Meer poëzie
Freedom to...
Posted by Rene Jansen
Yesterday evening I had a nice wining-and-dining with Martijn Hoogeveen, CEO of TakeitNow, a successful e-commerce initiative in the Netherlands. Martijn used to be one of the professors in my PhD Defense committee, and it is always inspiring to talk with him.Since we hadn't spoken about bPerform yet, he asked that question that always comes back when you are starting your business: "So, what is the essential problem of users that you are solving with bPerform?" I started to take off with my basic answer to this question "we help users save time with basic tasks, so they can focus on what really matters to them, and we help organisations to better make use of the available (often hidden) knowledge in their organisation..." Martijn responded "Good consultancy talk, but... you didn't explain to me the real underlying concept"
An interesting conversation followed. I told Martijn that Mark and I are firm believers that each successful innovation need to improve the freedom of people, and often has a social component (interesting reading on this topic is from Rheingold). I quoted the example of the Apple iPod: according to this theory the iPod is a success because it offers ultimate freedom in listening to your music. That's the difference with an old fashioned walkman or a simple 256Mb player: you have all your music available, everywhere... So, what does bPerform has to do with freedom and sociality? I realise my self we offer four types of freedom, and they all have a social component (pff, sigh of relieve... ;)
- Freedom of commitments We don't offer a simple "task manager", no, we offer you a tool to manage your commitments. Commitments with your manager, your team buddies or with yourself. We enable to ask for commitments (could you please...) and we enable the acceptance (or decline) from commitments (sorry, cannot...). So, we give more freedom to managers (less hassle, less phone calls to verify commitments and progress), and freedom to decide how you want to spend your time. Very important for our target group: professionals and knowledge workers, who are really looking for freedom in managing their own work "I wanna do it my way, scheduled when I wanna do it and at the location where I wanna do it, my commitment is only that I will do it - in time...".
- Freedom of sharing It's a sharing economy. "knowledge is power" doesn't stand anymore. If you share knowledge, you still have it, someone else has it, and together we are stronger. bPerform enables sharing of information. Sharing of your publications, your thoughts, your reports has never been easier. But you are still in control: You decide if you want to share, and with whom you want to share.
- Freedom of listening In this information and communication society you are spammed and overwhelmed with awful amounts of requests of attention. bPerform will help you to decide yourself: to whom do I wanna listen, and when. That sounds like... Freedom again :)
- Freedom of speech One of the main aspects in the Dutch constitution (and others of course). Perhaps this is the same as Freedom of sharing. It offers you a platform to make yourself being heard. No matter if that's done via blogs, mails, sms, chat...