What is the effect on people, markets, business, and society of the data individuals share about themselves, about their relationship with other people, with products, with companies, and brands?


A workshop with global innovators and industry executives, hosted by David Bosshart and Andreas Weigend.

Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute for Economic and Social Studies, Zurich, Switzerland, 01- 03 February, 2010.

 

GOAL

This workshop will explore the future of markets, customers, and individuals. It brings together 15 innovators, 10 industry leaders, and executives from Swisscom, SAP, Jung von Matt and Lufthansa. Together, we will chart new paths through the jungle of opportunities in technology, business and society. We expect everybody to actively participate with an open mind and genuine interest, co-creating insights and mapping out possible futures, based on dramatic changes in the connected, yet fragmented world of information, communication, and social media. Participants will learn to understand social networks in a new way, gain new and inspiring insights, and draw possible conclusions for the future behavior of individuals and firms. Relevant research results will be presented, from areas including anthropology, psychology, social network analysis. We will develop hypotheses of use for the sponsors, and derive insights from practical examples.

Specifically, we will discuss ideas in these areas:

Relationships:

  • Session 1. What is the meaning of the social data revolution?
  • Session 2. How can we understand new patterns of both individual and collective behavior?
  • Session 3. What are relationships between the digital and the physical world, what is the effect of space and (co-)location?
Markets:
  • Session 4. What is the true meaning of "free", its impact on pricing, sharing, and collaboration?
  • Session 5. What are the emerging new industry structure
Marketing:
  • Session 6. what are the principles underlying Marketing 3.0, and how can they be applied to create value both for customers and the firm?

On the first evening, a fireplace chat on privacy (or the absence thereof) will take place. On the second afternoon, one session will be youth panel. If there is siginificant demand, we might combine two of these 6 topics to space for short talks by participants. Please email Frau Ingrid Schmid what topic you are passionate about that you could present in 5 minutes or less.

 

AGENDA

01 Feb 2010 (Monday)

1000 Informal get-together
1200 Lunch (one-on-one pairings)

1330 Overview and expectation (David Bosshart)
1345 One point by each participant, related to the topic of the workshop, which they deeply believe in and which they want to make sure everyone in the group understands (two minutes each)

1500 How the Social Data Revolution Changes (almost) everything (Andreas Weigend)
1600 Coffee

1630 Session 1

  • What is the meaning of the social data revolution?
    • From a shift in technology to a shift in mindset
  • Extending customer value (value for vs value of customer)
    • across time: from transaction economics to relationship economics (customer lifetime value)
    • across network: from first order to second order interactions (customer network value)
  • Types of collective intelligence
    • Parallel collective intelligence (decomposition, portfolio)
    • Interaction collective intelligence (wikis, etc.)

    Exercise: Where has there been a shift, where not? Why did our predictions fail? Learnings?

  • Different patterns of communication leading to different patterns of organization
    • Within an organization, the way how "stuff" gets done is changing, including what counts as "stuff" and what doesn't.
    • Between the organization and the world, the boundaries are becoming porous to the point of vanishing. What does that imply for the future of organizations, the future of work? ("Most smart people don't work here")

1800 Dinner

2000 Session 2

  • How can we understand new patterns of behavior (i) of the individual, and (ii) the collective?
  • The notion of privacy emerged in the modern age / modernity. With ubiquitous data, has this notion become obsolete? If so, what replaces the vacuum it has left?
  • Incentive design: Intrinsic vs monetary vs community-driven motivation, social pleasure, etc.
2130 Fireplace chat
  • The New Privacy Paradigm: Why the established idea of privacy is no longer relevant, and what the future might be

 

02 Feb 2010 (Tuesday)

0815 Breakfast

0900 Session 3: Bridging the physical and the digital

  • What are the relationships between the digital and the physical world(s), what is the effect of space, (co)-location and distance? How is SDR changing these relationship?
    • The abundance of mobile phones has changed the way we do things (list vs flow, trade-off between computation and communication, etc)
    • Real-space / real-time decision making
    Exercise: Sketch out a location-based application where the distinction between the physical and the digital vanishes

1030 Coffee

1100 Session 4: Beyond free -New business models

  • What is the true meaning of "free", its impact on pricing, sharing, and collaboration?
    • The complete and exhaustive list of business models for the 2010's
    • The post-free era: Incorporating insights of behavioral economics and price perception
  • The emergence of group buying in Asia (for products and services, such as tuangou in China) (Andreas Weigend)

Exercise: Generate hypotheses to reveal the underlying drivers (belonging, cognitive load reduction, etc.)

1230 Lunch (8 break-out sessions, topics to be given at the beginning of lunch)

1345 Rapporteurs reporting results back to group (3 minutes each)
1445 Break

1500 Youth Panel

  • What does the 80's generation, and what does the 90's generation think about brands, loyalty, community?
  • What tools to they use, what tools do they want to make decisions, to simplify their lives?

1615 Coffee

1645 Session 5: The emerging industry structure
What are new, emerging business models? Which of the models existing today will morph into new forms, which will rapidly die away?

  • Innovation [x] verticals
    • Search was the innovation of the 1990's.
    • Social the innovation of the 2000's.
    • And what do we create in the 2010's?
  • Market principles: from abundance to scarcity and from scarcity to abundance.

Exercise: Platforms and Ecosystems

1815 Reflection
1915 Depart for dinner in Zurich
2000 Dinner in Zurich

 

03 Feb 2010 (Wednesday)

0815 Breakfast

0900 What have we learned so far? What will be next? (David Bosshart)
1000 Coffee

1030 Session 6: Marketing 3.0

  • What is the new meaning of marketing? What comes after the age of mass media?
  • Brands and Social Network Analysis: Tracking brand conversations and buzz.
1130 20-4-2020: Twenty Theses for 2010 (Andreas Weigend)
1230 Lunch

PARTICIPANTS

Innovators

  • Arnd N. Baetzner: Dipl-physicist (ETH) and concert pianist. Working on his PhD thesis (University St. Gallen) on the interconnection of transportation networks and spatial/urban design.
  • Ben Waber: PhD student in Pentland's Human Dynamics Group at MIT Media Lab, studying the technology of reality mining, using sensor data, extracting patterns that predict future human behavior.
  • Colin Harrison: Director, IBM Corporate Strategy, heading IBM's Smarter Cities group.
  • Daniel Olguin Olguin: PhD student in Pentland's Human Dynamics Group at MIT Media Lab, studying the technology of reality mining, using sensor data, extracting patterns that predict future human behavior.
  • Gregor Hochmuth: Associate Product Manager, Google. Formerly Hasso Plattner Ventures.
  • Ian Jindal: Advisor, entrepreneur and publisher. Founder of InternetRetailing.net, the European eCommerce Forum and the UK's first MSc in Internet Retailing. Obsessed with the digital customer and how profitably to connect with her.
  • Karin Frick: Head of Thinktank and Member of Executive Board of GDI. As an economist, she researches trends and countertrends in business, society and consumption.
  • Marsha Lindsay: CEO of Lindsay, Stone & Briggs.
  • Michael Ross: Cofounder of eCommera, a next-generation, data-driven platform for retailers. Former salesman of women's underwear (as CEO and founder of Figleaves).
  • Mike Sha: CEO and founder of wikinvest.com, previously responsible for Amazon.com's co-branded credit card business.
  • Peter Gloor: Research Scientist at the Center for Collective Intelligence at MIT's Sloan School of Management, leading a project on Collaborative Innovation Networks.
  • Ronald Chung: Digital native entrepreneur with business perspective on structured-unstructured data for real-world products/services to generate higher information granularity through collaborative human tools.
  • Ted Shelton: Serial entrepreneur, CEO of The Conversation Group UK.
  • Tiancheng Zhu: Startup entrepreneur. Worked at Zazzle.com, a marketplace of user generated content made into products. Also founded a social shopping startup in the Facebook Ecosystem.
  • Victor Lai: Senior Project Manager, Nan Fung China Development, Hong Kong. Developing commercial real estate and resorts in southern China.

Industry Executives

  • Andreas Schoenenberger, Country Manager Switzerland, Google
  • Beat Gruening, founder and CEO, Tally Weijl
  • Christian Wanner, CEO, LeShop
  • Dieter Berninghaus, Executive Board Member, Migros
  • Holger Schneider, E-commerce and New Media Development, Otto Group
  • Hubert Frach, Vice President Marketing, Lufthansa
  • Juergen Boehm, CEO, HolidayInsider.de, and founder, Immoscout24.de
  • Lars Redeligx, Vice President Pricing & Sales Development, Lufthansa
  • Kaspar Niklaus, CEO, Valora Retail
  • Raymond Baer, Verwaltungsratspraesident, Bank Julius Baer
  • Urs Riedener, CEO, Emmi (Schweiz)

Please also see the up-to-date list of participants from our workshop partners

  • Jung von Matt (including CEO Dominique von Matt),
  • SAP Schweiz (including CEO Hakan Yukse), and
  • Swisscom (including Executive Board Member Christian Petit).

 

REQUIRED PREPARATION BY EACH PARTICIPANT

To get the group started quickly, a booklet with information about each participant will be prepared. For this we need each participant to send in one week before the beginning of the workshop:

  1. Your one-page bio and interests (if possible with a photo)
  2. Your thoughtful responses to the following items:
    (a) Three deep points that you want to make sure the other participants understand clearly,
    (b) The biggest surprise you have had over the last 6 months in this area,
    (c) Your biggest hope for the social data revolution,
    (d) Your biggest fear for the social data revolution.
  3. One relevant issue at the intersection of the workshop and your work that you would like to make progress during the workshop, and/or any other idea you want to share with the group.

A FEW QUESTIONS

In addition to the required response to the questions above, here are some more questions to think about (see the responses of 100+ students of courses at Stanford and Berkeley in Spring 2009)

  • What's the coolest thing you have seen on the web in the last month? Why did it delight you?
  • Which blogs do you follow? Why those, and what does it mean for you to follow a blog?
  • How many people do you follow on Twitter? Why those?
  • What is the most important insight someone shared with you in the last months? And what is the most important insight you shared with someone?

Furthermore, throughout the workshop, we will consider how the Social Data Revolution changes

  • Relationships between individuals/groups and companies regarding their individual vs. collective behavior (within the next 2, and within the next 10 years),
  • Relationships between individuals (currently e.g., Facebook),
  • Relationships between individuals and organizations (symmetry, transparency),
  • Relationships within organizations,
  • Relationships between individuals and products,
  • Relationships between individuals and brands.
We will reflect on the emergence of collective behavior, new social movements, the geopolitics of emotion, and global mood. With participants from Europe, the US and China, we are in a great position to create insights that leverage the experiences os similarities and differences of the participants.

SOME READINGS

  • Alan Kirby, Digimodernism. How New Technology Dismantle the Postmodern and Reconfigure Our Culture. Continuum 2009
  • Andreas Weigend, blog on people and data. http://www.weigend.com/blog
  • Chris Anderson, Free. The Future of a Radical Price. Hyperion 2009
  • Clay Shirky, Here comes everybody. The power of organizing without organizations. Penguin 2009
  • Colin Harrison, The Next Big Thing (as of 1996)
  • Copenhagen Institute for Futures Study. Anarconomy. Report 3/2009
  • David Kirkpatrick, The Facebook Effect. Simon & Schuster 2010
  • Erik Qualman, Socialnomics. How social media transforms the way we live and do business. Wiley 2009
  • Gary Hamel, The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500.WSJ Blog 2009
  • Kevin Kelly, The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Coming Online. Wired 2009
  • Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, Connected. The surprising power of our social networks and how the shape our lives. Little, Brown & Company 2009
  • Jeremy Rifkin, The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis. Tarcher 2009
  • Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger, Delete. The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Princeton 2009
  • Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. How Social Production transforms Markets and Freedom. Yale University Press 2006

A FEW INITAL QUOTES

  • "The model that best predicted the network structure of U.S. senators was that of social licking among cows." Christakis / Fowler 2009
  • "Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring ... It's when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen." Clay Shirky 2009
  • We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day, every day, and not have it affect our perspective?" Kevin Kelly 2009
  • "Most radical, new, and difficult for observers to believe ist he rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts, peer production of information, knowledge, and culture ... It is easy to miss these changes." Yochai Benkler 2006
  • "We need a thorough revision of economic thought that includes anarchonomy (= anarchy and economy). You can give your product away and instead make money on service, advertisement, and more." Anarchonomy Report 2009
Please add your suggestions, questions, quotes, etc. to the workshop wiki. Thank you.

GDI Staff

  • Alessandro D'Elia, Business Development
  • Detlef Guertler, Editor-in-Chief, GDI Impuls
  • Ingrid Schmid, Executive Assistant to David Bosshart
  • Martina Kuehne, Researcher
  • Mirjam Hauser, Researcher

Please contact with any questions Frau Ingrid Schmid, ingrid.schmid@gdi.ch, +41 44 724-6201 (office phone). Thank you.