NESTA Connect

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?

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.

Industry Tunnel Vision

Hot-foot from the latest workshop in our 'Corporate Connections' project I was inspired to read the latest briefing from trend hounds Springwise:

The light at the end of an (industry) tunnel is a train....

This short article sets out three reasons why looking outside your industry's boundaries to innovate is a productive exercise.  Firstly 'your competition could be anyone'.  Not only are shoes competing for short breaks for the money in consumers' pockets,  other new competitors are likeley to leap sideways into your space.  Secondly 'consumers' expectations are being set outside your industry'.  Reliability, design standards and brand attitudes are all developing fast and people who demand ethics for example don't care if you're making coffee or cars.  Thirdly 'copying competitors is a race to the bottom' and Springwise come down against so-called smart followers.  Perhaps not so smart?

As particants in our Corporate Connections project already realise, (all members of the H-I Network, set up to faciliate this kind of x-industry open innovation perspective) stepping outside of your particular tunnel can be illuminating.  This open innovation project is cross-fertilising the pharma, FMCG, telecomms, airline, F1, electronics and energy industries and more.  We hope to be able to prove some of Springwise's observations with real innovations in 'the spaces in between'.  I will keep you posted either way...