NESTA Connect

Co-creation Rules video

Our moving record of this event is now 'cooked' and is available here or a short version on YouTube here.  Thanks to Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff for an evening that was scary, funny and wise in equal parts. 

Emergence and 21st century cities

I've just finished reading 'Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software' by Steven Johnson which was published in 2001 and most of the technology related stuff is obviously outdated, but the whole concept of order or patterns emerging from complexity is fascinating and resonates strongly with the concept of collaboration that we are pursuing through NESTA Connect.

There is a chapter on what we can learn from ants - this goes over territory we are have been influenced by and exploring already with swarmteams (see here) but the most interesting section for me was on cities. This takes me back to a statement I heard a while back staying that social networks are the new cities, which we'll be debating at our Nesta conference and the NLabs conference in the summer.

Berlin argues that cities, like ants, allow the exchange and storage of masses of information through the interaction of it's inhabitants. The development of cities are analogous to phase transitions in nature where an input of energy leads to a remarkable change in state of matter (e.g. liquid to gas, through heating for example). He describes the analogous injection of energy leading to phase transition in cities, first the heavy wheeled plow, then crop rotation, which both enabled more efficient agriculture and subsequently much larger connurbations.

He then describes in some detail the next major injection of 'energy' into cities by the industrial revolution, typified best by Manchester's the world's first industrialised city. It's population exploded 10 fold from just 25,000 in 1773 to over 250,000 in just 75 years, without being formally consitituted as a city. It was finally recognised as a city in 1853 after the massive population explosion had happened. However, whilst this short period was clearly explosive and chaotic, the city grew with a tremendous amount of order or self-organising clusters without top down leadership.

And of course, bringing us up to date, we are now in the next major injection of 'energy' into our cities, namely through the web and digital world which he argues is having a similarly huge impact on our cities which we are only just beginning to understand the social, policital and economic ramifications. Industries driven by ideas naturally gravitate towards physical centres of ideas generation (i.e. cities) but now we also exchange a vast amount of information and ideas using technology, leading to virtual and distributed clusters which are changing the way interact and share knowledge.

Greater Manchester has of course undergone an exciting and remarkable transformation in the last couple of decades building upon a range of strong influencing factors from an amazing music scence from the late 1970's onwards, to the IRA bomb in 1996, to the Commonwealth Games in 2002, to the creation of the largest campus university in the UK formed in 2004, to the relocation of large parts of the BBC to Salford in a couple of years. It will be fascinating to watch this next 'phase transition' in Manchester, and all other regions and regions, in response to these new online social networks and we are currently focussing our attention here (more on that soon).

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee, the godfather of the internet, is setting up the Web Science Research Foundation (which we also hope to work with) to research and understand and influence the social, policital and economic ramifications of this new transition. Exciting times.

The inverse of entropy

As a former and recovering physicist, I have been indoctrinated in the 2nd law of thermodynamics, namely that there is always an increase in disorder over time. Your physicist friends will tell you (what do you mean you haven't got any?) that Entropy is a measure of the degree of randomness or chaos in a system (such as a box/room/universe). This has all kinds of fascinating philosophical implications that I won't go in to, such as giving us our sense of time. Anyway, whilst I appreciate the mathematics and experiments that clearly back this up this law, I have always found this a rather pessimistic world view.

And yet the more recent trend towards emergence (more on that in my next post) talks of order arising from complexity in nature, in cities, in the brain and on the web. However this directly contradicts this famous 2nd law. In this case entropy or randomness decreases over time as order or patterns arise from complexity. In fact, John Maeda (all round good guy and graphic designer, visual artist, and computer scientist at MIT Media Lab) has been taking part in a debate hosted by the Economist about whether technology will complicate or simplify our life. He argues that currently most technology is infantile and therefore a complicating influence in our lives, however ultimately technology will unite with design and the arts in unprecedented harmony such that not only will our lives be simplified, but more importantly satisfying. I love the optimism of this argument even if can't quite bring myself to share it fully. Whose side are you on?

PS. Thanks to Ewan for pointing our John Maeda's TED talk (here)

Social Innovation Campers

I'm really pleased to showcase a new programme called Social Innovation Camp , taking place on April 4th-6th, that Nesta are supporting in partnership with the Young Foundation. The idea came to us from Paul Miller (School of Everything), Dan McQuillan (Make Your Mark) and Christian Ahlert (Open Business) inspired in part by Netsquared in the US. The event blurb is as follows:

What happens when you get a bunch of hackers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them? We’re going to find out. In London between 4th-6th April 2008, Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems. Our aim is find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.

This feeds into a wider group of Connect projects we are developing and supporting around innovation clusters that harness the participatory culture of the web focusing upon the social or creative economies, and I'll post more on this again as this evolves.

Gossip and Reputation

Ron Burt gave a great presentation tonight at Queen Mary University of London entitled Gossip and Reputation. He was on fine form, as he was when he spoke at Nesta last year (see here for webcast of that previous event). I really don't think I can summarise his points any better than he delivered them, so here they are verbatim:

Your reputation is owned by the people who discuss it. Their purpose is building ties with one another, which need not be about accuracy so much as empathy. Therefore, reputation building requires more than a display of competence. Reputation depends on colleagues telling stories to one another about you. Be suspicious of extreme reputations; they are based on gossip echo within closed networks [see below].

The closed networks that facilitate trust and build reputation to deliver value produce at the same time distrust, character assassination, and hostility. Closure [in networks] produces echo, not bandwidth. External relations wither, people benchmark solely against insiders, and the etiquette filter on information passing between people amplifies reputations into stereotypes with predictable problems for the value potential of diversity. Trust is facilitated between people already close, and distrust amplified between people not close, creating a potential for organizational arthritis.

How do you create an interdisciplinary research base?

I recently attended the ‘World Universities Forum’ in Davos. The conference was attempting to provide a discussion forum on the state of higher education and knowledge generation to parallel the World Economic Forums review of economics and wealth generation. Whilst the meeting has a long way to go to match the profile of the WEF, there were some interesting sessions – particularly on how different institutions are tackling the challenge of interdisciplinarity.

There was a consensus that we need a new era of ‘problem centred’ knowledge generation to tackle complex issues such as climate change and sustainable development. Universities will be in danger of making themselves irrelevant if they are not able to tackle these issues and given this, more interdisciplinary research is needed.

But it was also clear that our present academic system functions along disciplinary lines. All our rewards and incentives work in this way and this seems to be the case internationally.

Linda Katehi, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign spoke about the need for academics to feel respected by their disciplinary colleagues. Those whose work becomes more interdisciplinary feel that they are loosing their peer group. She felt such human factors were one of the main barriers to interdisciplinarity.

Eva Pell, Vice President for Research at Penn State University gave a slightly different perspective and spoke about the prevalence of new interdisciplinary research centres in US universities. At Penn State interdisciplinary research units account for more than one-third of their research programs and they have invested considerably in new buildings for research across disciplines such as the Huck Institute of Life Sciences. But Pell felt that success at Penn State did not come from new research buildings and centres. These often caused friction between departments who felt themselves diminished when funding streams were given to such new centres. Success had been achieved at Penn State when faculties were given shared financial ownership of interdisciplinary initiatives.

So what lessons can the UK learn from how US universities are tackling interdisciplinarity? Is there a danger the UK will go down the road of investing millions in new interdisciplinary buildings, rather than examining how institutional and cultural change can be achieved?

I am sure that some new centres are needed in areas where the old disciplinary divides now make no sense. An example of this might be the new Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre. Their website tells us that “the architecture of the building reflects the needs of interdisciplinary science, featuring open-plan, multifunctional laboratories as well as generously-proportioned meeting and atrium areas.” It would be interesting to hear from those who work there if this new building has truly changed the way they work. In any case, UK universities and research funders must look deeper at their infrastructures and cultures to really create an uninhibited interdisciplinary research base.

Power to the people

An article in this months Fastcompany magazine shows that Malcolm Gladwell was wrong in his book 'The Tipping Point', about how trends emerge through a small group of super-influential individuals.

It describes the work of social network theorist Duncan Watts, now at Yahoo and on sabbatical from Columbia University, who has conducted some real and much larger scale experiments on how trends spread through a network. In his studies, the people who started different trends within his experiments were virtually entirely random throughout the network, not limited to minority of influencers.

This article and non-Gladwellian (!) phenomenon has been discussed intelligently elsewhere (here and here), but reading the article reminded me of one of my favourite quotes by the anthropologist Margaret Mead as follows:

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."

In this spirit, we are trying to tap into and enable this people power through some of our projects here at Nesta notably the Big Green Challenge and RSA Networks.

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

The secret of successful collaboration

I attended two collaboration events last week which came from different angles yet met somewhere in the middle.  Firstly there was 'Collaborative Leadership' courtesy of the Global Business Partnership Alliance (GBPA).  This interactive workshop was one of their 'Discovery' projects and amongst other things involved a practical task with one of three small groups to create a way of suspending a book above the floor.  Here at NESTA the second event,  'Co-Creation Rules', was facilitated by Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff (see their manifesto) who used techniques borrowed from improvised comedy to get us to loosen up and trust each other.  The common theme that struck me was about rules.  With the GBPA event our group crashed and burned because we quickly decided that suspending the book from the ceiling 'wasn't cricket'.  No such inhibitions from our competitors! Then at 'Co-Creation Rules' I had learned to loosen up a bit and when the entire room of respectable academics, business people etc were asked to act out killing each other in slow-mo  I was able to let rip.   
So what has building a tripod out of the FT and attacking perfect strangers with a samuri sword taught me?  That the art to encouraging creative collaboration is to discard many but not all of the rules we and our leaders impose.  Aspire to 'bounded freedom'.