Is Research Overrated?
Posted by goodmind on December 4th, 2008
Today’s New York Times poses an interesting question: do we overrate basic research?
It’s a pretty loaded piece that takes on most of today’s favorite faux-controversial topics (Mr. Obama’s BlackBerry, the rise of China and India, America’s declining economy, and techno-nationalism). We almost didn’t make it through the entire article, when it seemed to suggest that as a nation, we ought to cut spending on research.
However, the reasoning behind this blasphemy is basically sound. According to Amar Bhidé, a professor at the Columbia Business School, the possibility for “midlevel innovation” is inevitably lost in the shuffle of a big research budget allocated from on high.
Midlevel innovation is defined as anything
…from a venture capitalist tweaking a business model to trim costs by a few percent to a technician fine-tuning his company’s business software to save a couple of data-entry steps in the accounting department.
It basically boils down to finding new ways of using existing technology, not spending big bucks to invent something totally new from scratch. It makes sense, and its something we’ve been helping clients do for a long time through research.
Most companies today need research in the first place, because they have previously relied on the latest technology to solve all of their business problems. Our task is to figure out how to help them use it efficiently, effectively, and profitably.
Get Caught Reading
Posted by goodmind on March 24th, 2008
The relationship between author, text, and reader has never been more dynamic, and consequently, has never been more unstable. Try reading just a small part of the extensive body of commentary and in-depth analysis of Steve Jobs’ Yogi Berra impression. Each piece links to an additional half a dozen or so other articles dedicated to de-constructing the syntactically simple yet semantically loaded sentence; “people don’t read anymore.” Or feel free to comment on it yourself, producing and publishing your own content on the web has never been easier, thanks in no small part to a number of Apple products.
While the cynics among us may feel that the ease of production is perhaps part of the problem with literacy, Ad Age points a finger at a different culprit; your friendly newspaper ombudsman. This role has had many titles over the years, from public editor, to reader advocate, and for this reason, Ad Age is asking financially strapped newspapers to “spend your dwindling budgets on reporting — instead of reporting on your reporting.”
We consider this sound advice, since this post itself proves that there are plenty of us bloggers out their to report on your reporting for you, for free. The idea of a public editor is alive and well, because readers are empowered enough to advocate for themselves, provided they have an author and a text to respond to. For this reason, and despite claims to the contrary, bloggers aren’t a threat to the role of the newspaper journalists, but rather newspaper ombudsman.
Influencers are Out
Posted by goodmind on January 29th, 2008
If you can’t stand the sight of Malcom Gladwell’s hair, then take a peek at BoingBoing’s post titled “Tipping-point skeptic says that super-Influencers are overrated.” Though it’s entirely appropriate that the skeptic alluded to uses overrated popular music to demonstrate the element of sheer luck involved in the social spread of “ideas,” his elaborate experiment could have easily been prevented by observing the obvious.
The failure of a certain hairstyle to make the transformation to major trend after a certain influential book was published, may be interpreted in a number of ways. Not only is it demonstrative of good taste on the part of the reading public, but also indicates the limits of influence that “influential” members of society have on the rest of us.
We tested these limits ourselves back in the mid 90’s when smoking cigars was all the rage. Baffled by the site of attractive women putting foul tasting carcinogenic wads of burning leaves in their mouths, we began insinuating that Vogue models were having a bit of fun by hitching rides on the late night garbage trucks that run up and down the East Side. To our dismay, we never saw even one smelly aspirant surfing down Second Ave. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar…
Word of Mouth Markets
Posted by goodmind on January 8th, 2008
It’s been awhile since Google was the subject of a feel good, quirky-employee-culture-puff piece, and frankly, we were getting worried. As it turns out, the search engine has quietly been running an internal gambling enterprise all this time. The New York Times first broke the story in an article excerpted below;
“Prediction markets have been used for years to predict things like elections. At Google, they are used, of course, for business. In the last two and a half years, 1,463 employees have made wagers with play money (Goobles, as in rubles) on questions like: will Google open a Russia office? will Apple release an Intel-based Mac? how many users will Gmail have at the end of the quarter?”
While we like the odds of Google basing business decisions on the wisdom of its own crowd, we also know Google is way too savvy to take the obvious approach in obtaining insight from gambling in the workplace.
Google’s internal prediction market was in fact a rather shrewd research project, a noble attempt to accurately capture the flow of information through the organization. Hedging a bet on Google:Russia was actually a data point in identifying the common factors (aside from demographic details such as job type, or level) that influence opinion.
Findings indicated that “microgeography” is the biggest opinion influencer, meaning information is shared most efficiently, and most effectively, via cross cubicle communication. By Western standards, this might be a low tech way to communicate, but it is not necessarily in tension with the prevailing Internet ethos of the company. Though Google employees prefer their tête-à-têtes to be face-to-face, the content of these interactions reflects the ease of access to new information.
As people consume more information online, the concomitant word of mouth output becomes “smarter” in a sense. Information may still circulate on a local level, but the geographical point of origin has never been more expansive.
