NESTA Connect

Organising without organisations

I attended an RSA lunchtime lecture last week with Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and co-hosted by Matthew Taylor of the RSA and Nico McDonald of Spy Media. The delegates were a who's who of the London internet scene who had rushed out of the lunch breaks to attend and unfortunately there wasn't a proper opportunity afterwards to catch up properly. He started out with a great statement as follows:

"web technology is becoming boring enough to be socially interesting."

i.e. the technology (blogs, wikis, social networks, email etc) is now useable enough to be adopted by lots of people to use it in new and interesting ways. He cited numerous examples of groups forming outside traditional public or private institutions to instigate change whether it is holding HSBC to account on it's promise of no bank charges to students, or to a flashmob in Minsk, Belarus, arranging to all meet in the central square and eat ice cream, which was sufficiently threatening to the authorities that the police broke up this subversive activity!

His basic premise in the book is that informational and coordination tools are so cheap and easy that groups and organisations can thrive without traditional institutions. The book covers familiar territory in a readable and interesting way, but isn’t really new per se, however in person Clay is very smart enthusiast for the new networked economy and good value.

I was interested in where he felt change would be greatest: in corporations or governments (in public or private sectors)? He was diplomatic in his response and obviously said that both are changing profoundly however he implied that the public sector is less used to people voting with their feet/wallets like the private sector is and therefore would find changing more difficult.

He finished by saying that the pace of change is so rapid that there is a social imperative to try different approaches to organising without organisations. For me this vindicated the approach we have taken with NESTA Connect which is testing open and networked organisational models in both the public and private sectors. I'd welcome further good examples of interesting open and networked institutions/organisations, or approaches or models that we could and should be testing to stimulate innovation through collaboration.

Focus on the fringe

Nice case study here of how Michelin moved from their “core business” and expanded beyond the scope of their traditional business of rubber processing to publishing tourist guidebooks. The Nokia example is more well known as it is more extreme. In neither case could this been seen as a smart move according to conventional wisdom but it's success implies that the conventional wisdom needs to be re-written, and it is.

The social life (and scent) of information

I've just finished reading 'The social life of information' by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, an oldish book (published in 2000) that too many people have recommended to me recently for me to ignore any longer.

It is always slightly shocking to me how dated the technology sections are in these kinds of books even after only 8 years. However the basic premise being that we are entranced by information and neglect the social context within which it operates.

My favorite anecdote from the book is a little story where a historian was reading through dusty old correspondence from the archives of a medical corporation and not finding the insight he was looking for. That is until he noticed the faint smell of vinegar on some of the letters, which he then realised was a reminant of the disinfectant used by the postal service from all post coming from towns or villages with a confirmed outbreak of cholera. This additional context clearly changed the rather cheery text contained in the letters, to something all the more interesting.

The authors also quashed much of the evangalism which is still rife about technology and the web signaling the death of distance, organisations, politics, institutions etc. Technology is having a huge impact on all of these things and more and yet they exist for a reason and the important question for me is how they will adapt to a world where information is plentiful and free.

And the audience takes over....

Building on what happened at the We-think event last week you may have seen that the audience took over when Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, was interviewed last Sunday at the South by Southwest Interactive festival – see here for what happened. An interesting follow up post here by Steven Berlin on the best way to gauge the tone in a room without technology is to crack a few jokes. 

Innovation - for profit or humanity?

Roland has got there first and given a great description of the latest project supported by NESTA Connect – Science for Humanity - so I wont do it again! But I think this project brings together several issues that are on the research community’s mind at the moment as well as ours!

In last thursday Independent Philip Moriarty, a physics professor at Nottingham argued that research had become too commercialised and that the government now was effectively asking researchers to “act like the research and development wing of a corporation.” He argued that academic research should be done in the public interest, not driven by the aims of a company.

Following on from this Will Hutton wrote a piece in last Sundays Observer looking at the tightrope that universities are being asked to walk between, on the one hand, being centres of knowledge and learning for their own sake and on the other, creating economic benefits for their region and country.

Hutton sites that those in the mould of Moriarty feel there is “an academic vocation that does not readily sit with commercial values”. And this is where I think Science for Humanity may have a part to play.

Whilst the argument about universities and the economic impact agenda will keep going, is there another avenue that we might want researchers to go down? Could they be using their knowledge and learning to innovate for the good of humanity?

We are hoping this is so – Science for Humanity is looking to harness the innovative capacity of researchers who don’t want to live in ivory towers but might not be motivated by profit.

What is Science for?

The impact of science and technology on our lives can hardly be overstated, and yet this is not universally applicable, and the differences between the developed and developing world are vast and growing further apart every day. And yet we are sleep walking into unprecendented levels of inequality between the technology have's and have-nots according to Susan Greenfield, speaking at Nesta launch of Science for Humanity last night.

She goes one to state that all scientists love solving problems, but then asks why these problems are often very narrowly focussed and, for university based researchers at least, stifled by the every increasing complexity of securing grant funding and the RAE. A great believer in the equalling power of science, she questioned why scientists cannot have more opportunity to apply their problem solving skills to some of the most challenging issues facing humanity. By her own admission she is possibly naively optimistic, however better that than a cynical bystander.

The idea behind this project was first published in her book Tomorrow's People and has now taken shape as this new network of individuals and organisations seeking to use their knowledge and experience to help create solutions to some of the world's most urgent social problems.

We also heard from Sir Gordon Conway, the Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for International Development, who also gave numerous examples illustrating the case for science to tackle issues of the developing world and the millenium development goals.

The immediate task of Science for Humanity is to build the network of both scientists and NGOs to register their interest and areas of interest, with a view to creating models for collaborative innovation which turn science into solutions that make a real and sustainable difference to the lives and livelihoods of billions of poor people in developing countries.

The Practical challenges in implementing this vision should not be underestimated and yet the buzz in the room was palpable and the interest and expectation is now there to deliver a more outwardly engaged and purposeful science community. Further ideas on how this could and should happen would be very welcome.

We-think: you are what you share

  Last night Nesta hosted the launch of Charlie Leadbeater's latest and long awaited book 'We-think' . The evening also featured the self proclaimed 'antichrist of silicon valley', Andrew Keen, author of last years 'Cult of the Amateur'. The two speakers were set up to occupy opposing ends of the debate around the impact of the web on society, economy and politics. However the discussion was remarkably agreeable, but that’s not to say they both agreed; far from it.

I won’t go over their arguments in detail rather will pick out a couple of the points which I found most interesting in the context of many of the things we are grappling with as part of NESTA Connect.

Charlie’s perspective is that we are moving from a world where ‘you are what you own’ to ‘we are what we share’. His thesis is nicely summarised in this little youtube video for a quick summary we-think and reminds me of a little of the excellent The Machine is Us/ing Us. He goes on to argue that the impact of the web will spread much further than media and entertainment and will have significant impact around 70% of the economy, and interestingly the biggest impact will be on the developing world where technology will allow millions of people to become participators. In terms of the pace of change, it could be remarkably slow, as much as 50 years for the culture to shift in many organisations. There are many issues yet to be resolved but on balance the impact on freedom, equality and democracy will be beneficial.

Andrew paints Charlie as a utopian (in the best possible taste). He stated that the web encourages anonymity and allows people not to take responsibility for their actions. He also had few kind words for people such as Chris Anderson, who he says have embraced the internet as an excuse for doing away with the state, absolute free market, doing away with State. He also controversially, states that academics are perfectly placed to be the risk takers of the future. The tenure system lends itself towards inward thinking but challenge is to lend itself to more speculative thinking. He argues that Universities might be the front line of the new battle and is the perfect institution to be turned upside down.

The most interesting part of the discussion for me was that the web, a platform that lends itself to sharing and arguably the 1960s greatest legacy, is now the platform for modern commerce which is based on individual ownership and competition. So the key challenge will be how will big organisations, whether private or public, will adapt to this collaborative world? Interestingly the debate around the impact of the web in the US tends to be mostly focussed upon the economics, but the debate last night focussed as much on the social and political implications. The consensus from both speakers was that organisations are critical and require a core engine that makes the rules and combines both top down and bottom up solutions.

So in conclusion, it was an interesting and thought provoking evening with lots of meaty issues to chew over. My own views are obviously more closely aligned with we-think than cult but Andrew made some interesting and perhaps deliberately controvertial statements, only some of which I disagreed with. For me, this reinforces the sentiment that concencus creates echo not bandwidth and that diverse or extreme perspectives are a good thing. With that in mind we should actively encourage and set up more debates and discussions  along these lines. What unlikely pairing could and should we get next time?