1st Nordic Conference on Injo, Helsinki 25 Sep

The 1st Nordic Conference on Innovation Journalism will be taking place at the Communications Research Centre, University of Helsinki, Finland on Sep 25. It is supported by Helsingin Sanomat Foundation and Sitra, who are funding the Finnish Innovation Journalism initiative. These are the funding organizations who have made it possible for Finnish journalists and researchers to come to theVINNOVA-Stanford research center of innovation journalism.

I will be keynoting the conference, so if you are going I will see you there! The conference program and registration is available on the conference website.

Here is an excerpt:

1st Nordic Conference on

Innovation Journalism:

Weather-casters of Future?

The Role of Journalism in Understanding Technological and Social Innovations

In recent years “innovation” has emerged as a key concept in which many issues of modern societies – solution to social problems, belief on economic growth, survival in international competition – seem to culminate. Central to the discussions on innovation have been the idea that traditional institutional boundaries between different sectors of society, such as politics, economy, culture and technology, have to be crossed more than before. This means that journalistic practises have had to become more flexible than before. The concept of Innovation Journalism was coined in 2003 by David Nordfors. For Innovation Journalism the process of innovation itself is the central concept, treating business, technology, politics, etc. as nested components of a news story. It is a ‘horizontal’ beat, spanning across the old beats, reporting on innovation processes and innovation ecosystems. Elina Noppari and Erkki Kauhanen have further defined innovation journalism as a kind of future journalism involving also cultural and social innovations emerging from outside of the ‘official innovation structures’.

Communication Research Centre CRC is pleased to invite everyone who thinks journalism and innovation is important to a one-day confence to discuss the role of journalism in understanding technological and social innovations.

Time: Friday, 25 September 2009, from 9 am until 5 pm

Venue: University of Helsinki Main Building, Fabianinkatu 33, Helsinki

Keynote speakers are Professor Kevin G. Barnhurst and David Nordfors, Executive director of the Research Center of Innovation Journalism, Stanford University.

Further contributors include Jyrki Alkio, Ulrik Haagerup, Risto Kunelius, Hannu Nieminen, Vilma Luoma-aho, Turo Uskali and Esa Väliverronen.

Conference language is English.

There is no registration fee. However, the number of participants is restricted due to limited seating; therefore, participation

Innovation Journalism Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia - Sep 3

The yearly regional innovation journalism conference in Slovenia takes place on Sep 3. There are are grants for covering the participation for journalists from the Balkan region. Others are welcome to the conference, but need to cover their own costs.

The conference is co-organized by Vibacom, who are running the Slovenian Innovation Journalism initiative, and EJC, the European Journalism Center in Maastricht.

I will be participating in the conference over video, I hope to see you there!

See the call below for applicants to the funded spots:

Journalists, editors, communicators and media employees from select Eastern European countries are invited to a conference on innovations in journalism on September 3 in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Participants can come from Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia, Slovenia, Austria, Italy and Hungary; the number of spots is limited.

The event is being organized by the European Journalism Centre and Vibacom, a business solutions company. The event will examine key points discussed at a Conference on Innovation Journalism which took place at Stanford University in the United States in May. It will also discuss innovation as a journalistic topic, the education and professional development of journalists and new media business models.

Accommodation and travel expenses will be covered by the organizers. The draft program is available here.

Interested applicants should send a CV (in English), including area of specialization and clips to Biba Klomp at klomp@ejc.net or Estera Lah at estera.lah@vibacom.si.

IJ-6 Conference Summary in Spanish

Mexican journalist Manuel Meneses Namihira from ID Investigacion Y Desarrollo has published a summary in Spanish of IJ-6, the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism, Stanford University May 18-20 2009. Manuel's summary is here. The official website of IJ-6 is here.

Keynote at the Innovation @ Creative Industries Conference in Berlin

Projekt Zukunft Berlin - the futurist initiative of the city of Berlin organized the conference "Innovation @ Creative Industries", and invited me to make the opening keynote. The conference website is here.

Here is the short description of the event:

Creativity and innovation are of key importance for the economic and social well-being of Europe’s cities. At this, creative industries play an important role due to many reasons: They are a major source of innovative ideas. They offer services and products which contribute to the innovative activities of other entrepreneurs within and outside the creative industries. And by being intense technology users and fast trend follower they often demand even more new developments. Yet, the high impact of creative and cultural workers on the cities’ innovation performance is often not widely known.

Therefore, the international and high profile conference „Innovation @ Creative Industries“ brings together 200 creative workers, artists and key stakeholders from public, private and NGO sectors around Europe to reveal the benefits of the booming creative industries and approaches to stimulate their contribution to innovation capacity of regions.

Here is the keynote I delivered at the event:

I wish to thank the organizers for inviting me to speak here today. This is an important event. The creative industries are important in the innovation economy – not only as an industry among others producing innovation, but as a part of the mindset that drives innovation, that enables society to incubate ideas and transform them into value, across the spectrum of human activity.

Also, Berlin is my mother’s home town, which makes it an extra treat to be here.

The VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism at Stanford University is based on three new concepts: Innovation Journalism, attention work and the Innovation Communication System. Innovation Journalism is Journalism covering innovation. It tells us how innovation happens, covering the innovation processes and the innovation ecosystems that nowadays determine our futures. In 2003, I did a Google search, and got thousands of hits on the expressions technology journalism and business journalism, but zero hits on innovation journalism. Journalists were covering innovation, but there was no name for it. It was done within traditional news beats – technology or business or politics or culture. But innovation is not about technology OR business OR politics. Innovation is about the combination of them. Innovation journalism can be seen as a horizontal news beat, crossing the traditional news beats.

People think innovation something techie. As a physicist and techie myself, I will stick out my neck and say that innovation is about language. Every innovation is an innovation in language. It needs a name so we can call it something. It needs a definition so we know what it is. And it needs a story, so that we can relate to it. If any of these three things are missing, the innovation will not happen.

I suggest society can not innovate faster than it can create new shared language. Society has an infrastructure for creating new shared language, for example journalism, communication and PR. Today we live in an attention economy, where attention is a scarce commodity. It has attention workers – people who generate and broker attention professionally. These are, for example, journalists working for ad-based media, or communicators and PR people. They are all stakeholders in public attention, and when there is public attention, then shared language is more easily created.

They are key players in the innovation communication system, which influences the flows of attention around innovation issues.

Innovation journalism, attention work and innovation communication systems are concepts that are constructive for discussing how innovation systems work, how innovation happens. They help society create new shared language around innovation processes and ecosystems.

Innovation journalism connects the innovation economy and the democratic society, which are not well connected today. I get worried when I hear innovation business leaders in democracies speak highly about the innovation policies of governments in non-democratic countries, at the same time expressing frustration over the lack of good policies by their democratically elected governments in Europe. I think this is because we lack the ability to have a public discussion around innovation issues. There is little incentive for elected politicians to spend much time on innovation, when journalism is not organized in a way that it is able to cover it.

The EU is hopefully recognizing this, and I hope they will address journalism and the creative industry it in their policies for developing Europe as the worlds leading innovation economy. Innovation funding can be used for developing innovation journalism, VINNOVA in Sweden is doing it already, as are Tekes and Sitra in Finland, together with the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation. More countries will hopefully do it, and hopefully more of the creative industry can be involved.

Storytelling is very important for innovation. Innovation needs vision and scenarios, and they need to be imaginative and inspiring. It needs new metaphors, introducing us to new things by analogies to things we already know.

We only need to look back at the role of science fiction to realize how important creative storytelling is for innovation. Science fiction gave us grand fantasies of futures shaped by scientific discoveries and technological progress. We grew up reading about how the interaction between people and technology conquered the universe. When these stories were written, they were fantasies, made to tickle and entertain. But in fact they were blueprints of the future. Young people got inspired, and chose educations and professions that enabled them to make the science fiction stories come true.

These science fiction stories were powerful, because they put science and technology into a social context, fantasizing about how it would change the human mind, the way societies work, and culture and art. We can see the results today.

And still, science fiction was until recently not considered good literature.

Our parents and teachers rarely looked upon science fiction as a respected form of literature. They preferred we read the classics.

The thing about science fiction was that it bridged popular science, technology and the humanities. That is tricky. The British scientist and novelist C.P. Snow gave in 1959 a well known lecture about how the breakdown of communication between the "two cultures" of modern society — the sciences and the humanities — saying it was a major hindrance to solving the world's problems. He noted that “literary intellectuals” felt no requirement to know anything about science and technology, they would even take pride in not knowing anything about it.

Innovation is often about bridging and mixing things that are separated, and this there comes with challenges for the innovators. It will trigger controversies and there will be politics. Think of, for example, convergence in information technology, where phone companies and computer companies are finding themselves increasingly in the same business, going from being complementary to being competing. That comes with a lot of politics both within organizations and between them.

Many useful innovations fail, because they did not manage to build a constituency, they lost the politics.

And even when innovations succeed, the innovators may fail. Entrepreneurs know how difficult it is to survive success. They need to be good politicians.

Innovation will continue to increase, and so will the politics, as our whole society gets increasingly affected.

The world economy is going through a fundamental shift. Economic growth used to be driven by doing more of the same. Now it is more about the new replacing the old. In the more-of-the-same economy, we switched our phones when the old one broke, in the innovation economy we switch our phones because we want the newer models.

In the more-of-the-same economy, researchers lived apart from the market people. The researchers focused on the future, while the market people played the more-of-the-same game. There was a chasm separating the techies and the market folks, they had different interests, different priorities and different languages. A version of C.P. Snows two cultures in the industrial economy.

Today, in the innovation economy, every launch of a product, process or service, is just a step on the way, a preparation for the next launch. The most important thing now, is to work on what comes next. That is the nature of the innovation economy. This means that researchers and market people are moving closer to each other, they need to bridge the techie and the market cultures. We need to bridge that to politics and the broader society, as well.

Many people still think of innovation as something very technological. This is a reason to why C.P. Snow’s “humanities culture” has until recently not cared very much about it, some people taking pride in being ignorant about it. Unfortunately, leading newsrooms live with the cultural divide between science and tech on one hand and the humanities and social issues on the other hand. This is not helpful for the democratic society in the innovation age.

The humanities are as important for innovation as science, technology and business. But most important of all is to bridge between them, to let social aspects, arts and humanities interact with science, technology and business in the same story.

Now, at the core of innovation there must be creativity, free spirit, and radical thought. The key value of an innovative society is not acceptance. It is tolerance. No entrepreneur will expect to be accepted all the time, few people will know what they are doing or the potential significance of it. But new initiatives need to be tolerated, so they can develop to the stage when people will be able to accept them.

My grandmother was a psychologist here in Berlin in the 30s, working closely with Wilhelm Reich. Reich was free-spirited and provocative. He changed the world by marrying two concepts: sexuality and revolution, he coined the expression “the sexual revolution”, planting one of the seeds for the youth rebellion and counterculture of the 60s. The “Sexual revolution” was a social innovation, not a technological innovation or a business innovation, but it has driven technological and business innovations, for example in healthcare.

It is the concept is the essence of an invention, and how this concept succeeds in creating change is what is the essence of innovation. This is the difference between invention and innovation. An invention can be done by one single inventor. But in order to be an innovation, it needs to engage people and make some change to their lives. Innovations are the outcome of innovation processes driven by ecosystems of stakeholders.

And, I will continue to repeat, innovation is about people.

Doug Engelbart in Silicon Valley is known as “the inventor of the mouse”. Doug is a pioneer of human-computer interaction, the invention of the mouse was only a small part of his big contribution, which was manifested in the so called “mother of all demos”, where he and his team at SRI in 1969 demonstrated live a fully functioning computer network with computers running interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, and hypertext, using a mouse. The idea behind the demo was to show how computers may help people interact better with each other.

Before getting his job at SRI, Doug had missed a number of job opportunities by saying that computers could be used for augmenting human intelligence, when everybody knew that computers should be used for automation. He said that computers should be small, when everybody knew that the bigger computers were, the better they were. Doug was bridging C.P. Snows two cultures, but few people on either side knew what he was talking about.

The people working with Doug were hippies, children of Wilhelm Reich’s sexual revolution, which was big stuff in California in the end of the sixties. They were young intelligent revolutionaries trying out LSD and and testing programming computers so that they would produce artistic sounds and patterns that would assist transcendental meditation. They loved reading science fiction. For them, technology and humanities were the same. That mindset shaped the way we relate to computers today.

Doug’s higher goal has remained throughout his life. He says we need to develop our collective intelligence in society, so that we can solve the big complex problems that are threatening humanity, like nuclear wars, global warming or pandemics. For this, he says, we need to develop technology that develops us. He talks about the “human system” and the “tool system”, where the humans develop the tools and the tools develop the humans. That is the core of the collective intelligence. When Doug spoke at my yearly journalism conference at Stanford two years ago, he pointed at journalism s the perceptive system of our collective intelligence. Not the sensory system, but the perceptive system, that helps us formulate concepts and deliberate what they mean. That is another way of describing the importance of creative industry in the innovation economy. Storytelling, creativity and art needs to be there.

Now let’s talk a bit about the risks that entrepreneurial innovators have to live with. For their visions to come true, they have to engage people around them, to bring in different stakeholders. They will need to play politics, and they need to do it good, because they are stirring the pot, and they are connecting things that people often feel don’t belong together.

In Silicon Valley, innovations are nowadays often developed by small companies, that then are acquired by bigger companies, except for small companies that themselves grow into big companies, like Google. This is a trend that we can see coming to the rest of the world. There is something with big companies, which makes it difficult for them to innovate radically. Not impossible, but still difficult.

This is what I call “the intrapreneur’s dilemma”. An intrapreneur is an entrepreneur who innovates inside an existing organization. The “intrapreneur’s dilemma” goes like this:

When someone tries to innovate within a traditional organization,
few will understand what he/she is doing,
but everybody will understand who is a trouble-maker.

After the innovation has been embraced by the organization,
few will remember who started it,
but everybody will remember who was a trouble-maker.

This is the dilemma encountered by many intrapreneurs - they risk punishment for success. Organizations that want to be innovative need to find solutions to the intrapreneur's dilemma and its consequences, if they don't wish to set negative examples that will scare off people from intrapreneurship. Here is an example: as long as a new project is of little impact and not well understood, the intrapreneur will be fighting for its continuation while others may ignore its existence or perhaps wonder why it should be allowed to steal attention from the more important core activities. Once a project has impact and receives recognition, incumbents within the organization will want to influence or control it. People may reason that 'a project as important as this one should not be run by a trouble-maker'.

Many entrepreneurs I know say it is futile to be an intrapreneur. Any entrepreneurial spirit must leave and start their own startup. Then they are in a better position to balance the forces, so that they can come out on top.

This can be true, but it can also be that there are ways of organizing companies and societies so that creativity and innovation can be a part of the system, without killing off the creators and innovators.

In order for us to discuss these very important issues, we need the creative industry. We need storytellers of all sorts, who can earn their living on helping society develop shared narratives about how we can change things for the better, how we can solve problems, and that can stimulate our brains with creative visions and scenarios about what our lives can look like. Just like science fiction did.

But keep in mind that this requires creative storytelling that is horizontal. We need to bridge C.P. Snows two cultures to succeed. The storytelling should not preserve and isolate the silos in society. It should punch through the silos, and help people understand how they relate to other people in the system, who have very different skills from their own. When the creative industry does this, it will be a central component of the innovation economy.

OPENING ADDRESS, IJ-6 THE SIXTH CONFERENCE ON INNOVATION JOURNALISM

OPENING ADDRESS, IJ-6 THE SIXTH CONFERENCE ON INNOVATION JOURNALISM
David Nordfors
Founding Executive Director,Tthe VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism
H-STAR Institute
Stanford University

18 May 2009, Stanford University

Welcome to IJ-6, the Sixth Conference on Innovation Journalism.

Thank you all for coming here, especially you who have travelled all the way from Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Slovenia, Pakistan, Israel, France, Chile, Mexico, UK, Korea and Kenya.

Thank you also to the funding organizations that are making the Innovation Journalism Initiative and IJ-6 possible. Above all, thanks to VINNOVA, the National Swedish Agency for Innovation Systems, that initiated the collaboration with Stanford in 2004, and who partnered with Stanford in upgrading the Innovation Journalism program to a research center this year - the VINNOVA-Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journalism. We are now a part of H-STAR, the Human Sciences and Technologies Advanced Research Institute here at Stanford, and we are really looking forward to build a solid body of research that will add further traction to our other activities. Thanks to the agencies and foundations that have made it possible for journalists and researchers from around the world to join the center at Stanford: the Helsingin Sanomat Foundation, Sitra and Tekes in Finland, the Competitive Support Fund and the USAID in Pakistan, Ad Futura in Slovenia and Conacyt in Mexico.

These are turbulent times for the media. When we started the Innovation Journalism program in 2004, the word 'blog' was quite new. Inside the newsrooms, people were discussing if blogs were to be taken seriously or not. Our Injo Fellow Marcus Lillkvist wrote the first story in Wall Street Journal on that blogs were getting ads, and that some blogs were earning enough money to hire people to work with them. The blogs contained mostly news from the paper publications. Today, online publication is in the lead.

In 2005 we recorded a roundtable discussion with Vint Cerf, Whit Diffie and a number of other experts and journalists. On the cover we wrote 'journalism stands at the crossroads of redefinition'. Vint was in the middle of switching jobs, going from Worldcom to Google. Since then, nearly all journalists in that video have switched jobs. Vint is still at Google.

The media industry is facing a business challenges, their business model is bust in several ways. Controlling the infrastructure for distribution of content was the key to making money. Control the production, control the distribution, control the content. When your channel of information gets public attention, sell that attention to advertisers by letting them pay to push their info through your infrastructure. People could control printing presses, fleets of trucks distributing freshly printed paper, broadcast concessions. But they can not control the Internet. In fact, as we move toward Net Neutrality - a concept promoted by Vint and many people in the Internet culture, where those who control the infrastructure of the Internet are forced to not censor the content - it may become illegal to try doing it. The trend in the media just now is to move away from vertical integration. Those who produce content are moving away from controlling the infrastructure, such as is the case with blogs. And those who control the infrastructure are moving away from producing and controlling the content, such as the companies providing the cables, the ISPs, and companies offering tools for aggregating and organizing information and transactions, such as Google, Facebook, or eBay.

In the eighties software industry broke out from the hardware industry. In the nineties network services broke out from the network infrastructure providers. Perhaps we are seeing now how content is breaking out of the media. We will have an industry providing the infrastructure for spreading content - like Facebook, Google or eBay - and other industries providing content, among them the journalism industry. A number of these players are earning their money by selling our attention to advertisers, and we are offered a greater variety of products and services in return for directing our eyballs here or there. Our attention used to give us news and entertainment. Now it's giving us tools as well, for example Blogs, word processing, search engines. That's actually not bad. But it will be bad if it ends up with that attention gives us only tools, and no good content. We need both.

This also means that the definition of journalism needs to be looked over.

According to the Oxford dictionary on the Internet, AskOxford.com, a journalist is, I quote, "a person who writes for newspapers or magazines, or prepares news or features to be broadcast on radio or television". Ironically, Oxford's Internet dictionary does not say a word about journalism on the Internet. But just pushing in the Internet in that sentence won't solve the problem. The problem is, we have been used to identifying the content with the carrier. This is understandable, because that was the way it was. But today, no more. Here is another example of how we have identified the content with the carrier: LPs and CDs used to mean music. Today CDs are no more pieces of plastic with music information on them. We rip the music and toss the plastic. LPs represent memories of old times, when vinyl was music and vice versa. But the cat is out of the bag, the information has broken free, the vertical integration is broken, and all the kings horses and all the kings men can't put Humpty back together again, with the possible exception of Steve Jobs, who seems to have brought back vertical integration to some extent with the iMac, and with the iPod, iPhone and iTunes. He is earning good money on it and people like it. So let's be careful with saying that vertical integration is gone from the news business forever. But we won't go back to old times.

We must look at how we can redefine journalism. It still means something, even if it is not brought to us on paper, through the radio or TV. It remains valuable. The old definitions related journalism to the medium. How about defining journalism by its relations to its constituency? How about talking about what journalism does for people, rather than stating which infrastructure it uses for spreading the information? For example, we can define journalism as the production of news stories, bringing public attention to issues of public interest. Journalism gets its mandate from the audience. It is required to act in the interest of the audience. This was valid for good newspapers, and it remains to be valid without newspapers. We are talking about the principles of journalism, that's what defines journalism. So when we are talking about the crisis in the media industry, we are perhaps not trying to address how to save the old business models, or how media should continue to be controlled by those who produce the content. We are talking about the importance of finding business models for the principles of journalism.

We need to adopt new definitions and find new models, or things might get worse. For example, in some countries around the world, public service broadcast is payed for by placing a fee on TVs, radios and other equipment used for taking part of public service content. The companies that collect these fees are very committed to the task. Now that public service TV is broadcast online, they are stating their intentions to collect public service fees on all personal computers. I guess all cell phones will soon be next. How much sense does that make? And as long as the production of public service journalism is payed for by these fees, the public service news organizations will be stepping on their own eggs when reporting on any Internet issues.

Which brings us to the next issue. Given that journalism will develop a strong innovation system, enabling it to continuously renew itself, so that it like the rest of the information industry is always aiming at the next product rather than aiming to prolong the lives of its earlier ones, what is its mission in society?

Society is going through a fundamental change. We are getting less driven by doing more of the same, and more driven by making new things replace the old. Curt Carlson, who is speaking later today, defines innovation as the process of creating and introducing new value in society. That's what is driving society more and more, not doing more of the old stuff. Power structures are shifting as a consequence. In a more of the same economy, power is in regulation. When society is driven by the introduction of new things, innovation often trumps regulation. Look for example at music. Innovation means that everything gets more connected. In the more of the same economy, it's easier to divide the labor, to establish professions following established routines, to write textbooks about how things were always done and how they should continue to be done. In the more of the same economy, people can group together with other people doing the same things as themselves, focus on that part and not communicate much with the rest of the world. In the innovation economy, however, everything is changing, technologies, business models and policies shape each other interactively, and everything becomes everyones business.

People in society need journalism to tell them the story of how the innovation economy hangs together, where the power is, how science, technology, business and politics co-evolve, and how this depends on and changes cultures. Doug Engelbart is suggesting we need to be connected in a collective intelligence, so that we can solve fundamental challenges, such as global warming, pandemics, the threat of nuclear wars, and so on. But our communication is limited by our shared language. How do we collectively develop words and stories that enable us to talk about the things we benefit best from talking about, and which enable us to find solutions, build wealth and happiness? Journalism is an obvious player, Doug has said he sees it as the perception system of our collective intelligence. Not the sensory system, but the perception system.

When we look it how we are interacting collectively today, it is valid to ask if we are heading for collective intelligence or if we are heading for collective neurosis. Here, again, the importance of matching business models and principles of journalism are important. We definitely need good business models promoting the principles of journalism, offering an incentive for directing public attention to issues of public interest, and facilitating a public dialogue which will deliver the greatest value to the audience. Without good business models for journalism, the players for public attention will soon be dominated not by those representing the audience - i.e. the journalists - but by those representing the sources - i.e. PR. I like both PR and journalism, they are both needed. They are both a part of the ecosystem that will hopefully direct our collective attention to maximize our collective intelligence.

In todays innovation economy people need professional news organizations, driven by incentives to represent the interest of the audience, to cover innovation so that people can engage, and can create maximum value for themselves and others. It needs to interact with other professionals, representing stakeholders in the innovation ecosystem, who also are playing for the public attention. Together they form the innovation communication ecosystem.

That is what the Innovation Journalism conference is about, and we will today and tomorrow, with the help of the Innovation Journalism Fellows 2009, discuss various aspects of how journalism can best play its part in the innovation economy. The workshops are defined and moderated by the Fellows, who will be summarizing some bullets on best practices. We will be doing it in two ways. Today we are looking at themes - "How tos". Tomorrow we will be meeting journalists who have covered innovation well - our Injo Picks 2009 - and talk with them about how things are done the best way.

All the workshops are organized by our Injo Fellows 2009: Christian Borg, Ellen Andersson, Fredrik Wass, Jörgen Lindqvist, Kerstin Sjöden and Mats Lewan from Sweden. Anna Kattan, Anu Partanen, Juha-Pekka Tikka and Jussi Rosendahl from Finland. Afzal Bajwa, Hamza Habib, Mubarak Zeb Khan and Sarah Hasan from Pakistan. Sabina Vrhnjak from Slovenia and David Luna from Mexico. Both Slovenia and Mexico are in the program for the first time this year.

This year we also have for the first time a special academic track on the the innovation ecosystems and the news. which takes place on wednesday in parallel with other interesting talks from the field. Just like innovation is new as a keyword for journalism, journalism is new as a keyword for research on innovation. I hope we will get a good dialogue between journalists and academics, it is really needed in order to move forward. The people who have put together the academic track are Vilma Luoma-aho, our Helsingin Sanomat Foundation Visiting Injo Researcher from the university of Jyväskylä in Finland, Marc Ventresca, Professor at Said Business School in Oxford and Senior Scholar at the VINNOVA Stanford Research Center of Innovation Journlaism at Stanford; and Turo Uskali from the University of Jyväskylä in Finland, former visiting researcher with us here at Stanford.

We should also be very grateful to Johanna Mansor, without who two stones would not be standing on top of each other here today. Thanks to John Joss, who is checking all the texts by all the Fellows and will be taking part in the moderation of the conference. We also are very grateful to all of our members on the Directors Advisory Board: Vint Cerf, Curt Carlson, David Demarest, Anders Flodstrom, Don Kennedy and Jacob Ziv, and the Program Advisors of our Center who are here today, who each are carrying a part in building the global initiative: Violeta Bulc, Turo Uskali, Amir Jahangir and Rick Horning. Final thanks to our friends that have given us advice on the conference: Mei-Lin Fung, Allison Murdock, Lisa Friedman, Laszlo Gyorffy.

Come Celebrate the 40th anniversary of Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos"

On December 9 1968, Doug Engelbart and his team from SRI International Augmentation Research Center performed "the mother of all demos" in front of a gaping audience of one thousand computer engineers. The demo let the cat out of the bag in a monumental way; Doug's big idea that the big thing about computers was not automation, but augmenting human intelligence was demonstrated in real life. The demo featured the first computer mouse the public had ever seen, as well as introducing interactive text, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email and hypertext. The audience could do nothing but cheer.

The demo has come back to life again on Google video (can anyone think of a better fit?). Here it is:



The Program for the Future Conference will be celebrating the event on Dec 8 and 9 together with Doug and his friends, among the speakers are

• Professor Thomas Malone, Founding Director, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence
  
• Professor Hiroshi Ishii, Associate Director, MIT Media Laboratory
• Peter Norvig, Director of Research, Google
• Andries van Dam, Professor, Brown University
• Alan Kay, President, Viewpoints Research Institute
• Steve Wozniak, co-founder, Apple Computer, Inc.

Click here for the program. The conference is organized and sponsored by the Tech Museum in San Jose, The MIT Museum, our colleagues at Media-X at Stanford, Adobe, Visual Insight, NMC, SDForum and Creative Commons.

On Dec 9, the birthday of the demo, the Innovation Journalism program will be contributing a panel of journalists and bloggers, discussing the future of technology and collective intelligence. In the panel are three trigger-happy intellectuals: Gregg Pascal Zachary, Peter S. Magnusson and Michael Kanellos. I will be facilitating the discussion, which will be taking place at the Wallenberg Hall at Stanford.

We will be focusing on the big issue of 'collective intelligence'. This is a core issue for Doug Engelbart. He believes that humanity needs to develop its collective intelligence in order to solve the increasingly complex threats against it, such as environmental catastrophes, nuclear wars and pandemics. The combination of information technology and human society can bootstrap the collective IQ we need to encounter these threats.

Doug keynoted IJ-4, the Fourth Conference on Innovation Journalism here at Stanford in May 2007. He talked about the "human system" and the "tool system", combining in a bootstrapped collective system, where both systems co-evolve, increasing the collective intelligence of the system. He pointed out that journalism is a part of the perceptory system of the collective intelligence. "Not the sensory system," he said. "The perceptory system". Very wise and visionary.

In March this year, Innovation Journalism Fellow Phyza Jameel did an interview with Doug on the need for collective intelligence. This short interview is a real gem, Doug's picture of the future is fascinating, scary and powerful - here it is:



The conference is a collective effort. Doug and his friends welcome you to be part of the Program for the Future team organizing the conference. If you want to get more involved with the Program for the Future Global Challenge for Collective Intelligence tools, contact Mei Lin Fung

Innovation Journalism: Copyright and the Use of Creative Commons

Information technology has topsy-turvied the sense of who can do what with the creative work of other people. Ten years ago, nobody would have imagined the Pirate Party - the Swedish political party proposing it is a human right to share music and entertainment on the Internet without following the standard copyright rules.

Today, everyone - including journalists - who want to understand innovation in markets for creative work must understand the copyright debate. It is about how we relate to art, entertainment or journalism, and how people working with it will earn a living. It is about how we will use computers and how the computer industry will look like, because the source code for computer software is under copyright protection. With the Internet, it has become a new game, but the copyright rules are still pretty much the same as before. Many people are ignoring them. The consequences are very strong in all fields that publish creative work.

This is the reason why EJC - the European Journalism Centre and my Injo program at Stanford organized the conference "Innovation Journalism: Copyright and the Use of Creative Commons" at the EJC HQ in Maastricht on 13 Oct 08. EJC has an excellent coverage of the event on their website.

Here is a short presentation of the invited speakers:

The key issue in all copyright protection is that of 'fair use'. 'Fair use' is the exception to the rule, cases where it is OK to copy, because you are adding so much of your own creativity that the end result is to be considered as yours. The Director of the Fair Use Project, Tony Falzone from Stanford, talked about this, and how it is applied on the Internet. Tony works with Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig , the father of Creative Commons that "provides free tools that let authors, scientists, artists, and educators easily mark their creative work with the freedoms they want it to carry." It is an effort to carry copyright into the Internet age.

Richard Horning is a partner at law firm Fish and Richardson and advisor to the Innovation Journalism program at Stanford. He talked about intellectual property protection and the freedom of the press (the first amendment here in the US). Rick showed how laws covering intellectual property and trade secrets have increasingly been used in order to silence journalists. Paradoxically, blogging is also making it more complicated to protect free speech in the court rooms - it is no longer obvious who is a journalist and who is not, and who should be protected by the first amendment. A typical case is Apple vs. Bloggers, where Apple sued a group of bloggers for revealing company secrets. Rick has a long background in both first amendment and intellectual property and innovation, and shared a number of glimpses into history with us. He for example was the legal councel of the Rolling Stone magazine when they were subpoenad to reveal the sources for their interview with the Symbionese Liberation Movements, the kidnappers of news tychoon heiress Patty Hearst, who after being kidnapped started appearing as one of them. (The Rolling Stone magazine was a venture capital funded startup at that time, with the same investors as a semiconducter startup called Intel.)

Evi Werkers and Sari Depreeuw, law researchers from FLEET - Flemish E-publishing Trends in Brussels, discussed the controversies between Internet search companies and content producers. They told the details about when Belgium became the center world attention two years ago, when a court in Brussels ordered Google News to remove all links to stories published by Belgian newspapers. The news stories are until today searchable only through local Flemish and French search sites.

In 2001 poet Jonathan Bailey got the adrenalin shock of his life when he found a large part of his own poetry and prose republished on an anonymous website. He tracked down the owner of the site and phoned the person, prepared for a hard fight. He found himself speaking to a 14 year old kid. Jonathan got fascinated by the problem of online plagiarism, and founded the website PlagiarismToday. He has since then resolved over 700 cases of plagiarism and turned it into a business. Jonathan has published a series of papers with thoughts on how to stop plagiarism on the Internet. He has written his own blog post about the Injo event in Maastricht (here).

Prof Gundolf S. Freyermuth from the International Film School in Cologne is an old friend of the Innovation Journalism program. A former lifestyle journalism pioneer in Germany, he has told stories about not fitting into the traditional news beats that many innovation journalists are living with today. This time Gundolf traced the origins of copyright, starting in the renaissance. Five hundred years ago, making a copy was just as expensive as making the original. The introduction of the printing press made copyright a real issue. Now that the printing press is being replaced by the Internet, another big change is under way. Gundolf thinks we will all be winners.

The presentations of the speakers are available on the EJC website.

I want to thank everyone at the EJC for putting together this enjoyable event: Willi Rütten, Biba Klomp, Bianca Lemmens, Arne Grauls, Bernd Kapeller, Ivan Picart, Kathlyn Clore and Ruth Spencer. They are very valuable friends, doing very important work.

Injo @ World Economic Forum

I have recently come home from a trip to Dubai, where The World Economic Forum organized the Summit on the Global Agenda. In their own words:

The Summit on the Global Agenda is a new, unique gathering of the world’s most influential thinkers – leaders from academia, business, government and society. Its purpose is to advance solutions to the most critical challenges facing humanity. This inaugural Summit of the members of the Forum’s Global Agenda Councils, the world's foremost intelligence and knowledge network, was held in partnership with the Government of Dubai on 7-9 November.

The world needs to examine the basic operating systems that drive its economies, markets and societies and aim for a “fundamental reboot” to establish a fresh platform based on renewed confidence and trust, and on sustainability, responsibility and ethical principles. That was the over-arching message that 700 of the world’s top thought leaders from business, government, academia and civil society delivered at the end of the inaugural Summit on the Global Agenda, convened by the World Economic Forum in partnership with the Government of Dubai.

I am a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Future of Media, together with Injo-colleagues Willi Rütten, director of the EJC, and Zafar Siddiqi, founder of CNBC Pakistan/Arabiya/Africa (both speakers at IJ-5), and roughly a dozen other top people from the world of journalism.

The detailed issue description of the council is available on the WEF website. WEF had selected the a number of input dimensions for us:

• Social Media
• Intellectual Property and Copyright
• Media and Global International public opinion
• Media new models
• The role of Media as public service
• Women in Media
• Innovation Journalism
  

It is gratifying that Injo is included in this list.

We quickly decided that our key issue was the future of journalism, not the media. The challenge is that journalism is needed more than ever - 'we live in an over-connected, under-informed world' and 'journalism is vital to help societies develop'.

Here are some key sentences from our initial report:

The same technology that has allowed people to create and share content has also undercut the media providers that served their communities with information. As blogs and social networks shine a light on new parts of the world, in other parts newspapers are turning the lights shutting down, cutting reporting jobs and
coverage.

But throughout that change, the professional, public purposes of journalism – to stimulate, educate and inform public debate, and to call to account – remain vital to the process of improving the state of the world.

Journalism needs to be reliable and credible, and that requires training and professional education –especially in societies striving to develop open and representative government. A missing component in many developing countries is a lack of professional journalists.

The full initial report is available here.

We discussed the need for journalism to be hosted by a business model that provides incentives to be loyal to the audience. If it does not, it can lead to conflict of interests. The present business model which is based on controlling the physical medium - that's why it is called the 'media' - does not have a long term future, even if it in certain parts of the world is still doing very well. The council asked itself "So how can we save journalism to help it save the world?"

Not surprisingly, we did not produce a new bumper business model for journalism. The council did, however, suggest that the WEF lifts journalism higher on its agenda. It was discussed if the WEF may start its own initiative for journalism, focussing on the global agenda issues. Here is a snapshot video interview with our council chair Pat Mitchell who is spearheading the idea of a WEF Global News Service.

The overall message from the councils was a call for continued innovation and globalization as we are heading deeper into this mother of financial storms.

Here is the video with the whole ending plenary session of the Summit on the Global Agenda:



Ulrik Haagerup, head of the Danish national news (at 2:18:00 in the video) suggested journalism needs to "re-boot faith in the future". He offered other journalists to join him in making "constructive journalism", journalism looking into possibilities, not only at problems. Ulrik Haagerup, Willi Rütten and I will be running a workshop next summer at the Deutsche Welle Global Media Summit, labelled "Constructive Innovation Journalism".

Klaus Schwab's summary of the Summit can be viewed at 2:19:30 in the video.

I am very much looking forward to continuing working with the Global Agenda Council. Also, the WEF Media and Entertainment Network will be arranging a seminar within the Innovation Journalism Fellowship program 2009.