Innovation is famously hard to define (like the “intelligence” measured in I.Q.—we know it’s a quotient but we don’t know exactly of what). What do we strive for under the heading of innovation? What do we hope to achieve? It’s not just that we are seeking solutions—not all solutions are innovations—we are also seeking to establish a connection with an imagined future. Innovations often seem like solutions to questions we didn’t know (how) to ask. If you want to get a taste of what innovations looks like, you should, of course, go straight away to TED.com. When (and if) you’re done take a look at what we’ve collected below. From the future of science to the evolution of the social entrepreneur, the following sites spread the innovative word.
1. IDEO: Deep dives and design thinking
Lately it’s been hard to do the normal morning media-skimming rounds without reading about Design Thinking. The answer to the question of how to innovate, according to the New York Times, Stanford University, and Fast Company, is to change the way you think about the creation process. What is needed, they agree, is more Design Thinking. Design Thinking and IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm, go together, well, like a shopper and carriage—as you can see in this 1999 management-theory cult classic “Deep Dive.” It’s the video that sort of started it all. Beautiful people from IDEO collaborate to design a super-sexy supermarket aisle-cruiser. But it’s not just about design, as IDEO founder Tim Brown makes clear in this MIT video, it’s about good thinking. Design Thinking places the emphasis on three aspects of ideation that often go under-emphasized a culture pretty obsessed with the technical side of things: empathy, ethnography, and rapid prototyping.
While empathy might be an armchair exercise of the imagination (however difficult to achieve), ethnography is not. It involves straight-up empirical research. As the word ethnography suggests, DT takes seriously the existence of real differences between “cultures,” in terms of conceptual maps, models, processes, attachments and goals—only here “cultures” can be defined broadly, as “patients” and “doctors” or “scientists” and “engineers.” Once you’ve got the data, prototypes should be built early and iteratively—not as icons to unveil to clients, but tools to help thinking progress. IDEO’s website is just overflowing with Design Thinking resources, talks and slidedecks. Dig in, Dive Deep, and, who knows, maybe you’ll innovate better.
2. @OpenInno: Look, we made you this Twitter hub!
Open Innovation (OI) is a term that refers to the need to open firms to external sources of ideas, or more radically to conceive of knowledge as flows that are to be harnassed and not stored. hypios is part of the OI ecosystem, and Dr. Henry Chesbrough, Executive Direction of Berkeley’s Center for Open Innovation, is a veritable OI fountainhead. He is usually credited with having been the first to use the expression “Open Innovation”, and is widely regarded as among the most important thinker on Open Innovation, having published 3 influental OI books and many papers on the subject. The Center for Open Innovation is itself a great resource on OI, but they seem poised to become even better. Last year, a few of the Doctor’s fans started a twitter hub for open innovation, @OpenInno. In 2010, they plan to gift the twitter hub to Chesbrough and the Center for Open Innovation. You can read the story of its glorious rise on this slidedeck. Personally, I love the idea of the Twitter hub (and #openinnovation as the go-to twitter tag for good OI resources), but not so much the idea of gifting it to the Guru, even if it might be the first gifted Twitter account ever.
3. Continuous Open Innovation Communities: Stefan Lindegaard and Braden Kelley
Sometimes you just need to talk to your peers about innovation programs, crowdsourcing platforms and OI metrics. When those moments come, you’ll probably turn to LinkedIn’s Continuous Innovation Community, facilitated by Braden Kelly and Stefan Lindegaard, because it’s the best and most active innovation “practitioner” community out there.
If Innovation is in your job title, it’s probable you’re a member, and if your aim is to talk to people with Innovation in their job titles you’re definitely already a member. There’s a warm, friendly vibe on this active community, with lots of active discussions and networking. You can post questions as philosophical as “what is the difference between inventing and innovation” (you know how we feel about conceptual clarity) and as pragmatic as “how do you create incentives to motivate innovation” (you know how we feel about motivating innovation). What would be great is achieving a better ratio of R&D practitioners and innovation-management guru interaction. As it is, the R&D voice seems a little muted, and this can be a problem if you want to get buy-in for your great pet innovation plans. The problem of mixing these two communities might requires some more ethnographic research (see Design Thinking above).
When you’re done discussing, you can access Stefan Lindegaard’s personal blog. Braden Kelley’s own site is here.
4. Michael Nielsen: Innovation in Science? He’s all over it.
If the scientific community is more your scene, turn to Michael Nielsen for biweekly updates and essays. Best known for his work on quantum computation, Nielsen turned his not-inconsiderable powers to forecasting the future of science and encouraging scientific collaboration in 2007. The resulting site is a mix of links to interesting projects like online lecture series, Christmas tree rocketry, and the ecology of Avatar, technical essays (some trivia: did you know laughing gas and carbon dioxide are the same thing? Me neither!), and pieces on the future of science. According to Nielsen, the future of science lies in creating a culture of extreme openness and developing a market for collaboration, both of which are anathema to the current state of research. While other communities are open to sharing discoveries and discussing problems (see OI communities above and Social Edge below), scientists remain coy about their work and postpone discussion until publication so they can stake a claim to results. The scientific journal as a model of sharing is, as Nielsen points out, a little more advanced than publication practices of the 17th century, but it hasn’t evolved to take advantage of new opportunities for sharing and collaboration (mainly, the Web). The current system of collaboration is inefficient, leaving many problems unsolved and work delayed.
Given that a top mind like Nielsen is working on a book entitled “The Future of Science,” we’re hopeful that the culture will change, someone will develop the necessary “infrastructure of trust,” and science will advance by leaps and bounds through more efficient collaboration.
5. Social Edge: By Social Entrepreneurs, For Social Entrepreneurs
Thinking about starting your own NGO or jetting off to personally end hunger (as these private pilots have recently been doing)? Read Social Edge first. In the last two decades, the non-profit sector has experienced a complete transformation. Now, innovative methods and tools, technological, financial and organizational, are as likely to cross over from non- to for-profit as the other way around. This overlap is great news for everyone, since social entrepreneurs aim for positive change in areas with a broad impact: transparent government, environmental concerns, and health policy.
Social Edge furthers innovation among social entrepreneurs through its collection of blogs, discussions, and resources dedicated to the “pioneers of innovations that benefit humanity.” No matter what your plan to solve the world’s problems, you’ll probably find a blog from someone who’s been there before. Contributions range from personal blogs about working in refugee camps, facing practical business challenges like ’scaling capacities,’ and running microfinance organizations to discussions of responsibility and success metrics.
It’s run by the Skoll Foundation, which funds social entrepreneurs’ programs, sponsors business school fellows, and partners with organizations like PBS to support filmmakers and journalists who document social entrepreneurs’ stories. Though lots of members, like Kiva founder Matt Flannery, are well-known and successful, the site is intended to help social entrepreneurs share common experiences, positive or disastrous.
Honorable Mention: EDGE: When you need to ask, “But what does it all mean?”
Despite its unfortunate lack of usability, the Edge is a good place to go and think. Each year they gather cultural luminaries together (virtually) and ask them to respond to a particular question. This year’s question: How is the Internet changing the way you think? To find out how the major innovating force of our time has changed the way Google VP Marissa Mayer (was she ever not wired?) and Brain Eno think, just click here.
Five for Friday is an informal roundup of some of the best things we’ve found on the Web. Email us to contribute your own theme ideas.
Image from l-i-n-k via Flickr.
Tags: @OpenInno, Braden Kelley, deep dive, design thinking, Edge, future of science, Henry Chesbrough, IDEO, Innovation, Michael Nielsen, OI, OI communities, Open Innovation, scientific collaboration, Skoll Foundation, Social Edge, social entrepreneurs, Stefan Lindegaard, Twitter hub, world question center
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