The Flicker Blog and Podcast

Whilst listening to the Innovation in Established Organizations panel discussion from Supernova 2006, I was struck by a remark made during the Q&A session. Unfortunately, the person making the remark didn’t attribute it (so I’ve no idea of the source ) but the general idea expressed was: In order to improve the efficiency of core business processes, you must remove all variation; yet in order to improve innovation in business processes, variation must be increased.

There’s always been a tension in organisational culture between the need to innovate and the need to make money more effectively, and for me, this apparently straightforward observation reveals an awful lot about the clashing ideologies that we all encounter from time to time.

A dry and lengthy (but no less interesting) presentation by Verna Allee from the 2006 Mesh Forum on how the language of traditional economics is often innapropriate for understanding or explaining contemporary online business. We often hear of intangible assets; this presentation explains the need to quantify and measure them.

Economies are usually measured, valued or understood on the basis of trading finite resources. The information/attention/knowledge/etc. economy is hugely different. Put simply, knowledge multiplies when distributed – unlike a tangible product, it does not become scarcer.

Talking about traditional accounting practices, she highlights one of the major institutional and ideological conflicts that arise – to paraphrase:
The typical HR mantra: ‘People are our greatest asset.’
A typical accounting statement: ‘People are our biggest expense.’
If a business can’t agree on where it has value, how can it grow it?