I may have mentioned that I will be on for a session at the 2011 Front End of Innovation conference next month. So, in addition to polishing final draft of the book I’m bound and determined to get out VERY soon, I’m preparing for the presentation part of the session.

This is hard. (Maybe I’m putting too much pressure on myself.)

Attendees at the conference come from all areas of business and elsewhere, run the range from academic to practitioner, engineer to designer, entrepreneur to executive to the people who actually do the work of innovating. The opportunity is a bit intimidating. On the one hand, only at a conference like that could you have 10, 20, or 100 focused and smart people in the same room working on the same thing–to learn something. On the other, I and everyone else will be speaking to 10, 20, or 100 people who probably have as much or more experience and knowledge about the area of innovation as I do.

At best, everyone should come out learning one thing. That’s what I’m shooting for. At the very best, they should come out learning one thing and inspired to look at the world just a little differently (for a while).  The the ultimate best, they should learn one thing, see the world differently, and say, “That was entertaining. It could have gone on for another hour…”

No doubt others have had this problem:  how, in such a short time (15-20 minutes) can you impart knowledge of value AND be entertaining, without being Malcolm Gladwell. If anybody has the secret and is willing to share, please send me a note.

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This is really hard. I’d forgotten the discipline involved with regularly writing to a blog (it’s been about 4 years since recursiveprogress first went off the air).
In the ensuing time, although I’ve developed a lot of thoughts and ideas that can be brought to bear on a variety of subjects and current events, the will to apply commentary to things on a regular basis has dissipated. The problem is that I want to share my ideas and to have them critiqued with responses back. I want to test some of the thinking that’s going into new books and essays.
But it’s really hard. Mostly because I’m also trying to keep this iteration of the blog focused rather than allowing it to meander around whatever caught my fancy on a daily basis.
More than that, at least the last time around I knew that there was one or two people out there somewhere reading what I put out. Starting again from ground zero, it feels a little bit like saying a speech into a mirror. You get the practice and one day when you deliver the speech it may be better, but it’s still only practice.

To prove just how plugged in I am, last night I was reviewing a Morgan Stanley report that was presented at the CM Summit–New York City in EARLY JUNE.  (How much could have changed, really?)

In any case, the report is a typically astounding accumulation of data about the macro-economic, stock market, manufacturing, purchasing, and other drivers of the Internet economy.  This, of course, is Mary Meeker’s wheelhouse.  Truly, the charts have a depth and intensity about them that demands the analyst’s talk track.  Insights abound.

As for me, without the benefit of Mary’s talk track direction, my own observations don’t necessarily run toward practical business strategy aha’s.  Well, that’s not entirely true.  There are those.  The one’s that stand out to me are not.  Here’s what I mean:

• A compelling line chart shows how the diffusion of mobile Internet has massively outpaced in speed and overall size all prior forms of (desktop) Internet.  That’s the funny thing about records:  they tend to get broken.  Twenty and thirty years ago, Ben Johnson and then Donovan Bailey set new records in the men’s 100 metre.  There was, just like the in the diffusion charts, successive incremental development over the years.  Only last year did Usain Bolt crush the existing pattern.  It’s impressive how fast and large mobile Internet is.  But it begs the question:  could it have been like this without the prior, expanding developments of the desktop Internet.  Like Isaac Newton, “If I have seen farther, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of others . . .”
• iPad among the fastest consumer computing devices ever. No doubt that at 28 days to reach 1MM units sold it blew past everything else but the game toys (Wii and DS).  It’s velocity was about 1/3 of the iPhone’s and 1/12 or so of the original iPod.  Again, what if there hadn’t been an iPhone or iPod to create the conditions for the iPad speed?  What if Apple hadn’t created their amazing retail structure?  What if the Blackberry (~300 days many moons ago) hadn’t tilled the ground for smartphone devices?  The iPad’s uptake velocity is amazing but the conditions are different.  What’s the learning?
• The iPad tablet is more like a desktop than like a smartphone as far as Internet page views go.  D’uh!  Having the data there is great but it should hardly be a surprise.  The iPad looks and feels like a more effective and efficient laptop PC.  It’s genetic relationship to the smartphone (iPhone) would be the same as our genetic relationship to a Rhesus monkey:  similar but an entirely different scale and class.
• I really like the the user device usage evolution over the past 30 years (“From Input . . . to Output . . . to Sharing”) slide.  I have no doubt that an anthropologist would have a field day with the subtext, which I read as back to the future.  Text to touch and keyboard to fingers go regress the medium back to pre-industrial and pre-Gutenberg times.  Oral history through recorded history back to oral history would be a parallel in my academic field.  Manual to mechanical to manual as far as ergonomics and industrialization go.  The best row is the one that shows the device usage going from “Creation” through “Communication” to “Consumption + Sharing”.  First, it lines up nicely to the Western socio-economic norm of the consumer society–a theme that somebody wanting a grad thesis should jump all over.  Second, it begs the questions, “Consuming and sharing what?  Who’s creating the stuff to be consumed and shared?”  After all, unless it’s permanent recycling, somebody’s got to be making the stuff–even if it’s just words.  By the by, wasn’t it just recently that the leitmotif of the Web was “everybody’s a creator now?”

There’s more.  The report, if you can find it, is well worth the read.  But that’s all I’ve got for now.

About four years ago I was at another conference, Future Trends, when I first encountered the people and ideas around social anthropology.  This is essentially the study of the culture going on around you.  There’s an obvious value for branding, marketing, innovation, etc.  And it makes complete sense.  But what the scientific sounding name really implies is the study of social behaviour, which is psychology and is a well tilled patch.

Here, at Web2.0, in New York, I am listening to a few journalists describe how to get buzz for your product.  The first speaker introduced herself as essentially a cultural anthropologist as a way to describe her angle and take on technology, reducing it to social behaviour.  As best as I can understand it, this seems to be the thrust of her guidance–at least as it relates to her:  technology products and services that align to the zeitgeist are inherently interesting.  Good insight.  The third speaker (a WSJ writer) just advised everyone that journalists like to tell stories.  Ergo, if your technology, service, product, has a good story it will be more appealing.

This meme of social behavioural psychology seems to be one of the threads of differentiation between today and “yesterday” (by which I’m referring to the dot-com period).  It warrants more engaged discussion, which I will post as time goes on.  It is likely, I think, to be the thrust of recursiveprogress/the sequel.