The Churchill Blog

Back in 1999 when I first started thinking about the potential of mass collaboration, the catalyst for my thought processes at the time centered around why talented technology engineers from different companies didn’t work together more often to take their ideas to a new level of inspiration. Why were they so tied and bound to the corporate apron strings and was there a fundamental reason or unwritten law that was preventing them from pursuing this green field of collaboration?
Indeed, was there room for a different model in which they could form loose relationships with like minded individuals from other companies away from the corporate mothership, giving them freedom to work with the best of the best, to develop their creative geniuses beyond where they were in pursuit of a greater challenge outside of the office or lab? Perhaps an altruistic avenue?

Now to some, I understand that the very notion of a company’s most talented and distinguished engineers freely teaming-up with peers from competing companies, sharing and exchanging ideas, is heresy of the highest order and sounds like an IP lawyers dream come true. However, imagine the creative possibilities if we managed to flip this switch. A new renaissance for technology development perhaps?

Just thinking about what new innovations could be spawned from these loose collaborations should really give you a sense of what makes it such an exciting time to be around. There is so much potential to change the old ways of doing things and engineer new processes at every level of society and business to spark new ground breaking advances. I know some of my ideas tend towards idealism at times but I really cant help thinking about the far reaching possibilities of ideas like this and I’ll leave it up to the rest of you to reign me in to a more sensible reality.

So here’s my first ‘throw-down’ for all of you… What do you believe are the barriers to this informal model of collaboration amongst our engineering elite? Is it even possible in today’s highly litigious environment and what needs to be done to ‘grease the skids’ of innovation here to bring this about in today’s world?

Let’s see where we can take this one and in part 2 of my next blog I want to explore the ideas of multi-discipline innovation. Stay Tuned!

In this post I’d like to explore a new idea with you that I think could be really quite interesting and, if you are generally supportive, could result in the foundations of a global experiment in crowd-sourcing that you all take part in.

I was thinking recently on the topic of how to demonstrate and test the power of the masses versus established ways of doing things and I hit upon the notion of the ‘Citizen CEO’.
What I mean by this is what would happen if we created a company that was completely at the mercy of the masses? In other words all of it’s core decisions were made by majority rule voting instead of by an established management team. In effect, we turn all business operational decisions over to you… the citizens, the consumers, the prosumers, the partners; to see how and where you chart this ship.

To make this even more fun we could even pit the citizen CEO business against a traditionally run business, either existing or created as a competitor for the purposes of the experiment. We could also film the proceedings which could then be shown via a weekly YouTube broadcast.

With a period of 6 months as the time-line for the experiment, the teams could then be judged on traditional metrics like revenue, margin, customer satisfaction etc and/or other relevant ones depending upon the type of business that gets decided as the proving ground.
Anyway, I think you get the idea…

So, the first step in this process is to decide whether or not this sounds like a good idea and one you believe we should pursue together. Step 2 would then be to hone in on an idea for the business itself which we can do only after this gets the thumbs up from all of you. If it does we will then make more decisions as to the direction this business takes based upon more questions and voting.  Stay tuned and thanks for reading!

Was working out in the gym today listening to the November edition of Fast Company on my iPod and I was suddenly immersed in the debate between the reality of gene sequencing versus the hype and the promise that was sold to the public. Heavy stuff.
However, pondering this further, I started musing about the possibilities of approaching the creation of companies and modification of businesses in the same way. Consider for a second if the same principles, brain power and technology that were used to decode the human genome were applied to specific industries, market-places and businesses? What if you could find the key to unlock the genome of a particular business, could you could genetically modify it to potentially create a super company of the future? Perhaps a bit far-fetched, but at least an idea worth chewing over I thought. After all just look at Pandora and their music sequencing software which takes a leaf out of genome sequencing to help music prediction and the notion of leveraging similar breakthrough approaches to build better businesses isn’t that crazy after all. Perhaps…

After delving into this a little more there appears to be some companies out there already who have thought along similar lines and have tried to establish consultancy practices around such a notion. One such company is http://business-genome.com/. While I like their train of thought, I’m not sure I would bet my last $ on them transforming my business just yet.

So in summary, not sure if this is a flyer or not, but thought it would be a good discussion to get the creative juices flowing! Let me know your thoughts.