Sujavna 3:28

1155 hrs/Sunday 21 July 2013

I am going to be brief in this post. The questions that comes to my mind today is: Do countries need to continue with an elaborate and costly machine called “defence forces” to protect their economic and cultural assets and citizens? If protection against aggressive enemy countries and/or terrorism is the objective, what innovations in international peacekeeping and dispute resolution-mechanisms can obviate the need for countries to spend on “defence”?

Any views out there? Wishing you a great week ahead and a wonderful weekend.

Sujavna 3:27

1150 hrs/Sunday 21 July 2013

From embedded war-time correspondents to citizen journalists and the use of social media, mainstream journalism has innovated from time to time to become more effective and efficient. However, to me, it seems that the core challenges for journalism and journalists, continue to remain – to define newsworthiness, to identify newsworthy stories and to follow up on these stories till they reach a logical closure, and all these managed efficiently!

So then, what can journalism learn from some other areas, in terms of innovative practices? A few random thoughts, in this direction:

·         Cloud Reporting (akin to cloud computing) – where a news-story can be logged, and can be followed up by individuals (journalists and others) or by any media corporation to either extend scope of the original investigation, add new dimensions to the original news story, provide additional investigative value-adds to the original story, et al. Cloud Reporting can be offered as a SaaS equivalent, with adequate safeguards to recognise and track the Rights of various parties contributing to each story.

·         Cues from the Energy Sector – just as the generation, transmission and distribution of power or Gas is split and handled by different corporate entities, what can be the positive outcomes (I can see a few negative ones!) from separating the journalism sector into (a) Story Capture Sector - frontline journalism, where specialist corporations invest in and employ journalists and other resources on the ground the capture stories, (b) an Intermediary Sector that purchases these news stories from the Story Capture Sector and may overlay an editorial perspective, as may be dictated by its stakeholder/shareholder policies (these can be the normal mainstream companies as they exist today), and (c) Local Story Supply Companies that enter into contractual agreements with a range of Intermediary companies to distribute the stories to a targeted local consumer base at a commission. Of course, a regulatory body will oversee that natural justice and market-driven economies of scale of operations exist in the ecosystem.

Do you have some ideas or views? Signing off here....

Sujavna 3:26

1045 hrs/Sunday 07 July 2013

Last week I was fortunate to have been introduced to a concept that offers insights into how ideas and information actually can be made to work. This is the concept of memes, which are indivisible units of culture, first conceptualised by  Richard Dawkins a scientist who said that a meme is a piece of culture that replicated through communicating, and perhaps evolved into other memes in the process.

I think that this is an important concept for the innovation processes in corporate and social organisations, and can play an important role to enhance the effectiveness of both the process and the end-product of the innovations themselves. And so I intend to understand more about memes in different contexts of the innovative process, in the coming weeks.

Any memes on memes itself? Signing off......