Watch the film of Tom Hulme on Vimeo.
Jeremy Myerson
So on to our second speaker and this is Tom Hulme, Design Director of IDEO. Ten years ago I published a book about IDEO called Masters of Innovation and Tom is one of those masters ladies and gentlemen. He has a physics degree from Bristol University, an MBA from Harvard, he is a serial entrepreneur and Angel investor and one of our best thinkers on holistic and network innovation. Ladies and Gentlemen, Tom Hulme.
Tom Hulme
Thanks Jemery, Oh my gosh, sorry! I think I woke everyone up. Um thanks Jeremy. I’m really excited to share some thoughts really around Open IDEO with you today and I though that the way I could structure this talk actually was kind of to try and take you through the journey we went on as IDEO to come up with Open IDEO. And there are some people in this room actually like Matt Hunter, who were on that journey with me, they’ll testify to the fact that, at times it was challenging as all good disruptions are but actually I think we developed some good learnings nine months into the project now so I’m really excited to share some of that stuff.
Um, my name’s Tom Hulme, I’ve been introduced, I won’t dwell on that stuff. Um, and also many of you actually know IDEO well I think so… I think I’m going to have the same challenges here…um, probably the best way to get in contact with me is through Twitter and actually I’ve got, right here I’m watching the Twitter feed of Intersect so if you guys want to actually use the Intersect [hash] tag set up and put questions up I’ll be checking them periodically and certainly we can come back to them so please do reference me in tweets or Intersect in tweets and I promise I’ll do my best to answer any questions good, bad or ugly so fire away please. I want to make this as interactive as possible.
So you know IDEO, I won’t dwell on that. I’m going to stand right on the corner here so let me know if I get too close for the sake of actually [?] …so you understand what IDEO does. We’ve been on an interesting journey with our clients. I think Jeremy summerised really well. We started having to solve more and more complex systems and actually, probably our greatest tool to address those systems now is the business model. Because the business model is agnostic as to what the solution is. We look for scalable approaches that can have impact so we don’t any longer start projects thinking the solution is necessarily a product, a brand, a service. We know that often it’s a combination of all of the above that makes the difference.
So, what I thought I’d do is, I’d actually share some of IDEO’s DNA, some of the stuff that we really believe in, and you’ll see why that naturally led us to Open IDEO.
So the first thing that, which I suspect… this is the kind of founder member club of collaboration, the first thing is valuing diversity. One of the things that IDEO has consistently has valued from day one is bringing together eclectic groups of people together into the same project. And actually as Nick did a great job of, I often think of the value being created as at the intersects of disciplines. We’ve kind of reached our human capacity of solving problems inside specific disciplines. You know, when Da-Vinci invented the first helicopter, he could do that because, you know, he could create a system. Now you can no longer expect an individual to create a helicopter. It’s created by the combination of incredible amounts of people and that will continue and that’s something we do in our projects. So you’ll see often in our projects you get all of these different, diverse perspectives coming together.
The other thing that we really believe in and, you guys would have heard of, certainly from Tim if you came to the past event, is we look to extremes for inspiration. So we look at the edge of markets. Now they might be the extremes of behaviour, so, you know, when we’re working with a credit card company, we’ll look at people that are incredibly risk averse, but sometimes there will also be extremes of markets. And the reason that is important is, if you…the one thing you know if the standard market, the average, the mean average is migrating. And it’s going to migrate to these extremes over time. So if you want a perspective on where the future sits, you should start looking at the extremes of behaviour today.
And the final one that I wanted to share, which I think Jeremy touched on already actually and Tim mentioned it last time he spoke to many of the people here, is we design systems. Now the unit of analysis of a system can sometimes be incredibly macro and sometimes it’s business models.
So this is a tool we developed when working with clients to remind them every aspect of a business model is a design opportunity. That’s the stuff the consumer sees – the product, the branding, the service, the pricing – but it’s also the stuff the consumer doesn’t see. It’s also the organisation shape, it’s the stuff Nick talked about. It’s the how you react to ambiguity. Can you design for openness? These sorts of things.
So those are three of the…and I’m happy to touch back on this if you like a little later…these are three of the things we really hold dear as a business. Now the interesting thing is, if you take all of these things to an extreme, so you know, practice what we preach, look to the extremes, and you take collaboration to extreme, if you value diversity, then logic will tell you, you get better results if you involve more people. Potentially involve everybody.
So that was some of our early train of thought. And similarly we realised that actually, any successful outcome is a function of many sort-of individual solutions and those different solutions take different approaches. So we thought…and you know, we looked and the market and the way it was moving and, you know the consulting industry, the design industry as well. If you take those to extremes, you know rightly or wrongly, whether you love it or not, you might end up at this, you know whole potentially scary world of open innovation, crowd sourcing – which has a really loaded name at the moment, we can probably touch on that if you’d wish – and network innovation, extreme collaboration, all of these different aspects.
So we made a commitment, and you know, I early on was a evangelical as I could be, that IDEO should have a point of view on fully networked, fully open innovation, and we should actually be building our own site to develop it, even if it’s potentially disruptive to our business. And Open IDEO was the result.
So I thought I could just, you know touch on that. But before… the natural thing, you know we often sort-of think hard about what open innovation means and one of the things we continuously asked ourselves, and we were continuously asked is, ‘yeah everyone’s getting involved in everything at the moment, but will it continue?’ We fielded that question all the time. And we believe, pretty passionately, it will.
Abraham Maslo, you know, the designer of probably the most fantastic triangular framework in history, and actually I think behavioural psychology still does a phenomenal job of teaching us, what we as human beings are striving for and where we’re moving and actually points towards open innovation.
So he talked about, you know, once you’ve got your safety needs, our physiological needs, all of the stuff we understand, once you have met all of those needs, you can start doing the stuff we enjoy most - human beings enjoy most. And that is, you know feeling a sense of belonging. Think community. It’s actually feeling esteem – self esteem. Happiness about being a member of a community and valued by that community. And finally, self-actualisation, which is really interesting. For me, and you know, our perspective would be, creativity is the ultimate form of self-actualisation. In the same way as, you know, the peacock’s beautiful display of vitality. As soon as you get beyond the fact that the peacock can feed itself, it has to show that that it can invest in this vitality. It has the energy to form this sort of display. Human beings are starting to do this more and more. It’s creativity. You guys understand this better than I do, but the exciting thing is, we all have this innate need to be creative.
So our perspective is, not only is open innovation and mass participation in creativity important, this is going to continue. And actually it’s a natural evolution for all of us. So we felt good about the fact that, you know we weren’t addressing it and everywhere we looked we could see exciting examples of this. So this is one I find really inspiring. So there’s a huge…YouTube is kind of being hijacked as a really interesting vehicle to have, to display ‘how-to’ videos. And this is Lauren Luke. She’s a 27 year-old single mum from Liverpool and she just set about putting up short tutorials on YouTube about how to apply make-up. She’s the most viewed channel in the UK, she had 40 million views in two years and she now has her own make-up line.
All of our traditional barriers to entry, barriers to contribution, they’re just being knocked down repeatedly. Everyone can participate. Nick has talked about this. And so actually, a lot of the value, in the future, will be…it will migrate to the places that enable people to participate in a rewarding way. And so YouTube, people hijack it to a certain extent for that, and now we’re seeing start-ups moving into that space and really fulfilling that need.
So Open IDEO was our attempt at moving into that space. So I’d love to share with you, just a quick perspective on what we came up with building it, and then, given that I think much of the theme of the next 48 hours is going to be around how important openness and transparency is, I’d love to share with you, ten learnings or so that we’ve had in the last six months from Open IDEO because I think they’re applicable to pretty much every social working situation ongoing. And then maybe we could have some sort of conversation around, you know if you’d like any more detail or I’d love to answer some questions.
So lets dive into Open IDEO. Initially, IDEO’s process you know. We do research, we actually prototype early and we launch. So we started by researching and we looked at the ways people were contributing, people were participating. And one of the interesting things we saw early is there was this big emergence of people consciously contributing and unconsciously contributing. Unconsciously contributing is less intuitive but what you see is, you know Google is a business that is built on unconscious contribution from the crowd. Every time you guys make a search, you’re making Google smarter. It’s a statement of human intent. They don’t need to be explicit about that because you get value back, which outweighs it. But at times Google’s even cleverer. You know, one that we really admire is Google Image Labeller, where they had the big challenge: their robots couldn’t index visuals, they couldn’t index images. So the way that they tackled that problem was, they built a game where you compete against someone you don’t know to tag words against a photo. You think you’re playing a game - you’re making Google smarter.
There are all sorts of fascinating examples. I have a good friend who has a start-up, who for the Finnish library at the moment is actually, through a game, which is saving moles (must be a Finnish thing) but saving moles you actually get to re-index the Finish cultural history so you’re working through books and translating them.
These will continue. I think Nick talked about ones where people know what they’re doing – there are also games in that side. But we pretty early decided and realised that we wanted fully conscious contributions. I’m not going to dwell on this because I think actually David Rowan’s going to do a great job this afternoon of taking us through some specific examples around where the participation economy’s going. But you see this everywhere. Sometimes people are doing it for money. Threadless – it’s a $50 million business, it was launched in 2000, where we can all become a designer and design our own t-shirts. It’s a great example. And then also knowledge markets – sites like Quora, which is becoming incredibly popular at the moment, is a classic contribution site. It’s as good as the crowd. Everyone makes the site cleverer.
In the days of the Industrial Revolution, scale was good because it reduced your costs. In this next decade you will see continuously that scale is good because it makes your offer better. Every time you buy something from Amazon it makes them smarter segmenting. Every time someone contributes to Quora, it makes it smarter. So consistently we’ll see systems where actually people’s contributions make the whole eco-system better. And we decided that this was the place that we hoped Open IDEO could live.
So let's take a quick look at Open IDEO. We’ve looked for conscious contributions, we looked at huge amounts of different platforms that existed. One of the things we learnt really early on actually is when you look at that… we looked at 108 platforms that enable some sort of design or some sort of innovation. And one of the things we really realised very early on is you can’t judge a platform. You have to judge a platform from the perspective of the community they’re trying to attract. And I’ll talk that a little more because it was a really important learning. I think a lot of us were snobbish about what looked like a good platform or a bad platform. It was a real mistake that I don’t think anyone needs to make.
We looked at open challenges. So once you’ve decided if the contribution is conscious or unconscious, you then decide if you want to consciously involve people. Do you want open environments where anyone can participate? Or do you want a closed environments where only a limited amount of people can participate? So open challenges…you know that classic example of an open challenge is Wikipedia. They, in April of last year reached their billionth edit on Wikipedia. And the thing you learn about Wikipedia the more you look at it is, they had to have this circular involvement of the crowd where everybody could actually edit and contribute because otherwise they’d be too overwhelmed. Can you imagine if just one chap was sat in a room and had to tick of every entry? Disaster! So open systems call for open moderation. They call for the whole system to be open.
The other approach, which you know depending on the challenge can be really valuable, are closed challenges. So probably the best exampled of a closed challenge is Innocentive, which invites its community of scientist to solve really tough scientific issues. This top one you probably can’t read is, it offers people $10,000 to come up with urinary biomarkers for lupus nephritis. So if any of you’ve got that in your pocket this is the… we’ll split it – I’ll submit it for you!
So closed challenges was the other approach. We decided, because of the IDEO’s DNA stuff that we just touched on, we’d go for the conscious contribution and we’d do it in an open system. And we dived into prototyping. So I looked for the lowest common sort-of way that you could prototype this sort of system and a classic one that you can see all the time now is you can hijack existing platforms.
So we just opened a page on Facebook and we asked questions. We called it ‘Big Conversations and Small Talk’ and we put interesting questions up there, principally just to see if people wanted to answer, whether the IDEO brand was actually interesting enough to have people engage in a dialogue. Whether we had permission to actually attract people and have those sorts of conversations. And it went well. We had huge amounts of friends and we learnt some really interesting things.
One thing that I was really fascinated by, we initially launched with a question around Iceland because we were doing some work for the government there at the time. And the thing I was interested in is, actually we attracted huge amounts of passionate people but were we just attracting people that were interested in Iceland? What we learnt is that, when we put up the next question about diet, all of the same people were contributing. So it was really interesting to us. We were appealing to a set of people that actually enjoyed the diversity of the challenge. They wanted to pattern match (or whatever you want to describe it as) from different industries, different needs. And it gave us the confidence to leap in.
So prototyping, you-know even in complex systems is absolutely possible. We live in a time when there’s almost no excuse for not prototyping anything in some way within 48 hours. Every platform can be hijacked. You can set up dummy web pages for services, you can do all this stuff instantly. It’s amazing how few people will still harness that.
So we’ll dive into Open IDEO now and I’m going to actually switch across to a video.
Film
For a while now, IDEO designers have been keen to put the best bits of the creative process online and invite everyone to join in. Open IDEO is a global community that will draw on your optimism, inspiration, ideas and opinions to solve problems together for the collective social good.
Each challenge starts with a big question; something to get all of us thinking. Next comes the inspiration phase, in which we all post inspiring things that we’ve seen out there that might help us solve the big question. The more visual the posts, the better. Images, videos and stories will all help to get everyone going.
After inspiring one another it’s time to flex our creative muscles in the concepting phase. How would you solve this problem? Post your solution and show everyone how you plan to make it a reality. If someone else’s idea sparks something for you, you can build on it. Open IDEO was designed with this way of working in mind. This is where you get to collaborate with other people and where the magic really happens.
Once concepts are fully formed, they’re put through the evaluation phase. This process is exactly as it sounds. You rate and comment on the concepts that you believe will best solve the problem, according to the given criteria. The concepts that rise to the top in the evaluation phase win, the winning idea being available for development by the challenge sponsor.
Your participation in each phase, plus how much you’ve collaborated with others, all add up to your design quotient or DQ for short, which you can chose to publicise or keep private. It offers you feedback and recognition. And because we’re all good at different parts of the process, we’ll all have slightly different DQs.
Just like in all good brainstorming sessions, we’re going for quantity as well as quality. The more you add, collaborate and critique in any phase, the bigger DQ you’ll rack up. The DQ will become a badge of honour for community members over time.
In a nutshell, we’ve created an open online tool that takes you through the creative process. It’s highly visual, collaborative, generates feedback and most importantly, it’s fun to use. Open IDEO offers it’s community inspiration and recognition. The site will be as good as its input and we’re looking forward to seeing what it becomes.
Open IDEO. An open platform for innovation where we create better, together.
Tom Hulme
So we launched Open IDEO, we didn’t know whether it would do well or badly and actually that’s still hugely subjective I guess. You know, with all of these things, out come the never binary. And by the way, when you launch these kinds of sites, everyone just jumps across to vanity metrics. Stuff like ‘how many users have you got?’ It’s totally irrelevant. Just forget the traditional benchmarks, the different sites against each other because the only real metric that matters is impact, and whether that in turns drives contribution.
So lets talk about some of the learnings that we’ve had in ten minutes and then I’d really love to dive into some Q&A. When I answer questions I’ll also be bearing in mind the site that we launched called Open Plant Ideas, which was in partnership with Sony and the WWF and that’s a channel off Open IDEO so it shares the same community but actually it’s fully through to the realisation phase, which is the most important bit you could argue now. And so I’ll share some learnings from that as well.
So lets dive into what we’ve learnt. So the first thing, which is…it sounds obvious but I think actually, I personally put my hand up that I was incredibly, spectacularly naïve about this, is the questions you ask are unbelievably important. That sounds really, really obvious and actually we’ve got some, we’ve all got some good ideas about what the questions are but if you think in terms of systems, the question’s absolutely key. Everything exists in a system. For questions you have to kind-of carve out islands of opportunity. Otherwise you’re asking people to completely redesign whole systems. And that’s incredibly tough.
So you start off with a great question of thinking actually what is a manageable chunk we can ask people to participate in. And by the way, I think this is actually why crowd sourcing is not as disruptive the to design industry as many people sort of, you know viscerally react. I think a lot of the value is in helping to ask the right question. It’s a lot of what the people in this room do. And actually answers often help you develop the question but, you know much of the value is in asking the right question because the one thing you can be sure of, is if you ask a bad question, you’ll get a bad answer.
So asking the question is tough. And the other thing that you have to remember, you know you guys will know probably better than me, great questions are inspiring, they’re short, they’re a call to action. But the thing I learnt is actually, these questions don’t sit in isolation. Questions are kind of fluid – they’re organic. So some of the stuff that really drives the question, which we should all be aware of, are things like the terms and conditions. People immediately see them bundled as the same thing emotionally. It’s also the partners you involve. When Sony launched with WWF, that was partly because they wanted to legitimise the question and make sure they had permission to ask it and secondly answer it.
But it’s also key to think about the evaluation criteria, and be clear about those. That’s part of the question. And finally, the one that I think is probably the biggest learning, is the initial contributions, the initial answers you get are without a shadow of a doubt, the biggest influence on the question. Because if you have initially someone that answers completely offbeat, they can derail everyone and send them in the wrong direction. And so one of the things that we did to try and learn and actually overcome that is, you’ll see if you look at the site, we have featured inspiration now. Part of the logic is to make sure we help redefine…we help make in people’s mind concrete what the question was rather than actually just featuring anyone that can go off at a real tangent. So that was a really big learning for us.
So asking the question is important. The next one, it seems obvious but again working with clients that are thinking about open innovation, this mistake is made all the time. They don’t ask themselves who’s best equipped to answer the question. So, I don’t know if Innocentive is a great or a bad platform and it doesn’t matter what I think. What it matters is whether the scientists that sit in their community have a decent perspective and like the platform, find it energising. And it’s often we find that people just assume that they can find, they can use any community to tackle the problem that they may have and it’s just not the case. So figuring out who can answer the question is really important.
Sometimes you guys will have access to the right community but other times you won’t and then you may need to partner to actually bring the right people to the table. So asking yourself who can answer the question is really important. And in our case, this is one of the things that we learnt with the Facebook page. We learnt that we appeal to a wide, you know a split gender mix – it was even, it’s actually skewed towards females recently since we launched a challenge on maternal health with Oxfam but it’s pretty split. The average of 20 – 40 year olds, often creatives. So Joseph asked the question ‘What does the community look like?’ on Twitter a few minutes ago while we were watching the video. And the community’s pretty evenly split in gender and it actually does a pretty good job now of, I think tapping into the extremes.
So we have community representation from 199 countries now. So it’s a wonderful way make sure that we actually have, you know… I’ve learnt recently, which is one of the most inspiring stories from the site, that it’s being taught in a design school in Accra, in Ghana. They actually use the site to put up course-work for specific challenges.
So, starting to see these stories, I think we’re a diverse community, people tend to be interested rather than just interested in specific topics and you see that reflected. But we have the same challenges as most internet sites that, you know 80% of lurkers…I actually think I’m wrong to say that’s a challenge because that may just be right. That’s what…some people, it may just energise them but, you know 80% of people lurk on the site, 20% of people contribute, hopefully today we’ll break through 12,000 active users, which is exciting. So the community’s absolutely important.
And the next one that’s important is, when you set up these systems, so other people contribute, completely open systems, incentives need to be aligned because you need everybody pulling in the same direction. That’s common sense. But the thing people forget, is actually motivations can be completely different. You know, my reason for contributing to the site may be fun and enjoyment. Actually, David’s reason for contributing to the site may be status. He may want actually to show his involvement. He might want it to be a badge of honour. Someone else’s reason for contributing to the site actually might be reputation or skills development. So you can actually design for all of these different motivations. Just be conscious that no community has exactly the same motivation.
The only time that tends the happen, and this is the main reason we avoided it, is when you throw money into the mix. Money in these systems, like the ultimate extrinsic motivator, which kind-of drives a market based approach, the danger with money going into the mix is you select for a very interesting type of person and you make some other behaviours you might value like collaboration, really tough to foster. People tend to work together as soon as money is put into the mix. There are some interesting ways around that we can touch on.
So incentives need to be aligned but your motivations for participating can be completely different. That’s common sense. We all have different motivations for being at this event today I’m sure. That’s not wrong! It’s actually healthy.
So in Open IDEO, our way of, you know driving our motivations if you like, were around recognition so Design Quotients is a tool we use that actually gives you feedback on your participation on the site, both in terms of quality and quantity. So we value everyone’s participation on the site. An the algorithm breaks it down into inspiration, breaks it down into concepting evalutation, but the last one and the most interesting one is also collaboration.
So if anybody even applauds someone else’s comments, or alternatively builds on someone else’s comments, that really drives their collaboration points. That’s a behaviour we really wanted to foster and by far that was the toughest one.
The next thing to do if you are choosing to employ this sort of system is, have a specific process and think hard about the bits you want to give up to the crowd. So which bits do you want to democratise? We talked about how setting the question, I think is really difficult. We experimented with this for a challenge that we did with the White House, and we asked them to set the agenda for the meeting at the White House. And it was really tough. Our participation dropped to a super-low level, which wasn’t a bad thing because the quality was still there. Getting people to ask the design question is pretty tough. Setting the design challenge en mass is really really tough.
So we haven’t seen any great examples… I can see the nachos are distracting everyone, you’re all sort-of like this…um, so the bits that we decided were probably most successfully be put out to the crowd or involve everybody are insight, so divergent, ideation: divergent and actually evaluation: convergent. So those were the bits that we figured that we could involve people in most successfully.
And interestingly - you just heard me say it - it’s both divergent and convergent stuff. So you get a lot of people that say ‘oh it’s good for divergent thinking’ actually it’s good for both if you design it right. So we could dive into some thoughts on that if you wish a little bit later.
Collaboration. So this is a network map that comes out at the other end of a challenge at Open IDEO. You can see it live on the site. And what we wanted to do, our dream if you like, if we you know…if you go to Nick’s workshop today and you work in a group of twenty people you’ll come up with ideas that are a function of all the interactions through the course of that workshop. We wanted to find a way of visualising that kind of node effect of learning. And this was the output. It’s what we call a collaboration map and it shows who’s built on other people’s ideas. What concepts came from which inspirations. And this really is becoming a useful tool for us. Just to understand how ideas are created. So we’re still early days but it’s good fun to see that happen.
And the different collaboration tools that we’ve built into the site: we enable people to applaud stuff – that’s the lowest level of engagement. You need a hook. You need a way that anyone can contribute. And applauding is the way and…you know and Facebook’s very smart now, they’ve got the ‘like’ button, they’re expanding on that, this is exactly the same logic. They’re kind of bringing people in slowly and they’re looking for tiny units of engagement that actually make the system smarter. We then have commenting, evaluation, you can build on other people’s ideas or you can come up with something completely new. So that’s a deepening and sort-of more complex involvement as you go along there.
So I think the learning from this is you have to design for different units of engagement and often your tiniest units of engagement are you most important because they’re your hooks. They’re what begin the relationship, begin the journey with the people that you’re working with.
So final four, which we’ll wiz through and then we’ll have some questions. So next one is maintaining a drumbeat. Nick touched on this. Another sort of fallacy, another misconception about open innovation is that it’s really easy to organise and everyone’s doing it because it takes no work. It’s not a holiday camp. It takes real, real work. You could argue that it takes more effort actually than just having a small team. So you have to believe that the output might be equally as good or better to justify that investment. But one of the things you have to do is keep a drum beat. It’s like any of these systems – you have to continually keep a drum beat and the best way to do it is to actually harness other platforms where people already congregate. So Twitter is a classic example of that. We also have things like build hours on Twitter where people improve concepts because we tend to go to where people are, rather than expect them to always come to our site.
And finally we integrated deeply with Facebook. Because that literally is where everyone is. I was talking to someone that had just been working with Starbucks the other week and Starbucks spent a huge amount of money on their website and they had 1.4 million visitors. In the same period, they’d revamped their Facebook page and they’d had 14 million likes. You have to go where communities are to bring them in. So it was an important learning for us.
And the final ones, which I kind-of think that these are more exciting because they become more philosophical, I’m excited about the fact that our virtual and real-life worlds are melding. You know, ten years ago, when everyone had those traditional Macs etc, you had online experience, offline experience. Now we struggle to distinguish the two. So when you’re designing system, online systems, remember that actually a lot of the value might be created offline. In our case one of the great reminders of this was the fact that we had Tweet-up organised in San Francisco, where community members on their own rallied and started attending.
So final couple, I’ll wiz through…the next one is the importance of valuing the journey. We write live blogs about the experience to understand what’s going on. Often the journey’s more important than the destination. You know, engagement around the topic…there’s all these lovely things that fall out of the journey. Understanding the question better.
And showing impact. I touched on it. But for us, we chose challenges based on their potential to show impact. It’s incredibly important for us. Because ultimately I think it will be the best metric of our success or failure. So the impact that Jamie, you know Jamie Oliver’s food revolution, the stuff we did with that, we’re seeing the impact now. We’re also seeing impact out in Ghana at the moment, where we have a team actually building the prototypes that were designed on an Open IDEO challenge in Accra as we speak and live blogging it – you can check that at the Ghana San.
The final one is, enjoy the journey. I think designing systems for openness is unbelievably scary. It’s terrifying but as long as you give up control, you get back far more than you’d imagine and this is one of my favourite sort of anecdotes: So we have a user based in Malaysia called Bernardette Quam and if I looked at her profile on Open IDEO, I’d see she never contributed. She was a lurker. She just you-know registered, looked at stuff, never contributed. At Christmas, we got a hand-drawn Christmas card through the post that she’d drawn using all of the inspiration from Open IDEO around colour and stuff, just thanking everyone for the platform, which was to me, was a wonderful journey. You have to design in time to enjoy all of the serendipity that happens in these systems because if you’re flat out working on it all the time, you forget stuff like this, which you could argue is kind of more impactful, more meaningful.
So that’s it from me. I think I’ve over-run by three or four minutes. Do we have time for a couple of questions Jeremy?
Jeremy Myerson
We do. A round of applause for Tom.