NESTA Connect

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.

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

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?

Our hopes and fears for the future of the web

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.

Innovation Edge - formal and informal conversations

We've got 3000 people registered to come to our annual conference called innovation edge next Tuesday. There are lots of interesting speakers but as has been mentioned many times before, the traditional speaker/audience format of big conferences doesn't make the most of the knowledge and networks of the attendees.

People have been experimenting with open space formats in recent years which is great but not right for such a big event i don't think. Also, sometimes we simply want to hear what people have to say. I'm looking forward to Tim Berners Lee in particular, even through it's via a video link up.

So facilitating some real dialogue at an event like this is tricky given the scale of the thing. However we are going to try and experiment which I've seen work really well at smaller events. Namely we've set up a Twitter account specifically for the conference and will try to participate in some conversations between the attendees live, and I'm the shmuck who agreed to do it. Now don't get me wrong, I'm really happy to try it but I'm not quite sure how it will work and am a little worried about insufficient connectivity at the venue, but nothing ventured nothing gained I guess.

Anyway the feed will appear on this blog so you can keep an eye on what's being talked about. We will also be live blogging here. Else, sign up to Twitter, if you haven't already done so, follow @innovationedge, and join the conversation if you fancy trying it.

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.   

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.

Who's using who?

I haven't posted in a while as I've been away so please bear with me as I get my blogging skates back on.

User-led innovation is possibly one of the hottest topics in innovation circles at the moment (to the extent that these things can conform to geometric shapes that is!). Nesta has been fortunate to host 2 of the leading people in this field in the last year, Eric Von Hippel  and Karim Lakhani. Karim has a great case study of the T-shirt maker Threadless, who has a very active community of customers/designers/users who create new t-shirt designs, vote on the best ones, and then produce the best ones. And one of my favourite anecdotes from Eric is around the self injection of insulin. Once upon a time, as a diabetic, you had to go to a doctor every day to be injected with insulin. This was so in convenient to one 'user' that he trained to become a medical doctor for 7 years so that he could inject himself. Hence, self injection of insulin was borne.

I recently became aware of interesting CRC report by Darren Sharp & Mandy Salomon available here  hich investigates the major drivers of user-led innovation and shows how user-led practices generate business and social value through a major case study of the virtual world Second Life. This case study shows how in virtual worlds innovation and play occurs without paying a fee, seeking permission or adhering to set [cultural or institutional] paths which engenders ‘entrepreneurial optimism’ which in itself is a driver of innovation.

It seems even the Government and policy makers are interested with the 12th word in the Exec Summary of DIUS's new Innovation Nation White Paper being 'users'. Also, this morning we had David Cameron, the leader of the opposition Conservative Party, speaking at Nesta talking of innovation in the post-bureaucratic age and championing the open source software development, collaborative innovation, and the role of citizens or users in innovation.

A common mis-conception is that users will somehow innovate for or with larger institutions, however I think the fact is that users first and foremost innovate for themselves, however there is scope and rationale for larger institutions to tap into their 'top 1%' - i.e. the fans of their brand/product or service to co-create value for both. There are still many issues yet to be resolved.

Given all of this excitement and activity I was surprised to hear Eric Von Hippel proudly describe himself as a 'former inventor, gone meta', by which what I think he means is a sole innovator who now studies the subject. In the UK, we think of the inventor as slightly eccentric and bothersome and yet are they making a come back via the guise of the user?

Nesta is also experimenting in this space developing user-led innovation pilots in a diverse range of different fields ranging from Mental Health Services, to a pilot programme we are developing with Virgin Atlantic. As users rise in prominence and importance, and the tools become democratised, we need the business models and culture that taps into the innovations, wherever they arise.