Causeit interviews key thought leaders, covers inspring conferences, and unpacks innovation concepts for our readers around the globe. If something sparks your interest, please write to us and/or share it with your networks! …
As the world shifts towards more-networked organizations, the creation of feedback loops is more important than ever. An organization's capacity for empathy determines whether or not its products and services will actually serve the people it is trying to earn money from, and its awareness of what motivates its competitors, regulators and even its own staff will determine its ability to form important strategic alliances, form public-private partnerships and retain its workforce.
Running a company can be incredibly challenging. I started Causeit in 2006, without a clear vision for the business, but with a remarkably big, broad vision for my work in the world. Having done several years of personal, transformative work alongside academic study in my field of Cyborg Anthropology, I was really clear that I was committed to creating love, joy and community in the world.
Several years later (seven, to be precise), I'm still constantly attending to the intersection of my personal and business visions, how they play out in the world, and what it means for my team.
I recently attended a “Generational Leadership” seminar to learn how the interaction of different generations of workers affects organizations’ ability to innovate and respond to a rapidly-changing business environment.
The organizations showing up to this conversation have caught on by now: the world is changing… fast. Every day you wake up in a slightly different place. While you were sleeping last night, more information was created in the world than you can process in a lifetime, and somewhere within all that data is a new business model waiting to be discovered. Are the people in your organization prepared to innovate at a rapid pace in order to keep up?
One of our clients, Innotribe (the internal innovation team at SWIFT) has left a couple of recommendations. While most of them landed on my LinkedIn profile, they're representative of the work Causeit's whole team did with Innotribe as they went through transitions in focus and strategic direction. Of course, their biggest endorsement was bestowing upon us the honor of speaking at Sibos, but you can't see that talk yet, so here we go. It always makes us blush a bit to hear good words from our clients, but we were always taught to take a compliment…
“In his work coaching for my team MJ [and Causeit] showed a clear ability to understand the challenges of executives, managers and the larger team and assist in translation between them. He is equipped with a multidisciplinary skillset which allows for work both on the communication dynamics of the team and functional implementation of strategy. His understanding of how to assist organizations moving from old, hierarchical models of leadership to new, more networked models [by introducing feedback loops and professionally-appropriate transparency] was instrumental in us achieving our goal. I benefited particularly from the practical, useful coaching for communication skills in a challenging business environment.”
— Nektario Liolios, Innovation Leader at SWIFT
“MJ and his company have coached my team to achieve better strategic alignment and operational efficiency. This was achieved through a two-day retreat where MJ’s and mine team were together, followed by one to one coaching on Skype/phone with individual team members though a period of four months. MJ’s personal drive and commitment contributed to the success of the overall endeavour.”
— Kosta Peric, Head of Innovation at SWIFT
“MJ supported our team through a complex situation. We particularly appreciated his ability to grasp all nuances of what was going on, his very strong and deep knowledge of team communication techniques, his role modelling with his own team, his wide range of skills ranging from strategy to practical and his pragmatic approaches, as well as his energy and drive coupled with a sensitivity during tricky situations.”
This week, Causeit's team (and our friends Jeffrey Van Dyk, Monique Svazlian and Mariposa Leadership) will be attending Wisdom 2.0, an innovative conference created by Soren Gordhammer and others in his tribe to help transform the conversation of what it means to work—especially in technology. The conference's site speaks for itself, but we thought we'd share a bit about our own intention for wisdom, mindfulness and innovation in a 60-second video. Feel free to chime in with your own thoughts about how the need for innovation in business can be harnessed to drive transformation as well:
“There’s a new world of organizations now. The disruptive startup scene and the Googles of the world represent an important shift from hierarchy to network. In this new model for how people connect, wisdom is more important than ever.
Our clients and colleagues face a fiercely-competitive business landscape which constantly demands ‘change.’ In this environment, the temptation towards shallow, raw, real-time information is strong, while it might seem there isn’t time for deep, nuanced consideration and critical thinking.
We invite you to join us in exploring this new, hyper-connected world. How do we broaden demand for innovation to include culture as well as product, people as well as business models—while still meeting real business objectives? How do we use this transition from hierarchy to network to be both more connected and more meaningfully effective—to become more human, rather than less?”
Martine De Weirdt, Jeffrey Van Dyk and MJ Petroni at a Wisdom 2.0 Summit 2012 dance party.
I've long wondered about why innovators become innovators. What is the attraction? What 'itch' does it scratch?
Our colleague Jeffrey Van Dyk gave a great talk at TEDxBellevue in 2012 about our 'core wounds'—those parts of ourselves which have a hidden superpower to give us drive and motivation. However, Jeffrey argues, they have a half-life, which is why so many people go through big career changes and other pivots in trajectory as they progress in their careers. Check it out for yourself, and see how your core wounds might be giving you great wisdom—and affecting the trajectory of your work.
The creation of a kit—literally, as in the Maker world, or figuratively, as in the software world’s APIs and application frameworks—serves as a magnet to whatever industry offers it. Make: magazine’s Project Editor, Keith Sammons, offers why:
MakerBot’s inexpensive 3D printing kit innovates in a number of ways, spawning not just colorful toys but a vibrant ecosystem—the Thingiverse—to bring together creative and practical designs from across the world.
Photo courtesy http://www.makerbot.com/
Kits are the gateway DIY project
Kits teach skills
Handmade beats store-bought
Making something is more fun
Kits are exciting and mysterious
Kits are great for sharing
Kits open up community
Kits drive innovation
History repeats
The creation of a kit can be as simple as assembling a literal or metaphorical parts list and a few instructions, or as complex as the work required to make an entire set of interchangeable parts.
Kits become powerful when they become interoperable
What makes kits powerful is interoperability. The more an ecosystem of kits is interoperable, the more effective it becomes at spurring further innovation. Just as an application program interface (API), software development kit (SDK) or application framework makes it possible to extend the functionality of code, kits of all sorts enable innovation not just by doing the important work of organizing, shortcutting and translating technical problems—but by creating a standard tool for people to organize around. When that organization happens, the not-so-tech-savvy visionary can encounter the technician-in-search-of-a-business-model. Alternately, the visionary can train themselves or the technician can become inspired by larger implications.
From a business standpoint, smart companies continually rediscover the value of opening at least part of their walled gardens to broaden and diversify their ecosystems (and communities). Doing so allows ideation to occur outside their company while still positioning them near or at the center of revenue sources for the expanded ecosystem. Contrasting the Treo to the iPhone or Android requires as much discussion of developer communities and APIs as it does hardware and OS. It’s important to remember that such ecosystems don’t just occur in the most visible spaces of product development (and more recently, revenue model innovation) but even in less visible spaces like the legal and organizational structures people engage (B Corps, collectives) and the processes they use (Agile, shared ideation).
Perhaps most importantly, these ecosystems engender community and, by convening people perhaps less likely to interact in another context, at least some degree of chaos and spontaneity.
Ecosystems become exponentially powerful when made navigable
Kit ecosystems could be argued to most deeply effect positive social changes when made navigable—or easy to dabble in. Ecosystems which are difficult play in, like (at least for now) pharmaceuticals and space flight, remain accessible primarily to those with social and economic privilege, and thus may not benefit from rapid innovations because of the lower number of participants in their ecosystems. They also are less prone to rapid innovation because the educational, social, and regulatory barriers to entry accept only certain kinds of problem-solving and emphasize conformity.
In stark contrast, tools which have been made more navigable—due to reduction of technical complexity, cost and other barriers—show rapid, far-reaching innovations. Look at how increasing accessibility made the video ecosystem (camcorders -> digital home editing -> online video) become interoperable with the ecosystem of the web (computing and programming kits -> HTML -> social media), finally converging around services like YouTube. Examples like this illustrate the importance of open ‘kit’ ecosystems to the everyday user.
This article is an excerpt from Causeit's research pilot Opening the Door for Innovation. Read more and tell us what you think!
Curious about the shift from hierarchies to networks? Have big ideas about what leadership will look like a new economy? We are too. We were honored to be invited by @innotribe of the @swiftcommunity to speak @sibos, the annual international banking conference, on just what leadership might look like. Here's a preview of the session while the full film is being produced:
Steven Johnson's deep dive into the patterns of innovators, Where Good Ideas Come From, explores the environmental factors supportive of innovation and how good ideas come to be. Johnson’s work centers on where innovations are conceived, but spends less time on the factors affecting their birth. While reading the book, it occurred to me to ask, “If so many brilliant ideas are emerging, why aren’t more being put into action?”
The animated intro to Johnson’s book provides a quick dive into ideas—and begs the question of how to make the best ones real. [youtu.be/NugRZGDbPFU]
Most of the discussions around innovation on TechCrunch or VC blogs are talking about software/hardware companies in the fertile innovation zones of the world: California's Silicon Valley, NYC's Silicon Alley, and the Pacific Northwest's Silicon Forest. There is innovation happening outside the tech world—and tech innovation outside these hotspots—but, by comparison, it’s rarely discussed in popular media. We set out to understand some of what's happening in innovation outside of the buzz that’s informing predominant policy discussions.
Innovation in the States
According to a recent Brookings Institute report, US innovation outside the tech sector is in trouble. The Institute asserts that innovation is not increasing wages for average Americans at the rate that it has in the past, and that few college students are receiving degrees directly relevant to the most talked-about types of innovation (~36% of STEM Bachelor degrees, to be more specific). So how can we bring innovation’s economic benefits to bear on the much discussed jobs war by making innovation accessible to small- and mid-sized businesses?
If our goal is to create good jobs and broad socioeconomic improvement, we need to borrow lessons from the tech sector about how to collaborate on, fund and protect emerging innovations in other fields.
The hidden players in innovation—and why they’re on the bench
The project originally started with the idea of playing cards, with innovation players (think persona models) and their strengths and weaknesses in the innovation game. We began exploring the ways innovation occurs beyond product development, and then sketched hypothetical players in those realms of innovation—giving the models names like Steve the Outside Entrepreneur (a tech startup veteran remote from the culture of the “Valleys”), Janette the Makerpreneuer (a tangible-goods craftsperson), and Gabriela the Mom (working outside the home in an economically-barren environment).
In this pilot ethnography and concept piece, we asked questions about where the untapped potential is and what opportunities exist. Based on real-life interviews with people representing these experience models, we found that—not surprisingly—many barriers to innovation still have to do with access to the confluence of social, financial and human capital—connections, cash and skill.
What are the right questions?
After you’ve seen the first draft of the research and concept piece, we’d love to hear feedback on what you see enabling innovation, the blindspots of innovation discussion, and what you’d like to see researched next.
Found on @techcrunch by @thatdrew —The veteran startup types behind what was once known as @cotweet , a collaborative social media platform, are now creating a consumer offering to help people engage the collective wisdom of the networks for rapid decision making. Stay tuned to @seesaw for updates!
Causeit is happy to introduce our strategic alliance with ORBIT & Co. A project of Mark Bonchek, a long-time advisor (and former client) of Causeit, ORBIT & Co. serves to cause breakthroughs in organizational ability to engage communities in true, meaningful conversation, rather than old-model, push-style marketing messages. We look forward to continuing our work with Mark as we help companies form, implement and share their big visions for world-changing innovation.
Mark Bonchek
Causes shifts in large organizations' understanding of how to create pull-based orbital brands, rather than just push-focused marketing.
Mark, the founder and chief catalyst of Causeit strategic advisor ORBIT+Co, has been at the forefront of strategy, media, and technology since his Ph.D. from Harvard University, which predicted the rise of social media in 1997. He has applied ORBIT principles in his work with IBM, The Economist, McKinsey, and the U.S. Department of Education.
Mark writes regularly in Harvard Business Review and speaks at leading conferences on orbit strategies. Click here to read his most recent article: “How Top Brands Pull Customers into Orbit”. He also serves on the advisory boards of Thinaire, Nomadic, DigitalAisle, and CashStar.
Mark holds an A.B. in Economics from Princeton University and a Ph.D. in Political Economy from Harvard University. He also served as a Research Associate at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab.
While I'm livetweeting the Techonomy 2012 conference (www.techonomy.com/#techonomy12/Causeit's list of related accounts), I'm inundated by the hashtags of thought leaders (#bigdata, #p2p, #socbiz, #innovation). For the uninitiated, this little # symbol has begun to be the web's low-tech way to have high-power sorting of conversation. It's a way for users to toss a bright little flag in the rapid-moving waters of web discussions, serving as shorthand, its own poetry form, and a tool for tagging.
There's a great article recently published by NY Times Magazine that talks about the cultural usage of hashtags. I even used hashtags almost exclusively to pare down an otherwise text-heavy presentation recently.
There's another element of hashtags which is extremely important to companies and organizations (or even committed individuals) interested in listening to their ecosystems. It's called semantic analysis—the reading of conversations for meaning. Hashtags allow machine systems a shortcut to sentiment analysis, the analysis of moods in conversations. Linguistic tools look for subtle indicators, and are complemented by users' conscious decision to emphasize a particular statement, concept, or feeling through a hashtag.
You can read a lot more about the wide world of social media for large organizations, and what changes it demands in their capabilities and structures in Accenture's rather dense, spot-on Social Media Management Handbook, which has a great microsite for those looking to dip their toes in.
Techonomy, a great thought leadership conference, is happening right now in Tucson, Arizona, here in the United States. Causeit is excitedly watching from afar (as we do with many conferences, for ecological and logistical reasons). Check it out for yourself at bit.ly/KapXTE12 or via www.techonomy.com.
Check out the agenda and participants, featuring leaders from all around the world like Ray Kurzweil and more.
I'm here in Osaka, excited to participate in the Sibos conference, SWIFT's banking convention, which brings people from all around to globe to discuss what's next:
Every year Sibos brings together influential leaders from financial institutions, market infrastructures, multinational corporations and technology partners to do business and shape the future of the financial industry. Facilitated and organised by SWIFT for the SWIFT community, Sibos is much more than a conference and exhibition. It is a unique forum to collaborate and take collective action in payments, securities, cash management and trade. With the power to draw some 7,000 participants from across the globe, Sibos is unparalleled in its reputation to reach the entire financial services industry.
I've been invited by Innotribe, SWIFT's innovation team (and a Causeit client) to speak in their Future of Organisations (or Organizations, for us USA spellers) session. I'll be bringing content in from Mark Bonchek, Marco Aurelio and Julie Sammons to round out my collaborative talk, which will be in conjunction with Jennifer Sertl, Guibert Englebienne and Mark Dowds. Look forward to seeing more soon!
Here at Causeit, we love change. It's part of the game of business innovation and personal transformation, and it's our version of normal.
Since we began our focus on innovation teams, we have been spending more and more time in the Bay Area. Now, we're excited to announced that both Causeit and its flipbook entertainment project business, Fliptography, are present in San Francisco, after our nine-month pilot expansion. Look for us at great networking events and conferences like the Wisdom 2.0 Summit, BlogHer Entrepreneurs and our favorite anti-office, Samovar, and a number of new haunts you're sure to introduce us to shortly.
This week, we've already met the vivacious Tammy Sanders of UC Berkeley's Executive Education center (and soon-to-be PhD candidate), as well as spent some time with co-innova, Cesar Castro's new innovation firm focusing on operations in Latin America (we originally met him at the TEDxSummit), Jeffrey Van Dyk of Spiritual Marketing Quest and Tirza Hollenhorst of Be Embodied.
All in all, we're finding a ton of great connections and can't wait to meet you.
Causeit is proud to be the Principal Partner for TEDxBellevue. This year, TEDxBellevue is also presenting TEDxBellevueLive:
In the spirit of "ideas worth spreading," TED has created TEDx. TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. TEDxLive is a new extension of the TEDx program. TEDxLive events are twice a year TEDx events built around the live webstream of the TED Conference. Instead of featuring local speakers and pre-recorded TEDTalks videos, TEDxLive events enable TED enthusiasts all over the world to experience all 12 sessions of the TED Conference, and TEDxBellevueLive will be featuring a subset of those sessions at 9AM Pacific Time, Wednesday, June 27, 2012.
Our event is called TEDxBellevue, where x = independently organized TED event. At TEDxBellevueLive, our attendees will experience the TED Conference, live, via webcast. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDxLive program, but individual TEDxLive events, including ours, are self-organized.
Causeit, Inc. is proud to be the principal partner for TEDxBellevue, an independenty-organized TED event, where we provide thought leadership strategy and production support, project management and leadership through our team members Anna, MJ and Matt. At TEDxBellevue, our mission is to bring together local community leaders to engage in ideas worth doing that will make a positive impact in our global community. Our 2012 theme is Sustainable Happiness, from someday to everyday.
Why Sustainable Happiness?
Sustainable Happiness transforms a future ideal into a daily reality. We’re committed our communities become places that support balanced lives, workability, and play for generations to come.
Find out more and join us on September 30th for the main event and June 27 for a livestream of TEDGlobal!
As I explore the city of Barcelona, I'm fascinated by the ease with which the city can be navigated. It's more than the ample bike lanes and easy transit options—it appears to be cultural as well. While wandering towards the Picasso Museum with a friend, I happened upon Disseny Hub Barcelona (DHUB). This design center featured a number of fascinating exhibits on systems design and machine senses—all focused on making interaction with systems and technology more human-friendly.
There were two primary exhibits at the space focusing on innovative approaches to human interaction with tech:
Industrial [systems] design affects our lives deeply—from the interactions we have with our cyborgian appliances, like smartphones, to the less-flashy but deeply important interactions between children and their toys or mothers and their breastmilk pumps. The DHUB exhibit is a selection of projects by the Department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology in The Netherlands. They have a great video explaining pieces of their work.
The I/O/I moniker for DHUB's exhbit refers to the critical design focus on a feedback loop. Typically, I/O refers to input/output, as with the input of a user manipulating a mouse, "Augmented Shadow" by Joon Yong Moon (2010, South Korea)and the ouput of a display. I/O/I adds a second I, signifying an input back into a system, creating interaction. I was surprised to find almost every piece in the exhibit invited touch or movement, often in intuitive ways, like a table which rendered shadows based on the location of cubes placed on it.
Perhaps the most novel element of the exhibition was the staffed laboratory, where I met a number of researchers and assistants, including a PhD candidate working on diversity in innovative technology, Susanna Tesconi. She explained how to program Arduino circuitboards (easy-to-use, pre-soldered boards loved by the Maker movement) and then all but insisted I try for myself.
I'm looking forward to going back to DHUB this week to interview Susanna and the rest of her team to find out about the hackerspaces throughout the city, how the DHUB exhibitions are being received, and her interesting research. Stay tuned!
"The face of commerce is going to change more in the next three years than the last fifteen," said John Donahoe, President & CEO of eBay.
He's right. Until e-commerce arose, the way we bought things had not seen major innovation since the advent of the department store. Sure, global corporations, increasing use of credit cards and international business changed what we bought and who made money from the process, but most consumers still purchased in stores or via catalogs. We all know how e-commerce changed things starting in the late 90s, with PayPal and eBay at the center of creating cottage industries for online sellers and trusted online payment for brands of all sizes.
Now, X.commerce, the new unified brand behind eBay and PayPal, wants to create a unified platform for the biggest changes commerce has seen in decades.
Social, local, mobile: SoLoMo
These days, SoLoMo is the hottest new term—a confluence of social, local and mobile commerce. Social commerce can be roughly framed as the confluence of recommendations by people who actually matter to you, more relevant promotion, and a highly-responsive buzz engine that lets small, disruptive brands like TOMS shoes reach breakthrough sales figures in months or years, not decades. Local commerce, long limited to in-person interaction, joins mobile commerce—in-store price comparisons, location-sensitive coupons, reviews and even handheld checkouts. The innovations of e-commerce are getting far more personal and even better at empowering consumers—at least tech-savvy ones.
So far, though, the hodgepodge of services—Groupon, PayPal, Yelp, Milo, online shopping carts, small- and big-business inventory systems and the like—have not been integrated. Using SoLoMo innovations has meant a strong commitment to remembering passwords and peering into your smartphone in store aisles—or committing to one basic ecosystem, like Amazon.
X.commerce: a digital commerce lingua franca
X.commerce is planning to change the landscape of SoLoMo and retail at large. "Today, in almost half of all retail transactions, the consumer accessed the web at some point of their shopping experience," Donahoe told attendees at the X.commerce Innovate 2011 Conference. Citing smartphones enabled with apps like RedLaser and Milo, Donahoe describes the paradigm shift: "Consumers are taking the e out of e-commerce."
X.commerce is the merger of three key services—eBay, PayPal and the open-source online commerce platform Magento—via an ecosystem called X.commerce Fabric. This collection of synchronized backend tools integrates basics like inventory, shipping and payment information with site visitor analytics, advertising optimization, recommendations and more. By making X.commerce open and accessible, the big leagues are leveling the playing field—because it's good for business.
The Ecosystem
Merging PayPal's electronic payment processing, eBay auction marketplaces and Magento's online shopping cart tools is only the beginning. Using X.commerce Fabric, small and large developers can create tools empowering merchants of all sizes to bridge the online/offline commerce divide. Suddenly, mom-and-pop soccer shops can access the same shopping cart and visitor-tracing tools industry giants like Target use.
X.commerce has an idealized clip that sums up how small merchants take advantage of this new ecosystem. [Jump to 7:16 in the video embedded below or click here]. In it, we see a transition from frustrated in-store customers, missing inventory and slow product changes to an idealized (and tech-centric) world of responsive commerce with happy merchants and consumers.
During the keynote, Matthew Mengerinck (VP and General Manager of X.commerce) demos the platform for a small shop called Soccer Pro in a cheeky makeover-special-themed clip. Check it out:
In the video, a small shop's inventory is instantly integrated with any marketplace (like eBay) which opts into the X.commerce Fabric. At the same time, the owner's local foot traffic is integrated with local shopping service Milo and online marketing analytics from Adobe's SiteCatalyst (42:02). In one system, small merchants have access to new ways to sell and the ability to know how effective their online advertising is—a formerly challenging intersection of many, many systems.
Playing well with others: PayPal Access & Facebook
PayPal announced a big change in their user experience during the X.commerce Innnovate 2011 conference: the ability to sign in with one click. Much like the single sign-on tools offered by Google and Facebook, PayPal Access will allow merchants to work with PayPal and its users with less back-and-forth to the PayPal site and more integration. For example, verified shipping addresses can be automatically imported into a merchant's site once a PayPal user has signed in.
Facebookjoined the conversation, too—through their increasingly flexible Open Graph standard, e-commerce sites built with Magento will now be able to integrate with Facebook. For example, a user could click "want" next to an item and their friends would see a news feed update saying Annie wants an iPhone from ABC Merchant. Users can also click 'own' next to an item to create a similar post.
By simplifying payment and integrating with social tools users are already familiar with, X.commerce lowers the 'activation energy,' a software user experience term referring to effort required to complete an action (or transaction). At the same time, by being first to market with these innovations and strategic partnerships, they make it harder for other online payment tools to compete with them.
Small partners (and new acquistions) mean big innovation in the X.commerce neighborhood
Small software and business services startups, especially in the Software as a Service realm (SaaS) are helping X.commerce promise (and deliver on) meaningful small business support. X.commerce is clearly committed to startups, having bought a couple and presenting funding opportunities to others through their VC Bait/VC Speed Dating events. A few key players are emerging in the X.commerce ecosystem:
Kabbageis a firm allowing online retailers to quickly access cash to purchase inventory without the complexity of big-bank loans—allowing online sellers to quickly take advantage of emerging market trends.
Kenshoo integrates and manages online advertising, allowing a reseller to optimize their Facebook, Google and e-mail marketing budgets, for example. In the X.commerce keynote demo, we saw a user dashboard which clearly indicated how an increased spend on e-mail had the best conversion value—without custom reports or needing to toggle between reports. What's more, the dashboard allowed the user to instantly adjust their ad spend. This is a critical piece for small merchants who may be incorrectly allocating their ad spends because they don't have time to analyze the results.
FreshBooks provides simple billing and invoicing services for small business. With PayPal's business-to-business payments, merchants realize a huge savings over traditional merchant processing—and the service is integrated into FreshBooks.
Milo, a startup recently purchased by eBay, provides a simple mobile app to browse live online and local inventory. With X.commerce integration, local merchants can easily place their inventory in front of online mobile shoppers in the same way that big retailers do.
RedLaser, another acquisition,provides in-store purchase support via barcode scanning. Now, with X.commerce and Milo integration, users can tap into huge catalogs of products with live inventory from both local and national retailers.
Where, another startup recently bought up by the X.commerce team,puts reviews, activity suggestions and Groupon-like local coupons alongside Facebook-integrated social tools. This means users can suggest activities (restaurants, for example) to their friends as a way to find things to do together. Where brings place information and reviews into the X.commerce Fabric.
The challenge: adding leadership to infrastructure
Purchases of startups, a stronger brand community and a clear commitment to be the biggest commerce player in the world—X.commerce's intentions are clear. Can they make it happen?
X.commerce's constituent parts—PayPal, eBay and the like—have become business-as-usual. Their combination further consolidates critical services and makes X.commerce a formidable competitor—or ally—for anyone entering the digital commerce realm (like Google Wallet and Square). Clearly, eBay intends to see huge surges in inventory listings and PayPal could benefit from increased transaction volume.
Right now, X.commerce seems to have solid technological backing, a strong position in the market and a healthy developer community. However, thought leadership around the future of commerce is lacking. The X.fabric behind the X.commerce platform is a critical tool for empowering small businesses, emerging markets, and new forms of entrepreneurship. So where's the discussion? The Fabric is also a place where innovation around the very nature of commerce, retail and merchants can change as middlemen are cut out and complexity is reduced. Conferences like Techonomy, TED, Wisdom 2.0 and the Compass Summit should have X.commerce leaders at the table to talk about how the changing nature of commerce is affecting (and being affected by) pressing world issues.
At the Innovate 2011 conference, a track existed on the future of commerce, but the tone was a little off. Presenters from Where, Milo and other firms created a world of what was possible with SoLoMo, but their messages fell flat with an audience of developers. While engaging developers in business innovation conversations is a laudable effort, X.commerce stands to benefit from creating an in-depth, focused conversation which invites more than developers to the table. Their Trends in Commerce conference track and Crazy or Brilliant site were a great start. To really be as disruptive as it aspires to be, the brand needs to increase its presence amongst major innovators in the startup scene and leaders within progressive Fortune 500 companies.
Causeit, Inc.
Causeit helps innovative ideas become real by empowering innovation teams. We provide coaching, open innovation and thought leadership support to organizations out to make a difference in the world.
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