NESTA Connect

P&G Open Innovation Launches

With the launches on the 18th in London and the 25th in Glasgow the challenge is now live.  I am never sure who will turn up to these sort of events but of the 150 or so who came to both, a large proportion were designer-innovators.  As you could tell from the high quality Q&A sessions (view the London one here, http://www.nesta.org.uk/mediaplayer/index.aspx?channel=18 especially the preliminary session) here were people seriously considering entering this challenge.  If anyone reading this didn't make it to the launches and has an idea for a product in the laundry care or  health and wellness markets which could get P&G excited, you have until the 13th November to register and sumbit at the BDI website here (you'll find the briefs there too): http://www.britishdesigninnovation.org/index.php?page=oic/index.  Good luck!

At the University of Utopia should the grass be greener?

At September's NESTA Crucible weekend (our development programme for researchers) participants were asked to plan and draw what their utopian University environment would be. This environment would give them the ideal space to work, think and innovate.

In the planning of this activity we supposed the groups would concentrate on aspects of their working environment such as transport links, childcare provision and organisation of departments. Particularly with a view to interdisciplinary research, the positioning of departments to break down rigid separations seems very important.

Whilst some of these issues did come up, the majority of groups concentrated heavily on creating a pleasant physical environment with nature walks, mountains and waterfalls. Several groups located their University by the sea and one even suggested that academics should be housed in rotating glass pods with a sea-view (the students they suggested should be housed underground!).

Obviously, there was a ton of artistic licence in this exercise, but it made me consider the importance of physical working environment to creativity and by extension to innovation. Is the relationship real or is this just an age old cliché? Do we actually need some blue-sky to do blue-skies thinking?

Having a quick look on Google, there does seem to be lots of references linking physical working environment to creativity but I can’t find a definitive study. (or any mention of the sea!) Everything else being equal, should we expect Sussex University to be more innovative than land-locked Leeds?

One suggestion is that rather than any particular environment we just sometimes need a different environment to allow us to think differently.

Cooperation Commons

“More people pooling more resources in new ways is the history of civilisation” – or so says Howard Rheingold who spoke at ‘Mass Collaboration’ last night at NESTA together with Mark Earls, author of Herd.

It was thoroughly enjoyable and informative evening – we covered a lot of ground from cooperation between hunter gathers to the global shift towards collaboration due to the increasing influence of non-western economies. And yet the whole evening felt light-hearted and fun, with a diverse and engaged crowd. It was my favourite event I’ve been involved with in my 10 months at NESTA and hopefully the start of an interesting new dimension to our work in developing NESTA Connect.

We could have filled the room several times over despite only minimal word of mouth promotion which is a tribute to the reputation of our speakers. Several people said to me beforehand that in meeting Howard, they were meeting a ‘hero’, and the same goes for me. Cooperation Commons is an amazing resource and has been a big influence on us in developing our work. There are lot’s of blog posts appearing today on the subject which is gratifying. Webcasts of the whole event (including a Mexican wave involving the entire audience) are on the NESTA website here.  Audio of both Mark and Howard's presentations are also available from here.

Space (to think and learn) - the final frontier

An excessive focus on productivity is actually having the opposite effect. By having an implicit or explicit goal of being productive in any particular endeavour, we limit the scope to think beyond the immediate task at hand. Through having the space to think and learn without the pressure to immediately assess the benefits, we can spark the new ideas and connections that lead to the innovations of tomorrow.

This has been brought home to me, having spent the weekend with 30 of the UK’s brightest and best young researchers as part of NESTA’s Crucible programme. The participants come from a wide range of different science and social science disciplines, and from both university and industrial environments. The aim of the programme is ultimately to support interdisciplinary research collaborations, through forging new connections, new ideas, or new opportunities. However, I believe that one of the real benefits of Crucible is the opportunity for the participants to network and to learn about a wide range of subjects from a series of interesting and sometimes provocative individuals.

This weekend we were fortunate to have Martin Kemp from the University of Oxford giving a fascinating presentation about the interaction between art and science which was for me the highlight of the weekend. A more detailed interview with Martin about interdisciplinary collaboration is available from here. He made a point that we simply don't allow ourselves the luxury to tap into that childlike wonder about the world, by asking questions of people and learning how stuff happens in disciplines outside of our own. I recall going to additional lectures in philosophy as a student event through my main subject was physics. I wasn't formally registered for the course but just had an interest in the subject so decided to sneak in on a regular basis. Not only was it enjoyable and thought provoking at the time, a longer term benefit has been to develop a different way of thinking which is frequently very useful. However, I now realise that we don't have the opportunity to do that kind of thing nearly as often as we should, and I think it is actually detrimental to our innovation capabilities.

There is of course a balance to be stuck. I'm not suggesting for one moment that we shouldn't have aims or objectives when starting out on a task. Nor do I wish to undermine the importance of planning carefully. I simply believe we should all engineer more opportunities in our work and personal lives that aren’t immediately orientated on being productive, rather that are about learning about a new subject, and expanding our experiences in some new direction. Google, for instance, allow their staff to spend 20% of their time on their own projects or interests without pressure to deliver on the business plan. This feels intuitively to be the right sort of ratio of structured verses unstructured time, but why don't other organisations follow suit? The benefits may not be immediately realised, but over the long term, I strongly believe that this will be beneficial for our productivities as individuals and ultimately as a country.