(OFF) Thanks very much...
(David Price) This is the ........ - shrinking (check) presentation.
It was originally 25 minutes, last night it was 23,
now it's 22.
I've got a 45-minute presentation, I'm just going to speak twice as quickly.
No, I'm only kidding, it's only 20 -- 22 minutes.
And I've got to think of the time to make sure I don't go over.
About four moths ago, I was diagnosed with cancer of the colon.
And what was it? Seven weeks ago, I had the operation
which kind of went OK, got rid of the tumor,
But when the colon got reconnected, it sprung a leak
and I got a thing called sepsis, which I later discovered,
is fatal in 60% of the cases.
What essentially happens with sepsis is
the organs start to pack in, one after the other, so
my heart was fibrillating, I lost -- kidneys stopped working,
lungs stopped working, so they pumped me on a ventilator.
And my wife Claire (check) who is here somewhere
was told to bring the family around, because they didn't expect me
to get through the week-end.
As you can see, I survived, and this is actually the first talk I've given
since I was in intensive care.
I was in intensive care for a week.
So, when a sick -- no, no honest (Applause)
But when I say I'm delighted to be here, I'm not just being polite.
(laughter)
I'm talking existentially rather than conversationally.
But I wanted to start with that story because, in that process of the journey
from diagnosis to operation, I met with some remarkable people:
on forums and ingress (check) groups, but I also visited and interviewed people.
So I interviewed some people in the Netherlands
who are treating their loved ones, who've got end-stage cancer.
They are lay people, computer technicians
who, frankly, conventional medicine has given up, they're stage 4,
they said there is nothing more we can do,
so they're administering endovenous cocktails of drugs.
some of which are approved, some of which are off-patent,
some of which are off-label (check).
I visited a clinic, here in Germany, which I can't name, because
they kind of operate in the shadows in fear that they'll be closed down.
And what it seemed to me, once I looked beyond health
is that this is a phenomenon which is happening
in all kinds of areas of public life.
That we're seeing what I call people-powered innovation.
And I think it's a real challenge for institutions and organizations.
So, why is it important?
I think it's important because it's kind of a natural consequence
of the issues I talk about in my book "Open".
where, now that we're able to share and exchange knowledge,
we're now at a point where we want to do something about it,
we want now to be more in control of our own lives.
But I think it's particularly important for the people who are in this room today:
educators and human resource people. 3:05
Because one of the things I was seeing is a major shift in the way
in which we accredit knowledge and competencies.
I don't know if any of you have read Phillip Brown's excellent book
called "Tne Global Auction", but he talks about how our graduates are facing
a high-skilled low-income future,
because of globalization and a whole range of other issues.
And recently, Laszlo Bock who is in charge of People Operations at Google said this
"Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to any job.
"The world only case about -- and pays off on --
"what you can do with what you know
"(and it doesn't care how you learned it)"
So my point, I guess, is that unless we change the product,
we risk being disintermediated.
By that, I mean, learners can find other ways
to get the knowledge and skills that they need.
And let's face it, the product hasn't really changed much in decades.
So I'd -- obvious that the best way to stay relevant
is to involve users in the process of innovation.
So this is what I mean by people-powered innovation,
users lead users, accelerate innovation
by either advocating for new products or services,
tinkering with existing products and services,
or creating new products and services from scratch.
That's my kind of working definition,
based partly on Eric von Hippel's definition of people-powered innovation.
So here's some examples.
The potato crisp, the home-baked (check) potato crisp
was invented in 1853 by a chef called George Crum,
who worked at a restaurant in Saratoga.
Now he gets the credit for inventing it, but I think it should go to
the disgruntled diner in that restaurant who kept sending the potatoes back, said
that they were too thickly sliced.
And this kept going backwards and forwards
and eventually George Crum got really pissed off about this
and cooked them as thin as he could, burning them to a crisp,
smothered them in salt and then sent them out.
And the diner loved it.
So he thought, oh, we're on to something here
but he didn't take out a patent: in fact, none of these examples have been patented.
So, 1853, we've always had people-powered innovation.
In fact, you could argue that up until the Industrial Revolution,
that's all we had, we had people-powered innovation.
But if you bring it a little more up to date
I don't know if you know the story of the skateboard
but it was something that surfers, facing a wind the way they couldn't surf,
it was the best kind of substitute.
So they took a pair of roller-skates, chopped them in two,
put wheels on either end of a plank of wood, and you had a skateboard.
So the skateboard industry is now worth $4.8 billion a year,
and a similar story happened with the mountain bike.
It was basically cannibalized from other forms of bikes
and developed entirely by users.
To bring it even more up to date,
I don't know if you're aware of this thing called Patreon?
It's been set up by Jack Conte who is a musician.
Certainly, he wouldn't have thought of himself as a kind of entrepreneur
but it kind of recreates in the digital age
the 18th century notion of patronage for artists.
So you pay up artists, because you like their work.
And it has been a hugely successful venture for Jack.
And then one of the few companies that have really latched onto
people-powered innovation at a very early stage
is Proctor & Gamble, who have developed a thing called Connect and Develop
and that service now, which brings in innovation
from outside of the organization,
that constitutes about half of all their innovations.
So much so that Proctor & Gamble say: "Proudly found elsewhere."
That's their motto.
And I wonder how many of us who work in universities could say the same thing,
or how many of us who are learning officers in companies.
So, where do we see people-powered innovation?
Well, you can go to any maker space (check) and you'll see it,
visit forums or interest groups, even groups like Anonymous,
whatever you may think of their philosophy,
you can't deny their ingenuity and innovation.
And I've looked at a number of examples
and I've identified four common characteristics.
I'm going to quickly go through them.
The first is need, the second is "Jugaad"
..... (check) if it's not a familiar term to you.
The third is the hacker ethic and the fourth is the sense of agency.
Right. Very quick examples.
It's a cliché, but it's a cliché for a reason,
that invention is indeed the mother of necessity.
And you get people-powered innovation where the need is greatest.
So it's no accident that some of the most innovative things that we now see
now are happening in the developed world in slums and favelas.
So 85% of mobile transactions have actually originated
in developing countries.
And 50% of them were created by users.
And if you think about it, that kind of paved the way for things like
Apple Pay and Samsung Wallet.
The first use of mobile banking was actually in the Philippines,
and what people did there was to take pay-as-you-go top-up vouchers,
take the code from them, text them to their friends and families
in other parts of the Philippines, and they used it as a kind of currency.
But they are not just turning air time into money,
they're turning shit into money too.
[To you it may be SHIT, To us it is MONEY "Shit Business is Serious Business"]
This is a genuine sign, I didn't make this up
but it says, if you can't read the bottom it says
"Shit Business is Serious Business".
There is a guy in Lagos in Nigeria who is
-- and Lagos has a big public health problem
because people are using the streets as toilet --
but there is a graphic artist called Isaac Agbetusin
who invented a thing that he called the Dignified Mobile Toilet.
They look like the kind of Portaloos that you see on building sites
but he's designed it, built it, delivers it to communities
and then he charges people 10 cents to use them.
But that's only part of the story, because then the waste is collected
and turned into biogas which is sold to energy companies. 9:18