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“Diversity and Ideas in the Porous Community” will be my talk at the first-ever TEDxWyandotte on April 2, 2013 at Kansas City Kansas Community College (KCKCC).

TEDxWyandotte – Core Impact: Exploring Ideas that Enrich a Community

The theme chosen by TEDxWyandotte curator Shari Wilson, Jay Matlack, Organizing Committee Chair, and the rest of the organizing committee is “Core Impact: Exploring Ideas that Enrich a Community.”

Among the other presenters announced so far are Adam Arredondo, CEO and co-founder of Local Ruckus, and Afro Cuban band, Making Movies. There are a number of other fantastic speakers representing compelling community efforts, but I’m sworn to secrecy until they are officially announced!

This will be my first TEDx talk after attending a variety of TEDxKC events the past several years – both in person and on video. While the TED talks and the now familiar format seems straight forward in its expectations and constraints, it’s a speaking style quite different than I use for my presentations. The TED talks style is so one-way (all eyes on the speaker on the stage in a darkened venue); it flies in the face of creating the diverse interaction we so fundamentally espouse with the Brainzooming methodology. As a result, from a format standpoint, I’m trying to craft a TED talk that looks like a TED talk but is still interactive; it’s a challenge, without a doubt.

My TEDx Talk: Diversity and Ideas in the Porous Community

The topic for my TEDxWyandotte talk is about how the most impactful, strategic change springs from large-scale, diverse, even contradictory, perspectives brought together to forge new ideas. Creating a porous community that readily cultivates diverse thinking is vital to a truly enriched community, i.e. a community were the benefits of great ideas are available to all participants.

And that idea holds intriguing implications for communities and change.

Look up typical definitions of community and you see words and phrases such as:

• Unified
• Common interests and location
• Living in a specific area
• Common history or interests

Not a lot of diversity there – and that’s a problem. Yet we find such excitement in forces pushing diversity and disruption through:

• Crowdsourcing – whether solicited or not
• Large organizations looking outside themselves for answers (and perhaps survival)
• Information available anywhere in the cloud that challenges the idea of place

Wrapping all my thinking together on this topic in a succinct fashion while also drawing some lines through the other presentations will be an exciting opportunity.

And to carry out the theme and raise the stakes just a bit, audience members will be able to select the stories they want to hear during the presentation. That means there are nine different variations of the presentation that are possible. We won’t know which one it will be until the audience makes their decisions throughout the presentation. It’s what I’ve started to call, “Live Blogging.” Just as with hyperlinks in a blog post, the audience community is able to direct the content deeper or move on based on its preferences.

If You’re Near Kansas City, Join Us for TEDxWyandotte

Once again, TEDxWyandotte will be Tuesday, April 2, at 5:30 pm at Kansas City Kansas Community College. If you’re in or around Kansas City, it would be great to have you join us and sell out this first time TEDx event. You can reserve tickets right now! You can also keep up to date on speaker announcements and other news about TEDxWyandotte on Facebook.

And if you have any ideas on the topic, I’m interested in hearing what you think! - Mike Brown

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Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Thursday, July 26, 2012 was the long-awaited Google Fiber announcement day in Kansas City. The much anticipated and high secrecy corporate communications event played out in the Westport district of Kansas City at the new Google Fiber Space, conveniently located on State Line road, just inside Missouri on the dividing line between it and Kansas.

I scored an invite to the first of several Google Fiber introduction events over the course of two days as Google executives and mayors Joe Reardon and Sly James (of Kansas City, Kansas and Missouri, respectively) unveiled the Google Fiber offering.

Since there are already many stories evaluating the offers and packages Google Fiber introduced, there’s not much value in regurgitating what you can read and see elsewhere. Suffice it to say while I’m not personally a huge consumer of many TV channels, the packages appear to deliver the expected speed, flexibility, and coolness factor – all at a price point that has to have other cable players (esp. Time Warner Cable here in Kansas City) quaking.

6 Corporate Communications Lessons from the Google Fiber Announcement

Instead of dissecting the Google Fiber offering, I put on my strategic marketing communications and event strategy hat to share these corporate communication lessons from the largely well-produced, seamless corporate communications event Google Fiber hosted in Kansas City.

1. Use mystery and mystique for all it’s worth in corporate communications.

Google Fiber announcement event invitees received a single email the week before announcing the event with a link to an RSVP form. The email promised future details, with no indication of what or when details would be coming. It wasn’t until the day before an email arrived with a map and timing directions, but not much more. The intrigue behind the event, the agenda, and its location (although reader Paula Holmquist called me a full week before with a correct tip on the venue), along with a pre-rock concert kind of feel in the parking lot all played into getting attendees even more ready for a big announcement.

2. Doing what you’ve communicated all along is still the best corporate communications strategy.

In a discussion with Aaron Deacon after the event, he talked about how the day’s announcements weren’t that far off from what Google had been saying all along – although Google HADN’T been saying (features, affordable price points, starting installations where demand is strongest, etc.) all that much. But because people thought what Google had been saying sounded too good to be true, there was, in some circles, a built in readiness to find disappointment in the announcement (i.e., an inferior offering, too high prices, or some other fatal flaw).

While you can nitpick the offering (it’s missing some cable channel staples), Google basically delivered against what it had been messaging throughout. The simple formula works: If “What You Do” = “What You Say” then you “Win.”

3. Create new language you can (try to) own.

Who had heard of “fiberhood” before today as a way to describe a neighborhood that had banded together to vie for faster Internet speeds? Despite its new application in this setting, you already see “fiberhood” showing up in news stories, blogs, and tweets. (Interestingly, when you Google “fiberhood,” however, you get pages of results about car hoods.)

One potential opportunity for new language Google didn’t embrace, as pointed out by Dave Sandel (who we’re working with on the Gigabit City Summit), was “television.” If they’d been up for it, Dave suggested what Google is offering goes beyond “television” or even “home entertainment.” Google missed the proactive opportunity, at least today, to craft a new term defining the integrated digital environment it’s pitching with Google Fiber.

4. No matter how cool your brand, forced skits with corporate employees trying to act are cheesy.

When we did the Building the Gigabit City large-scale brainstorming event, we were challenged trying to come up with ways to make 100 times faster Internet speeds tangible. We wound up using several about how cooking a meal would take seconds and a work day might last less than 15 minutes. Google added to the mix today with an example about how a car could drive to NYC while a broadband speed car wouldn’t have even made it out of the Kansas City metro area.

Nice example, but when it came time for a demo, the Google corporate employees had to play act a few family situations that were totally forced and pretty awkward. Very few executives are actors, so don’t make them do funny skits if doing so accentuates their lack of acting talent.

5. When you’re attacking a competitor, you CAN be subtle about it.

Time Warner Cable was in the news right before the Google Fiber announcement when it pulled a popular ABC affiliate (KMBC) because of a larger breakdown in negotiations over fees for local station programming. The disappearance caused a furor locally and led to online threats about customer defections when Google Fiber gets here. Within the Google Fiber event there was one brief mention about someone wanting to be able to watch KMBC. There was no need for more, because everyone familiar with the situation knew it was a subtle shot at a player who stands to lose a lot from Google Fiber.

6. Even if your brand is all about digital, use physical space and create experiences to support your brand.

Google created a Fiber Space to serve as its first “storefront” in Kansas City to demonstrate the service and show-off the hardware. Creating cool tech-oriented retail spaces is nothing new, but force fitting one into a former strip center and gym location which happens to be nearly ideally situated geographically (i.e., on the Kansas-Missouri state line and just 4 blocks from the Wyandotte-Johnson county line in Kansas) is.

The Fiber Space not only features video displays demonstrating the equipment and applications for Google Fiber in healthcare, gaming, sports, etc., but also physical representations of Kansas City (including a great Royals and Chiefs sports card display). And in a great use of behind-the-scenes experience sharing, the Fiber Space features the “set” used for the Fiber section of the Google Fiber announcement’s opening video. Just when you think everything is CGI, you get to see there were really physical toy cars used for the video, and they do fall off the track!

And the whole experience was strong enough to make you forget you were walking through a former Little Caesar’s Pizza location!

And there were more corporate communications lessons!

In the interests of time and length, I stopped this list at six corporate communications lessons, but there were more, including:

• The value of well-used humor (as displayed in the launch video above)
• The importance of starting strong (with the video) and ending even stronger (with the combo of sharing the pricing and having the mayors hosting a segment that drew a standing ovation)
• Don’t turn around and start spam emailing the people who just came to your event

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

How can ultra high-speed internet speeds drive innovation? “Building the Gigabit City: Brainzooming a Google Fiber Roadmap,” a free 120-page report, shares 60 business opportunities for driving innovation and hundreds of ideas for education, healthcare, jobs, community activities, and more.  Download this exclusive Google Fiber report sponsored by Social Media Club of Kansas City and The Brainzooming Group addressing how ultra high-speed internet can spur economic development, growth, and improved lifestyles globally. 

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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“When Everything Is in the Cloud, What Does ‘Place’ Mean?”

That was a quote from the inaugural Gigabit City Summit courtesy of Josep Piqué, Director Strategic Sectors – 22@Barcelona during the wrap-up section of the inaugural Gigabit City Summit. Amid so much great discussion and information sharing during the global conversation, this comment from Josep Piqué stood out to me as a very rich, life-changing strategic question in the years immediately ahead.

As more of the “things” we work and play with are digitized, they have the potential to become omnipresent. When you start to digitize organizations and the structural elements that give organizations their presence and power? Well then, if not all, than a whole bunch of bets are off.

This was exactly the point that Simon Kuo raised when the early Building the Gigabit City results were shared. Simon talked about how education and businesses will be turned over as physical structure is completely re-envisioned.

These points got me thinking about some of the areas affected if “places” becomes irrelevant. I will admit, this list is not based on extensive research or philosophical exploration. I simply started a list of ideas about what place might mean and some of the related areas that could start to change.

What Does Place Mean?

Place is where someone or something is from . . .

• It shapes a person or object’s history and background
• It’s somewhere you stay or leave and may return to in the future

Place is where people meet and congregate . . .

• Governing happens
• Learning happens there
• Information and opinions are shared
• Spiritual beliefs are celebrated
• Friends are made

Place is where functions are carried out . . .

• People work
• Marriages happen and families are created
• Money is saved, spent, and invested
• Teaching and learning happen

Place is where people are entertained . . .

• Movies are shown
• Concerts are performed
• Sports are contested

Place is where goods and services are consumed . . .

• Goods are sold and bought
• Medical treatment is provided

Places are where people reside . . .

• Property is sold, bought, and owned
• They are defended
• People live, raise families, and are buried
• Taxes are paid

How would you change this list?

There are clearly duplications and omissions among this list inspired by Josep Piqué and Simon Kuo. Would you help build and improve it by sharing your ideas on what “place” means and how it shapes our lives today . . . and will in the future? - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

How can ultra high-speed internet speeds drive innovation? “Building the Gigabit City: Brainzooming a Google Fiber Roadmap,” a free 120-page report, shares 60 business opportunities for driving innovation and hundreds of ideas for education, healthcare, jobs, community activities, and more.  Download this exclusive Google Fiber report sponsored by Social Media Club of Kansas City and The Brainzooming Group addressing how ultra high-speed internet can spur economic development, growth, and improved lifestyles globally. 

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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The Brainzooming Group joined with the Social Media Club of Kansas City in summer 2011 to plan Building the Gigabit City. The initial Building the Gigabit City effort was a large-scale brainstorming session to imagine what Kansas City could be like with ultra-high-speed Internet courtesy of the introduction of Google Fiber on both the Kansas and Missouri sides of the state line.

The initial Google Fiber brainstorming session continues to lead to a variety of other outputs, including the free 120-page “Building the Gigabit City” report recapping the concepts and ideas generated at the session. The session also produced a recap video with a variety of brainstorming session participants sharing their hopes for a new Kansas City.

What’s Next? The Gigabit City Summit: A Global Dialog on Smart and Connected Cities

Most recently The Brainzooming Group has partnered with Curiolab and Sandel & Associates to create and produce the Gigabit City Summit, A Global Dialog on Smart and Connected Cities. This series of global discussions held through Cisco Telepresence, is allowing experts worldwide to meet, share their expertise, and convey best practices from the implementation of next-generation city efforts. Participants throughout the Gigabit City Summit sessions will include:

• City leaders at the forefront of next-generation communities
• Industry and community experts who manage smart/intelligent community initiatives
• Vertical experts in industries highly subject to disruption by a faster, more seamless Internet, including media, healthcare, education, government, entrepreneurship, and venture capital

We held the first Gigabit City Summit session on June 27 to set the stage for the entire series of events. Presenters included Mayor Joe Reardon from Kansas City, KS (Wyandotte County), Mayor Sly James of Kansas City, MO, and author Tim Campbell who provided an overview from his book Beyond Smart Cities – How Cities Network, Learn and Innovate (affiliate link). You can listen to the entire inaugural Gigabit City Summit session online to get a sense of the topics we’ll be covering monthly.

Participate in the Gigabit City Summit

As a Brainzooming reader, I want to personally invite you to listen and participate live via WebEx, courtesy of the Smart + Connected Communities Institute, to the next session on Leadership, Organization and Community Challenges. The session will take place live on Wednesday, July 25th, 7:00-9:00 am CDT and will be available for replay afterward.

The second Gigabit City Summit will features representatives from innovation hubs around the world, including Amsterdam, Barcelona, Hyderabad, Singapore and Toronto. In addition the co-chairs of the Mayors’ Bistate Innovations Team, Mike Burke and Ray Daniels, along with David Warm, Executive Director of Kansas City’s regional planning organization will talk about preparation for the arrival of Google Fiber, which is scheduled to make a major announcement about the Kansas City Google Fiber product launch on July 26th.

Sponsor the Gigabit City Summit

Beyond listening to the sessions, there are sponsorship opportunities for organizations who would like to engage in these global, next-generation cities conversations.

Gigabit City Summit sponsors can take advantage of exclusive networking, content marketing, and thought leadership opportunities, in addition to a variety of other sponsorship assets. The sponsorship document below highlights the Gigabit City Summit and the related sponsorship opportunities for the series of events.

Contact me at info@brainzooming.com  if you’d like to discuss how your organization can become directly involved as a Gigabit City Summit sponsor.

Let’s keep the conversation going! - Mike Brown

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

How can ultra high-speed internet speeds drive innovation? “Building the Gigabit City: Brainzooming a Google Fiber Roadmap,” a free 120-page report, shares 60 business opportunities for driving innovation and hundreds of ideas for education, healthcare, jobs, community activities, and more.  Download this exclusive Google Fiber report sponsored by Social Media Club of Kansas City and The Brainzooming Group addressing how ultra high-speed internet can spur economic development, growth, and improved lifestyles globally. 

      (Affiliate link)

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Google Fiber recently held an event at the Kansas City Public Library exploring the state of Internet access in Kansas City, a.k.a. the digital divide. When I was signing in, a Google rep at the registration desk noticed that I was from The Brainzooming Group and said, “Brainzooming. We use that Gigabit City report you produced all the time.” She was referring to the “Building the Gigabit City” report that we produced with the Social Media Club of Kansas City after an intensive brainstorming session at the very same library last fall, which involved more than 90 community leaders and interested citizens from around the Kansas City metro.

That was a reminder how ideas build upon one another and that answers often must percolate a while—and be addressed from different perspectives—before they move forward toward implementation.

The Digital Divide in the Gigabit City

One focus of the “Building the Gigabit City” report was the urban core in Kansas City. Many of the participants in the urban core brainstorming session group were concerned about the digital divide. The question of whether urban core residents, particularly those who are older and with fewer economic resources, might be left even further behind once ultra-high speed Internet came to town was a particular focus in the brainstorming session. The digital divide has also been a recurrent theme in the work of the Mayors’ Bi-State Innovation Team and is reflected in its playbook.

The Google digital divide event provided additional data points, including an excellent take from John Horrigan of TechNet on why we should be concerned about the digital divide even if we are on the other side of it. In his talk, John Horrigan highlighted multiple impacts of the digital divide:

• Increased costs to society of the digital divide
• Greater challenges for people to gain access to jobs
• Negative educational outcomes resulting from the digital divide
• Limits on our ability to deal with the increasing cost of healthcare in the US.

Horrigan also made the point that while mobile access to the Internet via smartphones does bridge part of the digital divide gap, it falls short in both quality of experience (because of the limiting nature of the small screen) and in depth of experience (because of increasingly onerous data caps and throttle).

At the Google digital divide event, Google unveiled some excellent research that not only quantified the the size and the geography of the digital divide, but also drew some conclusions about why it exists, and offered insights into how the digital divide might be bridged.

Addressing the Digital Divide

The reality of the digital divide is a reminder that truly profound innovation and creativity carries not only the burden of producing breakthrough ideas, but also of producing the path by which people can use those ideas in a broad and sustainable manner.  –Barrett Sydnor

If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to the free Brainzooming blog email updates.

How can ultra high-speed Internet speeds drive innovation? “Building the Gigabit City: Brainzooming a Google Fiber Roadmap,” a free 120-page report, shares 60 business opportunities for driving innovation and hundreds of ideas for education, healthcare, jobs, community activities, the digital divide, and more.  Download this exclusive Google Fiber report sponsored by Social Media Club of Kansas City and The Brainzooming Group addressing how ultra high-speed Internet can spur economic development, growth, and improved lifestyles globally. 

Barrett Sydnor

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Recently, venture capitalist and senior Kauffman fellow, Paul Kedrosky, gave the last of four scheduled presentations at the Kauffman Foundation relating to Google Fiber. He concentrated on what Kansas City should do to make sure it—and the U.S.—gets the most out of the Google Fiber innovation opportunity. Here are four specific lessons on Google Fiber innovation from Paul Kedrosky that likely apply to our organizations as we strive for greater innovation.

1. Co-location

Kedrosky said some applications are not appropriate for development in Kansas City. Development must take place close to where they will eventually be used because even with extremely fast internet connects, execution or feedback will not be fast enough. The reason for this may be physical (in the case of stock trading, the speed of light is the limitation) or they may be sociological or cultural.

The lesson: Make sure that functions in your organization requiring nearly immediate feedback are in proximity—in terms of both physical location and where they fit in the hierarchy. Think sales and marketing, or production and engineering as examples where co-location is critical.

2. Upload/download symmetry

No matter how fast you can download information, it really does not matter if your upload bandwidth is too narrow. Eventually the download will become “occluded,” that is stopped or slowed because the response (upload) moves too slowly

The lesson: If senior management is not giving fast enough feedback and providing enough information, it makes no difference how much capacity an organization has. The organization will eventually stop what it is doing because it is waiting for senior management direction.

3. Understand the advantage/inevitability of flat-rate pricing

Historically the trend in communications is to flat rate pricing. The same first-class stamp takes your letter across the street or across the country. Likewise, long distance calling is rarely metered anymore. Widespread adoption and use becomes the counterbalance for falling prices.

The lesson: Customers shy away from pricing that involves cognitive complexity and risk. They ask questions such as, “What happens if I go over my limit?” or ”What else might I want to do with this product that I won’t be able to?” Look for ways you can make your pricing model flatter. Think restaurants and buffets. Also, consider making standard the options and add-ons that customers want or need. Price in a way that forgoes some upfront revenue but creates more satisfied customers—who, in turn, are likely to return and buy more.

4. Encourage playful experimentation and waste

Paul Kedrosky believes Kansas City will only make the creative breakthroughs in using Gigabit speed if it actively encourages, even demands, playful experimentation and waste. Indeed the title of his presentation was “Waste Lots, Want Lots.” Waste should come in two forms: waste of bandwidth and waste of latency.

The lesson: Ask these questions: Would you have encouraged (and rewarded) an employee who spent time in the back shop soldering seemingly random circuit boards together? Would you have encouraged (and rewarded) an employee who spent time, lots of time, trying to figure out a more systematic way to meet girls? If the answer is no, then you would have not been in on the founding of either Apple or Facebook. You may say that there are no Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg working for you. You are most likely right, and we could know at least one reason why. –Barrett Sydnor

How can ultra high-speed internet speeds drive innovation? “Building the Gigabit City: Brainzooming a Google Fiber Roadmap,” a free 120-page report, shares 60 business opportunities for driving innovation and hundreds of ideas for education, healthcare, jobs, community activities, and more.  Download this exclusive Google Fiber report sponsored by Social Media Club of Kansas City and The Brainzooming Group addressing how ultra high-speed internet can spur economic development, growth, and improved lifestyles globally. 

Barrett Sydnor

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The Kauffman Foundation is hosting a series of speakers in Kansas City to provide ideas, inspiration, and innovation lessons for how Kansas City can best take advantage of innovation opportunities with the The Google Fiber project. The latest Google Fiber project innovation talk was from Nick Donofrio, former executive vice president for innovation and technology at IBM. You can watch the presentation here.

My top 7 innovation lesson takeaways from the Nick Donofrio speech include:

1. Innovation isn’t about starting with the solution. Make sure you start with understanding the problem.

Donofrio stresses that starting with the solution often occurs because that is where our experience, specialization, and biases are. He stressed over and over that Kansas City can’t view Google Fiber as a solution, but rather as a tool or an enabler for solving significant problems.

2. Understand this century’s recipe for innovation.

The recipe for innovation in the 21^st century is an environment that is collaborative, open, multi-disciplinary, and global.

3. It is just as important (and sometimes more) to innovate in process and in business model as it is to innovate in product or service.

Donofrio detailed examples from Sweden and India. In Sweden, the deputy mayor of Stockholm changed the process for dealing with a large project, from bidding it out one piece at a time, to bidding it as a whole. In India, Bharti Airtel moved away from a business model in telecommunications that called for owning everything to one that just owns the client interface. Vendors and suppliers own/run the network, the back office, etc. Oh, and the phones are really free.

4. Count on it being an instrumented, interconnected world, so innovation must work in those areas.

There are now 250 billion devices connected to the Internet. The trend is on its way to one trillion devices connected to the Internet.

5. In education beware of the “flop on top” when it comes to technology.

Too often in the U.S., we impose technology on education (our solution) without an understanding of what problem we are trying to solve.

6. There is a huge opportunity for innovation using big data sets.

The cost of calculation has decreased by a magnitude of 16 in the last 100 years (10 to the 16 power). In the next 20 years, the cost of calculation is expected to decrease another magnitude of 8. This dramatic reduction in the cost of calculation allows modeling and simulation of almost anything.

7. You never know who has the last piece of the puzzle when solving significant problems.

The innovation lesson is that it is vital innovation efforts be inclusive. For societies, this creates both an opportunity and a responsibility for those at that top of the socio-economic pyramid to make sure that those at the base of the socio-economic pyramid are included and have genuine opportunity.  – Barrett Sydnor

How can ultra high-speed Internet speeds drive economic development? “Building the Gigabit City: Brainzooming the Google Fiber Roadmap,” a free 120-page report, shares 60 business opportunities for and hundreds of ideas for education, healthcare, jobs, community activities, and more.  Download this exclusive report on the Google Fiber project by The Brainzooming Group addressing how ultra high-speed Internet can spur economic development, growth, and improved lifestyles globally. 

Barrett Sydnor

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