Apple just put the new I-Phone on the market and it was celebrated today as the most dynamic new product launch in the UK this year. There were the usual ‘need to get a life’ people waiting outside of the London store as well as elsewhere to get their hands on this hot eye candy of an Apple consumer product.
A slew of useful Apps are embedded in the I-phone but they are the usual suspects and nothing radically new for us. The glaring lapse of Apple is to include any social enterprise tools or any environmental or fair trade or green Apps embedded. Why? Where is the radical innovation here?
A couple of months ago in San Fran, I proposed to Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO a very useful Social Exchange Application for Goodwill giving through the I-phone. he listened attentively and pronounced it a great idea.
He delegated the process, but after his initial entusiasm, he passed it on to his trusted lieutenants who let this project die off. This was due to their obvious lack of interest in anything that doesn’t have a direct line of sight to profitability. Next quarter thinking has invaded Apple. the economic downturn makes Social Enterprise and Corporate Responsibility to take a way back … seat on the Apple’s innovation agenda.
Is this the Leadership we expect from Steve the most charismatic of the Tech world’s CEO?
Or is his leadership tarnished by his lieutenants not carrying through?
Either way the road is slippery. When the economy is in the dolldrums it is when we need to exhibit fearless leadership and to be vigilant and forward thinking with innovation. It is not when we are coasting along at 90 mph on a free highway. Storm weather captains we need with large compassion in their hearts for those others in times of Crisis. A Social Exchange will support those people in need through giving and supporting the organizations NGOs, and NPOs who work and advocate on their behalf everyday in the field.
That’s what we do with compassion and that’s where real Leadership’s mantle rests.
Apple failed Social innovation this year, but there is always the future. But that is not the way Apple became the undisputed leader in coolness and tech design. They seiged the future first and took giant risks in the past but somehow now they have become risk averse or perhaps a little weak kneed.
Yet this is the future and it won’t wait for Steve’s boys to get their act together or brace their knees for the green gardening neccessary to blossom the Social Innovation field.
Arguably the Old Merry UK is pages ahead of the US on Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship but it’s well behind the magnetic shores on strict technology entrepreneurship, business development and tech Innovation. yet now they try to catch up mightily.
That is why we launch our new Tech and Social Entrepreneurship Innovations in the UK and not in the US. Now we go ahead and built the Social Exchange as an independent App and we will get support from NESTA , UK’s Technology Innovation, entrepreneurship, social support arm. But the most gigantic innovation of mine and Satori Social ventures is the BillionPeoplePhone which we call ‘Bphone’ and will launch also in the UK this Fall season.
London is a great place for Social Tech innovation even with the slow on the uptake Gordon Brown hagis fed, highlands free range goverment. I like living here and have many friends who find it stifling politically and the nanny state can be an Orwellian Nightmare. Imagine driving from plymouth to london and getting something as 8 different speeding tickets from various cameras along the way. I had an expensive cheap thrills ride. The icing on that particular cake was the cumulative ticket that the camera enhanced Met traffic police issued me on the end of the trip by calculating the distance covered and the time it took me to arrive from the first camera clocking me to the last one in Belgravia. The horrors of technology and the snooping state. Now for speed driving we also have to go free range in the Scottish highlands. Anyways, Times change and London is still a super cool place to develop technology and social innovation.
After all….It is no accident that both Adam Smith and Karl Marx sharpened their teeth here and are still neighbors in a local cemetary.
