This white paper by Freddy Snijder first appeared as a blog post on Visionscapers.net/freddysnijder. It summarizes the vision and trends behind visionscapers.net and how we operate as a networked organization.

1. Visionscapers.net – the upcoming independents &
organizing for innovation in a networked economy
March 4th, 2011
Freddy Snijder
This paper first appeared as a blog post on Visionscapers.net (bit.ly/f6XpWq)
This whitepaper summarizes
Post sections
the key points of my • Visionscapers.net in a nutshell
presentation during the • Networked mindset for 21st century innovations
Visionscapers.net beta launch • The power of diversity
workshop held on the first of • Combining the best of the 20th and 21st century
December 2010. It was an • Visionscapers.net as a social innovation
• Our real-life network foundation
inspiring event celebrating that
• Our online network foundation
from now on we are • Bringing it all together: Visionscapers.net
developing and further • Your feedback (comments)
growing our ‘offline’ and online
organization in public. Multiple
other Visionscapers (this is how we call ourselves as partner members of the
Visionscapers.net network) also presented during this event. The overarching
theme was our increasingly networked world and its effect on how we work,
organize, innovate, and on our lives in general.
Inspiring : Impressions of the Visionscapers.net Betalaunch held on the 1st of
December 2010

2. In my presentation (http://slidesha.re/lwU6eB) I introduced Visionscapers.net
as a networked innovation company and what trends and thinking were
fundamental to its development.
Visionscapers.net in a nutshell
Visionscapers.net is a networked company consisting of independent
professionals and small companies who can team up to help realize product,
service or organizational innovation: innovations that leverages the
possibilities and opportunities of our networked society.
Visionscapers.net combines the best of 20th and 21st century organizations to
simultaneously benefit our clients and ourselves, the Visionscapers. I will
explain this in further detail later in this post.
Providing a networked economy mindset for innovations in the 21st
century
One pillar Visionscapers.net is founded on is the trend of our society becoming
increasingly networked. This trend is mostly driven by the ubiquitous
availability of the Internet and the social technologies build on top of it (think
Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and blogging platforms such as WordPress).
Watercanon fight Flashmob organized by participants using Facebook (Photo by
Duncan Rawlinson (thelastminute) on Flickr.com, Creative Commons License)

3. It empowers any individual to discuss, organize & collaborate on a scale and
with ease not seen before. This new empowerment leads to new opportunities
to create new sustainable value for consumers and companies. It enables
individuals and companies to organize in new ways, allowing much more
efficient & effective innovation and value creation in general.
As Visionscapers.net we are a living example of how individuals and
companies can organize in a new way. Other than traditional organizations, we
don’t have a strong hierarchical structure. We are all equal peers, with equal
influence and responsibility to make our networked innovation company a
success. This might sound like a burden, but the truth is that being trusted and
working together as equal peers, and being able to shape and grow a
company together is highly motivational to us all.
Being a networked organization we practice what we preach on a daily basis.
The networked economy mindset that is native to us, and which we further
grow through our experiences as a networked innovation company, enables us
to help companies:
• Develop sustainable innovations for the 21st century
• Transform existing products and services to strong propositions for the
future
• Improve innovation productivity by guiding the organization to start
working as a network and benefit from the opportunities to co-create
with end-users and other product & service stakeholders
Next to large projects, as a network we can also organize ‘pressure cooker’
sessions to help create new ideas and solutions.
The power of diversity
Another pillar Visionscapers.net is founded on is the importance of diversity in
developing successful innovations. Diversity keeps us sharp, and our ideas
fresh. It also enables a multi-disciplinary approach, allowing for synergies
between different aspects to be created. This is key to successful innovation
development.
The iPhone of Apple is a well known and prototypical example of an innovation
that is full of synergies between aspects rooted in different disciplines. For
instance, it combines form & interaction design, with the appropriate
technology (e.g. multi-touch screens and APIs for Apps) and a business model
that helps increase and sustain the use of this phone (App store with a
growing community of developers). The interactions & synergies between
different disciplines is actually much more complex and intricate for the
iPhone, but I hope you get my point why a multi-disciplinary approach to
innovation is of such importance.

4. With respect to Visionscapers.net, to illustrate our diversity, there are partners
in the network with, for instance, a background in product design, user
research, technology development (including (web) software development),
co-creation, project management and marketing. You can navigate the
network to learn more about who are in the Visionscapers.net network.
Combining the best of the 20th and 21st century
Combining the advantages of large ‘traditional’ companies and that of
networks of ‘independents’ is the third pillar on which Visionscapers.net as a
networked organization is founded.
Large traditional companies have scale and ‘name in the market’ (brand).
While a network of independents have the advantages of autonomy, passion
for high-quality results, efficiency, agility and flexibility. Bringing the best of
these two worlds together in Visionscapers.net benefits us Visionscapers and
our clients simultaneously.
We are able to combine the best of both by strengthening the bonds in our
‘real-life’ network, creating a shared online identity and making our internal
organization more effective by using online tools. This is explained further in
the sections on Our real-life network foundation and Our online network
foundation.
Visionscapers.net as a social innovation
The number of independent professionals and small companies is growing. I
strongly believe that the new possibilities and power that the Internet provides
to individuals significantly influences this growth and will continue to do so in
the future. The Internet, and different social technologies built on top of it, do
not only empower people to communicate and organize on a scale not
possible before, it also allows them to be more flexible in how they set-up and
live their daily lives.
Many people start their own company, alone or with a few partners, because
they are passionate about what they do, whether it is e.g. product design, web
service development or marketing. A fourth founding pillar of Visionscapers.net
is the idea to create an organizational structure that allow independents to:
• Stay independent and to work on the topics they are passionate about
• Have the same benefits of scale and brand large, traditional, companies
enjoy
This all in a way that also significantly benefits our future clients. I will get back
to this in the last section of this post where I bring together all resulting
benefits.

5. Our real-life network foundation
Creating and growing or sustaining a networked organization of independent
professionals is not simply a matter of giving any new network member a
username and password for an online network. I wish it would be that easy!
The challenge is that ‘just a network account’ will not result in the strong bonds
between the network members that are needed. Network members needs to
have strong bonds: to be able to invite each other to work together, to actually
be comfortable working together, to find synergies, to enable cross-fertilization
of ideas and for new initiatives to spontaneously emerge.
So, to continuously facilitate the development of our real-life network we
frequently organize offline meetings (every +/- 3 weeks). These meetings allow
us to get to know each other better, provide input and direction to the
continuous development of Visionscapers.net as a company, discuss new
opportunities face-to-face, share ideas, gain new insights and get fresh
perspectives on relevant topics. The meetings are always very energetic and
inspirational; you can find some great photos in our Visionscapers.net events
& workshops group on Flickr.
In what directions we grow as a network and as a company, how we operate
on a daily basis and what we stand for is defined in continuous collaborations
with the network members: it is a networked company for, and of, the
Visionscapers.

6. Us, Visionscapers, at the 6th Visionscapers.net meeting in Amsterdam

7. Our online network foundation
Having stressed the importance of building a real life network through frequent
meet ups, it’s good to introduce our online network, which plays an important
role in the Visionscapers.net organization as well.
It consists of two parts: the internal visionscapers.net network and our public
blog network. The internal network can be seen as the ‘inside’ of the company.
It is where we discuss anything that relates to the strategy, marketing, new
business development and daily operations of Visionscapers.net.
Our blog network on the other hand is public and is our ‘united face’ to the
outside world. Although the individual blogs are focused on our individual
identities, the combination of the content we write and the interactions we
make through the blogs will help define our combined identity. This results in a
shared brand, together with the work we actually will do together as
Visionscapers.net of course.
Through our Visionscapers.net blogs all the Visionscapers are actually on the
edge of the network: we are all a connection point to the outside world. We
don’t have a PR department, a marketing & sales department or any
department XYZ that handles contact with the outside world like traditional
companies do. If a visitor to our site is on the blog of e.g. Jan Heemskerk and
has a question, he or she can e-mail or call him, even if it doesn’t directly
relate to his work. He could subsequently answer the question himself directly
or ask other Visionscapers to help out.
This implies that every Visionscaper represents the network and the network
represents every Visionscaper. In short : ‘You are the network, the network is
you’!

8. All Visionscapers.net partners are at the network boundary, as a point of
contact to the outside world. The general Visionscapers.net contact info area
refers to the e-mail address of the specific partner you are currently visiting.
Bringing it all together: Visionscapers.net
Visionscapers.net – the networked innovation company – is an organizational
innovation that benefits the network members as well as our future clients:
• We provide one entrée to a fragmented market of independent
professionals that can help our clients realize innovations
• We provide a diverse set of disciplines, skills and services making us
uniquely positioned to help clients realize innovations – from vision to
success
• Our diversity keeps our innovation power sharp & fresh and enables us
to bridge disciplines. In our network we deepen our insight into different
areas of expertise together
• As independents we provide high quality through our passion for what
we do
• We are cost efficient, agile and flexible
• Together we are an innovation powerhouse that is able to accept and
complete much bigger projects than we could on our own, and are able
to build a shared brand that is much bigger than our own individual
brands.

9. Your feedback and input is very much appreciated
If reading this post left you with questions, or it inspired you in some way,
please do not hesitate to leave a comment below or send me an e-mail!
Thank you for sharing and listening,
Freddy Snijder
Founder and managing director of Visionscapers.net
Contact.freddy@visionscapers.net
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organization, organization, passion in work, presentation, pressure cooker,
proposition development, sharing, SME, social innovation, social technology,
summary, trends, Visionscapers.net