Making Innovation Flourish

'Do we expect too little from humanity?'

That was Sir Tim Berners-Lee's response to the question 'do we expect too much from the web?'.  It was part of a memorable day for me, culminating in an event to promote NESTA's founder sponsorship of the Web Science Research Initiative, an organisation (supported by MIT and Southampton University) devoted to promoting and disseminating the emerging field of 'web science'.

I owe my career to Berners-Lee, or at least indirectly, to his invention.   It was strangely apposite that on arriving at NESTA's office, he walked past my desk while I was stuck on the phone, arguing with an ISP about a DNS issue relating to our latest collaborative workspace - the Innovation Index. 

My only other opportunity to interact with him was regarding his presentation, as I had the dubious honour of being in charge of our first live webcast from this building.  (In a 'geeks shall inherit the earth' moment I even took a picture of all the kit we'd had to hire in to do the video mixing and encoding).  I vainly tried to help his Mac talk to our plasmas, and tried not to look too panic-stricken as I realised that (a) he was presenting from his own laptop and (b) he had been updating some of the slides earlier that day - so the one I would be linking to on the live feed was marginally out of date.

The event itself was a bit of a blur.  I was operating one of the cameras, attempting to take notes and occasionally popping my head around the door to monitor the vision mixing.  All the technology worked (four overflow rooms with split screen presentations / speakers), live webcast (now archived online), twitter channels from the overflow rooms and the wider internet piling on Roland, doing a thankless task as moderator (you can see him asking questions on their behalf in the Q and A session).

Others have blogged on the content, and mused on the various offerings of both Tim, Charlie Leadbeater and Andy Duncan - the latter two having been asked to respond to elements of Tim's presentation and add some perspective from a sociological and commercial background (in the spirit of web science being a multi-disciplinary approach to understanding the web).

Ultimately, it is Tim's passion for the web, his passion for it to work better, for it to deliver meaning and value to people that will stick with me.  His humility is well documented, but I hadn't expected to him to be so passionate, so articulate and so... right.

Connecting people with information and back again.  That's all the web is.  A series of links at various levels of abstraction.  Because no matter how much or how little technology we use (irony intended), what commercial model web publishers and ISPs use, or what technical standards we use or aspire to, the web should, fundamentally, be about making positive changes - whether it's simply being more efficient or becoming better informed or breaking down geographic/age/racial barriers - in how we interact with our fellow man.

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.

Innovation Technology: How new technologies are changing the way we innovate

NESTA’s Provocations are regular extended essays by leading thinkers that showcase
thought-provoking work on innovation.  In 'Innovation Technology: How new technologies are changing the way we innovate', David Gann and Mark Dodgson argue that a new set of technologies is emerging that enables firms to innovate more rapidly, efficiently and accurately than ever before. This 'Innovation Technology' (IvT) includes eScience, virtual reality, simulation and modelling techniques, and rapid prototyping.

Indeed, it is possible that it will have as profound an impact on economic growth and social well-being in today's knowledge economy as the development of machine tools had on the industrial economy of the mid-19th century.

Over the next decade, understanding what IvT does, how to use it and where its limitations lie will prove critical for those running businesses, working in firms and providing public services. As a result, government policy-makers at all levels would do well to appreciate its implications.

I welcome your thoughts...

Office 2.0 - How NESTA is using social tools & web apps

In an earlier comment, I mentioned that I'd post about what social tools we are using at NESTA, and the timing seems just right, as I've been invited to speak about this same subject at the Office 2.0 conference next week. In fact, it hadn't clicked just how many ways we've embraced the whole '2.0' way of working until I scanned the list of conference sponsors to find that we're using quite a few of their products/tools - as well as loads of others. Here's a breakdown of what we're doing:

Internal Collaboration & Knowledge-sharing
Our Intranet is a structured (hybrid) wiki powered by ThoughtFarmer. We opted for a hybrid approach instead of pure wiki, mainly because we wanted to gradually introduce social tools to the business, and structured wikis offer wiki functionality without the 'geek factor' - or chaos - that can be associated with traditional wikis. I think ThoughtFarmer's interface is one of the 'friendliest' out there, something our staff seem to appreciate.

We've also been using CommunityServer to drive our internal blogs & discussion boards. I must admit I'm not the biggest fan of CommunityServer, as it's been fiddly to work with and tricky to find UK developers to support it, but it ticked our ICT department's box of being Microsoft-friendly, so there we go. (We also use CS as the platform for managing our Creative Pioneer business support programmes.)

Online Workspaces & Extranets
We use Central Desktop for a number of things: my own team uses it as a collaborative workspace for all work, from steady-state 'rolling' work, to discrete projects. I personally love it, as it means all my docs are available from any computer in the world. We also use CD across the business as a way of managing work/relationships with external partners, from marcomms designers to Committee members to participants on our Crucible programme. My team is able to create extranets in a matter of minutes now that we're using Central Desktop. I'm a former Basecamp user, and I *heart* Central Desktop.

Fancy Feeds
We're using del.icio.us to do some pretty cool things aside from the usual social bookmarking. For example, our Innovation Digest email newsletter is created from a del.icio.us feed, as is the online version. It really simplifies the workflow, automating much of the drudgery associated with building newsletters.

And all the RSS feeds on our website are powered by del.icio.us and Feedburner, which is a pretty quick and simple 'hack' for RSS-enabling a website. I'm surprised more folks don't do it, to be honest. It's not the most elegant solution, but it works!

Speaking of feeds, I should also mention that we're using Yahoo Pipes to meld 2 feeds from our Typepad blogs to fill the 'blogs' slot on our website homepage. Again, it's a bit of a workaround, but it gets the job done.

Beyond RSS
We've introduced Netvibes to various staff members, and they all seem to say the same thing: Netvibes has changed my life (I agree!). While we first introduced it as a handy RSS reader that doesn't require ICT support, we soon found it became much more than that: a way of organising your digital 'clutter', planning for trips, and all sorts of other uses.

Remote Workers
We've used WebEx to enable our UK Partnerships team to collaborate across distances, often as an alternative to flying - which is great not only for the environment, but also in terms of cost. We've also used it to train our remote staff on using some of the tools above. I must admit we've had limited success in using it for online events, but I'm keen to give it another go under different circumstances.

Other Bits & Bobs
Last but not least, it's also worth mentioning that we use Wufoo and SurveyMonkey for our online surveys - both internal ones, and external. We use Wufoo for the simple ones, and SurveyMoneky for the more complex ones.

So what's next? We're currently trialling Diigo within my team, with the ultimate aim of introducing our Policy & Research team to this method of collaborative web annotation. I'm sure they will find it incredibly useful for the research & review process. And we're always on the lookout for new web apps and tools.

The really cool thing is that most of the above tools are free or low-cost, so I guess we're proof that you don't have to spend thousands of pounds to introduce web-based tools to the business context. So much has changed over the last couple of years. The old days of the 'Cost - Quality - Speed' triangle has gone; these days you CAN have all three: done cheaply, done well, and done quickly.

The future is smart machines (and soup)

Last week I read an interview with Tim Berners-Lee about the future of the internet, the so-called 'semantic web'. Not as catchy a name as 'Web 2.0' but potentially even more powerful. Reading the interview reminded me that while the concept of the semantic web has been around a while, and has been proclaimed the Next Big Thing by net gurus the world over, explaining the concept and why it could revolutionise our lives is difficult. Eyes glaze over as soon as things like "data-meshing" are mentioned, and even Sir Berners-Lee's explanation didn't quite hit the mark for me. So here's my own attempt at a Plain English explanation of this woolly and unfortunately named concept, hopefully in a way that even my mum would understand. Make of it what you will.

Let's start at the beginning, with Web 1.0: producers created content that was published on websites for consumers to find and consume.

In Web 2.0, the lines betweeen consumer and producer are blurred. Consumer-producers can now upload their own content, and consume the content of other consumer-producers, through blogs & sites like YouTube or MySpace. By exchanging this home-made stew of information with each other, online social networks are created.

Web 2.0 is also about doing more stuff through your web browser, things that you used to do on paper or on software that you had to install on your computer. BackPack replaces your personal datebook or Outlook calendar, Flickr replaces your photo albums, for example. You can label your photos and events with descriptive words or 'tags' that make it easy for you to find them. And of course, you can share this content with your friends.

Now on to the tricky part...

Missing the point: net radio's last stand

In the same week that NMA announced that online (download) sales now acount for 90% of British single sales (yes, ninety!), the UK Copyright Tribunal did exactly what I was hoping they wouldn't: they followed the US CRB in effecting royalty charges that could kill internet radio in the UK entirely. What's more, the UK fees will be up to 9 times the amount their US counterparts will pay. Pandora, one of the most respected US services that had only recently started broadcasting in the UK, is preparing to shut down their UK operation as early as this week.

What stations like Pandora do is provide an excellent way of selling more records. Here's how: you type in the name of a song or musician you like, and Pandora plays you music that is similar. You may never have heard of the artist or song that Pandora plays to you, but if you like it, you can buy it from iTunes or Amazon at a single click. I have no doubt that this has led to an increase in sales, especially for lesser-known artists.

The whole purpose of royalty fees is to protect composers and performers (and of course record companies) by compensating them each time their song is played in public, thus generating income for them. But actions like the new net radio fees will only end up hurting music sales, which generate more income than royalties. The UK Copyright Tribunal and the US CRB have effectively killed off one of music's cheapest and most effective marketing tools.

Until regulatory bodies like this recognise that the world has changed around them and learn to adapt their ways of working to account for the digital age, it's a lose-lose situation. Regulation needs to evolve to support innovative business models like internet radio, or nobody wins.

Social web for social issues

This morning's news about a screensaver and online social network for Alzheimer's sufferers and their carers is exactly the kind of social innovation the Innovation Challenges team are exploring. The screensaver is a simple application with the "why didn't I think of that" factor: a carer and person with dementia can upload text, video and photos to the screensaver to help them remember important people, moments and facts about their lives. It's great when an existing technology like this can be adopted and put to good use. If the social network element works well, I can see that being taken up by folks without Alzheimer's as well. Millions of elderly people live alone, and this could be their connection to other people out there. Sure, it's not the same as actual physical contact, and some considerations would need to be made for those not familiar with computers, but it could just be the lifeline that keeps lonely elderly people going.

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.