Foursquare is a somewhat popular mobile based application that allows you to “check-in” to locations and provides information about where you are to your friends (or to your larger social networks if you choose) and depending on how often you check-in at any one particular location you can earn points and even real-life rewards from certain businesses.

Right now businesses are taking advantage of this information as a way of luring new customers and rewarding loyal customers. One Facebook friend posted:

Attentive businesses will use this information to their advantage in this way. I think that’s great. There is a problem though – many people are very leery of using a location based application that gives away their position so freely. In fact one enterprising organization – Please Rob Me - is using its cynicism about location based tech to invite would be criminals to watch for when you are away from home.

So what would I look for in a next generation of something like Foursquare? Well, why not put the ownness on businesses to accurately map their location using GPS co-ordinates. By doing this you, as an individual, could sign up for this type of service and just by having your phone enabled the application could pick up on what business you were patronizing. By using an anonymous id businesses could instead push rewards to you instead of waiting for you to announce yourself. Keeping with the anonymous id the application could inform other users of how many people are currently at any given location. This doesn’t mean you would have to make everyone anonymous; like how the applications work now you could allow people to share more of their personal location information if they choose too. The key however is that the anonymity option would still allow businesses and users to connect without a direct, transparent relationship.

I believe these tweaks would greatly open up the use of location based applications to a broader user base. What do you think?

The process I chose to follow for the development of this business venture (Andrew Miller Consulting) was to use crowdsourcing as a way of learning more about myself and what my work could offer to my clients and my community. I’ve talked a bit about this in the past so I won’t linger too long on it but I feel the background is important.

For the purpose of my work, as well as the collaborative work I perform with clients, I look at crowdsourcing as a way of extracting social knowledge from a known community of interest. This may take several forms – both online and through face to face meetings.

What is important is that everyone understands that they all have equal say, that I don’t singularly have an answer already decided and that the wisdom of the crowd will be trusted.

Deliverables and Service Menus

Since launching this venture I’ve heard from several people within my crowd that they don’t quite understand the deliverables I offer; where are payment points and the like. They get the overall vibe of what Andrew Miller Consulting is all about but not necessarily the exact value proposition. While I’m still working out a way of representating this information under my Services tab I thought sharing my process here would help to get me there (and give you all an opportunity to contribute to the solution).

I thought my first stab at this would be to script it like a menu (hat tip to Dan for that term).

• Conversation Hosting: Organizational Community Development – developing a community of trust within your organization. This develops an environment where people feel safe sharing their successes and failures, learning together and then coming up with really innovative solutions. At the end of this work the organization will have a developed methodology for working together in a more productive way.
  • Deliverable: Perform staff/management/supporter interviews to develop basic issue framework.
  • Deliverable: Develop community meeting purpose, frame and flow.
  • Deliverable: Host community meeting(s).
  • Deliverable: Provide handbook for organization to help maintain a community of practice.
  • Deliverable: Provide options for maintaining and growing harvested social knowledge.
• Digital Narrative: Harvested Social Knowledge – developing a social knowledge management tool set to make the harvested social knowledge useful. This develops an environment where your stakeholders use community intelligence to not just grow the organization’s social knowledge but to also attract even greater participation and support. At the end of this work the organization will have a developed set of social media tools that can be used internally and/or externally with supporters.
  • Deliverable: Perform staff/management/supporter interviews to assess technological ability.
  • Deliverable: Develop community meeting purpose, frame and flow.
  • Deliverable: Host community meeting(s).
  • Deliverable: Document the organizational narrative.
  • Deliverable: Develop appropriate tool(s) (e.g. website/blog/wiki/custom programming/etc.).
  • Deliverable: Implement tool(s) based on custom fit to organizational narrative (i.e. custom content integration).
  • Deliverable: Train community on use of tool(s).
  • Deliverable: Provide documentation for tool(s) usage and support.

Every Engagement is New

While my title – Innovation Gardener- may seem a little cheeky (and that’s ok with me) it speaks to what I am inspired to do for my clients. Like a gardener tending vegetables you know that every season there are some basic ingredients necessary for a successful harvest; but everything else is variable. Mother nature doesn’t provide daily in measured amounts and my clients needs vary greatly as well.

I provide my clients with those basic ingredients necessary to grow innovation but I am there, like a constant gardener, to make sure all of the variables beyond the basic ingredients are met.

For this reason every engagement begins with a conversation about the purpose of our work and we’ll keep that purpose as a central focus until the work is completed.

Working Together

I’d certainly appreciate feedback on whether or not this clears up questions you may have had about our services. If you’ve read this far and think your organization could benefit from my offerings please get in touch with Andrew Miller Consulting here!