The themes and threads from my first impressions at SXSW have begun to unfold and re-enforce as the week progress. Within conferences such as this it easy to end up with a light inspirational touch across many themes, but I have endeavoured to uncover practical steps to overcome aspects I see stifling innovation.
Being a liberal leaning festival the air oft hangs heavy with the weight of politics and the affect of Trumpa-loompas isolationist policies.
Most sessions have made reference to an increase in diversity, the benefits of fighting against this isolation and alarmist ideals. To counter Groupthink and the surburbinisation of the mind.
To be less like machines.
Controlled by algorithms
The hype of big data has been replaced with the hype of AI and machine learning.
No one could really manage the massive amount of data, so we have given up the job to algorithms to make any sense of this by allowing machines to be assistive tools.
A pre-programmed response based on inputed variables at the expense of a human touch.
We have replaced intuition and experience with algorithms. Machines are now deciding want content displays in our social feeds, suggest people we should fall in love with and if we are financially sound.
However if we are to extrapolate this self re-enforcing curation. Without the 'intuition patterns' of different people, challenging from outside our sphere of experience can we truly innovate or find solutions to marketing challenges our clients are facing.
Fighting groupthink
Adam Grant, professor at Wharton talked about 'originals' and the success their thinking has facilitated.
Originals keep inspired by outside sources, not only to find a reference point but to help explain new ways of thinking. An appreciation of Shakespeare was the reason the Lion King was made.
The movie nearly died in pre-production due to executives unable to grasp the first original story Disney had written. With the re-telling of so many established stories, producing an original was a new way of working for them.
It was not until an executive exclaimed "It's Hamlet with Lions" that it was understood and given the go ahead.
Originals know their weaknesses.
He suggested you role play as a team to see how your competitors would kill your company as a way to think differently about the strategy for our companies.
We always play a better offence than defence.
Anil Dash, CEO of Fog creek talked a lot about ethics and values of our businesses. To challenge our notions of success and progress. Is Uber's business model and the use of the sharing economy as a stop gap to driverless cars bringing value, or simply making a few people very rich at the expense of the workers that got them there.
Think about implications of successful creations and make tech a little more humane.
Caroline Winnett of Skydeck, a tech accelerator implored us to dispassionately follow the scientific method for our ideas, to ensure they are proven process to find success and true value.
The Scientific method:
- Observe existing phenomena
- Form a hypothesis or testable
- Test through experiments and data
- Iterate based on results to make new hypothesis
The creators
Having faced a minor burnout attending 4-5 panels and discussions a day I decided to wander the festival and take in some of the spectacles.
An entire floor of the convention centre was set aside as a trade showcase for companies to share their ideas and products.
This was a showcase of inspiring people doing amazing things with technology. With the rise in investment in mobile technology it has afforded access to low cost componetry to bring the connection be
A solar powered hydroponics farm in a shipping container, equivalent to 5 acres of farming land.
Donating USBs to fight facism by air dropping South Korean soap operas into the North.
Japanese students given the opportunity to explore whatever they wanted too and building robot caterpillars to explore how machines can learn from nature.
Thinking that I had found a soda startup ( I run a soda blog) lead me to a fascinating discussion with a marketing automation company, HelloSoda. They had a new tech allowing for Bayesian belief networks to fill in the gaps in data through analysis and probabilistic modelling so we can have richer segmentation in our data.
Super nerdy but tackling a big issue of relevance and personalised marketing.
By Ogilvy creative director of tech, Michael Ford