I have stumbled across this RSA Animate video on a few occasions now, most recently on Kneale Mann’s thought-provoking blog, YouIntegrate. It’s an adaptation of Dan Pink’s talk at an RSA event. This video illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace. I wanted to share it with you in light of what the Government of Canada is currently doing regarding innovation incentives.

The premise of the video is quite simple, but controversial nonetheless:

• For simple, rudimentary tasks, a monetary reward works as an incentive.
• For tasks that require conceptual and/or creative thinking,a monetary reward leads to poor performance.

What is the ultimate motivator in the workplace?

Autonomy, mastery, and sense of purpose.

Please don’t miss the very important point that this only applies once the issue of money is placed off of the table. In other words, your employees must first feel that they are being compensated fairly for their jobs.

It’s interesting to see that the Government of Canada is basically taking the opposite approach of what is recommended in this video by offering $10,000 cash bonuses for innovation.

I can’t wait to see the results.

Here’s the 3rd installment of my favourite video series (i.e “Did You Know”) illustrating the changing media landscape. No explanation necessary, just watch the video and enjoy.

The original Did You Know 3.0 video can be watched here.

I’m always blown away whenever I step outside of the social media fishbowl/community and step into reality.

Which reality am I referring to?

The one where the vast majority of intelligent people in the workforce have never used, let alone heard of free tools such as Google Docs (assuming it’s not blocked).

What is it?

Google Docs is the ultimate tool for when you need wiki functionality, but don’t necessarily want to open it up to the public and/or you just have a short term initiative in mind.

What makes it great?

People are already used to using it (most don’t know they are)

How is that possible?

It uses the same menus, icons and basic features as Microsoft Office products (Excel, PowerPoint, Word)

What’s the difference?

Any amount of people can work on the exact same document collaboratively in real-time. No more emails and/or documents with tracked changes!

Show me how!

Watch this video to get an idea of what I’m talking about…

So please , do yourself a favour (if you’re not already all over this) and start saving yourself and your organization some valuable time today!

I’m always hungry for new videos that illustrate where this new world of digital content creation and collaboration is taking us. Here is one from Semantics Incorporated that explains web 3.0/the semantic web from a service angle.

I also really like the “Did You Know 3.0” and “The Machine is Using Us” videos. Know any other good ones?

I’m heavily buried in the process of preparing my materials for the upcoming MARCOM 2009 conference, however I wanted to post this up rather than just tweet about it. Basically, Apps for Democracy , the Washington D.C crowd sourcing initiative that I often use in my presentations, has just launched a new initiative called Apps for Democracy “Community Edition”. Citizens get to submit their community improvement ideas in real-time and vote using this insights portal.

Why do I think this initiative will work? Because last time they had very little support and yet they managed to have citizens develop 47 applications in 30 days using crowd sourced government data. The estimated cost had they gone through the RFP process, would have been $2.3M, not to mention 12 years of procurement. The total cost ended up being the prize money of $50K. The ROI therefore was 4000%.

Have a look at this video if you’re confused.

Apps For Democracy Community Edition from Peter Corbett on Vimeo.