NESTA Connect

Over-Specialisation Nation!

Is it is possible to become too specialised?

The dramatic events of last week on the financial markets are one example how, I believe, specialisation can cause major problems. The ever increasing (so called) 'sophistication' of financial instruments have become so complicated that they can't be understood by enough people, certainly not the financial regulators, and therefore the products that end up having no bearing on genuine economic reality, leading to the recent bubble and subsequent credit crunch.

Similarly, I have long felt frustrated at specialists in academia or industry who are so narrowly focused on their narrow niches that it is practically impossible to understand what they say and what they are working on, and only a handful of other people can even question them let alone understand them.

Don't get me wrong. Without question we desperately need well trained and educated specialists who understand complex issues in great detail, be it financial or philosophical. The world is a complicated place, and I'm not for one moment advocating a retreat to creating renaissance men and women, however appealing a romantic notion that may be. It's simply not possible for individuals to be sufficiently knowledge about a breadth of issues or disciplines as it once was.

However I think when swathes of business and academia get so specialised and riddled with jargon that they become practically incomprehensible, then I think we've gone too far and need to take a step back. I think businesses, academia and governments need to create more space for specialists to interact with larger groups of people across traditional boundaries. This is what we try to do with our NESTA Connect programme. As I've said previously this space might be provided by talented people who span multiple disciplines themselves, or organisations that act as intermediaries.

This excessive specialisation is a global phenomenon, and yet the UK is interesting in that a) it has one of the most specialised education systems in the world, and yet b) the opportunities open to graduates of a particular discipline tend to be wider here compared with Germany, and possibly the rest of Europe, for example.

So in conclusion, I believe we should no longer tolerate the uber-specialist who talks to no-one but their immediate micro peer groups. Else we run the risk of losing the ability to discuss, debate and question other people, leading to the ludicrous situation that precipitated the recent crash in financial markets.

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."

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?

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?

Innovation - for profit or humanity?

Roland has got there first and given a great description of the latest project supported by NESTA Connect – Science for Humanity - so I wont do it again! But I think this project brings together several issues that are on the research community’s mind at the moment as well as ours!

In last thursday Independent Philip Moriarty, a physics professor at Nottingham argued that research had become too commercialised and that the government now was effectively asking researchers to “act like the research and development wing of a corporation.” He argued that academic research should be done in the public interest, not driven by the aims of a company.

Following on from this Will Hutton wrote a piece in last Sundays Observer looking at the tightrope that universities are being asked to walk between, on the one hand, being centres of knowledge and learning for their own sake and on the other, creating economic benefits for their region and country.

Hutton sites that those in the mould of Moriarty feel there is “an academic vocation that does not readily sit with commercial values”. And this is where I think Science for Humanity may have a part to play.

Whilst the argument about universities and the economic impact agenda will keep going, is there another avenue that we might want researchers to go down? Could they be using their knowledge and learning to innovate for the good of humanity?

We are hoping this is so – Science for Humanity is looking to harness the innovative capacity of researchers who don’t want to live in ivory towers but might not be motivated by profit.

Crucible 07

It is now almost 2 weeks ago that NESTA hosted the first of its three Crucible weekends (30 June - 2 July), but needing at least a week to recover this seems like a good time to reflect on the weekend.

Crucible 07 took 30 early-career researchers down to Royal Holloway in Surrey for their first event. Much of this weekend centred around the awardees getting to know each other - and there was a lot to get to know. I felt really priviledged to be part of this group of talented researchers from academia and industry. The rest of the weekend was focused on science policy and the Media, including a move to London on the monday for a set of sessions hosted by the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology.

One of the main motivations for running Crucible is to form an interdisciplinary network of researchers and help stimulate innovative collaborations that would not have occured without the diverse network. I have always been fairly skeptical as to how easy it would be to do this - or at least how easy it will be to measure and explicitly show we have done this. But the feedback we have received so far from participants is indicating we are having an effect on the attitutde of those taking part. So far 70% of those who have replied have felt that theie experiences will make them more likely to collaborate with someone from a different discipline. Others have indicated that they will already be chasing up ideas and potential collaborations with others they have met at the Crucible weekend.

So the important question for NESTA now is, how can we make sure we can convert the good intetnions of those 'end of the evening pub-conversations held at Crucible into real collaborations. What can NESTA do to provide that extra activation energy to make things happen?