In the IT world, I am not sure if I should take user-driven innovation to be a sign of progress or a sad display on how difficult things have become. With all the talk about Web 2.0, wikis, social media, and the cathedral and the bazaar, I would think that any technologist who isn’t at least passingly familiar with these ideas must be on a contract, working out of a cave, typing programs on dusty green screen terminal connected to the corporate mainframe by a thick token ring cable.

However, the ‘new trend’ of allowing users actually provide feedback into the products that they are using has produced a professorship at MIT and been mentioned in the New York Times ::sigh::  IMHO, this is simply the realization that ignoring people is less effective than communicating with them, and less effective means less profitable.  I think the technology world should be embarassed that it is so disfunctional that this is at all new or interesting enough to study.

On a similar note, Ben Stein has some interesting thoughts about how to have a business conversation.  If you plan on doing anything other than pure solo work for the rest of your life it is mandatory reading.  Interestingly, it seems that the best conversationalists are the ones who are the most considerate and do the most listening.  Sounds like organizations might want to focus on having an actual conversation with their customers …

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 17th, 2007 at 9:35 am and is filed under People, Relationships, Understanding, Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.