NESTA Connect

Do you work for an innovative company?

I enjoyed a session at the Global Business Partnership Alliance last week, with a group of leading corporates debating what hinders or helps innovation in their cultures.  Have a look at the list below and see if any of them ring bells for you.  And yes, NESTA was included in the sample!  In order of importance:

1. Internal communication - overcoming silos.
2. Allowing failure and eliminating a blame culture.
3. Allowing anyone to challenge anything.
4. Developing a positive attitude to change - overcoming fear and complacency.
5. Developing a positive attitude to risk management.
6. Empowering people to try new initiatives without explicit approval.
7. Welcoming ideas from outside the organisation - eliminating ‘not invented here.’
8. Encouraging new ideas.

Interestingly, those internal walls between silos seem to be a key problem - not something I usually consider as I work in corporate open innovation (COI) where the barriers are external.  I will make a mental note to see if the models am developing for COI work as well in large companies that just need wiring up better across markets or departments. 

For a more complete blog of the event, see Paul Sloane's here (he facilitated). 
http://www.bqf.org.uk/innovation/ .

In the breakout sessions we were asked to generate some novel ways of approaching these problems and I got quite excited about one of our group's ideas; the idea of a ‘Shadow Board’ which would have the same agenda as the main board and be tasked to comment/challenge/debate decisions like Her Majesty's Opposition.  This would encourage openness, new ideas and possibly address problems 1, 3 and 8 above!

Any takers?

Customers & Faster Horses

We've been in the planning phase for a little while on a new project on customer-led (or user-led) innovation with Virgin Atlantic called V-Jam which kicks off next week. This builds upon a lot of discussion and enthusiasm in certain circles around user-led innovation, which also formed the basis of a recent Nesta report, which I thought was rather good report called The New Inventors.

Anyway, with that at the forefront of my mind, I was very interested to read JP's post on Faster Horses and the follow up post Whoa! Reigning in Faster Horses. Both posts are well worth a read and triggered much discussion around what choices and involvement customers could and should have in the innovation process. A quick summary from the 2nd post has the following 4 bullets (much more explanation is given in the original posts by the way):

1. Customers should have a spectrum of choice. 

2. Customers should be able to look under the hood if they want to.

3. It’s not just about what choices are offered, it’s about how those choices are offered.

4. There is no law today that says the customer cannot be a disruptive innovator, a wild-eyed visionary.

I rather like that list so thought I'd share it here but check out the original (via the links above) for a more detailed analysis. Basically, customers are no longer passive consumers, rather want to be active producers and innovators in your business (some of the time). JP is clearly writing, partially from his perspective at BT, and it'll be interesting to see how the V-Jam experiment progresses with Virgin Atlantic too. More on that here soon.

In the meantime, I'll be interested to learn of good examples of how customers have been involved and empowered in other industries and businesses.

Enabled by Design now a social start-up!

Today sees the wonderful announcement that Enabled by Design have secured funding from Innovation Exchange's Next Practice programme.  The funding supports EbD through to April 2010 and therefore will allow this excellent project to develop in the way that it deserves and is the next episode of the story which began at the first Social Innovation Camp of which it was the inaugural winner.

This is an extremely satisfying result for all of us here at NESTA.  For not only are we a major supporter of Social Innovation Camp, we are also a significant contributor to the Innovation Exchange Fund.  Therefore EbD represents a powerful example of how social ventures can be initiated and nurtured in a new and exciting way.

There are many people behind this particular story so all of us here at NESTA send our heartfelt congratulations to everyone involved and I recommend you read today's announcement by EbD to find out more. 

[image courtesy of EbD's beautiful new flickr image catalogue]

What we are learning about open innovation

I recently stumbled across the openinnovators blog and was impressed with the information and resources on there. They were looking for guest bloggers to submit articles so I took the opportunity to summarise what we have been learning about open innovation through our experience in the past couple of years. The article, called 'the art and science of open innovation', is available to read here.

I believe that, whilst awareness in open innovation is increasing, the focus is still primarly around hard factors such as intellectual property and investment models. Whilst we have learned a lot about these hard factors, and have a definite point of view about them, this article focusses mainly on the cultural factors/barriers to open innovation which I believe often get overlooked.

Anyway, as always, I'd be interested in any comments or feedback.

Check Out Open Innovators

Normally I wouldn't use this blog just to promote another website but would simply post it to my delicious feed.

However I'm going to make an exception for Open Innovators as I think it's a really useful site and blog with lots of good info and I think readers of this blog would be well advised to have a browse. In particular this page is a really useful list of initiatives, tools, platforms and intermediaries that is really helpful. It's not complete, but these things never are and it's better than most. Take a look and see what you think.

I'm in the process of writing an article for them about what we are learning about open innovation from our experience to date, so watch this space for that, but I'm at a loss for a jazzy title - any good suggestions?

People First

So it's 0403 on November 5th and Barack Obama has just been called as the next President of the United States.

A lot has been spoken of the role of technology and social media in his extraordinary campaign and the election as a whole. And of course I have to wholeheartedly agree that it has been utterly ground-breaking and certainly could be considered truly disruptive in its context. 

But through our projects, we here at NESTA Connect continue to learn over and over again, that while process and technology are so important...to truly guarantee success, we have to recognise that it's ultimately all about people.

Advice for the arts from the social web

Once upon a time, before my current birth as part of the NESTA Connect team, I spent a year on secondment to the third phase of  Mission Models Money.  MMM is a ground-breaking initiative in arts & cultural sector which looks to ensure that the not-for-profit organisations that are so central to ensuring a thriving UK arts sector are nimble and articulate enought to respond to the changing environment they find themselves in - be that in regards to funding, technology, audiences or business models.

And to mark this week's launch of MMM's very exciting fourth phase, entitled Designing for Transition, I have written a short essay on the opportunity that the social web points to for arts & cultural organisations.

Today's web is really radically different to that of even just three or four years ago. What we have seen is that the web's centre of gravity has shifted from being a source of broadcast information to a platform for dynamic conversations. This essay explores how this new social culture of the web is changing our behaviours and our expectations and considers how, by paying fresh attention to the three qualities of participation, conversation and collaboration, arts and cultural organisations can harness its potential.

[Read the full article: Mission 2.0]

And for those of you looking to read a truly brilliant survey of the opportunity ahead of non-profit arts here in the UK , I can but advise you read the exclusively-at-MMM first draft of New Flow by Tim Joss, Director of the Rayne Foundation. It's certainly somewhat longer than a blog post but in this attention economy, sometimes we get very good returns on significant investments.

Open Innovation in Universities

Just a micro post to draw attention to this tender for a research project on open innovation in universities from JISC. I'd be interested to see this done well, so just posting incase anybody is interested in bidding. Not something we'd do but very interested in open innovation organisational models in universities. 

Innovating without a budget

Given these tough current economic climate I'm interested in how can you innovate without spending any money at all?

This scenario cropped up for me recently as I was chatting to an old friend who has just taken on responsibility for innovation within the company he works for, a successful software development company, that works primarily within the pharmaceutical sector. The company is full of scientists and other left brain types.

He was asking me for ideas about things they could do i leapt in with various ideas, but they all required some cash e.g. buying various books, bringing in external facilitation, and setting aside some budget to kick start various promising experiments and bringing them to proof of concept stage. He slightly sheepishly thanked me for the suggestions but then came clean that there was no budget, at all! Not even for a book or two. The emphasis is new for them and I think the senior management are reluctant to put money into high risk activity without it proving it's value.

We often talk about the value of innovating around constraints but what about a very hard constraint such as zero cash and just some time and good will of colleagues?

So my suggestions for what it's worth are:

1. Get out more - set aside some time to meet people - clients, customers, other companies or people doing interesting stuff. don't try too hard at first to link it immediately to the business. Just try to get inspired initially.

2. Mix things up - sit in a different seat, find some right brain thinkers, stir things up a bit, start researching other fields or domains.

3. Encourage both uncertainty and decisiveness - the danger with left brain organisation is they will close down new ideas before they've had time to mature so it is hard to develop new ideas. But at the same time be decisive about killing bad ideas or more importantly trying new stuff.

4. Find a few quick wins - are there some obvious things you could implement now that would prove the value of innovation within the company to secure some cash to try slightly larger scale projects.

That's as far as I got as a first attempt. But what do you think? I'd be really interested if you could help come up with ideas for what he, or anybody, could do to innovate without spending money. Thanks.

So what does it all mean?

This is the latest excellent video from Karl Fisch et al from shifthappens, the previous iteration of which you can see here.  It's provocative stuff, for everyone, not just those in education at whom it was first targetted.

Thank you to Dominic Campbell for bringing it to my attention.