There’s too much going around my brain right now…
New models for managing rights and copyright on digital materials: Reacting to the recent Mandelson madness. Don’t cut off our broadband, allow us to pay what’s fair for content, whilst watching or listening to it anywhere we want – after all we’ve paid for it, we deserve to be able to do at least that! However, the ‘industry’ doesn’t know how to do this because it limits its thinking to the outdated modes of rights management we have today.
Social R&D: The value of domain exploration i.e. companies and individuals following curiosity-based research with end consumers in the context of a specific domain or industry, to see what needs, and opportunities they can un-earth before then innovating around those areas; rather than focusing on trying to solve particular perceived ‘problems’.
Firms of endearment: Having re-watched a Lou Carbone talk at MIX09, I re-adjusted some of my investment strategies today. He cites “Firms of endearment” a book that asked people “what companies would you mourn the loss of?” and shows that the companies that topped this chart hugely outperform the rest of the marketplace. What if we only invested in companies that we love? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if the companies we hated shrivelled up and died a lot faster precisely because nobody loved them? Or those investment strategies actually influenced companies to change their ways to focus more on experience and getting us to love them.
Influencing Behaviour Change as a new discipline or area of study within the context of the industries I work in taking what has been learned in other areas and applying it to some of the challenges we face. Many of our society’s problems are due to fixed modes of behaviour. “If only people would… “ is a common cry levelled at problems as far ranging as climate change and anti-social behaviour. I’ve noticed a few things that give me some clues that potentially ‘community’ is quite a key influencing factor in behaviour change. However is anyone really focusing on behaviour change? Or are we split into two halves: Those who assume behaviour change won’t happen, and so change the environment or create solutions that don’t require people to change their behaviour (low carbon houses or low emission vehicles for example) – and those who assume you have to incentivise behaviour change, and limit themselves primarily to stick or carrot measures (charge people for carrier bags or pay them to recycle). Is there a trick we’re missing by not focusing at a more granular level on how people make decisions, and how over time we can influence behaviour change in a more sophisticated way in a number of areas that will make a difference to our society.
The question is… which shall I explore first??