Last week I attended the Institute for Small Business and Entrepreneurship Conference at the Connaught Rooms in London.  It was great to see old friends such as Ted Fuller, Alistair Anderson, Rob Smith, Simon Down, Zoe Dann and Harry Matlay among many others.  I have to confess I spent much of the time just talking to people rather than attending presentations.  But hey, I can read that stuff on the CD later. My presentation was on the anticipation of new business models in the post-production industry, and can be found here.

A big highlight for me was attending Muhammad Nouman’s presentation on low-tech innovation in the marble mining industry in North West Pakistan. He is my PhD student and is now getting the final stages of his PhD together.  He’s done an amazing job collecting data in such a difficult region and is such a conscientious guy.  He’s probably not looking forward to his viva in March, but I am!

There has never been a better time for innovation in the Digital Economy. The barriers to disruptive innovation by non-computer scientists have been lowered by a nexus of possibilities, namely:

• Widespread access to broadband technologies
• Smartphones that enable new forms of communication, handheld internet access and bespoke applications development (Ling, 2004)
• Software platforms that enable a high degree of networked connectivity and communication, such as blogs, wikis, twitter, Facebook, ning, youtube, flickr. As well as connectivity, there is the potential for rapid-fire one-to-many and many-to-many broadcasts and interactions that have the power to amplify any interaction very quickly to a very wide, possibly global audience.
• Readily available real-time geographical location data
• Increasing availability of government datasets to the public, e.g. for e-citizenship (van Deursen and van Dijk, 2009) or for practical applications, such as data from the Ordnance Survey in the UK

It has never been easier to not only access and use technologies, but to extend them, to customise them, to develop mew combinations, to access and develop new sectors and markets. My focus in 2010 will follow on from last year’s work in the creative industries  to seek out new ways of creating value from novelty, towards new business models, new products and services.  Part of that will involve working with those who have the ability to use social media, probably connecting with people outside my existing sphere of influence, developing new activities based on real-time information and breaking news. So this time next year, I could very likely be working with people I don’t know yet on something that hasn’t happened yet — that’s what makes it so exciting!

References

van Deursen, A.J.A.M and van Dijk, J.A.G.M (2009), Improving digital skills for the use of online public information and services, Government Information Quarterly Volume 26, Issue 2, April 2009, Pages 333-340

Ling, R. (2004)The Mobile Connection: The Cell Phone’s Impact on Society, Morgan Kaufmann