NESTA Connect

The 5 habits of highly innovative groups

I heard a great quote the other day from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, talking about how to create the right environment for mass collaboration (thanks to Charlie Leadbeater for introducing me to it). I'm paraphrasing but it goes something like this. Wikipedia's success down to 5 constituent components:

1. one part anarchy (anything goes)
2. one part democracy (people can vote on a disagreement)
3. one part aristocracy (people who have been around for a long time get listened to)
4. one part meritocracy (the best ideas win out) and
5. one part monarchy (on rare occassions the buck has to stop somewhere).

I think these 5 components could be a useful starting point for looking at collaborative innovation more widely and the trick is to enable them all and to make them habitual. What do you think are the components that are most frequently missing? I would probably say 1 and 4.

Network effect for social innovation

Robert Metcalfe coined the term 'network effect' to mean the phenomenon whereby a service becomes more valuable as more people use it, thereby encouraging ever-increasing numbers of adopters. He was referring to networked computers but the term has increasingly gained wide spread use.

One of the most interesting applications is around network effects for social change, and last Thursday saw the beginning of an interesting experiment in this space. The Royal Society of Arts is seeking to transform the diverse fellowship into a network to create positive social change. Mick Fealty describes the event as follows (here):

James Surowieki notes in his Wisdom Of Crowds' critique that diversity of opinion and experience is a prerequiste for a crowd to be smart. Next is independence, ie people who are not likely to be swayed by people around them. Then decentralisation, where "power does not fully reside in one central location, and many of the important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing planner."

Finally aggregation, some means of determining the group's answer to the question, in this case: what might RSA Networks do and how might they deliver?

This last should begin to be determined through a number of outputs from the day, but the Open Space technology is a good match for Surowieki's first three determining factors. RSA Fellows, or at least this bunch here today, are indeed a 'smart crowd'.

Of course this is just the start of something and it is too early to say whether this will reach the all important 'critical mass' but we are watching it progress with interest (see here for exactly how we are observing and participating). However, it's been a while since I attended an event with such a buzz and determination, so I strongly believe that the right conditions are there for successful collaborations to flourish.

Crowdsourcing Football

Open source has come of age, or broken free depending on your point of view. What was once the province of the software community (Linux, Apache etc) has made it's way into all manner of unexpected places in recent times such as in films, books, toys, cars and now football.

News this week that MyFootballClub has taken a controlling stake in Ebbsfleet Utd will be an interesting experiment in crowdsourcing. "Own the club and pick the team" is their motto but can this really work? Can a football team operate without direct leadership of a manager? Football managers have always taken on board the fans opinions but then ultimately made their decision based on their own more detailed information. Certain managers such as Sven in charge of England were often criticised for pandering too often to fans in team selection. However, regardless of the dissappointing performance at the last World Cup, he did have a compartitively good record as England manager.  Perhaps the fans knew a thing or two after all.

I suspect the injection of cash and the extra fans and profile generated by this experiment should boost Ebbsfleets chances of promotion to the football league anyway, but I'll be interested to see how it pans out. I am increasingly aware of people arguing that the militaristic 'command and control' school of leadership that is still prevalent in most organisations, is not the best way to encourage the creativity that is often the hallmark of great teams, and innovative organisations. But whether MyFootballClub ends up demonstrating the wisdom of crowds or the dumbness of crowds remains to be seen.

Interaction + Iteration = Innovation

Isaac Newton, in a rare moment of humility, acknowledged the contribution of others in his many achievements through the famous statement that he was 'standing on the shoulders of giants'. However, his insight should not be withheld for our historical heroic individuals - it applies to us all. And yet we seldom realise that this is the case as most of our histories tend to be about those individuals (almost always the successful ones) rather than the wider community within which they operate. Yet, they are, by definition, just the tip of the iceberg.

We've been arguing for some time that all innovation is fundamentally collaborative, and I believe it is becoming more so, given increasing specialisation in all domains. It may be possible to invent an idea or concept as an individual, though this always builds upon the work of others. But more importantly, to realise commercial or social value, requires input from many other people - both seen and unseen. And yet the finance, support and infrastructure for innovation in the UK (and elsewhere) tend to be mostly focussed upon the individual (person or organisation).

I'm particularly interested in the space between the individuals, or the 'interaction' within an innovation community. This interplay between participants has an inbuilt feedback mechanism or 'iteration' which is a hallmark of the design process and is essential in successful innovation. Good innovations don't just rise to the surface naturally without the momentum of a wider community of advocates. Returning to science for a moment, modern physics is clear that the world works very differently at different scales. The laws that are true of atoms and sub-atomic particles do not 'aggregate up' to apply to larger masses and structures where entirely new emergent phenomena occur at larger scales e.g. magnetism. The same applies to groups and communities.

Therefore, I'm trying to get up to speed on the work of Burt, Gravenotter and Wenger to understand the sociology or anthropology of groups and networks. However this appears to be at an early stage of development and a fruitful strand of research. One of the evaluation techniques we are using in several of our Connect projects, Corporate Connections and RSA 360, is the use of video ethnography to observe and track the development of diverse range of participants seeking to innovate collaboratively. I think this will be fruitful and will reveal insights not obtained through traditional quantative or qualitative techniques.

But I am beginning to realise that we lack a vocabulary to even talk about group dynamics properly. Can anybody please provide me with examples of case studies that capture the essence of group dynamics (both positive and negative) that properly explain the emergence of collaborative innovation, rather than simply telling the stories of heroic individuals or aggregating individual behaviour?