Marshall McLuhan very often provides an instructive reference point for how we understand our changing world. As I wrote in my Chapter 1 of Living Networks:
The brilliant visionary Marshall McLuhan accurately described the media as an extension of our senses. Your eyes can see what’s happening in your immediate vicinity, your ears can hear what people are saying in the same room as you, but with television and radio as an adjunct to your senses, you can see and hear anywhere around the world. All of the cameras and microphones of the world’s media are an extension of your eyes and ears, and journalists are your personal emissaries to report on their findings and impressions.
In my keynote on The Future of Crowds at TheNextWeb conference shown below I built on this perspective to suggest that:
“Crowds are an extension of our capabilities”
Continue reading Why crowds are an extension of our capabilities
Below is a brief interview I did when I spoke at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam recently.
Some of the points I cover:
Continue reading We have a choice whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about the future
Last week I had an early evening meeting set up with Indy Johar, the inspiring co-founder of Hub Westminster. When I arrived I found that Indy had invoked an ‘Open Meeting Protocol’, offering £10 to Matt Sevenoaks of KPMG to join the meeting, who in turn invited Shelley Kuipers, the CEO of Chaordix, who as it happens I had conversed with on email as reecently as a few days before but had never met in real-life. Another Hub Westminster member Pamela joined us.
To be frank I don’t completely understand the protocol, even after viewing the very interesting Prezi explanation below from David Pinto. In essence it is a structure for inviting people to join a meeting by paying them (nominally) £10, and thus participating in a value-creating structure.
Continue reading Open Meeting Protocol and the structure of emergent collaboration
[This post first appeared on the Getting Results From Crowds book website]
Over the last two weeks I have delivered 8 keynotes or workshops on crowdsourcing across Western Europe. Most of them have been highly interactive sessions, bringing out new ideas or highlighting common issues or concerns. Part of the intent has been to gather input from many participants on what to cover in
There is much to share. For now, I will quickly review the events I’ve run so far and highlight just one insight that was prominent in the questions or discussions from each event. Many of themes mentioned were in fact echoed across several events. I will write soon in more detail about a number of these topics.
- Ketchum Pleon Amsterdam client presentation
Insight 1: Know when to use open calls and managed crowds.
A question that frequently arises when you discuss crowdsourcing is how to manage the sheer quantity of input you can get. Of course the best approach depends on what type of crowdsourcing you are doing, but the first answer is in the filtering mechanisms that you use, which enable the most valuable input to become visible. However another approach is to use a closed crowd, where participants are selected by quality or profile. In this case you can take a ‘managed crowd’ approach in which a more individualized approach optimizes outcomes. While many definitions of crowdsourcing refer to an ‘open call’, in fact in many siutations restricting the pool of contributors will lead to better results.
Continue reading 8 crowd insights from 8 crowdsourcing workshops
TheNextWeb produced a good quality video of my keynote at TheNextWeb Conference 2012, shown below.
It doesn’t show all of my full motion graphics presentation, though it frequently cuts to show segments of the visuals through my keynote. I will create and share a full video of my motion graphics presentation along with the audio of me speaking, however as I’m travelling it may take a little while to complete.
Here is a brief overview of the structure of the presentation:
Continue reading Video of TheNextWeb keynote on The Future of Crowds
Internet dystopian Andrew Keen, author most recently of Digital Vertigo, has just spoken at TheNextWeb Summit and Conference.
He and his arguments are intensely annoying because his case is blindly and obtusely one-sided, though it is useful to have his voice to provide a counterpoint to digital utopianism.
Part of his argument is that we are giving away too much of our identity and personal data. That is absolutely valid, and it is good that people are reminded to think carefully about what they share online.
However Andrew conflates oversharing with the shift to crowds, going so far as to suggest that there is no value in crowds. Yesterday in specific response to my prior Summit presentation on The Future of Crowds Andrew said that all innovation, all new ideas of value, come from brilliant individuals.
Continue reading Why Andrew Keen is fundamentally wrong about crowds
I am giving keynotes this Wednesday at TheNextWeb CxO Summit and on Friday at TheNextWeb Conference.
My topic will be the Future of Crowds, a big picture view of how crowds will be the future of everything, including its impact on work, organizations, business models, capitalism, reputation, media, marketing, innovation, opportunity, and government.
However one of the most interesting aspects of my keynote is that my visual presentation will consist entirely of motion graphics, 3D, and video – there will be no still images.
I first started experimenting with using Flash in presentations in the 1990s, and often use a variety of videos and flash embedded into my presentations. For many years I have wanted to create an entirely moving graphic presentation. When I was asked to speak at TheNextWeb, I thought it was a great opportunity to finally do it.
For the last few weeks I have been working with a global team of moving graphic and 3D designers to create my visual presentation.
Continue reading Keynote at TheNextWeb: The future is motion graphic presentations
On 1 May I am running a half-day Crowdsourcing for Startups and Social Innovation workshop at Hub Westminster.
From 1:30pm to 5:00pm we will run a highly interactive session looking at the practical ways in which crowds and crowdsourcing can be used to drive value in crowds and crowdsourcing.
We will primarily look at the crowdsourcing landscape, how to get outstanding results from using crowds, how to drive successful crowdfunding, and crowd business models for profit and non-profit, exploring many examples of how entrepreneurs and social innovators are using the ideas, energy, and enthusiasm of crowds to create amazing new ventures. Crowdsourcing is at the heart of how value is going to be created.
Continue reading Discount for London incubators at Crowdsourcing for Startups and Social Innovation workshop
I am currently in transit in Hong Kong on the way to London for a few days with my and my goddaughter’s family at the beginning of a five-week speaking tour. Below is my itinerary in case you’d like to get along to any of the events. My schedule is jam packed in almost all of the locations on the tour. However there are two gaps in my schedule 5-9 and 11-14 May, so do let me know if you are interested in discussing engaging me on any of the days that I am currently free, for example for executive briefings on the future of business or business transformation.
Continue reading European speaking tour: What, where, and what else
Je viens de faire une courte vidéo à propos du crowdsourcing.
Dans mon livre Getting Results from Crowds, qu’on pourraît traduire par “Obtenir des résultats des masses”, j’explique comment les organisations, petites et grandes, doivent procéder pour bien utiliser le crowdsourcing.
À Paris, le 3 mai, je présente avec le Boostzone Institute un petit-déjeuner à propos du crowdsourcing. Je vais parler en détail des opportunités, des défis et de comment les entreprises doivent s’y prendre.
J’espère vous y voir!
On April 28, immediately after my keynote at TheNextWeb conference in Amsterdam, I will travel to Cologne to run a workshop on the Future of Crowdsourcing. Unfortunately I will miss what looks like an excellent Crowdsourcing Summit on April 27 as I will be speaking in Amsterdam that day.
I’ve made a short video to introduce some of what we’ll be covering in the Future of Crowdsourcing workshop.
Continue reading Future of Crowdsourcing workshop at Crowdsourcing Summit in Cologne
I start a busy five week European speaking tour from this Saturday with a weekend in London with my wife the jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two lovely little girls before heading on the Tuesday to Amsterdam for my first keynote at TheNextWeb Conference.
Since Victoria and I will both be in London I wanted to organize a catch-up drinks for people we know, and also anyone else who wants to come along. As such I thought we could frame it as a ‘Future and Design’ drinks, with all welcome. Details here:
Date: Monday 23 April
Time: 6:00-8:30pm
Venue: Alphabet Bar, 61-63 Beak Street, Soho, London W1F 9SL (Map)
Continue reading London Future and Design drinks on 23 April – hope to see you there!
I’m at the Melbourne Google Enterprise Atmosphere on Tour event, the first of 25 events around the world. I am doing the keynote on The Evolution of Business at the Melbourne and Sydney events, giving an external perspective which happens to be highly aligned with the Google vision.
The event included a Google Apps demo. Since in my organizations we have used Google Apps for several years the demo initially seemed very straightforward to me, though in fact I did see a number of features that we are not yet using that would be useful.
The demo seemed to be over-emphasizing the concurrent editing and collaboration features of Google Docs, which I think of as pretty basic. However it struck me that in fact the vast majority of organizations represented in the audience still store most of their business documents on a hard disk somewhere. The number of documents being emailed between people inside companies today is still massive.
That is crazy. Emailing documents back and forth is fraught with staggering problems, not least version control.
Continue reading Every business document should be in the cloud and concurrently editable
Yesterday I ran Getting Results From Crowds and Crowd Business Models workshops in Sydney, the first in a global series of crowdsourcing workshops.
In opening the Crowd Business Models workshop, I ran through some of the driving forces that are shifting business models to crowds. I had quickly drawn up the list the evening before the workshop, with the first coming to mind Distributed Attention.
During the workshop we had an awesome panel of three of Sydney’s top entrepreneurs: Rebekah Campbell of Posse, Sebastien Eckersley-Maslin of BlueChilli and Phil Morle of Pollenizer.
Each one of them spoke about how much harder it is to get people’s attention than even a year or two ago. For each of them, one of the fundamental reasons that business models need to start with crowds is that individual attention is increasingly fleeting. You can’t bolt on crowds to a business model as an afterthought – it must be at the center.
Continue reading The MegaTrend of Distributed Attention is driving everything
Je suis enchanté de faire une présentation à Paris 3 mai avec Boostzone Institute. Dominique Turcq de l’institut et moi avons discuté depuis longtemps de notre intérêt commun qui est le futur du travail et des organisations.
Je vais parler du “Crowdsourcing”. Mon nouveau livre Getting Results From Crowds vient de paraître, et en mai-juin je fais des keynote et des ateliers sur le sujet à Sydney, Amsterdam, Cologne, Londres, Bruxelles, New York et San Francisco, entre autres.
Pour moi, un futurologue, c’est quelqu’un qui aide les gens à réfléchir à propos de l’avenir, afin de prendre de meilleures décisions aujourd’hui.
Quand je regarde l’avenir du monde des affaires, il est clair pour moi que le crowdsourcing, ou faire appel aux masses, vont être au centre de comment le business, la société, et les entreprises vont changer.
Continue reading Le Crowdsourcing en France: une opportunité de créer le futur
For me, the most interesting part of my new book Getting Results From Crowds is Chapter 22 on Crowd Business Models (which you can download here). I knew that after getting the book out a major direction for me would be delving deeper into the wonders of crowd business models. I’m now beginning to do some more exploring, together with lots of other people.
Next Monday I run a Crowd Business Models workshop in Sydney, the first in a global series of crowdsourcing workshops.
My Crowd Business Models framework below, like all my frameworks, is in perpetual beta. Part of the intention of the workshop series is that we will collectively evolve my crowdsourcing frameworks, including the one for crowd business models.
The Startup Genome project setup a year ago to gather comparative data on startups around the world. Its Startup Compass allows entrepreneurs to compare statistics on their companies with others in their locality and around the world.
A post on Techcrunch provides a great summary of some of the data gathered in the almost 12 months since the launch of the project.
I was particularly interested in the rankings of startup cities around the world, reproduced below. There is no question that the US is no longer the predominant startup country in a world in which economic and entrepreneurial activity is increasingly global.
Continue reading Entrepreneurship becomes global: the top 25 startups hubs in the world
We are kicking off our global series of crowdsourcing workshops on Monday 16 April in Sydney, with a morning workshop on Getting Results From Crowds and an afternoon workshop on Crowd Business Models.
In the following weeks I will be running crowdsourcing workshops in Cologne, London, Paris, Brussels, and New York, followed later in the year by San Francisco and other leading cities.
In the spirit of crowdsourcing, we are offering a free pass to the full day consisting of both workshops in Sydney to the two best answers to the question:
What new opportunities does crowdsourcing create for growing businesses?
You can answer in two ways:
Continue reading Competition! Win free pass to Sydney workshops on how to grow your business using crowdsourcing
The JOBS crowdfunding Act is a great step forward, but the potential of the entire scheme is undermined by the lack of reputation measures.
This is my first opportunity to write about the historic passing on Thursday of the JOBS (Jumpstart Our Business Startups) Act that allows equity crowdfunding in the US.
I have covered the early moves towards equity crowdfunding in the US that resulted in this bill and included a chapter on the topic in Getting Results From Crowds. It is very exciting to see this come to fruition, in the end faster than almost anyone could have predicted.
I believe that this is a critical shift that is taking capitalism into a new phase. The capital markets are – finally – becoming more open, allowing capital to go where it will be best used.
Continue reading No reputation measures is the critical flaw in the JOBS crowdfunding bill
The purchase by Havas of a majority stake in crowdsourced ad agency Victors & Spoils is a sign of a major shift in the advertising industry.
I have written several times before about crowdsourced advertising agency Victors & Spoils. V&S Founder and CEO John Winsor spoke at our Future of Crowdsourcing Summit, and I have since written about some of their lead work with Harley-Davidson and where they have taken that.
The big news today is that global advertising conglomerate Havas has taken a majority stake in V&S, also naming John Winsor as Chief Innovation Officer for the group.
Continue reading V&S acquired by Havas: A pivotal moment for crowdsourcing in advertising
[Originally posted on Getting Results From Crowds book website]
As awareness of crowdsourcing increases, there is a rapidly increasing appetite for learning how to do it well.
Yesterday I spoke at the City of Sydney’s Let’s Talk Business event on Outsourcing: Costs Down + Revenues Up, alongside highly experienced executives such as Matt Barrie, CEO of Freelancer.com and Wai Hong Fong, CEO of OzHut.
Continue reading The growing appetite for learning how to crowdsource
These are frantically busy days, which is squeezing my ability to blog and capture some of the fascinating stuff flying by. In coming months I think I’ll try to do more ‘mini-blogging’, just capturing quick thoughts and impressions rather than writing up every interesting speaking engagement or media appearance I do.
Yesterday I gave three presentations, and I’d love to write (at least) a full blog post about what we covered for each one. However that’s not possible, so I’ll just share quick thoughts about each topic and what I will try to write more about later.
The day started by giving the keynote at a Consumerization of IT event run by CIO Magazine, supported by HP and Microsoft.
Continue reading Themes of the day: Consumerization of IT, Crowdsourcing for small business, Crowdsourcing in PR
I hope you can make it!
Sydney will be the site of the launch of a global series of crowdsourcing workshops over coming months in Sydney, Amsterdam, Cologne, London, Paris, Brussels, New York, San Francisco and other cities. I am very excited about the workshops, the material we’ll cover, and what we’ll learn during the workshops to help create the forthcoming Second Edition of Getting Results From Crowds.
Below is the announcement of the Sydney workshops. Please pass this on if you think people would be interested! 
Crowdsourcing Workshops: Getting Business Results
Sydney, Monday 16 April
Getting Results From Crowds: 9:00am-1:30pm
Crowd Business Models: 1:30pm-5:00pm
Continue reading An invitation to Sydney (and global) crowdsourcing workshops
I caught up with some of the Yammer team this morning, including Chief Customer Officer David Obrand, while they are in town for the Yammer on Tour series.
I was particularly interested in talking with them about Yammer’s shift to activity streams. In the massive convergence of enterprise social platforms that we’ve seen over the last years, one of the major emerging spaces is activity streams.
Last year I wrote about activity streams in the context of Tibbr’s launch. Tibbr put activity streams squarely on the map, by integrating status messages from people with notifications generated by enterprise software including ERP, CRM, and HR systems. Employees are able to follow their colleagues and they can also follow updates on any activity, including events, projects, or even invoices. Tibbr was very well positioned to do that given Tibco’s history in providing enterprise integration middleware.
Continue reading Yammer and why activity streams are a key foundation for integrated applications and organizations
Our Social Media Strategy Framework has been one of our most popular frameworks, with well over 100,000 views, as well as more for the translations into 12 languages.
I have used the framework extensively as a starting point to help executives understand the space and clients to develop social media strategies. Many people have told me that they have used the framework with their own organizations or clients to develop effective social media strategies, or have shared it in presentations or online. I’m delighted that it has proved so useful.
However the visual still can be hard for people to make sense of, particularly in terms of how it should be applied to their own organization. To help that I have made a brief video explaining and going through the Social Media Strategy Framework. It simply provides a high-level overview of the framework, but for many people it will probabl ybe more useful to watch the video than spend time looking at the diagram. Feel free to use the video however you want if it is helpful.
Earlier this week I spoke at a financial advisor retreat in the stunning Margaret River region of Western Australia, a region of wide-open beauty that is the source of many extraordinary wines.
I gave two keynotes at the event on subsequent days, on How to Lock-in Your Clients, and Success in a Connected World, which drew on my connected world visual framework.
I will write more later on the quite specific topic of Success in a Connected World for Financial Advisors. For now I thought I’d share a brief extract of the content I covered in my keynote on how to approach Twitter.
Around 15-20% of the audience had Twitter accounts, so my suggestions were intended as a high-level introduction on how to get started on Twitter, though the advice is relevant to anyone. The recommendations are based on my own thoughts as well as a range of research, notably the excellent Who Gives A Tweet? Evaluating Microblog Content Value from Carnegie Mellon University. This is what I suggested:
WHAT TO TWEET
Continue reading 5 things to tweet and 5 things NOT to tweet
In my first book Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships: The Future of Professional Services the final chapter was titled Value-Based Pricing: Implementing New Revenue Models. Pricing by value rather than time is clearly a central aspect to building true knowledge-based relationships, since knowledge should be measured by the value of its application rather than time spent by professionals.
The chapter in my book provides a fair overview of the key possibilities and factors in value-based pricing. However I am not a deep expert in the field. When discussing the issue with clients, I usually refer to Ron Baker, who among other claims to fame has written books including Pricing on Purpose, Professionals Guide to Value Pricing, and one I’ve long had on my bookself, The Firm of the Future.
Ron is currently in Australia running a series of workshops on The Firm of the Future, and he kindly invited me to join his masterclass session in Sydney this morning.
Continue reading Value based pricing is at the heart of the future of professional services
In Chapter 2 of Getting Results From Crowds on The Rise of Crowdsourcing we included a Crowdsourcing Timeline, showing a selection of some of the important events in the world of crowds over the last couple of hundred years.
Tapping crowds has a long and illustrious past, with of course an acceleration over the last 15 years as humanity has becoming connected, vastly broadening the scope of crowd participation.
The image below is taken straight from a two-page spread in the book. Click on the image for the full-size version.
Voici ma première vidéo en francais, qui est à propos du futur de Facebook.
Quelques miettes du video :
Continue reading Le futur de Facebook et le rôle de la France
Ceci est le premier billet de blog que j’écris en français. Je suis Australien, né à Canberra, mais mon père travaillais pour l’ONU et j’ai passé presque tout ma jeunesse à Genève. Je vivais ainsi à quelques kilomètres de la France et j’y allais tous les samedis pour skier. Cela fait bien longtemps que je n’ai pas vécu dans un pays francophone, mais heureusement je n’ai pas trop oublié mon français.
Je vais passer de la fin avril à la fin mai en Europe, commençant avec un keynote à The Next Web à Amstersdam sur The Future of Crowds et enchaînant par la suite avec diverses conférences et ateliers, entre autres, à Londres, Luxembourg, Cologne, Moscou et Milan.
Durant cette visite, mais aussi dans les années à venir, j’ai l’intention d’augmenter mon visibilité et de travailler beaucoup plus en France. La France et le français ont joué un rôle très important dans mon passé et je voudrais qu’il en soit de même pour mon avenir.
Continue reading Explorer le futur en France et en français
This evening I spoke at the Crowdfunding for Change event run by Avis Mulhall‘s Think Act Change. The event kicked off with a presentations by Adam Chapnick, head of business development at seminal creative crowdfunding platform IndieGogo, and award-winning film director Gillian Leahy, followed by a panel consisting of myself together with Alan Crabbe, co-founder of leading Australian crowdfunding site Pozible, and Ryan Wardell, founder of ProjectPowerUp.
Below are live notes from the event, capturing what I could of the presentations and conversation. I wasn’t able to take notes when I was speaking, so will write more about my thoughts on effective crowdfunding and where it is heading another time.
Continue reading Insights and real-life case studies in effective crowdfunding for change
Following the launch and fantastic response to Getting Results From Crowds we will be running a series of workshops around the world on creating value using crowds and crowdsourcing.
The first ones will be in Sydney on April 16, followed by a number to be announced shortly in Europe and the US (see our call for crowdsourcing workshop partners).
See the event page for full details on the workshops.
Continue reading Grow your business faster! Crowdsourcing and Crowd Business Models workshops in Sydney
This morning I appeared on Channel 7′s The Morning Show talking about the world 10 years from now.
A few of the things I mentioned in the interview include:
Continue reading Ten years from now: What we will do, have, and not have
The future of libraries is a rich and fascinating topic. It’s over 10 years now since I first gave a keynote on the topic, to an an audience of over 1,200 members of the Australian Libraries and Information Association conference. In 2007 I gained notoriety on the topic when Richard Watson and I put libraries at 2019 in our Extinction Timeline, and have been drawn into strategy sessions with a number of major libraries since then.
Last week The Times (of Ottawa, Illinois) published a piece titled ‘They’ll be reborn’ What does the future hold for libraries?, sparked by discussion of the need for big new library projects in the region.
In the article I am quoted:
Continue reading In the future libraries may die, but they will be reborn
Scenario planning as a management discipline has a long and rich pedigree. It is just one of a wide variety of tools and processes that have been developed to help executives and organizations build strategies and succeed in an uncertain world. However almost 15 years experience in applying a wide variety of strategic futures tools have lead me to believe that scenario planning is the single most powerful approach available.
This certainly doesn’t mean that scenario planning is always the best approach to help organizations explore the future. However I see it as the single broadest and most powerful tool to facilitate rigorous, structured decision-making about the long-term future in high levels of uncertainty.
As I have written, the greater the uncertainty, the greater the value of scenario planning, and in almost every industry today uncertainty is increasing. The many industries to which we have applied scenario planning include financial services, media, infrastructure, and many others.
In fact, engendering scenario thinking among executives is far more important than scenario planning, however scenario planning is often the best route to that outcome.
Scenario planning is a rich and varied domain, and should be implemented uniquely depending on the context and the objectives. One of the challenges is that many people talk about ‘scenario planning’, often meaning very different things, and not infrequently degrading the term by applying it to unsophisticated approaches to dealing with uncertain futures.
To help a large consumer-goods organization we worked with last year on a scenario planning project to understand the issues, I pulled together an overview of what scenario planning is and a typical process. We have summarized that in the following two page document.
Click on the image for full-size pdf
Continue reading Scenario Planning in Action: What, Why, Success Factors, and Process
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About the Blog author
Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of AHT Group, which consists of 3 companies: consulting, publishing, and ventures firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy firm Future Exploration Network, and events company The Insight Exchange.
Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.
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Web 2.0 Framework
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Extinction Timeline
SAP White Paper: Service Delivery Innovation
White Paper: The Seven MegaTrends of Professional Services
CNET/ University of Virginia White Paper: How Technology Purchasing Decisions Are Really Made
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Microsoft Strategic White Paper: How To Lock-in Your Clients (1.1MB)
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