NESTA Connect

Global challenges require interdisciplinary solutions

Interdisciplinary collaborations are the key to solving global challenges according to John Beddington, Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Governement, speaking at last nights Crucible reception in London.

We are very proud of our Crucible programme and participants past and present which brings together early career researchers from academia and industry, and from a wide range of scientific and social science disiplines. It is the type of forum which doesn't exist nearly enough in my view and it's at the edge or intersection of those disciplines where the interesting stuff happens i.e the global solutions to big problems, or the exciting new research areas.

We are abitious about finding more opportunities to mainstream this kind of activity therefore we're really pleased to be able to announce that the UK Energy Research Centre  are looking to run their own Crucible.  The Centre acts as a bridge between the UK energy research community and the wider world, including business, policymakers and the international energy research community. This is an example of a demand-led rather than discipline-led research which I believe will increasingly be a model of future research success in the UK.

We hope this new Crucible partnership will be successful in seeding interdisciplinary collaborations, particularly between the science and technology communities and the social sciences. Only by combining these expertise will we be able to tackle the big issues in energy research such as demand reduction and environmental sustainability.

Are we doomed?

Pretty much so according to this article in the New Scientist. I am blogging about this not because the future of the human race is part of NESTA's remit (it's not) but because of NESTA Connect's interest in putting together large innovative networks.  New work in complexity theory suggests that the more complex a system is the more it is prone to instability and collapse (Just look at what one oil refinery strike in Scotland is capable of if you doubt it).  If we are trying to build complex on line systems for innovation this is a watchout - will they be more vulnerable than tried and tested ways of innovating?  One last sobering thought.  This article quotes Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist from Utah: " I sometimes think of [technology] as a faith-based approach to the future" he says, and the article concludes that innovation might be subject to diminishing returns or perhaps absolute limits governed by our resources, the complexity of our systems and a desire for growth at all costs.   

Extreme collaboration: The Formula 1 Intensive Care Unit

Regular readers of this blog or attendees at our events, know that we describe our objective to be all about fostering new, unexpected or extreme collaborations across disciplines and organisations. The word 'extreme' always seems to catch people's attention and I'm often asked what that means. I think the best way to explain is through an example.

We came across a great example of extreme collaboration described in this article about how Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the McLaren and Ferrari racing teams worked together to halve the number of mistakes in the surgical and intensive care units through a collaborative project.

However this is the sort of collaboration that normally never occurs. People and institutions tend to network and learn within their field, discipline, sector or silo of choice, but usually don't engineer sufficient diversity into their networking to allow these kinds of serendipitious cross-fertilisation of ideas to occur in the first place. I believe that individuals and organisations should deliberately create space within our schedules to network outside of our silo say 10% of the time, and I am confident the benefits would be realised provided there was a sufficiently open mind to make the necessary lateral leaps.

I think this example illustrates how knowledge from one domain (formula one racing) can be usefully applied into another (intensive care units of a hospital). Does anybody else have any good examples of extreme collaboration or experience of how it can be fostered to generate innovation?

Can the UK meet new interdisicplinary challenges?

This morning the today programme did a feature on synthetic biology - a new field that is really taking off and combines the skills of engineering and biology to essentially build biological systems from scratch. I think you can listen again on their website - the item was just before 9am.

The most famous proponent of the field is the american researcher Craig Venter founder of the Institute for Genomic Research in Maryland, USA now called the J Craig Venter Institute with an additional campus in San Diego The Today feature interview Professor John McCarthy, head of the Manchester Interdisciplinary Biocentre who has previously commented on this blog. The feature was very timely as i had just mentioned synthetic biology in NESTAs other blog. This is a new field requiring interdisciplinary research and the ability to work across the physical and biological sciences. If successful, it could have a transformative effect in many areas of technology from pharmaceuticals to biofuels. The problem for the UK is that with our education system which encourages early specialisation, we produce graduates with such a narrow focus that they do not have enough basic knowledge of both fields to flourish in such interdisciplinary areas. The feeling amongst some of the academic community - as relayed to me by a member of staff at the Royal Society - is that because of our education systems the UK may very well be left behind in this important emerging area of research.

Are these really the 50 most innovative companies?

Business week has just published its annual list of top 50 innovative companies available here. Are these really the 50 most innovative companies? Who do you think should be on the list?

I think the list is rather predictable and tells us more about what people think of as innovation. These are big brand product led companies which are important but is that really what we mean by innovation?  As always the list is more telling for who it leaves out rather than who it includes - what about companies from sectors such as architecture/construction, financial services, media, brand and PR, financial services and tourism and hospitality?

Nesta recently published a policy brief on innovative firms which talked about the UK not having produced 'Gorillas' like Google and Microsoft. It's often said that if Bill Gates had started Microsoft in the UK he'd now be heading up the biggest software business in Guildford i.e. we lack the aggressive ambition to grow in the UK.

However many organisations are becoming increasingly distributed and outsourced. Over 40m US citizens are self employed 'free agents' and 20% of UK workforce will soon be working from home. Whilst the UK would surely benefit from more brands that act as hubs in the global economy, there are many examples of small companies or even individuals who act as powerful nodes which can be more agile, responsive and dare I say it, innovative.

Are online social networks the new cities?

You may have seen that Nesta is planning it's forthcoming Innovation Edge conference which is shaping up to be a really interesting day.  In preparing for the event I casually mentioned to the organisers that it might be interesting to have a session on the topic of social networks as the new cities. This casual comment has now morphed into a great line up of speakers including Michael Birch (Bebo), Richard Leese (Manchester City Council), Jon Gisby (Ch4), Inkie (Street Artist and SEGA) and Charlie Leadbeater (We-think Author).

The session is getting very popular so I'm getting a little nervous about how the themes we should and could debate and discuss. So I thought I'd ask readers of this blog if there were particular points of view of questions you might have for any of the panelists that we can feed in to the preparation for this session?

My take, for what it's worth, is that cities have traditionally been the financial, social and creative of the world. However technology now enables new centres of gravity to form online and we now carry our 'communities' on the devices in our pockets? I think this is profoundly impacting on the way we connect, interact and collaborate and will fundamentally change our cities and traditional social hubs. Obviously the death of cities is far from being realised with most cities growing rather than contracting, so we still crave the interaction and benefits that close proximity affords. And yet many people complain that we don't know our neighbours and our communities are increasingly isolated. With our expanding and increasingly global social networks, what do you think this will mean socially, politically and geographically in 5, 10 or even 20 years time?

These are all huge themes and I'm not expecting complete answers, but I'd really welcome any thoughts and ideas you might have that we could pose to the panel to discuss and debate at the event. BTW, the event will be webcast so if you can't make it you will still be able to see what happens.

Control the Process NOT the ideas

I spent the day yesterday listening to the diverse experiences of four leading interdisciplinary collaborators, as selected by a community of over 450 other noted interdisciplinary practitioners. This was part of a Nesta research project which is still in it's early days so I won't attempt to summarise the findings here just yet.

However one thing occurred to me as the day progressed to be a common thread in each person's experience. Namely that successful interdisciplinary collaboration thrives in an environment with clear boundaries or controls around process and behaviours, but limited or no controls around the legitimacy or control of ideas.

For me this was an interesting insight as in setting up new collaborations we often spend a lot of time imposing controls over the ideas, but not enough contrals around the process and environment. These collaborations then often fail due to distrust or disagrements around the intellectual property or different intellectual perspectives. A much more productive collaboration would flourish with infrastructure and incentives that liberate the cross fertilisation of ideas through a clear set of boundaries and process.

What's your experience? Are we looking to control the wrong thing?

Open alchemy starts bubbling

After what seems an eternity of preparation, NESTA Connect's new programme kicked off in some style at the RSA on Thursday.  Open alchemy is an exercise in collaborative innovation between non-competing companies linked by a shared supplier, Oracle.  The hypothesis we are testing is that if we link up a diverse group of one company's major clients and ask them to innovate together we will get just the right balance of common interest and productive weirdness.  We'll see!

Anyway at least everyone turned up (in no particular order Lloyds TSB, NHS, Virgin Atlantic, Unilever,  BT, Arup, Rolls Royce, Cancer Research UK, Pfizer, BBC, Vocalink, Dept of Transport, Interbrand). The evening was ably facilitated by Innovaro who are a core team member with us and Oracle.  This enabled our diverse group to choose four agreed future trends/themes which were adapted from Innovaro's Gamechanger programme. This first meeting (or Catalyst Dinner) will now lead to a 24 hr innovation workshop in June called the Reaction Chamber where we will develop these themes to provide breakthrough innovations, or at least concepts which we can work on together.  More news nearer the time but on this evidence it seems that the idea of linking companies together like this could well be a scaleable idea. 

I'm also delighted to see some of the themes we discussed on the night are already generating comment.

Virtual Clusters

We have an interesting group of projects emerging as part of the NESTA Connect programme that is provisionally called 'Virtual Clusters'. Projects to date include Web Science Research Initiative, Swarmteams, RSA Networks, Social Innovation Camp and a couple of exciting location specific projects too. We are now looking to find somebody to develop and manage this portfolio with a specific focus upon innovation clusters, both location based and virtual/global. It should be interesting and fun. More details are available here. Please get in touch if you know anyone who might be interested.

Accelerating Social Innovation: lessons from SiCamp

80 ideas, 100 people, 44 hours, 7 projects, sun, snow, and lots of energy and enthusiasm. Social Innovation Camp came and went last weekend and was great fun and very productive. For a flavour of how it all worked, take a look at the Guardian Blog by Bobbie Johnson, Twitter, Flickr, or David Wilcox Qik videos.

The reason I was keen for Nesta to support SiCamp in the first place was to see if a hack-weekend format would work for bringing together people around social challenges. I was not aware of it being tried before like this, certainly not in the UK. Also, it seems to fit our Nesta Connect mantra of experimenting with new, unexpected or extreme collaboration to stimulate new innovation.

On of the big lessons for me of the weekend was how limited organisation can unleash ideas, which is counter-intuitive for many. There was so much energy and enthusiasm there was in all the groups compared with the large organisations and beaurecracies that normally try to solve some of these very same issues, but they tend to try to crack 'nuts' with a proverbial 'sledgehammer'.

Also, none of the groups that came together were pre-formed so there was a big socialisation aspect that was really important. A great way they used to break the ice on the first night was some stickers where you could tag yourself or others with words that describe yourself in some shape or form: 'geek', 'coder', 'troublemaker', 'connector' etc. As Johnnie Moore stated in one of the clips, it's very hard to be pompous with stickers/tags on you, and that certainly helped build the interactions.

So well done again to the team, in particular Anna Maybank, Paul Miller, Christian Ahlert and Dan McQuillan for doing a great job in making it all happen and work so well. The big question for me now is, how to mainstream the energy, enthusiasm and ideas of Si Camp at larger scale.