Crowdsourcing for the Environment

Winner of Starbucks' Coffee Cup Challenge Isn't a Coffee Cup | Fast Company

I feel Starbucks have somehow been short-changed with this as the winning suggestion. It highlights the productivity of idea generation that is the result of crowdsourcing; many good ideas but difficult, if not impossible, to implement.

By choosing this idea as the winner, Starbucks reveals their need to move in small steps from their present position to something new. This is not uncommon and it important for firms to understand how far and how fast they can move to effect change.

I wonder how many of the ideas generated by this initiative will ever be implemented.

MasterCard Partners in Prepaid Set to Drive Global Innovation and Growth Source: BusinessWire 24 June 2010

MasterCard Worldwide today launched MasterCard Partners in Prepaid - a new initiative to stimulate MasterCard's collaboration with partners and customers around the world and drive growth in prepaid. MasterCard Partners in Prepaid will focus on delivering innovation at a number of levels: in the sharing of global best practices, in thought leadership, in investments in partner growth; and in simplified interactions. The initiative aims to accelerate innovation and engagement to deliver the best prepaid solutions for the marketplace.

Companies are accessing key stakeholders in order to crowdsource ideas to enhance their offerings.

Assessing the Potential in Innovation Outcomes

In this Harvard Business School note on Bloomberg.com the authors highlight a number of issues to be considered when the potential of a new or changed offering for customers is to be assessed.

Bank of New York Mellon Extends Offerings to Include Securities Clearing

Source: PR Newswire 22 June 2010

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BNY Mellon, the global leader in asset management and securities servicing, today announced the creation of a new company to clear futures and derivatives trades on behalf of institutional clients. The company, BNY Mellon Clearing, LLC, is a U.S. registered futures commission merchant and a member of the National Futures Association, and plans to become a clearing member on major exchanges and central clearinghouses on a global basis to support the trading activities of its clients.

This is an obvious response to the growing preference of Regulators across the world to see more and more transactions on centrally cleared hubs. This trend to more centralized clearing has two major side effects.

First, as more transactions get standardized and centrally cleared, a platform for further financial innovation is created allowing firms to recombine these standard offerings in new ways. This phenomenon, known as the spiral of financial innovation, may be slowed down by regulations that require higher capital on non-standardized transactions.

Second, as more transaction consolidate onto hubs, the network becomes less resilient to failures of the hubs themselves. This is similar to the network effects found in the internet and the electricity grid which are resilient to failures of thousands of lesser connected nodes but very brittle for failures of key highly connected hubs.