Story Field has in collaboration with Digital StoryLab started the site loveis.dk, where people from the whole world, with different backgrounds, ages, religion and interests tell about what love is to them, during 1 minute videotakes.


They have a lot of different views on love, ranging from “my bike”, “muffins and pancakes”, “when I smoke a joint with my friends on the balcony”, “I can always feel it in my stomach”, “A bike ride in Copenhagen in the early morning”, “universal energies”, “inspiration and passion” to the classic: ” My girl- or boyfriend”.


The site is open to usercontribution, as everyone can send a video, with their take on love, as long as it is max 1,5 minute long and of good quality.


A lot of the latest videos was recorded during Copenhagen Carnival this year, where we had a stall and collected footage about love from the samba dancing and happy visitors. A couple of times people asked us “Why?”, and the answer is: “just for fun…and to spread a little love”!


Visit the site on www.loveis.dk and send your video to julie@storyfield.dk or nikoline@digitalstorylab.com

Last Wednesday, I hit an afternoon meeting at Nosco that has great success with an idea management software as a source to innovation.


Jesper Müller-Krogstrup from Nosco talked about the usage of the software in Danfoss that has facilitated the involvement of the 12.000 employees in the project Man on the Moon. It is an interesting project, because it is not only product-oriented as the employees also receive education in project- and innovation management. The Man on the Moon project has, if we should trust the statistics, harvested outstanding results, since 91 % of the employees expressed relevance of using the tools in their work and that they have changed their behavior. Moreover, the outcome of the project in 2010 is three strong ideas that are now being implemented.


Additionally, Søren Salomo, who is a professor at DTU, presented some theoretical aspects on innovation management. According to Salomo, innovation ought not to be linked to creativity since the agenda is to successfully implementing new ideas on the market and to explore the needs of certain actors. The mission of innovation management is to make the ROI (Return on Investment) visible and to quickly determine whether a concept leads to success or not. On DTU, they have also used idea management software in a project where 1300 students participated. The result was 300 ideas that were explored further and 24-25 ideas with the potential for innovation.


From my perspective, the idea management software has many advantages due to possibility of involving a large scale of actors. But I also see certain disadvantages, since the software does not give the participants the option of visualizing their experiences and standpoint as the exchange of ideas is exclusively done in a written context. Furthermore, I cannot help thinking that the authentic insights, that e.g. Story Fields’ video diaries provide with, will get lost in such large scale projects. However, I think that both approaches could reach far by going hand in hand: Idea management is an excellent way of generating ideas whereas video diaries can help testing the final ideas that comes out of such software.

On May 26th, Story Field visited the international innovation camp at The Danish Red Cross Youth where Søren Bo Steendahl, who owns the consultancy Kadaver, told us about his success with social innovation.


Kadaver works with creating positive changes in the society and only for clients who they see value in. The firm has had great success with the video “Mukhtar’s birthday” for the campaign Bedrebustur.dk that received over a 1 million hits on YouTube the first week after the release and gave Arriva significant benefits on the market. Kadaver is, furthermore, responsible for the hospital project Masanga in Sierra Leone, the digital stamp Poteo and the computer bags Bangura Bags made of cycle tubes by tailors in Africa.


According to Søren, successful social innovation is to get an unique idea that meets a social need in a new and innovative sense. Søren did not disguise that it is alright to earn money by doing something good in the society. He encouraged the workshop participants not to see poor people as poor creatures but as consumers. The secret is to find products or solutions that may fit to their markets and realities. In this context, he told us about a development project where rats were trained to track mines and activated the local people in doing an effort to save their own land.


The rest of the camp went by with innovation workshops, where the people from The Danish Red Cross Youth experimented with creative methods of learning and where new ideas were approached on walks and in fictive coffee shops. Moveover, Søren’s advice about not saying “but” og “not” but “yes..and” to the other’s innovative comments was practiced to perfection where the agenda was to appreciate the diversity of the group.