San Francisco 2011

Best Practices and Emerging Trends

Stylized illustration inspired by the characteristic steep streets of San Francisco, with buildings placed on sloping terrain and a car driving up a hill. The illustration symbolizes the city's unique topography, urban life and iconic streetscape, known from areas such as Powell Street and the city's historic cable car routes. The simple shapes and warm colors create a modern and playful expression that represents movement, urban development, technology and innovation in San Francisco.

Introduction and Context

San Francisco 2011 marked a natural high point in the BI program’s journey from e-business and multichannel strategy to a comprehensive focus on innovation and entrepreneurship. While earlier seminars had focused on the tools and effects of digitalization, 2011 explored the nature of innovation—how ideas are turned into action, and how the interplay among people, organizations, and society creates the foundation for new value.

The seminar opened poetically with the quote:

“Creativity is thinking up new things. Innovation is doing new things.” – Theodore Levitt

This statement became a recurring theme throughout the week. Participants moved between technology environments, academic presentations, and companies such as Netflix, Pixar, and Cisco. At the same time, significant attention was given to the public sector, health technology, and sustainable services.

The OECD report The New Nature of Innovation provided an academic framework. It described a paradigm shift: innovation no longer takes place primarily in laboratories, but within networks of users, suppliers, and stakeholders across society.

Watercolor illustration of a classic American diner inspired by the 1950s, featuring red leather booths, vintage decor, a Harley-Davidson machine, and an American car parked inside the restaurant. Coffee and breakfast food on the table enhance the warm, nostalgic atmosphere. The illustration conveys American culture, entrepreneurship, the spirit of a road trip, and the informal gathering places where ideas, people, and stories come together.

Program Overview

March 27 – Napa Valley:
- Informal networking day, where participants shared experiences from their own projects in Norway.
March 28 – Innovation and Public Services (CITRIS):
- Steve DeMello presented how technology and healthcare policy can be combined to increase patient independence.
March 29 – The Innovative Organization (Amabile, Haykin):
- A focus on creativity, culture, and leadership—and how organizations create space for experimentation.
March 30 – Design Thinking, Social Media & Mobile Disruption:
- Cuthbertson, Ezell, Kalyanam, and Amar presented methods for service innovation and new business models.
March 31 – Commercializing Innovation (UC Berkeley):
- Jennifer Chatman and Venrock VC provided insights into how innovation culture and venture capital are connected.

Watercolor illustration of a classic American diner inspired by Lori’s Diner in San Francisco, featuring red leather booths, neon signs, and a traditional American breakfast of pancakes, eggs, bacon, and syrup. The warm lighting and retro interior create a nostalgic 1950s atmosphere inspired by American road culture, music, and informal gathering places. The illustration captures the atmosphere of iconic diners in the United States, where people come together over coffee, conversation, and classic comfort food.

Key Themes

Innovation in the Public Sector

Steve DeMello (CITRIS, UC Berkeley) showed how healthcare and care services can be transformed through technology and user insights. The goal was not simply greater efficiency, but dignity and security—enabling older adults to live “one year longer at home.”

Creativity and Organizational Culture

Teresa Amabile (Harvard Business School) and Bill Haykin (The Napa Group) highlighted people as catalysts for innovation. In The 6 Myths of Creativity, Amabile shows that creativity requires neither solitude nor time pressure—but rather psychological safety, autonomy, and genuine support from leadership.

Technology and Business Models

Richard Cuthbertson and Stephen Ezell presented Service Innovation Strategies and What Makes an Effective Service Artifact. They showed how valuable services are often shaped by small, tangible details—physical, visual, or digital—that enhance the user experience and build trust.

Business Model Innovation

Alexander Osterwalder and Business Model Generation provided a framework for describing, testing, and reinventing value creation. The model made it possible to connect technology, customer insights, and the organization within a single, integrated framework.

Digital Disruption and Social Platforms

Kirthi Kalyanam (Santa Clara University) described 2011 as a “Sputnik moment” for retail: mobile technology, data, and social media were radically transforming competition.

Michael Amar (iFeelGoods) and PowerReviews demonstrated how Facebook Credits and user-generated recommendations were creating new forms of loyalty—early precursors to today’s influencer economy.

Case Studies

Netflix – Freedom and Responsibility:

Netflix’s model was built on radical trust. Employees were given a high degree of freedom, but also responsibility for results. This became a textbook example of culture as a driver of innovation.

Gilt & iFeelGoods – Social Commerce:
These two companies illustrated the shift from traditional marketing to digital sharing. Rewards, game mechanics, and real-time response became new tools for building loyalty.

Peer Insight / Service Design:
Through the work of Cuthbertson and Ezell, participants saw how “service artifacts”—from a welcome message to packaging—can create emotional value and recognition.

CITRIS / UC Davis – Welfare Technology:
Health technology solutions were used to reduce costs while improving quality of life. This pointed toward today’s welfare innovation in the public sector.

Reflections and Discussion:

The common thread throughout the seminar was the recognition that innovation is socially organized work.

Haykin emphasized the balance between structure and freedom—organizations must foster experimentation without losing direction.

Amabile pointed out that fear and time pressure are among the greatest barriers to creativity.
DeMello reminded us that the public sector must be measured by the human value it creates, not just by cost efficiency.

The OECD’s findings reinforced this perspective: future competitiveness depends on user-driven innovation—collaboration across sectors, cultures, and professions.

International Perspectives

Silicon Valley represents risk and capital, but also a culture of sharing.

Europe and the Nordic countries bring a different perspective: long-term thinking, welfare, and social sustainability. The seminar showed how these two traditions can complement each other—experimentation meets social responsibility.

Watercolor illustration of Powell Street in San Francisco, featuring the iconic cable car traveling through the city’s steep streets. In the foreground, a laptop and notebook sit on a café table, symbolizing reflection, travel, learning, and modern knowledge work. The warm golden tones, distinctive buildings, and historic cable car capture the unique atmosphere of San Francisco—a city known for innovation, technology, entrepreneurship, and creative culture.

What Do We Take Home?

Design Thinking as a shared language for innovation.
New tools for connecting technology, users, and business models.
Insights into how culture and trust create lasting change.
A deeper understanding of how the public sector can learn from business—without losing its human-centered mission.

Peder Inge Furseth

Peder Inge Furseth was a key academic driving force behind the San Francisco seminars and played an important role in making the encounter with Silicon Valley relevant to Norwegian and European organizations. Through his role as a professor at BI Norwegian Business School and as academic director of the program, he helped participants place the presentations within a broader context—one in which technology, innovation, business development, and people had to be understood together.

In San Francisco, participants met entrepreneurs, researchers, technology leaders, and investors from some of the world’s most innovative environments. Furseth’s strength was his ability to connect these experiences with practical challenges and opportunities facing Norwegian organizations. He helped translate Silicon Valley’s ideas and ways of working into a

Nordic context where collaboration, trust, and long-term value creation play a central role.

Throughout the seminar series, he served as an important bridge between research, business, and technology. For many participants, he therefore became more than an academic leader—he was also a mentor who inspired them to think differently about innovation, digitalization, and commercialization.

Learn more about Peder Inge Furseth here

From Studies and Seminars to Today’s Knowledge Hub

The studies, seminars, and academic trips documented on this page form part of the knowledge base behind The Invisible Capital. Topics such as customers, technology, innovation, digitalization, and value creation have been part of this journey for several decades — while these fields have continued to evolve.

At The Invisible Capital, we continue exploring these questions through dedicated knowledge series. Here, earlier theory, research, and experience are connected with newer knowledge, emerging technologies, and today’s challenges facing people and organizations.

Innovation

Innovation is not just about new ideas. Value is created when knowledge, technology, and ideas are developed into products, services, processes, organizational forms, and business models that are actually put into use. The series on innovation traces the field from Schumpeter to modern innovation research and explores incremental, radical, disruptive, open, and user-driven innovation.

→ Explore the Innovation series

The Customer

The customer is not simply the recipient of what an organization produces. In a competitive market, the customer is a decisive factor in whether an organization actually succeeds in creating value. The series on the customer explores customer orientation, customer insight, customer experience, satisfaction, loyalty, trust, and the human interactions that shape the customer relationship.

→ Explore the Customer series

Value Creation

What does it really mean to create value — and who creates it? The Value Creation series moves from economic theory and influential thinkers to a broader understanding of how people, knowledge and skills, institutions, organizations, and the public sector contribute to value creation.

→ Explore the Value Creation series

Digitalization

Digitalization has evolved from individual technologies into a fundamental part of how organizations operate and create value. The Digitalization from A to Z series traces this evolution through the internet, the web, e-commerce, search, UX, social media, mobile, omnichannel, cloud, data, platforms, and digital transformation — leading up to today’s AI-first era.

→ Explore the Digitalization from A to Z series

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence represents the next chapter in the digital evolution. In our dedicated AI knowledge hub, we explore how artificial intelligence works, how AI finds and uses information, how it evaluates sources and websites, and what this development could mean for people, organizations, and value creation.

→ Explore the articles on Artificial Intelligence

Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within Us All

Tom Kelley and David Kelley of IDEO show how creativity, Design Thinking, and experimentation can be used to foster innovation in both people and organizations. The book explains how collaboration, curiosity, and the courage to test new ideas create the foundation for the services, products, and organizations of the future.