Fringe benefits

  Please rest assured that the subject of this post isn't veering wildly from the usual theme of collaborative innovation, to comment upon new trends in hair styling. People who have seen my hairstyles over the years will testify that this is not a subject I can claim to write about with any credibility. Rather, I return to the subject of celebrating fringe, or non-core, activities in stimulating innovation.

This subject is inspired by having just returned from a very interesting 2 day Triple Helix Summit in the US. The triple helix model of innovation seeks to harness the complementary expertise and resources of three sources: Industry, Academia and Government. And it's potential to stimulate innovation and solve complex problems often occurs at the boundaries, or the fringes, of these three, very different institutions.

The conference was wide ranging and there were lots of very interesting presentations. It's hard to summarise in it's entirety by below are a few quotes that I picked up along the way and resonated with me for various reasons:

• "What do we call collaboration in the classroom? Answer: Cheating." Lisa Galarneau
• "Collaboration is the art of willing cooperation with the enemy." Leigh Jerome
• "If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and we are patient in them, we shall end in certainties." Francis Bacon (alas Francis was not a delegate at the summit!)
• "The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet." Bruce Sterling
• "Rarely do you find a requirement for something that doesn't exist yet." David Finegold

Also, there were a number of important discussions and insights into the following:

A good way to address barriers to collaboration - The two issues that kept being cited as barriers to open and  collaborative innovation were a) culture/trust and b) organisational structures/hierarchies. Lisa Galarneau pointed out that neither of these barriers exist, or not to the same extent at least, in virtual worlds such as Second Life and World of Warcraft. Here you have the opportunity to play in possibility space. What I mean here is that these virtual worlds almost always require collaboration to get stuff done (slay a dragon etc) so you can take the opportunity to try hand at leadership or take on different roles in a group. An additional benefit is the flattening of the barriers with respect to age and cultures as well. Whilst the examples are 'just' games, increasingly companies like IBM use virtual worlds to support collaboration across their business and address these barriers with some success.

Why do we have organisations anyway? - Ron Coates won the Nobel Prize for economics in the 1930s for describing the reasons that organisations exist are to minimise transaction costs due to economies of scale. However, interestingly Kevin Maney argues that technology is now redefining the organisation as transaction costs are plummeting (in some cases to zero), which means that within an organisation transaction costs are now actually often higher than outside - the complete reverse of the situation described by Ron Coates in the days when many Corporate, Academic and Government Institutions were founded. It is exactly these challenges that we are faced with and seeking to address through our Corporate Open Innovation Projects, but I'd never really thought about it in those terms.

What is the impact of technology upon places? - Again, there was a lot of talk about the impact of mobility, geo-presence and social networks. When asked whether social networks are the new cities, Kevin described the fact that we are continually faced with choices which trade off between fidelity/quality verses convenience. E.g. the high fidelity or quality of going to see a live concert, verses buying the music on iTunes. You can't beat the face to face interaction that our cities facilitate, but it is also usually less convenient than interacting via technology. Also, new technology is continually improving both the fidelity and convenience all the time so our choices in balancing these trade offs are changing. The impact on places was merely inferred that they need to respond accordingly and generally deliver an increasingly high fidelity/quality experience. So the short answer is, no, social networks are the new cities, but they are affecting the way we interact with places and will continue to do so as the fidelity and convenience increases.

Finally, I'm pleased to say that the Connect narrative (recently rearticulated here) underpinned by the concept of extreme collaboration was well received and judging by the level of discussion and debate afterwards, it gives me further confidence that we are playing in an interesting, important and evolving space. Finishing where I began, maybe looking outside of core business/activity of industry, academia or governments, and back at the fringes are back in fashion after all.

Comments

[Brendan Dunphy]

I wish I had the opportunity to join you, sounds very stimulating! I am particularly taken with the observations regarding external transactions costs being lower then internal ones and the opportunity for virtual worlds to enbale the sort of extreme collaboration that is increasingly required but hierarchy and process hinder.I believe existing business models are a major barrier to innovation. We need a shift in thinking here to create more sustainable and agile busness models better suited to enable our future (temporary, evolutionary, inclusive) rather than our industrial past(permanent, fixed, exclusive).

[Roland Harwood]

Thanks Brendan,

I couldn't agree with you more and these new business models are exactly what we are trying to explore and embed through some of our projects working with the likes of P&G, Oracle and others.

Roland