Just back from a week in the UK working on a Technology Futures programme for Innovaro. We assembled a wide range of world experts from around the globe to build a picture of what the world might look like in twenty years time from a technology perspective. In the same room we had people that had just come back from Davos, TED presenters, geneticists, Koyoto negotiators, cold fusion experts and ex-Presidential Advisors.

It generated a range of fascinating and jaw-dropping insights.

I’ll blog these as I churn through my notes over the next few days. In the meantime, here’s one to get you started. It comes from an expert in foresight who is working for one of the worlds largest architectural firms (I cannot name people as we ran the event under Chatham House rules to ensure the discussion was as open as possible).

“We are already constructing buildings that have been designed as Faraday cages.”

Oh, and in the same vein, he also noted that on any average day, “there is two and a half miles of smog over Shanghai.”

Malcom Gladwell comments on the fringes that exist within an organisation in his article for the New Yorker about workplace design.

More precisely, as one study after another has demonstrated ,the best ideas in any workplace arise out of casual contacts among different groups within the same company. If you are designing widgets for Acme.com, for instance, it is unlikely that a breakthrough idea is going to come from someone else on the widget team: after all, the other team members are as blinkered by the day-to-day demands of dealing with the existing product as you are.

New ideas do not necessarily live within the borders of existing intellectual domains. In fact they are most often at the edges and in curious intersections.

Grant McCracken has a great post about the difficulties that corporations have with scanning for non-incremental innovation. His thoughts build on the recent HBS article about fringe scanning which I blogged about here.

In seeking a solution to stopping the organisation getting blinded, he suggests :

…the creation of an observation platform from which we can keep an eye out for the next new things. In keeping with our Tsunami references, let’s call it a wheelhouse, a conning tower, or a ship’s bridge.

The trick would be to find 5 or 6 really smart, well educated, well informed, well connected, deeply curious, utterly practical people. These qualifications create a tiny Venn intersection, but, hey, we only need 5 or 6 people.

I once worked as part of team for an online bank in London doing exactly what Grant suggested. It was fascinating work, but it was also the first place that the CFO looked for making cuts when the company went into a retrenchment phase. The people that left at that time went on to create some fascinating new business, like zopa.

In cutting back the team that looked for early signs of new business ideas, they also cut back their source of new revenue from potentially disruptive ideas.

Do the words “shot” and “foot” spring to mind?

Footnote – in the comments to Grants post, there’s an eye popping quote (by Tom Guarriello) from Chris Anderson (Wired editor) at Pop!Tech : “I do whatever my intern tells me. If s/he tells me to run a story about X, I do, even if I don’t get it.”

David Skilling, chief executive of The New Zealand Institute, is quoted in a Time Magazine article about the state of New Zealand as a country. Skilling is a very interesting person for a whole number of reasons, and very bright. In the article in makes some very topical points about the impact of geography on globalisation (which is outside the focus of this blog), but he also makes an interesting point about the fringes :

Just like in biology,
the interesting stuff
happens on the edge.

Something I had been meaning to read for a while was the excellent HBS article called Scanning the Periphery (it’s a PDF). The article – which in the HBS tradition – has become a book, examines the value of fringe scanning and suggests methods for doing so. Interestingly there is also a “Peripheral Vision” blog which is suffering from neglect with a mere three entries.

This quote goes some way to encapsulating the value of fringe scaning :

Buckminster Fuller developed a very personal and systematic approach to scanning the periphery. Whenever he was at an airport, he would randomly select a magazine from the stands in the bookstore and read it on his plane ride from cover to cover. On one trip the magazine might be about gardening, on another about fashion or airplane design. With each trip, Fuller learned something new and saw the world in a different way. Many managers could benefit from adding such vicarious reading discipline to their travel routines, especially now that we customize our computer screens and newsletters to report only what we deem relevant. Undirected searches may offer answers to questions that we do not even recognize or know how to formulate.

There’s also some interesting validation for harnessing the fringes inside an organisation :

Most organizations have maverick employees with insights about the periphery,but they rarely tap these individuals. Find informed people, either inside or out, who reject the conventional wisdom about your businesses. Maybe they are congenitally unhappy with the direction of the business, or maybe they are talented outliers with insights into new customers and technologies that give them an idea for a new business. What shifting winds are they feeling that the rest of the organization is missing? As Andy Grove notes in his book Only the Paranoid Survive, these mavericks usually have a difficult time explaining their visceral feelings to top management, who are usually the last to know.

As I’ve mentioned before, the really interesting innovations don’t usually come from the core of a sector or industry, they come from the edges. The edges are places where people either don’t know or don’t care about the rules and paradigms at the core.

Next week at Duke (in the States) there’s a symposium where thirteen of the USAs “top scientists” will share their thoughts on emerging great ideas in science and how today’s discoveries might change medicine.

How does this relate to the fringes?

“I think science’s next great idea will come from a youngster who stumbles upon it by asking interesting questions,” says Thomas Steitz, Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale University

Read the article here.