NESTA Connect

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'.

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.

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.

Our hopes and fears for the future of the web

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.   

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.

Are we doomed?

Pretty much so according to this article in the New Scientist. I am blogging about this not because the future of the human race is part of NESTA's remit (it's not) but because of NESTA Connect's interest in putting together large innovative networks.  New work in complexity theory suggests that the more complex a system is the more it is prone to instability and collapse (Just look at what one oil refinery strike in Scotland is capable of if you doubt it).  If we are trying to build complex on line systems for innovation this is a watchout - will they be more vulnerable than tried and tested ways of innovating?  One last sobering thought.  This article quotes Joseph Tainter, an archaeologist from Utah: " I sometimes think of [technology] as a faith-based approach to the future" he says, and the article concludes that innovation might be subject to diminishing returns or perhaps absolute limits governed by our resources, the complexity of our systems and a desire for growth at all costs.   

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.

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. 

What is Science for?

The impact of science and technology on our lives can hardly be overstated, and yet this is not universally applicable, and the differences between the developed and developing world are vast and growing further apart every day. And yet we are sleep walking into unprecendented levels of inequality between the technology have's and have-nots according to Susan Greenfield, speaking at Nesta launch of Science for Humanity last night.

She goes one to state that all scientists love solving problems, but then asks why these problems are often very narrowly focussed and, for university based researchers at least, stifled by the every increasing complexity of securing grant funding and the RAE. A great believer in the equalling power of science, she questioned why scientists cannot have more opportunity to apply their problem solving skills to some of the most challenging issues facing humanity. By her own admission she is possibly naively optimistic, however better that than a cynical bystander.

The idea behind this project was first published in her book Tomorrow's People and has now taken shape as this new network of individuals and organisations seeking to use their knowledge and experience to help create solutions to some of the world's most urgent social problems.

We also heard from Sir Gordon Conway, the Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for International Development, who also gave numerous examples illustrating the case for science to tackle issues of the developing world and the millenium development goals.

The immediate task of Science for Humanity is to build the network of both scientists and NGOs to register their interest and areas of interest, with a view to creating models for collaborative innovation which turn science into solutions that make a real and sustainable difference to the lives and livelihoods of billions of poor people in developing countries.

The Practical challenges in implementing this vision should not be underestimated and yet the buzz in the room was palpable and the interest and expectation is now there to deliver a more outwardly engaged and purposeful science community. Further ideas on how this could and should happen would be very welcome.

Emergence and 21st century cities

I've just finished reading 'Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software' by Steven Johnson which was published in 2001 and most of the technology related stuff is obviously outdated, but the whole concept of order or patterns emerging from complexity is fascinating and resonates strongly with the concept of collaboration that we are pursuing through NESTA Connect.

There is a chapter on what we can learn from ants - this goes over territory we are have been influenced by and exploring already with swarmteams (see here) but the most interesting section for me was on cities. This takes me back to a statement I heard a while back staying that social networks are the new cities, which we'll be debating at our Nesta conference and the NLabs conference in the summer.

Berlin argues that cities, like ants, allow the exchange and storage of masses of information through the interaction of it's inhabitants. The development of cities are analogous to phase transitions in nature where an input of energy leads to a remarkable change in state of matter (e.g. liquid to gas, through heating for example). He describes the analogous injection of energy leading to phase transition in cities, first the heavy wheeled plow, then crop rotation, which both enabled more efficient agriculture and subsequently much larger connurbations.

He then describes in some detail the next major injection of 'energy' into cities by the industrial revolution, typified best by Manchester's the world's first industrialised city. It's population exploded 10 fold from just 25,000 in 1773 to over 250,000 in just 75 years, without being formally consitituted as a city. It was finally recognised as a city in 1853 after the massive population explosion had happened. However, whilst this short period was clearly explosive and chaotic, the city grew with a tremendous amount of order or self-organising clusters without top down leadership.

And of course, bringing us up to date, we are now in the next major injection of 'energy' into our cities, namely through the web and digital world which he argues is having a similarly huge impact on our cities which we are only just beginning to understand the social, policital and economic ramifications. Industries driven by ideas naturally gravitate towards physical centres of ideas generation (i.e. cities) but now we also exchange a vast amount of information and ideas using technology, leading to virtual and distributed clusters which are changing the way interact and share knowledge.

Greater Manchester has of course undergone an exciting and remarkable transformation in the last couple of decades building upon a range of strong influencing factors from an amazing music scence from the late 1970's onwards, to the IRA bomb in 1996, to the Commonwealth Games in 2002, to the creation of the largest campus university in the UK formed in 2004, to the relocation of large parts of the BBC to Salford in a couple of years. It will be fascinating to watch this next 'phase transition' in Manchester, and all other regions and regions, in response to these new online social networks and we are currently focussing our attention here (more on that soon).

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee, the godfather of the internet, is setting up the Web Science Research Foundation (which we also hope to work with) to research and understand and influence the social, policital and economic ramifications of this new transition. Exciting times.

Social Innovation Campers

I'm really pleased to showcase a new programme called Social Innovation Camp , taking place on April 4th-6th, that Nesta are supporting in partnership with the Young Foundation. The idea came to us from Paul Miller (School of Everything), Dan McQuillan (Make Your Mark) and Christian Ahlert (Open Business) inspired in part by Netsquared in the US. The event blurb is as follows:

What happens when you get a bunch of hackers and social innovators together, give them a set of social problems and only 48 hours to solve them? We’re going to find out. In London between 4th-6th April 2008, Social Innovation Camp will bring together some of the best of the UK and Europe’s web developers and designers with people at the sharp end of social problems. Our aim is find ways that easy-to-build web 2.0 tools can be used to develop solutions to social challenges.

This feeds into a wider group of Connect projects we are developing and supporting around innovation clusters that harness the participatory culture of the web focusing upon the social or creative economies, and I'll post more on this again as this evolves.

Long live the networked (& reputation) economy

They say "It's not what you know, it's who you know." I've always disliked that phrase, not necessarily because I disagree with it, but simply as it doesn't seem fair or right. This response reflects my background which is originally academic where ideas are, in principle at least, the primary currency.  However I am increasingly of the view that relationships and networks are increasingly the currency upon which our economy and society is based.

With increased mobility of people, capital and information, it becomes more difficult to create value or competitive advantage through knowledge alone. All major economies trying to capture the higher value jobs/functions and create knowledge economies, however with information becoming increasing ubiquitous, any slender market advantage achieved through creating/developing/secretively hoarding exclusive information can be very quickly eroded.

I believe that we are moving from a knowledge economy, if indeed we ever were one, to being a networked economy, where organisations and individuals create value primarily through their relationships and networks. This is a world where reputation is increasingly crucial but also increasingly permanent. Of course people will try to influence perception but will be less able to control it. This networked reputation economy applies to multinational corporations as much as individuals. The best idea in the world will go nowhere if the originator is unpleasant or impossible to work with, as all innovation is fundamentally collaborative. And interestingly, our reputations are cumulative, so bad deeds done by an individual or organisation in the dim and distant past are less likely to 'go away' so the optimist in me hopes that this will lead to greater responsibility percolating through the networked economy.

So what do you think? Is this right? Is this a good thing? What are the impacts upon our economy and society? I'd be very interested for comments or thoughts.

The Power of Collaborative Innovation

The main focus of the World Economic Forum at Davos later this month is The Power of Collaborative Innovation. Obviously I'd love to attend but alas my own personal networks don't extend that far, but I'll certainly be watching the podcasts. The fact that they have chosen this topic does however give me significant encouragement that we are onto something interesting with the Nesta Connect programme which is underpinned by the concept of supporting extreme collaboration across disciplines, organisations and places.

Since we launched in June 07 we've refined our narrative about what we do and why, and I wanted to get it down in writing here as it has evolved and invite comment and discussion, perhaps even from the eminent delegates at Davos (you never know!).

1. All innovation is fundamentally collaborative - If you look at any major innovation from nanotechnology to NHS direct, they all involve collaboration. Invention may be a solitary act though frequently isn't, but implementing those ideas/inventions commercially or socially, require collaboration, either explicitly or implicitly to make them succeed.

2. Most support/infrastructure/funding for innovation is targeted at individual people or organisations. - Innovation support seldom effectively recognises the network/community/space between the individual people or organisations and it is typically focussed upon the stimulation or development of new ideas rather than demand for them. This may be symptomatic of our individualistic economic and political world view of the rationale and enlightened self interest.

3. Collaborative projects are higher risk, but potentially higher reward. - Projects within a single discipline or organisation are more likely to result in evolutionary/incrementally innovations whereas more collaborative projects across multiple organisations or disciplines are more risky but can result (if managed/structured well) in more disruptive, higher impact innovations.

4. The world is increasingly specialised or compartmentalised. - This is especially true in education and academia (we have one of the most specialised education curriculums in the world) but also applies to business and government. I have worked professionally as both a physicist and a musician but now find myself in the rather bizarre situation of being a specialist in non-specialisation. Having said that, I am a firm believer in the need for expertise and specialists, after all the world is a complicated place and required thorough investigation to gain real insight.

5. Diversity or difference drives innovation. - By this I don't just mean ethnic or gender diversity. I really mean diversity or skills, experience, expertise etc.  After all, perspective is worth 50 points of IQ (so says Alan Kay, father of the personal computer).

6. We need to create more space (both physical and virtual) to cross fertilise ideas across disciplines. - An over emphasis upon productivity in all walks of life has resulted in some incredible advances and improvements. However, in much the same was as Google allow their staff 20% of their time, 1 day per week, to work on outside interests/projects, we all need some space to experiment, play, take risk and share ideas. This needs to be supported and encouraged. I currently think that Google's 80/20 rule here is probably about right and I don't suggest this would ever form the majority mode of operation, but I reserve the right to change my mind.

7. Successful collaboration doesn't usually happen by accident - the right type of leadership and facilitation is critical. Jimmy Wales attributes the success of Wikipedia to one part anarchy (anything goes), one part democracy (people can vote on a disagreement), one part aristocracy (people who have been around for a long time get listened to), one part meritocracy (the best ideas win out) and one part monarchy (on rare occasions the buck has to stop somewhere).

So, these seven points are roughly my version of the Connect the narrative as it stands in mid Jan 2008. These are hypothesis that we are trying to understand and prove or disprove through our projects, research and discussions. The narrative will change with time but I would welcome your input and suggestions now on how it can be improved. In the meantime, it will be interesting how the Davos delegates interpret the theme of this year’s forum.

Global swarming

Various research has identified a small number of characteristics from nature's bioteams, which don't tend to be present in human organisational teams. The top three include:

• Instant Messaging - Lots of simple whole-group broadcast communications e.g. food over here, danger over there
• Collective Leadership - Any group member can take the lead at different times as appropriate e.g. migrating geese take it in turns to lead the pack
• Group Ecosystems - Small is beautiful (and innovative and smart) …..and big is powerful.

Find out more about the first of these in an article by Ken Thomson here .

I'm pleased to say that we are now working on a  practical implementation of bioteaming principals through new pilot project called Swarmteams which seeks to test some of these principles within human networks, in this case music fanbases. More on this shortly.

Cooperation Commons

“More people pooling more resources in new ways is the history of civilisation” – or so says Howard Rheingold who spoke at ‘Mass Collaboration’ last night at NESTA together with Mark Earls, author of Herd.

It was thoroughly enjoyable and informative evening – we covered a lot of ground from cooperation between hunter gathers to the global shift towards collaboration due to the increasing influence of non-western economies. And yet the whole evening felt light-hearted and fun, with a diverse and engaged crowd. It was my favourite event I’ve been involved with in my 10 months at NESTA and hopefully the start of an interesting new dimension to our work in developing NESTA Connect.

We could have filled the room several times over despite only minimal word of mouth promotion which is a tribute to the reputation of our speakers. Several people said to me beforehand that in meeting Howard, they were meeting a ‘hero’, and the same goes for me. Cooperation Commons is an amazing resource and has been a big influence on us in developing our work. There are lot’s of blog posts appearing today on the subject which is gratifying. Webcasts of the whole event (including a Mexican wave involving the entire audience) are on the NESTA website here.  Audio of both Mark and Howard's presentations are also available from here.