Jim Willis: “It was a bit like surfing the web in that we were jumping from topic to topic very quickly but getting into each topic with a profound sense of depth in a very short period of time.”
Renee Hopkins Callahan: The official IdeaFlow BIF-2 Collaborative Innovation Summit wrap-up!
Chris Flanagan: “Next up is turning those connections into meaningful interactions.”
Alice Wilder is here to talk about listening. In college, she did academic research as an undergrad, where she learned how to interview children. In graduate school, she met a visionary woman, Angela C. Santomero, who was working at Nickelodeon, and they worked on behavioral resonance, specifically looking at the negative effects of TV on kids, and they pondered how TV could have a positive effect on them.
Santomero created Blue’s Clues, and it became as popular as Sesame Street. They do a lot of research on the show (Wilder leads the R&D for the show). They get a lot of feedback from kids; one kid said “you’re making me a headache”, and the writers took it right back to the drawing board. They watch kids watching Blue. She showed a pair of simultaneous videos: the show playing, and the kids watching. I never understood how well some TV is configured for simulating true interactivity.
Kids want to be heard, want to express themselves and be listened to. They are working on an initiative to allow kids to publish as a way to learn writing.
Hugh Herr told us that from the knee down, he’s all nuts and bolts: his legs were amputated below the knee after a mountain climbing accident. He was told he’d never climb a mountain aain. The turning point was when he asked “what does a doctor know about mountain climbing?”
Hugh spent his time in the machine shop to build artificial legs and feet that were optimized for mountain climbing… maybe the ultimate mountain climbing boots! He can adjust his height. If he needs to be seven feet tall, no problem!
Simplicity through biological inspiration
He showed the results of his R&D: an artificial knee that permits a normal gait, navigation over rough terrain. They are active and are designed to behave like the biological components they are replacing.
Bill Taylor, author of Mavericks at Work, challenged the audience to tap into the wisdom of their customers. He talked about a shoe designer, John Fluevog, who learned about Linux, open source, and how grassroots contributors can create someting great. He decided to take the same approach to footwear, and asked his customers to submit designs for shoes. They had 300 finalists, and have made 10 different designs of shoes.
Didn’t pay them, but named the shoe after the designer. The lesson is that you can learn amazing things from the people who may never work for you. It can even go further: Threadless is a company that makes t-shirts with designs that customers submit and vote on. They are a framework for expressing their customers’ creativity. He brought up Tim O’Reilly’s phrase: “The architecture of participation.”
Peter Durand of Alphachimp is a tribe of visual learners who doodle the day away. The world he lives in is the world of events; he documents events visually.
Most innovation happens when you’re really irritated. Peter was bitching and moaning to his supergenius friend about all these drawings he has on websites, CD-ROMs, etc. So they started to design a software package to be cheap, fast, and out of control. The Missing Link. It fills in the gaps between event, knowledge input, and knowledge retention. The BIF-2 event archive is emerging as he speaks. He says it took him 15 minutes to construct the site. Pretty cool. I’ll stop blogging it now so you can just go check it out!
Randy Antik of Swat Team Partners is all about championing innovators. He wants to be six years old for the rest of his life.
“You only live in this history” -Frank Gehry
What it’s all about:
Randy’s role: be unstuck, leverage ideas, play to win. As a parent, he and his wife were told his son would never graduate high school. So they asked to have him tested, but the school couldn’t help him with his learning differences. They moved to a city with the resources to help him, tried private schools, tried boarding schools, and that got them closer. Eventually found a doctor (Dr. Mel Levine) who could help, and called him every day for three months until he had an opening.
This turned everything around. The aha was that they were very fortunate, but what about all the other kids? How do you scale Levine’s approach to reach all the kids? So Antik worked with Dr. Levine to explore the market, take initiatives (education, awareness, training, scaling), find money, and figure out what was in it for the stakeholders.. They’ve traind 28,000 teachers, reaching 4,000,000 kids a year, raised $70 million, and are involved with major city and state initiatives.
Many needs and opportunities out there like this. Antik realized he was a facilitator; he was unstuck, curious, and could offer strategic doing. This let him line up his passions and skills, and to realize his role: champion great minds and ideas.
Michael Singer believes “that things need to become more complex.” What if… artists are researchers? What if… an artist does work where no one can see it? He did artwork in natural environments such as the Everglades. What does that tell us about the role of humans there? The role of light? He showed his work in the Denver airport; an acre of wild untamed landscape inside an airport, right next to a McDonald’s. In his work, What If? becomes Imagine.
What if you think about parts of your city that you have trashed? Materials left over from a recycling center can become part of an eco-research park.
Living with infrastructure: can we live with what sustains us? Pictured, a power plant that uses excess heat to grow plants; the nurseries embedded in the plant are used by local non-profits who would otherwise need to go upstate for food sources.
Rick Borovoy (Co-founder and CTO of nTAG Interactive) is talking about networked name tags and belief trees. He builds technology that supports face-to-face community building: a wearable networked computer in the form of a name tag. It slides to reveal a PDA display for sending a message or checking your agenda for the event. It lets you switch modes: group to personal and back again.
Think about your belief tree: perhaps you believe “technology can build community”. Maybe you believe that it can build community online. But even if you organize your beliefs into a tree form, it’s really a belief forest: many beliefs (those of the sponsors, collaborators, etc.) You may think that it’s your product idea that is at the root of the tree, but it’s wrong: you’re what’s at the root.
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:
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.