Suspended Judgement

Defining technologies as GPTs, and ascribing their impacts on human history is not an exact science - indeed it sometimes seems more an exercise in semantics than useful analysis, although it’s certainly a lot of fun arguing over which advances qualify and why - for this reason the Computer and the Internet are sometimes taken as two separate GPTs, and sometimes ICT or ‘Digital technology’ stands alone. What matters, though, is that thinking about things in this way provides a way of seeing the impact of digital technology in a better historical context.

There are four useful things to draw from this in my view:

New GPTs have been emerging increasingly frequently since the industrial revolution, and digital technology, as it changes the way we mediate, process and communicate knowledge, is adding to this acceleration. This includes new processes and ways of organising that digital technology is enabling

As important as it is, digital tech is not the only currently developing GPT - for instance bio-tech, nano-tech and artificial intelligence are likely to be extremely disruptive also. We need to be aware that digital tech is just one part of the story, and that we need to learn to live happily and confidently with change and the emergent implications of a multitude of technologies.

Digital tech can be compared with other technologies that have changed how everything works, such as electrification, the automobile and mass-media. We can gain insights from looking at how these other GPTs changed society, how long it took, how painful it was, what the positive and negative implications were. This gains us some valuable perspective.

Because the impacts of digital tech are so broad, we need to be wary of restricting it to simple categories or trying to simplify its influence. We should be thinking as holistically as we can about how digital technology affects this thing or that thing, this piece of legislation, and that traditional institution. There are a large number of secondary technologies, services and behaviours that digital technology has brought about and each of these has a disruptive impact also. (These are sometimes called ‘spillover effects’).

There are two further things I should note about this.

First of all there are important counter-arguments to the idea that GPTs are increasing in frequency, especially when compared with the early 20th century, and that digital tech is having the impact it tends to be given credit for. The most recently articulated argument of this kind is by the economist Robert Gordon in his book “The Rise and Fall of American Growth”, which was published in January this year. Gordon argues that unlike during most of the 20th century, we haven’t seen the impact of digital technology reflected in US growth and productivity figures. This is correct (and the issue of the “productivity paradox” is something we’ll come back to in future posts, I’m sure), however I think there are other factors at play. Firstly, only looking at productivity ignores other impacts the technology is having, especially human and relational ones. Secondly, I think digital tech very often has a deflationary impact on business, it redistributes value and effort in ways that don’t increase productivity overall (which again is something I’m sure we’ll return to). And thirdly, it took other technologies decades to realise their potential in the wider economy, and I think most firms are still quite a long way off restructuring themselves to fully take advantage of the capabilities offered by digital tech, even at the same time as people individually are becoming increasingly empowered by it.

The second thing I should mention is the converse of this “it’s actually slowing down” argument, namely the “change is accelerating to the point of technological singularity” argument. The concept of the ‘Singularity’, while it has taken many different forms over the last half century or so, essentially is the idea that technological change will accelerate to the point where it a) doesn’t need human intervention to keep accelerating, and b) produces a super-intelligence and/or series of disruptions that outstrip human ability to understand, assess or intervene in any meaningful way. I’m generally not a believer in these kinds of arguments, as I believe human progress is more contingent and less linear than they tend to acknowledge, and there is a strong smell of millennialism inherent in singulatarian thought. That’s not to say that I don’t think the effects of rapid technological change aren’t significant or even unprecedented in human history, just that I think it’s more likely that our civilisation will collapse as a result of inequality than due to the emergence of a super-intelligent AI.

I also think us humans should back ourselves to figure this all out. We’ve been pretty good at it in the past.

So, while predicting the future, as everyone knows, is a mug's game, and the only certainty is that important things will happen in the near future that are not foreseen, or even widely imagined, I think there is important knowledge about the present that is not widely understood, both among the general public and our political and municipal leaders. While we can have fun extrapolating this to the future, (and we will!), I also want to describe what I think the current state of knowledge is on these topics, and how I understand things.

I should emphasise that these are my views and opinions, presented openly for feedback and discussion. I'm not a social theorist or economist - I'm not sure what qualifications would be most appropriate, to be honest - but I have spent my life working in the tech industry (I got my first tech job aged sixteen in 1983), whilst also having spent many years studying critical movements in western thought and international politics, in which I hold undergraduate and master's degrees. These questions have long been close to my heart, and I reckon I should probably do more to write about them...

Anyway, hopefully this will turn into a series of posts covering as many of these issues as I can. I’m also trying to make them easy and accessible for everyone while still staying true to the complexity of the terrain, so please let me know whenever I get too jargony.

And so, where to start...

The first aspect we need to unpick quickly is what we mean by the word 'digital' in the first place.

The origins of the word go back to the 15th century, and for nearly 500 years its meaning was confined to being a proxy for ‘fingers’ or ‘numbers lower than ten’. During the second part of the 20th century, though, it came to mean the change from analogue forms of information and information processing, to 'digital' forms in which individual values are represented by numeric codes that are much easier to store, transmit, retrieve and process than their analogue counterparts. And increasingly it is being applied to everything touched by the 'digital revolution' - digital currencies, digital economy, digital democracy, etc. etc.

‘Digital’ constitutes a number of complementary technologies, of course, the most important of which are the computer, which has been on a path of rapid and incremental development since the 1950s and has seen performance increase exponentially, while size, cost and power requirements have reduced similarly; and the network, which allows computers to talk to each other and share their capabilities, which, by extension, allows people, as well as an increasingly large number of objects out in the world, to do so as well.

These technologies are often abbreviated to ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) but there is also a sense that the use of the word ‘digital’ sometimes means more than just these technologies, and so I’d like to mention a couple of ways in which I think this is true.

Firstly, I think it's useful to understand 'digital’ in the context of what economists and historians of technology sometimes call General Purpose Technologies, as this gives us a framework within which to understand it's impact on so many aspects of our lives.

Secondly, there is an important sense in which, certainly within the technology industry, the term 'digital' is not just used to describe the technology, but also the changes in human behaviour that are enabled, or made necessary, by their application. Put simply, ‘thinking digital’ does not mean understanding the technology, but it does mean understanding some of the effects of the technology. This is especially important when discussing such things as digital literacy, digital skills, digital transformation, and the digital economy, but also has a major bearing on civic, democratic and legal processes. After all, how our institutions account for these behaviours, and the reality that engenders them, is really what will shape our fortunes for the next generation or more.

I’ll discuss these two things in parts two and three respectively, before moving on to other things. In the meantime, please comment below or talk to me on twitter.

However, there is one provision that concerns me a bit, depending on how it is implemented, as I think it's too ‘normative’ - i.e. it pushes a specific conception of what correct behaviour looks like - and could very easily backfire:

"The IT companies and the European Commission also aim to continue their work in identifying and promoting independent counter-narratives, new ideas and initiatives, and supporting educational programs that encourage critical thinking."

If I read this correctly, this encourages the IT companies to privilege 'counter-narratives' on their platforms, but will this promotion be overt, or will it be in the form of manipulated content streams - e.g. recommended YouTube videos, Twitter's 'Things you missed', Facebook's myriad ways of manipulating streams, etc.

At the same time they are also tasked with encouraging critical thinking - which if successful will presumably alert people to the fact that their information is being manipulated, that certain ideas are being hegemonically privileged, and therefore the platform isn't an honest broker of information and worthy of trust. They don’t seem to see a conflict between these things.

It's not at all clear how this will be acted on. Twitter's European Head of Public Policy says: "In tandem with actioning hateful conduct that breaches Twitter’s Rules, we also leverage the platform’s incredible capabilities to empower positive voices" - how will this be done? It’s hard enough identifying hate speech - how can ‘positive voices’ be fairly identified and privileged?

The vast majority of this speculation has occurred outside of the official reporting and press conferences, which were marked by great respect and decorum as they should be. 

Despite this, one particular question really stood out:

During the press conference following Lee Sedol's sole win versus Alpha Go - game 4 of the series - a reporter from NHK Japan asked addressed the following question to DeepMind co-founder, and Alpha Go project lead, Demis Hassabis:

"Today there was that sequence of Alpha Go moves which looked like an unfathomable mistake to even the experts, but they couldn't dismiss it because mistakes have previously turned out to be advantageous. If this happens in real world usage, something medical where someone's life depends on it, and even to experts it looks like a grave error, but people accept it thinking that there's a bigger picture in mind, it will cause a lot of confusion. What do you think about that?"

Here's how Demis responded:

"Well of course the first thing you have to remember is that Aplha Go is a prototype program. I wouldn't even say it's in beta. It's not even in Alpha, probably. So, of course, part of why we're doing this match is to look at what those weaknesses are, and you can only do that in games, in Go, by testing against a very diverse range of opponents, who are extremely skilled. And there are not very many of them in the world. Lee Sedol is one of those. So that's one thing I would say. Of course, also we're playing a game. A beautiful game. But healthcare would be a different matter, and that would require, obviously, extensive, stringent testing in the normal way for software. But this is a one-off programme, you know, in a prototype phase and work in progress phase that we are testing here, so I think that's a very different situation."

His response is perfectly reasonable and correct. He's right to point out the current state of development of Alpha Go and the category difference between playing Go and other applications. On the other hand though, the techniques employed by DeepMind in AlphaGo, and this tournament itself, are part of an attempt to explore the dynamics of general purpose artificial intelligence. So the question by the NHK reporter is absolutely relevant and to my mind gets to the crux of our developing relationship with AI.

Will we still trust the machine when our instincts tell us it's making a mistake? And what will that do to our sense of agency? Our psychology?

Activity that will, and should, be largely uncontrolled in a system as complex as a major city. This seems to me to be the crucial challenge to smart city policy in general, and to the success of Sheffield's emerging smart city activity in particular.

We can list and publish the values, concepts and themes that we want the city’s smart initiatives to take into account - and that is what we have attempted to do in the forthcoming SmartSheffield report. This provides a useful guide and point of reference (provided it changes and adapts over time), and may be enough for most purposes. However I think more is needed to inspire people to action; to present an overarching, philosophical rationale that describes the ambition - the WHY we should do any of this.

Cities can do incredible things when the whole population is lined up behind them to help to push. So what, I’ve long wondered to myself, could inspire such common effort?

A while ago, I was struck by the words of philosopher Catherine Audard during an expert panel on progress and human development at the LSE, Audard borrows from Amartya Sen, John Rawls, John Stuart Mill, and many others before her, when she says that most resource-based approaches to defining progress leave out a crucial factor: namely the priority of freedom. Not freedom just in the liberal sense of state-assured rights and liberties, but freedom in terms of choice and action. This, she says, is above all what makes us human, and what makes makes life worth living. It is at the root of our happiness.

This freedom, though, is not simply a matter of having many choices to make, or being provided with many options to choose from, but crucially is characterised by the ability to rank our preferences, our needs and our desires according to a *timescale*. That we are beings that are both changing and continuous, and that it is through our consciousness of time, memory and anticipation that we are able to produce plans for life.

This is what constitutes freedom - our ability to rank our preferences, plan our lives, make personal and collective progress and not be stuck in one point in time.

This means moving away from thinking of people as consumers of goods and benefits, and towards an active vision of the human person as a 'doer', with the ability to convert resources into utilities. This is what I believe our vision of progress should be anchored to: A conception of the individual as a dignified, free being who shapes his or her life in cooperation and reciprocity with others.

She says:

“If we turn from measuring the resources that the self has access to, to listening to the human person herself as a developing being, we have a good indicator of progress in terms of agency and freedom. In particular if we look at the temporal horizon for self development that exists, or not, we have an excellent indicator of quality of life. And also of numerous social pathologies that go beyond injustice. Like being stuck forever in your territory, in your space, in your housing estate, in unemployment, out of school, etc.”

I think all of our smart city initiatives must be able to tell a convincing story about how they are enhancing the freedom of the city’s citizens, in this way.

Firstly, there's the obvious issue with scale. Once all my appliances have similar features, it adds a lot of unnecessary noise to our lives - as calm and ubiquitous as they design it, there will always be notifications and update messages, etc.

Secondly, I don't like the idea of being tapped up for donations anyway - donating always involves research, no matter how much you trust an intermediary (Whirlpool..?!) I know exactly who I give money to and why, because I've already done the research.

But the biggest reason for the "hmm.." is that even if the idea has merit, it's all about the implementation. Providing the option to make micro-donations every time you use the washing machine is one kind of thing. A behaviour-promoting implementation, like incentivising you to use electricity at off-peak times by diverting some of the saving to a good cause is another. Providing this functionality using open standards and an API so developers can write apps that let you see and manage all of your micro-donations and connected appliance settings in a single interface is something else altogether...

technology and nature exist in harmony with each other (or at least appear to on the surface), and one wonders whether a global corporation such as GM would spend the equivalent of $90m to present such an optimistic vision to the public nowadays. Or perhaps I should qualify by saying "Western" corporation, as the closest contemporary things it brings to my mind are

giant models of new Chinese cities

..

As it finishes, the film presents a conception of progress that is perhaps most notable now by the tarnish such words seem to carry:

"And so, we see some suggestion of the things to come. A world, which far from being finished is hardly yet begun. A world with a future in which all of us are tremendously interested, because that is where we are going to spend the rest of our lives.. In a future which can be whatever we propose to make it.

True, each of us may have different ideas as to what that future will be. But every forward outlook reminds us that all the highways, of all research and all communication - all the activities of science - lead us onward to better methods of doing things, with new opportunities for employment and better ways of living.

As we go on, determined to unfold the constantly greater possibilities of the world of tomorrow.

As we move more and more rapidly forward, penetrating new horizons.

In the spirit of individual enterprise.

In the great American way.”

Yet equally, at the end of the great depression, and the beginning of the Second World War, when hope and optimism were more needed than at perhaps any other time in human history, it reminds us also of what modernity replaced (Marshall Burman be damned) and, perhaps, how much we take for granted today.

Let me try to explain the distinction: privacy is the idea that the device can record useful data without the wearer, or people in the wearer's environment, knowing. So that could be video or location information or movement or whatever. 

Non-publicness, on the other hand, is the idea that other people can't tell what you are doing. You could be reading a book, or messaging someone, or playing a game, and everyone can see that you're doing something, but no one knows exactly what. Or even approximately what. These aren't nefarious things, or things that impinge on your or any one else's privacy, but they are things that used to be public and now are not. And the result of such things is that we end up with public spaces in which everyone is doing lots of different things - including some things they could never do before - but the physical act of all of those activities involves staring at a small screen, either in the person's hand or, with Glass, suspended in space an apparent few feet away from the viewer's eyes.

I think this is just as big a problem as privacy, because the conformity of behaviour that results from this non-publicness means our public spaces are less social. In a sense everyone is carrying their private world around with them in a little box, and when they enter that private world, they have a little unspoken 'do not disturb' sign hovering over their heads. If you've ever suddenly noticed that in a crowded place, say waiting for a train, the majority of people you can see are all doing the same thing it's pretty creepy. Feels that way to me at least..

And so it has amazed me for quite a while that no one has seriously looked at addressing this issue (please tell me someone has. If you know someone who's tried it please let me know!) 

Which is why I'm really interested in the new YotaPhone that is apparently launching before the end of the year. This phone is like any other mid-range Android phone, but it has an e-ink screen on the back. Now Yota (who are Russian I believe) intend the e-ink screen to be used to stream information to it without needing to unlock the main display and navigate to an app. So the e-ink screen can essentially show you all your notifications without draining the battery.

This is terrible publicness! This is back to privacy again - but in reverse. Instead of recording data about other people without them knowing, the back of the phone shows everyone your information which you don't want them to see. Not that they want to see it anyway, mind. Yes of course you could cover the back screen up, but if you use a case to do that it defeats the purpose of having an always-on screen. And not covering it with a case means you'll need to remember to place the phone LCD-screen up and cup the phone in your hands whenever you use it in public. A rubbish experience I suspect.

No, what Yota should do (or what someone should do with their handset), is try to solve the publicness problem and have the e-ink screen show the outside world what the user is doing with the phone. At least for those apps that the user has agreed to share with the outside world and at what level of fidelity. Do you show that the user is reading a book? Reading a book using Kindle? Or reading To Kill A Mockingbird using Kindle? And then what kind of interface should they use to indicate their preferences? Can it be built into the standard notifications interface? Should there be defaults and presets? Which ones make sense?

This is the work I'd like to see being done. Maybe the fuss over Glass' 'privacy' will encourage it, but I rather doubt it.

There are plenty of famous examples of organisations with very innovation-positive rules:

Google with their famous '20% time', and 3M, HP and others with their 'Bootlegging' time.

Nordstrom with their 'One simple rule', Zappos with their 'culture-first' philosophy.

Ultra-successful video-games company Valve, where no one is actually told what to do at all.

And so on..

These, though, are all companies that were created pretty much from the outset to foster an innovative culture, and the well-known institutional rules are supported by a whole set of norms and practices. It's another matter entirely to change an existing culture. In fact for organisations of a certain size it may be impossible - as management guru Peter Drucker once said: "Company cultures are like country cultures. Don't try to change them -- work with what you've got."

So, with this in mind I'd like to talk about 'culture' as a tool in itself, not just as something that the whole organisation is bound up in. Rather than confronting poor organisational culture as a large-scale problem, we can also think about it as a small-scale solution that can bring about change from the bottom up. 

In this conception, culture is *how* we do work together, as distinct from the work that we do, or the outputs.

For instance, at web-development agency Technophobia they have an IT security policy that dictates that all staff must lock their computers when they leave their desks, even if it's just for a few minutes. However, instead of giving the job of policing this policy to a security officer or to line managers, the company makes *everyone* co-responsible for policing. And it does so by adding a simple additional rule:

"If anyone (and it really does mean anyone), happens to see an unlocked computer they have permission to open the currently logged in user's email and send an email to everyone in the company declaring that they have left their computer unlocked and most now pay penance by buying everyone donuts."

And that's it. The 'donutting' game has been running for well over a decade and is a highly effective way of enforcing an important security policy. I have seen people stand up from a table in the pub after work and automatically tap the Alt-Ctrl-L key combination onto the tabletop, the muscle-memory is so strong. But in addition to the effectiveness of the policy, the fact it's a game adds immensely to the culture of the company. Everyone has a great donutting story. And there are some legendary donutters. It serves as an initiation rite for new starters - it's nearly impossible to avoid being caught during the first few weeks. People always express their personality when writing donut emails - it's rarely just requesting donuts, and some of them are truly hilarious. And of course the pennance involves food, which brings people together too. The cultural aspects of the game are not easy to measure but they are hugely significant.

At logistical engineering firm Loadhog, they have an emergency "I'm stuck" bell. If any of their engineers and designers are at their wits' end and can't figure out a way to solve a problem on their own, they can go to the 'Juicer' - Loadhog's stand-up conference area - and hit the emergency button that sounds the bell. Anyone who hears it (and it reverberates through the whole factory) can stop what they are doing (within reason), and join the engineer in the juicer to lend their expertise and help work through the problem together. Again, on the one hand this is an effective way of doing work. It's more efficient than to tie up an engineer on a problem for a long time when it could be solved quicker collectively. But the the bell adds a whole extra dimension - no one is left in any doubt as to the importance the organisation places on problem solving. And it creates an environment in which the unexpected can happen any time. I'm sure every engineer who works there remembers the first time they hit the emergency button and has a great story about it...

And so these policies are made more effective by being 'cultural practices' than just 'rules' or 'processes'. This is not simply "socially transmitted behaviour patterns, beliefs and thoughts". Nor is it about people sharing common values (although that is important too). It is more like what we think of as Culture with a capital C - artefacts, performances, games, images, etc. that increase our knowledge, understanding and ability to cooperate with each other.

In large organisations, this kind of thing can't easily be imposed  from above, but there should be space for it to spring creatively from below. In my experience teams and departments in most organisations have more autonomy to create culture than they believe. Equally, though, this is absolutely not about how management should measure team culture. Management should be measuring outputs. Teams should be exploring how much autonomy they have to create culture in the delivery of the outputs. However, management should also understand how to reward increased efficiency - for instance with the opportunity to use the freed time to further innovate, and develop new value, instead of simply with 'rationalising' jobs.

It's about being given the space to determine how best to do something collectively. And sometimes it's about adopting some practices in one (harmless) area which can spread to more important ones once people have got the hang of it.

Another aspect is that it needs to be consensual and sanctioned by all team members - which can be difficult if the team is very diverse (as teams should be). Of course any cultural practice that excludes people is unacceptable. But generally, as in the examples above, there is little penalty for non-participation. Induction is also important in this respect - it needs to be sensitive to the history of the practice and its effectiveness as well as just its performance.

And finally, there needs to be a way for the culture to adapt and change over time. And to be discontinued if it is no longer relevant to the people involved or is no longer effective.

  I'd love to hear about other cultural practices that people have created in their organisations - please comment if you have a good story to tell!

But first, some basics:

Here's how advertising exec Philip Beeching describes the HMV board's attitude towards digital technology in the early 2000s:

  "...we stood in the boardroom in front of the new MD, Steve Knott and his directors. For some time we had felt the tides of change coming for HMV and here was our perfect opportunity to unambiguously say what we felt.

The relevant chart went up and I said, "the three greatest threats to HMV are, online retailers, downloadable music and supermarkets discounting loss leader product".

Suddenly, I realised the MD had stopped the meeting and was visibly angry. "I have never heard such rubbish", he said. He accepted supermarkets were "a thorn in our side" but not for the serious music fan.

"As for the other two," he continued, "I don't ever see them being a real threat. Downloadable music is just a fad and people will always want the atmosphere and experience of a music store."

  On the one hand what happened to HMV is a textbook example of what Clay Christensen described in "The Innovator's Dilemma" - it failed to adapt to new technology and existing customers' unstated needs - but I think it's worth thinking about this a little more. The problem may be ignorance, but I don't think it's of an obvious kind. It's not that HMV executives didn't understand the new technology (I don't know whether they did or not), but that they didn't realise how much of their own preferences and beliefs were in actuality derived from a myriad of learned behaviours that in turn are determined by the format in which the music is presented. Or put another way, much of the image they had of a 'music lover' was in fact a set of learned behaviours and practices that resulted from the format in which the music was presented, not the love of the music itself. The ability to scan the racks in a music shop and not be overwhelmed, the ability to flick rapidly through records or CD cases, the ability to quickly release a CD from its crystal case without damaging the tiny pronged ring in the middle, the ability to recognise bands instantly just from a glimpse of a logo or the graphical style of the sleeve…all these things have zero to do with the music, but everything to do with being a music-lover. But these are all learned behaviours - much as they are valued by those that posses them, they are not strictly necessary. More than that though, they take time and effort to learn. Years later we remember the ability, but we will have forgotten the process it took to learn it. This holds true for a great many things.

And so, when the format changes, the behaviours relating to the earlier format don't get learned and new ones do - you can moan about children not being able to tie shoelaces all you want, but it's not going to make any difference and it's certainly not their fault that they are more used to velcro fasteners...

  Pretty obviously, the main question that anyone resurrecting HMV is going to be faced with is what to do with all the high-street retail spaces. If HMV gave them up and moved their whole operation online, they'd be competing with Amazon, iTunes, Spotify and the rest directly. I think they would lose - they are too far behind, too irrelevant and it's not obvious to me how they might leapfrog the others in that space. So the question then becomes how to use the physical spaces to compete better despite the cost overhead they represent. This might be an impossible circle to square, but then again maybe not. I would suggest that the retail spaces should be entirely directed at increasing HMV's relevance to their community of customers by allowing them to experience and learn an entirely new set of behaviours around music. Instead of shops, the stores become highly sophisticated interactive experiences that allow people to discover, engage with and experience music, and that process of engaging incentivises them to place orders for music with HMV rather than with other retailers. Meanwhile it also provides them with the presence, community and technology to create new services that ultimately replace their traditional revenue stream.

Here's what I mean in a little bit more detail:

1. Develop *music* experiences, not 'retail' experiences.

In my mind this means getting rid of all the stock (apart, perhaps, from some high quality exclusive items which are only available in store).

Develop interactive experiences that allow people to discover, review, sing along to, remix, review, rate, share, compete, learn and socialise. And I don't mean put in some Dance Competition arcade cabinets, I mean a hugely information-rich set of experiences that are connected to each other and all share data. That are integrated into a single flow instead of individual activities.

Make sure there is a balance between group activities and personal ones, and that both can be expressed publicly. For instance if there are stations where people can discover music, make visible what the people to the left and right are listening to and show music that combines styles or bridges the gap between them. Give people a chance to meet and interact with each other. And maybe give them ways of choosing or influencing the music that's playing in different areas of the space using directional speakers. 

Make the act of engaging fun - not just swiping touch screens, but experiment with different interfaces, perhaps gesturing in thin air or flying a craft though a landscape of music. Make the enormity of the catalogue visible and tangible, but also comprehendable and inviting. Create an equivalent of flicking through records, but one that is orders of magnitude more efficient and not easily reproduced at home.

  2. Reward engagement.

Of course customers can purchase music wherever they encounter it in the 'experience', in whatever format they want. That may mean that it is instantly available to them on their mobile device, but also arrives in a physical format in the post a day later. And of course the purchasing process needs to be incredibly slick, either using a physical card or biometric identification. No long process of shopping trolleys, just "I want that track" - done.

And in addition to this, engagement should be rewarded: participation should earn discounts when people buy products through HMV online. This is a key piece of the strategy - use the offline engagement to give a reason for people to choose to buy through HMV online rather than through Amazon or iTunes. The balance of this is of course crucial, but acknowledging the value of high quality customer engagement and content is perhaps also a weakness in the models of other online retailers.

  3. Build vibrant local music communities.

These HMV music spaces should be places people go to experience and engage with music, rather than simply to buy it. They should be places for people to meet, especially young people who perhaps don't have as many places to meet up as once they did, or don't have much reason to go to the high street any more at all.

They should be places for bands, musicians and dancers to meet fans and perform. And not just 'stars', but other professionals as well - promoters, choreographers, sound engineers and people who design lighting rigs for huge stadium shows... location and context targeted messaging, via Facebook Graph Search for instance, can reach micro-communities that make this viable, and every city in the country has creative skills strategies and local organisations who can facilitate such things.

They should curate the local music scene - either independently or in collaboration with local venues and music publications. This means making sure all local gigs are logged and that information is made available in compelling ways digitally, not just posters on the wall. And make sure the activities of local bands are displayed as well - when they're on tour or when a new release is due, etc. That information should be available online and offline though great interfaces. And should also provide feeds into other 3rd party information providers, for example ensuring that Songkick and the like have fully up to date gig lists.

  4. Build brand quality.

There's so much history in the HMV brand that it should have much more currency and authority in our swirling, uncertain connected culture than it currently does - I think it's lost a lot of gravitas over the last couple of decades. It should do deals with bands and labels to produce HMV co-branded, high quality special issues that are only available in store. Perhaps get rid of the current HMV logo entirely and simply use the iconic dog and gramophone image. Make it mean something. When someone gives someone a physical item as a gift and it has the logo on it, that has to mean something like "I didn't just order this online, I physically went into a shop and chose it for you"...

  This is an extremely rough outline, obviously, and I could list many more ideas for exploiting the space between on and off-line. It also sounds like  a huge expense with no guaranteed return, however the point is to regain relevance and create new behaviours in order to then capitalise on them subsequently. The physical-space experience needs to work incredibly well and not lose too much money, while in the meantime HMV essentially becomes an information company rather than a retail company. But I think the only way to do that is understand the customer to the point of creating them anew...

This situation applies to Jessops as well, and Comet to a degree. In all three cases a huge boom in consumption - in music, photography and consumer electronics - is taking place but is being mediated online leaving high-street retailers in the cold. The trouble is I haven't seen any of them *really* fighting back by changing the purpose of their retail spaces and radically re-imagining how people engage with them. 

Some well respected Internet investors believe that physical retail is not going survive at all. However, I think people still need destinations, not primarily to buy things, but to commune with things and people and creativity in general. And many retailers are failing at this. I also think it is possible to create rewarding behaviours that are impossible to experience at home and that people will crave, and that that is a viable business, despite the competition of ultra-low-margin behemoth Amazon. The truth is, the only way I see *anyone* competing with Amazon is by leveraging an asset that they have no experience in: physical spaces. The experience would have to be absolutely heart-poundingly amazing though, and how many firms can pull that off...?

Looking through its myriad projects, there are two types that I can easily imagine being used in schools, both of which are very well supported with lots of initiatives. Firstly, there are a large number of innovative educational games and media, some of which seem to do a great job of tightly integrating the educational components while still making them very definitely secondary to the experience. And secondly, there are lots of projects designed to bring advanced technologies to hobbyists, often in the form of kits.

Now I think this is something that all schools should keep an eye, but I'm especially thinking of Sheffield's new University Technical College, of which I'm a board member. Wouldn't it be great if the college curated a list of interesting projects? Especially if the curation was done by students themselves? And further, imagine students running their own Kickstarter projects? Using their engineering and programming prowess to prototype new products, and their digital media skills to design, create and manage a campaign..

Imagine this becoming standard practice - just part of the curriculum...

Anyway, I can't wait till Kickstarter launches in the UK next week, I'm expecting an explosion of British creativity to be unleashed when it does. Meanwhile here are twelve brilliant and inspiring projects currently on the platform that I think might get kids more engaged in learning:

GoldieBlox: The Engineering Toy for Girls

"GoldieBlox is a construction toy + book series starring Goldie, the kid inventor who loves to build."

Build Your Own Laser Cutter

"With our custom kit, you will have all the parts you need to assemble your own fully-functional laser cutter!"

Divine Space

"The beautiful and immersive universe of this sci-fi game is built based on real astronomical data."

Multiplo

"A system to design and build things in an easy way. Specially Robots."

Troller 1D

"An educational/hobby robot that can crawl (like a caterpillar) or curl itself into a circle and roll itself around."

The New Science

"Newton, Galileo and other great minds from the Scientific Revolution race toward discoveries in this unique worker placement game."

Mimix™ Tilt-to-Fly controller and NanoQ™ copter

"Real-Life Aerial Gaming with a flick of the wrist. Fly it; Play it; Hack it."

Parallella

"An open-source parallel processing supercomputer that costs $99."

Magicians

"Play a great modern fantasy Role Playing Game and learn a foreign language at the same time."

NODE

"A modular, handheld powerhouse of sensors."

The Plaid Avenger

"A graphic novel to entertain, excite, and educate…and with an experimental interactive comic app as well!" (And introduces kids to global affairs.)

SparkLab

Now there's lots to say about this, not least that there's plenty of historical precedent for this kind of thing (Tim Wu's The Master Switch is a good starting point for reading down that avenue).

One aspect that I'm interested in, though, is how the stacks, and other 'lesser' social media technology companies like twitter, yahoo and aol, impact on the openness of the web by acquiring new companies and vertically integrating them... Again, there's much to say about this, and often acquisitions or rumours of 'sunsetting' lead to much wailing and gnashing of teeth. It has been thus since the early days of the web (think Geocities) and continues unabated (think Instagram). It's a feature of a highly innovative field and drives huge amounts of finance and incentives into the system. But it's not always (to say the least) beneficial to users or to innovation in general. Lots of technologies are poorly integrated or even abandoned following sale, leaving some great ideas to rot on the vine. It's quite illuminating to take a look at the lists of acquisitions made by the 'stack' companies: Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Amazon.

Anyway, a few days ago I had an opportunity to talk to Kevin Farrar, Leader of IBM's Global Entrepreneur & IBM Academic Initiatives for UK & Ireland (thanks Kevin, and Ogylvi PR for arranging it!). Kevin had just overseen IBM's London SmartCamp event, which was held on the 5th of October.

SmartCamp is a series of events held all around the world in which IBM seek to identify and support early stage entrepreneurs who are developing technology that aligns with their Smarter Planet vision. I wanted to ask Kevin about IBM's approach to their 'innovation ecosystem' and find out whether it differs appreciably from the 'stack' companies' acquisition-focus.

What I found was that it does indeed have a very different approach. Kevin explained that IBM's intention is not to discover companies for acquisition, but to create two-way value in a couple of specific areas:

Introduce IBM technologies into the startups as they get to a suitable growth point - so IBM get a technology and service foothold in a growing company, while the startup gets access to IBM technologies and advice at little or no cost.

Figure out how the startup's technologies can be incorporated into IBM's offering, and at what level of integration - so the startup gets access to IBM's client base, while IBM expand their offering and ability to service their clients needs.

In addition, the winners of the event get enrolled in a mentorship programme; facilitated access to investment and further venture funding; entry into regional and global SmartCamp finals; and of course a fair amount of profile and promotion. IBM of course also get to further their Smarter Planet agenda.

The purpose of the exercise, as Kevin assured me, is relationship-building not lock-in - there are no binding commitments following the event, and the startups are free to pursue whatever strategy they wish, with or without IBM's help. IBM do, of course, also have a Venture arm, but there again the focus is on ecosystem rather than acquisition.

I also had a very interesting conversation with Odera Ume-Ezeoke, the CEO of SmartCamp London-winning company Viewsy, who provide technology that tracks footfall in retail spaces by monitoring mobile phone connections. I'd like to write another post just about Viewsy because I think their technology, and others like it, raise a host of interesting social and privacy issues. One thing Odera said that is pertinent to this post though, was that the process forced them to be extremely clear about what they were trying to achieve and how they were going about it. The other thing that the startups contribute to the initiative is time and focus, both of which are in short supply in adolescent companies. He was very excited at being a SmartCamp winner though, and told me it had been a great experience - huge congratulations go to him and his team!

Now, I'm under no obligation to say nice things about IBM and I'm sure that IBM historians would point to countless examples of IBM defensively acquiring competitors, and withholding technologies in order to retain lucrative revenue streams from their legacy service contracts, etc., etc. Equally, it's probably not entirely fair to characterise all the 'stacks' as being the same - they are all, to one degree or other, involved in ecosystem building.