Today our spotlight falls on Jim Banister, former Chief Development Officer of Warner Bros. Online and author of the book Word of Mouse: the New Age of Networked Media. Jim is applying his 20+ years in technology and media and rolling it into a very interesting startup based in Park City called SpectrumDNA. SpectrumDNA provides a studio for entrepreneurs and digital networking artists to incubate, acquire, accelerate and package web-based social media experiences or “enginets”. Follow along as Jim explains exactly what an “enginet” is and what his company is doing to acquire and foster the talent to successfully create them.

Silicon Slopes:  What is the idea behind SpectrumDNA and how was the company founded?

Jim Banister: Well, some would argue that I didn’t like focusing on ’one thing,’ so I created a company that enabled that strength (and weakness). Truth is, to the unitiated, what we do at SpectrumDNA looks like disparate businesses, when in fact there is a deep-set commonality running through everything we do.

We built a studio for what we call ’enginets.’ These are what essentially amount to software applications for social media, but these applications must possess a certain DNA which, among other things, includes the ability to allow consumers to break out of their normal role—to become producer, distributor, marketer, vendor, exhibitor and so on. I came up with a process called “enginetworking” that binds the creative, business and technology aspects of social media applications, and forces the creative and planning process through lenses that ensure we are building as expediently, efficiently and economically as possible—before ever writing a lick of code.

Robin Rankin and I had worked together when I consulted with her former company. She immediately got what I was talking about when introducing them to the concept of enginetworking. But she got it on a whole different level from where I live. She is a complement to me in that she is not a technologist or creative, in the media-creator sense. She’s enormously creative, of course, but in the way she views the world and interacts with people. She is a social networker. Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon? How about Three Degrees of Robin Rankin!? She swims in that water every day. It’s part of her makeup. I can end up in the clouds on occasion (laughs), and I saw in her the opportunity to partner with someone who shared my value system, [she] loves people, and could check my occasional lapse into techno-centritis. Helping remind me it’s about the people. Even though enginetworking preaches that very thing, it’s still easy to fall into the traps.

We actually started as a non-profit teaching and consulting entity. We set out to put Utah on the map (back on the map?) for thought-leadership in social and networked media. Still workin’ on it!

Silicon Slopes: Tell us about your journey from Chief Development Officer at Warner Bros. Online to your decision to lead a small startup in Park City, Utah.

Jim Banister: Oh, my years at Warner Bros. were like getting paid to get a PhD in media. Fantastic! Being in online, I worked with television, film, cable, publishing, consumer products, home video/dvd… you name it. No “buts,” but as an executive you find yourself empowering other peoples’ ideas and companies, not necessarily your own. Studios are built primarily around harnessing creative, not being creative. The creative stuff is done by the Spielbergs, Abrams, Lucas’s, and a slew of names you’ve never heard. That being said, I had enormous latitude at Warner Bros. Primarily because online was such a new medium nobody knew what to say no to!

We did some amazing stuff. And bizarrely, we were profitable from year one at Warner Bros. That was not the de rigueur attitude of the Web 1.0 phase, but we did it anyway (I talk more about that in my book, actually). So when AOL bought Time Warner, something we argued strongly against, it brought in a new era that kind of squashed creativity in favor of seeking synergies—very corporate.

Then the ‘dot bomb’ hit. While I went and worked with Terry Semel and several of my former Warner Bros. colleagues for a while, I felt like I had the opportunity to try some new stuff. And I’d been living in LA a long time, and I knew I didn’t want to live there anymore. So a couple of things happened: I came up with what I still consider to be the ultimate in immersive entertainment, a project called XQuest (which is still in development). And I almost simultaneously embarked on what would be my first re-location experiment and moved to London in ’01. I took a gig working with the BBC for nearly a year, and really enjoyed living in London. Really enjoyed it. Did I mention I enjoyed it? I learned a lot more about the European idiosyncrasies with respect to digital media, too.

By 2003, I was back in the States, but by then I’d sold pretty much everything I owned that was rooted in Los Angeles and had begun a mission to find the place I’d live next. From Vancouver to New Orleans to Montreal I searched. It was during that itinerant time I decided to write the book—Word of Mouse: The New Age of Networked Media. It was and still is an autopsy of what I’d learned in my previous 10 years on the cusp of traditional and emerging media. It took me a year to really get it right, and it was released in 2004. Simultaneously, I was consulting, and happened to be doing some work for a Park City-based company where my now-business partner, Robin Rankin, worked. They insisted we do one of our meetings “on the mountain,” which I thought was pretty cool. I’d been to Utah many times, but until that moment hadn’t considered it as a potential home. Within 10 days, I’d put an offer on a house. I’ve been here ever since.

Robin and I decided to get into business together within a year after that.

So my decision to found a startup in Park City was rooted in the intention to build my work around my life, instead of my life around my work. I chose quality-of-life, and everything else fell into place from there.

Silicon Slopes: Can you talk about the concept of “Agile-Adaptive” as it relates to social media and how you are applying this philosophy at SpectrumDNA.

Jim Banister: Sure. Traditional media like film, television and print are rooted in a process and product that have distinct stages and endpoints. A film is “in-the-can” when it’s finished being produced. A television show is referred to similarly. And a magazine or newspaper issue “go to press” when they’re ready to be distributed.

Each of those has a demarcation between production and distribution/marketing. And while the production processes are inherently iterative for all of them (e.g. multiple takes of a scene when shooting a movie, editing and re-editing an article before its finalized, etc.), once they are finished and they get distributed or marketed, they’re done. No changing them. Robin likes to characterize them as a “dud or a stud.”

Well, in social media, once launched, the application may or may not work as planned or intended. The difference is—a dud can become a stud. And it happens more often than not that a Web application for social media simply doesn’t resonate in its first incarnation.

Web applications are always changing (or should be). The idea that a “product” constantly evolves, and what ultimately resonates with an audience may end up being something entirely different than what you thought it would be. The key is to: launch, listen, iterate, repeat.

The Agile-Adaptive methodology actually started in software development, but has now moved into enterprise management practice. I put our whole company through agile-adaptive training. We literally question all our assumptions for the business, and each of our products every two weeks. It can make some folks profoundly uncomfortable to work in that way, but I think one can make a pretty strong case that not doing it as a creator of social media properties is a big mistake. You need to be structured to adapt and evolve with marketplace trends, emerging technologies and the capriciousness of human behavior.

Silicon Slopes:  It is no secret that one of the biggest problems facing Utah’s technology companies is recruiting talent. SpectrumDNA has found a unique way of tapping into and recognizing talent through its eXtreme Enterprise program. Can you describe the program and what it is designed to accomplish?

Jim Banister: eXtreme Enterprise flips the classic human resource problem in digital and social media on its head.

It’s never really been a problem to find software developers and UI designers with a good idea, or possibly even a great prototype. The long-pole in the tent is finding commercialization teams that have the chops in webX.0 and agile techniques to make a business out of it. So we created a program that is inherently cross-disciplinary, but is focused on business school students—ostensibly those groups of young people whose job it will be to make an enterprise profitable, or get it sold for more money than was put into it.

eXtreme Enterprise abstracts the “business idea” from the “entrepreneur.” That is, we don’t take business school students and their ideas; but instead take business school students and give them an idea to exploit. More accurately, we offer them a slate of pre-vetted business ideas, and they get to re-vet them, decide on their top choices and then we assign them one of their top choices.

Then over a full-year, they get to launch and run a real business in the relative safety of school.
This is not a simulator. We train them in agile-adaptive management techniques, our proprietary enginetworking methodology, provide production infrastructure and resources, and a network of mentors; and we expect them to take it very, very seriously.

The program is not inclusive. That is, not everyone can or should be an entrepreneur. It is a highly selective program.

Silicon Slopes:  How did the idea initially come about?

Jim Banister: Robin’s and my original mission for here in Utah was educational—a not-for-profit to help companies and learning institutions better parse the never-ending innovations in digital media and render them into deployable curriculum and generalize-able techniques. For a number of reasons, our company transformed into a commercial social media studio. But our intention on education hasn’t waned.

In a conversation with Nelson Gayton during Sundance ’07 boomeranged us back to the original mission, but in a highly commercial context.

Nelson was the Managing Director of the Media and Entertainment Initiative at The Wharton School (and he is now the Managing Director at the Media and Entertainment Institute at UCLA’s Anderson School). I was lamenting that [business] schools were still having students write 100-page business plans; and that in digital media, it’s marginally more effort to actually launch the business and iterate it based on realaudience behavior instead of predicted or expected audience behavior. He and I agreed on that point, so we formed a plan and syllabus and were able to do the pilot program of eXtreme Enterprise at one of the best business schools in the country. Very lucky, really.

Silicon Slopes:  The pilot program was started at Wharton University in 2007. What kind of feedback has the school given about the program after its first year in action? Are you getting the results you expected?

Jim Banister:: In some ways the results exceeded expectations.

We did two projects last year, and both are extremely viable and fundable enterprises. But we did not expect that any of the students in that first year would or could want to continue post-graduation with their enterprises. We were wrong. We actually found the opposite. If we’d had follow-on funding (beyond what SpectrumDNA put into it) in place with the right timing, we could have smoothly transitioned a core business team into an operating business. As it stands, SpectrumDNA is perpetuating the businesses internally.

The other thing we found that was powerful is that right out of the gate the teams tried to kill the projects. It was a useful vetting, in that in the process of trying to prove the enterprises wouldn’t work, they actually found that they would. In that process, they made the projects their own. It was very cool to watch.

Silicon Slopes:  UCLA will be adding the program this year. Pepperdine University in Malibu and Westminster College in Salt Lake City may soon come on board. Are you targeting any other schools?

Jim Banister:: At the moment we’ll be fortunate to be able to support the handful of schools that know about it and want the program. We’re resource constrained.

The good news is that we treated the entire eXtreme Enterprise program as an agile-adaptive enterprise, and the Wharton pilot program taught us a pretty good chunk of what we needed to know to scale the program. At this point we’re pretty sure it’s a just-add-money proposition to roll the program out more broadly.

Silicon Slopes:  Will the large universities in Utah be adding your curriculum to the program anytime soon?

Jim Banister:: Hope so. It would make my travel schedule a whole lot friendlier.

Silicon Slopes:  Describe the “repeatability formula” that is taught to students and those who engage with your company.

Jim Banister: We focus on enterprises intended to be rooted in “networked media”—Web, mobile wireless, etc.—but we’re pretty sure what we teach is extensible beyond that. For example, agile-adaptive enterprise management techniques are universal. We actually saw some of the Wharton students apply the techniques to all their school activities, curricular and extra-curricular. And we combine that with a proprietary methodology called “enginetworking,” which is a blueprinting process for an enterprise that fuses technology, design and business into a single value proposition: how do you engage human beings in quantity, more frequently and more deeply?

Most entrepreneurs in social media forget that the “nodes in the network” to which they’re programming are not computers, or mobile devices or any manner of “networked technology.” It’s humans.

Writers learn it. Filmmakers learn it. Game makers learn it. And social media enterprise creators can learn it: How to engage humans is a relationship problem between “creator of experience” and “participant in experience.” That relationship underlies the nature of narrative, and the relationship between creator and participant is very different in social media than linear media (like film and print).
Fortunately, it’s a process that is indeed learnable, and repeatable—and increases an entrepreneur’s odds for success.

So, like television, film and print before it, social media is moving into a phase where “technique” is more important than “technology.” That is, how to apply the technologies to engaging humans in more, and more compelling ways.

Silicon Slopes:  What new Digital Media technology are you most excited about?

Jim Banister: I’m less excited about the technologies than I am the “techniques” we’re discovering. All media started out technology crazy—film got sound, then color; television went from black-and-white to color, and we eventually got TiVo and High Definition. There’s always a fascination with new technologies, but media is and will always be about the “programming.” I’m not talking about “code” alone, per se. I’m talking about that stuff that engages audiences in compelling experiences, and those auteurs that make that their aim. If film, publishing and television are media for storytellers, and interactive gamers are media for storyformers, then social media is for storydwellers. It’s our job to create worlds and the context in which they dwell within our programming—from eBay to Facebook, from Ancestry.com to the Addictionary—we’re better served as thinking about our Web destinations as “worlds” than as “content.”