Making Innovation Flourish

Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web

Just finished listening to Jonathan Freedland interviewing Sir Tim Berners-Lee live on stage at the Innovation Edge conference.  It's always odd seeing your heroes, and for once, he didn't disappoint.  TBL was charming, self-effacing, and more importantly, made interesting and intelligent points on the future of the web.  NESTA has helped fund the Web Science Research Initiative which he has set up, and he outlined most of his reasons for setting this up in an all-too brief video linkup.

What lessons can be learnt from the way he developed the web?
You need to give people space and time to find solutions.  Give them a chance to try and see the bigger picture, to find the generalised solution where possible.  And if you are asking or funding someone to develop a solution then don't micromanage them.  Specifically, if you tell them what to produce in too much detail  you'll end up with the same old ideas you had. 

And bear in mind that the end destination can come from left field - he quotes a possibly apocryphal story of Einstein's 'if we knew what we were doing it wouldn't be called research.'.

What are his hopes and fears for the 'adolescence of the web'?
Berners-Lee was very keen to point out the distinction between the people who use the web (and therefore the society that this creates or reflects) and the technology, or 'substrate' as he calls it, that underpins the web. 

Fundamentally, he sees the web as 'humanity interacting' or more prosaically, as 'humanity connected'.  Technology should not get in the way or dominate.  So, the web should be neutral, enabling new ways of democracy, new ways of doing science etc...
 
What is the rationale behind web science?
"We found that people doing interesting things tended to fall between various stools - computer science, psychology, economics etc.  The web needs to be thought of less as a series of connected computers to 'humanity connected'.  There are more web pages out there than neurons in your brain.   It's a very big system - one which we rely on - and it is not obvious what its properties are?   Will the blogosphere keep a check on the press?  Or will the blogosphere turn into a rumour mill and spread hatred etc - as part of a cultural revolution?
 
Is the web stable?  TBL is arguing that we need a science to understand this.  And we have a duty to understand it, so that we can take care of it.  He spoke of the unexpected or unintended effects of the micro leading the macro - eg ebay's role in driving down the prices of new items.

How fragile is the web?
Commenting on the 'megalapse' or the potential for the web to meltdown.  TBL argues it's more subtle threat than this.  Will the web be a force for the good?  The web may work fine but the society may not be one you want to live in, eg the use of email has arguably passed the tipping point of spam usage.

Is the future of innovation about collaboration?
The world is full of groups working and making their 'own language' .  The web should be making this more transparent and enabling more people to contribute.  Challenges in medical advances can only be done collaboratively, the problem is simply too big for an individual to keep in their head.  How does this work when one person's head has half the idea and if another has the other half.  How can the web help enable this solution?

Well, how can it?

*Update - podcast now online here

Mixed signals from the future

Just back from the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference, and it seems that most of the posts so far cover the developer/tech side of the coin, so I hope my business perspective will add to the conversation...

I was definitely amongst the minority at the conference, being both female and not a developer. I went along in hopes of catching a glimpse of the future as well as a peek at the Seedcamp stand & winner, as I was thrilled to hear from my Investments colleague that NESTA is backing Seedcamp (more on this later). While I never quite managed to catch up with the latter, I'm pretty satisfied that I did get a preview of where online innovation is headed.

For some reason, in the past I've always considered the 2 facets of 'Web 2.0' meme to be discrete: one definition being all about 'the social web' (social networking), the other being about 'the web as platform' (web-based applications). But I came away from the conference realising that the point where these two definitions converge is the most interesting and useful. Quite a lot of the speakers I caught touched on making web apps social.

Another key theme was interoperability - that is, the need for all these cool tools to be able to work with each other, and to be able to move information seamlessly across from one place to another, without the user having to do anything, and all under a single sign-on. (I'd been meaning to blog about this very same thing for a while, until Michael Geist's article pretty much summed it all up for me with this statement: "The irony of the current generation of online social networks is that although their premise is leveraging the internet to connect people, their own lack of interconnectedness is stifling their potential.") At FOWA Jyri Zengstrom made a relevant analogy comparing all these 'silo'ed social networks and apps to the way the US phone system started up, with different phone networks that didn't allow you to call people who were on a different supplier's network. The same thing happened with IM, and so it is now with social networks & online apps. But change will come.

Speaking of irony, I had a good chuckle about the fact that at a conference about web apps, I couldn't get online. The wifi connectivity was awful, in direct contrast to the Office 2.0 conference where the speed was so fast I am sure things were loading before I clicked! UK conference centres could learn a thing or two from across the pond, but I digress...

Rashmi Sinha and Suw Charman offered very different advice to app developers & web start-ups. Rashmi's talk was aimed squarely at B2C applications, with the advice to launch publicly early, then refine the product based on feedback from real-life users, not a cobbled-together closed group of people you think will represent users. Funny that I had never considered SlideShare, an app that lets you share Powerpoint presentations, as B2C but I guess it is! Suw's talk focused on B2B, where the public launch/refine model doesn't work,  because (non-tech) organisations don't have the luxury of being able to mess around with Beta releases. They want products that work properly, NOW. If you can't deliver first time, they certainly aren't going to hold off buying a tool while you fix bugs or hire support staff. I actually think Suw's talk would have gone down much better at Office 2.0, as I got the feeling that a lot of the folks at FOWA were more interested in hearing about how to get rich quick with The Next Big Thing than how to deliver products that businesses would adopt and use across the enterprise. Which is odd, because I think the latter has great potential for impact and long-term earnings.

On the topic of enterprise apps: I had a look at the Huddle demo - with a critical eye, as I'm a big fan of Central Desktop. While CD isn't pretty, it is chock full of useful features. Huddle on the other hand, is all shiny and 2.0-y but left me feeling a little disappointed with what it actually does. It does offer a sign-off workflow for docs that need approval, and a more user-friendly way of seeing who's in your workspace, but overall I think Huddle's not quite ready for prime time yet. Imo things like Outlook/iCal integration and emailing into the system are essential requirements if you are going for the enterprise dollars.

But the best talks for me couldn't have been more different: youthful optimism from etsy.com's Robert Kalin, and experienced wisdom from Thomas vander Wal. Gum-chewing Kalin flittered all over the place, touching on topics as diverse as the history of money, the way we attach meaning to handmade objects, and how Rockefeller made millions selling oil to the Nazis. Kalin is a revolutionary in geek's clothing, and he wants Etsy to be the forum where crafters, artisans and makers of all types can rise up against the mass-produced soul-less factory goods so common in the WalMart economy. I've been a fan of Etsy since 2005 so I'm one of the choir, but I left his talk feeling there is still hope for changing the nature of markets. Even if you're not an 'act local think global' person, the Etsy story is truly compelling: Kalin was a high-school dropout carpenter who started Etsy from his living room, which in 2 years has grown into a global marketplace selling 7000 items per day and has over 1.4million items on the site from 100,000 sellers.

Thomas Vander Wal's talk was a bit less stream-of-consciousness, but no less inspiring (full notes on the talk here and here). The overarching message I took was that these tools (and the people who make them) need to respond to the very nature of human beings. We as humans have only a certain amount of attention, and we are being bombarded by 'social spam' due to the way social sites don't allow you to filter out all the noise generated by Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, RSS etc. Sometimes you only want to know one kind of info from a friend/contact - and it should also be noted that not all 'friends' are created equal. Tools need to understand that you only want to hear Sally's views on aeronautics, and that someone you once met at a party is not the same kind of friend as one you grew up with. Social bookmarking needs to evolve so when you're looking at someone else's bookmarks, it only shows the ones that you haven't already seen. Sounds a lot like the semantic web to me.

Secondfest: the shape of things to come?

This weekend I attended Secondfest, The Guardian- and Intel-sponsored 3-day virtual music festival that took place in SecondLife, the online virtual world. Intel donated the use of their SecondLife islands, and The Guardian sponsored what promised to be a stellar lineup of artists.

On the whole, it looked just like a real-life music festival: several stages, a campsite complete with tents, drinks stalls and whatnot. But this is exactly what let things down in my mind. Why would you build an exact replica of a real-life festival in an environment where you could have virtually anything? Why not put one of the stages on a cloud? Or inside a giant dinosaur? Or under water? Making the impossible possible is one of the joys of SecondLife. I think they missed a real trick here.

Difference drives innovation...

Please note : This post has moved

In my experience, homogeneity of skills, influences, opinions, ideas, competencies, knowledge and cultures, can only lead to conformity of views and the maintance of the status quo.

More interestingly (to me at least), differences in skills, influences, opinions, ideas, competencies, knowledge and cultures, can lead to one of 2 potential outcomes:

1. Firstly differences can descend into chaos, fragmentation and highly un-productive activity, or
2. If managed well, differences can lead to a highly creativity, inspiring and innovative environment.

The key question is, of course, how to you set things up so that you create the latter innovate outcome, rather than the former. The short answer from me (at the moment) is that I'm not sure, however we are in the process of trying to find out.

Nesta launches a new programme on June 14th called Connect, which seeks to prove that new, unexpected or extreme collaborations drive innovation. Our key lines or enquiry are centred around differences, networks, interactions and trust. It's a fascinating subject which spans psychology, solciology, antrohopoly, technology, economics and politics, so we've got our work cut out for us. We'll post on this blog as and when we find out more.

Trust, technology and transliteracy

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I attended an event on 'Transliteracy'€™ at the Institute of Creative Technologies (IOCT) at De Montford University yesterday. As a simple soul, I normally like to shy away from words of more than 3 or so syllables and from difficult (to say) concepts such as ‘interdisciplinarity’ and ‘transliteracy’. Having said that, I was intrigued by the work Prof Sue Thomas and her colleagues are doing at the IOCT so decided to participate.

Transliteracy is fundamentally it is about communicating effectively in different ways and sometimes using different technologies, but has a much more detailed definition you can find here.

Effective communication and building trust gets a lot more difficult when technology is involved as you don’t have the usual body language and eye contact that we often take for granted in face to face interaction. Blogs, social networks or online environments like Second Life, all have their own cultures and etiquette, which are often not obvious to the uninitiated.

Also, it is often said that something like 95% of communication is non-verbal. If this true, then there are real challenges to communicate across distance using technology, which is usually text based. The style of communication also varies massively depending on the communication channel (e.g. irony is difficult in email as I frequently discover to my cost, small talk is the norm at the beginning of face-2-face meetings but not in some other forms of communication etc.).

In particular, when talking about stimulating innovation, I would argue that all innovation is fundamentally collaborative. With increasing specialisation in business and academia in recent years, this has led to an increasing need for organisations and individuals to develop wider, more open networks, partnerships and trusted communities to share ideas and to innovate. In particular, a powerful source of innovation is to collaborate across traditional boundaries, be they organisational, disciplinary or geographic.

Therefore, much of the discussion centred upon how can we communicate effectively and build trust across these disparate communities. Technology definitely has a major role to play in supporting these boundary-disrupting collaborations, but perhaps there is a need to further develop most peoples ‘transliteracy’ skills (idea for a future Nesta programme perhaps).

Another possibly interesting observation (to me at least) was that, through the use of technology, it may reduce the need for facilitators or super-connectors (which are critical in off-line collaborations) because more background information is typically available in a technology facilitated collaboration. For example, it can be easier to ‘scan the room’ for interesting people to talk to in an online environment where peoples profiles are there for everybody to see. If only most networking events or parties were so easy to navigate. And yet, if you are unfortunate enough to get stuck in the (virtual) corner talking to that boring bloke who just split up with his girlfriend and he wants you to talk through it’s last days of their relationship in real time, it is still far easier to ‘exit stage left’.

I’m pleased to say that the event was interesting and populated with a diverse and interesting bunch of people, who surprisingly were not technologists, but included sociologists, anthropologists, musicians, writers and a museum curator! We probably posed more questions than answered, but I guess that is par for the course at this stage. As de Bono argues in his book ‘Lateral Thinking’, it is important to suspend judgement and not kill off an idea too early until it is more fully formed. I think there is still a lot to do with this concept of transliteracy, but it certainly provided some food for thought.

PS. Being flippant for a moment, I am increasingly conscious of the trend to coin a phrase ‘xyz’ and then for ever more being referred to as the person who coined that phrase/term/meme. Transliteracy could be included in this category, as could crowdsourcing, web 2.0, the long tail, the wisdom of crowds and many more. I want to capture the zeitgeist by coining a new meta-phrase which encapsulates this phenomenon – how about ‘coinification’? As in “that’s just utter coinification”. :)

Enterprise 2.0 at NESTA

On Friday we took another step toward Enterprise 2.0 with the launch of our new structured wiki Intranet. I think the structured wiki approach is a great way of introducing organisations to the concepts of the social web - in theory, providing the best of both worlds: the empowerment and collaborative elements of wikis, with the order and familiarity of traditional content-managed systems. In my mind, this caters for both types of users: the freeform searchers & the more traditional navigators. It reduces the fear of chaos, while still providing a great deal of the flexibility and tools common in other 'social web' environments. We're yet to prove the theory, but I do think the product we've chosen (ThoughtFarmer) has a lot of potential to bring real positive change to our ways of working. Even if we only reduce the overuse of email, it'll be a great start.

Goodness 2.0

Earlier this week I attended another Beers & Innovation event run by NMK; this one was called Goodness 2.0 and was aimed at examining how non-profits, charities and NGOs can use social tools.

Ian Delaney's already written up an excellent summary of the event, but there was one big takeaway for me: Steven Buckley's intro with the water buffalo story. Check the NMK blog for details, or watch the video yourself. I've given these so-called charity gifts in the past, but hadn't really considered that folks weren't actually getting the goat or chickens I thought they would. Sure, I understand the charities need to pay overheads and whatnot, but it's certainly put a different slant on these 'Good' Gifts.

I love stories like the water buffalo story. It's things like this and the Free Hugs movie that make all this social web stuff worthwhile. Every day I'm bombarded with the depressing stories and video clips of mainstream media, always showing a war or crime or other negative story. Yes, YouTube and the like also have their own share of negative or shocking vids, but they also have an equal share of touching, moving, uplifting stories that remind me that there's still hope for humanity.

Uploading...Innovation

I'm really excited about today's Uploading...Innovation event at NESTA. We have a great group of people coming from all kinds of different backgrounds, the commonality being that they are all building innovation communities on the web. To get things moving we have invited a number of people to deliver short sharp provocations and host the conversations that flow from them – maximum three minutes long – and the following people have accepted this challenge:

• Charles Leadbeater on the ideas behind his new book We Think
• Mark Earls on our herding instincts 
• Molly Webb on the insights emerging from the DEMOS project The Atlas of Ideas
• Dan McQuillan from Amnesty on using social media in campaigning
• Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff will invite you to come together to co-create
• Mark Vanderbeeken from Experientia on a distinctive European approach to user centred innovation
• Jeremy Ettinghausen from Penguin on the crowdsourcing novel www.amillionpenguins.com

Otherwise, the event is open and democratic and anybody can suggest a topic of conversation, but with the group of people we have coming I don't think we'll be short of opinions. I'll post again during or after the event with an update, otherwise keep an eye on the event site here for pictures, posts and video clips.

Innovation as a contact sport

There is a lot of talk at present regarding the importance of collaboration/open innovation and networking, and I would argue that innovation almost always happens through collaboration, rather than in isolation. However, the essence of successful collaboration is often dominated by anecdote and opinion, and hard facts or data are limited to the best of my knowledge. As with any meeting of individuals or organisations, it is critical that participants can find a common language, so that they can communicate and collaborate, and build trust.

Therefore we are in the process of developing a new programme, called NESTA Connect, that will focus upon finding and supporting unexpected, novel or extreme collaborations that disrupt the boundaries between different disciplines, organisations and places. The intention being to examine and explore the essence of successful collaboration and then showcase the best of the best models and collaborators.

We know that we cannot begin such an endeavour without tapping into and harnessing the extraordinary network effects of the Web to connect people to one another, to promote co-creation and harness collective intelligence. Therefore I am delighted that NESTA are hosting 150 of the leading online collaboratives at an event next Tuesday called Uploading Innovation (NB this event is full).

I am particularly interested to share experiences of the ways in which people engage online rather than focussing upon the technology side of things, and are also keen to understand the impact that online communities having on communities centred on physical locations or places? I'll post again after the event to feedback the key findings from the day, but any thoughts or comments on any of the above would be of interest.