NESTA Connect

So, what do you do for a living?

I've never liked that question as it takes too long to answer properly. I'm sure I could improve my party pitch, but I'm starting to realise that my friends or colleagues are equally bad at explaining their careers. I blogged recently about over-specialisation here which is often explained as a response to the world is becoming more complex. But is it really the case that our roles and responsibilities are more complex or simply a case of more jargon that surrounds them.

Now I know that by creating new words, groups can figure out who's in and who's out. Yet if we are moving towards more collaborative business models and yet we can't explain what we all do more clearly, then we need to find ways to simplfy our language, translate the jargon, and navigate our way around the complexity. Any suggestions?

The talkoot of the town (& bothy)

I’ve recently learned of the Finnish word ‘talkoot’ (from these guys) which is described as follows:

Talkoot is the cultural equivalent of common work in a village community, although adopted to the conditions of Finland, where traditionally many families lived in isolated farms, often miles away from the nearest village.

A talkoot is per definition voluntary, and the work is unpaid. The voluntary nature might be imaginary, due to social pressure, especially in small communities; and one's honor and reputation may be severely damaged if one doesn't show up — or proves to be a poor worker.

Learning this new word immediately reminded me of when I used to live in Edinburgh, and when we had many a great trip to bothies (such as the one in the above below). Bothies are described as simple shelters in remote country (usually means at least 2 hours walk from the nearest road and certainly no electricity or plumbing) for the use and benefit of all who love wild and lonely places.

Bothies appear to me to have a lot in common with the isolated Finnish farms where the idea of Talkoot arose. There is an implicit understanding in bothies that you temporarily share the space with anybody else who may be there, and collectively work together to gather firewood, make food, clean up etc. (As an interesting aside, Euan McIntosh also used bothies as a powerful analogy of social networks back in May at Nesta’s innovation edge conference, but I won’t go into that again here.)

But why, you might well ask, am I talking about talkoot and bothies on a blog about collaborative innovation? Well as Peter Drucker says (via Euan Semple):

In a knowledge economy there are no such things as conscripts - there are only volunteers. The trouble is we have trained our managers to manage conscripts.

Organisations based on hierarchical command and control structures have proven to be very efficient for mechanistic or specific tasks but generally terrible at stimulating innovation and creativity. So in seeking to create these new organisations in a world increasingly based on ideas and relationships, which required an environment that encourages voluntary and spontaneous contributions, perhaps we have something to learn from the spontaneous and voluntary nature of both bothies and talkoot.

Over-Specialisation Nation!

Is it is possible to become too specialised?

The dramatic events of last week on the financial markets are one example how, I believe, specialisation can cause major problems. The ever increasing (so called) 'sophistication' of financial instruments have become so complicated that they can't be understood by enough people, certainly not the financial regulators, and therefore the products that end up having no bearing on genuine economic reality, leading to the recent bubble and subsequent credit crunch.

Similarly, I have long felt frustrated at specialists in academia or industry who are so narrowly focused on their narrow niches that it is practically impossible to understand what they say and what they are working on, and only a handful of other people can even question them let alone understand them.

Don't get me wrong. Without question we desperately need well trained and educated specialists who understand complex issues in great detail, be it financial or philosophical. The world is a complicated place, and I'm not for one moment advocating a retreat to creating renaissance men and women, however appealing a romantic notion that may be. It's simply not possible for individuals to be sufficiently knowledge about a breadth of issues or disciplines as it once was.

However I think when swathes of business and academia get so specialised and riddled with jargon that they become practically incomprehensible, then I think we've gone too far and need to take a step back. I think businesses, academia and governments need to create more space for specialists to interact with larger groups of people across traditional boundaries. This is what we try to do with our NESTA Connect programme. As I've said previously this space might be provided by talented people who span multiple disciplines themselves, or organisations that act as intermediaries.

This excessive specialisation is a global phenomenon, and yet the UK is interesting in that a) it has one of the most specialised education systems in the world, and yet b) the opportunities open to graduates of a particular discipline tend to be wider here compared with Germany, and possibly the rest of Europe, for example.

So in conclusion, I believe we should no longer tolerate the uber-specialist who talks to no-one but their immediate micro peer groups. Else we run the risk of losing the ability to discuss, debate and question other people, leading to the ludicrous situation that precipitated the recent crash in financial markets.

Engineering serendipity

I met an interesting company yesterday called CellCentric, a cambridge based company that has developed a network of specialist academics (in the field of epigenetics). In essence what they do is find links between the work done by the academics generally working in very narrow specialist silo. They then can more objectively assess the ideas and also spot opportunities to develop the intellectual property and sell on the IP to big pharma companies. This type of collaboration would usually only happen by chance very rarely.

With more distributed organisations and specialised knowledge, the need for these type of organisations is increasing, who can organise integrate knowledge and organise innovation between organsisations. And it's organisations like Innocentive, Kluster, Innovaro, The Disrupters, Innovation Arts, WhatIf and CellCentric that all create value by aggregating knowledge and brokering relationships. I’m going to coin a term and acronymn and describe them as an engineering serendipity businesses (ESB), which I also think is the business NESTA Connect is in too.

Other organisations like the IPGroup do something similar to Cellcentric with the academic research base, but on a much broader disciplinary scale. Can their success in unlocking the potential of epigenetics be transferrable it is to other disciplines, or sub-discipilnes, or sectors?

I'm always keen to collect examples of interesting ESBs so please do send me details of other good examples.

Video and final stab at social networks and cities

Readers of this blog or attendees at Nesta's recent events will have heard me, or others talk about the theme of 'social networks as the new cities'.

I don't intend restart this discussion again in detail but for anybody who is interested, find here a video of a talk I gave earlier in the summer at the NLab conference in Leicester, on this topic.

It's something of a stream of consciousness exploration of the subject but hopefully gives a flavour of my point of view. Namely that cities arn't just simply analogous to social networks, but rather some of the functions that cities provide (proximity, economies of scale, random interaction etc) are now increasingly being provided by social networks.

And most importantly, we are only just beginning to see the impact on our cities and places which will be profoundly impacted by the web, just as they have been historically by other disruptive technologies.

Anyway, enough on that, but as always I'd be interested in any thoughts and feedback as ever.

PS. Thanks again to Sue Thomas for curating the event and inviting me to attend.

Convergence of Media Production

Broadcasters have for years now been talking about developing content across different platforms.

When it works well - BBC's coverage of the Olympics, Channel 4's Big Art Project - it is wonderful.

But TV producers and digital production companies have traditionally faced a key barrier to innovation. Their differing business models, ways or working and the issue of intellectual property ownership have meant that collaboration to produce convergent content is more difficult than it ought to be.

NESTA teamed up with PACT to sort it out, and they have produced some useful legal templates and a guide to allow firms to contract more easily to work together.

What we'd like to know is whether they can be used outside of these media sectors. If relevant to your business, please feel free to try them and let us know?

Guide to collobaorating

Jon

Maps and hierarchies

Generalists and specialists are needed in all organisations and in most complex situations. However they couldn't be more different and work in different ways.

For instance, generalists create maps, like the wonderful London tube map, to make connections, chart routes or lines of enquiry. Whereas specialists build hierarchies, that tend to have more linear branch (or root) like structures, like the figure on the left.

If a node fails in a map, i.e. a station is closed, it often doesn't usually matter critically, at least if it's not on the periphery. There is still a different way to navigate around. Therefore generalists are interested in the bigger system rather than the individual components.

However if a node fails in a hierarchy, it can knock out the whole branch or even the whole system. Therefore, individual components or nodes are critical for the specialist.

As a general principal, as we become more connected and distributed I believe we need more maps at different levels. This is a complex business and there is still a long way to go to make these as useable as a tube map.

To some extent I think an output of our Connect projects is to map the respective spaces we are operating in. And it's worth considering both maps and hierarchies when facilitating collaboration.

As a map geek (let's face it - who isn't?) I'd love to get any links to useful or beautiful (or both) maps that we can learn from.

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?

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.

Users, Abusers, and Cross-Cutting Networks

I attended the launch of our latest report on User-Led Innovation yesterday. The event included contributions from a number of really interesting organisations/communities such as Sibelius, Swapits, and GBADev where it's the customers/consumers/users that do much of the innovation around their respective product ranges. What is interesting about all of these examples is how people are increasingly giving away their ideas for free, either to a) address a specific need, or b) for fun, or c) for kudos; or for some complex combination of all three.

The traditional approach to innovation is to protect your ideas and create economic value from them. And yet, as access to ideas or information becomes much easier, open and free, it is the networks or communities that will become the bedrock of innovative people and organisations, not the ideas themselves. And it will be our ability, as individuals or organisations, to innovate and create value through our networks and relationships, not so much our ideas.

However the great thing about networks is also their achilles heel. Namely that their value is widely distributed. This means that it is hardly ever in one person or organisation's interest to organise them. Also, organisations are often wary of facilitating communities as it can be easy to perceive them as abusing the brand or remit of the sponsoring organisation.

Therefore, if you accept some of the above, there is possibly a role for public sector support around more cross-cutting networks, or even a network of existing networks, as others typically don't have the time, money or incentive to set them up and run them. I think Nesta already does this to a small degree but how could and should we scale this up?

TBL and events, dear boy, events

It all came and went in a bit of a blur in the end.

Sir Tim Berners Lee came to Nesta yesterday to talk about the Future of the Web, joined by Charlie Leadbeater (Author) and Andy Duncan (Channel 4). The webcast is available here. I think he's the most important person we've had at Nesta in the 18 months. Nobody else has done more for innovation or collaboration in my view. And yet he was so down to earth yet clearly very passionate about his subject even though he must talk about it publically nearly every day.

It also formed the launch of a project which we are supporting called the Web Science Research Initiative. It quite rightly seeks to study the web as a complex system in it's own right. It's at a vague but exciting stage right now and feel excited about the prospect of being part of it.

I didn't particularly enjoy the event in the end, mainly as I was somewhat preoccupied with observing other peoples thoughts via the twitter backchannel. For me, incorporating twitter was a partially successful experiment and one we can build on, but I'd rather be listening in future. I was however rather delighted to be able to ask a question on behalf of a chap in Iceland.

Others have criticised the panel and discussion format, however I think it's always a very tricky balance between the big themes and big name speakers (which draw people in) and the more detailed discussion and intimacy that we also want. In restricting Tim's talk, we aimed to give more time for discussion but in hindsight I think some people, myself included, would prefer to have just basked in the presence of a great innovator and heard more from him without interruption. However it was, as with everything else, an experiment, from which we will learn continue to play around with.

Tim said something about not underestimating the potential of humanity connected, and it is that very un-british, ambitious and optimistic note upon which I'd prefer to focus on.

Come 2gether08 right now

I really enjoyed 2gether08 last week. A festival focussed on exploring the positive social potential of technology. The buzz was palpable and it was great to be involved and participate. Steve Moore has an uncanning knack for collecting interesting people and bringing them together. I don't know how he does it and I suspect he probably doesn't either but we can learn a lot from simply bringing together a smart and passionate group of people, and creating the space for them to collaborate. For those who missed it or want to get a flavour of what it was all about, take a look at some of the various videos/content expertly documented by David Wilcox and others here, http://2gether08.com/. Let's build on this momentum.

Will you do me a favour?

A friend contacted me the other day and apologised for asking a favour of me at short notice. It got me thinking to how economists always bang on about transactions as if we are autonomous beings somehow rationally balancing resource needs, but ultimately I think favours might be a better word, and certainly a lot more human.

Apart from limited command-and-control type situations, people interact because they feel inclinded to do so because of some kind of trust relationship, however limited or limitless. Favours can be tiny or huge, financial or non. Transactions as a word is too cold and ignores the relationship between parties.

The RAND corporation did work on the prisoners dilemma that showed that tit for tat strategies seem to work best in most situations. i.e. tend towards acting altruistically unless it is not reciprocated. Isn't that how we respond to people when they ask a favour of us? Needless to say I agreed!

NLab Social Networks are no 'Moore'

I really enjoyed the nlabs conference on Thursday and thanks to Sue and the team for convening such an interesting crowd.

I was finally able to get off my chest about how social networks are starting to fulfil some of the fuctions that traditionally made cities great, such as the random interactions on city streets that we use to continually learn and modify our behaviour. Start of a longer conversation there I hope.

I think that online social networks are particularly useful for building relationships, not with people you know well already, but rather with people you don't know well yet, such as people you meet at conferences for example. And it's the 'strength of weak ties' that social networks enable that stimulate more interaction and ultimately innovation.

It was good to talk about some of these themes with a new crowd too. I was amazed that when I did the 'who knows Steve Moore test' that there were only a handful of Moorites in the audience. I kind of take it for granted these days in social media circles that they'll know Steve but there we go.

Anyway, all the videos and presentations will be available here pretty soon and worth skimming through, in particular Ken, who was on fine form I thought, but all contributions were really good.

Battle of the Brands

Noah Brier has recently set up a new site called Brand Tags that does what it says on the tin. If you ever wondered what others felt about Pepsi and a stack of other brands, you can find out by looking at its tag cloud.

More fun, though, is the Battle Mode - the idea that some brands are stronger than others. Thanks to his innovative use of web 2.0 technology, we have a collaborative (and user-generated) brand ranking.

Don't ask the experts, ask the students!

Interesting piece in today's FT about japanese innovation. In particular the advice of Yukinori Kida, owner of a small Toyko-based components business KDA, which employs 50 staff and made a profit of Y30m on sales of Y1bn last year.

"KDA spends a healthy 3 per cent of sales revenue on new product development. Mr Kida uses students as researchers, believing they are open-minded as well as cheaper: "University professors are strong on narrow subject areas, but if you need to study a problem from a new perspective, they are really not that good."

Why are some companies better at open innovation?

One of the nice things about this job is discovering intermediary organisations that are working to the same ends - to understand and promote open innovation.   I was at a Global Business Partnership Alliance (GBPA) workshop  recently where we explored the statement 'Innovation in the future will demand that historically adversarial relationships be replaced by co-operative relationships based on trust and openness.' I couldn't agree more and what was interesting is that GBPA go on to define the 'vital signs' of those companies well equipped to change their behaviour.  I sum these up as a kind of 'corporate empathy' which embraces good communications skills, habitual transparency and a commitment to partners' interests that is rare in today's dog-eat-dog world.  We looked at a case study - Chrysler's well-known supplier cost reduction exercise (SCORE).  The trouble is, I'm not convinced this is truly co-operative innovation.  Chrysler gives the competing suppliers a 'choice' of passing on all savings generated or keeping half of them, with a 'bearing' on the future relationship.  Sounds like Hobson's choice to me and if you're a hard-pressed small firm the odd $5m today can go a long way.  NESTA's Open Alchemy programme is, I like to think, a bit more forward-looking as it's about future profits not past costs and it's a bit more open-minded in that suppliers such as Oracle are on a level playing field with their clients such as BT or Pfizer. 

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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. 

Co-creation Rules video

Our moving record of this event is now 'cooked' and is available here or a short version on YouTube here.  Thanks to Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff for an evening that was scary, funny and wise in equal parts.