NESTA Connect

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.

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'.

How should Universities manage Intellectual Property by 2020?

The UK's government department for innovation, universities and skills (DIUS) is working on developing a framework for higher education in the UK for the next ten to fifteen years to strive towards maintaining a world class education system in 2020. One of the big questions in the DIUS consultation is around intellectual property (IP). In fact the precise questions is “How should Universities manage IP by 2020, for their own benefit and for the wider economy”?

One hypothesis that underpins some of our work is that we need more outwardly facing academic communities, embodied perhaps by 'public intellectuals' who regularly engage with businesses, policy issues, current affairs, global challenges, or with experts in other disciplines. A couple of stories fresh in my mind from events in the last couple of weeks come to mind that I think are relevant.

• CERN carefully considered patenting the World Wide Web when it was created but its inventor Tim Berners Lee had to push hard to keep it free and open. Would the web have had the impact it has on our society and economy had they patented it? Almost certainly not.
• LEGO Mindstorms was hacked within a week of being available on the market, clrealy infringing LEGOs copyright. They had to decide to sue or support. They decided on the latter and, to cut a long story short, it led to Mindstorms being the most successful product range ever. So much so that LEGO now has shifted its perception of itself as a manufacturer of toys as a facilitator of fan-based networks.

Neither of these examples come from Universities, but what can we take from them to answer the DIUS question? Will universities shift their own perception of themselves as Lego did? How can we learn the lessons of the challenge faced by CERN in the late 1980's when Tim Berners Lee created the web? Interested, as always, in any views.

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.

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."

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.

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?

Measuring research output

Last night John Denham, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills gave a speech at the RSA in which he called for scientists to engage more fully with policy-makers and the public. He saw this as a key enabler for meeting the challenges of the next century.

This call in itself is not new, but Denham went further in actually considering some of the reasons why the research community are often reluctant to leave their ivory towers.

He stated "My concern is there may be disincentives in the system that emphasise published and peer-reviewed work over public policy advice. The work that some scientists and academic departments do to support policy makers can be undervalued.
"The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is currently being reviewed by HEFCE and as part of this I feel we need to have a discussion on whether there is more to ensure that this essential work is properly recognised.”

I think many will welcome this statement but will want the minister to look further at how the RAE has affected other parts of academic culture.

The RAE has been a reality of academic life for the last 20 years and few would doubt it has had a positive impact on the quality of academic output in the UK – but it has also narrowed the focus of what it means to be a researcher, particularly in science and technology subjects where as Denham concedes, the system is weighted towards publishing as much as possible in high impact-factor journals.

Another area that may suffer from the pressure of the RAE is interdisciplinary and risky/adventurous research. The argument goes that such research will not be published in traditional high impact-factor journals and that it is more difficult and takes longer, reducing published output.

As part of the consultation mentioned by Denham, HEFCE published a piece of statistical research by Evidence Ltd which indicated that using publication metrics (relative numbers of citations) to assess the quality of research will not disadvantage interdisciplinary research, as has been widely believed.

This is interesting, but in many ways does not solve the problem as there is still a widely held perception that such research is at a disadvantage. Whilst the perception exists, some department heads will still steer their younger colleagues into ‘safe’ well established areas of research.

And before we jump to condemn such behaviour it worth remembering that the RAE holds the key to significant amounts of funding which can make or break an academic department.

Going back to John Denham’s original concerns regarding policy and public engagement, I wonder if he is opening a wider debate on exactly what should be the role of the academic and indeed academic institutions in society? Can we develop an academically excellent but more innovative and outward looking ‘Academy’ with links between disciplines and to industry, policy makers and the wider public?

Our present system, whilst paying lip service to all these wider relationships does not provide the right structure of incentives. This is the challenge for HEFCE in planning its new model to assess research.

At the University of Utopia should the grass be greener?

At September's NESTA Crucible weekend (our development programme for researchers) participants were asked to plan and draw what their utopian University environment would be. This environment would give them the ideal space to work, think and innovate.

In the planning of this activity we supposed the groups would concentrate on aspects of their working environment such as transport links, childcare provision and organisation of departments. Particularly with a view to interdisciplinary research, the positioning of departments to break down rigid separations seems very important.

Whilst some of these issues did come up, the majority of groups concentrated heavily on creating a pleasant physical environment with nature walks, mountains and waterfalls. Several groups located their University by the sea and one even suggested that academics should be housed in rotating glass pods with a sea-view (the students they suggested should be housed underground!).

Obviously, there was a ton of artistic licence in this exercise, but it made me consider the importance of physical working environment to creativity and by extension to innovation. Is the relationship real or is this just an age old cliché? Do we actually need some blue-sky to do blue-skies thinking?

Having a quick look on Google, there does seem to be lots of references linking physical working environment to creativity but I can’t find a definitive study. (or any mention of the sea!) Everything else being equal, should we expect Sussex University to be more innovative than land-locked Leeds?

One suggestion is that rather than any particular environment we just sometimes need a different environment to allow us to think differently.