We designed and built the original site, but the PO team deserve all the credit for the project's success. They have some exciting next steps planned, including covering mental health and district nursing services.

Our friends at School of Everything and MySociety also picked up well deserved awards at the same event, so it was a good day all round for socially conscious online projects.

Last month, NESTA hosted an Innovation Edge conference, which was a big celebration of UK innovation, especially in the public sector and among new commercial startups. Photos from the day give a picture of just how ambitious the conference was, and Roland Harwood's blog is a good place to get a NESTA view on the event, and the comments seem to be almost unanimously positive. I have to confess to being slightly ambivalent towards the event as the main sessions (aside from Bob Geldof, who I missed) were actually quite poor and I object quite strongly to injecting the the word 'Britain' into every sentence as the UK Prime Minister chose to do. Notwithstanding the fact that the format was quite traditional, I think Roland and those people at NESTA who are actually engaged in promoting innovation deserve great credit for a successful event.

This week sees the Channel 4 2gether festival in London, organised in conjunction with UnLtd, Involve, Ipsos Mori, polyWonk, Social Innovation Camp and the UK Catalyst Awards to bring together innovators across a range of social, business, educational and creative sectors to tackle major social issues. The event will also host the launch of Channel 4's 4IP digital innovation fund. The perpetual motion machine known as Steve Moore has been the driving force behind this initiative, but lots of other people are supporting the event too. Definitely worth attending if you are in London, as I unfortunately won't be. Bringing people and organisations together in these events is undoubtedly useful, and I suspect just the connections alone generate some innovative new ventures or projects.

In addition to NESTA, there is also the RSA Networks project that seeks to harness the knowledge and innovative thinking of RSA fellows to generate social good - see this excellent roundup of lessons learned from the project so far. There is also the UK government's Innovation Unit, which "...is devoted to stimulating, incubating and accelerating innovation to achieve transformed services with better outcomes for citizens.", and is also involved in a project that Headshift are helping to implement: the Innovation Exchange, which seeks to provide a clearinghouse for ideas and potential projects that brings together innovators, commissioners of services and potential service providers.

But to what extent is actual innovation an outcome of these initiatives? Sometimes I wonder if there is not an oversupply of people interested in innovation for its own sake, independent from the real problems that surround us. Despite having attempted to absorb a fair amount of innovation theory, I always come back to the basic idea that 'necessity is the mother of invention'. I would put my money on somebody with a burning problem and a passion to solve it rather than a well-meaning group who want to help every single time. Innovation is as much about problems as it is about solutions, just as creativity is often driven by constraints and limitations rather than freedoms and possibilities.

DJ Alchemi's recent article Against Method in Innovation is a breath of fresh air amidst a lot of uncritical, rather foggy writing on the topic:

"I'm kind of surprised that the abstract concept of innovation remains so popular with policy makers and agencies...

Using innovation as a catch-all term to cover a wide range of changes in products, services and organising creates the expectation that these changes share important characteristics and, critically, may share similar solutions. But do they, should they, or could they? To take the relatively narrow domain of integrated IT, on the one hand you have the Apple approach; on the other open source. How much do they have in common? Not an awful lot."

Over the years, I have watched a lot of public agencies put a lot of time and money into what they thought of as 'innovation' or service improvement, and looking back, most of this proved to be wishful thinking at best.

A few years ago, we worked closely with an NHS quango that had been set up with a brief to innovate and improve service delivery in a difficult and under-supported area of health care. Yet, for the most part, the people chosen to lead the organisation were at that stage in their careers where they wanted to build a little empire, secure their funding and go to a lot of meetings. They were the last people I would expect to be able to "deliver" innovation. There were in fact people in the network trying to think differently about, for example, how we diagnose and treat young people; but they were largely overlooked in favour of less challenging recipients of support who were more closely aligned to the buzzwords and ideology du jour emanating from government. The only thing guaranteed to take their mind off cultivating their new bureaucracy was the imminent threat of funding cuts or extinction. In that sense, they are actually quite typical of the attitude of many large organisations in both the private and public sector. They had a few very talented and committed people at the top and the bottom, who genuinely cared about service improvement and the impact this could have on peoples' lives; but they had created a zone of bureaucratic mediocrity in the middle that spent its time building empires and protecting the organisation from disruption.

For me, this gets to the heart of why large companies and organisations, especially those that rely on government funding, are not often the best locus for innovation. But we should not forget, as Geoff Mulgan writes in a fantastic article about public sector innovation, that it is often individuals within public organisations and the civil service who come up with some of the most successful ideas for programmes. So what is about the organisations themselves that acts against successful innovation?

What stops public organisations from innovating?

First, they lack one of the most important drivers for innovation: an imminent threat or a problem that impacts them personally. The sad fact is, the survival of many of these organisations is unrelated to their performance, and it is precisely this absence of cause and effect that means many of them descend into bureaucratism. People with real needs and real problems are usually the most highly motivated to find solutions.

Second, they place too much emphasis on buzzwords, 'strategy' or official policy, and there is a natural tendency to pursue innovation that addresses these objectives. Think of 'choice' in the UK health sector or 'social cohesion' in community relations. The problem is that these buzzwords often represent the codification of yesterday's problems or issues, and by the time funding calls or innovation programmes start looking for 'solutions', the time lag is so great that you end up fighting the last war, not the current one.

Third, classical approaches to innovation often try to target innovation directly, rather than creating the conditions for innovation to occur and to spread. As Robert Austin argues in his 2006 Harvard Business School Working Paper, many successful innovations are the result of accident or coincidence:

In business, there's a saying that goes "if you don't know where you're going, any map will do." You can almost always get managers to nod in agreement with this suggestion that you might as well not start something if you don't have its end objective well defined. Working without a clear definition of your objective is considered wasteful, inefficient. But if you are trying to get outside what you can anticipate and see in advance, if you are going after the truly new and valuable, this way of thinking can be a problem. This is one truth about innovation that artists seem to understand a lot better than managers.

Finally, many organisations cannot resist the urge to create a platform, place or process, ostensibly to support innovation, but it often simply constrains it. People who innovate are not in the habit, on the whole, of going to a special place to engage in interactions and sharing that might result in innovation. The RSA, Unltd, NESTA and other organisations have all created their own online platforms to support innovation, and whilst each has it merits, I wonder whether that is the right approach, or whether we should instead be reaching out to find the problems, ideas and potential innovations that are out there in the wild. As Roland Harwood wrote recently:

A common mis-conception is that users will somehow innovate for or with larger institutions, however I think the fact is that users first and foremost innovate for themselves, however there is scope and rationale for larger institutions to tap into their 'top 1%' - i.e. the fans of their brand/product or service to co-create value for both.

At Headshift, we have done some projects using social software for explicitly innovation-focused purposes inside internal communications, science/R&D and marketing functions for corporate clients, and these have been fascinating, if perhaps too early to suggest definitive conclusions. In most cases, there was not a clearly defined 'innovation process' but rather a belief that joining up the reading and writing of smart people working towards a common cause is likely to lead to better collaboration and, if we are lucky, innovation. This is also the approach we are taking to our work with the Innovation Exchange - seeking to aggregate, recombine and facilitate connections between people with matching needs, rather than create another environment in which we ask people to congregate to innovate.

How might we harness user-led innovation?

In the public sector, and civil society more widely, imaginative approaches to stimulating user-led innovation are much needed if we are to build services for the new century. User-led innovation has become more achievable since the advent of the internet, and more recently social computing, which has brought us ideas such as the architecture of participation or easy group forming as the experimental wing of political philosophy.

The usefulness or otherwise of building a platform for user-led innovation or horizontal innovation, as described by Eric Von Hippel, is an interesting question. To their credit, many organisation today realise that they are not the only source of innovation and they are seeking new ways of involving users in innovating and improving what they do. The holy grail they have in mind is the distributed network of people responsible for the Linux kernel or the kinds of stories told by people like Don Tapscott in Wikinomics such as ideagoras.

One mode that I think has potential is the barcamp-style gathering, which the Social Innovation Camp recently tried out, bringing together web developers with people who wanted to launch projects based on social objectives. The organisers have been very open about learning lessons from the event in the hope of repeating it in the near future, and whilst I think some tweaking is needed to better match up people, problems and potential solutions, it strikes me that the basic idea of participative solution design is a good one for this purpose.

Incidentally, one of the "winners" of the first SICamp was a project called Enabled by Design, which aims to crowdsource the development of assistive devices, innovations and 'life hacks' to help people with disabilities or constraints enjoy better independent living. Currently in the UK, the provision of such devices and advice bears all the hallmarks of a health service run like a massive factory. From the simple issues, such as there being essentially one type of crutch, in a fetching gun-metal grey, to the fact that it is not possible to procure household adaptions that do not look like they were designed for a Victorian hospital, the use of assistive devices on the NHS is not an altogether uplifting experience. This is one of those problems that immediately stood out as a 'must have' rather than just a 'nice to have' in terms of filling a clear need, plus it has all the characteristics of a very big problem that looks solvable through a series of small, human actions joined together by the kind of real-world incentivisation model that works so well on the internet. Watch this space.

Enabled by Design reminded me very much of Patient Opinion - a simple idea, with a clear need that aims to improve the big, impersonal process of healthcare provision through lots of small-scale, human actions, but run by people who feel the need and are highly motivated to fulfill it.

It will be interesting to see what emerges from Channel 4's commendable support for 2gether and 4IP. With so many good people and project being brought together, there is a lot of potential for good things to happen.

Here are some bookmarks relating to innovation in the meantime.

The official part of the conference programme was OK, but there were too many pay-to-speak slots that let it down, and not enough deep thinking about what this all means for the future of work and organisations. There were also some curios like AIIM trying to hitch the old KM horse to the E2.0 buzzword. This was interesting, as it also points to one potential future for enterprise social computing: death by buzzwords and vendors, as happened to the KM 'scene'.

A constant underlying theme was cloud computing, and Google gave an excellent introduction to how they see this working in combination with internally-hosted software, but I got the impression that next year will be when this takes centre stage.

For a good overview of the event, I recommend:

• Doug Cornelius's diligent session notes
• Trib's piece "there is a community out there"
• Ross Mayfield: "2008:process-specific solutions"
• Dion Hinchcliffe's roundup

So, where are we?

Well, we have some smart companies adopting social tools for practical purposes: Wachovia, Pfizer, Lockheed Martin and Bearing Point all shared case studies. So did the CIA, as covered by Stewart Mader, who humorously suggested the way we run enterprises is similar to their own 1944 Manual on corporate sabotage (see also this video interview).

There was a lot of interest in case studies and real experience among the attendees, and this was perhaps not given enough attention in the programme. Partly in response to that, the Headshift team worked hard throughout the week to release our first batch of 30 case studies and 45 use cases that we have come across in companies we work with. Lots more to come...

E2.0 showed that we have some really passionate, smart individuals working in customers, vendors and consultancies who really get the value of lightweight social tools as an alternative to lumbering, expensive enterprise IT. This is very important, as these people are the community that will be taking this work forward, and they seem to have a remarkably collegiate and open attitude to learning together, which is a key success factor in my view.

We also have a plethora of small, fast moving vendors and an even more rapidly evolving open source, mashup and integrator scene. Some of these are very specific, and some are growing into proto-platforms that cover a proportion, but so far not all, enterprise social computing features. And features is the operative word here, because features alone are not enough to drive adoption.

And, we now have competing, traditional vendor platforms in the shape of IBM Lotus Connections, whose new version launched at the event, Microsoft Sharepoint and Oracle BEA. Connections looks by far and away the best all-in-one product right now, but Microsoft have recognised Sharepoint's weakness and now offer a range of partnerships and third-party extensions to bring some of IBM's feature list to MOSS. The IBM/Microsoft bake-off on day one of the conference was astonishing for the contrast between Lawrence Liu's embarrassed demo of basic Sharepoint "features" (I felt for him, as he is clearly a really nice guy) and Susanne Minassian's confident, informative demo of Connections.

Connections will do well because it is a good product. Sharepoint will have a greater install base because of ignorance and laziness among IT departments, but where it actually works for users, this will be as a result of either very expensive customisation or the leveraging of the partnerships mentioned above that provide social features. A default install of Sharepoint, as Lawrence Liu's demo proved, is a very lonely and sad place to be.

Overall, I think the best value and most flexible feature sets are to be found with the specialist vendors, but it takes quite deep knowledge of the field to integrate these tools in the right way. That's where consultancies like Headshift can, I think, make a big difference by bridging the gap between the feature sets of the products and the real-world business use cases and needs of people working in companies. Our customers are the individuals who need these tools, not the IT or procurement departments, and I think this gives us a different perspective.

Barriers to adoption

A prominent topic among hallway conversations at E2.0 was the issue of barriers to adoption and how we overcome them. There was a good thread on the E2.0 community site, and several of the E2Open sessions (well done Ross!) covered this as well.

Mark Masterson from CSC warned us (and probably me in particular ;-) not to fall into the trap of just blaming IT:

The funniest thing, in this regard, to happen at the conference, was to listen to someone make such a "I hate IT! The hell with them -- this stuff is so important because it frees us from them!" comment, and then, moments later, hear them cursing under their breath because the hotel WiFi had failed again. Irony of a fine vintage.

Whilst he has a good point, I think this also supports my thesis that IT needs to split into plumbing (e.g. making the Wifi work and running underlying networks), core systems (the old school apps management) and business-focused facilitators (people who are free to help departments do whatever they want, including experimenting with social tools). These three areas of IT work have different skillsets, velocity, goals (five nines vs best endeavours support) and also attitudes.

Our former colleague Suw picks up on Andrew McAfee's remark at E2.0 about barriers to adoption:

I didn't expect the panelists to say that the Enterprise 2.0 tooklit is so incomplete as to hinder adoption, but I was a bit surprised that none of them identified management as a real impediment in their first round of comments. So I pressed the point by saying something like "I didn't hear any of you point the finger at the managers in your organizations. Were you just being polite, or are they really not getting in the way of Enterprise 2.0? The new social software platforms are a bureaucrat's worst nightmare because they remove his ability to filter information, or control its flow. I'd expect, then, that each of you would have some examples of managers overtly or covertly trying to stop the spread and use of these tools. Are you telling me this hasn't happened?"

That is in fact what they were telling me, and I didn't get the impression that they were just being diplomatic. They said that managers were just another category of users that needed to migrate over to new ways of working, and not anything more. In other words, the panelists hadn't seen managers in their organizations actively trying to impede Enterprise 2.0.

To what extent is "management" really a barrier to adoption? I am not sure, because I have seen the whole spectrum of reactions from management spanning enthusiasm, "we must do this" or cautious support all the way to "over my dead body" (ironically in a company where we had been running successful wikis for two years prior to this comment being made ;-). I think the issues are more granular and diverse than just the attitude of management. Asking people to change the way they work, even if that is as simple as just adopting new tools, is always hard when they also have to continue doing their job at the same time.

There is no easy formula for overcoming barriers to adoption, but we can share some tips that have worked for us:

• entertain and excite key stakeholders and make them feel IT can be genuinely liberating - we call it creating headshift moments :)
• try to stimulate demand among early adopters that span different status levels and functions - e.g. management, operations and support roles - and support this group as closely as possible
• focus on supporting concrete, clearly bounded use cases or scenarios based on what people actually do day to day, and set yourself the challenge of achieving demonstrable improvements in existing ways of working before trying to move on to new ways of working
• create new 'watering holes' where people can get better information than from traditional systems - e.g enterprise RSS on blackberries and mobile devices rather than just email - to develop more touch points with potential users
• once people are comfortable using new tools to support existing work, start to create bridges between this and entirely new modes (e.g. social bookmarking or personal blogging)
• target individual incentives, not collective benefit directly
• do not try to target culture change directly, but use tools that embody the new culture as a 'trojan horse' to effect change
• do not allow projects to be handed off to IT alone for implementation when they move beyond pilot
• get users (and in some cases clients) involved as soon as possible in the process, and let their experience be the judge of what works and what does not work
• avoid the usual 'roll out' process and instead build outwards from successful applications, person by person and group by group - ideally using early adopters to recruit second wave adopters

Of course, the real approach varies considerably from case to case, but I hope these generalities are useful nonetheless. Sam Lawrence of Jive Software posted an entertaining piece yesterday about some of the new behaviours we can expect to see within new enterprise social computing scenarios.

I think we might extend our use case gathering to look at barriers to adoption and how we overcome them. Could be a useful repository.

Possible futures?

The E2.0 conference reminded me in a way of the late KM-era events that were all about the tradeshow, vendors and software-as-the-solution rather than the nuanced, complex issues of how to make it work for real people. So the future I think we should try to avoid is one where the solution to every problem is to buy software.

Another possible future is one in which enterprise social computing is smothered by the dominant major players (Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Cisco, etc) who assimilate its features into their platforms and systems, helped by tick-box procurement where more features = better. Whilst I think Connections and Sharepoint will be important parts of the enterprise social computing world, it would be a real shame if the cambrian explosion of innovation that created the enterprise social computing field was gobbled up entirely by a few big dinosaurs.

How about a balanced, blended future where we continue to innovate with both tools, adoption techniques and business models? That sounds desirable to me, but I think we need to think very carefully about how we design, procure and integrate tools into businesses. Existing processes favour the big purchase that lasts around 5 years, but the problem is that waves of innovation and re-invention are coming in on a much faster timescale, so the first challenge is how to provide stable systems that can refresh and develop more rapidly than companies are currently comfortable with. The second challenge is how to turn this into what Clay Shirky called situated software than looks and feels native to the environment and culture of the host organisation. One size does not fit all, nor is one interface the best for all users. We need to move from providing capabilities (blog, wiki, social network, etc) to providing contextualised solutions to specific business needs that build upon the new behavioural characteristics of social tools and the affordances of social networks.

But there is another challenge, and that is the need to maintain a level of simplicity that can appeal to second wave adopters in the enterprise - the kind of people who, in truth, have never really engaged with anything other than email. Clay Shirky has some intelligent things to say about this as well in an interview with CIO Insight:

The cognitive model is to treat the computer not as a box, but a door. It's something you need to get through to get to the value on the other side. People don't want a door with 32 different kinds of handles; they want a relatively transparent view of the other people who are using the system.

Given the feature creep and vendor competition I saw in the tradeshow part of E2.0, I think we should really try to heed this advice.

I suspect the best implementations of enterprise social computing in the next few years will continue to be constructed on a base of products (whether a major platform like Connections or a combination of best-of-breed tools), but their real value will be in the way these are moulded to individual and group needs within the enterprise to create truly situated, native tools that support both existing and new ways of working better than enterprise software ever has before. But even that is worth little unless we can also succeed in engaging people and weaving these tools into the social and political fabric of the organisation. Software can't fix that.

Sounds like we have our mission :-)

im join the navy as a MEO i was just wondering what its like? is it any good?

sorry to ask but are you a real person?

you can tell its fake cos none of the ppl on his top friends hav him on theirs

Whatever turns u on I suppose! The Navy are struggling so much to recruit and keep people in. You must know yourself there are hundreds of submariners handing their notice in. They need more dedicated people like yourself....altho I'd be interested to know if you're still so dedicated after another 5 years when you might have a family to consider leavin behind for 6 months at a time!

• Culture, infrastructure and security concerns holding back adoption.
• Control - over what systems people use at work, the content they create and how it is disseminated.
• The various social software options and their suitability depending on the circumstances.
• ROI - apart from identifying bottom line improvements from the use of social tools, a more curly issue is measuring softer consequences - such as the value of strong deep social networks, development of a collaborative environment or motivated empowered employees - if indeed that's possible or worthwhile at all? (For more on this see Jon Mell's blog post: Web 2.0 ROI Discussion at Web 2.0 Strategies.)

I felt the conference was pretty light on tangible examples of how companies are actually using, mixing and matching social tools to suit their needs and the translation of this into strategies for others to test. (She says as she makes a mental note to be sure to tell fellow Headshifters to stick to some grassroots presentations drawing on our Case Studies and Use Cases!). There was also lots of ruminating on how companies need to change behaviours and about technology being just an enabler here (not something I wholly agree with).

'Facebook' once again proved its ubiquity by making it onto the agenda. Panel and conference members shared their experiences of companies either preventing access behind the firewall, or conversely, opening up and allowing people to use it in ways that help them at work. The main topics of conversation here were about security and trust. Whilst the security issue should give pause for thought (like privacy and information confidentiality), the trust aspect is a no brainer. If companies think Facebook is an instrument for time wasting and don't trust their people to work autonomously and responsibly, then there's little surprise that these same companies are struggling to adopt approaches and social tools grounded in openness, sharing and emergence.

Furthermore, simply allowing people to use Facebook at work doesn't address the deeper issue of trying to make available to people networking and other tools which help them get their jobs done. Facebook may be popular, and have some features like the 'status update' that helps keep colleagues informed of where you are, what you're doing, and your availability, but there are a host of aspects which are perhaps inappropriate for a professional work environment. There are other ways to achieve a 'Facebook-like' effect in the organisation, with tools that can be better integrated with existing systems, supportive of work processes and reflective of the organisation's and the individual's needs

Another issue related to the above which surfaced during another panel discussion, was that of approvals for externally facing employee blogs. Initially I thought there was some contradiction when the speaker described how companies should seek innovative ways to engage with its customers, shift towards transparency and customer advocacy, whilst simultaneously noting that his company heavily manages employees' external public engagement with customers (via blogs). But, on reflection, perhaps there's not - it's just another form of risk aversion and control. Unlike employees however, the customers can say whatever they want - and it may be easier for the organisation concerned to track and respond to feedback if it is in a forum which is closer to home.

The 'Great Contract Challenge' provides another illustration of the prospective benefits of crowd sourcing. In other words, tapping the 'wisdom of the crowds' offers greater innovation potential than traditional approaches which have viewed and relied on exchanges as the source of new/novel financial instrument creation. Prospective customers' involvement in the design and selection of those instruments which appear most promising, should also constitute a form of natural selection and help ensure only the fittest new products make it to market.

Aside from the shift in mental models, the contest also underlines the departure from traditional approaches to control - of information and processes - and a move towards participation, transparency and democratised decision-making. Admittedly, the contest is being staged in the public domain, where such ideas have already found fertile ground, and social networking and idea-sharing sites, and tools in support thereof, are now relatively commonplace. Nevertheless, there's also increasing evidence of this type of change occurring in many professional service organisations, not least of which being their growth in the adoption and adaptation of social tools tailored to suit their business purposes.

Even if those organisations don't subscribe to an 'innovate or die' approach apparent in the derivatives sector, they still need to pay careful attention to the strong steady changes fostering teamwork, dialogue and learning, being nutured by their more adventurous competitors. To that end, we're now seeing ever increasing interest in the customisation and use of tools such as wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, tagging and RSS to help better connect knowledge workers with current relevant information and expertise to extract value from complexity and commoditisation alike. Those same tools which support MarketsWiki and other collaboration environments.

As noted by Bruce MacEwan in his recent blog about law firms, billing hours and complexity:

"There will always be both ['expert' and 'commoditized service]. That said, I think what constitutes either will evolve. Some of what is viewed as expert now - will devolve into commodity. New areas (unseen before - maybe new types of financings to emerge from the current crisis) may be the new "expert" (i.e., the always-sought-after high value engagements) areas."

To lubricate this information -> knowledge transformation cycle, and for firms to extract value from it, they need to make it far easier for their staff to generate, find, share and use information and expertise. One straightforward way to do this is through the use of malleable systems which are shaped by and emerge from people's interactions with them. Systems which not only give people a better platform on which to work, but which can also make use of the trails people create as they search, bookmark, rate or view things - all very simply stuff focusing on supporting and gathering intelligence from people's interaction with the system. And when these individual activities are aggregated, they provide powerful indicators of what is most useful or important to people across the breadth of the organisation. Another example of crowd sourcing - but this time applied internally - to tap and share the wealth of knowledge which otherwise occurs in casual exchanges, via email or other channels, and can so easily be lost in organisations which fail to innovate, or at least improve, their current information and technology environments.

The Guardian sensibly uses moderators to keep the debate clean and legal, which is more expensive but less risky. Over at the Daily Telegraph, where a refresh of their own blogging system is underway, the newspaper allows anybody to create blogs, and the whole system is far less moderated. At the other end of the spectrum, the BBC is the biggest buyer of online moderation services anywhere.

This difference between the Guardian and Telegraph has been the subject of barbed comments between the two recently about Telegraph blogs giving a platform to fascists and Comment is Free publishing the views of Islamists. However, both sides have since found common cause in attacking the BBC for allegedly using its considerable license-funded budget to squeeze out commercial rivals.

Over at the Guardian, Emily Bell kicked off this debate recently with a post an article (no comments) calling for a new conversation about the BBC, which picked up the issue of the BBC's relationship with the commercial media sector, and its ability to compete head-on with advertising-funded services outside the UK. Nick Reynolds from the BBC chipped in with Emily Bell: What Conversation Exactly?, where ex-Beeb policy person Tom Loosemore asked some difficult questions, while others continued the debate about whether or not the BBC misuses its large budget to unfairly compete with the commercial sector.

A month later, after the BBC Trust's review of bbc.co.uk, the Guardian's PDA blog invited the Daily Telegraph's digital editor Edward Roussel to set out an argument for reigning in the BBC: Budget-busting bbc.co.uk threatens digital revolution, says Telegraph chief. This attracted some interesting comments and responses from both BBC supporters and critics alike.

Now, Mike Butcher from TechCrunchUK has joined the debate, echoing many of Roussel's arguments about massive overspend ('heads would roll in the private sector' etc.), calling on the BBC to use its budget to support innovation in what he calls the "startup sector" and arguing for the BBC to create a major open platform through which to allow third parties access to its content and services.

For a fan of both the BBC (for whom we have worked), the Guardian and also the Daily Telegraph's digital offering, this debate makes interesting reading, especially the comments attached to each of the posts quoted above. Really good, open stuff, and exactly the kind of open debate we need among social media practitioners.

I think the oft-repeated claim that the BBC has 'overspent by 48%' is slightly disingenuous, as this results largely from a change in accounting methods that makes the Beeb's digital groups carry a bigger share of overall corporation overheads. As for the competition argument, is there merit to the claims that the BBC is crushing competition? Perhaps, in some areas, but the quality of BBC output and wider its social and economic benefits are sufficient to justify a strong, well-funded public service offering in both TV and digital services. It is the envy of the world, and if the BBC was broken up or turned into simply into a public funding pot for third party content, then we would lose something of immense retained value that would never be re-created. The Guardian should understand this well, since it has been free to innovate in both online and offline publishing, and to take a long-term view, precisely because the Scott Trust has given the newspaper a degree of protection from short-termism. Ultimately, I think if we compare the value derived from £500m of investment in the BBC's growing digital services to other uses of public funds such as bureaucratising the health service, military adventures or bailing out failing banks, I personally believe the BBC stands up relatively well.

Mike is right, of course, that the Beeb should be focusing on opening up and working with the rest of the digital sector, but actually it is ... or at least parts of it are trying to. A good proportion of its budget goes straight back out to the industry, and the BBC has been a proving ground for many people and ideas that have gone on to succeed in both commercial and public sectors. Also, I think the BBC's attitude to innovation has been better than most in the UK media, and in the last few years it has experimented and tried to learn about what works and what doesn't. It is not only what Mike calls the "startup sector" that innovates: startup is simply a growth stage for all companies, good or bad. Being a web startup is a bit like waitressing in LA whilst hoping for your big acting break. Some will catch a break but most are going nowhere, especially in an advertising downturn. The fact that our major media are trying to compete through innovation is a great sign, and I think the impact of their work has the potential to bring new ideas and techniques to a much wider audience, which is in turn useful as a way of expanding the potential market for startups or other companies trying to innovate in other areas.

I really hope that in the UK media scene, a strong, public service-driven BBC can continue to co-exist peacefully with a strong commercial sector, because I think this has the biggest benefit for consumers. The Guardian and Telegraph's continuing commitment to social media are a good sign that they are not in danger of being crowded out by the BBC, but if advertising continues to dip then rather than argue that the BBC's international advertising-funded services represents unfair competition, they should perhaps try to innovate around business models and revenue streams with the same energy they have put into developing successful online services.