Damn it’s cold outside. Subzero degrees in Copenhagen as we approach the weekend. Brrr. Good thing we are working with such burning hot topics, well in fact we a fired up by working with people that try to change the world bit by bit. So bring it on winter.

This week beside general busyness on our projects and Thomas going to Berlin to participate on a workshop for the Official artwork for the London Olympics in 2012. Magnus and I had a very interesting workshop with Martin Ferro-Thomsen, founder of Issuu.com,  about his current start up project conferize.com – that promise to change the way the conference business work. We are helping Martin and Conferize.com along with the social design on the service. Thinking about all the artifacts, all the knowledge and all the relations shared at tousands of conferences, you realize how many social design opportunities that emerge when people meet up and how amazing it would be if you could scale this by making it digital. Conferize.com promises to do that and Martin and the team are very dedicated to launch a service that makes a change… if in doubt read the Conferize manifesto http://blog.conferize.com/post/6102168246/conferizemanifesto.

This week another of our interesting clients went from stealth mode to public sign up. The project now have an official name and the site is up at shareleap.com. Shareleap.com like Conferize.com is on a grand misson changing the world by making business more transparent and collaborative. One could say, they are trying to redesign influence. 

Shareleap.com promise to change the possibilities for small investors and shareholders to influence large companies, allowing them to share and synchronize ideas and opinions, in order co-create or endorse agenda proposals. individually small shareholders are ultimately powerless, and the general assembly in most companies are designed to keep small investors out of power. If connected through a social platform like shareleap.com, small shareholders could be a major voice and regain influence. Moreover, in an increasingly turbulent and “broken” stock market, a lot of companies would actually see a great advantage in having a good and direct dialogue with small investors.

Working with start ups is such a thrill for us, we find that our competences and experience in working with social design and social business models, really is making an immediate difference, because we are in the creation and execution phase all the time. There is no layers between the product and the business + working with people who are running 10 times faster than anybody else, to keep up with their own ideas and ideals is just inspiring us to push the envelope on things. 

Reflecting on this weeks work, we see a new pattern in terms of innovation coming from the start up scene, from people who truely believe they can change something that is broken. We see the best ideas come from people that are outside “organisations” because they can work more agile and prototyping than larger corporations and traditional agencies are able to do. One area in particular that I see as an emerging space for this type of disruptive innovation is “Digital service innovation”. Here the digital and social realm offers possibilities for creating platforms that not existe and in fact disrupt existing institutionalized business models. This could be some up in the credo: You don’t need to own the market, to change it.

In fact think about the recently announced IPO of Facebook, which promise to become a top 10 IPO introductions of all time – estimated to generate 100 billion dollars, certianly by far the biggest for any social network site ever. Interesting (and a little scary) Facebook has done nothing but to create the platform and to own the relations – a lot of them. If Facebooks userbase is worth the astronomic amounts is beyond me to judge. However, it shows us that social platforms are immensely powerfull and quite a prosperous innovation space. However I think that the more Facebook tries to force it’s platform into commercial use, the less it be interesting for users to use. At least I have a hard time seeing the “like advertising” turning into an attractive business – somewhat profitable perhaps, but not very… ehm pretty. However I think Facebook and other major players will increasingly, become the infrastructure that will integrate into all other activities on the net. Facebook now owns the social graph of many people, and in the future that’ll be like selling oxygen to people drowning. 

Returning to the point. Platforms. Niche platforms. Major disruption will come from start ups and inventors creating “niche” platforms around specific areas of interest. Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is going to be to generalized and to broad for capturing all the potential action, it will probably be the “backbone” of a lot activity. But my guess is we wil see a continual rise of a mulitude of emeging niche platforms – like shareleap.com and conferize.com taking on specific business’  - where there are specific conditions and in particular specific social contexts and values to cater for. This is not disruption for the sake of disruption, but basically fixing inherent problems that the market is to slow or to blind to adress it self. That’s innovation. And it’s great social design. 

Just to say, in Socialsquare, we are spending a lot of time in our projects as well as in our methods thinking about the design of digital and social platforms, and how they are changing valuechains and businessmodels, by making markets  more transparent, distributed and scalable. In fact we are working on an event where we’ll share more of these insights, so stay tuned for more. And do drop by or set up a meeting with us if you are interested in more.

Have a cool weekend.