People sometimes wonder how our work relates to physical commodities. The Internet is by some mistakenly believed to change only the industries of intangible products, such as it has with music, news, video, marketing and so on. But this is not the case. The Internet will change all markets - also the market in industries of physical and very non-digital products. And the challengers in these industries will as well thrive through social and digital business models that utilise on co-creation, involvement and social innovation. At fashion company MUUSE they are responding to the crisis in the apparel industry by acting as a business...

Despite that many of us SQ staffers are avid skiers, none of us – unlike many others danes  - are going skiing during this winter holiday. In fact most of our office has been full all week. We’re working on our projects (while dreaming of skiing) and are also preparing for our launch event on the 1st of March. This week we sent out the invitation for the launch. The titel is ‘R.I.P. Social Media’. The statement may be a bit bold, but it’s no joke. We mean it when we say it… Of course we don’t think that Facebook, Twitter and other social media will loose its relevans in the nearest future. But when it comes to creating value and challenging the markets, the...

Citizensourcing (term coined by Lukensmeyer & Torres, 2008) describes the design and configuration of a new relationship between a government and its citizens, based on a set of web 2.0 principles mostly applied from crowdsourcing, co-creation and mass collaboration. Citizensourcing describes the act of taking a task that is traditionally performed by a designated civil servant and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of citizens in the form of an open call. This offers new ways of interactive public value creation and citizen co-creation by systematically integrating external actors into the governmental and administrative processes.

It has been a hectic week at Socialsquare. so this weeknote is short and sweet.  We have been working on the project “The Farm”, where Kim, Magnus and I where have  all involved in a workshop regarding the vision that our customer has for the project. All the gentlemen above have also been working on the “The Book” project.  Magnus has participated in a Smart cities conference addressing waste management - yes, sometimes you have to get dirty to change the world.  This week we have be in "launch mode" preparing for our upcoming event, where we are ready to show you the "new" Socialsquare. Nicolaj, Emil and Kasper has been hard at work preparing things on each of their...

The food co-operative Københavns Fødevarefællesskab (KBHFF) proves a brillant example on how many movements and start-up businesses are fundementally organised and conceptualised in a very diffent way than earlier. In the video below our former collegue Andreas Lloyd talks about KBHFF and the strength of distributed networks. Andreas is highly involved in KBHFF and is now an independent ethnograpic researcher. Last week Martin came up with the credo You don’t need to own the marked to change it. The video supports...

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...

European Glass Context is the biggest biennial for contemporary glass art in Europe. It takes place on the danish island Bornholm every four years and brings together Europe's most prominent glass artists. The next biennial starts off this year in September. Back in november Susanne Jøker Johnsen – head of the biennial secretariat – contacted us after reading this previous blogpost on crowd funding. She wanted our help for a new funding concept for the biennial. Like a lot of cultural...

Our projects have moved along nicely this week, as have our new biz meetings, writings and calls, but in general this week has been a week of research. Kim, Martin and myself have been working on "the Book" project. Doing interviews, desktop research and hosting a very interesting insight workshop with our esteemed client's management and chairman. It was our first workshop in the office and it worked out fine, although I believe we need to look more into a new printer so that all our flows, sketches, diagrams and analysis get an enhanced (and at least larger) presentation. We have held some great conversations around the different perspectives on open innovation both internally...

As part of our latest project – “The Book” – we are investigating the publishing industry. Our job is to design a business model that facilitates, commercialises and improves the availability of content originating from a wide range of writers, while meeting the nature and possibilities of the Internet. We are therefore deconstructing the process of writing and publishing. We are talking to authors and asking crucial questions about writing and publishing, about the function of publishing companies, about the interaction between authors and readers and about the creative process in general. It is clear that the book industry is changing (or “being disrupted”, to use...

This week thousands of sites - including Wikipedia, Mozilla, Wired – went “dark” for 24 hours in defense of a free and open Internet. Needless to say, we at Socialsquare are also worried about the US bills SOPA and PIPA. The DNA of the Internet is based on freedom, anarchy and the free flow of knowledge - to limit these basic dynamics will amputate the creativity and the opportunities on the Net. If SOPA and PIPA were adopted, content owners and the US government could hinder the very infrastructure for sharing (not only the illegal sharing!). And without sharing the Net will not have co-creation - which in our opinion might be the single most important feature of the...