NESTA Connect

Counter-Intuitive Innovation

  “The only thing harder than starting something new, is stopping something old.” Dr. Russell Ackoff

There is a small but persistent minority of people I talk to about open innovation that quickly dismisses it as obvious, usually very politely, and claim it's just what organisations have been doing for years. However the more I think about it the more I firmly believe that open innovation is highly counter-intuitive which is why it remains somewhat marginal.  To illustrate the point here are  some traits of open innovation  which often pass people by so I feel compelled to capture them in this post.

1.  Start At The End.  

Without a clear vision for the sort of relationships you're aiming for, you can forget about asking potential collaborators for their skills, ideas or resources.  You need to show that you are serious about collaboration and that means being clear about the time, money and appetite you have to see a potential partnership though to the end. We would always recommend starting at the end, with a win-win business model.

2.  Buy From Your Customers

How many of your customers are inventors too?  Organisations tend to think of customers as primarily recipients of products and services however they are often amazingly knowledgeable about your brand and sometimes it makes clear business sense to buy from them as well as sell to them. This two-way flow of value is too often overlooked.

3.  Show Not Tell

Many large organisations are trying to become open innovators by first trying to change their culture. Whilst this is rational, it rarely seems to work.  Companies will often change their ways of doing things more happily and spontaneously if they see first-hand evidence of colleagues adopting a new approach and it working.  Success sells. 

4.  You Will Never Spot a Winner.

Ok you might sometimes, but lateral leaps only become obvious with the benefit of hindsight. Some of the best collaborations we've been involved with now seem perfectly natural but I cannot stress enough the challenge it was in getting there.  Great new ideas don't actually have to make complete sense at the start.  If there's something there that's conceptually exciting there are plenty of rational process you can apply later.  Killing a good idea and new relationship off too early is a dangerously easy trap to fall into - who will ever know it would have made millions?

5.  It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who Knows You

There is a lot of discussion about networked effects and  it's valuable to have a large, diverse and engaged network. However the real key is for people to approach you first with an opportunity before they go to your competitor. Their incentive will be financial but much more important that that is the ease with which they can find you, understand what it is you want and understand that you really would value doing business with them.   

Calling innovative graduates

NESTA and BT are kicking off a new collaborative innovation programme aimed at the corporate graduate intake.  Graduates in Partnership was inspired by a small group of enthusiastic BT graduates who had the idea that good things could happen if high-potential young professionals from different companies were given the opportunity to network with their peers on other graduate schemes.  Here is the programme plan:

Event 1 - 13th August 09
Shared Agenda: Discuss the key business issues affecting economic grow

Event 2 - 22nd September 09
Shared Innovation: Develop, in collaboration with a diverse range of skills and perspectives, cutting edge innovative solutions to the agreed business issue.

Event 3 - Date TBC

Shared Solutions: Present the business propositions to influential figures in industry, and pitch for sponsorship for delivery.

Graduates in Partnership builds on other NESTA Connect programmes (see Corporate Connections or Open Alchemy) which have experimented with putting together unlikely partnerships bewteen corporates in different fields of business. 

It will be up to the graduates to represent their companies and come up with shared opportunities and problems and then make things happen back at the ranch.  Our aim is for real new products and services to arise from these collaborations - this is definitely NOT just a training exercise. 

If you're a grad or run a scheme there are still one or two place left for the first event on the 13th August.  Just book a place here to join the likes of BT, IBM, News International, Barclays, Accenture, Nissan and Pfizer. 

“This programme is a really exciting new take on collaborative innovation.

It will foster our talent at the same time as creating links across

business that will continue to provide benefits in years to come.”

Paul Excell, Chief Customer Innovation Officer

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.

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

Will you do me a favour?

A friend contacted me the other day and apologised for asking a favour of me at short notice. It got me thinking to how economists always bang on about transactions as if we are autonomous beings somehow rationally balancing resource needs, but ultimately I think favours might be a better word, and certainly a lot more human.

Apart from limited command-and-control type situations, people interact because they feel inclinded to do so because of some kind of trust relationship, however limited or limitless. Favours can be tiny or huge, financial or non. Transactions as a word is too cold and ignores the relationship between parties.

The RAND corporation did work on the prisoners dilemma that showed that tit for tat strategies seem to work best in most situations. i.e. tend towards acting altruistically unless it is not reciprocated. Isn't that how we respond to people when they ask a favour of us? Needless to say I agreed!

Why are some companies better at open innovation?

One of the nice things about this job is discovering intermediary organisations that are working to the same ends - to understand and promote open innovation.   I was at a Global Business Partnership Alliance (GBPA) workshop  recently where we explored the statement 'Innovation in the future will demand that historically adversarial relationships be replaced by co-operative relationships based on trust and openness.' I couldn't agree more and what was interesting is that GBPA go on to define the 'vital signs' of those companies well equipped to change their behaviour.  I sum these up as a kind of 'corporate empathy' which embraces good communications skills, habitual transparency and a commitment to partners' interests that is rare in today's dog-eat-dog world.  We looked at a case study - Chrysler's well-known supplier cost reduction exercise (SCORE).  The trouble is, I'm not convinced this is truly co-operative innovation.  Chrysler gives the competing suppliers a 'choice' of passing on all savings generated or keeping half of them, with a 'bearing' on the future relationship.  Sounds like Hobson's choice to me and if you're a hard-pressed small firm the odd $5m today can go a long way.  NESTA's Open Alchemy programme is, I like to think, a bit more forward-looking as it's about future profits not past costs and it's a bit more open-minded in that suppliers such as Oracle are on a level playing field with their clients such as BT or Pfizer. 

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.

Extreme collaboration: The Formula 1 Intensive Care Unit

Regular readers of this blog or attendees at our events, know that we describe our objective to be all about fostering new, unexpected or extreme collaborations across disciplines and organisations. The word 'extreme' always seems to catch people's attention and I'm often asked what that means. I think the best way to explain is through an example.

We came across a great example of extreme collaboration described in this article about how Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children and the McLaren and Ferrari racing teams worked together to halve the number of mistakes in the surgical and intensive care units through a collaborative project.

However this is the sort of collaboration that normally never occurs. People and institutions tend to network and learn within their field, discipline, sector or silo of choice, but usually don't engineer sufficient diversity into their networking to allow these kinds of serendipitious cross-fertilisation of ideas to occur in the first place. I believe that individuals and organisations should deliberately create space within our schedules to network outside of our silo say 10% of the time, and I am confident the benefits would be realised provided there was a sufficiently open mind to make the necessary lateral leaps.

I think this example illustrates how knowledge from one domain (formula one racing) can be usefully applied into another (intensive care units of a hospital). Does anybody else have any good examples of extreme collaboration or experience of how it can be fostered to generate innovation?

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?