays’

For a thorough review, see here

blueChallenge™ allows to define, launch, lead and close idea competitions and innovative projects contests for teams, customers, researchers, developers or start-ups.

It lasts from a couple of weeks to several months and focuses on one specific key issue and limited scope. It requires to take into account IP aspects and incentives to motivate contributors. bluenove is in charge of all or part of this project: the communication plan, the software selection and implementation, the idea pipeline management and the online community management.

blueResearch™ is based on our know-how and methodologies to set up and lead seminars and co-creation workshops, as well as focus groups in real life and online.

With ICM™, we are able to define, prepare, launch and lead one or several online communities contributing to the innovation process by providing ideas, expertise or innovative projects.

They may communities of customers, start-ups, entrepreneurs, developers, academic or public researchers or suppliers, and also coworkers or a mix of all.

We manage design, planning and definition of the project ambition, as well as recruitment of internal or external contributors. We can also support the selection and management of the collaborative software solution. We focus upstream on the feeding of the idea pipeline, and downstream to generate innovative pilot projects.

While taking into account IP issues, we are driven by ROI and successful partnership objectives.

The Audit O&C™ measures the open and collaborative innovation potential of an organization. It shows if the means and resources dedicated to innovation are consistent with the ambition of innovation.

This methodology results from months of development and tuning by the bluenove team (the third version of the methodology is now available).

It is not a benchmark with other companies. It results from merging our analyses of academic research and best practices from our operational projects. It its applicable to all the industrial sectors. It has been validated with Innovation Directors from large companies such as Alcatel-Lucent (Bell Labs), Total, Orange, L’Oréal… It includes more than 300 criteria covering Vision, Culture, Organization, Processes and Tools of the company. The Diagnosis is based on individual interviews and team workshops. It is available online with multimedia content (videos, schemes…). A shorter version (138 criteria) is also provided as a training module.

A final report is provided, including an analysis of the current situation on various dimensions, and the position on a scale from 1 to 4. It assesses the company’s potential of open and collaborative innovation.

Concrete recommendations and an action plan are proposed based on this potential.

blueConnect™ is a methodology of “partnering watch” allowing to identify and benchmark projects from competitors, detect innovative start-ups in a given market, select them, make opportunity studies and define new pilot projects and launching.

The deliverables are analysis data sheets and presentation of new projects opportunities.

The Open Innovation Map is a collaborative scouting platform that can be enriched by its users (UGC). It synthesizes the partnership scoutings of all teams. The OIMap emphasizes the Open Innovation strategy of one company concretizing it in an attractive. Because it summarizes a typology of actors, the OIMap helps your company to understand its innovative ecosystem.

contact@bluenove.com to find out more about our Innovation Community Management™ methodology

contact@bluenove.com

Definition of a Start-ups Open Innovation Programme for a cloud computing services supplier. Definition of the relevant communication policy and value proposition highlighting. Recommendation on Critical Success Factors and international deployment RoadMap.

To browse similar cases taken from our Track Record, please clic here.

Management of a mobile applications developer’s challenge for the national launch of a new device.
Participants recruitment, Community Management of the public social network’s page and use of social medias to communicate on the event.
blueChallenge™ methodology.
Assistance in organizing and Web medias covering the award ceremony.

Today we learn the word : DEVELOPER

For level 2 and more : contact@bluenove.com

and visit us at LEWEB10 in Paris at : http://www.leweb.net/partners/2010/demozone

Support for an advertising agency Business development project towards developers’ community, notably through communication and product marketing

Market watch to provide a gaming operator with Web, mobile and point of sale innovative initiatives. Cooperations recommendations with selected players.

Open Innovation training seminar for a public company

Redaction of a white paper about Smart Grid for a profesionnal association

Open Innovation training seminar for a leading company.

The California Technology Showcase forges profitable links between the best and brightest California technology firms and Europe’s premier technology leaders. The speakers and the start-ups presenting.

Developers Focus Group recruitment and leading to provide a computing software editor with feedback on their future usages and needs. Trends recommendations.

Innovation market watch to support electrical goods producer in digital technologies integration project. Cooperation means recommendations.

bluenove a développé un ensemble de modules de formation dans le domaine des NTIC et de l’Innovation
Ces formations sont distribuées par notre partenaire
KIELA
01 42 21 09 78
Contacter Adelie Elbaz : aelbaz@kiela.fr

Conference focus > Examining Mobile Operator Applications Revenue Strategies, New Network API Strategies and Web Platform Developments that Enhance Service Creation and Profitability

To find out more about ‘Open Platform’ strategies and APIs and Developer Community Management: contact us at contact@bluenove.com

bluenove has been selected by Microsoft as a member of the BizSpark Partner Network to support Software startups looking for Business Development opportunities in France.
bluenove also connects innovative startups to the BizSpark programme.
Look for us in the The BizSpark Network Partner Directory.

More information about the BizSpark programme at : http://www.microsoft.com/BizSpark/

The ‘GroundSurf’ concept is at the convergence of a set of technological, marketing and social streams we believe in and support at bluenove :

• the sport values and the ‘green & clean’ trend – the city-life, the Y generation, the social networks and communities – the startup and entrepreneurial spirit : bravo Stéphane !
• the power of a brand : Gordon & Smith
• the mobile : bluetooth connectivity, Location Based Services, content creation and upload, real time connexion with my friends and my network, media and digital entertainment, personnalization, etc.
• the innovation process: from team-buiding, prototyping to commercial launch

This is why we, at bluenove, are proud to support the innovative ‘GroundSurf’ project and its partnership approach as a concrete and successful example of ‘Open Innovation’

Community management for a telecom operator widget portal, and notably users, developers and partners FAQ redaction. Roadmap follow-up

Support to a telecom operator for attracting to their portal developers interested by common marketing of their mobile applications.

Asking « why an API » is like asking why have a website? From being able to make transactions on mobile devices to expecting the content they watch or listen to being available in multiple formats, their is a shift occuring and the consumers are driving that shift

Watch John Musser, Founder of ProgrammableWeb.com, speak about the “State of the Open API” and it’s relevance in today’s economy.

Venez visiter le stand bluenove les 9 et 10 Mars 2010 pour découvrir les offres de veille blueConnect et comment intégrer les dernières tendances et technologies mobiles dans votre stratégie !

Lieu > Cité des Sciences et de l’industrie – 30 Avenue Corentin Cariou – 75019 Paris

Plus d’informations sur :
http://www.lemobile20.fr/2010/

Software solutions study for an association, to help it improve collaboration. Launch and management of a corporate social network meeting its needs

http://www.innovate100.com/

Adidas Originals is launching the first-ever Augmented Reality experience embedded in footwear.

Each Adidas Originals AR Game Pack shoe in the 5-shoe collection has a unique AR code printed on the tongue that, when held in front of your webcam, gives you exclusive access to the virtual Adidas Originals neighborhood. Your shoes control the game !

Adidas Originals has broken the barriers to the limitation of an iconic shoe. No longer does a sneaker fit the niche of comfort and style, but now it is the key to a whole new virtual world. (ltdmag)

I really enjoyed the Mobile Premier Awards event last monday in Barcelona and i am really proud that bluenove was among the sponsors.
Great startup presentations and great Winners !

I really enjoyed the Mobile Premier Awards event last monday in Barcelona and i am really proud that bluenove was among the sponsors.
Great startup presentations and great Winners !

And the Mobile Premier Awards Winners are …!?

Change management to new usages of information sharing, whithin the context of a new web and mobile tool introduction in a holding company. Decentralized platform animation setting up.

bluenove is proud to sponsor the ‘Mobile Premier Awards’ event in Barcelona on Feb.15th 2010, the year’s best in Mobile Startup innovation, to keep detecting and selecting innovative startups and applications for its customers

For more information about our services and especially our blueConnect offer, please contact us at contact@bluenove.com

The ‘Mappy API Challenge‘ is a great example of an ‘Open Innovation’ initiative as a contest open to all developers and entrepreneurs willing to create innovative Web applications thanks to Mappy AJAX or AS3 APIs. It rewards the boldest ideas in the field of Web mapping.

Join the challenge at: http://api.mappy.com/fr/challenge

Management of the multipartner serious game project on the innovation process bluenove, Paraschool and INRIA have been selected for, within the context of the call for projects on Serious Game launched by the French Minister of Industry – Digital section

bluenove has been selected within the context of the call for projects on Serious Game launched by the French Minister of Industry – Digital section (NKM) with Innov’Nation, leant on the financing operation FEDER.

It is lead in partnership with bluenove, Paraschool and INRIA and aims at the conception, development and testing of a multi-player serious game with an original scenario. Asking the player to manage an innovation process, its ambition is to increase awareness on open and collaborative innovation strategies.

Partner of Paraschool for Serious game project Innov’Nation.

mobile trends for the next 10, a collaborative outlook – http://tinyurl.com/y98g4os

With contributions from Howard Rheingold, Douglas Rushkoff, Marshall Kirkpatrick, Gerd Leonhard, Timo Arnall, Carlo Longino, Katrin Verclas, Atau Tanaka, Alan Moore, Marek Pawloski, Ajit Jaokar, Nicolas Nova, Inma Martinez, Tony Fish, Jonathan MacDonald, Willem Boijens, Carlos Domingo, Russ McGuire, Raimo van der Klein, Michael Breidenbruecker, Robert Rice, Steve O’Hear, Ted Morgan, Martin Duval, Andreas Constantinou, Fabien Girardin, Matthäus Krzykowski, Rich Wong, Andy Abramson, Ilja Laurs, David Wood, Stefan Constantinescu, Henri Moissinac, Kevin C. Tofel, Enrique C. Ortiz, Felix Petersen, Tom Hume.

Support for Web services developers’ community Business development for a telecommunication operator, through a dedicated online platform and social medias

Market watch to provide a cosmetics producer with technologies coming from core and related businesses. Cooperations recommendations with selected players

Innovation process reegineering (Stage-Gate) for a telecom operator to open it to external knowledge (ideas, technologies). Analysis of the cooperation terms with start-ups.

Launch and management of a platform to federate and facilitate sharing between targeted players of the Home Automation community. Organization of a strategic reflexion seminar with them

L’interview sur: http://www.osereso.com/innovation-participative.html

Pour vous inscrire au Workshop ‘Open Innovation’ que nous animerons le 7 décembre 2009 sur :http://www.osereso.com/open-innovation.html

For a cosmetics producer, challenge organization for university researchers to enrich its open innovation platform

Thanks to bluenove’s Innovation Community Management™ services, Orange (Orange Partner) has just launched a new Web 2.0 platform to support Mobile App Developers to share and discuss about Innovative Mobile Apps (see other topics below) in a very interactive mode with the Orange Partner team and with other Developers, and develop distribution opportunities through Orange.

You can join and start discussions at: http://appshopcommunity.orangepartner.com

I really enjoyed the presentation of the 10th Collection by Orange last friday (Thanks again to Yves and Christophe!).
Great innovations on their way on the IPTV side, on the Web and on the mobile side:
> i have been especially impressed by the future Gamer experience with MMORPG/Virtual Worlds soon available on IPTV as well as the quality of the Full Web experience on TV in addition to TV Widgetized Orange services such as www.pikeo.com, www.wormee.com or www.2424actu.fr,
> the other way round with the new ‘Video Party’ Web TV (http://video-party.orange.fr/) including Orange exclusive contents and beyond;
> the RCS (Rich Communication Suite) based applications on mobile mixing Address Books and Social Networks,
> and also the clever ‘People Projects’ brand initiative and App on Facebook (http://apps.facebook.com/people-projects/)

If you didn’t have the priviledge to be invited, here is the video about the 10th Collection on Orange Innovation TV:

More information on :http://www.digiworldsummit.com/2009/pages/?all=journee&id=1&idl=22

‘Tapping a Legion of Smart Programmers’
A startup called Mashery is helping companies take a page from Apple, Facebook, Twitter, and others to enlist the aid of outside software developers

bluenove attended the OSIM conference last september and an interesting vision of what ‘the Ideal Mobile App Store‘ could be came out from a brainstorm organized by WIP.

Here is what came out :

What do you think about it ?
Send us your comments at: contact@bluenove.com

Innovation market watch program and start-up ecosystem study for a telecom operator. Publishing of a monthly Newsletter giving usages and trends analysis

Launch and management of a platform dedicated to mobile applications developers feedback on its web services, for a telecom operator. Cooperation terms recommendation

Analysis of cooperation propositions made to a request for information (RFI) on a Home Automation project by a telecom operator. Partners recommendation and support in making a demonstrator

Internal brainstorming workshops leading for a game editor

If you are a creative Developer or an innovative Entrepreneur/startup willing to connect through us with our Telecom & Media customers (BT, Orange, YellowPages, etc.) or a Corporation interested to develop an Open Platform & Open Innovation strategy, please contact Yassine Damil atyassine.damil@bluenove.com to plan a meeting during the conference

ICT, marketing, Open Innovation training seminar in partnership with Kiela

There is an on-going debate about why Open Innovation does not happen easily and is not widely spread among most major Corporations while, on paper, its management philosophy and aim may appear quite obvious. Even Corporations that have officially adopted this innovation strategy and management seem still to face difficulties to implement it effectively and in a sustainable way.

With the feedback and know-how we, at bluenove, are progressively adding up from the different ‘Open & Collaborative Innovation’ missions, from workshops to long-term projects we have been implementing for almost 2 years with our customers in many sectors, and recently sharing about this topic with Carlos Diaz (CEO at Bluekiwi Software), it appears clearer to me that when it does happen effectively, it is because the teams or the Manager, i.e the Corporate employees managing it, have a set of specific skills, backgroup and motivations.

To make it short, my point is that the Open Innovation ‘Change Agent(s)’ within an organisation who will be the one(s) delivering OI at the end of the day have to manage some risks and opportunities, as employee(s), that are a bit different from the ones their colleagues in other jobs and departments deal with.

Some of the risks handled by the ‘Open Innovation’ Change agent within a Corporation:
> interact online more and more often in a real-time ‘Web 2.0′ mode with external partners (startups, Developers, experts, etc.) thus facing Brand & Legal related issues and dilemas about ‘if,what,how’ to answer and give feedback, while handling the pressure to answer back fast enough
> appear too pushy when promoting ideas/products/services from ‘external’ partners
> appear towards the Communication & Brand department as the one always trying to put the Brand at risk: proposing co-branded related initiatives, Press Release involving a partner, experiencing frustrations from the Brand team about brand related framewoks and format constraints, etc.
> appear towards the Legal department as the one managing Partnership contracts issues as too much in favor of the ‘external’ partner
> appear towards the Purchasing department as the one disturbing the Procurement processes when ‘dealing’ with small (and weak) startups rather than other big (well structured) corporations
> appear towards the R&D; team as sometimes careless about IP issues

On the opportunities side, the right ‘OI change agent’ will be the one :
> enjoying acting as the ‘external partner’ Champion within his Corporation and facing his colleagues: helpind among other things the startup or Developer to not get lost and exhausted contacting and meeting with all the decision stake-holders
> enjoying the connexions and contacts with new companies and people outside the walls of the company
> commited to deliver sometimes not aligned objectives and timings for both his employer company and the partner
> viewing, and being open about it, these external contacts also as opportunities for future jobs
> enjoying and sharing the ‘creative vibes’ from entrepreneurs and developers
> not feeling bad and ashamed fighting for budgets and expenses for things such as events and travels

As a employee, if you truly see these as Risks and Opportunities, you are probably the right ‘Open Innovation Change agent’ for your Corporation.
If you are the HR person in charge of searching and identifying the ‘Open Innovation’ Manager/Team Member within or outside your Corporation, this is a check-list of criteria to make sure he/she feels in line in terms of skills, background and mind.
The best guarantee for an enjoyable job and an efficiently delivered Open Innovation approach.

contact@bluenove.com

Developers’ community management for a telecom operator to call on their ideas for future web srvices to integrate to the roadmap. Launch of a challenge on online gaming

Web services analysis and assessment of their return on investment to help an advertising agency in its decisions. Recommendation of a strategic positioning and new services to integrate to the roadmap

As a startup, an SME or a Developer have you ever been feeling like this when trying to partner or deal with a major Corporation ?

The New York Times is having a pretty positive view at this partnership trend between SMEs and big corporations with examples from Microsoft, FedEx or American Express or of course, Procter & Gamble and their ‘Connect & Develop’ programme.
But on the other hand, things do not look so good when it comes to help startups and developers manage their killing issue i.e. their Cash Flow as indicated in the WIP (Wireless Industry Partnership) July Report : ‘The number one developer issue I’ve heard the last few months is not about fragmentation or monetization; it’s about cash flow and getting paid, especially from the big companies. It seems like the larger companies are pushing out their payment dates from 30 – 45 days, to 45-90 days or longer. In fact, some developers have stated that they have not seen payments from app/operator store sales for even 6-12 months! With staff turnover/layoffs high, there is also the ‘missing invoice’ phenomena….. Most folks in the big companies don’t really understand that $10k-$100k may be chump change for them; but for a small company it means a lot. Doing the ‘payroll dance’ at the end of the month, and hoping the stars align on cash flow is very stressful. Wouldn’t it be better to spend the time on innovation and making better apps?’

Not mentioning the great potential of APIs that are starting to be seen as the ‘Next Marketing platform’.

In a way it is quite funny to see that in a world where Telcos, Internet and IT players are fighting and competing to attract the best Startups and Developers around their platforms and APIs with Brand campaigns, Super Events, Newsletters and Online presence, etc. the easiest way to have the strongest competitive advantage today is to …JUST PAY THEIR BILLS ON TIME !

bluenove is a consulting firm developing and supporting Open Innovation programmes for major corporations

iPhone applications ecosystem study to benchmark an advertising agency mobile applications. Recommendations of a strategic positionning, a roadmap and cooperations with the studied players

https://www.openinnovationsaralee.com

Semaine chargée en conférences !

bluenove sera présent à la conférence LIFT à Marseille à laquelle je parlerai le vendredi 19 juin d’Innovation Community Management

bluenove participera aussi à la conférence Mobile 2.0 Europe à Barcelone les 18 et 19 juin à laquelle, Delphine Baptiste(consultante bluenove) y rencontrera les startups innovantes et les Developers présents > contact@bluenove.com

I will have the pleasure to speak at the LIFT event about Innovation Community Management™

Delphine will be participating at Mobile 2.0 Europe in Barcelona on 18 & 19 june 2009.
If you are an innovative start-up willing to partner with Telco operators and especially Orange or a company looking for support to use our Innovation Community Management™ services, please contact Delphine at this great event or at:contact@bluenove.com

Interesting how the Harvard Business Rewiew is presenting the impact of Twitter on Radical Innovation.
Also interesting to see the way the Innovation issue is being raised in some magazines lately (in Time or Telerama).

Nevertheless, i believe Twitter and to a wider extent Social Media is just one piece of the Innovation game and challenge.
Actually at bluenove, we call it Innovation Community Management™ considering that :

1. the entreprise innovation ecosystem includes both external and internal Communities where innovation can be generated from: including Customers, Suppliers, Startups, experts networks, Universities & Labs, and employees
2. Expertise and know-how in the 4 following areas are then necessary to develop and implement a successful Innovation Commmunity Management™:

• Social Media management (including Twitter)

• Community Management know-how andsolutions (Entreprise 2.0 software & online event and communication applications and tools)

• Idea Process Management, methodology and software solutions such as BrightIdea or I-Nova

• Open Innovation : Intellectual Property and Partnership Management

For further information about Innovation Community Management™
contact@bluenove.com and check the Slideshare presentation herebelow:

Remembering my background in Physics and as CEO of bluenove, here is a litte attempt to put Entrepreneurship into an Equation :

Entrepreneurship = ∞ x Crisis Management +∑ x Innovation + 100 % x (Freedom + Fun*)

* might be impacted by Extreme Economic Downturns

Besides an analysis of behaviors about how Men versus Women use Twitter, actually showing than Men seem more to follow Men, an Havard Business research demonstrates that
‘ the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets. On a typical online social network, the top 10% of users account for 30% of all production. To put Twitter in perspective, consider an unlikely analogue – Wikipedia. There, the top 15% of the most prolific editors account for 90% of Wikipedia’s edits ⁱⁱ. In other words, the pattern of contributions on Twitter is more concentrated among the few top users than is the case on Wikipedia, even though Wikipedia is clearly not a communications tool. This implies that Twitter’s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network’.
What a nice Pareto (80/20) rule exemple !

(thanks to Jan Van Den Bergh)

ICT, marketing, Open Innovation training seminar in partnership with Kiela

Online gaming workshop leading with market experts to make its understanding easier for a telecom operator

…using almost the same blue color for its logo

versus

I do agree with Loic Le Meur’s post about ‘Can you « build » a community?’ and about what it takes to grow a community from its native ‘raison d’être’.
This does make a lot of sense when it is about a community that is not ‘Enterprise’ related. I would say it is indeed for the Community leader all about being GENUINE when communicating and socializing with others (i love this world in English, translation from ‘AUTHENTIQUE’ in French).
On the other hand, when it comes to ‘Enterprise related communities’, and especially aiming at stemming Innovation and good ideas from them, community categories such as Customers, Suppliers, External Experts, Universities and Labs, Startups, Developers or even Employees, i believe it does require some kind of support to give them a chance to happen and grow (as shown with our last initiative to support Internal Participative Innovation). The Community leader is then probably turning into an ‘Innovation Community Manager’.
‘Innovation Community Management’™ is then closer to a successful blend made of Social Media tools (twitter is one), Idea Management software and processes, community management tools (polls, feedbacks, CRM, etc.) and some understanding of the concepts of Open Innovation and its related issues such as Intellectual Property or Partnership Management.
But again in theory, i guess and agree that communities should appear and grow or die based on their natural and obvious ‘raison d’être’ either driven by a Super Customer, a leading Expert developer or an intra-preneur employee.
contact@bluenove.com

Launch and management of a platform dedicated to developers feedback on its web services, for a telecom operator. Marketing positioning recommendation

Thanks to its methodology Innovation Community Management ICM™, bluenove has developed a specific know-how to define, recruit, launch and manage online and offline communities of beta-test customers, entrepreneurs, developers or partners.

A Development 2.0 manifesto (6 may 2009)

6. Fewer “lessons learned” documents, more open conversations about failures. Create an environment where it is ok to fail and talk about failure, so long as you are serious about learning from your mistakes and you don’t spend too much time following the wrong path. Fail often, fail quickly. Trust donors to understand that development is a complex issue.

7. Embrace transparency. You can now make it really simple to track how you are spending donor money. Let everyone hear the voices and experiences of people affected by your projects.

8. What you don’t have resources to do, others might jump at. Social media are great at releasing volunteer energies around your mission. Engage and go beyond your traditional support base.

9. Value (and plan for) conversations with your constituencies, at all levels. Every employee in your organization now can and, most importantly, should want to interact with as many stakeholders as possible through social media to further your mission. Establish a constant dialogue with donors so they don’t feel like they are ATM machines. Thousands of conversations a day should be a coveted objective, not a dreaded scenario.

10. Plan for serendipity. Do focus on results, but be open to get to them in unexpected ways, suggested by your the end users. Incorporate user-driven innovation in your proposals.

11. Think about the full circle. Found an innovative way to tackle a development issue? Go beyond the initial success. Use networks to scale up quickly. Make the connection between the results of your experimentation and the core mission of your organization obvious.

13. Cast a wide net. Your partners and colleagues are your filters to sift through unexpected sources of development knowledge. Collect snippets of information from multiple sources and highlight patterns among them. Use social media to tap into weak ties and bring together innovative perspectives to solve tough development issues.

14. Go beyond polished documents. Think visual. Documents and publications are not the natural unit of knowledge. Release unfinished products if this can help advance your cause and get others to contribute. A visual a la Gapminder can be more impactful on policy makers than a publication.

Collaborative innovation is knowledge sharing (ideas, expertise, technologies) whithin teams and between teams in a company, in order to lead to innovations more effectively and more efficiently

[Collaborative Innovation Network is] a cyberteam of self-motivated people with a collective vision, enabled by the Web to collaborate in achieving a common goal by sharing ideas, information, and work.

Peter Gloor (2005)

We believe that collaborative innovation is supported by communication technologies and web 2.0 platforms.

See our partnerships with software editors in Partners.

Corporate social network launch in a public service and change management to new form of collaboration. Internal community manager training

Transverse collaboration in a company, meaning between several services or activities, is a key factor for raising new ideas, best practices sharing and best projects selection.

bluenove offers to manage transition to new cooperation and information sharing usages, notably based on “2.0” software platforms (internal social network for instance).

The methodology ICM™ favors, inside the company, a collective dynamic.

The terms of intervention depend on each client’s needs concerning the scoop, the means (form a collaborative platform to focus groups or co-creation workshops).

The social media killer-app in 5 main categories of user cases:

1. Customer service: crowdsourcing and messaging service.
2. Networking: developing contacts and relationships through conversations
3. Business Management: advertizing, reminding, customer feedback
4. Traffic: viral marketing
5. Information: sharing information and ideas

Source: applicant

Start-ups ecosystem study for a telecom operator. Fast Track innovative projects selection and drafting of three opportunity studies

Open Innovation worshops leading within a seminar on new innovation management modes, destinated to the Regional Innovation Network

ICT, marketing, Open Innovation training seminar in partnership with Kiela

KIELA
tel : +33 1 42 21 09 78
Contact Adelie ELBAZ : aelbaz@kiela.fr

What are your favorite Web and Mobile services ?
Thank you to contribute to our poll

Project management of gaming platform launch for a game editor

Mobile internet valuable services study and sizing, to help a telecom operator in positionning its innovations. Bulding of the related business plan

Innovation market watch program and start-up ecosystem study for a telecom operator. Enrichment of a qualified database

Project management for commercial launch of a photograph platforme for a telecom operator. Proposition of new turnover sources and business planning

J’ai eu le plaisir de présider la session suivante lors de cette conférence:

11:20-13:00 SESSION 2.

L’INNOVATION OUVERTE ET LE MANAGEMENT DE L’INNOVATION

Président : Martin DUVAL, bluenove
> Exemples de pratiques d’innovation ouverte
> Innovation ouverte et évolutions de l’organisation interne des entreprises

- Dr Carlos HÄRTEL, GE Global Research
– René ROHRBECK, R&D Deutsche Telekom
– Thierry WEIL, Ecole des Mines de Paris
– Thomas DURAND, CM International

Organisée au siège de l’OCDE à Paris, cette conférence a examiné le phénomène de l’innovation ouverte à l’échelle mondiale sous l’angle des entreprises et des organismes de recherche en France et en Europe. Réunissant des experts représentant des sociétés à la pointe de l’innovation comme GE Research, IBM et Deutsche Telekom, ainsi que des organismes de recherche publics tels que l’Institut Pasteur et l’INRIA, cette conférence s’est attachée également à analyser les variations internationales observées au niveau des pratiques d’innovation ouverte. Il est apparu essentiel de prendre ces variations en compte pour comprendre les mécanismes de diffusion des pratiques d’innovation ouverte et les politiques à mettre en œuvre pour concrétiser les promesses du modèle de l’innovation ouverte.

Les gouvernements des pays de l’OCDE doivent faire face à de nouveaux défis au fur et à mesure que la mondialisation et l’innovation ouverte ont une incidence de plus en plus sensible sur les pratiques en matière d’innovation, sur les liens entre les systèmes d’innovation à l’échelle nationale et mondiale et sur la capacité à récolter les fruits des investissements en R-D et dans l’innovation au niveau régional, national ou mondial. Parallèlement, le modèle de l’innovation ouverte, conjugué au développement de réseaux mondiaux d’innovation, pourrait améliorer la rentabilité des investissements publics et privés en R-D.

En s’appuyant sur des études de cas et sur une analyse empirique, le projet de l’OCDE « Globalisation and Open Innovation » a analysé les tendances et les déterminants de l’innovation ouverte et a mis en lumière ses implications politiques pour les gouvernements, l’enseignement supérieur, la recherche publique et les entreprises.

bluenove est plus que jamais à la disposition des grands groupes et institutions para-publiques pour les accompagner tant en interne qu’en externe dans leur stratégie d’Open Innovation et l’animation des réseaux de leurs écosystèmes innovants.

N’hésitez pas à nous contacter à contact@bluenove.com pour obtenir un feedback plus précis sur la conférence.

Ecosystem study of Web and mobile applications in digital edition to ease market entrance for a telecom operator. Positioning and cooperations with the studied players recommendations

Organization and leading of an internal brainstorming workshop to identify segments in home equipments and prioritize the project roadmap

Of course there are many reasons to think that this financial and economic crisis will affect startups in a very bad way.
But there might also be a set of positive ones for startups to travel through this recession.
I actually believe that beyond creating or developing a startup, it is rather INNOVATION that is something that is more than ever needed in times of crisis and recession in order to generate any growth or business optimization left to be obtained during the months and years to come. That is both true for startup companies and may be even more so for major corporations and brands.
And deeper is the crisis when internal resources are lacking and budgets shrinking, the more major corporations will have no other choice than managing innovation in an ‘open and collaborative’ new way, collaborating much more openly and efficiently internally and with their ecosystem and especially with innovative startups.
These major corporations and brands (‘Together we can do more’ says Orange) will therefore have to transform themselves into ‘Open & Collaborative Innovation’ champions with a stronger and clearer vision faster than what they would have done in a more ‘comfortable’ economy.
From a crisis to an opportunity ?

These transformation challenges and opportunities are the ‘raison d’etre’ of bluenove, ready to support both major corporations and startups

Expertise

Web, Mobile, API, Home Automation, Smart Grids, Innovation process, Open Data, Serious Game

Prior to bluenove

Research mission on the innovation processes in the support to business aviation (Dassault-Aviation), CFO assistant (Safran Aerospace India), Assistant to the subsidiaries manager  (Autodistribution)

Education

Master of Science in Management HEC Grande Ecole with a specialisation in PIC (Project Innovation Conception) achieved at École Polytechnique

For further information: 

Expertise

Services, Internet, Applications, Web, Mobile, Telecoms, Industries, Cosmetics, Softwares, Computer Sciences, Games, ITC

Prior to bluenove

Change Management Analyst (Capgemini Consulting), Financial Planning (Hachette Fillipachi Presse), Innovation Consulting

Education

Master of Science in Management EDHEC with a specialisation in Entrepreneurship

For further information: 

- More than ever growth through innovation and collaboration: the current global and financial economic crisis makes it even more obvious that only innovation will generate the last chance for extra growth potential for the leading corporations and brands in the 3 to 5 years to come. Furthermore, given the expected constraints on internal resources and R&D; budgets within major corporations and brands, only a new paradigm through innovative partnerships and external collaboration will enable it to happen.
– A fast emerging trend: ‘Open & collaborative innovation’ is a still new yet a fast growing trend as a young management discipline in major corporations.
– A proven strategic model from major brands: leading brands such as P&G; (through its ‘Connect & Develop’ partnership platform and program), Nokia , General Mills (G-WIN program), Microsoft (Microsoft IDEES program being deployed internationally), Orange (Orange Partner program), etc. are developing dedicated strategic partnership programs to empower and accelerate their innovation and go to market.
– Innovation, Change and Brand management are merging disciplines: the innovation, change and brand management fields are more and mode linked, interrelated if not overlapping. Some leading advertizing agencies are for instance offering ‘startup connection’ services and Brand Management consulting firms are developing Innovation management services: companies such as Prophet are strongly positioning innovation at the heart of their services. And new breed of consulting firms such as Venture2 or bluenove are emerging.
– The 2.0 effect: Web 2.0 created new ways and trends to manage brands and marketing campaigns such as ‘crowdsourcing’ processes or collaborative platforms bringing user and designer communities together and redefining the frontiers of creativity, art & culture. Bluenove is for instance a partner of the ‘New Life Copenhagen’ project which integrates a set of innovative and collaborative platforms : www.wooloo.org , www.wecollaborate.org, www.kollaboration.biz . The city itself is therefore becoming socially connected and enabling a new proximity marketing.
Mobile 2.0 is also starting to contribute to convergent (web, mobile, tv, content) viral marketing dynamics and advertizing with examples such as mob-it.
Social network based solutions are of course entering the ‘Enterprise 2.0’ thus accelerating organizational changes and culture transformation within corporations.
And major Brands are now using web 2.0 values to define their next generation claims such as the ‘Together we can do more’ by Orange.

How will major brands and advertizing agencies adapt to these new strategies and change management issues mixing convergent Branding, Innovation and Technological skills ?

bluenove is a strategy consulting firm specialized in change management through open and collaborative innovation

Expertise

Services, Internet, Applications, Web, Mobile, Telecoms, Networks, CMS, Web Programming, API, Open Data, Beta tests, Serious game, Developer Community Management, Events

Prior to bluenove

Consultant Business Team iW3 (innovative Web, Workstation & Wireless) (Logica Management Consulting), Network and Technology Deployment Architect (IntermediaSud)

Education

Master of Science in Information Technology at ENSEEIHT (Concentration in Networking and Telecommunications), Specialized Master in Digital Business Management at HEC Paris and Télécom ParisTech

For further information: 

Expertise

Pharmaceuticals and Cosmetics Industries, Services, Internet, Web, Mobile, Cosmetics, ITC, Chemistry

Prior to bluenove

SARBEC Cosmetics R&D (New products formulation, Cosmetics)

Education

Master degree in Chemistry and Engineering Formulation at Chimie Lille

For further information: 

Expertise

Industrial Innovation, Intellectual Property (IP) Management, Partnerships Direction, Life Cycle, Technology Transfer, Intellectual Assets Assessment and Monetization

Prior to bluenove

IP Broker (Valorip), Licensing Manager (CEA Valorisation), UinversitéIndustry Partnerships Coordonator (University of Montreal & Affiliates), Founder (MAZLAB in Montreal, Networks21 in Singapore), Innovation Advisor (Canadian Innovation Center), Lecturer (UVSQ, ESC Toulouse, HEC and Polytechnique Montreal)

Education

PDMA Certified in NPD (New Product Development), Specialized Master in Innovation and Technology Management at Toulouse Business School, Mathematics & Industrial Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique of Montreal

For further information: 

Thanks to http://www.mobile-zeitgeist.com/

Expertise

Business Developpement, Intellectual Property (IP) Management, Partnerships Direction, Technology Transfer, Intellectual Assets Assessment and Monetization

Prior to bluenove

IP Broker (Valorip), Business developper & Account Manager (Norma Conseil), Financial Auditor (Deloitte)

Education

Civil Engineer at ESTP, Specialized Master in Innovation and Technology Management at Toulouse Business School

Expertise

Internet, Web, Telecoms, Networks, e-learning, Serious Games, Programming, Computer Science

Prior to bluenove

‘E-learning and Serious Games’ Project manager assistant (KTM Advance)

Education

Master of Science in Information Technology at ENSEEIHT (Concentration in Networking and Telecommunications), Specialized Master in Digital Business Management at HEC Paris and Télécom ParisTech

For further information:

Expertise

Mobile, Internet, Web, Mobile Payment, Mobile Banking, Ebusiness, SEO, Programming

Prior to bluenove

R&D engineer: cross-platform mobile solutions design and development (mobile payment, bank, trading) (Lemon Way)

Education

Master of Science in Information Technology at ESIEE (Concentration in Computer Science), Specialized Master in Digital Business Management at HEC Paris and Télécom ParisTech

For further information:

Expertise

Sustainable development (social, environmental, economy), Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), partnerships, financing and marketing

Prior to bluenove

Partnerships project manager (Nicolas Hulot Fundation), Assistant secretary, donor relation (Free Happy Culture Association), Digital printing Technical salesman (Figarol)

Education

Master in Sciences of Environment, Territory and Economics at Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University with a concentration in Engineering in Sustainable Development and an optional course in Corporate Social Responsibility

Expertise

Biotechnology, Pharmaceutical industry , Cosmetics, Agronomy, Food industry, Intellectual property

Prior to bluenove

R&D plant amelioration: wheat (Biogemma), R&D fundamental research (INRA)

Education

Master in Bio-Engineering at Paul Sabatier Toulouse III University (Concentration in plant biotechnology), Specialized Master in Biotechnology Industry Management at Toulouse Business School.

For further information:

Expertise

Services, Internet, Web, Transport & mobility, Marketing studies, Mobile, ITC

Prior to bluenove

iDTGV Innovation Manager (SNCF), Qualitative market research analyst (Audirep), Quantitative market research analyst (BVA-Reason Why)

Education

Master in Marketing & Marketing Studies at Nantes University, Specialized Master in Technology and Innovation Management at Grenoble École de Management

For further information:

Expertise

Open Innovation, Web, Social Web, Innovation Management, Problem-Solving, Collaboration, Community Management, ICT,

Prior to bluenove

Open Innovation Researcher (Hypios)

Education

Faculty of Organizational Sciences with a specialization in Information Systems and Technologies at Belgrade University, Specialized Master in Management and Dynamic of Organizations at Mines ParisTech, Université Paris X Nanterre, in collaboration with ESCP Paris and École Polytechnique, PhD in Management Studies at Université Paris-Dauphine

For further information :

Expertise

Services, Innovation management, Innovative design method (C/K), Usage-driven innovation, Automotive industry, Electric vehicle,

Prior to bluenove

Innovation strategy at an automotive R&D direction (Valeo)

Education

Ingénieur Polytechnicien program at École Polytechnique, Master Project, Innovation, Design at École Polytechnique in collaboration with HEC Paris, Mines ParisTech and Paris-Dauphine University

For further information :

Mobile Monday – Partnership Platforms and Mobile Innovation

Expertise

Entrepreneurship, Internet, applications, web, mobile, online media and advertising, networks, Urban Mobility, ITC, design thinking

Prior to bluenove

Student consultant (Schneider Electric), online media and advertising (Aol Advertising & BMW), startups (winner of Startup Weekend Grenoble 2012)

Education

Master of Science in Innovation, Strategy, Entrepreneurship – Grenoble Ecole de Management

For further information: 

Expertise

Business intelligence,Technologic and competitive business watch, Eco-innovation, Sustainable cities, Renewable energies

Prior to bluenove

Junior consultant in Business intelligence
Consultant in Eco-innovation and european financing(SAUR)
Consultant in Eco-innovation(ANDRITZ)

Education

Master in Business intelligence(EEIE &UVSQ)
International Master in Management of Eco-Innovation.(International chair of Econoving)

Expertise

Innovation and change management, entrepreneurship, growth strategy, business development, process optimization, brand engagement, corporate marketing

Prior to bluenove

Innovation and community management, intrapreneurial/entrepreneurial initiatives (Alcatel-Lucent), Marketing and strategic development manager, international relations (GERC Group), Freelance communications and marketing officer (British Counsil), Freelance writer (Hubert Burda Media Group), Simultaneous interpreter, translator (Federation France-Ukraine, Council of Europe)

Education

Micro MBA, entrepreneurial program at ESCP Europe, Professional Master in Commerce and international relations at Institute of European Studies,  Planification and business administration at Temple University (Philadelphia, USA), Master in Interpretation/translation at NTUU KPI (Kyiv, Ukraine)

For further information:

Expertise

Entrepreneurship, Innovation management, Innovative design method (C/K), automotive industry, project financing.

Prior to bluenove

Business Plan for the PARISS project, electric sport car presented at the 2012 Paris Motor Show.
Innovative design mission for the SNCF group. Use of CK theory.

Education

Master 2 Managing Technology and Innovation- University Paris Dauphine, jointly accredited with Mines ParisTech, ENS Cachan and INSTN

For further informations : 

The ‘Orange Patner Start Up Programme‘ is an Open Innovation programme developed by Orange and supported by bluenove.
Here is a success story about the startup NPTV and its ‘mob-it‘ service used by Orange for its Pikeo service.
More information…

Martin Duval (bluenove)  presentation: zoom on Mobile 2.0

Organization and leading, for a postal company, of a brainstorming workshop with start-ups to detect their expectations towards a large company, for a potential opening program

Business development project management for media productor

Collaboration within teams requires more flexible organization, less hierarchy, to favor creativity.

bluenove offers to assess the ability to cooperate, identify innovation obstacles and make propositions to improve it.

blueChallenge™ methodology has been conceived to define the way participation and creative contributions are stimulated.

Expertise

Creativity management, Creative groups management, Problem solving strategy, Cognitive psychology, Differential psychology, Statistical analysis, Psychological measure tool building, Change management, Serious game, Association

Prior to bluenove

Creativity management research analyst (Bell Labs Alcatel-Lucent)

Education

Master’s Degree in Work, organisation and personnel Psychology and mastère in Social Psychology at Paris 5 University René Descartes

For further detail :

Expertise

Car industry, Telecom, Innovation processes, ITC

Prior to bluenove

Innovative products manager, Strategic partnerships with startups and big corporations (Orange Strategic Anticipation)

Education

Master of Science in Communication and Technology management at Paris Dauphine University

For further information: 

Expertise

Design thinking, Renewable energies, Cleantech, Smart Grids, e-business, Entrepreneurship, Business Development

Prior to bluenove

Private Equity analyst for Cleantech and Greentech investments (123Venture), Business Developer UK (Nheolis), Project Manager Preliminay Design (AXA Group Solutions)

Education

Master degree in Systems Engineering INSA Toulouse, Master of Science in Management ESSEC Paris with a specialisation in Entrepreneurship, Global Manager in Asia track ESSEC Singapore

For further information: 

Expertise

Entrepreneurship, Startup, Innovation management, e-business, Web, New technologies, Social media, Green business, Renewable energies, ITC/IS

Prior to bluenove

Co-founder Rag Sarl (import/export trade trend products) & innovative services solutions for environment, Sorbonne Innovation and Technology Association President, Financing and sale consultant (Bouygues Immobilier)

Education

Master of Science in Innovation and Technology Management at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University with a specialization in entrepreneurship, innovation strategy and e-management

For further information: 

Expertise

Web, retail, cloud, games, softwares

Prior to bluenove

Education

For further information: 

Project management of a music platform technical launch for a telecom operator

Tws08 Behind the Scenes – video powered by Metacafe

Tws08 Highlights Clip – Free videos are just a click away

more on : https://www.tws2008.com/video.htm#top

Open innovation and Nokia Philosophy, Dr. Bob Iannucci, CTO of Nokia and Head of Nokia Research Center.

Innovation market watch program and start-up ecosystem study for a telecom operator. Selection process reengineering and internal and external communication

bluenove analyses the various innovative initiatives and the profile of the company’s ecosystems, even outside its core business. It makes recommendations on the most relevant partnerships and business opportunities.

Our methodology blueConnect™ enables start-ups and innovative partners detection, analyze, selection and presentation. This analysis may be enriched and shared through the Open Innovation Map.

To illustrate this service with some cases taken from our Track Record, please see here.

Israel’s official dot com.petition
Presenting the selected and most promising Israeli web2.0 startups

The ‘Orange Start Up Programme’ within ‘Orange Partner’

A small fire under the streets of Manchester connects BT with some Big Thinking…

The bluenove website coming soon… click on :

To this excellent analysis from David Simmoes-Brown at NESTA i would add the following. Among the Development phase possible streams for COI, i would add a 4th element to the standard Spin-offs, Licencing, and JV: that is a dedicated and tailor-made ‘Open Innovation Start-Up Partnership Program’. The one i developed at Orange and now supported by bluenove, the ‘Orange Start Up Programme’, embeds unique elements inspired from the COI philosophy such as :

1. a specifically designed partnership contract/MoU which is co-signed with the purchasing department to create momentum and speed very early in the partnership process
2. no exclusivity nor IP issues dealt during a first ‘opportunity phase’ of collaboration, again to create extra pressure on the Corporate organization to deliver faster Time To Market and first mover advantage
3. up to support to the startups to help them raise funds with third party VCs thus contributing to the development of sustainable partners within the ecosystem as well as initiate extra opportunity flows from the VC community
4. a process driven activity pipeline management with clear operational KPIs
5. an efficient and agile interfacing with other innovation related departments (R&D;, Marketing, Purchasing, Corporate VC and M&A;, Brand and Communication…)
6. a collaborative knowledge management intranet/extranet tool
7. a source for experienced based training modules about the COI theory and its successful implementation
8. an existing platform to facilitate potential bridges and connexions with similar platforms and programs from other Corporations and industrial sectors

This mix of know-how, processes and intranet/extranet layers has now been captured into the ‘Lab Innovation Partnership Platform’ (LIPP) developed by bluenove, a new consulting firm specialized in COI design and implementation, that we are now ready to deliver to other Corporations (beyond Orange) and to other industries (beyond Telecom) aiming at implementing ambitious Corporate Open Innovation programs.

We could not have found a better introduction to describe what bluenove’s support and services are all about. The ‘Orange Start-Up Program’ has been designed and implemented by bluenove for Orange based on these ‘Open Innovation’ principles. In addition, it also includes a set of specific key process elements and a good proportion of know-how in order to deliver efficient and balanced partnerships between startups and big corporations.

Actually ‘Making Open Innovation work for you’ could very well be the ideal baseline for bluenove !

Contact us at : martin.duval@bluenove.com for more information about the Bluenove ‘Lab Innovation Partnership Platform’(LIPP) to help you design and implement your tailor made Open Innovation program.

Check : dream Orange and lab’Orange
and some more information on : Orange- Innovation.tv

As mentioned in numerous blogs and more and more conferences, Enterprise 2.0 is clearly one of the hotest topics of the moment i.e. how the new Web 2.0 services, tools and life style behaviours mostly based on UGC (User Generated Content) and social networks will enter (and exit) the walls of the Enterprise. Productivity gains and value creation are expected within the enterprise through use of advanced collaborative tools among the employees and also through new ways to connect with the customers, from marketing and sales to customer care.

Considering the investment trends in ‘cloud computing‘ infrastructure to develop online based ‘Solutions As A Services’ (SAAS) by major players such as Microsoft, Google or Amazon’s EC2 (Elastic Cloud Computing) platform, hosting issues are on their way to be solved once clear SLAs (Service Level Agreements) are offered to third parties. The growing number of Open Source solutions and APIs available from an increasing number of players contribute to enrich the required ecosystem and favour development synergies based on mash-ups. Given this context, I would expect a high proportion of Enterprise 2.0 start-ups to be acquired in 2008 to complete the 2.0 Suites provided by bigger software providers.
Before discussing the ‘how’ and ‘what’, I do believe it is no longer a question of ‘if’ but rather one of ‘when exactly’ this shift will happen, certainly there will be a strong acceleration in 2008. Corporations are facing the irresistible human resource wave of a self trained (and for free) generation thanks to the very low barriers to try, learn and early-adopt most of the new 2.0 services. This next generation of users will, at the very least, expect to use the same tools at work that they do at home or while on the move with their mobile and wireless devices. They may also expect to experiment with even more innovative ones (also as customers) within a dynamic ecosystem of commercial (PRM) and innovative partners proactively managed by their company. This all presents an opportunity for a company to empower their employees with a strong culture of leadership and loyalty through daily innovation. The ‘Orange Start-Up Program’ and the Bluenove ‘Lab Innovation Partnership Platform’ are also about that within Orange.

Todays standard wikis,blogs and RSS feeds are often presented as the main examples of the 2.0 tools to be used at work, with solution providers such as Netcipia or Bluekiwi. A more emerging model is the use of Social Networks in the business environment, ‘Business Social Networking’ (BSN). I already mentioned a few months ago my perception on my Facebook profile as the Ultimate Multimedia and Real Time resume from a recruitment standpoint. The sub trends to be faced by the CIOs under this BSN umbrella are the long tail business model, the UGC management and the need for identity management in the spirit of the Open ID initiative.
Bear in mind also the new trends from start-ups such as H-Care (an OSUP partner) aimed at bringing a 3D digital assistant interface for customer care and support. Or Netineo, also a partner of the OSUP, which enables you to create your own Live and collaborative TV within your intranet. This rapidly evolving environment is confirmed by cases such as the free ERP/CRM solutions provided by Dolibarr.

It will not be easy for the CIOs to manage the three following streams : 1) the pace of change of these new ‘working styles’, 2) the dilemma between integration of new creative collaborative tools and data leak prevention, and 3) the temptation to keep contracting with major software suppliers rather than directly engaging with a wider number of innovative start-ups thus risking not to play a direct role in the development of their own innovative ecosystem.

http://www.orange.com/en_EN/
Simpler, more dynamic and interactive, and you can personalize it too…check it out!

The principles of Distributed Innovation.
Joy’s Law, attributed to Sun Microsystems co-founder Bill Joy, emphasizes the essential knowledge problem that faces many enterprises today, that is, that in any given sphere of activity most of the pertinent knowledge will reside outside the boundaries of any one organization, and the central challenge of those charged with the innovation mission is to find ways to access that knowledge.
‘No matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else.’Say again?

Open innovation is opening one company’s innovation process to external knowledge (ideas, technologies, patents), expertise and know-how. In addition, it also refers to a best use of intellectual property (IP) giving it value through external initiatives (spin-off, licensing, transfer).

Open innovation is a paradigm that assumes that firms can and should use external ideas as well as internal ideas, and internal and external paths to market, as the firms look to advance their technology

Chesbrough, H.W. (2003)

Innovation process opening, from idea to concept, prototype and then innovation, may be therefore made inside-out and outside-in: integrating outside knowledge or offering one company’s own unused knowledge to external entities. It is difficult to identify the stage this opening must be done, regarding the ratio risk / profitability.

Cooperation terms differ according to the innovation sources beyond R&D (customers, suppliers, public and private labs, universities, start-ups, even competitors on new markets or new activities).

LeWeb3 event succeded for 2 days to make Paris the wordwide capital of the Web 2.0 trends.
Orange sponsored the event, and it has been a great opportunity to demonstrate the Next.com services (Pikeo, Soundtribes, BubbleTop, Whose Game as well as the Orange Island in Second Life) through a nicely set booth. In addition, i participated to the Start-Up Contest jury. Beyond the winners (Goojet #1, PlyMedia #2, G.ho.st #3, Erepublik and SplitGames both as #4), i noticed the following trends.
Definitely convergence again between Web and Mobile. Through Goojet of course which allows easy and fast creation of widget application on the web and transfer to the mobile. I still prefer though the ‘mob-it’ approach from NPTV we are supporting in the ‘Orange Start-Up Program (OSUP)’ since it enables web contents to be sent to a much broader existing handset base thanks to a Java based application approach. Also a convergence going from mobile to web with Zyb allowing you to transfer your phone contacts, your ‘real’ friends meaning your friends in real life, back to the web to start developing a social network dynamics on top of your real friends and not the opposite way i.e. trying to end up becoming real friends with virtual ones collected over time from your different web communities and social network services .
Still the confirmation of video as the emerging 2.0 format. In addition to the presence of Seesmic, Loic Lemeur’s new start-up, interesting to note that PlyMedia was given the #2 position for its platform allowing publishers to add multi-function layers on top of a video content such as text, or ads or even interactivity through IM or Chats elements. I was also pleased to meet again Netineo (not part of the competition) who developed a great Live TV platform. Not mentioning the presence of Vpod.tv among the sponsors and exhibitors.
The virtual words and 3D platforms were also very much present. Both Erepublik and SpiltGames came in the top 5 of the contest thus enhancing the importance of games as a key market place. On our side WhoseGame got some good feedback on the booth. I am also looking forward to follow in 2008 what SongSong, member of the OSUP, and its new team, headed by Nicolas Gaume as CEO, will launch in the area of community based virtual universes. Finally with a different approach to Second Life (go and visit our Orange Island), the start-up Yoowalk presented a great way to ‘Walk around the Web’ in a 3D city where I, my avatar, walks along or inside the YouTube or Myspace buildings and therefore meet also people (visitors of the site at this moment) and then goes back home to further personalize its house with different contents appearing on the walls such as videos for instance.
Overall it was still quite striking that a majority of the 30 start-ups pitches were poorly presented. Presentation skills are still an issue and most of the jury members recognized that the entrepreneurs are not preparing this exercice well enough. It is probably not yet obvious to the young CEOs to choose between the Demo and sales driven approach or the 10 questions flow requested by the jury in an exhaustive and well ordered manner. The presenter has to face a different set of audiences with different expectations, the other visitors at the conference, its pairs and sometimes competitors, the VCs, the possible corporate and business partners and the jury, often made of a mix of the formers. There is definitely room for improvement in this area.
Regarding feedback, we were quite pleased to see that BubbleTop is more and more mentioned versus Netvibes by some bloggers who analyzed and compared the evolution of both products.
On the conference side I was very impressed by the presentation from JP Rangaswami, CIO Global Services at BT which describes the challenges and opportunities for existing corporations and their current organizations to welcome and embrace the next generation of workers who will be super ‘trained’ with these news ways of communicating, collaborating and sharing. Definitely to me one of the key dimension of what Web 3.0 might mean i.e. how this Web 2.0 wave will impact the Enterprise and which companies will create competitive advantage out of it while others will suffer from it ?

LeWeb3 event succeded for 2 days to make Paris the wordwide capital of the Web 2.0 trends.
Orange sponsored the event, and it has been a great opportunity to demonstrate the Next.com services (Pikeo, Soundtribes, BubbleTop, Whose Game as well as the Orange Island in Second Life) through a nicely set booth. In addition, i participated to the Start-Up Contest jury. Beyond the winners (Goojet #1, PlyMedia #2, G.ho.st #3, Erepublik and SplitGames both as #4), i noticed the following trends.
Definitely convergence again between Web and Mobile. Through Goojet of course which allows easy and fast creation of widget application on the web and transfer to the mobile. I still prefer though the ‘mob-it’ approach from NPTV we are supporting in the ‘Orange Start-Up Program (OSUP)’ since it enables web contents to be sent to a much broader existing handset base thanks to a Java based application approach. Also a convergence going from mobile to web with Zyb allowing you to transfer your phone contacts, your ‘real’ friends meaning your friends in real life, back to the web to start developing a social network dynamics on top of your real friends and not the opposite way i.e. trying to end up becoming real friends with virtual ones collected over time from your different web communities and social network services .
Still the confirmation of video as the emerging 2.0 format. In addition to the presence of Seesmic, Loic Lemeur’s new start-up, interesting to note that PlyMedia was given the #2 position for its platform allowing publishers to add multi-function layers on top of a video content such as text, or ads or even interactivity through IM or Chats elements. I was also pleased to meet again Netineo (not part of the competition) who developed a great Live TV platform. Not mentioning the presence of Vpod.tv among the sponsors and exhibitors.
The virtual words and 3D platforms were also very much present. Both Erepublik and SpiltGames came in the top 5 of the contest thus enhancing the importance of games as a key market place. On our side WhoseGame got some good feedback on the booth. I am also looking forward to follow in 2008 what SongSong, member of the OSUP, and its new team, headed by Nicolas Gaume as CEO, will launch in the area of community based virtual universes. Finally with a different approach to Second Life (go and visit our Orange Island), the start-up Yoowalk presented a great way to ‘Walk around the Web’ in a 3D city where I, my avatar, walks along or inside the YouTube or Myspace buildings and therefore meet also people (visitors of the site at this moment) and then goes back home to further personalize its house with different contents appearing on the walls such as videos for instance.
Overall it was still quite striking that a majority of the 30 start-ups pitches were poorly presented. Presentation skills are still an issue and most of the jury members recognized that the entrepreneurs are not preparing this exercice well enough. It is probably not yet obvious to the young CEOs to choose between the Demo and sales driven approach or the 10 questions flow requested by the jury in an exhaustive and well ordered manner. The presenter has to face a different set of audiences with different expectations, the other visitors at the conference, its pairs and sometimes competitors, the VCs, the possible corporate and business partners and the jury, often made of a mix of the formers. There is definitely room for improvement in this area.
Regarding feedback, we were quite pleased to see that BubbleTop is more and more mentioned versus Netvibes by some bloggers who analyzed and compared the evolution of both products.
On the conference side I was very impressed by the presentation from JP Rangaswami, CIO Global Services at BT which describes the challenges and opportunities for existing corporations and their current organizations to welcome and embrace the next generation of workers who will be super ‘trained’ with these news ways of communicating, collaborating and sharing. Definitely to me one of the key dimension of what Web 3.0 might mean i.e. how this Web 2.0 wave will impact the Enterprise and which companies will create competitive advantage out of it while others will suffer from it ?

The companies selected as winners for this year’s LEWEB3 start-up competition are:

1st place – Goojet
2nd place – PLYMedia
3rd place – G.ho.st

The honorable mention companies are: erepublik and Splitgames.

In addition to the main competition, there was a special jury prize awarded by competition sponsor, TF1. The winner of this prize, Holistis, will be granted a consulting session with senior leaders from TF1′s Internet and Innovation team to help provide guidance on messaging and presentation skills.

The companies selected as winners for this year’s LEWEB3 start-up competition are:

1st place – Goojet
2nd place – PLYMedia
3rd place – G.ho.st

The honorable mention companies are: erepublik and Splitgames.

In addition to the main competition, there was a special jury prize awarded by competition sponsor, TF1. The winner of this prize, Holistis, will be granted a consulting session with senior leaders from TF1′s Internet and Innovation team to help provide guidance on messaging and presentation skills.

Again this year Orange is one of the Le Web 3 event sponsors.
I am particularly glad to work with my friend Cathy Brooks and be for the second time one of the judges of the Start Up Competition. The results will be given on Day 2, december 12 at 10am.
See you there…

Again this year Orange is one of the Le Web 3 event sponsors.
I am particularly glad to work with my friend Cathy Brooks and be for the second time one of the judges of the Start Up Competition. The results will be given on Day 2, december 12 at 10am.
See you there…

When the band Clint, Soundtribes member, goes live on Orange Island /Second Life, it sounds rock ! Clint goes Live on Second Life
Visit Orange-Island on Second-Life :
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Orange%201/191/134/30

Participating to the Value Chain Panel Discussion: Overcoming The Challenges Of Delivering A Successful Mobile Advertising Ecosystem

14.20 Determining How To Generate Usage And Mobile Advertising Revenue From Mobile Communities And User Generated Content

Please contribute to the Poll to better understand how innovation and partnerships are managed (or not) in most major corporations

I am talking about my Facebook profile.

The following struck me recently when i got head hunted for a job by a search consulting firm. Within the standard approach of such a consulting firm, after a first contact by phone or mail, they usually request you to send them the good old form including your education and experience fitted in an A4 page. It is then up to you to add or not a ‘hot or not’ nice corporate picture of your face if you have one and if you decide to enrich this conservative format: probably a black and white picture would actually be better if you think positive and bet many paper photo-copies of this great candidate profile will be made. In addition you can always try to show your wild side by writing some of your fun hobbies in the ‘Interests’ section with a series of boring and generic key words such as Music, Cinema or some exotic sports.

Of course this standard format is part of a traditional and efficient process where HR consultants have to look at tons of resumes and most of the time only spend a few seconds with their sharply trained eyes to analyze your potential out of these one or two pages.
Nevertheless, when i look at the amount of real time and multimedia information i put on my Facebook profile, the gap strikes me.
The same level as in their standard A4 i.e.
– my personal info: may be not my year of birth but up to the current status of my relationship. The ‘it is complicated’ status might not help by the way.
– my education and current job info.

But the ‘pic’ section is when it gets a bit richer with the tons of pictures i can put. And not only pictures of me but sometimes of my family and friends.

And it gets full multimedia when my interests are described with my favorite music the ‘Hunter’ can listen to and hopefully enjoy (now he or she can even discover music while working thanks to the search for candidates) and the UGC video of my favorite sports.

But it gets much more powerful when looking at my network of friends and contacts (the ‘entourage’ application would not look so good in the A4 form i guess) and the threads i either posted myself or commented, luckily when they are business related.

And all this content is updated in real time . I admit that posts made during office hours might be an issue…
My profile is therefore complete, multimedia, social network enabled, and real time. It’s all there now.
With this is mind i do believe a whole new area of opportunities should appear for start-up companies, beyond Linkedin, either in the technical side or the service side to narrow the gap between the already available, self-structured and not yet analysed to its fullest potential data on each candidate and the traditional HR organisations and processes which have not yet changed to capture the new values generated by the 2.0 trends.

Orange in Second Life…

Agenda
Creating Propositions for High Value Segments of the Digital Youth market?
18th October, The Guoman Tower Hotel, London

New Opportunities and How to Address Them:
Social Networking, Mobile Internet, Mobile Advertising, Mobile Music, User-Generated Content: Understanding the End-User and Creating User Experiences that Sell
> Stimulus Speakers and Panelists:
– The Opportunity from Social Networking – Martin Duval, Director of Social Media & OSUP, Orange/FT Group
– Understanding End-User Attitudes, Lessons from the ‘Worldwide Lab’ – Liza Noonan, European Strategic Marketing Manager, Alcatel-Lucent
– How are Students/Young Adults using ICT equipment today, How will they in the future? – Dawn Nafus, Research Anthropologist, Intel Labs

Jean-Louis Constanza (Orange Vallée) : « Chez Orange, je suis un patron de start-up qui dispose de la puissance d’un groupe »

Did you ever wonder what was the missing link between Claude Francois, a friday afternoon at the office, Sex Pistols and a 1m90 Wolf, we have an answer and it has been recorded !
Here is the coolest Orange Next.com team contribution to our dear Soundtribes.com service !!

Special messages to members from my team:

- Thomas: what were you doing in my office with these sunglasses on ?

- Aida : i will definitely do it your way next time i ask you to prepare a contract !

- Gwen: simply a revelation !

They even talked about it this morning on France 2 TV, are you guys stars or what ?

simsave, ukibi, and soon social networking based on adress book management ?

In this special World day against the Alzheimer disease , i am glad i have contributed through the world premiere i launched with my team at Orange Mobile France 2 years ago with Medical Intelligence and PasteurMediavita when we developed the Columba bracelet .

I know now how to raise funds from VCs…brilliant ‘UGC’ video !
How to raise money from VCs…

No, this is not the title of a new low budget summer sci-fi movie where some out of space hardly creepy creatures would attack a fun group of bored teenagers in a peaceful californian small city. Instead i am talking about this organisational specie which supports entrepreneurial projects and got quite famous during the dot-com bubble with some private U.S. based structures such as Idealab or Garage.com (they still exist by the way) even though the formal concept appeared in the 1960s in the USA and got followed by many public initiatives worldwide. Some pan-european private incubators were also developed such as GorillaPark or SpeedVentures (they don’t exist anymore by the way). I actually entered the bubble myself opening and managing the French subsidiary of SpeedVentures before being hired by Orange to manage for 2 years Inventmobile, the Orange mobile focused incubator which then got merged with the France Telecom VC fund Innovacom .
But let’s look at the definition of ‘Business incubators’ from Wikipedia:
‘ Business incubators are organizations that support the entrepreneurial process, helping to increase survival rates for innovative startup companies. Entrepreneurs with feasible projects are selected and admitted into the incubators, where they are offered a specialized menu of support resources and services. Resources and services open to an entrepreneur might include such diverse elements as :

- provision of physical space (offices, labs)
– management coaching
– help in preparing an effective business plan
– administrative services
– technical support
– business networking
– advice on intellectual property and
– help in finding sources of financing. ‘

Focusing on supporting the very early-stage phase of a project, incubators used to value these elements as sweat equity rather than providing seed capital. For instance, we valued Inventmobile’s incubation support at 150k€ to take a share of 10% of mobivillage back in 2001, our first investment out of 6 over 2 years. Mobivillage was acquired by the japanese For-side 3 years later at 15m€. Not to mention the other 5 investments were not as successful…
It seems that a new wave and breed of incubators is now appearing and yes i will resist the temptation to call them Incubators 2.0.
Based on the assumption it requires little investment (from 20 to 50k€) and a short phase (about 3 months) to develop a standard web 2.0 new service to be Alpha tested, initatives like ycombinator in the U.S. or seedcamp in Europe, bring virtuality to the incubator concept mainly by not providing physical space, even though SeedCamp plans to provide office space in London. Another key difference is that they provide seed financing (up to 50k€) and strong networking rather than the above mentioned set of elements, a structured business plan being less and less of an issue at this stage, for up to 10% stake of the company.
I would also like to mention the notion of ‘Business Accelerators’ focusing more on international business development support. In that category, I met few month ago in San Francisco Michel Ktitareff, the co-founder of French Business Accelerator (FBIA) providing great support for French young companies to enter the U.S. market through the Silicon Valley ecosystem.
Finally and to a certain extent, i consider the ‘Orange Start-up Program’ (OSUP) i launched a year ago within the Orange group as a contributor to the incubation models thus providing a Corporate version of it. The OSUP’s purpose is to develop an innovative ecosystem around Orange and mainly focused on web 2.0 business opportunities through partnerships with start-ups and VC funds. In less than a year, this global program has identified more than 200 start-up companies, contacted 100, flagged 30 potential partners, signed 10 MoUs to and launched 4 new services/products with more than 2m€ early-stage fund raising support from VCs (+ 3m€ round currently being negociated, summing up +5m€) . Next year’s ambition is higher for these KPIs in order to broaden the areas of expertise and partnerships beyond 2.0 to domains such as Contactless, Mobile TV, Content, Broadband, Location Based Services, Health Care, etc. A similar Corporate version is the Microsoft IDEES program developed in France by Julien Cordorniou.
However successful these different models are, there are all great ways to propose constructive solutions to the lack of early-stage financing and support for innovative projects, that is still not solved at least in Europe and particularly in France.

I am not here going to talk about what happened again in Second Life (SL) : just read the newspapers or listen to the radio to keep updated about which company did what lately as the buzz keeps going daily. Working on Virtual Worlds related projects, i recently felt that i had to understand more about the behaviors and user interests within SL. Even though i registered in October last year, it is only during these last few months that i often left my RL (Real Life) to dive into SL and become more of an SL ‘resident’. One thing that strikes me most of the time is the friendliness of most of the people there, very patient at explaining features you don’t know about or new places to discover. Another one is how much they are concerned about keeping their SL separated from their RL: i realized that especially when i asked to some of them their opinion about opportunities to bridge communication between SL and RL, and they made it clear that keeping anonymous is fundamental.
But let me now tell as a summer story how i managed to make some money in SL for the first time.
I met a girl in the Hall, a place where new residents are often starting their way into SL, and we had a friendly conversation. At some point she proposed to take me to a great island with a beautiful beach. « Wait for me here and then you’ll TP » (TP stands for TelePortation !), she said: not even time for me to tell her that i had no idea how to teleport, she disappeared. After few seconds a pop-up invitation to teleport appeared, and i clicked ‘yes’. I arrived then in the most beautiful island, with an amazing beach area, the waves (and the sound of the waves), and another area with confortable seats on the beach. Actually, as i was getting closer, i could see residents seating around a girl dancing in the middle. The chat got very active, with people congratulating the moves and applauding (not easy by chat) the dancer. As i was getting closer, i realized i even didn’t know yet how to sit on one of the beach sofas: a request for help later, and someone told me i just had to point a place to sit, click on it then click on ‘sit’, and here i was confortably joining this fun group of avatars. After just few seconds, one the friendly avatars asked me to go and dance , ‘your turn ….’ (i respect the SL confidentiality rule by not giving my avatar name here to just anyone!). Well i then sent messages for help since…i had no idea how to dance. Few tips later, here i was shaking my avatar body on that virtual beach with supportive chat messages from my new friends. Until i got the scary message from one of them « t-shirt off! t-shirt off! « . Not the time to get virtually shy i thought, couldn’t find the blushing feature anyway, therefore i asked for extra support to find out how to get my t-shirt off. And i did it. And as a cherry on the top of all the learning and training process, i couldn’t believe it when i saw poping up some messages asking to accept 5, then 10 and even 25 Linden dollars from my supportive admirers. I clicked ‘ok’ of course and therefore you know now how i first made money into Second Life. Beyond this for the least interesting new experience, i also though i experienced a new dimension of the 2.0 behaviors that i now call the ‘User Generated Training’!
Have a great RL summer.

I participated to the ‘Wireless panel’ on Thursday June 28, the California Tech Showcase and had the pleasure to meet Ajit Jaokar, author of the book Mobile Web 2.0
Thanks to Ajit for this post on his blog: Opengardensblog

I participated to the ‘Wireless panel’ on Thursday June 28, the California Tech Showcase and had the pleasure to meet Ajit Jaokar, author of the book Mobile Web 2.0
Thanks to Ajit for this post on his blog: Opengardensblog

When we look at Venture Capital activity, it is now obvious that the web is back in vogue again. The difference with 5 years ago being probably that 1) most of those projects are based on strong business models, 2) are developed most of the time by successful entrepreneurs and not first timers, and 3) that the whole ecosystem is strongly pulled by the huge web and heavily capitalized champions, the big GYMs (Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft).
In this short attempt for a quick bulb diagnosis through the prism of the Social Networking sites, such as Myspace of course, definitely Facebook, and now the Bebo case following rumors about its valuation at $1 billion, i will therefore make the assumption that Facebook and Bebo are still in a start-up phase.
When it comes to the business model, it makes actually more sense to talk about modelS, given the number of them, going from audience, advertizing (sometimes through deals with GYM like for Myspace with Google or Facebook with Microsoft), premium services and contents, distribution deals with telco operators (like Orange in the UK), etc…The issue would rather be to pick the right ones at the right time, the same goes for partnerships with strategic players, as the community grows virally without alienating the users on the way. I guess this « anti-churn » ability, to use a wording more familiar to Telco operators, is definitely the know-how, if not the secret science of Bebo’s team, as Barry Maloney from Benchmark Capital, Bebo’s key VC, would say. It definitely also requires science when it comes to managing the cold start phase of a start-up community service at launch, but that phase has now been far passed by Bebo. On the other hand, the Facebook open APIs strategy is so impressive that it would require a specific posting and analysis.
Beyond my slightly provocative title, I will not actually try here to decide if a valuation of $1 billion is worth or not. But i admit that the accumulation of business model options, proven science to start and develop a community especially within the complex youth segment, a cool and strong brand, international ability to expand and develop partnership deals, cross-synergies with multi-channel (web, mobile, TV) and multi-content (music, photo, video, TV) platforms and related business models, good timing considering the change of life styles of the new generations, dynamic open APIs strategy and the first mover advantage being back with this 2.0 era, are definitely able to generate huge goodwill values.
And if no one is interested on the buying side at this amount, let’s bet that IPO remains a great option for companies like Bebo or Facebook.

Le clip « Ghetto Millionnaire »
envoyé par blackmamba_bm. – Regardez plus de clips, en HD !

http://www.innovate-events.com/2007/

The increasing number of start-up launching services on the web and especially within the 2.0 trend is bringing a new issue: should web services be developed in stealth mode or not? Thanks to both Mark Fletcher and Paul Kedrosky for their disagreement which i summarized herebelow.
Stealth mode is when a company is operating in secret for some length of time before launching their product or service. Is success of a web service inversely proportional to the secrecy that surrounded its development ? There are both supporters and opponents to this approach. Here are some good reasons for not going Stealth but rather go fast and be open as early as possible under the assumption that most web services should not take more than 3 to 5 months from conception to launch:
First mover advantage gives the opportunity to define the new space and have competition compared to you.
There is no such thing as a unique idea. It is indeed highly probable that someone else has already thought about your wonderful web service, and is actually way ahead of you.
It forces you to focus on the key features of the service thus shortening development cycles.
Being perfect at launch is not only impossible and unnecessary but probably detrimental. The rule should be ship early, ship often since the service can be continuously updated and fixed.
The sooner something gets out there, the sooner it will start getting feedback from users. In a way, users could be seen as the most valuable asset of a web service if not the only one. They act as advertizers, providers of new feature ideas, quality testers and most of all help find out extremely quickly if the service is actually useful or not. But the price to pay to develop a strong base of passionate users is the high level of customer support responsiveness required.
Final point, launching quickly probably doesn’t require a lot of money and ressources, thus avoiding an heavy and disturbing fundraising process happening too early in the company’s life cycle.
But other could argue that Stealth mode is the way to go because :
Even though first mover advantage is important, there are many advantages to be follower when it requires heavy infrastructure investment. As an example Google was not the first search tool in the market.
Entrepreneurs stay in Stealth mode sometimes not so much because they think their idea is unique but rather because they think there is no need to prematurely advertize.
Launching early with the key functionality of the site carries the risk of not reaching an acceptable quality level.
Shipping early and often is great but doesn’t necessarely means ship wide. Opening can be progressive with a viral approach from a predetermined and limited list of early testers. Thus avoiding to upset many people not ready to handle bugs and a too minimal level of features.
Feedback from users can be obtained without exiting strealth prematurely.

I leave it up to you to favor or not the Stealth mode vs Open approach from a start-up standpoint. As you may have guessed, i would rather recommend to go Open mode but with the difference of a progressive launch such as Joost when it come to opening it to testers and users.

I spent the week of march 5th in the Silicon Valley meeting about 10 companies and start-ups, thanks to the SF Orange Lab team support. Among them, we met successful ones in the area of Social networking, Virtual Worlds and other earlier stage projects realted to Music and e-commerce. I also met an « acceleration incubator » project aiming at helping French start-ups develop their business in the U.S. capitalising on the strong Silicon Valley ecosystem.
Beyond the cliché where we all think that U.S. start-ups have a unique way of developing their business in Europe through a first implementation in the U.K., it has been interesting to see how some of them have different european expansion strategies.
One of them is planning for instance to start from scratch an local subsidiary on a country by country basis: the idea is to use the « code » and the Brand of the mother company and then create a local legal entity with a local marketing team owning a share of it. It almost sounds like a franchising approach. The assumption here being that a local motivated team will have more chances to quickly start the take off of a local community of users and the implementation of local partnerships with Telco operators and industry players.
Another one in the same area is more relying on stronger focus on technology and in house knowledge of Telco mobile operators messaging systems (sms, mms) to ease connectivity with Telcos technical platforms. Thus making it possible to define mobile deployment strategies at Corporate level with their telco partners and accelerate then implementation at local level.
Another is more counting on leveraging their local early adopter user communities (French, Spanish, Italian..) from a US based community management team providing online dedicated support for service, technical and networking.
Finally others are aware of a time to market issue that they are already facing with their existing ressources within the US. They know it would take them more than 6 months or a year to define and implement a strong European strategy. Therefore they are keen to almost « outsource » to a powerful European Partner (like Orange) the management of their European local presence and developments.
Let’s also emphasize that some of them raised funds from VCs to specifically accelerate their European development.
It is obvious that there is not one single way for a US start-up to develop itself in Europe and there shouldn’t be one standardized way either for Orange to consider Partnerships with them.

http://www.orangepartner.com/site/enuk/news/events/orange_partner_camp/orlando/p_onetoone.jsp#1

http://www.telco2.net/event/agendaDay2_01.php
http://www.telco2.net/event/event_speakers.php

http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/telecoms/0,39040748,39366935,00.htm

Introducing the Orange « SMS Juke Box » (Orange Wifi Café) at the Midem Net 2007 in Cannes.
A new service which is being premiered at the Wifi Café Orange during Midem 2007. A playlist of songs is presented in a menu with a code for each one. All customers have to do is select a song and send the corresponding code by SMS. They then receive a message specifying the waiting time before the song is played… in the restaurant or cafe. Orange, in partnership with the start-up www.YCD.net is reinventing the jukebox, with a new mobile dimension.
Article in Music Info Hebdo : http://netft.francetelecom.fr/recurent/default/EN/all/rp/article0107/UPL6561_a_005/a_005.pdf
http://www.francetelecom.com/en/financials/journalists/press_releases/CP_old/cp070117.html
http://www.servicesmobiles.fr/services_mobiles/2007/01/services_musica.html

http://www.leweb3.com/leweb3/participants/index.html

http://www.pikeo.com/?locale=en

http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/11/29/new-phot-sharing-site-se-habla-espanol-et-francais/

http://www.ivcs.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=19