NESTA Connect

Twighlights of Reboot Britain

I really enjoyed Reboot Britain yesterday. For all it's faults (and yes I could find plenty but I don't want to dwell on those), left me hooked and inspired. I was tweeting pretty hard all day so instead I've decided just to capture my twitter highlights, or Twightlights below as a mini record of what emerged from the day (my tweets were sometimes, but not always, verbatim) and in no particular order:

1. There are 5 core literacies [we must teach our children]: attention, participation, collaboration, crap detection & network awareness. - Howard Rheingold

2. We need confidence about our beliefs and ability to change stuff for the better. Smart governments work *with* people who then take responsibility and some power.  - Lee Bryant

3. [We need] ecosystem economics but it's a fine line between perspective and platitudes - Julie Meyer

4. [Of new technology] men ask 'what does it do?', women ask 'what does it do for me?' -  Joanne Jacobs

5. The media needs to learn to grow up and stop focussing on the narcissism of small differences - Jenni Russell

6. Politicians are hidden by walled gardens and hidden by moats. - Alberto Nardelli

7. We live in a world where a tiny pools [silos] of specialists make decisions that affect us all - Gillian Tett

8. I want to vote on the issues i care about not for a party i don't care about - er, Me

9. Real change never happens from the top down - Micah Sifry

So what next?

Lot's of people, myself included, have asked where we go from here. It's an important question but not one I can answer right now. "Conversations first, the relationships, then transactions" is the principle I subscribe to and yesterday we had tonnes of conversations both on and off line so I am confident the relationships and transactions will follow. I for one will be participating with bated breath.

And particular thanks go to...

Finally, I particularly want to thanks Steve Moore, Rohan Gunatalike and Jess Tyrell who worked so hard on making the event such a success. And I also want to thank  the Travelling Geeks who sprinkled their magic dust on the proceedings and hopefully got a flavour of the british buzz right now.

By the way...

I love the fact that a bunch of people got fed up with the format and self organised a splinter group called Rebootrebootbritain.

And I also really enjoyed David Gauntlett's for doing playful lego models too. Here's mine by the way:

 

More?

There is masses of content available. Check out the essays, twitter, lego models, blog posts, images, audioboo recordings and video coming soon I promise. 

The future of innovation is ... together

Excellent new collaborative book about the Future of Innovation where hundred of authors give their views.   Here's the link.  The plan is for this to grow into a kind of innowikki so why not submit your own thoughts?  To save you hunting high and low, here are mine!  

The future of innovation is ... together

Let’s ignore the difficulties and problems of collaboration for now. There are many factors driving businesses large and small towards corporate open innovation (COI) at the dawn of the 21st century: Innovation is expensive and outsourcing promises lower overheads; Innovation is now global and even the largest multinational corporations (MNCs) realise that their knowledge has limits; Innovation is slow and often incremental and MNCs are attracted by the possibilities of quickly side-stepping disruptive competition or colonising new markets in a kind of corporate lateral thinking; Innovation is a group endeavour and some businesses have been quick to recognise the potential of the new web based networks as humanity wires itself together.

It is fair to say that most writing on COI is from the MNC standpoint. Most small companies are not familiar with COI as a concept and don’t know where to start or how to engage with MNC’s even if they do. From the perspective of SMEs or start ups the motivations are quite different. NESTA’s P&G Open Innovation Challenge has shown us that what many small businesses need above all is a customer. And if that customer is also a business or development partner rather than a pushy venture capitalist who insists on owning a large chunk of the business, so much the better.

Trust in the future

So what about those difficulties and problems? The solutions to the problems of intellectual property are almost as numerous as the business partnerships themselves. One solution NESTA noted in its Corporate Connections programme was to ‘keep the lawyers out of the room’ for as long as possible. This approach resulted in a profitable and unlikely partnership between McLaren and NATS and contrasts with the ‘sign first, ask questions later’ approach of most MNCs. For more unequal ‘David and Goliath’ partnerships, more creative approaches to intermediation can be beneficial as can the plethora of web based idea matching services that is now emerging. The one common element here is that establishing trust among actors in the innovation process will become a much more deliberate part of innovation strategy. A side-effect of this will be the necessity for more empathy between very disparate organisations. Partnerships will only succeed if everybody can answer the question ‘why bother innovating?’ on behalf of their external partners.

Extreme collaboration

Just as the extreme sports such as wingsuit flying or BMX racing are more exciting and rewarding than their more conventional counterparts, extreme collaboration can get you further, faster. NESTA and Virgin Atlantic’s current experiment in user-led innovation in which we are encouraging users to take a stake in the outcome is in stark contrast to the usual situation in which companies get away with paying nothing for ideas. Initial indications are that this approach is paying off and that treating customers as potential business partners can work. Of course with conventional companies this sort of innovation is tough. A recent paper from Cambridge’s Institute for Manufacturing notes that implementing an open innovation strategy presents many challenges for management. Many MNC’s have a decent strategy but are struggling with attaining the more operation capabilities to match. Some large companies will also have to be culturally reprogrammed in order to enable openness and cooperation rather than encourage secretiveness and competition. They will have to look hard at how they achieve the high levels of personal commitment to a project that open innovation requires.

Innovation is the new marcomms

To conclude, I feel excited about this new phase in innovation. As open innovation moves from the margins to the mainstream it has the potential to reinvigorate all R&D and NPD activity in companies. If you’re old enough to remember how marketing became essential in the boardroom in the 1980s then perhaps like me you’ll predict a similar resurgence as innovation gets a pace a top table.

Peripheral Vision at Venturefest

I went to Venturefest on Monday for the first time. The event was packed, had a good buzz and it really struck me how well networked places like Oxford/Oxfordshire really are.

As a relative outsider I enjoyed presenting on the theme of open innovation to a packed and rather warm room. My general argument was built on several themes I've blogged about before (here, here and here) around how most organisations are support innovation in terms of 'invention' but increasingly need to develop their 'search' capabilities. As specific examples of this trend I cited three projects with P&G, Virgin and Oracle, and how they are finding new ways to collaborate with their customers, supplier and clients.

The overarching premise is simply that the solutions to most, if not all of our problems are already out there so we need to be better at finding them. In the words of the late, great JG Ballard:

“The future reveals itself through the peripheral” 

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NESTAs 2009 Crucible programme had its second residential last weekend and the group received a presentation from Dr Cameron Neylon from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Cameron is an enthusiast for open science - anything from open access publication to blogging about lab results as soon as you have them. Through open access to data and the collaboration that this allows, Camerom believes that we will make more progress and ultimately innovate quicker.

Interestingly many of the early career researchers who participate in Crucible found this appraoch alien and certainly not a way of working their home institutions promote!

The general feeling was that working this way could be risky for an early career researcher - what if someone steals your results?

Cameron has blogged about the event at Science in the Open and the article and responses have brought up some interesting ideas around the issue of risk. Careers in research are risky enough as it is - is working in an open way any more of a risk?, or could it actually create new research pathways and be less risky?

Another reply has suggested that the perceived risk is conencted to the way research is funded. The system has arisen whereby we effectively fund work that has alrady been done as grants will only be awarded for work that is so clear cut and proven that it has no risk associated with it. It is only in this environment that researchers can not risk sharing data or results in an open way.

 

I would have written this post yesterday but I was frankly exhausted from what was a typically exciting and intense Social Innovation Camp weekend, where six back-of-the-envelope ideas for using the web to tackle important social problems are taken to prototype stage in less than 48 hours. 

The SI Camp weekend has so many elements to it but I'd summarise it as:

• one part hack-day
• one part MBA crash-course
• one part party
• one-part X-factor
• an unimaginable volume of croissants

And most importantly come the show&tell on the Sunday afternoon we heard from how six excellent projects had developed, with weedayout.com taking the runner-up slot and myPolice, a Patient Opinion analogue for police services taking the coveted title of the SI Camp Scotland winning project.

The ever-dynamic flocklocal.net team hard at work, recipients of an honourable mention

Social Innovation Camp gets a lot of attention and praise as being the stand-out champion of social technology for social change and that is certainly all well deserved.  However now that I am a relative veteran of two camps as well as being party to that which goes on under the bonnet, please indulge me in one of my favourite passtimes...namely mythbusting.

Myth 1 - Social Innovation Camp is just a weekend event
This is a popular one and just not true.  While the weekend is certainly the main showpiece event, it is the culmination of a process of several months.  During this time the core SI Camp team will work with a large number of key stakeholders and influencers to raise understanding of the process in its chosen location (Scotland in this case), manage a communications process to ensure that as diverse a set of ideas are entered as contenders for the weekend build and run a series of meetups to build a community of people interested in attending the SI Camp.

Myth 2 - Social Innovation Camp will save Britain's imminent public service funding crisis
Paul Miller, co-founder of #sicamp, has written an essay for Reboot Britain on how public service start-ups can help transform Britain for the better.  He is one of the most articulate voices on the subject so I recommend you read his piece Weary Giants and New Technology.  So what we require is a more vibrant ecology of sustainable start-ups focussed on fixing things that matter.  Part of this is providing a clear route and understanding of how anyone can take a back-of-an-envelope idea and turn it into the next big thing and SI Camp is an important part of the first stages - building awareness, showing what is possible and encouraging new issues into being solved using digital means.  But more support from all quarters is needed so as to bring high-potential projects to maturity - only then will we are really reap the benefits of this stuff. 

Myth 3 - Social Innovation Camp is all about social innovation
Well clearly it is to some degree!  But the point I want to make here is that SI Camp is mainly about people.  People who understand need and people who understand (digital) opportunity.  They then have a conversation and learn about each others expertise and work together to produce something that neither could have though of by themselves.  What this means for me is that we need not just more conversations but better practical conversations about what is possible.  And SI Camp is the best practical conversation I've ever seen. 

NESTA is delighted to be the majority funder of SI Camp since its inception and thereby be part of the extraordinary confluence of social innovation and new technologies. 

And finally, on a personal note it has been a true delight to have support Anna Maybank, Katee Hui and Paul Miller in what little way i have been able to - their phenomenal hard work, passion and dedication - mostly behind the scenes - is inspirational, visionary and deeply practical all at the same time - a difficult trick to pull off indeed.  

[Images courtesy of The People Speak - watch out for their #sicamp Scotland film on www.sicamp.org in the next few weeks]

I firmly believe that the solutions to many (if not all) of our innovation problems are already out there somewhere; it's just that we need to get much better at finding them.

We all know that too much 'reinvention of the wheel' happens within all organisations. But in an ever more connected world, the core innovation skill set is now migrating away from invention capability, and more towards innovation search capabilities.

By way of illustration, take a look at this video below* (it's actually a public service ad but don't let that put you off). It's a nice pun on a similar ad earlier in the series which you may have seen recently at the cinema. 

Did you spot all the changes? If you are like me you didn't even get close. We generally don't spot stuff if we don't focus on it, even if it's right before our eyes. And that's the problem. We are arguably too focussed on our work, projects, sectors to spot what's coming up in the slipstream.

The promise of open innovation, namely of brighter, faster, cheaper innovation, is now coming of age. It's the organisations who engage pro actively and systematically with others, whether it's customers, suppliers, universities or clients, are beginning to see the returns on investment from this strategy.

In other words all innovators and innovative organisations need to become better detectives, and be better able to spot what's happening outside of their immediate focus.

*Thanks to Paul Sloane for the link

Why are most events rubbish?

I've attended, spoken at, or organised more than my fair share recently, and found myself mentally writing a list of do's a don'ts as follows:

• Presentation - I prefer bumbling enthusiastic honesty to a slick rehearsed presentation, everytime.

• Visualisation - Please don't read out your slides verbatim - Tell vivid stories, show pictures, convey your enthusiasm.
• Contradiction - Give me a healthy disagreement any day of the week, rather than fawning consensus (alas I fear a very British trait).
• Conversation - There is never enough time or space for conversation. The best bits, as the unconference crowd well know, are the coffee breaks - always.
• Inspiration - Going to events for me is all about getting inspired and learning something new, even though things all too often conspire against this.
• Connection - There is almost certainly someone in the room you really would want to/should speak to - the trick is how to find them.
• Facilitation - Is a dark and underrated art but alas so frequently apparent by it's absence.
• Discussion - Panel sessions are often tedious and artificial unless superbly curated. And Q&A almost always feel tokenistic and seldom adds much value.

Unfortunately, most events I attend still get many of these things wrong. We really must stop meeting like this!

A recent notable exception was bTween09 in Liverpool which was excellent, and I'm also looking forward to Reboot Britain on July 6th which I know will buck the trend too. A common thread in those exceptions is the use of Twitter which I find most useful and interesting at events especially to plug the attention gap and to make connections and start conversations with interesting people. 

Oh, and thanks also to Johnnie Moore, who gave me the title of this post and is also one of the most unassuming but best facilitators out there.

We're learning a lot about corporate open innovation and we think it's about time that we started consolidating our knowledge and articulating it as effectively as we possibly can, to encourage others to get involved. 

To achieve this, we've recently started working with an agency called Moving Brands. Over the coming months they'll be helping us to work out how we best communicate: what we do; the concept of corporate open innovation and the specific things we've learnt from the projects we've been involved with. They'll also be working with us to create practical tools and resources that will help others run successful open innovation projects themselves.

The project has it's own blog so take a look and tell us what you think.

Anyone remotely conscious will have know that as a country we face an unprecedented set of challenges: a decimated economy, ever increasing demands on our public services and trust in our political system at an all time low.

But instead of more pessimism, how can we begin to punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services?

NESTA is delighted to announce Reboot Britain, a day-long event on July 6th in London which will explore these issues. 

The day runs from 9:30 to 6pm and has a two-track format:

• In the main lecture theatre there will be a non-stop series of high-impact presentations by leading politicians, technologists, entrepreneurs and commentators
• In the surrounding rooms there will be participant-led sessions and practically-focussed workshops in response the main presentation themes in real-time

To find out more and to register your place please visit rebootbritain.com

I have noticed that as soon as you use the word ‘innovation’ in a conversation, most people immediately assume that you’re talking from the realm of the epic and world changing or the spectacular and breath-taking. Whilst disruptive innovation is important, I think it sits at just one end of a wide spectrum, at an end that receives dis-proportionately large amounts of attention. Let’s spend more time at the other end, the end of the small and the incremental, the quick and the cheap.

The benefits of working in this space are so numerous that, rather than offer any comprehensive analysis or opinion here, I will simply throw up some that stand out for me:

RISK – lower both for resource and the implications of taking a new innovation to a market or society

TIME – quicker in terms of resource, process and seeing results; failing happens quickly

DIFFICULTY – fewer and smaller barriers to innovation process, implementation, roll-out; reduced stakeholder network complexity; smaller technical and conceptual leaps; credibility can be built

So what’s the best way of investigating this sometimes unfamiliar territory? I’m sure there’s a perfect algorithm somewhere that will beautifully describe the most effective and efficient approach. However, I believe we learn most effectively by simply doing, and this point in the spectrum provides an environment that is conducive to just that.

Let’s spread our attention more evenly across the innovation spectrum and allow ourselves to change the way in which we approach things. Whilst time for talking, discussing, meeting, strategising, postulating, hypothesising and analysing can’t be eradicated altogether, why not take some of this time to make sure we answer the question ‘so what are we ACTUALLY going to do?’ ?

Can we risk being open? Or should we be asking can we risk not being open?

NESTAs 2009 Crucible programme had its second residential last weekend and the group received a presentation from Dr Cameron Neylon from the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory.

Cameron is an enthusiast for open science - anything from open access publication to blogging about lab results as soon as you have them. Through open access to data and the collaboration that this allows, Camerom believes that we will make more progress and ultimately innovate quicker.

Interestingly many of the early career researchers who participate in Crucible found this appraoch alien and certainly not a way of working their home institutions promote!

The general feeling was that working this way could be risky for an early career researcher - what if someone steals your results?

Cameron has blogged about the event at Science in the Open and the article and responses have brought up some interesting ideas around the issue of risk. Careers in research are risky enough as it is - is working in an open way any more of a risk?, or could it actually create new research pathways and be less risky?

Another reply has suggested that the perceived risk is conencted to the way research is funded. The system has arisen whereby we effectively fund work that has alrady been done as grants will only be awarded for work that is so clear cut and proven that it has no risk associated with it. It is only in this environment that researchers can not risk sharing data or results in an open way.

myPolice wins Social Innovation Camp Scotland!

 

I would have written this post yesterday but I was frankly exhausted from what was a typically exciting and intense Social Innovation Camp weekend, where six back-of-the-envelope ideas for using the web to tackle important social problems are taken to prototype stage in less than 48 hours. 

The SI Camp weekend has so many elements to it but I'd summarise it as:

• one part hack-day
• one part MBA crash-course
• one part party
• one-part X-factor
• an unimaginable volume of croissants

And most importantly come the show&tell on the Sunday afternoon we heard from how six excellent projects had developed, with weedayout.com taking the runner-up slot and myPolice, a Patient Opinion analogue for police services taking the coveted title of the SI Camp Scotland winning project.

The ever-dynamic flocklocal.net team hard at work, recipients of an honourable mention

Social Innovation Camp gets a lot of attention and praise as being the stand-out champion of social technology for social change and that is certainly all well deserved.  However now that I am a relative veteran of two camps as well as being party to that which goes on under the bonnet, please indulge me in one of my favourite passtimes...namely mythbusting.

Myth 1 - Social Innovation Camp is just a weekend event
This is a popular one and just not true.  While the weekend is certainly the main showpiece event, it is the culmination of a process of several months.  During this time the core SI Camp team will work with a large number of key stakeholders and influencers to raise understanding of the process in its chosen location (Scotland in this case), manage a communications process to ensure that as diverse a set of ideas are entered as contenders for the weekend build and run a series of meetups to build a community of people interested in attending the SI Camp.

Myth 2 - Social Innovation Camp will save Britain's imminent public service funding crisis
Paul Miller, co-founder of #sicamp, has written an essay for Reboot Britain on how public service start-ups can help transform Britain for the better.  He is one of the most articulate voices on the subject so I recommend you read his piece Weary Giants and New Technology.  So what we require is a more vibrant ecology of sustainable start-ups focussed on fixing things that matter.  Part of this is providing a clear route and understanding of how anyone can take a back-of-an-envelope idea and turn it into the next big thing and SI Camp is an important part of the first stages - building awareness, showing what is possible and encouraging new issues into being solved using digital means.  But more support from all quarters is needed so as to bring high-potential projects to maturity - only then will we are really reap the benefits of this stuff. 

Myth 3 - Social Innovation Camp is all about social innovation
Well clearly it is to some degree!  But the point I want to make here is that SI Camp is mainly about people.  People who understand need and people who understand (digital) opportunity.  They then have a conversation and learn about each others expertise and work together to produce something that neither could have though of by themselves.  What this means for me is that we need not just more conversations but better practical conversations about what is possible.  And SI Camp is the best practical conversation I've ever seen. 

NESTA is delighted to be the majority funder of SI Camp since its inception and thereby be part of the extraordinary confluence of social innovation and new technologies. 

And finally, on a personal note it has been a true delight to have support Anna Maybank, Katee Hui and Paul Miller in what little way i have been able to - their phenomenal hard work, passion and dedication - mostly behind the scenes - is inspirational, visionary and deeply practical all at the same time - a difficult trick to pull off indeed.  

[Images courtesy of The People Speak - watch out for their #sicamp Scotland film on www.sicamp.org in the next few weeks]

Becoming Innovation Detectives

I firmly believe that the solutions to many (if not all) of our innovation problems are already out there somewhere; it's just that we need to get much better at finding them.

We all know that too much 'reinvention of the wheel' happens within all organisations. But in an ever more connected world, the core innovation skill set is now migrating away from invention capability, and more towards innovation search capabilities.

By way of illustration, take a look at this video below* (it's actually a public service ad but don't let that put you off). It's a nice pun on a similar ad earlier in the series which you may have seen recently at the cinema. 

Did you spot all the changes? If you are like me you didn't even get close. We generally don't spot stuff if we don't focus on it, even if it's right before our eyes. And that's the problem. We are arguably too focussed on our work, projects, sectors to spot what's coming up in the slipstream.

The promise of open innovation, namely of brighter, faster, cheaper innovation, is now coming of age. It's the organisations who engage pro actively and systematically with others, whether it's customers, suppliers, universities or clients, are beginning to see the returns on investment from this strategy.

In other words all innovators and innovative organisations need to become better detectives, and be better able to spot what's happening outside of their immediate focus.

*Thanks to Paul Sloane for the link

We MUST stop meeting like this!

Why are most events rubbish?

I've attended, spoken at, or organised more than my fair share recently, and found myself mentally writing a list of do's a don'ts as follows:

• Presentation - I prefer bumbling enthusiastic honesty to a slick rehearsed presentation, everytime.

• Visualisation - Please don't read out your slides verbatim - Tell vivid stories, show pictures, convey your enthusiasm.
• Contradiction - Give me a healthy disagreement any day of the week, rather than fawning consensus (alas I fear a very British trait).
• Conversation - There is never enough time or space for conversation. The best bits, as the unconference crowd well know, are the coffee breaks - always.
• Inspiration - Going to events for me is all about getting inspired and learning something new, even though things all too often conspire against this.
• Connection - There is almost certainly someone in the room you really would want to/should speak to - the trick is how to find them.
• Facilitation - Is a dark and underrated art but alas so frequently apparent by it's absence.
• Discussion - Panel sessions are often tedious and artificial unless superbly curated. And Q&A almost always feel tokenistic and seldom adds much value.

Unfortunately, most events I attend still get many of these things wrong. We really must stop meeting like this!

A recent notable exception was bTween09 in Liverpool which was excellent, and I'm also looking forward to Reboot Britain on July 6th which I know will buck the trend too. A common thread in those exceptions is the use of Twitter which I find most useful and interesting at events especially to plug the attention gap and to make connections and start conversations with interesting people. 

Oh, and thanks also to Johnnie Moore, who gave me the title of this post and is also one of the most unassuming but best facilitators out there.

Innovate then disseminate...

We're learning a lot about corporate open innovation and we think it's about time that we started consolidating our knowledge and articulating it as effectively as we possibly can, to encourage others to get involved. 

To achieve this, we've recently started working with an agency called Moving Brands. Over the coming months they'll be helping us to work out how we best communicate: what we do; the concept of corporate open innovation and the specific things we've learnt from the projects we've been involved with. They'll also be working with us to create practical tools and resources that will help others run successful open innovation projects themselves.

The project has it's own blog so take a look and tell us what you think.

It is time to Reboot Britain!

Anyone remotely conscious will have know that as a country we face an unprecedented set of challenges: a decimated economy, ever increasing demands on our public services and trust in our political system at an all time low.

But instead of more pessimism, how can we begin to punch through the gloom and take advantage of the radically networked digital world we now live in to help revive our economy, rebuild our democratic structures and improve public services?

NESTA is delighted to announce Reboot Britain, a day-long event on July 6th in London which will explore these issues. 

The day runs from 9:30 to 6pm and has a two-track format:

• In the main lecture theatre there will be a non-stop series of high-impact presentations by leading politicians, technologists, entrepreneurs and commentators
• In the surrounding rooms there will be participant-led sessions and practically-focussed workshops in response the main presentation themes in real-time

To find out more and to register your place please visit rebootbritain.com

So what are we ACTUALLY going to do?

I have noticed that as soon as you use the word ‘innovation’ in a conversation, most people immediately assume that you’re talking from the realm of the epic and world changing or the spectacular and breath-taking. Whilst disruptive innovation is important, I think it sits at just one end of a wide spectrum, at an end that receives dis-proportionately large amounts of attention. Let’s spend more time at the other end, the end of the small and the incremental, the quick and the cheap.

The benefits of working in this space are so numerous that, rather than offer any comprehensive analysis or opinion here, I will simply throw up some that stand out for me:

RISK – lower both for resource and the implications of taking a new innovation to a market or society

TIME – quicker in terms of resource, process and seeing results; failing happens quickly

DIFFICULTY – fewer and smaller barriers to innovation process, implementation, roll-out; reduced stakeholder network complexity; smaller technical and conceptual leaps; credibility can be built

So what’s the best way of investigating this sometimes unfamiliar territory? I’m sure there’s a perfect algorithm somewhere that will beautifully describe the most effective and efficient approach. However, I believe we learn most effectively by simply doing, and this point in the spectrum provides an environment that is conducive to just that.

Let’s spread our attention more evenly across the innovation spectrum and allow ourselves to change the way in which we approach things. Whilst time for talking, discussing, meeting, strategising, postulating, hypothesising and analysing can’t be eradicated altogether, why not take some of this time to make sure we answer the question ‘so what are we ACTUALLY going to do?’ ?