Making Innovation Flourish

Making innovative places (part three - conclusions)

Concluding thoughts on the first NESTA Summit: Making Innovative Places, held on 12 December at NESTA's head office in London.

Some further observations on the Place Summit we held last week.  Read back for some earlier thoughts on the event.

5.    It’s a jungle out there – John Goddard took issue with the concept of an ecosystem, claiming that in an ‘ordinary region’ (another Benneworth-ism – not as insulting as it sounds), it was less a smoothly-functioning ecosystem and more a policy-strewn jungle.  Looking at the recent roll-call of recent ‘place-based’ initiatives, he might have a point.
  Watch John Goddard's speech (as part of the panel session)   

6.    It’s the people, stupid – the more the researchers and panellists talked about absorptive capacity, about leadership, about innovation beyond science & technology, the more we came back to a common theme: people.  AnnaLee Saxenian is known as the originator of the concept of ‘brain circulation’ in her research into the origins of the growth of Silicon Valley.  Notably, however, innovative people are far away from traditional innovation policy, which touches on them only rarely – such as the carriers of ideas in Knowledge Transfer Partnerships.  When AnnaLee talked about policy, she talked only about the importance of indirect policies (no ‘innovation policy’ in sight) – and in particular about immigration laws and the role of the (previously) most excellent California Community College system.
    See AnnaLee Saxenian's keynote speech 

7.    Crisis, what crisis?  There was, unsurprisingly, some scholarly disagreement during the day.  Paul Benneworth’s work (and that of a team from the Young Foundation in a forthcoming NESTA publication on local social innovation) pointed clearly to the role of crisis in forcing a city or region to get its act together.  This, however, posed a problem for our path dependence specialists, who seemed to imply that a region had very limited ability to change direction, crisis or no crisis.  Ron Martin gave the example of the North West of England in the 19th century which continually failed to adapt to the rise and rise of overseas cloth producers, despite massive mill closures.  I think that the key to unlocking this dichotomy is in a word that Paul used: perception.  The crisis needs to be seen, comprehended and acted upon by the existing regional leaders.  If that’s the case then urgent action can result.  If it’s not, then stagnation and collapse won’t be far away.

My final comment is one of observation and challenge.  Richard Leese talked of a city’s ‘strategic capacity’ in decision-making and leadership.  Charlie Leadbeater observed that Richard himself had over the course of 20 years walked the line between civic boosterism and challenge – something that is often missing in other regional leaders.  The challenge, therefore, is how to develop more regional leaders like that: sophisticated consumers of analysis who are able to take what works, challenge what doesn’t and bring people with them on their regional innovation journey.

What do you think?

Making innovative places (part one)

Over the next few days I will be reflecting on the first NESTA Summit: Making Innovative Places. It was quite a day. Stephen Timms, Sir Richard Leese and AnnaLee Saxenian delivered keynote addresses and we launched three final reports, one interim report and one policy briefing. 

That all sounds very impressive but I said it then and I’ll say it again: the 90 delegates were collectively as impressive as the ‘big names’ and I hope that much of the value will live on in the connections made as much as the evidence heard and opinions formed.

‘Yesterday’ actually started on Tuesday. The Daily Telegraph picked up on a pre-publication copy of ‘Rural Innovation’ and extensively quoted Dr. Sami Mahroum, the NESTA Senior Policy Analyst who has driven our ‘place’ agenda.  In a significant article, Richard Tyler talked of a ‘new industrial revolution’ that was going ignored by central innovation policymaking. He wasn’t wrong.

 

Silicon Valley comes to the UK

What is it about Silicon Valley that still sparks so much curiosity and interest for us in the UK? Perhaps it’s driven by our quest to find a perfect solution to the UK’s own innovation landscape – or our desire to be inspired by the luminaries from the Valley who have led the world in technology innovation.

We’re delighted to announce that NESTA is bringing Silicon Valley to the UK – 17 leading entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, and university / industry collaborators will tour the UK’s ‘Golden Triangle’ - Cambridge, Oxford and London – in November.

Included in the mix are Reid Hoffman (Founder of Linked In), Megan Smith (Vice President of New Business Development at Google), and Javes Slavet (a Partner at Greylock Venture Capital).

We have an exciting range of events for students, entrepreneurs and policymakers who will have the chance to learn from the entrepreneurs about their experiences - both successes and failures - hear about the latest developments in Web 2.0 and other technology, and to consider whether the Silicon Valley model can or should be neatly translated into the UK’s innovation landscape.

View the full range of speakers or click here for details of the events that NESTA is putting on.

Five ways universities drive innovation

Our latest Policy Briefing focuses on the five ways that universities drive innovation.  Universities have traditionally had three main missions: undertaking research; teaching; and transferring knowledge. The UK’s increasing need to innovate to meet the economic and social challenges of the 21st century will place further pressure on these roles, but importantly will also introduce two more – universities’ international and regional missions.

Universities increasingly provide important national and regional links into the global knowledge economy. They exchange knowledge, gather intelligence and facilitate international flows of highly-skilled people who, in turn, create and attract high value-added businesses. As powerful institutions with well-connected and highly-educated leaders, they are also important actors in regional networks, and help lead the design and delivery of economic development strategies.

However, few universities can excel in all five roles. Each must choose where to concentrate its efforts depending on its strengths and regional requirements. Government should encourage greater interaction between universities and the wider economy and society, and ensure that research funding encourages innovation.

As ever, I'd welcome any comments on this publication....

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

Please note: This post has moved

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”. :)

Collaboration and Competition in Balance

What is the right balance between collaboration and competition in enterprise? It strikes me that given the focus on improved productivity through increasing specialisation in corporations in the last 10-20+ years (out-sourcing, off-shoring etc), there is an increasing awareness of the need to redress the balance? The current trend towards open innovation appears to result in direct response to this recent history.

Have organisations, professional communities, industries lost the skills and ability to collaborate which can also lead to prosperty or value through different means? In attending a workshop co-hosted by Cambridge Uni and Unilever last week, it was clear that many businesses are now grappling with trying to identify those missing collaborative skills and how can we regain them?

Corporate Open Innovation - Hype or Reality?

I attended and spoke at a very well run City-Zone networking event on Corporate Open Innovation on Wednesday which had a lively debate around this theme. The room seemed to be split as to whether 'open innovation' was truly a new phenomenon or just the latest management fad. Proctor and Gamble and Oracle presented how they are actively engaging their supply chain, small companies, or customers to innovate. I added to these examples and talked about how IBM in particular are taking a very enlightened approach to innovation as described in their Global Innovation Outlook report.

My own view is that there is undoubtedly hype and spin around the theme of 'open innovation' at the moment, and the reality of innovating and managing IP is a particular problem that needs resolving. Having said that, I believe the evidence that open networking and partnering leads to better, and more innovation, and is increasingly the way innovation is happening and will happen in the future. I find the work of Lakhani and Burt compelling in this area. Corporates have strong brands and the infrastructure to take a product or service to market. But the enthusiasm, ideas and ability to execute often lies outside of the business. Therefore, I believe we are seeing a new way of working and innovating emerging but there is still a long way to go.

Reaching out from the creative silo

Our latest policy briefing (Reaching out from the creative silo: the arts, creativity and innovation) calls for an updated policy debate on the creative industries. As a mature sector, these industries must face up to the challenges of their low productivity growth and of ensuring that the benefits reach out from the creative silo and influence wider creative contributions in the UK's economy and society.

Research in this area must treat the arts and creative industries with the same degree of rigour as traditional industries. By applying existing models of innovation that are known to work in more traditional sectors, policymakers can develop a richer set of interventions than public funding alone. In our view, supporting creative enterprises as they identify and adopt new technologies, helping them think through the IP implications and supporting collaborative networks are high priorities.

We'd welcome your thoughts...

• NESTA Policy Briefings
• NESTA Creative Pioneer Programme