NESTA Connect

Diversity drives UK Innovation

Is diversity Britain's core characteristic?

Andrew Marr claimed on Britain from Above on Sunday that for it's size, Britain is the most geographically diverse country in the world. Also, London is now famous for being the most diverse city in the world having more than 300 languages spoken by significant populations, whereas New York comes a long way behind with a mere (!) 200. In what other ways is the UK particularly diverse (or not)?

One of our primary hypothesis at Nesta Connect is that diversity drives innovation. In other words, the more perspectives there are looking at a difficult problem, the easier it is to solve.

If that's true, is there an opportunity to better harness that diversity to make the UK a more innovative country?

Pyramid blueprints

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs describes ‘need progression’: from those that are primitive and physiological in nature to psychological ones that relate to personal growth and ‘self actualisation’. Once needs on a given level are met, the individual moves ‘up’ a level and no longer prioritises needs on the lower level.

 

Is there a pyramid for businesses? How high up is the need to collaborate? To encourage corporate open innovation, do we need to first help organisations address needs that sit towards the base of the pyramid?

Whatever the pyramid looks like, I think most organisations would place ‘the need to collaborate’ too high up. We need to convince the world to push it down towards the base. By sharing what we know about corporate open innovation, NESTA Connect can hopefully convince organisations that collaboration could be more essential for survival than they think.

Please insert meaning as required

OK. I'm always thinking about things I might blog about but then often don't because I can't finish the thought and don't want to publish until I've had a chance to think it through. But that's taking too long and means I generally don't post as often as I'd like. Therefore below are 3 fragments of stuff that I've been mulling over recently with no explanation given as I've not found one:

1. Innovation inertia - My 2 year old son loves a 'spinny thing' in the park based on the conservation of angular momentum. Momentum (or inertia) is defined as mass x velocity. If we insert product = mass and brand = velocity, then we could have a nice analogy. But what's the business equivalent of pulling yourself in to go faster?
2. Does art need to be narcissistic? Is there such a thing as selfless art? I saw the film 'Man on Wire' recently which was great. I hugely admired the achievement (walking/dancing across the twin towers on a tightrope!) but the main guy was hugely narcissistic and egotistical, as well as massively talented and driven. Is that a bad thing? How do we harness this more?
3. Cities are about closeness and proximity that cut transportation cost, but the biggest cost these days isn't for stuff, but people, and not for money but rather their travel time.
   

The Comedy Bow-Tie of Innovation

Traditional innovation theory is full of funnels such as these. The thinking is that lots of ideas miraculously appear and then are filtered down and developed until they are successfully launched into a predetermined gap in the market.

However it is widely acknowledged that this 'linear model' of innovation is a long way from reality. See here for lots more on that. Andrew Gaule has suggested here that the model is more like a bow-tie and building on that I'd like to suggest it is more like a comedy bow tie. Confused? Let me explain.

A comedy bow tie spins around in the middle for hilarious (!) comic effect.

The Comedy Bow-Tie of innovation on the other hand is a little something like this (excuse the hand drawing but I couldn't figure out an easy way of doing spirals)

• Phase A - Lots of potential inputs. New ideas are simply recombinations of old ideas
• Phase B - Iterate furiously
• Phase C - Breadth of market applications

All a bit like a comedy bow-tie don't you think?

So to stimulate innovation one must:

1. Legitimise scanning for new ideas from unlikely places e.g. Googletime (assuming you are already scanning in the usual places)
2. Create the space to iterate - innovations never come fully formed and need to be developed and redeveloped many times. This requires time and small amounts of money e.g. Skunkworks
3. Set up a mechanism to target multiple markets, this is seldom clear early on

What do you think? Does this make sense? And can you help us find a better name?

Artificial dualities, digital yoga and the embodied web

I call it artificial.  Clay Shirky calls it "an accident of history".  We're talking about the distinction made between online & offline.  The other common terms for this pair is virtual & real or (dare I even say it) cyberspace & meatspace.  Whatever the language used however, the problem I have is not with the words per se but with the split itself.

Differentiate then integrate.  For any innovation in whatever field to really become pervasive, it pretty much has to follow this simple three word formula.  If you're reading this blog, more likely than not, you've lived through the period where the internet and web technologies have differentiated and now we are in the first real phase of integration.  If you're not sure what differentiate means, the simple test is to remember life before Facebook.  If you're not sure what integrate means, the test for that is to remember life without email. See!

This is why Clay talks of making a distinction between online and offline as an accident of history.  No ten year old uses this language because their digital life is conditioned so early.  Show me the person today who considers a phone call a virtual experience.  But back in the day, holding and speaking into a piece of metal resulting in the voice of your grandmother who lives in Idaho must have been a pretty ethereal experience.

The reality of our lives contain all experience, be that spent reading this post, slaying a demon on World of Warcraft or having a coffee with a new friend.  By using stark binary dualities as virtual and real, we are distinguishing one as having more substance than the other.  This is separation and perhaps a disservice - our world probably has enough of that.  Let us consign this particular accident of view to history and instead move to a far more interesting problem.

A relationship that I am finding much more useful to explore is that between the non-binary pair of web and place.  Or to use an equivalent spiritual pairing, mind and body.  As a culture which has become ever more dependent on the intellectual faculties of mind since the Renaissance (thank you M. Descartes), our disconnection between mind and body has become increasingly acute.  In fact, the information economy in which most of us live pretty much does not require our bodies at all, much of the time we may as well be brains in vats.

The Sanskrit word yoga means union, for through its practices body and mind, though never ever really apart, are invited back into intimate relationship.  This can take effort, it certainly takes patience and commitment but the results are well worth it since they are harmony, peace, learning and a strength that can move mountains.

(Please excuse any contradiction but) There is danger in the web remaining a web-only phenomenon.  So what we need now is a digital yoga - the reconnection between web and place.  I call this the Embodied Web. Enough brains in vats.  Let's get integrating.

Thankfully of course this is inevitable. Thankfully of course this is already happening.  Alternate reality games, geo-social networking tools like Brightkite and everyone born in affluent circumstances since 1992 are all early examples of this artificial boundary becoming more and more blurred.  You'll probably be alive to see it dissolve completely.  Be excited.

Dealing in more than one currency

I remember after a relatively lazy lunch some years ago, asking a friend of mine who worked at the Bank of England what this thing money really was.  After the initial look of alarm in his eyes, normal service resumed and, being a solid economist, a solid economist's answer is what I got.  Somewhat unsatisfied, I then perused the rather fun Bank museum but to no avail for my question remained: what currency truly motivates our actions?

While the term online transaction may conjure up images of frozen Paypal screens and shoes which looked good on screen but give you blisters on the street, let me use it to refer to the motivation behind interacting in online communities, be that the blogosphere, social networks or whatever.  The intention behind this transaction is rarely clearcut but there appears to be two main contributions.  One is the wish to share and connect.  The other is the desire to be seen.

Together these two factors constitute whuffie, the currency introduced in Cory Doctorow's cult hit Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. 

Tara Hart in an excellent recent post on this topic clarifies whuffie when she says that:

Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it.

But does working in this kudos or gift economy get you fed?  Tara says oh yes it does, and is confident that as the value of online communities continue to grow and evolve this can only be more and more the case.  In fact, she is so confident that November will see the publication of her new book on this very topic. 

In the next few years, I believe the ability to deal in multiple currencies in a consistent and integral way will become an increasingly key skill for fruitful 21st century living.  Money, time, carbon, whuffie and attention all have their value and their place, but to over-emphasise one to the exclusion of the others can limit our view and therefore our capacity for innovation.

PS Guess how much it costs to visit the Bank of England's museum? 

Virtual Skyscrapers

There was an interesting article by Anil K Gupta in today's telegraph where he argues that the long-standing symbol of the business world, the corporate HQ, will soon be no more. The days of an all-powerful, single location, world headquarters are numbered.

And yet the world is becoming simultaneously flatter and more spiky at the same time (see here). Many organisations are becoming increasingly distributed and outsourced. This fits with the fact that over 40m US citizens are self employed 'free agents' and 20% of UK workforce will soon be working from home.  And many corporations already have their 'real' HQ's in far less glamorous locations for all sorts of practical reasons, so the central London HQ on the 50th floor is often less about the central hub and more about status and symbolism. 

So the demand for sky scrapers appears to be every increasing, but with the distributed organisation perhaps we need to invent virtual skyscrapers too.