The power of the remix is all about making something new, fresh and possibly better.

The fact that what I did connected with someone else to inspire them to make something else out of it, that is satisfying in a way that nothing else is…. Once you let go of notion that ‘this is mine’ and others build on top of what you did, you can work together a lot better [and inexpensively]… Walt Disney didn’t create fairy tale characters like Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella…  

— Actor and director Joseph Gordon-Levitt speaking about his  open-production collaboration community, hitRECord.

Via ZDNet

1. Make it easy for people to share their story. Medtronic has a Facebook app encouraging customers to show lives well-lived with their insulin pumps.
2. Leverage the social in social media. Dieters need peer support and Weight Watcher provides it.
3. Make it about the customer. Amex OPEN Forum does a lot more than just push its products
4. Get feedback. Lay’s changed its Facebook ‘like’ button to say ‘I’d eat that.’
5. Break through barriers. Don’t use regulation as an excuse for complacency

My theory is that storytelling in the 21st century has an opportunity to be transformative in a way that enables those formerly known as the audience to become collaborators. Thanks to the democratization of tools to create and distribute media, the formerly top-down entertainment industry is now bubbling up with new stories and business models.

So at Columbia, we are working to build a Story Design lab that mixes narrative design, game mechanics, and design science to tackle social problems. Last week, we concluded a pilot for the Story Design lab. Columbia students and former foster kids (one being filmmaker Lydia Joyner) worked together to build an immersive storytelling experience. Participants came to realize that this was not just a sci-fi tale, but a story rooted in the experiences and feelings that our collaborating foster kids went through when they aged out of care. By designing with instead of designing for, the students and former foster kids built an experience that created emotional connections and empathy for those who age out of care.

Purposeful Storytelling: How Designing With, Instead of For, Promotes Understanding |Technology on GOOD

The most effective way to integrate external social media with a social intranet is to treat the intranet as your main hub for both. For example, IBM Connections allows you to add Twitter search widgets, integrate directly with iTunes or look up addresses via Google Maps. With the Twitter widget, users can specify hashtags they want to monitor, and it updates in real-time. Teams can use this information to help with anything from research on a specific topic or monitoring conversations around a product launch.

— Larry Bowden, IBM VP portals and web experienced, interviewed in Beta News

Woodland talked about how he and a colleague began thinking about codes for supermarket products in the late 1940s after hearing grocery store operators complain about high labor costs associated with manual price changes.

His inspiration? Morse code.

“Morse code had been used in flashes of light and in flashes of sound,”Woodland said. “I got the bright idea of putting it on paper so that it could be scanned by a computer.”

At Fjord, we work across domains like media, health care, retail, education, and banking, and the work always involves an element of “new.” A new platform or technology, a new business proposition, or new target users. We work at the front edge of mainstream, where innovation meets mass-market appeal. The constant presence of “new” in our work feeds our curiosity, and makes exploration a necessity.