NESTA Connect

Innovating without a budget

Given these tough current economic climate I'm interested in how can you innovate without spending any money at all?

This scenario cropped up for me recently as I was chatting to an old friend who has just taken on responsibility for innovation within the company he works for, a successful software development company, that works primarily within the pharmaceutical sector. The company is full of scientists and other left brain types.

He was asking me for ideas about things they could do i leapt in with various ideas, but they all required some cash e.g. buying various books, bringing in external facilitation, and setting aside some budget to kick start various promising experiments and bringing them to proof of concept stage. He slightly sheepishly thanked me for the suggestions but then came clean that there was no budget, at all! Not even for a book or two. The emphasis is new for them and I think the senior management are reluctant to put money into high risk activity without it proving it's value.

We often talk about the value of innovating around constraints but what about a very hard constraint such as zero cash and just some time and good will of colleagues?

So my suggestions for what it's worth are:

1. Get out more - set aside some time to meet people - clients, customers, other companies or people doing interesting stuff. don't try too hard at first to link it immediately to the business. Just try to get inspired initially.

2. Mix things up - sit in a different seat, find some right brain thinkers, stir things up a bit, start researching other fields or domains.

3. Encourage both uncertainty and decisiveness - the danger with left brain organisation is they will close down new ideas before they've had time to mature so it is hard to develop new ideas. But at the same time be decisive about killing bad ideas or more importantly trying new stuff.

4. Find a few quick wins - are there some obvious things you could implement now that would prove the value of innovation within the company to secure some cash to try slightly larger scale projects.

That's as far as I got as a first attempt. But what do you think? I'd be really interested if you could help come up with ideas for what he, or anybody, could do to innovate without spending money. Thanks.

So what does it all mean?

This is the latest excellent video from Karl Fisch et al from shifthappens, the previous iteration of which you can see here.  It's provocative stuff, for everyone, not just those in education at whom it was first targetted.

Thank you to Dominic Campbell for bringing it to my attention.

Collaborative Models in the Film Industry

I love film festivals, and the London Film Festival is one of my favourites.

This year, NESTA is sponsoring a London Film Festival Fringe event, called Power to the Pixel. Director Liz Rosenthal describes the event as looking “ahead to where the power of the internet and digital platforms can offer new opportunities for those creators and companies that can no longer effectively function within the old film business model”.

Of course, there are plenty of traditional film businesses trying to understand these opportunities also.

Showcased at Power to the Pixel were some of the most innovative creative and business tools from around the world. Here are some of them:

PlaceVine – brings content creators and brand owners together to create sponsored content. Check out Shane Meadows Somers Town for an example. Would you guess that his short film was fully funded by Eurostar?

M dot Strange – talked about how to make a $70 million (style) feature film in your bedroom, and then show the world how to do it for yourself via YouTube. He uses his social network of admirers as zombie extras who then virally market the movie. And then they subtitled it into 17 languages. For free.

Wreck a Movie – gives film-makers a platform to crowd-source their own production using social networks. Timo Vuorensola explained how he and some friends went from space cadets in Star Wreck: In the Pirkinning to selling war bonds to fund animated feature that satirises Moon-based Nazis in Iron Sky.

All of the talks will be up on the Power to the Pixel website soon.

Embracing Chaos & Connectivity

I recently watched an excellent documentary on BBC4 called 'high anxieties: the mathematics of chaos' (still available on iplayer) which essentially tells 3 interwoven histories over the last 100 years or so, namely:

1. Chaos theories in mathematics
2. Economic theories and models
3. Climate change theories and models

To cut a long story short, the main message is that  we have repeatedly make the mistake of believing that the world behaves like a big pinball machine with predictable causes and effects. However in reality, mathematics and science include inbuilt chaotic behaviour which we generally choose to ignore as it's too unsettling.

More specifically, what the 3 histories show us is the following:

• The is potential for chaotic behaviour almost everywhere
• the more connected a system is, The more likely that chaotic behaviour occurs that system (be it mathematical, economic, climate etc)
• The more you drive/push/grow a system, the more likely chaotic behaviour will occur.

Now I can't see our global connectivity decreasing any time soon; in fact I think it can only increase. Therefore assuming chaos is generally something we strive to avoid/manage in economics or our climate, this suggests to me that we need to rethink our attitude to relentless growth.

Ever the optimist I believe we need to embrace this ambiguity and chaos, not ignore it, and be more wary of certainty. Perhaps we should learn to live with ambiguity from unexpected sources such as artists, the slow movement and mathmeticians. But then again i'm not certain.

Is a recession a threat or opportunity?

You could argue that the medium or long term prospects of many organisations will be the last thing on the minds of their management teams at the moment.  Cost of materials and transport are rocketing, currencies are fluctuating wildly, share prices are all over the place and I haven't even mentioned credit or the lack of it.  I was working in the advertising industry the last time things slowed down and remember all the arguments that we advanced for increasing spend and not cutting back like the competition.  Some clients were able to heed this advice and some weren't and I learned that there is no general rule. I am working with two contrasting organisations at the moment in this regard.  One, Oracle, is talking about encouraging  businesses to avoid succumbing to the trench mentality that today's economic uncertainty understandably is provoking. They argue that with the right support this could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for innovators and entrepreneurs to fight their way out of the downturn with creative products and services.  The other organisation's cup is half empty (I won't mention who)  and see a downturn in consumer spending exacerbating an already tight situation.  Innovation is still important but it will be turned towards cost-reduction rather than true creativity.  Which side of the fence do you sit on and what will the implications for your organisation's future focus?

Extreme collaboration take 2: Resistance

What do you get when you bring together a film maker and actor (Gael Garcia Bernal, Motorcycle Diaries & Babel etc), a human rights campaign director (Colm Ó Cuanacháin, Amnesty International) and a supposed expert on web technology (err...that would be me then apparently), all ably facilitated by Wai Mun Yoon, a digital strategist and all round renaissance man?

The answer is a great little event yesterday called Resist which sought to understand how communications networks shift the way we understand poverty and our power to resist its causes?

The outcome was a great discussion which also involved a fair few people chipping in questions from the web, all feeding in to the development of a film with Gael and filmmaker Marc Silver are producing and due to come out in 2010.

It was an unusual gig for me, and different to what I usually get involved in, but one I enjoyed all the more so because of the different perspectives that fed into the discussion, and not the usual suspects to talk about these topics. The webcast is available here if you want to take a look. I hope to be involved going forward and urge you to take a look too and get involved too.

By the way, this post builds upon a previous post on this blog here, which seeks to illustrate what we mean by extreme collaboration which underpins all of our work here at Nesta.

Women are the natural collaborators

A recent Harvard Business School research paper describes a study of over 100,000 employees in an unnamed corporation, that analyzed over 100 million e-mails and 60 million electronic calendar entries over a three-month period.

The results showed the lack of communication across the organizational hierarchy and geography. In short, most people tended to communicate with others in their own group or with peers. However, women were statistically far more likely to transcend pre-existing organisational barriers.

This may not appear that startling a finding but i think it's important. Intuitively women tend to be the community builders and men display greater competitive drive. However in this study we see cold hard data to satisfy even the most analytically inclined (hopefully). With so much emphasis on collaboration and breaking down pre-existing silos, it needs stating that there is a clear gender divide at play here.

This has also been brought home to me recently as we've been writing a manifesto that we intend to unleash shortly called 'the campaign for extreme collaboration'. However several female colleague object to the use of the word 'extreme' as it seems unnecessarily agressive and provocative (which is part of the reason why I like it if I'm honest). However I wonder if it also makes the more feminine concept of collaboration more appealing to men. Interestingly we had a considerable positive response to the manifesto by a predominantly male community when I shared a draft of the manifesto at the recent ibm innovation jam.

We are in the midst of the first networked global recession and I believe we need to rethink or organisational and political structures to reflect this increasingly interconnected world to be more collaborative and (slightly) less competitive.  Dissappointingly women in top jobs are in decline and yet they are needed more than ever.

What is the right size to thrive in a recession?

One of my favourite observations of the last couple of days comes from James Cherkoff who runs his own small business who asks:

"What do I say the next time my commercial bank asks for a solid business plan?"

Pot calling kettle, and all that. Anyway, the current crisis really demonstrates how everything and everybody is linked to everything else. And in particular that trust (between large financial institutions) is the bedrock upon which the 21st century networked economy is all about.

So our economic fate is increasingly intertwined with others and we are experiencing our first real networked global recession as Charlie Leadbeater says. This obviously means we have to find £400bn pounds when our banks get too creative, but it also creates plentiful opportunities if we know how to embrace them. So, ever the optimist, I am wondering whether, can we turn this to our advantage given the diversity and connectedness of the UK.

Desperation is the father of necessity (with necessity being the mother of invention) and it may well be the smaller agile businesses who can find the bigger opportunities in the next 12 months, though obviously the corporates ought to find it easier to whether the storm i.e. Small is Beautiful but Big is Powerful.

The crisis is a fascinating reminder for large swathes of the population (and estate agents) in how markets can go down as well as up, but more importantly is possibly a once in a generation opportunity to really radically redesign and rethink our politics, economics, and society for the better.

Meerkat Moments

When you know what you are doing, its head down and on with business. It's when you don't know what to do, or what's going on, that you have, as Toby Moores delightfully describes it as, Meerkat moments.In other words, head up looking around frantically for new ideas and information.

It seems like that is what we are having a meerkat moment on a global scale at present. An image that I find both amusing yet disturbing. Where are the experts who understand this stuff? There don't appear to be any and we should stop looking. The myth of the expert really needs to be put to bed.

The important thing is decisive action, even if it needs to be revised or retracted later. But who know what tomorrow might bring. More meerkat moments no doubt.

Can you have too much innovation?

We are sitting here in NESTA's office in the city of London surrounded by financial chaos, much of it arguably occasioned by unrestrained innovation.  For a more qualified view than mine see Chander Velu's article here.  There is a new mantra of business nowadays, best summed up by the Economist: "Innovation is now recognised as the single most important ingredient in any modern economy".

The interesting question is can you have too much of a good thing?  We will see where the new balance of regulation versus free markets ends up in financial services but in the meantime it is interesting to note the history of innovation itself from devil to darling to disaster. 

I saw a presentation at the British Academy of Management conference recently which addressed this entitled 'When did innovation become strategic?' given by Ian Stewart of Birmingham City University . He charts the rehabilitation of innovation which, for 400 years, was seen as a form of deviance (for which you could be killed) through various subsequent stages.  These include uncomfortable pragmatism, innovation as an organisational reflex and utlimately lead to the current state of innovation as strategic and fundamental to how organisations operate.

The moral of this story? Those that are working to promote innovation such as we at NESTA need to bear in mind that it wouldn't take too much for us to be defending a discredited mantra rather than riding an unstoppable wave.