NESTA Connect

Innovating without a budget

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

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

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

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

So my suggestions for what it's worth are:

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

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

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

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

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

Can you have too much innovation?

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

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

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

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

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'.

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

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?

Artificial dualities, digital yoga and the embodied web

I call it artificial.  Clay Shirky calls it "an accident of history".  We're talking about the distinction made between online & offline.  The other common terms for this pair is virtual & real or (dare I even say it) cyberspace & meatspace.  Whatever the language used however, the problem I have is not with the words per se but with the split itself.

Differentiate then integrate.  For any innovation in whatever field to really become pervasive, it pretty much has to follow this simple three word formula.  If you're reading this blog, more likely than not, you've lived through the period where the internet and web technologies have differentiated and now we are in the first real phase of integration.  If you're not sure what differentiate means, the simple test is to remember life before Facebook.  If you're not sure what integrate means, the test for that is to remember life without email. See!

This is why Clay talks of making a distinction between online and offline as an accident of history.  No ten year old uses this language because their digital life is conditioned so early.  Show me the person today who considers a phone call a virtual experience.  But back in the day, holding and speaking into a piece of metal resulting in the voice of your grandmother who lives in Idaho must have been a pretty ethereal experience.

The reality of our lives contain all experience, be that spent reading this post, slaying a demon on World of Warcraft or having a coffee with a new friend.  By using stark binary dualities as virtual and real, we are distinguishing one as having more substance than the other.  This is separation and perhaps a disservice - our world probably has enough of that.  Let us consign this particular accident of view to history and instead move to a far more interesting problem.

A relationship that I am finding much more useful to explore is that between the non-binary pair of web and place.  Or to use an equivalent spiritual pairing, mind and body.  As a culture which has become ever more dependent on the intellectual faculties of mind since the Renaissance (thank you M. Descartes), our disconnection between mind and body has become increasingly acute.  In fact, the information economy in which most of us live pretty much does not require our bodies at all, much of the time we may as well be brains in vats.

The Sanskrit word yoga means union, for through its practices body and mind, though never ever really apart, are invited back into intimate relationship.  This can take effort, it certainly takes patience and commitment but the results are well worth it since they are harmony, peace, learning and a strength that can move mountains.

(Please excuse any contradiction but) There is danger in the web remaining a web-only phenomenon.  So what we need now is a digital yoga - the reconnection between web and place.  I call this the Embodied Web. Enough brains in vats.  Let's get integrating.

Thankfully of course this is inevitable. Thankfully of course this is already happening.  Alternate reality games, geo-social networking tools like Brightkite and everyone born in affluent circumstances since 1992 are all early examples of this artificial boundary becoming more and more blurred.  You'll probably be alive to see it dissolve completely.  Be excited.

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