Last Thursday was something of a watershed for the UK government. Data.gov.uk was launched, becoming one of a growing number of government portals giving us access to reams of official government data. That might not sound terribly exciting, but for businesses and research organisations that use official and reliable information, the announcement may fundamentally change the way they operate.

Government data has traditionally been stored in departmental silos where it is difficult to access. Many aggregation sites, such as the ONS, are notoriously hard to navigate.

The Guardian has been campaigning for such an initiative for some time,  although its progress could only be described as incremental. In one of a number of articles on the site (you can find them here), they trace the birth of data.gov.uk to a comment made by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who invented the world wide web, to the Prime Minister at a dinner for recipients of the Order of Merit:

“Gordon Brown said to me, ‘How should the UK make the best use of the internet?’ and I replied that the government should just put all of its data on it,” Berners-Lee recalled. “And he said ‘OK, let’s do it’.”

The site has been open to developers since October, in which time – without wanting to rely too heavily on one newspaper – The Guardian has created a portal which allows you to search for data from other ‘open government’ sources. It’s rather ambitiously called World Government Data, although currently supports only Anglophone countries. It mimics other efforts to combine official data from around the globe in an accessible way.

Why is this good news? Firstly, it seems only fair that taxpayers have access to information whose collection they have financed. Secondly, releasing such a vast body of data to the public enables a greater pool of talent to find ways to use it, in building new applications or finding new insight.

Ito World, for example, created some great visualisations using transport data . They were also responsible for this amazing video showing the edits made to OpenStreetMap over the course of 2008:

Greater access to data like this can have profound consequences. Members of the online mapping community scrambled together data from various sources to create an OpenStreetMap of Port-au-Prince that aid workers could use to help co-ordinate their efforts. Whilst their work was undoubtedly appreciated, it would have been made far easier with greater access. Here’s to Open Data.

The image above is used with kind permission of Jason Hawkes.

Yannis Kavounis, the head of our Millenials Knowledge Venturing team, talks to Tom Ding

Tom: Yannis, I have been meaning to ask you about Millenials and the recession…

Yannis: Recession, anxiety, layoffs… I’m personally exhausted from all the speculation and debate around it. Let’s talk about something more uplifiting: change and our future.

Tom: Sure. But where will the change come from?

Yannis: Well, not from government and politicians. They are only trying to resolve the problem using the same tools and context that caused it. So what’s left? Us – ordinary people, and Millennials of course. Millennials are connected and aware of the power of the collective. They have the technological and creative tools to take risks. And most importantly they’re young, not jaded and realise that grassroots overhaul of our economy and values is the only way forward.

Tom: I have seen a few diffferent versions of Millennials and Generation Y, what is your definition?

Yannis: At The Futures Company we say Millennials are the cohort of people born between 1979 and 1992, or roughly those aged between 16 and 29 at the moment.

Tom: OK. So give me some examples of these new values you talk about…

Yannis: So, for instance, I love how some of us are still rooting for ownership (intellectual or physical) as a fundamental principle of our economy. Well, guess what, Millennials are teaching us that modern business models can be based on more fluid and open concepts such as access and open source. Think of a world where you don’t ‘own’ but you ‘share’ – as and when you need to. Who needs iTunes when you have Spotify?

Tom: Yes and everyone I know has started using Spotify all of a sudden. I read that they just got their millionth subscriber in the UK, around the same time that the billionth application was downloaded for the iPhone – which I guess is open development, if not true open source. But is all this generational change about technology?

Yannis: Well, hasn’t generational change always been about technology, through every stage of human evolution? The interesting thing about current technology is how Millennials are using it and the role it plays in their lives. For them, it’s the means to an end, not the end itself – it is the greatest facilitator of societal change at the moment. I see Millennials as the generation that will use technology to help us enter a new age of realisation … be that in the economy, consumerism, or through our social values.

The picture is borrowed, with thanks, from wearesuperfamous.com

(edit: The Futures Company definition of Millenials is those born from 1979 to 1992, not 1982 to 1992 as originally written – a typo, apologies)

Tom Ding writes:

“One day I will tire of digital photography
and ‘get back to basics.’
While my pictures will not be
easy to share with friends and family
[via popular photo sharing websites]
If a photo is unsharable,
does that make it more personal,
therefore
more meaningful to me?”

(Carles, Hipster Runoff)

Now that everyone and their mum has a super-compact, many mega-pixel camera in their bag (and another on their phone), some have begun to miss the bits of photography that they have left behind. The lomography movement has been around for a while now, long enough to spawn satirical blog post poetry and iphone imitations anyway, but the impossible project feels more substantial. And more interesting.

In case you hadn’t heard, almost a year ago Polaroid announced that due to a lack of demand, they were to cease production of the film used in their cameras; the countdown to the final time when someone would truly “shake it like a polaroid picture” had started. Most enthusiasts were left with no option but to pay over the odds on ebay for the last scraps of the stuff, but a few have embarked on something altogether more ambitious: ‘the impossible project’.

Inspired by the original inventor Edwin Land (“Don’t undertake a project unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible”), a team of twelve amateur experts have acquired the equipment from one of the old factories. They are determined that by 2010 they will have invented a new type of film, compatible with the original cameras, but that uses components that are still in production. On the website a new clock is ticking (29,333,530 seconds at the time of writing); if they manage it, and if Russell Davies is right when he says that this is going to be a year for ‘real, post-digital things’, then it may have been a manifestly good idea.

The photograph, from The Impossible Project website, is of the former Polaroid film factory.

Tom Ding writes:

At risk of sounding like a Christmas quiz, what do the pictures have in common? Answer: they all relate to the summer success of the British Olympic Cycling Team, marked so emphatically last Sunday when the cycling squad kept on winning, cleaning up all three main prizes at the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year Awards. (GB Cycling won team of the Year, Chris Hoy was voted Sports Personality of the Year, while Performance Director Dave Brailsford became Coach of the Year.)

As it happens, a couple of weeks earlier a few of us here at The Futures Company were fortunate enough to see Dave Brailsford speak. The evening was fascinating from start to finish, but four things stood out for me:

Only wanting half (Slim Pret)
When Brailsford first received lottery funding he was given a fixed budget to be split between forty athletes. He responded by saying that he would like all the money, but that he only had half that number of world-class (and potentially medal-winning) cyclists, and that he would split the cash between them instead. His belief that each of these athletes was a champion in the making allowed him to put them in charge of their own training regimes (marginalising some coaches in the process), and insist that internal targets would be emasured against controllable variables such as acceleration and time (the medals would take care of themselves). The single-mindedness of this approach seemed remarkable.

Chimp
I have heard of sportsmen relying on ‘mental boxes’ and ‘triggers’ to control emotion before, but not of a whole team adopting a common approach and language. Brailsford employed a psychiatrist to work with the squad and together they developed the notion of the ‘chimp’ – a codeword for any sort of emotional barrier or mental block. Each cyclist’s ‘chimp’ is personal and different, and the techniques they use to control it are their own, yet critically, it is also accepted that they all have one. In this way, trackside arguments and training failures could be put down to ‘the inner monkey’ and brushed aside.

Door Handles
The concept of ‘aggregating marginal gains’ in sport has also been seen before, but it has never been employed with such conviction: sure, British Cycling hired  Formula One engineers to model the aerodynamics of helmets and bikes, but Brailsford also had someone to continuously clean the door handles in the Olympic village lest germs should get into the camp.

Al Pacino
After hearing one of the very best coaches in the world reveal the extraordinary measures it takes to be the best, there was one piece of comfort for this less accomplished sportsman: it is good to know that even the most successful team in the country use this speech from Any Given Sunday to motivate themselves before the big day. At least my rugby team has been doing something right.

Andrew Curry writes:

Alice Rawsthorne has an interesting article on the impact of recession on design in the International Herald Tribune. It seems it’s all good news. This shouldn’t be a surprise; innovation thrives on scarcity and constraint, and design is no different. And certainly the historical evidence bears this out. The Bauhaus and the Modernist movements emerged in the 1920s and ’30s, and the Italian post-war design boom from the depths of its post-war austerity.

The current financial and economic crisis requires that we think again about how our systems work, and – as she writes – designers excel at simplifying complex issues and collaborating with other disciplines. Rawsthorne anticipates that designers will help companies to cut costs by thinking about new ways to use materials and by imagining new service models (for example part-ownership or ‘renalism’ rather than outright purchase, as is happening with the Parisian Velib bicycle initiative – or Streetcar and Zipcar, come to that).

Beyond this, there are whole new approaches to service and system design, and she commends the work of Live|Work, which has redesigned support services, for example in its work in Sunderland, to put the user at the centre and access resources from multiple agencies rather than being caught between them.(It also works in the private sector).

The final bit of good news? The market for expensively designed objects has tanked. Half of the lots at Sotheby’s design auction last month went unsold.

Thanks to core 77 for the tip. The picture of a Velib station at the top of this post is from an article about the Velib scheme in Post-Carbon Cities.

Jo Phillips writes:

When she spoke at the Booksellers Association conference last week Michelle Harrison, one of our Directors, implored the industry to think harder about how to sell books to consumers who are showing signs that they prize collective experience far more than they used to. This extends beyond valuing such experiences over material things (e.g. a book) to valuing the shared experience above the individual experience (e.g. reading a book in the bath). Whereas five years ago people were telling us what they wanted most was a bit of ‘me-time’, now it seems above all what we value is quality ‘we-time’.

As we move into the summer season in the UK this desire to get together is evident in the huge growth in festivals of all kinds and scales – last year there were over 550 of them and nearly two thirds of adults have attended a live music event in the last three years. Booksellers are in on this act – the Hay Festival, which starts today, grows larger every year (new for this year is a link up with a prison broadening its base further). Book clubs are also growing in popularity. But these are still niche audiences among book-buyers.

The need for social innovation is a challenge to many industries that have focused on benefits for individuals. It may call for turning the category on its head, as Nintendo Wii did by sidestepping the industry competition for faster, bigger, better graphics to focus on enabling living room fun between friends, or through product innovation, as Walkers Sensations did by creating the sharing crisps opportunity.

Becky Rowe writes:

We held a breakfast briefing a few days ago to talk about what Millennials – that fast emerging 16-25 cohort – want. Yannis Kavounis (our Director of Innovation and wannabe Millennial) suggested that the answer is authenticity and innovation. Innovation is easy to understand but difficult to do well – putting customers first, pushing the boundaries of technology, re-mixing and recombining the old to create something refreshing and new all sounds pretty easy – but turning that into sales can be a minefield. In contrast, authenticity is both difficult to understand and difficult to do – juggling honesty and transparency, and staying true to the brand, whilst taking into account environmental and ethical concerns while keeping an eye on the bottom line. It requires a significant shift in the way the most companies do business.

They may be difficult to achieve, but there are rewards to be had. The interesting thought of the day for me was that the Millennials’ interest in these two qualities are levelling the playing field between big and small companies. The days of the big brand reaping the rewards simply for being big are over – it just isn’t enough anymore. But it seems that the days of Naomi Klein’s No Logo may have passed as well. For Millennials, it isn’t about big brand versus small brand or good versus evil. It is about how well a company (big or small) can deliver on those two core values of authenticity and innovation. So the new marketing battleground isn’t about the ‘coolest’, but about the ‘best’.

The big companies obviously have a head start and could win by throwing money at it, but trying to change the shape of their existing business models, may be more of a challenge. The smaller, more dynamic companies are likely to have less likely to be constrained by ‘the way we do things around here’, and could win by being better at spotting opportunities, but may not be so good at thinking through all the implementation issues. The Millennials seem happy for either – but whichever way you look at, they want you to put some effort into it.

Jake Goretzki writes:

Belgian chocolate – while evidament the best in the world – has always let itself down by the conservatism of its brands (Cote D’Or’s range hasn’t really changed for the last 40 years). So it’s a pleasant surprise to find some innovation, from ‘Dolfin’, a brand which I hadn’t previously heard of but is apparently making friends and influencing people in the supermarkets of Bruxelles.

I like the way the packaging communicates the brand. But even better, the wrapper is like a re-sealable rolling tobacco pouch, and really gives the chocolate the feel of something specially blended for the special moment, to be taken in small doses in reflective interludes. It takes Galaxy’s ‘indulgence’ to another… galaxy, ah oui. But be warned; it’s 70% cocoa – so you’ll love it or hate it.

The Core 77 design blog has a good piece on the reasons for Nokia’s innovation success.

In summary they are:

• the maths – go where the markets are (Nokia has increased its lead over competitors in the emerging markets yet again
• design it for the markets you’re selling in (Nokia has a design lab in Bangalore; in emerging markets features which enable phone sharing may be more useful than megapixels)
• ‘Show the people’ – do the marketing at the right level (Nokia has been using promotional vehicles, literally: vans and even railway carriages.