Brian Jepson’s Weblog

Betsy Cohen of Nestle asked us to think about working in a small company… how about a company with 250 people? Then she asked us to think about a company with 250,000 like Nestle. How can these folks be coordinated, how can they communicate?

She talked about a product called FortiFlora, a probiotic sold for dogs and cats, sold in little packets (a colon’s best friend?). They developed an innovative process for the active ingredients, innovative packaging in packets, still in launch. How to communicate this to consumers and vets?

In July 2006, she became the Global Sustainability Champion across all Nestle products. Loking into corporate social responsibility as well as energy, CO2, and packaging material reductions. Found new packaging for various products, replacing multi-material non-recyclables. What they’d been doing is raising awareness across the company so that everyone’s engaged in this.

Lots of stuff has to come together to make this kind of big change:

• Work across companies within Nestle
• Work across cultures (in 80 countries)
• Work with manufacturers, retailers, government, NGOs

Her challenge: how do you stay innovative in such a large organization?

As a kid, Curt Columbus was the kind of kid who other kids didn’t play with. Glasses, chubby, comic books. But then he got the chance to play the lead in the Scottish Play (I won’t even type the name since I’m sitting in a theatre), and it turned everything around. He sees the theatre as a democratic space. He said that in 500 BC, theatre and democracy were born in Athens. They used the theatre to explore how they were organized as a society.

Fast forward to Shakespeare’s time. Once again, we needed the theatre to help us explore how we organize ourselves: he looked at flawed monarchs, examined the system from within the system. The theatre was an active space: the audience was noisy, in dialogue with the action on the stage, sometimes even throwing things.

Our society is getting more and more isolated (go to the gym, wear an iPod, watch close-captioned TV), and it’s hurting democracy. “The theatre is a possibility for a democratic space… The television doesn’t know you exist.” In the theatre, ideas are presented, and you respond to them. He explains the parallels between our society’s response to global warming and The Cherry Orchard, which they are currently presenting at Trinity; the audience should ask why the characters in the play don’t do anything to stop what’s happening to them.

Walt Mossberg asked him about the cost of the theatre, guessing that 70% of the population can’t afford it. Curt responded that the cost is even more (you have to leave the house, get a baby sitter, pay for parking; he and Walt compared that to Netflix or movies over iTunes). Curt pointed out that Broadway, Vegas, etc. are not a democratic spaces. He then described how Trinity is making the theatre more accessible to kids, and offering $20 flat pricing on tickets.

Alph Bingham is talking about Globalization 3.0: Globalization of the individual. When he headed west to graduate school, he packed up all his belongings and hit the road. When he arrived, they asked him to skin poisonous frogs. They had to figure out why it was yellow, so he and his colleagues were taking pigment out, taking toxins out, and nothing really added up. He felt like Edison: “I now know 1000 ways NOT to make a light bulb.”

Somewhere between sitting down and hitting his chair, the answer hit him… it was more of a Eureka incident rather than a slow discovery. That led to the question of, how do you organize a research business? For too long, we’ve followed the Edison model (perspiration-based approach). So Alph and his colleagued asked if you could organize for Archimedes?

They looked at the Internet, and decided to put the problems in front of everyone, in hopes of producing Archimedes-like events more frequently. The result was InnoCentive. They took challenges from Fortune 500 companies and posted them online (like the old west wanted posters). The net result has been that one-third of the posted problems have been solved. He calls the company a Medici-attractor.

Peter Gloor is here to talk about Swarm Creativity. His journey started 20 years ago as a grad student when he was hacking some software for IBM. He became a banker, worked in industry, but in 1997, he returned to a paper he had written on his CyberMap software, and decided to start a company based on it. It didn’t work out, but was a great learning experience on how not to organize a company. He’s getting back to the core idea with iQuest Analytics. He’s not the CEO this time, just the crazy chief geek. This time they are applying the cybermap concept to people.

The lesson they learned from analyzing social networks was “Don’t be a star, be a galaxy.” The real measure of value is “betweenness”; the person who is a galaxy is more powerful (imagine if you connect to only two people, but those two people are George Bush and Bill Gates).

Roger Mandle, the President of RISD, is speaking about the Art of Innovation. As much as he is an administrator, he wonders if he’s an artist? After all, he’s steeped in arts: his parents and children were/are artists, he’s educated in art history and studio art, and he went on to teach art.

He wondered where innovation comes from, and thinks it’s: inspiration, personal passion, a firm and genuine belief that drives your vision, an open and receptive mind and eye.

He eventually came to realize that RISD was his work of art: like film/painting/performance, the school is a living product of groups of people. Its mission is like the meaning of a work of art (what does it add up to?). The audience are students, museum visitors. (Think like artists, get out of the way so others can do their thing.)

Frans Johansson (”The Medici Effect”). His talk: “my journey to the intersection.” Mother African American/Cherokee, Father Swedish, grew up in Sweden. Went to Brown, studied environmental science, brought together the science communities by founding the Catalyst magazine. He recognized John Donoghue whose department was the first to support the magazine. Went on to Harvard Business School, started a company that did well until it didn’t, and was inspired to write The Medici Effect (it was going to be called “Intersections”). He was again inspired by Donoghue’s experiments with thought-controlled devices. So he started searching for stories “at the Intersection”, and contemplated how the Medici Family supported artists from all over the place, and sparked the Rennaisance. Frans found:

• All new ideas are combinations of existing ideas.
• Not all idea combinations are created equal.
• People and teams that break new ground generate and execute more ideas.
• Medici Effect is simple combinations: the more stuff you bring together, the more possible combinations you have.

Dean Kamen came up to talk about FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology). The problem he discussed was the decline of science knowledge in the US. Even though we’re talking about this now, it’s a problem that’s been going on for a long time.

The US responded to this problem with standards, testings, computers in the classroom, and more, but it didn’t fix it. This stated the problem as supply and demand. Kamen wanted to look at it as a Demand and Supply problem, which is the basis of FIRST. He made it more like sports: coaches not teachers, nurture not judgment, cheerleaders, etc. He went looking for sports stars of science. They formed FIRST. They set up a robotics competition in cooperation with engineers from major corporations, and the engineers said they got more out of it than the kids. In the fifth year, they outgrew their digs in Manchester, and moved it to Epcot Center. Five years later, they even outgrew Disney, and set up regional events with the finals at the Houston Astrodome! The next year they were at the Georgia Dome.

38% of the kids on the teams were women and minorities. Their “little league” uses the Lego Kits.

Brandeis University Study, funded by the Ford Foundation: FIRST participants are 50% more likely to attend colege; 3x more likely to major in engineering; 9x more likely to have freshman year internshps. Female participants were 3x more likely to pursue technology and engineering in college.

Announcement: RI will be the first state in the US to make FIRST available to every high school. Kamen will challenge every other state to follow RI’s lead.

Saul Kaplan kicked things off with a re-cap of the previous day. I appreciated his focus on the interactions in the hallways and reception afterward. This is the part of conferences that has always appealed to me.

He introduced today’s host, Walt Mossberg. Always nice to see a native returning home. Walt reminisced about the things that made Rhode Island great, such as fried dough. He invited Congressman Jim Langevin up on stage who opened the event and introduced his friend Dean Kamen as “an inventor and entrepreneur with a social conscience”.

Langevin mentioned that Kamen is currently working on a device to create potable water that will be the size of a steamer trunk. He challenged Kamen to invent a wheelchair that was more than a wheelchair; a true mobility device that did more than just moved around on four wheels… and then proceeded to show us Kamen’s invention, Langevin’s own wheelchair called the iBot.

Robert Ballard: “Born in Wichita, Kansas, where all oceanographers come from”. As a child, Ballard was spellbound by the idea of walking on the bottom of the ocean (20,000 Leagues Under the Sea). From that point on, he was fascinated by the bottom of the ocean. In college, he ended up in ROTC and eventually became an Army intelligence officer. He got a visit one night from a Navy Officer bearing an envelope transferring him to the deep diving submarine at Woods Hole, which finally took him to the bottom of the sea.

As a grad student, he kept on, exploring hydrothermal vents, meeting tube worms. There is more biomass in earth than on it (that’s why we need to look inside Mars, not on it). There’s also more history in the deep sea than in all the museums in the world. The state of preservation is phenomenal.

All well and good, but the problem was that they were using very old technology. Average depth of the ocean is 12k feet. 50% of it is deeper than that. A typical dive was 2.5 hours down, 2.5 up. “A 5 hour commute in a freezing elevator with no bathroom.” Plus, it’s dark down there. So they weren’t getting a lot done.

Eventually, he learned about fiber optics. This suddenly opened up the opportunity for telepresence. It’s not as if you actually get out of the submarine! In 1981, he published a cartoon in National Geographic that showed the concept: a robot that had everything his sub did, but without his body. The next step, hook it up to a satellite, and it’s everywhere.

He loves Rhode Island. The RI inferiority complex: stuck between Massachusetts (”where the smart people are”) and Connecticut (”where the rich people are”). But, “we’re going to kick the butt of the other states because we have a real creative engine here”

But how to deal with resistance to the idea? Ballard got the opportunity to define the “Ocean Blueprint for the 21st century”. To go where no one has gone before on planet earth. We have no idea what we’ll discover, so there’s no point in having a science crew. So, he got a small ship, loaded it with hardware (not much room for scientists). So that forced the scientists to stay on the beach. The plan is to make this ship, base it in Quonset, and go where no one has gone before. If you voted for Proposition 9, you supported the Inner Space center at the Bay Campus (Instead of “Houston we have a problem”, it’s “Kingston, we have a problem”). This will not only hook up the scientists, but also the kids.

RI schools are Internet 2 compatible, and this will bring “America’s first ship of exploration” to the kids.

Mary Pat Ryan started with a story about how her car got stolen; not surprising, living in NYC… except the car was garaged. It just disappeared. Even though it was covered by insurance and she got a new car, she had an emotional attachment to the old car, and started wondering what that was. At the time, Sirius was launching, and she was at IMAX at the time. An experience with the audio track of an IMAX movie led her to be more interested in the theatre of the mind, so she made the jump to Sirius.

What will kill a company faster: bad idea or bad execution? She thinks an idea only becomes an innovation if a great execution takes it there. Exploit the “pockets of passion” in your teams to make your ideas wonderful. Allow their passion to live in the company.