NESTA Connect

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.

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.

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.

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.

Big science and the $6bn dollar man

This Wednesday will finally see the start of the biggest experiment in human history, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. It has cost somehwere in the region of $6bn so is understandably getting lots of questions asked about how to justify such mind boggling expenditure.

The classic response to these sort of questions is to say that Big Science projects like CERN/LHC have led to all kinds of major commerical spin-offs. For example, the world wide web was invented at CERN, and famously not patented. However to judge something based on it's unintended consequences is a strange justification. A much tougher sell is the fact that the discoveries that result from big science may often not pay back for decades or even centuries. Creating space for that type of research requires foresight but also considerable political courage and conviction.

One of the major scientific discoveries at the LHC is prediced to be the discovery of the Higgs Boson, sometimes called 'The God Particle'. This is the particle which is what gives matter it's mass. You could well ask 'is that worth $6bn?', but I think that's the wrong question.

On a personal aside, Peter Higgs was one of my professors at Edinburgh University and it was the toughest course I ever did, but very satisfying in a very geeky 'maths as a performance art' kind of way. Anyway, we'll hopefully know soon if he was right and hand him a nobel prize.

I believe we live in an overly productivity obsessed age and we don't have the space to think/innovate in a our public and private organisations. I think we need the foresight and investment into big science where the outcome is deliberately unknown and unclear. To paraphrase Tim Berners Lee, 'If we knew where we were going, it wouldn't be called research'.

Collisions, combinations and collaborations

I have nearly finished the book The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. It's a very easy to read business book on 'intersectional' innovation and is full of great examples which are very relevant to a lot of the work we do at NESTA Connect.

In particular it has some very simple descriptions of why the intersection of fields are more innovative (because of the exponential increase in possible combintions of ideas), the importance of specialism verses generalists (both needed of course), and the sorts of skills and metrics that help and hinder these approaches (punish inaction not failure, and the section on incentives and motivation is very relevant but I won't go into it here).

The whole field of interdisciplinary collaboration/research is much talked about, especially in academic circles, but in my view has become too wooly and nebulous to really impact on our institutions. Therefore, I welcome the almost brutally simple approach the author takes to explaining why intersections are important and how they can be created.

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.