summ( )n

Before the creative gathering in Delft, I had one more meeting, in the office of Van Den Busken Dialogue and Branding agency. A rare case, but I didn’t take any pictures (can’t remember why), so to keep the visual look and feel of this blog consistent I have to use a helping hand of the Google maps.

I was invited to make a presentation combined with a game for the InterDirect, a network of independent direct marketing agencies, and this was my first meeting with Pieter van den Busken himself, the founder and currently a chairman of the network. Pieter is one of those rare people whose biography is also a history of the industry they work in (and often shaped – like Henry Ford for automotive or George Gallup for public opinion polls. Ok, we don’t call DM (direct marketing) a BM (Busken marketing)… but may be we should, at least in the Netherlands. it’s interesting to notice that the meaning DM is constantly changing – it used to mean ‘direct mail’, then ‘direct marketing’, and now ‘dialogue management’. The same business, yet ever changing, I was told.

Pieter turned 70 last year, but he is as ‘workaholic’ as always before. We had a great conversation (including with his two sons who currently run the Dutch DM agency he founded many years ago), and made a deal. So now it’s time for me to figure out what is

Last Wednesday I went to Delft, to joint a kick-off workshop of the CRISP, a new large-scale R&D program for creative industries in the Netherlands. I was invited to the event at the last moment, and wasn’t quite aware how large it is. I though about a homey workshop of a few designers and researchers, but no, it was a large event with a colossal program which was brewing for more than a year, with 20 mln budget and over 160 participants (and nobody told me about it – *sigh*).

CRISP stands for Creative Industry Scientific Programme, and will consists of eight large multi-partner projects; you can read more about this program and the members at their website (although the project descriptions are pretty basic at the moment). There are two projects that are directly linked to games: G-MOTIV, with a modest aim of learning how to change our motivation using game elements

and another one called i-PE – Intelligent Play Environments to stimulate social and physical activities.

It’s indeed a pity that I didn’t know about all these projects, otherwise I would pith for participation with Summ()n, in some way or another. However, knowing how tightly closed and well-guarded the system of these grants, it wouldn’t even worth trying. As my friend just told me, “either you’re friends or you’re not”.

But never mind, it was nice to see some old friends anyway, and I am glad that they got their piece of the pie.

I put some of the pictures I took in Delft to me set on Flickr – CRISP kick-off workshop in Delft .

Last Monday I made a short presentation at the Philips Innovations Services, a new consultancy wing of the company, about ‘people-driven innovation’, one the the buzzwords these days. The triggering point for me was a study by Erik van Hippel from MIT Sloan (I wrote about this work a while ago – see Dark matters of innovation), but to present his conclusions in a more comprehensible manner I had to first present an entire spectrum of various degrees of people involvement into business-driven innovation:

I bet that although some of the part and pieces of this spectrum were familiar to the audience (there were about ten consultants in the room), its totality, the whole framework was a new thing. And so was an entire ‘people-driven’ part, which I juxtaposed to business approaches; here I followed the binary logic by van Hippel (as well as many others, of course, Pyramid to Pancakes would by just one example). Some of the examples, lille an open source biotech or community-driven genetic research, triggered quite a discussion.

But my own story was very different from the usual take on these examples; I argued that we shouldn’t get stuck in the neurotic fights between Tweedledum and Tweedledee, between business-driven vs people-driven approaches, but rather construct a more holistic and integrated approach (and corresponding practices), of multiple role and position. Alas, integrated things don’t sell very well.

Anyway, the slides can be found at Win novation or wikinnovation . There are a couple of points I didn’t manage talk about, like the whole Transactional Analysis by Eric Berne, but I decided to leave them.