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.

Collisions, combinations and collaborations

I have nearly finished the book The Medici Effect by Frans Johansson. It's a very easy to read business book on 'intersectional' innovation and is full of great examples which are very relevant to a lot of the work we do at NESTA Connect.

In particular it has some very simple descriptions of why the intersection of fields are more innovative (because of the exponential increase in possible combintions of ideas), the importance of specialism verses generalists (both needed of course), and the sorts of skills and metrics that help and hinder these approaches (punish inaction not failure, and the section on incentives and motivation is very relevant but I won't go into it here).

The whole field of interdisciplinary collaboration/research is much talked about, especially in academic circles, but in my view has become too wooly and nebulous to really impact on our institutions. Therefore, I welcome the almost brutally simple approach the author takes to explaining why intersections are important and how they can be created.

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. 

Hyper Island and Dare

A surprisingly recurrent question that I find myself asking about creative innovation at NESTA is "How do they do it in Sweden?". The Swedes seem to have a track record in good innovation practice.

So when Skillset launched their excellent Media Academy programme, which aims to nurture creative people for the new media sector, they drafted in Mattius Hanson from the wonderful Hyper Island.

I'm glad to say that the UK (notably Scotland) can hold its own too with Dare to be Digital having an equally successful record of getting talented people into industry - this time in games.

Fringe benefits

  Please rest assured that the subject of this post isn't veering wildly from the usual theme of collaborative innovation, to comment upon new trends in hair styling. People who have seen my hairstyles over the years will testify that this is not a subject I can claim to write about with any credibility. Rather, I return to the subject of celebrating fringe, or non-core, activities in stimulating innovation.

This subject is inspired by having just returned from a very interesting 2 day Triple Helix Summit in the US. The triple helix model of innovation seeks to harness the complementary expertise and resources of three sources: Industry, Academia and Government. And it's potential to stimulate innovation and solve complex problems often occurs at the boundaries, or the fringes, of these three, very different institutions.

The conference was wide ranging and there were lots of very interesting presentations. It's hard to summarise in it's entirety by below are a few quotes that I picked up along the way and resonated with me for various reasons:

• "What do we call collaboration in the classroom? Answer: Cheating." Lisa Galarneau
• "Collaboration is the art of willing cooperation with the enemy." Leigh Jerome
• "If we begin with certainties, we shall end in doubts; but if we begin with doubts, and we are patient in them, we shall end in certainties." Francis Bacon (alas Francis was not a delegate at the summit!)
• "The future is here, it's just not widely distributed yet." Bruce Sterling
• "Rarely do you find a requirement for something that doesn't exist yet." David Finegold

The secret of successful collaboration

I attended two collaboration events last week which came from different angles yet met somewhere in the middle.  Firstly there was 'Collaborative Leadership' courtesy of the Global Business Partnership Alliance (GBPA).  This interactive workshop was one of their 'Discovery' projects and amongst other things involved a practical task with one of three small groups to create a way of suspending a book above the floor.  Here at NESTA the second event,  'Co-Creation Rules', was facilitated by Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff (see their manifesto) who used techniques borrowed from improvised comedy to get us to loosen up and trust each other.  The common theme that struck me was about rules.  With the GBPA event our group crashed and burned because we quickly decided that suspending the book from the ceiling 'wasn't cricket'.  No such inhibitions from our competitors! Then at 'Co-Creation Rules' I had learned to loosen up a bit and when the entire room of respectable academics, business people etc were asked to act out killing each other in slow-mo  I was able to let rip.   
So what has building a tripod out of the FT and attacking perfect strangers with a samuri sword taught me?  That the art to encouraging creative collaboration is to discard many but not all of the rules we and our leaders impose.  Aspire to 'bounded freedom'.