NESTA Connect

Global swarming

Various research has identified a small number of characteristics from nature's bioteams, which don't tend to be present in human organisational teams. The top three include:

• Instant Messaging - Lots of simple whole-group broadcast communications e.g. food over here, danger over there
• Collective Leadership - Any group member can take the lead at different times as appropriate e.g. migrating geese take it in turns to lead the pack
• Group Ecosystems - Small is beautiful (and innovative and smart) …..and big is powerful.

Find out more about the first of these in an article by Ken Thomson here .

I'm pleased to say that we are now working on a  practical implementation of bioteaming principals through new pilot project called Swarmteams which seeks to test some of these principles within human networks, in this case music fanbases. More on this shortly.

Open Innovation guru Chesbrough visits NESTA

Henry, adjunct professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California and Executive Director of the Center for Open Innovation was recently described by The Economist as “the godfather of open innovation”.  So as leader of the open innovation programmes at NESTA his visit was A Big Deal for me. 

I wasn't disappointed - from the dinner to the end of the corporate workshop some 24 hours later Henry was tireless and engaging for very different audiences from the policy and business worlds.  Click here for a short taste of him in action.

Henry Chesbrough opened the corporate lab with a presentation on the theory of open innovation, and lead the discussion on the implications for practice.  You could tell this subject is hot by looking at the quality and seniority of the audience from organisations as diverse as ARUP, AstraZeneca, BBC, BT, GSK, IDEO, RBS, Oracle Kodak, Capgemini, McLaren F1, Microsoft, Oracle, Unilever, P&G and Cancer Research UK.  Henry explained why open innovation was on the rise citing factors such as the explosion in venture capital, private funding of universities and increasing workforce mobility amongst others.  He then outlined four themes of the 'logic of open innovation': 

• Good ideas are widely distributed and no-one has a monopoly;
• Not all the smart people work for us; 
• Companies must employ poker players as well as chess players;
• You must manage IP in order to manage research.   

From the discussion afterwards it became clear that many of the attendees were already experimenting with open innovation in various ways.  Notes were compared and lessons swapped.  As examples of NESTA's work in this area we also had short presentations from Mike Addison at P&G, Mike Phillips at McLaren and David Rajan of Oracle.  I hope Henry comes back to NESTA soon and if he does I would like to move the agenda on to the future of corporate open innovation, invite more interested novices and examine how to extend COI to harder sectors like financial services, the creative industries and smaller companies.  Let me know if that appeals!