”99.5 percent of the people that walk around and say they are a social media expert or guru are clowns,”

he says, continuing with

“we are going to live through a devastating social media bubble.”

Source: Techcrunch

We held the first Social Innovation Sydney Startup Camp this weekend. It was great to see so many people willing to work together in an open and collaborative way on developing social innovation projects.

It really inspires me with hope for the future of our world to see people join together, starting as strangers, and collaborate on social innovation ideas so effectively.

There’s a nice round-up of Startup Camp from @lucyjjames on her blog: day 1 and day 2; and a some feedback from the participants on Social Innovation Sydney.

The two different kinds of innovation are:

1. continuous improvement – the drive for operational excellence, which is driven by optimising existing business processes and products (in the Six Sigma world the DMAIC approach is used for this kind of change)
2. step-change innovation – creating new ways of thinking, new products and new ways of doing things (in the Six Sigma world the DMADV or DFSS approach is used for this kind of change)

It often seems that the revenue and cost impacts of these two different kinds of innovation is little understood.

The former, optimisation, generally has the effect of reducing costs. This is an admirable thing and is always worth doing.

However, I sometimes think that we are in danger of optimising the customer service and humanity completely out of our business operations by focusing so much on cost out initiatives.

The second kind, step-change innovation, is more focused on new revenue opportunities. This is the lifeblood of any business, it is not sustainable to keep taking costs out of the business and merely optimising the existing business and products.

Sustaining innovation within existing businesses is hard. Academics have been researching for years seeking the secret sauce of innovation so that we can pour it into our businesses and succeed according to some formula.

But it is not that easy. Innovation is hard. I’ve done it from inside of large organisations. New ideas are difficult to achieve consensus upon. New products are hard to bring to birth when everyone is already doing well with the existing products. It is hard to get people to buy into change unless there is a substantial reason to get their attention.

Everyone is usually running hard to keep up and to meet the current KPIs and the last thing they need is some crazy innovator trying to stop them from getting business as usual done.

Innovation is risky and entails the possibility of failure.  It is important to ask ourselves how we can make this risky business of innovation work for our particular organisation.   A key factor is how failures are treated.  Another important factor is allowing some time out of normal business to build the innovation idea into reality.

In my experience innovation within a successful existing business is only possible with the help, protection and support of highly engaged senior executives.  Every time I’ve tried it without this type of support it’s been almost impossible to survive the political tension between innovation, business as usual and meeting existing KPIs.

However, there is one certain thing.  Operational excellence and continuous improvement are not the way to grow a business.  But they are a great idea for freeing up some funds to invest in step-change innovation that creates new business models and new products.  Thus it is important for an organisation to make space for both kinds of innovation.

There’s been a great line-up of speakers so far, with:

• Bernie Hobbs, ABC Science (who’s doing an excellent job as Conference host)
• Dr Andrew Maynard, Director of the University of Michigan Risk Science Center and the Charles and Rita Gelman Risk Science Professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health.
• Natasha Mitchell , ABC presenter of All In The Mind.
• Wilson da Silva , Editor-in-Chief of COSMOS
• Elena McMaster , Nanotechnology Project for Friends of the Earth Australia
• Craig Thomler , Gov 2.0 advocate
• Dr Craig Cormick , Manager of Public Awareness and Community Engagement for the Australian Government’s Department of Innovation, Industry, Science and Research
• Dr Kristen Lyons, Senior lecturer in Sociology at the University of Queensland

Dr Andrew Maynard’s keynote on Social media and science communication – a load of Jackson Pollocks? was interesting and he noted his top three issues to consider for science communication:

• Hubris – disregarding the medium because you don’t understand it. Assumed authority – old model does not work, and Control – “rather misguided theory that we can control conversations”.
• Creating value – behaving like rockstars does not give us credibility as science communicators – remember cause & effect. Trying to mimic viral videos and blogs is not the answer need to have the good content that creates value.
• Uncivil behaviour – feeling that we can “tell people forcefully what is right until the get the message” – ends up alienating people we need to connect with.

And a fascinating panel session on Web 2.0 or Web too far? chaired by Natash Mitchell. The panel discussed topics as varied as:

• Online democratisation and/or demonization.
• How to manage when the web is used to distort, misinform and distribute propaganda.
• How anti-science ideologies and commercial agendas use the web, and how we should use social media to democratise scientific knowledge.

This year I remember some family members – Claude and Tim from Crows Nest, and Henry Demas – who fought in the Second World War. These men were ordinary working class blokes, not famous, not important. Based on stories and their military records they were larrikins with some disrespect for hierarchy and authority.

Local boys from Crows Nest in Sydney, Claude and Tim fought in North Africa and the Pacific. They sailed to the Middle East and were at Tobruk for part of the siege. After being withdrawn from Tobruk and following a training period in Palestine they took part in the two epic battles at El Alamein (first battle of El Alamein and second battle of El Alamein) before returning to Australia in time for offensives against the Japanese in the New Guinea campaign. Their fourth and final campaign took place in British North Borneo.

Claude and Tim returned at the end of the war. But they did not return the same as they had left. Not physically damaged, yet they were each damaged in some ways.

Claude returned as an extremely angry man. He became an alcoholic, abandoned his young family, lived an itinerant existence and died alone in a veteran’s hospital on a Christmas Day in the 1960s. Ironically, after so many years of wandering away from his family, the hospital in which he died was only a few minutes away from his family who were celebrating Christmas. A sad end to the life of a man who, by all accounts, was intelligent and easy going in his youth.

Tim – a polite, kind and unassuming man – married, worked in a factory and lived a quietly medicated existence until his death in the 1980s. He never could sleep very well after the war and only rested with the help of medication and beer. Always a natty dresser, Tim never left the house without wearing a ‘proper’ hat; and he maintained meticulous personal hygiene throughout his life.

Washing and carefully drying his feet was an extremely important ritual for Tim several times a day. As a young child I did not understand any of this. I never understood why he was so obsessed with keeping his feet clean and dry. But I bet if we’d fought in tropical New Guinea and Borneo during that fierce fighting in impossible jungle terrain we’d want clean and dry feet for the rest of our life too.

I can truly understand why the generation of men who went off to fight in World War 2 wanted to come home and live quietly ordered lives. I can see the attraction of a world where supper was on the table at 6pm and everyone was safely behind their white picket fences.

Henry Demas was much more unlucky than Tim and Claude. He was part of the Australian 2/18th Battalion and was taken prisoner by the Japanese at the fall of Singapore in February 1942. This is such a sad story. He survived Sandakan – one of the most horrific parts of the war in the Pacific – until the war was almost over. Henry survived several of the Sandakan Death Marches only to die very close to ANZAC Day in 1945 – 28 April 1945. That simple fact made me cry. The Japanese surrender was only a few months away in September 1945. To be so close to the end and not survive seems terribly poignant.

But then only six men survived the horror of Sandakan, which some refer to as “Australia’s holocaust“. The exact numbers of the dead at Sandakan, as recorded by the Australian War Memorial: 2428 “known” dead: 1787 Australians and 641 British.

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”
Source: The Ode

Lest we forget.

It was pretty cool to discover that I have both a pirate and a convict relative. And Talk Like a Pirate Day will probably never be the same.

But then I started to delve a bit further into this story and the layers of complexity began to emerge.

My ancestor, Damianos Ninis, was appparently a Greek freedom fighter in the Greek War of Independence – the war against Ottoman Turkish oppression.

It is reported that at his trial the defence argued that:

the Greeks who were fighting a war against the Turks had the right “under international law to remove articles of war from a neutral ship proceeding to an enemy-occupied port (namely, Alexandria).” The verdict rendered by the Court stated that Manolis, Ninis and Vasilakis were to be sentenced to death, whilst Boulgaris, Papandreou, Stroumboulis and Laritsos though sentenced to death “but with a recommendation of these four to mercy, since, they had not taken a leading part nor committed any act of violence.”
Source: A History of Greek Migration and Settlement to Australia by Stavros T.Stavridis

It turns out that Damianos survived his time in Australia, arriving on the Norfolk in 1829. He was granted a complete pardon in 1836 and returned to Greece the following year. Two of his sons later returned to Australia, hence the family line continues here.

All of this got me thinking about how important the words we use really are.

It is likely that Damianos and his compatriots considered themselves to be freedom fighters against an oppressive regime. To the Turks they were probably classified as terrorists, and the British categorised them as pirates.

I wonder how we can work this kind of thing out now. Who is a freedom fighter, who is a terrorist? The question is very apt now with the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. And I suspect that there are no easy answers.