GigaOM » Paul Miller

This London accelerator plans to do good and make profit

Bobbie Johnson — Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:30:51 +0000

The concepts of public good and private enterprise are often pitted against each other — or at least seen together so rarely that seeing them in combination can feel harder than getting Steve Jobs and Bill Gates in the same room. The focus on small, easy ideas at the expense of big, important ones is the sort of thing that has compelled luminaries like Tim O’Reilly to ask people to work on better things and Peter Thiel to found Breakout Labs.

Now London’s Bethnal Green Ventures wants to help redress that balance with an accelerator program targeted at spawning a new generation of technology companies focused on tackling big problems.

Starting this June, the group will take in its first cohort of early stage technology startups who “aim to solve a social or environmental problem.” As they say:

That could be anything from fixing healthcare to reducing carbon emissions or improving education to reducing crime – the key is that your idea must have the potential to help millions of people somewhere along the line.

To be clear, however, this isn’t a charity. Only those with for-profit companies (or intending to build for-profit companies) are able to apply, and director Paul Miller says he is inspired by those who combine ambition and business smarts, like “AMEE, Fitbit, Meetup, OPower, Patientsknowbest, Whipcar, Zopa,” he says. “For me they’re all putting tech to use to solve important problems and have the potential to grow to benefit millions of people.”

And while the outfit is taking the now-traditional model — three months, small investment, intensive mentoring — but says it’s not just a copy of Y Combinator with a bit of do-gooding layered on top. In fact, the team was intimately involved in producing the recent Startup Factories list of European accelerators, so they have spent a long time trying to understand what makes them work.

This is not the first attempt at an accelerator-style approach to social entrepreneurship — there are events like Boston’s MassChallenge, which has been running for several years.

But Bethnal Green Ventures isn’t new to this game either. It’s been around for a couple of years in various guises, and originally span out of Social Innovation Camp, a weekend hacking series that started in 2008 and now has events across the globe. For this, they’re bringing in mentors — so far those announced include two big engineering talents, former Twitter lead developer Blaine Cook and Matt Biddulph, co-founder of social travel website Dopplr, which was sold to Nokia in 2009.

The deadline for applications is April 29.

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Predictions for the year ahead: Digital workplace edition

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 14:01:34 +0000

It’s the season for look-back lists and predictions for the year ahead, and over on the Intranet Benchmarking Forum blog, Paul Miller, who’s at work on a new book about digital workplaces, has applied this end-of-the-year ritual to his area of expertise. His post offers up a lengthy list of 10 changes Miller expects to see in digital workplaces in 2012.

Several of Miller’s prognostications will only be of interest to intranet professionals and those interested in a truly deep dive into the web-based internal tools organizations use to get work done, but others are fascinating for any manager or independent pro interested in the future of work. Take Miller’s ideas about the design of physical offices, for example. He predicts:

Perhaps inevitably the driving force in the Digital Workplace is real estate reductions and re-shaping of office environments. The lead times in the physical world are far longer than in the digital so organizations are trying to assess now, what they need on a physical work level in five years from now. Will anyone come to an office? If so who, when and why? The change in the physical workplace is being enabled by the rapid improvements in the Digital Workplace but lots of money is being wasted still on offices that will be virtually empty in 2016.

The impact of the rise of remote collaboration and more flexible ways of working on our built environment is a topic many organizations (and urban planners) are just starting to think about, weighing whether these changes will mean not only an absolute reduction in their real estate footprint, but also whether the mix of spaces companies and cities provide needs to evolve. Miller seems spot on that these considerations will only become more prominent in the coming years. The evidence also suggests he’s right when he argues that the rise of the digital workspace is one of the few areas where governments may get out ahead of business and lead:

London in 2012 hosts the Olympics and at a Government level there is a drive to promote flexible working for three weeks around the Games. Organizations are being required by Government to change their policies because the Digital Workplace can take the strain and these organizations will never look back after the Olympics as habits will have been changed. In Holland, Finland, US and UK government policy loves the Digital Workplace – less traffic, less sickness, reduced carbon, fewer accidents on the roads, business as usual when bad weather strikes, happier home lives – and this top down push will accelerate corporate wide shifts in how and where work happens.

Check out the complete post for Miller’s ideas about BYOD, usability and increased remote collaboration driving organizational restructuring, as well as other changes expected in the digital workplace in the coming year.

What are your predictions for how remote collaboration will develop in 2012?

Image courtesy of Flickr user garryknight.

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Do middle managers need web work boot camp?

Jessica Stillman — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 17:02:23 +0000

With technology advancing, there are fewer practical restrictions to act as a barrier to increased uptake of virtual working. So what is holding organizations back from broader adoption of the practice? Perhaps, in part, middle managers and their lack of training. That’s what Paul Miller, CEO of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, suggested when we spoke with him about a book he’s writing on the digital workplace:

In the book I talk about one of the major oil companies. They equipped people with new, more portable devices and new smartphones and then the next day, 25 percent of people disappeared. So you’re a middle manager. You’re used to seeing people coming into the office and all of a sudden they vanish, and I think one of the key issues is middle managers learning how to manage when you see people far less than you ever used to. How often should you meet them? How do you keep an eye on them? Obviously, it brings up this whole issue of judging people on results and outputs rather than inputs.

Companies are starting to realize people are unused to this way of managing people. What they’re finding is that the biggest block to digital working is that middle managers aren’t skilled to do it. Organizations have learned that you actually do need to train managers in how to manage people in a virtual environment.

Miller went on to cite companies such as BT and Microsoft in the Netherlands, which have had improved success with virtual working after training their middle managers, so he’s certainly correct in his basic point that the training makes a difference, but is this news?

Five years ago, articles were already noting that when it comes to any sort of telecommuting, “the real impediment is the resistance of middle managers” and arguing that “more managers should be trained.” Back then Chuck Wilsker, president of the Telework Coalition, estimated that no more than 15 percent of firms were training managers for remote work. Based on Miller’s account, more companies have jumped on board, but certainly not as many as would be expected to have gotten with the program over half a decade. Perhaps the real story is how little progress has been made.

Why aren’t more companies training middle managers for the realities of the digital workplace despite repeated calls to send them to web work boot camp?

Image courtesy Flickr user familymwr

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