by Roger Dennis

The age of the personal satellite (Science Foo Camp)

I’ve just got back from a weekend of cognitive overload at Science Foo Camp at the Googleplex.  Given that there’s just so much to take in, here’s a list of three interesting links that are worth exploring more:

  • Victimless Leather – a small coat growing from living human and mouse stem cells
  • Bjorks new album called Biophilia, and the interactive apps that redefine what music is
  • Learning about the ‘small spacecraft’ initiative at NASA under Will Marshall.  The plan is to use Andriod smartphones to power small, inexpensive satellites  that run on Open Source software. Below is a photo of the finished satellite.  Note that the metal tape measure is the aerial and there is no shielding on the device.  The first launch is later in the year, but the beer bottle shown in the photo will not be on the rocket.

by Roger Dennis

(off topic) Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork (HBR)

Richard Hackman is apparently the guru of team dynamics, and the article link below was from another guru, Bob Sutton at Stanford. This combination means that although this post is not directly related to my usual topics, it’s worth reading for anyone in business.

Misperception #2: It’s good to mix it up. New members bring energy and fresh ideas to a team. Without them, members risk becoming complacent, inattentive to changes in the environment, and too forgiving of fellow members’ misbehavior.

Actually: The longer members stay together as an intact group, the better they do. As unreasonable as this may seem, the research evidence is unambiguous. Whether it is a basketball team or a string quartet, teams that stay together longer play together better.

Six Common Misperceptions about Teamwork – J. Richard Hackman – Harvard Business Review.

by Roger Dennis

Health Foo Camp and ideas at the fringes

From the 15-17 July I spent the weekend in Boston at another wonderful Foo Camp.  For the uninitiated, a Foo Camp is a three day, invite only unconference. My translation of this is that it’s focused creative chaos which leads to cognitive overload.  There’s some background about Foo Camps on wikipedia here, the origin of Health Foo here and full coverage of the weekend here.

However I was also interested to learn more about the organisation that sponsored the event, and more specifically, the people inside that organisation.  Health Foo was supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation ,  the largest philanthropy devoted solely to the public’s health in the USA.  To put that in context, according to Wikipedia the foundation has USD$7.5 billion in assets, and annually grants  grants about USD$400 million a year. The team inside the Foundation that supported Foo is called Pioneer and Paul Tarini is the lead in Pioneer for Health Foo.  When it came to introductions, Paul described his role as looking for oddballs.  That piqued my interest and over the weekend I sat down with him and discussed with him exactly what he meant.

Pioneer was started eight years ago when the incoming President of the Foundation adopted a portfolio approach for most of the teams in the organisation. It was decided that there should be one team that had a high risk portfolio and that team was Pioneer. Paul was the second director of that team.  He likens their role to that of a venture capital fund in that it finds unconventional projects and supports them.  Paul comments that “…we have much more license to fail than those other teams.”   They’ve worked on some fascinating concepts; for example six years ago they were supporting a project to use prediction markets to anticipate flu outbreaks.

Teams like Pioneer are rare in any organisation, let alone in philanthropy.  Most leaders simply fail to recognise the need to explore the periphery of their sector to find new and novel offerings. They incentivise everyone by operation goals, and this kills innovation.  Clearly at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation there is recognition of the need to look to the edges, and Pioneer fulfills that role.  However you still need to measure the investment and I asked Paul about how Pioneer justifies it’s existence.

His response was that individual projects have their own metrics to assess how they are progressing.  Additionally, there is an annual survey of stakeholder audiences, and in this survey is a component that measures the reputation of the Foundation for idea generation and innovation.  Finally, they monitor the spread of ideas to other teams as a gauge of success.

I was also interested in why the Foundation was interested in Foo Camps.  Paul’s response reflects the nature of his role and his understanding of where the most interesting innovation is to be found: “we believe new ideas often occur when two different disciplines intersect and begin to wrestle with each other; FOO camps are well-suited to foster such interaction.”

Paul Tarini (with Jane McGonigal who was also at Health Foo)

by Roger Dennis

Really Bad Workshops – presentation resourcess

Got the fever to create an awesome workshop and want to blow the socks of your audience with your presentations? I mentioned some resources in the book and here’s two more places to look:

1. Presentation Zen – there’s both a blog and a book.

Blog : http://www.presentationzen.com/presentationzen/

Book : http://tinyurl.com/2mbm26 (on Amazon)

2. Duarte – This is the team behind some very slick presentations that you might have seen some of their work running alongside some of the TED conference speakers. There’s both a blog and, well, you get the idea…

Blog: http://blog.duarte.com

Book : http://tinyurl.com/6zv3gs (also from Amazon)

by Roger Dennis

Free eBook Released – Really Bad Workshops (and how to avoid them)

Some years ago I was given a copy of a wonderful e-book by Seth Godin called “Really Bad PowerPoint (and how to avoid it)”. At the time I was working for a large corporation in London and subjected to weekly doses of death by PowerPoint. This little book was an eye opener as it addressed a very specific corporate sin – bad communication.

It was small, digestible and contained many pearls of wisdom that guided me in my presentation style. In essence it helped me put the power back in PowerPoint.

A few years – and a few organisations later – I began to reflect on another corporate sin: the bad workshop.  If you’ve experienced bad PowerPoint then it’s likely that you have also experienced a bad workshop.  The difference is that while a bad presentation might last for minutes (if you’re lucky), a bad workshop can drag on for hours (if you’re lucky).

However it’s not hard to create better workshops, and so I put virtual pen to virtual paper and wrote a eBook.  To be more precise I’ve written the shortest eBook (18 pages) with the longest title (24 words): Really Bad Workshops (and how to avoid them). Ten Tips to Make Workshops Work. By Roger Dennis (with acknowledgement to Seth Godin). It’s based on my experience running corporate workshops around the world for both the public and private sector.

If you use Twitter it’s virtually free and you can pay with a tweet for the book.  If you don’t use Twitter, it’s still virtually free.

You can download it here.

by Roger Dennis

Five Discovery Skills that Distinguish Innovators — HBS Working Knowledge

The Harvard Business School Working Knowledge site has published an extract from “The Innovator’s DNA”, the latest book from Clayton M. Christensen (with Jeff Dyer and Hal Gergersen). They outline the five discovery skills that distinguish the Steve Jobses and Jeff Bezoses of the world from the run-of-the-mill corporate managers.

The key concept is that research supports the idea that innovative tendencies are not genetic. Rather, they can be developed. The authors identify five discovery skills that distinguish successful innovators: associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.

Reading the extract it felt like someone had just described my day job.  Read more here : Five Discovery Skills that Distinguish Great Innovators — HBS Working Knowledge.

by Roger Dennis

(off topic) Cathedral Square 48 Hour Design Challenge

Over the weekend I worked with a team from Arup and Opus on the 48 Hour Design Challenge (to redesign parts of the Christchurch CBD after the recent earthquakes).  We worked to redesign Cathedral Square and I blogged some of our thinking, progress and end results here.

Last night we were rapt to win the award for the design of this site and hope that some of our thinking will be used by the City Planning team.

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.