Starbucks have a decent reputation as a pretty innovative company.  They were one of the pioneers of online idea jams for instance, and have crowdsourced the reduction of waste in their business.

That may be grand and all, after all, we all can use a little inspiration now and then, some new research suggests that regular trips to Starbucks may be denting your employees creative urges.

The research explains that caffeine blocks the adenosine chemical inside the brain.  Adenosine acts to inhibit various chemicals within the brain, often therefore reducing our energy levels and helping us get to sleep.  So how does this affect our creativity?  Well it also affects our minds ability to wander.

Various studies have shown that a central part of the creative process is the ability to connect up seemingly disparate ideas, mashing them together into new and innovative mental collaborations.  In order to do this well, we need to give our brain the freedom to wander wherever it may go, and that’s something that caffeine has a big impact on.

Rather than destroying our focus, it instead acts to laser our mind in on the task at hand.  That’s great if you have something you need to concentrate on and need the energy to do it well.  Just so long of course that this something isn’t coming up with new ideas.

Now of course, we are drinking coffee in ever greater numbers, whilst at the same time demanding heightened creativity from our employees, so what to do?  The answer may lie in a study conducted at the University of East London.  They found that so long as people think they’re drinking real coffee, they get all the positive side effects of actually doing so.

So if you want the positive side of coffee, but also want your employees to be creative, it seems the answer is to serve them decaf but make them think it’s the real deal.

I’m sure you’re all familiar with how most external social networks operate by now.  You get free access to the platform, upon which the site encourages you to post a whole lot of content.  This data is then used to sell advertising to people hoping to reach you.

The model is widespread, from Google to Facebook.  Is it right though, or is it an example of large companies cashing in on the free work community members do for them.

The whole idea runs counter to what Ted Nelson envisaged when he predicted the rise of social networking back in the 60′s.  His idea was that each time someone contributed data to the social network, they would receive a micropayment from the network for their efforts.  So for instance, if you add something to the newly acquired Waze system, Google would have to pay you for that input.

The notion is certainly an interesting one.  There is obviously a vast ‘free economy’ existing on the web.  For instance, you don’t have to pay to read this blog (although you can click on some ads if you want).  You can go onto the Huffington Post and read articles from people who are not paid for their work.  You can go onto YouTube and listen to music that you haven’t paid for.  You can register for a MOOC and get free university standard education.

Whilst that notion of lots of free content is incredibly enticing, but are those short-term gains hiding from us the longer term issues that may come from the loss of the livelihoods in those industries?

Of course the issue has taken on added importance recently with the news that many social networks have been turning over the data we’ve freely posted to security agencies around the world.  So not only were we freely contributing to the vast Facebook fortune, we were also eroding our liberties into the bargain.  Is that really worth getting something for free?

There’s an interesting talk on the issue below by Ted Kovacs, CEO of Mozilla, who launched StopWatching.Us recently in protest to it all.  He talks about the need to have power and control over the data we submit online.  Does he go far enough though?  Is securing privacy enough or should networks also be paying us for the data and labour we’re providing to them for free?  Let me know your thoughts in the comments.

In the past few weeks I’ve shared a few examples of how science is gradually opening up.  We’ve had the likes of Harvard using crowdsourcing methods in their research into diabetes.  In a similar vein was PCORI project from Michigan, that aims to get patients involved in the medical research process more than they currently do in their role as pharmaceutical guinea pigs.  Or you’ve got the German based social network for scientists to hang out on and collaborate on projects.

Whilst the bulk of the science done around the world remains very much in the old school, these kind of efforts do represent an interesting shift.  Adding their considerable grist to the mill in the past few days has been Mozilla.

They’ve announced the launch of the Mozilla Science Lab.  It’s a project that they hope will apply the open source principles that much of the web was founded upon to scientific endeavour.

The aim of the Science Lab is to foster an ongoing dialogue between the open web community and researchers to tackle this challenge. Together they’ll share ideas, tools and best practices for using next-generation web solutions to solve real problems in science, and explore ways to make research faster, more agile and collaborative.

So in other words, they want to encourage the kind of open and collaborative tools that I highlighted at the start of this post.  Their initial goals are of the low hanging fruit variety.  They’re teaming up with Software Carpentry to try and improve the digital skills amongst those in the science community.

It leads me to wonder if they’re playing catch-up a bit on a community that is already making great use of social tools in their research.  As the saying goes, the future already exists, it’s just unevenly distributed, and there are already plenty of positive deviants out there doing great things.  Hopefully Mozilla can help spread the awareness of those isolated projects, and aid the more mainstream science community in following suit.

You can keep up to date with the project via their Twitter feed – http://twitter.com/mozillascience

The illusory superiority bias is one of the more commonplace in society.  If you haven’t come across it before, it’s the psychological reasoning behind our often false sense of self-confidence.  In plain English, we often think we’re much better at things than we really are.  It’s one of the reasons why performance management systems such as Work.com are so effective, because they use other people to provide the appraisals, and those people often have a much better grasp on reality than we do.

A nice study that typifies the delusions so many of us work under was conducted by Development Dimensions International.  They were looking in particular at innovation, and in particular how innovative we believe our behaviours are.

They asked approximately 1,000 professionals about innovation in their workplace, and in particular their own experiences of the innovative cultures where they worked.  Half of those in the study were managers, whilst the other half were not.  Would the opinions of the managers match up with those of their team?

You won’t be surprised to learn that the answer is a firm no, but what may surprise you is just how far the disconnect was.  For instance, when asked whether their leader demonstrated unwavering openness and appreciation for unique ideas and opinions, just 43% of employees agreed.  A whopping 78% of managers thought they demonstrated these traits though.

The trend continues.

When asked whether employees are encouraged by their managers to expand their understanding of business trends and emerging issues, just 51% of employees agreed vs 77% of managers.

A similar lack of awareness was evident when looking at how mistakes are dealt with.  Just 47% of employees thought managers helped them learn from mistakes, vs 77% of managers.

Likewise, just 42% of employee thought their managers took the ideas they produced and championed them to senior management, which was a stark contrast to the 75% of managers who believed they did this very well.

The report went on to share what they believe the managers key role should be in the innovation process.  They break it down into four pieces.

1. They inspire curiosity
2. They challenge current perspectives
3. They create freedom
4. They drive discipline

Sadly, despite most managers believing they did all of those things, most of their team didn’t.  On the off chance that you’re one of those managers that has a slightly tighter grasp on reality and would like to improve your own performance when it comes to innovation, the report concludes with four steps you can take right away to get things moving.

1. Senior Management Sets the Pace
2. Choose the Right Leaders
3. Develop Innovation Leaders
4. Build a Business Process for Innovation.

Find the full report here, and an executive summary of it here.

Article originally appeared at Work.com

Crowdfunding is stretching its tenticles into an ever increasing array of areas.  One area of particular interest is that of student finance.  Around the world universities are charging ever higher tuition fees.  With developed countries struggling with recession, state support is being removed, passing the burden onto the students themselves.

Of course, the idea of students turning to the web for financial support is not a new one, but efforts have often been on the seedier side of selling certain services on eBay.

Upstart aims to change that.  They’re a crowdfunding company, where the investment is not in a project or product, but in you.  The company, which recently itself raised $6 million in fresh funding, exists to help students finance their university studies by offering investors a stake in their future income.

The offering has all of the hallmarks of traditional crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter.  Candidates publish a profile of themselves that describe their potential and also what they intend to use their investments for.  Investors, who also have profiles of their own, can then offer cash to those who catch their eye.

In return for their investment, they will receive a percentage of that person’s pre-tax income over a fixed number of years.  This figure is typically determined by the individual when they create their profile, with the figure going as high as 10%.  Individuals can also set a cap on how much is repaid to investors.

Upstart alone has already seen around 50 individuals secure investments of around $1.4 million using their site.  They’re far from alone however.  In America Pave offers a similar service, whilst in Germany Career Concept do a similar thing.  There is even a Latin American alternative called Lumni.

An additional feature of such sites is that as well as providing investment in promising individuals, investors can choose to mentor and support them in their formative years.

Suffice to say, such methods of funding are still but a drop in the ocean of student finance, but they do represent an interesting alternative to traditional finance options.

Modern conferences are increasingly interactive affairs.  It’s common for events to have Twitter walls throughout the venue where delegates, speakers and sponsors alike can share their thoughts on the days events.

As a means of encouraging more engagement it’s great, but do such online conversations result in larger followers for those that participate?  That’s the question Nesta, a UK innovation charity, wanted an answer to.  They used LeWeb 2012 as their test bed, as thousands of people descended on London for one of Europe’s largest technology events.

They teamed up with Trampoline Systems to gather data on the Twitter activity of 80% of event attendees.  These accounts were examined before the event, during it, and afterwards to try and gauge the impact the event had on the connections people made.

The results make interesting reading, both for event organisers, and for those looking to attend (or indeed speak at) events.  They found that the rate of new followers increased by 15% in the three months after the event.  This was even more pronounced for speakers at the event, who saw their rate of new followers increase by 26%.

The suggestion is clear.  Attending the event caused attendees to seek out and gain new followers faster than would otherwise have been the case.  What’s more, the number of replies and retweets increases significantly in the month after the event, compared to the month preceeding it.  So people that connected to each other during the event, sustained that relationship after the event.

Suffice to say, the research isn’t able to explain the quality of the connections made, but in many ways, that isn’t the point of such events.  They exist to trigger new thoughts and bring people together around a common interest.  Once the connections are made, it really is up to the two protagonists as to what they do from there on.  If you’re either an organiser or an attendee though, it certainly provides some interesting food for thought.

I wrote earlier this month about the Harvard Catalyst project, whereby ideas for scientific research into diabetes was crowdsourced via the Innocentive website.  The hope was very much that this approach would be the vanguard of a new method of sourcing research ideas.

That may now be the reality.  The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) has asked researchers from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to scale up a prototype of just such a platform.  The site, known as WellSpringboard, is the winner of the PCORI Challenge, a $40,000 competition to find novel approaches to connecting researchers with interested patients.

The platform is a simple one.  A person has an idea for a research project.  They then record a video explaining their idea.  WellSpringboard then post this video to the site, give it a funding goal and then promote the idea via their social media channels.  Once enough people have funded the project, it is then opened up to researchers who apply to carry out the research.  These applications are reviewed by a combination of the general public and a board of scientists.  So it’s a combination of crowdsourcing ideas and crowdfunding the research.

“We want to bring the public’s voice into the world of health research, to allow them to ask for answers to questions that are most important to patients of all ages and the people who care for them,” Matthew Davis from the University explains. “We also want to make it possible for researchers to join the virtual exchange of ideas that can attract broad public attention and investment. Researchers will be able to apply for the funding raised by the public, through a scientifically rigorous review process that involves scientists and non-scientists.”

They hope that even if people don’t wish to contribute financially, they could do so in other means.

“Even if someone couldn’t contribute financially, they could still say that they are willing to take part in the study, if that’s possible,” explains Davis, who notes that researchers often struggle to find enough people to participate in their studies.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a fascinating project undertaken by Harvard.  They wanted to take an innovative approach to diabetes research, and attempted to open up the entire process to people outside of the usual field of researchers.  They did this throughout the process, from idea generation all the way to assembling the team of people to work on it.  It was a fantastic example of the possibilities that can arrive when research is opened up and people can collaborate widely.

So I’m really excited by the German based company ResearchGate.  They raised $35 million this week in venture funding, with backers including the likes of Bill Gates.  The site has nearly 3 million researchers already signed up as members, and aims to offer them a cutting edge facility to network and collaborate.

It’s been a tough journey for the site.  Research is notoriously competitive, and those pressures don’t always lend themselves well to open collaboration with the kind of people you often view as your rivals to fame and glory.  ResearchGate believe they’re beginning to knock down those barriers however.

The key is their novel approach to encouraging sharing.  Rather than asking researchers to share information from successful research that will hopefully be peer reviewed, they instead ask researchers to share their mistakes and failures.  They contend that there is as much to learn from failures as there is from success, and this data therefore is invaluable, especially in fields such as medical research, where knowing what doesn’t work is often as important as knowing what does.  When that information is hidden for instance, you can imagine the duplication of effort down futile avenues.

The real value of the site comes from the way it can connect up scientists from around the world so they can collaborate on important issues.  Ijad Madisch, founder of the site, has been targeting the younger base of academics and researchers from around the world who are already comfortable with the notion of networking online, and in particular with the notion of sharing what it is they’re working on.  He has found that a much more effective use of his time than trying to convert naysayers to the cause.

The $35 million will help the site improve its level of functionality, whilst also helping them develop ways to monetize the site.  Whilst plans on how to do that are not in the public domain as yet, one has to hope that they don’t dilute the ability of the site to attract the finest minds to collaborate on projects of real value to society.

Jason Hibbets is an open source advocate, and the author of a book on building an open source city. An open source city is a place that applies the culture and philosophies of the open source movement.

In the book, he outlines five characteristics that help to make a city ‘open source’.

1. Citizen participation – this is arguably the hardest part, as traditionally citizens have had a passive involvement in how their town and cities have been governed.  Areas such as participative budgeting show what can be achieved however, with the rise of civic crowdfunding another pointer to the future.
2. Open government - transparency is expected of our governments now, even more so given the news of state sponsored spying via Prism.  If people are to participate more then transparency has to be a given.
3. Open data – as of course does the ready availability of data.  #2 and #3 really go hand in hand.
4. Frequent collaboration – Hibbert recommends the frequent hosting of events and conferences to allow like-minded people to gather around their passions.  Whilst physically gathering together is great, it’s interesting that he doesn’t touch on online events and fora much at all.
5. Open source economy policies – last but not least, he advocates having strategies to build a local economy that includes open source companies.  He believes that these companies can help encourage innovation, with the open government and data policies from earlier tied into helping develop the startup economy.

Whilst it’s undoubtably an interesting theory, I’m inclined to think he gets a little bogged down in the open source economy aspect of it.  We’ve seen from clusters in other niches that there are typically but a few of these in any country, and indeed even over a wider area.  So there must be doubts over how many cities can become open source hubs in this sense.  That aside though, I think the principles of open and participative governance are very much on the rise, and hopefully that’s a trend that will continue.

Jarod Lanier is somewhat pessimistic about our digital future.  He believes that the rise of the web has led to an erosion of many of the professions we had previously held dear to us.  Foremost amongst those is journalism.  It’s a well trodden argument over the past few years, as publications have struggled to come to terms with the rise of the web, in much the same was as the music industry has struggled.  Papers have gone back and forth on the notion of paywalls as a means of monetising the online traffic that is slowly eroding their print businesses.

And what of the journalists themselves?  Increasingly we have bloggers churning out content online, much of it for free.  Whilst the rise in ‘citizen journalism’ could very well prove a positive thing for readers in the short term, Lanier argues that in the long-term it’s overwhelmingly negative as it drives the profession of journalism into the ground.

Given that context, it’s interesting to read the Oriella Digital Journalism Study today.  They asked around 550 journalists from around the world how they were responding to the rise of digital, and its impact on their profession.  The results are fascinating.

Rather than being concerned about the digital erosion of their profession, the journalists seemed overwhelmingly positive about all things web, in the English speaking world at least.  For instance 59% of journalists had Twitter accounts, although this dropped to 33% in Germany.  Interestingly however, the number of journalists with a blog fell compared to last year.

There are also interesting geographic trends emerging in the report.  Particularly noteworthy is the high level of digital interest amongst French journalists, especially given the ongoing ranglings between French publishers and the likes of Google News.

The report also comes with some telling insights into the future.  For instance 20% of those surveyed revealed that citizen journalism (ie the free kind) had as much credibility at their publication as the paid and professional version.

You can access the report here

http://www.oriellaprnetwork.com/research