NESTA Connect

Stuff I Like

Here at NESTA we're privileged to get exposed to lots of innovation "stuff" - (products, processes, services, people, connections).

It seems churlish not to try to share some of it, so here are some links to things that I like.

British Library Business and IP Centre
http://www.bl.uk/bipc/

A wonderful resource to help develop your innovative idea into a business. Check the vast library of patents and get some free advice. Alternatively, you can marvel in the gorgeous building - food for the soul and worth the ticket price to London if you don't live there.

Wii Hack. In a good way.
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/245

Johnny Chung Lee shows TED a couple of innovative uses for a Wii remote.

I like this because:

- His hacks bring either social benefit or fun, or both.

- He's showing a lovely example of user-led innovation.

-  At the end of the video clip, he makes the point that rapid dissemination (via YouTube), helped him take a prototype to a mainstream market in less than 6 months.

- Johnny's presenting at the rather wonderful TED conference.

Virtual Worlds and Kids. Some good news.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7415442.stm

A BBC story about the benefits kids can get from virtual worlds. The research makes a good point about asking users what they want - even if they're "just kids"!

My colleague Katherine Mathieson has written more on the subject of kids and innovation.

Apologies if you've seen any of these before. If so, your challenge is to post up your own favorite innovation stuff.

2 steps to a small and connected world

There was an interesting article here in the FT yesterday about geographic context providing the next generation internet, and there is already a lot of serious cash pouring in that particular direction as described in the article.

However my question is, will that be enough? This query is triggered because I'm also currently reading finally Duncan Watt's now quite old book 6 degrees of separation where he describes something that had been puzzling people interested in networks for  a while, which they describe as the small world paradox.

Let me see if I can describe this as I understand it. By taking one step and then another, can never get you further than taking 2 steps (see the picture of the triangle for a mathematical illustration of this same point). However in network theory this is exactly what can happens. 2 steps through a network (or 2 degrees of separation) can take you very far indeed. The best way to describe this is if you have 2 friends who you know through very different circumstances who you don't think would have anything in common. So 2 people who are potentially very different (and therefor far apart in their own social networks), are actually very close - in fact just 2 steps removed because of their affliation with you!

The logical leap here is that people usually connect with people they are similar to, however they also a) use a couple of different criteria to determine how people are similar such as geography AND occupation and b) people tend to emphasise similarities over differences. And it's these conditions that make the world small, and therefore also searchable. If you use just one criterion, i.e. just geography, the network is very large and unsearchable. It's also worth noting that if you use too many categories to label nodes in a network it becomes overly fragmented and again unsearchable.

Which brings me back to the FT article - geographic search is great and important but not enough in itself, so the wise bucks will go towards creating content and networks that are categorised and searchable by several but not too many different contexts.

'Open' journalism?

Recently the Liverpool Daily Post become the first newspaper in the UK to broadcast its afternoon editorial conference live on the web.

In addition to the video stream editorial staff simultaneously have a live blog, giving readers the opportunity to comment on events and make suggestions.

An interesting example of a more 'open' and collaborative approach - will be intersting to see how this works in journalism and what sort of effect it will have on the areas that they cover.

Managing Creativity

Here at NESTA, we often discuss the role of creativity in innovation.

My tentative conclusion so far is that great artists or creative thinkers always challenge the status quo - and that's why they're useful to the innovation agenda.

Having the desire to change things and the ability to ask "Why-not?" seems as characteristic of the good artist as it is of the good entrepreneur.

An oft-asked question is whether this can be taught or harnessed.

Gordon Torr explores this in his new book - Managing Creative People - worth a read.

The view from the Innovation Edge

In the 18 months or so since I’ve worked at Nesta we’ve hosted probably over 100 small events (by small I mean for around 50 and 150 people). Yesterday we cranked things up a couple of notches and then some, and hosted the Innovation Edge conference at the Royal Festival Hall in London.

Over 3000 people registered, I’m not sure how many people turned up in the end but needless to say it was a lot. Somebody said to me that there were 3000 people who didn’t really know why they were there – it was meant as a joke however on reflection I think that is strangely a good thing. What other forums exist to convene such a diverse crowd – I think we need more opportunities like that.

The highlights for me, and most people I think, were Tim Berners Lee, Bob Geldof, and even Gordon Brown, and the exhibition space too which was buzzing. They all managed to make a big meta subject like innovation very real and voiced strong opinions in different ways. Several people have commented that the panel discussions were less successful and I have to agree (though I only attended 2). It’s really hard to have an interesting and intimate conversation with 700 people in the room – a challenge for many big conferences and something we’ll need to learn from. Next time I’d be keen to combine the big name keynotes from the likes of Tim, Bob and Gordon (sounds like a Cornish folk band to me!) with a much more fluid and informal afternoon session.

The video and audio from these sessions and the rest of the day can be found here.

The whole day was also rather bizarre for me as I was manning the conference twitter account. Twitter, for those that haven’t heard of it yet, is a service for people to communicate through the exchange of quick and brief comments. You can see the outcome from the experiment here (though you’ll need to scroll back to posts yesterday). There were at least 150 people tweeting. I have mixed feeling about this experiment. I do feel strongly that social media are changing social dynamics at conferences, as they are elsewhere, and we should embrace them. However I don’t think I’ve seen it used brilliantly yet. It was interesting if not a little distracting to engage with it during the sessions. It can be, and unfortunately it was at times yesterday, used rather negatively. However I think we have discovered a new phenomenon of at least one reported case of post event twitter hangover. It did enable me to meet up with a bunch of twitterati in several of the breaks, none of whom I knew, but was a great way of networking at such a huge event.

We’ll now surely revert to hosting a series of smaller events as before, for some time including hosting Tim Berners Lee in person on July 8th, which I’m very much looking forward to (more details on that shortly). However, on balance, I think its good to have a big bold event like Innovation Edge once in a while and based on much of the verbal and virtual feedback I’ve seen today, I think we pulled it off.

As always, I’d be very keen to hear your views or opinions on the day, how it could and should be different next time round, and on the use of social media at conferences etc...

Innovation Edge - formal and informal conversations

We've got 3000 people registered to come to our annual conference called innovation edge next Tuesday. There are lots of interesting speakers but as has been mentioned many times before, the traditional speaker/audience format of big conferences doesn't make the most of the knowledge and networks of the attendees.

People have been experimenting with open space formats in recent years which is great but not right for such a big event i don't think. Also, sometimes we simply want to hear what people have to say. I'm looking forward to Tim Berners Lee in particular, even through it's via a video link up.

So facilitating some real dialogue at an event like this is tricky given the scale of the thing. However we are going to try and experiment which I've seen work really well at smaller events. Namely we've set up a Twitter account specifically for the conference and will try to participate in some conversations between the attendees live, and I'm the shmuck who agreed to do it. Now don't get me wrong, I'm really happy to try it but I'm not quite sure how it will work and am a little worried about insufficient connectivity at the venue, but nothing ventured nothing gained I guess.

Anyway the feed will appear on this blog so you can keep an eye on what's being talked about. We will also be live blogging here. Else, sign up to Twitter, if you haven't already done so, follow @innovationedge, and join the conversation if you fancy trying it.

Vague but exciting!

In March 1989, Tim Berners-Lee submitted a proposal for an information management system to his boss, Mike Sendall. ‘Vague, but exciting’, were the words that Sendall wrote on the proposal (available to see here), allowing Berners-Lee to continue to develop and invent the web, and subsequently spawn the internet revolution that we are still very much in the midst of.

I think this is amusing but also an important comment in the context of managing innovation. Namely Mike Sendall had the vision and scope to allow him to continue to develop ideas that were 'vague' but have subsequently led to an almost unquantifiable amount of economic and social value. In a world overly obsessed with productivity (which I've talked about previously here), how would this be allowed to happen in most organisations today?

Many thanks to James made me aware of the Vague but Exciting quote in the first place.

On a related point, I'm very excited that we have Tim Berners-Lee speaking via live link up at our innovation edge conference in a couple of weeks. Recently voted (here) the most influential figure in the world of technology over the last 150 years, he claims (in this BBC article) that "the web is still in its infancy". I'm very much looking forward to hearing from him what his hopes and fears are for the web's teenage years and adulthood?

Lights...camera...social action!

For those of you interested and who haven't seen it already, have a look at the social innovation camp film available here. It's less than 10 minutes and gives a much better taste of what it was all about than any words can convery. As I've said previously it was a great experiment and one that appears to have been talked about a great deal already (e.g. here and here  and here) and I really hope it grows and goes from strength to strength.   

Intellectual Property and the Unreasonable Man

George Bernard Shaw is famous for having said "The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him... The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself... All progress depends on the unreasonable man." Perhaps one such example is the now long famous rise and fall of Shane Fanning, founder of Napster, who whilst still in his teens, pretty much destroyed or transformed the music industry, depending on your point of view. 

Is this an example of, as David Albert Newman suggests of "pirating intellectual property ... for the good of society ... (if) this is a correction to dysfunctional markets"? This comment comes from a very interesting Harvard Business Review Online Forum entitled Who Owns Intellectual Property?, which nicely summarises the multiplicity of opinions about IP these days.

In creating new models of collaborative innovation, we are understandable continually hitting up against the IP issues and trying to figure out how to share risk and reward. I believe these issues are very closely related to the often ignored concept of trusted relationships between collaborators. I'm still not exactly sure of how things need to change, but I have no doubt that they must. Are current IP arrangements are a relic of 20th Century business and will they be increasingly subverted/irrelevant? Have a look at the HBS forum and see what you think.