Women + Innovation

A few weeks ago, I saw Amber Case (Cyber Anthropologist) speak at TED: Women.

Amber spoke to some interesting themes in the techno social world -- that tools have always been an extension of our physical self, but that today so many of our tools are the extentions of our mental selves. We carry around the equivalent of 1000 lbs of information in our digital selves, and we are present (interacting with others) even when we're not physically there. Its leading to ambient intimacy and panic architecture. Most importantly, though, she reminded me what I already know: that the creation of self requires meditation, self-relfection, and long term planning.

 

Which is why last week I turned off my cyber self and spent hours each day playing in the snow (technically Cyber Eli -- or ElitheChef -- was turned off for two weeks thanks to the stomach flu). No FB, No Twitter, No Email. And that is how I missed this very interesting conversation and debate about women in technology. To summarize:

 

The Wall Street Journal criticizes Michael Arrington of not supporting women in tech. He responds with this post, pointing the blame at women -- who don't want it bad enough. A number of other people respond, but here's the challenge (posed by Violet Blue here) that I find most interesting:

 

"Tell me exactly why we should have more women in tech. What benefits it brings to business, to profit, to innovation. To development. To leading companies and advising them. I bet you can’t. And for that, you are always going to be full of it."

 

I think its a good challenge, in part, because I can answer it. Off the cuff -- here are my reasons why:

 

1. To business -- women bring new business models. More women are systems thinkers and in that -- they are thinking about the whole product experience, from supply to distribution. They are thinking about the direct and the indirect costs. They are considering externalities. In doing so, they are generating new business models that are generate products better for us and better for our communities.

 

2. To business (and to leading companies and advising them) -- $$$$. Blue touches on the statistics here, as well as the return to share holders. God knows, I go blue in the face talking about them.

 

3. To leading and advising companies -- Risk Awareness. It was love at first sight when I heard this talk by Halla Tomasdottir, who has created a venture firm based on feminine principles. In doing so, she answers questions about risk, and the myths about women being more risk adverse.

 

4. To innovation and development (and obviously, I'm not a developer, this is just anecdotal) -- Tim Brown has a famous story about kids developing product ideas based. When segregated by gender, the girls created 200 more ideas then the boys. They attributed this to the boys competing to speak over one another, and the girls listning to each idea -- a process which generated better brainstorming.

 

5. To innovation and development -- female centric design. So few designers are thinking about the other half of the population and those that are (ahem, Apple, the Femme Den, etc) are doing a pretty good job. Disclaimer -- female centric design won't come only from women leaders, but just like men design products thinking about themselves as the end user, so do women, ergo....

 

6. To innovation and development -- collaboration. In its real sense.

 

I'm going to stop now, but I think its an interesting excersise. It's not about pointing fingers, but it keeping the conversation about "why" pertinent, because that'll hopefully change the dialogue, the mindset, the conventional thinking. It's not about equality. It's about difference.

 

What the Workplace can Learn from Gaming Mechanics

At lunch recently, a friend told me that her company had recently been awarded one of the best places to work for women. Then, she paused. I asked her what that meant, and she paused again. “I really don’t know.”

There are any number of awards out there that recognize companies efforts to increase gender diversity, especially in senior management. Applauded efforts include mentoring programs, flexibility, and board diversity. ForbesWomen even recently published the ranking of the 10 Best Cities to live in for working mothers.

These are all good efforts. But while companies employing these strategies are recognizing the importance of women, they aren’t fundamentally trying to change the workplace itself. They are, as Steve Blank writes, still asking women to know the boys rules and be willing to play be them. These are the rules that make women feel like the odd (wo)man out in an organization; the rules that favor hierarchy and competition over collaboration, and are a little chincy when it comes to the positive feedback. Tired of these rules, women will pull the “it’s not you its me” line and high tail it out of management. More likely than not, she’ll start her own gig, but without economies of scale or access to the capital she needs for big time enterprises. There is a 94% chance that her business will never net more than $1 million in revenue.

Serendipitously, a friend wrote a piece for the Stanford Social Innovation Review -- noting that civic organizations had a lot to learn from gaming mechanics. It got me intrigued enough that I tracked down Jane McConigal’s TED talk about how gaming can change the world. In her research, gamers are head over heals committed to their work because of the 4 elements of gaming mechanics:

1. Urgent Optimism. You are given an urgent task to save the world, but it is calibrated to your skill level, so more often than not, it’ll be hard, but you can do it!

2. Collaborators and community surrounds you. Collaborators want to see you succeed, they offer you help, AND they give you positive feedback. You are part of a tightly woven social fabric.

3. Blissful productivity. You are working hard, solving problems, and there is nothing that makings you happier.

4. Epic Meaning. Enough said. Everyone wants to be part of something meaningful. Something bigger than themselves.

These are the same mechanics that underscore feminine ways of leadership. Which might explain why, according to a recent Forbes’ article, “the new face of videogaming is almost as likely to be a 30-something woman as a teenage boy--and not just in her leisure time.” McConigal would tell you that people become addicted to gaming because they are more successful in gaming than they are in the real world. Given the overlay of feminine leadership and gaming mechanics, its not hard to make the leap that women will be more successful in the gaming world than in the world of management.

Which begs the question, what can companies learn from gaming mechanics that would also help them really engage, retain, and unleash the power of women in the workplace? According to Forbes, companies are recognizing the value of gaming for training; what would it look like if we incorporate gaming mechanics into organization design? Would this change the rules? And in changing the rules, would it improve the environment for everyone?

I would put $10 on yes.

Work space and the summer kitchen

I have a vision for a business strategy + design firm for Portland, that will cull together the rich raw creative talent of our city and marry it with business opportunity. Occasionally, I can even see what it looks like, and my office space definitely has a working test kitchen. Why? Because I can best describe things -- from experiences to people -- in the vernacular of food. Everything takes on a taste, color, feel. Synthesis can be best described in food combination -- sea salt caramels anyone? And because food substances lend themselves to rapid prototyping.

This vision became a bit more robust today when a friend sent me a link to the Salt Water Farm in Lincolnville. She thought I would enjoy their feasts and classes -- which I likely will. But what most struck me was the description of their kitchen:

"The space is designed around the concept of a summer kitchen. Native to the North, these kitchens are set away from the house, near the garden. They are a place where vegetables are gathered on tabletops, summer berries are preserved for the fruitless months of winter, loaves of bread are baked and set to rest, fish are filleted and smoked, tomatoes are left to warm in the sun and where a chef is free to cook as he/she pleases, undisturbed."

To me, this reads messiness and creativity at its best. Beautiful.

Yet, some order is required. Preserving requires sterilization. Space is a prerequisite of dough.

It got me thinking, can we design work spaces that mirror the summer kitchen -- bringing together the messiness of creativity with the order of productivity?

OpenIDEO Forces ME Open

So, I've been sitting on this blog for a couple of months -- unsure if I wanted to commit to it, but enjoying the opportunity to write on a few topics that bring me total joy. Signaling Ownership was one of the first blogs I put down -- noodling on this particular innovation challenge: how do we reward the investment and signal ownership without derailing collaboration and the role of the ecosystem in getting any one innovation off the ground?

Two days ago (Monday evening to be exact), OPENIdeo launched, and to some extent posited one solution -- your personal DESIGN Quotient.

Originally, I thought the site would be another crowd sourcing competition to elicit innovative ideas to social issues. But digging in, OpenIdeo wants users to engage in the entire creative process -- from inspiration, to riffing on that inspiration, to conceptualizing ideas, to riffing on those ideas, to evaluation.

Therein getting at the collaboration aspect of my challenge.

NEXT... as a community user, your participation in the site begins to build your DESIGN quotient -- the degree to which you contribute, collaborate, inspire, and create. At the end of the day, you get a DQ badge to reflect your identity as a designer.

Therein getting at the "ownership" aspect of my challenge.

So... It'll be a lot of fun to participate and see how it works (Scott and I enjoyed a few hours with ball game playing on the site last night), so I'm quite hopeful. Here's a video explaining how it all works:

Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

It also convinced me to get off the pot so to speak with this blog.

Today is as good as day as any to go live.
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Part Time Lover

I snorkelled at a post to the LinkedIn Maine Entrepreneurs group the other day. It argued that "part-time" entrepreneurs, those who build the venture 'on the side' aren't serious, won't attract the attention or capital that they need, and ultimately won't succeed.

Tough love. And good advice. For any one who falls into the following categories:
- a kept man or women
- an independently wealthy man or women
- any entrepreneur on round 2+, having successfully exited from a preceeding venture

For the rest of us, there is cash flow to deal with.

Last week, I ran into an entrepreneur who's new venture is in the "women" space and so we often connect and collaborate. I had heard that she had accepted a full time position and inquired how that was going. "Its a job," she replied. "I hope that I will be able to devote myself full time to [insert top secret venture name] in December." We commiserated about the concern (gossip?) people have expressed -- is the venture over and done with? Is it in trouble?

I also heard from another friend, that her serial-entrepreneur-husband (he has two start-ups in the works) had just accepted a full time position with a company in Massachusetts, recognizing that his start-ups are at least 1-3 years down the pike.

The Stefanski household maintains a professional service arm, Bazaar Strategies, which specializes in the innovation and product/business development space. Two of Scott's start-ups (including the current one) have come through Bazaar Strategies. It's a nice complement. His side of the business also enables him to work with people who lend human and social capital to the new venture. Again, a nice complement. That said, meeting new people, he will often run into a singular challenge: "What do I pitch?" Will he be taken seriously if he's doing contract work while launching a new venture? It's a common problem that many of my venturing friends talk about.

But I have to wonder, is this really a problem?

In a recent blog post, Seth Godin describes the perfect problem. It's the one you can't solve because their are too many "requirements." Knock down any of these requirements and you have a solution. (It's like Jack Traven's "shoot the hostage" scenario in SPEED... oy, late night television is just not the same when the Sox are on the West Coast.")Entrepreneurs do worry about whether investor's will take them seriously if they are only part-time. But I wonder, is this an intractable problem or do they worry because self-help gurus, like the guy in the LinkedIn group, tell them to worry. Do they worry about it because there are life coaches out there espousing the value of "freeing yourself to explore who you really want to be in the world."

The real entrepreneur knows that there is a lonnnnnggggg early life cycle to the start up. Activities are slow; there is research, prototyping, testing, and iterative revisions. There is also a whole lot of waiting, and I don't seem harm or fowl in filling down time with activities that will keep the lights on.

The time will come when its all or nothing, and at that point, the entrepreneur will dive in head first.

Signaling Ownership

I had a conversation yesterday with a Maine angel who previously worked in one of the state's innovation programs. "A key issue," she tells me, "is that all of the state programs want to own the entrepreneur, in order to be able to claim their success and demonstrate a good ROI." As such, the programs compete rather than complement; silos form and the ecosystem of support that the entrepreneur really needs to succeed is damaged. Interestingly enough, Saul Kapln called this in his keynote address at the Maine Innovation Economy Summit.

The social innovation space is guilty of a similar issue. Any good social entrepreneur could be claimed by Ashoka, TED, the Acumen Fund, the Skoll Foundation, etc. etc. At GlobalGiving, we called many of these talented individuals "Triple Crown Winners." In the social space, these individuals become "product" which build brand and promise, and demonstrate a good SROI. Same problem, though, while the reputation aspects are important for the entrepreneur's credibility, the competition driven by ownership may damage the complete support the entrepreneur needs.

The human driver is probably a mix of ownership, meaning, and belonging (as well as, of course, the ongoing effort to build a parallel with the private sector ROI). It is a similar set of drivers that, in the retail philanthropic space, find nonprofits creating micro-donation options, e.g. $3 will educate a child in Burma. While helpful for giving the donor a sense of meaning and contribution, it is likely an inaccurate outcome, because the costs of educating children are likely fixed, and $3 is meaningless without the other, say, $299,997 (there are a host of other issues here as well, e.g. $3/child may buy one level of education and $6/child may buy another).

It creates an interesting design challenge, how do we reward the investment and signal ownership without derailing collaboration and the role of the ecosystem in getting any one innovation off the ground?

I'll be interested to see how Kickstarter and Profounder (both enable crowdfunding for private ventures) manage this challenge.