Innovation, experience, technology, encouragement to sum up some of the speaker’s messages at Campus Party 2013

One of my main attraction points was seeing that Brian Solis would be speaking at the conference part and having recently picked up his book “What’s the future of business?”, I was really looking forward to his take on innovation and business. Ironically only a handful of people showed up for his talk, but his message was nevertheless inspirational and made a whole load of sense to me.

The success of a business, product etc will rely on it being an experience for it’s users and hopefully a positive and enriching one at that. Hopefully a lot better than my Sony photo competition experience, thanks to printer or operator or some other malfunction an hour was wasted and my original entry refused to the competition, so much for the expensive looking set-up. But back to Brian’s message as a business you must compete for the future not for the moment. Part of innovation is to constantly iterate your innovation and to keep looking for the dilemma. The dilemma itself is where innovation will keep coming from and with that some innovations will succeed and some won’t.

The most striking comment he made for me was that when you set a trap to attract a mouse, the second mouse get’s the cheese and this is often what happens in innovation. There aren’t enough second mice out there or enough resilience and determination to last the next iteration or hang around for the tipping point.

Business needs to come from the heart driven by purpose and people. Creating experiences will always outclass technology and in my view this is indeed where game psychology can add value to other business sectors.

Basically Brian filled up my cup of encouragement and inspiration and I will now read his book with a new perspective, because I believe once you get a sense for the person who wrote the book, you also have a new experience reading the book from their view of the world combined with your own.

Thanks to the Sony mess up I did miss out on a talk I wanted to attend and only reached the tail end of Sean Charles presentation on the future of level of game publishing. The buzz and passion he got from his venture was palpable and the concept of creating branded communities and tournaments for your brand followers definitely speaks to me in the world of ramification whether it is for business or for learning, there is power in people and communities. It is amazing and fascinating how our world around us is changing because of people power and knowledge sharing.

From side conversations I heard I missed a great talk by Mitchell Baker of the Mozilla Project, who are truly hoping to create an open share experience online outside of the controlled and supervised constraints of governments. Very much an internet experience created by open source for open communication which is refreshing to hear about if you ask me. the how is well beyond me, but the concept I find definitely appealing even if I question if it can be truly open ever in today’s world where conspiracies seem to pop up every day in new places.

It was odd to find a “reluctant optimist” on the speakers programme as well, but once again Leo Johnson was a breath of fresh air with inspirational stories of people he met on his travels and why they inspired him. I did think he looked familiar, but only in he question and answer section I connected the dots to Boris Johnson (it did explain the signature hair and walk that obviously runs in the family). Leo was funny, philosophical and asked everyone that had ever felt that they hadn’t given it everything to go and connect with that passion and go all out. His community project for Kilburn in London is a definite positive and if we can all help our local community to make it a better place then I think globally we can make a massive impact but locally we can make a real difference.

The next speaker Jon ‘maddog’ Hall from Linux was definitely a big hit with the technology crowd because listeners went up and questions had to be stopped early. I can see why in traditional technology companies he is considered a maverick or rebel, but I love his thoughts on open source work and the future of learning and with the increasing importance of self-learning and self-teaching. His examples of entrepreneurs in very poor communities definitely put most wealthy nation entrepreneurs to shame. They all started local and made something work that was important for their local community even against massive odds and ridicule without grants, bank loans and other luxuries most of us take for granted.

Some of his message went completely over my head due to it’s technical nature, but for geeks out there contemplating open source or closed source, there is more money in open source because there is no certification for it. He made a great point that in technological education some of the foundations are actually completely wrong instead of learning Dos, windows, iOS, what should be thought is how operating systems are structured and then each of the listed above could serve as examples of such systems, the same with networks, office applications, databases etc. Certification in one specific software only doesn’t vouch for knowledge of the whole concept and various other typologies, that to me makes total sense.

I have to say that my mission to find inspiration, innovation, ideas and encouragement was definitely accomplished. I also gained a t-shirt, sunglasses, a few new friends and a vital essential glow in the dark tube to freak people out with on the tube home. Oh and I loved the the cartoonist wall, the pictures you can see on our facebook page.

#gamification #entrepreneurship #cpeurope
@briansolis @campuspartyeu