Coolfarming

Peter Gloor

• Publisher: AMACOM
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814413876
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Creativity

Beekeepers understand the importance of a fertile nurturing ground and cross pollination. Likewise, author Peter Gloor teaches readers that those who want to gain a business advantage shouldn't spend their time chasing ideas, but instead should nurture the cool ideas all around them to foster exciting new trends. In Coolfarming, he reveals the proven, four-step process for farming cool new ideas and unleashing a swarm of creative output. Featuring real-life examples from companies like Linux, Twilight, Procter & Gamble, and Apple, this invaluable and insightful book explains: how to provide a fertile nurturing ground for developing original ideas; how to determine what "cool" means for one's target group; what makes something worthy of being the next big thing; how to turn creative dreams into real products by enlisting the help of a dedicated and passionate Collaborative Innovation Network (CIN); and how to carry new ideas over the tipping point and turn them into widespread phenomena. Those who want to stay ahead of the curve and ride a wave of profit need to learn how to find, develop, and popularize the trends of tomorrow. Coolfarming moves individuals and organizations to crosspollinate creative ideas and resources that yield highly sought-after results.

1

How Do You Turn a Cool Idea into a Trend?

As special as Steve is, I think of Apple as a great jazz orchestra. Steve did a superb job of recruiting a broad and deep talent base. When a group gets to be that size, the conductor’s job is pretty nominal—mainly attracting new talent and helping maintain the tempo, adding bits of energy here and there.¹

—Michael Hawley, professional pianist/computer scientist/former Apple employee

WHY IS IT that Apple products are cool? Why is Steve Jobs cool? What if you could become cool, too? And what if you could make your own ideas cool? What if you could even turn them into the next big thing?

The good news is, there are indeed steps you can take to be cool, and to convert your ideas into a cool trend. This book addresses the basic questions of what the magic of cool is. It shows you how to “coolfarm” your ideas, how to make trends cool, and how to become cool yourself. Coolfarming tells how to convert creative dreams into cool products by enlisting the help of dedicated and passionate collaborators. Coolfarming is about how to get the “next big idea” off the ground.

So what is it that makes things cool? Cool things have four properties:

1. Cool things need to be fresh and new. We don’t want yesterday’s stale old ideas, but radically new and better ones. Apple is cool, Microsoft is not. Why? Apple has a unique knack for repeatedly coming up with beautiful new product concepts and designs that usher in new markets, first in computers with the Macintosh, then in digital music players with the iPod, and then in mobile phones with the iPhone. Microsoft has grown bigger in size and may be more profitable with its copycat strategy, but nobody has ever accused it of being cool—that’s reserved for creators of radically new things. Microsoft’s technology does the job, but it’s clunky, arcane, and clogged with features that nobody wants. Apple, on the other hand, has consistently defined new markets with superbly designed, innovative products.

2. Cool things make us part of a community. They help us be with people like us. As psychologists and sociologists have found out, if given the chance, we want to be with as many people “like us” as possible—the more the merrier. Why did two million people trek to Washington’s National Mall for the inauguration of President Barack Obama? Why did they stand in line for eight hours to personally attend Obama’s swearing in and not just watch it on TV? Simple answer: It was the chance to be part of something cool and new, to witness change, jointly, with two million other like-minded souls. Even something as simple as owning the latest iPhone or BlackBerry makes the owner part of a community, a sister and brotherhood, with the token of entry being the coolest of handsets.

3. Cool things are fun. Just owning an iPhone is fun, if only because it is so well designed and looks so cool. Making calls and surfing the Web on an iPhone is fun; playing music on an iPod is fun. Going to a musical on Broadway is fun and relaxing. Drinking coffee in Starbucks is fun, too, not the least because every Starbucks customer is in good company with other people who are also enjoying a good cup of coffee in a relaxing atmosphere. It’s not for nothing that Starbucks carefully selects and trains its baristas to provide a superior customer experience.

4. Finally, cool things give meaning to our life. Cool things make people feel good and happier. Owning a cool thing can become a goal all by itself, whether it is the new iPhone, the designer bag from Adidas, or the car we always wanted. Of course, owning a cool thing could also mean joining an activist group to fight global warming. For many people the thing that gives meaning to their lives is making the world a better place—the ultimate in cool.

Cool trends can only be created through the creativity of swarms. My previous two books, Swarm Creativity (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Coolhunting (AMACOM, 2007), introduced the idea of Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) and explained how to coolhunt. Coolhunting is the art and skill of chasing down cool trends by spotting the trendsetters collaborating in COINs. This book makes the bold leap to “coolfarming,” explaining the steps that anybody can take to make cool trends happen. Obviously COINs cannot be mandated into action, and inventions cannot, by sheer force of will, be turned into new trends. Nevertheless, there are steps that the creator of a new idea or the enthusiastic very early adopter of a concept can take to increase the odds of turning the cool new thing into, indeed, a new trend.

The Four Steps of Coolfarming

This swarm-based innovation process happens in four steps:

STEP 1 The creator comes up with the cool idea.

STEP 2 The creator recruits additional members to form a Collaborative Innovation Network (COIN).

STEP 3 The COIN grows into a Collaborative Learning Network (CLN) by adding friends and family.

STEP 4 Outsiders join, forming a Collaborative Interest Network (CIN).

These four steps establish the most efficient engine of innovation, creating the innovations that continuously change our lives. This book is written for creators and COIN members. If you are looking for practical hands-on advice on how to carry your cool ideas over the tipping point, converting them into real trends, this book is for you.

CREATORS

In 1857, Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville invented and patented the phonautograph in France. The phonautograph was an ingenious device to record the human voice using a system to encode black and white dots on a sheet of paper. Chances are you never have heard of de Martinville or his device. Right after he filed his patent, he was forgotten. The fame—and the riches—went to somebody else. Most likely you learned at school that Thomas Alva Edison, roughly thirty years later, invented the phonograph to record and play back music and sound. The question is, Why did Edison succeed when de Martinville failed? The answer: Edison was a coolfarmer and creator, de Martinville was not.

De Martinville had really clever ideas, but he was not able to get them across. His environment, his “swarm,” his peer group in mid-nineteenth-century Paris refused to accept and embrace his innovation. Contrast this to Edison, who has an unbeatable track record as one of the most prolific, productive, and successful innovators. He famously said that innovation is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration. His perspiration not only got late-nineteenth-century New York to accept the phonograph, but also the lightbulb, electricity, and many other innovations that still shape our lives. Traits like perseverance, but also social intelligence, even collective intelligence, distinguished Edison from similarly smart and creative people like de Martinville, who came up with very clever ideas, only to see them forgotten.

COINS

The creative ideas of the creator are taken up by small groups of innovative people in Collaborative Innovation Networks. These are groups of about two to fifteen intrinsically motivated people, who get together to create something new—not because they are paid to do so, but because they care about their cause. They assemble around a common vision, which they want to come true. They are innovators and trendsetters by conviction, and not because they want to fill their bank account. They are convinced that what they are up to is unbelievably cool and they want to carry their conviction to the rest of the world. COINs are nothing new; they have been around since historical times.

While Thomas Edison got all the credit for his inventions, in fact his greatest invention was the creation of Menlo Park, a research lab in New Jersey where he assembled other creative geniuses such as William Hammer, working on the development of the lightbulb; Charles Batchelor, Edison’s loyal right-hand man and prolific inventor of telegraph systems; John Kruesi, the builder of many of Edison’s designs; and dozens of others. Even Nikola Tesla, inventor of the AC electric system, spent time working at Menlo Park—a prototypical COIN if there ever was one, and well before the Internet age.

With the advent of modern telecommunications, in particular the Internet, COINs have sprouted up all around the globe. COINs are responsible for creations ranging from microfinancing institutions in the developing world, LEGO Mindstorms, and even the Internet itself. Little did the world know that a new epoch was about to start when Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau advertised their brand-new World Wide Web system over lunch at the 1991 ACM Hypertext conference in San Antonio, Texas. Their improvised lunch session raised interest among students and researchers from as far away as Helsinki to California, from Alaska to Australia, and this far-flung group began working together. And the rest, as the saying goes, is history.

CLNS

Once the cool idea has been turned into a product by the COIN, people in the COIN bring the product to their friends and family. In a two-way learning process, this extended group, the Collaborative Learning Network, learns the basics of the product from the COIN members, makes suggestions for improvements, and points out deficiencies of the initial prototype.

Almost from the beginning, Edison teamed up with other innovators. While the relationships were sometimes tumultuous, they almost always were productive. When young Edison came to Boston early in his career as an inventor, he immediately immersed himself in the community of other telegraph inventors, producers, and investors. He rented work space in the shop of Charles Williams, a leading telegraph producer. Later, as an aspiring entrepreneur in New York, Edison formed a partnership with Franklin Pope, another leading telegraph engineer. His mentors also introduced him to patent attorneys and other inventors—a Collaborative Learning Network that was crucial for Edison’s future success.

CINS

Finally, the enthusiasm of the Collaborative Interest Network carries the final product over the tipping point and turns it into a real trend. In this final phase, commercial interests come into play. While a CLN includes at most a few hundred people, the CIN encompasses thousands or even millions of loyal users, virtually guaranteeing the success of the product.

Early on in his career, Edison collaborated with the leading telegraph companies. Western Union and Gold & Stock Telegraph Company became his main customers, carrying his innovations to the remotest corners of the United States and Europe. Even before that, as a teenage boy, Edison had shown a knack for socializing with journalists, which helped him to grow and cultivate his celebrity status in the press. Having the press on his side was highly advantageous for fostering societal acceptance of his more disruptive innovations such as the phonograph. And so another crucial difference between Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville and Edison was this: Edison showed himself a genius in building up a Collaborative Interest Network to carry his inventions over the tipping point.

Finding the Trendsetters

Now imagine how cool it would be if we were able to recognize the next Thomas Alva Edison while he was still a boy. Or if we could have predicted the success of the phonograph right at the time of its inception and recognized the failure of de Martinville’s phonautograph. The good news is that this COIN-based innovation process can indeed be recognized and tracked from the outside. We can take a general understanding of how new trends develop and apply it to coolhunting, finding the next big thing. The trick is not to look for the trend, but to look for the Edisons, the cool people creating the cool trends.

Coolhunting means finding trends by finding the trendsetters. It means being on the lookout for the four-step process involving (1) creator, (2) COIN, (3) CLN, and (4) CIN. The earlier in the process you can identify the trendsetters, the better. By the time new trends are being pushed by Collaborative Interest Networks, they have become pretty self-evident to the rest of the world. If you spot them in the Collaborative Learning Network phase, they are still somewhat under the radar, so you are ahead of the crowd. Finding the original creators, while they are still on their own, not yet supported by their surrounding COIN, is pretty hard. Who could have distinguished young Thomas Alva Edison from young Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville? Both were aspiring young innovators. One went on to change the world, the other sank into oblivion. One succeeded in rallying a COIN, the other stayed a lone inventor. The best point in time to find new emerging trends therefore is to look for the COINs. Once you have found the COINs, you have also found the new trends they are about to create. Now, how does this work?

FIGURE 1–1. Hunting for buffalo is like hunting for cool trends—looking for tracks and following the swarm.

Think back to our forebears. As depicted in Figure 1–1, man once hunted for prey on the prairies, trying to find a wild buffalo, whose meat would carry them through the winter. Coolhunting means hunting for your own buffalo in the Internet age. The parallels between the early hunter and the coolhunter in the Internet age are striking. The most successful early hunters had to read the mind of their prey; successful Internet coolhunters have to read the mind of their customers. Internet customers do not leave hoofprints and dung behind, but they leave traces nonetheless, in online bulletin boards and forums, in blogs, websites, and wikis. These virtual traces provide a similarly clear image to the well-informed coolhunter.

FIGURE 1–2. Coolfarming is like traditional farming, but instead of killing the prey, put it to productive use.

Once you have found your cool thing, it is up to you to help make it succeed. Think again back to our forebears hunting a buffalo. Once they caught and slaughtered their prey, it provided food for a fixed period of time only. Think of how much better it would be to catch the buffalo alive, tame it, and use it to pull a plow (like in Figure 1–2), or to breed and grow young buffalos as a never-ending source of milk and meat. This book tells you how to tame and grow your own buffalo herd in the process we call “coolfarming.”

Growing Your Own Trends

Making cool trends happen means creating an environment where COINs flourish. Nurturing COINs is similar to nurturing a swarm of bees, such that the bees produce more honey or the swarm splits so that a new swarm will emerge. Organizations that want to nurture cool trends are like beekeepers supportive of swarming. Bee swarming is risky; it is hardly controllable, and yet, the expert beekeeper observing his hive will usually catch the swarm and get it back to double the honey output. The same metaphor applies to organizations supportive of COINs. Observe the COIN members, help them develop their ideas, provide a fertile nurturing ground for developing new ideas, and they will get their cool trends off the ground. Coolfarming is “making the C...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 HOW DO YOU TURN A COOL IDEA INTO A TREND?
• 2 SWARM CREATIVITY: The Force That Fuels Coolfarming
• 3 CREATORS: Building the Vision
• 4 COINS: Building the Product
• 5 CLNS: Teaching and Preaching the Gospel
• 6 CIN: Building the Buzz
• 7 COOLHUNTING: Find the Trends Through the Trendsetters
• 8 WHAT MOTIVATES COOLFARMERS?
• AFTERWORD: It’s Not Chief Executives, but Chief Creators We Need!