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.

Video and final stab at social networks and cities

Readers of this blog or attendees at Nesta's recent events will have heard me, or others talk about the theme of 'social networks as the new cities'.

I don't intend restart this discussion again in detail but for anybody who is interested, find here a video of a talk I gave earlier in the summer at the NLab conference in Leicester, on this topic.

It's something of a stream of consciousness exploration of the subject but hopefully gives a flavour of my point of view. Namely that cities arn't just simply analogous to social networks, but rather some of the functions that cities provide (proximity, economies of scale, random interaction etc) are now increasingly being provided by social networks.

And most importantly, we are only just beginning to see the impact on our cities and places which will be profoundly impacted by the web, just as they have been historically by other disruptive technologies.

Anyway, enough on that, but as always I'd be interested in any thoughts and feedback as ever.

PS. Thanks again to Sue Thomas for curating the event and inviting me to attend.

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

The Comedy Bow-Tie of Innovation

Traditional innovation theory is full of funnels such as these. The thinking is that lots of ideas miraculously appear and then are filtered down and developed until they are successfully launched into a predetermined gap in the market.

However it is widely acknowledged that this 'linear model' of innovation is a long way from reality. See here for lots more on that. Andrew Gaule has suggested here that the model is more like a bow-tie and building on that I'd like to suggest it is more like a comedy bow tie. Confused? Let me explain.

A comedy bow tie spins around in the middle for hilarious (!) comic effect.

The Comedy Bow-Tie of innovation on the other hand is a little something like this (excuse the hand drawing but I couldn't figure out an easy way of doing spirals)

• Phase A - Lots of potential inputs. New ideas are simply recombinations of old ideas
• Phase B - Iterate furiously
• Phase C - Breadth of market applications

All a bit like a comedy bow-tie don't you think?

So to stimulate innovation one must:

1. Legitimise scanning for new ideas from unlikely places e.g. Googletime (assuming you are already scanning in the usual places)
2. Create the space to iterate - innovations never come fully formed and need to be developed and redeveloped many times. This requires time and small amounts of money e.g. Skunkworks
3. Set up a mechanism to target multiple markets, this is seldom clear early on

What do you think? Does this make sense? And can you help us find a better name?

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?

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. 

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?

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?

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.

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?

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.

Organising without organisations

I attended an RSA lunchtime lecture last week with Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and co-hosted by Matthew Taylor of the RSA and Nico McDonald of Spy Media. The delegates were a who's who of the London internet scene who had rushed out of the lunch breaks to attend and unfortunately there wasn't a proper opportunity afterwards to catch up properly. He started out with a great statement as follows:

"web technology is becoming boring enough to be socially interesting."

i.e. the technology (blogs, wikis, social networks, email etc) is now useable enough to be adopted by lots of people to use it in new and interesting ways. He cited numerous examples of groups forming outside traditional public or private institutions to instigate change whether it is holding HSBC to account on it's promise of no bank charges to students, or to a flashmob in Minsk, Belarus, arranging to all meet in the central square and eat ice cream, which was sufficiently threatening to the authorities that the police broke up this subversive activity!

His basic premise in the book is that informational and coordination tools are so cheap and easy that groups and organisations can thrive without traditional institutions. The book covers familiar territory in a readable and interesting way, but isn’t really new per se, however in person Clay is very smart enthusiast for the new networked economy and good value.

I was interested in where he felt change would be greatest: in corporations or governments (in public or private sectors)? He was diplomatic in his response and obviously said that both are changing profoundly however he implied that the public sector is less used to people voting with their feet/wallets like the private sector is and therefore would find changing more difficult.

He finished by saying that the pace of change is so rapid that there is a social imperative to try different approaches to organising without organisations. For me this vindicated the approach we have taken with NESTA Connect which is testing open and networked organisational models in both the public and private sectors. I'd welcome further good examples of interesting open and networked institutions/organisations, or approaches or models that we could and should be testing to stimulate innovation through collaboration.

What is Science for?

The impact of science and technology on our lives can hardly be overstated, and yet this is not universally applicable, and the differences between the developed and developing world are vast and growing further apart every day. And yet we are sleep walking into unprecendented levels of inequality between the technology have's and have-nots according to Susan Greenfield, speaking at Nesta launch of Science for Humanity last night.

She goes one to state that all scientists love solving problems, but then asks why these problems are often very narrowly focussed and, for university based researchers at least, stifled by the every increasing complexity of securing grant funding and the RAE. A great believer in the equalling power of science, she questioned why scientists cannot have more opportunity to apply their problem solving skills to some of the most challenging issues facing humanity. By her own admission she is possibly naively optimistic, however better that than a cynical bystander.

The idea behind this project was first published in her book Tomorrow's People and has now taken shape as this new network of individuals and organisations seeking to use their knowledge and experience to help create solutions to some of the world's most urgent social problems.

We also heard from Sir Gordon Conway, the Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department for International Development, who also gave numerous examples illustrating the case for science to tackle issues of the developing world and the millenium development goals.

The immediate task of Science for Humanity is to build the network of both scientists and NGOs to register their interest and areas of interest, with a view to creating models for collaborative innovation which turn science into solutions that make a real and sustainable difference to the lives and livelihoods of billions of poor people in developing countries.

The Practical challenges in implementing this vision should not be underestimated and yet the buzz in the room was palpable and the interest and expectation is now there to deliver a more outwardly engaged and purposeful science community. Further ideas on how this could and should happen would be very welcome.

Emergence and 21st century cities

I've just finished reading 'Emergence: The connected lives of ants, brains, cities and software' by Steven Johnson which was published in 2001 and most of the technology related stuff is obviously outdated, but the whole concept of order or patterns emerging from complexity is fascinating and resonates strongly with the concept of collaboration that we are pursuing through NESTA Connect.

There is a chapter on what we can learn from ants - this goes over territory we are have been influenced by and exploring already with swarmteams (see here) but the most interesting section for me was on cities. This takes me back to a statement I heard a while back staying that social networks are the new cities, which we'll be debating at our Nesta conference and the NLabs conference in the summer.

Berlin argues that cities, like ants, allow the exchange and storage of masses of information through the interaction of it's inhabitants. The development of cities are analogous to phase transitions in nature where an input of energy leads to a remarkable change in state of matter (e.g. liquid to gas, through heating for example). He describes the analogous injection of energy leading to phase transition in cities, first the heavy wheeled plow, then crop rotation, which both enabled more efficient agriculture and subsequently much larger connurbations.

He then describes in some detail the next major injection of 'energy' into cities by the industrial revolution, typified best by Manchester's the world's first industrialised city. It's population exploded 10 fold from just 25,000 in 1773 to over 250,000 in just 75 years, without being formally consitituted as a city. It was finally recognised as a city in 1853 after the massive population explosion had happened. However, whilst this short period was clearly explosive and chaotic, the city grew with a tremendous amount of order or self-organising clusters without top down leadership.

And of course, bringing us up to date, we are now in the next major injection of 'energy' into our cities, namely through the web and digital world which he argues is having a similarly huge impact on our cities which we are only just beginning to understand the social, policital and economic ramifications. Industries driven by ideas naturally gravitate towards physical centres of ideas generation (i.e. cities) but now we also exchange a vast amount of information and ideas using technology, leading to virtual and distributed clusters which are changing the way interact and share knowledge.

Greater Manchester has of course undergone an exciting and remarkable transformation in the last couple of decades building upon a range of strong influencing factors from an amazing music scence from the late 1970's onwards, to the IRA bomb in 1996, to the Commonwealth Games in 2002, to the creation of the largest campus university in the UK formed in 2004, to the relocation of large parts of the BBC to Salford in a couple of years. It will be fascinating to watch this next 'phase transition' in Manchester, and all other regions and regions, in response to these new online social networks and we are currently focussing our attention here (more on that soon).

Finally, Tim Berners-Lee, the godfather of the internet, is setting up the Web Science Research Foundation (which we also hope to work with) to research and understand and influence the social, policital and economic ramifications of this new transition. Exciting times.

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

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...

The Power of Collaborative Innovation

The main focus of the World Economic Forum at Davos later this month is The Power of Collaborative Innovation. Obviously I'd love to attend but alas my own personal networks don't extend that far, but I'll certainly be watching the podcasts. The fact that they have chosen this topic does however give me significant encouragement that we are onto something interesting with the Nesta Connect programme which is underpinned by the concept of supporting extreme collaboration across disciplines, organisations and places.

Since we launched in June 07 we've refined our narrative about what we do and why, and I wanted to get it down in writing here as it has evolved and invite comment and discussion, perhaps even from the eminent delegates at Davos (you never know!).

1. All innovation is fundamentally collaborative - If you look at any major innovation from nanotechnology to NHS direct, they all involve collaboration. Invention may be a solitary act though frequently isn't, but implementing those ideas/inventions commercially or socially, require collaboration, either explicitly or implicitly to make them succeed.

2. Most support/infrastructure/funding for innovation is targeted at individual people or organisations. - Innovation support seldom effectively recognises the network/community/space between the individual people or organisations and it is typically focussed upon the stimulation or development of new ideas rather than demand for them. This may be symptomatic of our individualistic economic and political world view of the rationale and enlightened self interest.

3. Collaborative projects are higher risk, but potentially higher reward. - Projects within a single discipline or organisation are more likely to result in evolutionary/incrementally innovations whereas more collaborative projects across multiple organisations or disciplines are more risky but can result (if managed/structured well) in more disruptive, higher impact innovations.

4. The world is increasingly specialised or compartmentalised. - This is especially true in education and academia (we have one of the most specialised education curriculums in the world) but also applies to business and government. I have worked professionally as both a physicist and a musician but now find myself in the rather bizarre situation of being a specialist in non-specialisation. Having said that, I am a firm believer in the need for expertise and specialists, after all the world is a complicated place and required thorough investigation to gain real insight.

5. Diversity or difference drives innovation. - By this I don't just mean ethnic or gender diversity. I really mean diversity or skills, experience, expertise etc.  After all, perspective is worth 50 points of IQ (so says Alan Kay, father of the personal computer).

6. We need to create more space (both physical and virtual) to cross fertilise ideas across disciplines. - An over emphasis upon productivity in all walks of life has resulted in some incredible advances and improvements. However, in much the same was as Google allow their staff 20% of their time, 1 day per week, to work on outside interests/projects, we all need some space to experiment, play, take risk and share ideas. This needs to be supported and encouraged. I currently think that Google's 80/20 rule here is probably about right and I don't suggest this would ever form the majority mode of operation, but I reserve the right to change my mind.

7. Successful collaboration doesn't usually happen by accident - the right type of leadership and facilitation is critical. Jimmy Wales attributes the success of Wikipedia to one part anarchy (anything goes), one part democracy (people can vote on a disagreement), one part aristocracy (people who have been around for a long time get listened to), one part meritocracy (the best ideas win out) and one part monarchy (on rare occasions the buck has to stop somewhere).

So, these seven points are roughly my version of the Connect the narrative as it stands in mid Jan 2008. These are hypothesis that we are trying to understand and prove or disprove through our projects, research and discussions. The narrative will change with time but I would welcome your input and suggestions now on how it can be improved. In the meantime, it will be interesting how the Davos delegates interpret the theme of this year’s forum.

Global swarming

Various research has identified a small number of characteristics from nature's bioteams, which don't tend to be present in human organisational teams. The top three include:

• Instant Messaging - Lots of simple whole-group broadcast communications e.g. food over here, danger over there
• Collective Leadership - Any group member can take the lead at different times as appropriate e.g. migrating geese take it in turns to lead the pack
• Group Ecosystems - Small is beautiful (and innovative and smart) …..and big is powerful.

Find out more about the first of these in an article by Ken Thomson here .

I'm pleased to say that we are now working on a  practical implementation of bioteaming principals through new pilot project called Swarmteams which seeks to test some of these principles within human networks, in this case music fanbases. More on this shortly.

The 5 habits of highly innovative groups

I heard a great quote the other day from Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, talking about how to create the right environment for mass collaboration (thanks to Charlie Leadbeater for introducing me to it). I'm paraphrasing but it goes something like this. Wikipedia's success down to 5 constituent components:

1. one part anarchy (anything goes)
2. one part democracy (people can vote on a disagreement)
3. one part aristocracy (people who have been around for a long time get listened to)
4. one part meritocracy (the best ideas win out) and
5. one part monarchy (on rare occassions the buck has to stop somewhere).

I think these 5 components could be a useful starting point for looking at collaborative innovation more widely and the trick is to enable them all and to make them habitual. What do you think are the components that are most frequently missing? I would probably say 1 and 4.

Network effect for social innovation

Robert Metcalfe coined the term 'network effect' to mean the phenomenon whereby a service becomes more valuable as more people use it, thereby encouraging ever-increasing numbers of adopters. He was referring to networked computers but the term has increasingly gained wide spread use.

One of the most interesting applications is around network effects for social change, and last Thursday saw the beginning of an interesting experiment in this space. The Royal Society of Arts is seeking to transform the diverse fellowship into a network to create positive social change. Mick Fealty describes the event as follows (here):

James Surowieki notes in his Wisdom Of Crowds' critique that diversity of opinion and experience is a prerequiste for a crowd to be smart. Next is independence, ie people who are not likely to be swayed by people around them. Then decentralisation, where "power does not fully reside in one central location, and many of the important decisions are made by individuals based on their own local and specific knowledge rather than by an omniscient or farseeing planner."

Finally aggregation, some means of determining the group's answer to the question, in this case: what might RSA Networks do and how might they deliver?

This last should begin to be determined through a number of outputs from the day, but the Open Space technology is a good match for Surowieki's first three determining factors. RSA Fellows, or at least this bunch here today, are indeed a 'smart crowd'.

Of course this is just the start of something and it is too early to say whether this will reach the all important 'critical mass' but we are watching it progress with interest (see here for exactly how we are observing and participating). However, it's been a while since I attended an event with such a buzz and determination, so I strongly believe that the right conditions are there for successful collaborations to flourish.

Corporate open innovation - why bother?

is the subtext of my article.  I think there are lots of excuses (so-called "barriers") for not considering corporate open innovation.  The usual suspects are intellectual property, complexity and an unwelcome interdependence of companies. More interestingly I think there's a sort of glass ceiling formed by more human issues such as intertia, corporate culture/tradition and psychological factors.  So I choose not to believe in barriers to open innovation but in accelerators such as personal and cultural change and thinking outside the company box.  Does any of this chime with you?

Connect, collaborate, innovate

We are official at last. Nesta Connect launched last night and we had a great turnout and a range of interesting speakers. It feels odd to be launching as we've been doing 'stuff' for some time but it's good to be finally fully up and running.

Jonathan Kestenbaum set the scene followed by Eric Von Hippel, the 'David Beckham' of Innovation, who gave us a whistlestop tour of all things new and important in collaborative innovation. I tried to give a brief outline of what we are trying to achieve and highlighted our first three flagship projects, namely Design London, Procter and Gamble Open Innovation Challenge, and Crucible. Jeremy Myerson of RCA and David Gann from Imperial then set out the vision for the Design London programme. The videocast of the event is now online here if anybody is interested in taking a look.

Anyway, we'll keep posting here as we go/learn, and David and Rachel from the Connect team will also start posting too. Would be interested to get feedback on the launch or the lowdown on interesting things happening in the wonderful world of collaborative innovation.