Month / June 2011

by Roger Dennis

Innovation at scale – software platforms

In my experience there are only a handful of ways of unleash innovation at scale across thousands of employees.  The best of these is to employ idea management software, and in this category my favourite tool is called Spigit. It creates an environment of ‘gameification’ in innovation, and The Guardian wrote about it today, showcasing how it works in the UK civil service:

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has already taken steps down the gamification route. In the past it used suggestion boxes to encourage its 120,000 staff to come up with ideas on how to improve the way it did things. But it found this did not help in evaluating, selecting and developing those proposals with the most potential into meaningful business cases for implementation.

David Cotherhill, the DWP’s deputy director of innovation, explains: “It’s important to have a structure in place for supporting and making decisions on ideas that come into the system. Where you don’t have that they tend to stagnate.”

To try and address this situation, the department used Spigit’s platform for enterprise ideas and innovation management in creating a marketplace for developing and trading proposals for change. The platform, which was dubbed ‘Idea Street’, was also tweaked to support a number of gaming techniques such as points, leader boards and a ‘buzz index’ in a bid to make it more engaging.

The DWP now has more than 6,000 staff actively using Idea Street and says it has implemented over 60 proposals, which are expected to save it more than £20m by 2014-15. The system has also been rolled out across a number of other government departments, including the Ministry of Justice.

via Gamification for the public good | Guardian Government Computing | Guardian Professional.

by Roger Dennis

Children Accurately Predict The Future Of Computing (article link)

Worth a look, if only to remind yourselves that it doesn’t take experts to have an accurate view on where things can go in the future:

The Latitude research organization believes children can contribute to scientific advancement through their unbounded imagination. The Children’s Future Requests For Computers and the Internet asked children to draw what they wished computers could do in the future. Some of the predictions, such as Google image search, would come true on the day the study was announced. Many others are on their way. Even without the general knowledge of what scientists are working on, the surveyed children show remarkable (and adorable) foresight.

Children Adorably, Accurately Predict The Future Of Computing | Slideshows.

by Roger Dennis

Introducing The Growth Agenda

You may have already picked this, but I’d like to formally introduce The Growth Agenda. It’s a global network of smart thinkers with proven track records that collaborate to help organizations address big challenges and exploit major new growth opportunities.  The network spans both geographies and sectors.

The organisations that have already worked with the Growth Agenda have found the insight and innovation produced to be far richer and deeper than available elsewhere. What makes the offering different is the implicit link to concrete growth platforms for the future  – the identification of tangible, sizeable and credible opportunities that will shift a sector are the outcomes of our projects.

As you can see from the website (www.growthagenda.com) the Growth Agenda builds on the proven approaches from the past and takes innovation and growth strategy the next step forward:

  • It is already enabling major organisations to identify emerging changes and develop growth strategies to create and capture value from innovation,
  • It provides access to a wealth of expertise and different perspectives to help organisations to find new ways of creating significant and sustainable growth.

What is different (and we think unique) about the Growth Agenda is not just the scale and level of challenges being addressed, but also how this is being achieved: As well as a transparent approach that links together a bespoke talent group to each project, it also provides organisations with a simple way to engage and work with this expertise so that is just like partnering with a single entity – but one with a great combination of insights and experience. This is explained in more detail here.

For every project, a core team member of the Growth Agenda acts like a film producer – bringing together the ideal combination of global talent and expertise to deliver the best results. They select the most appropriate experts to help address the challenge / opportunity; choreograph how and where this expertise is most effectively involved; and ensure that the questions addressed help to push the boundaries and identify the biggest, best and most sustainable growth platforms.

The Growth Agenda itself is incidentally a not-for-profit organisation with no overheads as exists solely to bring a bespoke group of leading talent together in a equable and impactful manner:

  • It operates as a network where all organisations involved are able to support and be supported by the very best expertise available.
  • Within the global network we have people leading growth in major businesses, leading academics, expert consultants and government advisors.
  • Some see that this approach is reinventing how organisations access the best talent to identify major opportunities well ahead of the competition.

From a personal perspective, the Growth Agenda provides me with the opportunity to work with great people in terrific organisations on big issues with a unique combination of talent that work together as one seamless group.

If you have any questions about this and our perspectives, please do not hesitate to ask.

by Roger Dennis

When ideas have sex…

I love this quote from Kirby Ferguson, a New York-based filmmaker, in his series “Everything is a Remix”:

the most dramatic results can happen when ideas are combined. By connecting ideas together creative leaps can be made, producing some of history’s biggest breakthroughs.

His video series has the foundation of some serious reading, and harks to the work of Steven Johnson. Watch the video for some more context to this quote..

via Everything is a Remix.

by Roger Dennis

Foresight/innovation at scale – Magnetic South

Over the weekend I was interviewed on Radio New Zealand about a initiative to forecast the future of Christchurch (my home town that has been devastated by a series of earthquakes since Sept 2010). It was called Magnetic South and was a version of the Foresight Engine developed by the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto.

It’s a way of scaling public engagement so that ideas can not only be submitted, but can also be built upon in a transparent manner.  The software also adds a game layer which turns the initiative from something potentially dry, into something that becomes compelling and addictive.

Magnetic South went extremely well, with over 8000 ideas submitted, built upon and improved by collaboration from the time the game commenced.

You can see the threads of the game here, where some very sharp visualisation enables the tracking of individual ideas as the are commented on and built upon.

Although I was the one that was interviewed, kudos needs to go to Richard Gordon, CEO of Landcare Research who backed the game, Bob Frame who drove it (and who took some conversations we had a couple of years ago to places that I didn’t expect) and Stephanie Pride who got very little sleep for the 5 weeks prior to the game, and during the game itself.

(However my interview did cause a hiccup in the process, when Radio NZ listeners took the chance to logon in such numbers that the server in Silicon Vally crashed the game prematurely.)

You can hear the full interview here.

by Roger Dennis

Resource Efficiency: The 6th Wave of Innovation

Echoing some of the trends that we’re seeing emerge from Future Agenda, Dr Moody holds that the global financial crisis of heralded the start of a sixth major wave of innovation — that of resource efficiency. You can take a look at his book called  The Sixth Wave, or scan this Wired article for a precis of his four main points:

  1. Waste is an opportunity
  2. Sell the service, not the product
  3. Bits are global, atoms are local
  4. If in doubt, look to nature

Recommended reading.

via Resource Efficiency: The Sixth Wave of Innovation | Epicenter | Wired.com.

by Roger Dennis

Christchurch and Silicon Valley – the parallels

Governments around the world have repeatedly tried to transplant the Silicon Valley culture to their own localities.  It never works.

It never works because they fail to understand the long term view.  Silicon Valley exists because of a truly unique institution – Stanford University.  It’s more of a research facility than a university, and this point was hammered home to me in a visit there last year.  When talking to one of the professors – who is an expert on long term thinking – he said that that university doesn’t really care about publishing.  It cares about industry partnerships.  That culture was born out of the private sector – Stanford was born from a grant from a railroad tycoon in the 1890s.

However while this beginning was critical, it was the 50s that saw the real impacts of the university. After WWII the focus was very much on creating new businesses, and this created companies like HP. In addition, some research points to the fact that a “powerful sense of regional solidarity” was critical in the birth of Silicon Valley.

So where are the parallels? At the moment Christchurch has three things:

  1. a powerful sense of regional solidarity
  2. an extraordinary opportunity to start from scratch with the CBD restart
  3. an excellent university ecosystem

Here’s my argument – Christchurch should be aiming to take a very long term view in order to create an environment of innovation that rivals the best.  We have no shortage of talent in the at respect. The question therefore should be – what’s the focus?

Given that the CBD is essentially a greenfields rebuild, then why not engage with companies like GE and Cisco (who would jump at the chance to deploy leading edge technologies) and create a city that’s a living lab for urban living?

The infrastructure that powers a city could be built in a lego type fashion, where the old could be easily swapped out for the new.  As companies come and go (as they are prone to do) the city could attract new players who are seeking to deploy their technologies in a real world laboratory.  Alongside this the university would establish a business focused research facility that leveraged the living lab, and spun out businesses that based themselves in the region.

Attempting this from scratch would be madness.  But Christchurch has a window of opportunity at the moment that most cities never get, and never will. This is a long term play to develop an ecosystem of business, talent and research that could be unrivalled in the world, and position New Zealand extremely well for the future.

Why wouldn’t we do it?