Week3, Day3

Scenarios, changed our scenarios :)

While working on scenarios, we found out that we have to add some elements to our business plan to get ready for future unexpected situations. For example while considering a natural disaster situation we had to add the back up restore plan for our infrastructure, also added risk buffers to our revenue projections. 

Week 3, Day 2

Noise is directly proportional to fragmentation of communication channels in open innovation 

From collaborative work exercise in our open innovation project, I have learnt that it is important to make single more visible communication channel for all the contributors is very crucial. Adding more channels to the communication may cause confusion among the collaborators and may result in extra effort to manage the fragmented  information.

Week3, Day 1

Crowd-sourcing 

“There occurs the beautiful feeling that only humanity together is the true human being, and that the individual can be cheerful and happy only if he has the courage to feel himself in the Whole.” 

― Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Truth and Fiction: Relating to My Life

Group working was the highlight of my last seven months in IDBM. Truly speaking it was quite a brain cooking experience. Watched strong talkers taking over the projects and then screwing them, the quiet and silent people rescuing every body in the end to safe the face. So it was pretty much all that we discussed earlier today. Some points to remember

• Big groups good at choosing but small groups good at implementing the innovation
• In organizations where group thinking prevails, sometime young new entrants acts a refreshing opposition.
• group behavior crucial for futurist thinking. The masses projects the trends.
• imitation is good as long as people can stop imitating when benefits of it decreases.
• For future predictions timing is the key element.
• It important to understand the reason behind the change.
• Small changes can cause ripples and butterfly effects.
• Scenarios building can help to handle unexpected.
• weak signals are the signals of new emerging issues they identified by changed behavior like wow effect.
• The main reasons for ignoring the changes are tendency to take short cuts, inability to see the change and denial from reality. 

YLE - Web based digital media -Sami Kallinen

We had been having lectures on open innovation since last week. On conceptual level Sami Kallinen's lecture was almost the same as last week's lectures, highlighting the pros and cons of open innovation with the data relevant to his field of work. However for me the take away of the day was his statement on future services design that you have to design your services with easy access for every body, independent of what technology users are using and irrespective of what devices they possess.
  

Week2, Day5

Keep on creating the technology and hang on!!!

Nokia have been under a lot of pressure in smart phones era because of continuous, fast paced and effective  innovations from competitors like Apple and Samsung. Once the leader of mobile phone devices market, Nokia had been pushed to the corner to fight for the survival. However, In the toughest of the times Nokia has shown quite a resilience and kept on trying to come back. The revenues from their cell phones intellectual property rights royalties  had been their life line for some years now but still they are able to leverage on them and try to catch up with market by creating more innovative technology and this was also the essence of  Jyri Hämäläinen's lecture on Friday. He has not talked much about the concepts of designing open innovation, Instead he focused on how they manage innovation at Nokia Research Centers. The main things I learnt from his lectures are

• Various kinds of emerging technologies in mobile phone devices like Media technologies, Radio systems, sensor technologies. Because of my work experience in mobile phone services domain I was ware of most pf these technologies but topics like "Graphene" and felixible electronics (Morphs) were new to me.
• The way Nokia collaborates with different educational institutions across the world to create the innovation, how they facilitate the whole process and how they take benefit from it.
• Universities acting along with companies as main source of open innovation providing platform for students establish themselves.
• Standardization, How small and large companies collaborate together to create a common standard for technology that all can use to create innovation.

Pros and Cons of Open Innovation.

Pros:

• Collaborations and large pool of resources working together
• Platform for university students to establish themselves
• Interoperability, as many organizations work together to create a common standard.
• Public funding to enable open innovation

Cons:

• No clear boundaries for ownership of the solution
• Project management is very complex in open innovation.

Week2, Day4:

Open Innovation, A mindset than a toolbox

Before the start of this course, I read an article about open innovation (http://www.openinnovation.eu/open-innovation) to get familiar with the stuff. The mobility and virtual existence of the workforce has make it impossible for organization to keep their knowledge based hidden from the outer world. So instead of fighting to keep it closed now companies are showing high tendency to share the knowledge  build on other works and open the untapped internal knowledge sources to outer world. In today's discussion we were discussing almost the same topics. The Insight video of Henry Chesbrough was really good in explaining the concepts in easiest possible way. The take aways of the day for me are

Benefits of Open Innovation

• Open innovation is allowing the organizations to build on the other work while promote the sharing of unused internal knowledge with external world
•  This helps in reducing the cost of development by a significant level. 
• Companies having valuable knowledge also make business through royalties of sharing knowledge. 

Challenges

• Leadership mindset is the biggest hurdle. There is always a fear in mind of company management that if somebody else will make their idea successful than it will show their incompetence.
• Most of the organizations think that most of smart people work for them. 

Trends in Open Innovations

• Usually companies look for getting knowledge from other but inside out knowledge transfer is being blocked   primarily because of the fear of competitions success.
• Universities on the other hand promote open innovation as it gives platform for sutends to establish themselves.

Open innovation Vs Open Source

• Both concepts are based on principle of wide spread knowledge.
• Difference is that open source is deliberately formed without business model while open innovation has the business aspect with it.

Week 2, Day 3

I finally met the quick Web Development!!!

I had been working in Information and communication technology for quite some time and  some of it needed a lot of focus on web technologies. But irony of the matter is that I have developed only one website in my life and that two around fifteen years ago when web development tools were not that developed as we have today. My course project is an online web community and networking service for single parents. So now I have the opportunity to actually  do some web developing using some online development tools. We started today with initial design of the webpage  and adding some functionality to it. The things I have learnt today are

• various available online web development tools.
• Started the webpage with wix.com
• Created my first ever web forum and community for online discussion.
• Created my first product catalogue.
• Learnt some methods of putting user registration forms. 
• Learnt the ways of integrating websites with social media.

Missing in early action!!!

I was not able to attend the lecture from Kati Sulin about Fazer beacuse of my physio appointment. Also I can only find one blog about it till now and that too with not much of information. So I shall wait for other IDBM bloggers to write their learning, So I can learn something out of them 

Week 2, Day 2

Social Media- Opportunity to differentiate and Power to dominate

For an instance if we put our self in the shoes of a marketeer for large consumer goods company, then what will be an ideal situation to communicate our message to target audience as a prospective customer? Firstly we should have access to masses. TV , news papers, radio and other conventional media can do that for us. But then we also require to know customer a so that we can effectively send the message to  address the specific customer needs. We also want to know if our message was actually delivered to target audience or not. Also we need to measure the feedback and response to the delivered message. Now conventional media does not have all this capability e.g. in TV there is no way of accurately measuring how many people have actually seen an advertisement and then no way to handle feedback. To get such insights companies have to run separate research activities. 

Now Social media has overcome most of these barriers. It can provide access to media, allows you to get insights of customer to identify the needs of customers, trends in the market and also provides a feedback medium to improve the products and services. It also gives relatively easy way of measuring the response of marketing campaign in terms of sales performance and change in brand image without running separate research campaigns. In today's lecture Jussi Pekka from Valio explained how Valio as a leading Finnish milk products company uses social media for marketing.

With my exposure to social media marketing during my professional career, I was aware of most of the presented concepts like Media Trinity, social media for differentiation, visibility and transparency of the company, customer insight and trend identification etc. But following points were the new learning and the take aways of the day for me.

•  Social media as a new customer service channel and market. Helps in keeping customer happy and engaged while providing simplified and cost effective method for companies. 
•   Social media as a sales tool attracts the customer, keeps them satisfied and engaged, helps in generating more sales for companies and also extending the sales life cycle of the products as compared to conventional market.
• New metrics insight helps in identifications of benefits that social media can bring to businesses, while differentiating it from conventional media. It provides healthy business cases for companies to invest more into social media marketing.