Serendipity for Squares

04 August 2012

Antony Marcano explains the benefits of embracing the serendipity economy within an organisation: > Ensure that employees have social networking tools at their disposal. Share the ideas. Create a simple sign up page that’s sent out to employees or even the general public. Get feedback. Provide “seed-funding” to the projects that inspire the most passionate responses. Get the first few features built. See how hard or easy it is. If it works out, you’ll have empirical data to base future estimates on and you’ll have the beginnings of the product (maybe something releasable).

For established organisations, with a solid brand image, adopting an experimental culture may seem risky. How would you feel if your bank or insurance company started exhibiting the behaviour of a lean startup? Shareholders and the stock market may react poorly to this kind of apparently wild business experimentation.  

But companies don’t have to drag their carefully cultivated brand through the uncertainty of the lean start-up mire in order to exploit the serendipity economy.

Using Antony’s MARTA heuristic, let’s try to think beyond risk mitigation: embrace serendipity and test our new ideas on the market, while protecting our established brand, and maintaining customer loyalty and shareholder confidence. 

Let’s assume for the purpose of this thought experiment that our company has a reasonable handle on internal privacy and controls media leaks. We start by introducing access to an internal social  media platform (like Yammer, or Glassboard). We actively encourage employees to participate in public social networks (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook et al.), while making it clear what information we do and don’t want sharing on these platforms. We provide time and space for employees to meet informally and encourage cross-pollination of teams, divisions and ideas. We introduce twenty-percent time and encourage people to self-organise around solving the problems that they care most passionately about.

When interesting new projects and product ideas start to emerge we help them flourish, while gathering feedback internally. When we’re ready to take the plunge and test an idea with the public, we can start thinking about managing the risk. 

We could opt to mitigate the risk of our customers and shareholders losing confidence in our brand by testing our ideas quietly. A subset of our most loyal, sympathetic customers are a good place to start; friends and family are a relatively safe audience.

If we decide that an idea is contrary to our brand, values or the market for our idea does not appear substantial enough, we could simply avoid exposing it to public scrutiny.

We could reduce the risk of damage to our brand by framing the idea as research or as being “just a hobby”, as Apple has done with the Apple TV since its introduction.

We could transfer the risk to someone else by hiring a specialist company to build and test our idea under a totally different brand.

And if we decide that the idea is close enough to our core business that the risk of damage to our brand is acceptable, we could simply push ahead and test it out in the open.

Being a big, trusted brand shouldn’t preclude us from acknowledging, embracing and exploiting serendipity. Failure to innovate, invent and adapt can be a killer; just ask Kodak and RIM.