In the new book The Science of Serendipity: How to Unlock the Promise of Innovation, author Matt Kingdon promises to unpack the concept of serendipity in a useful manner so the corporate innovator can learn to harness this somewhat mysterious force to fuel innovation.

And so he does. Kingdon, co-founder and chairman of London-based consultancy ?WHAT IF! Innovation, explains why it’s critical for innovators to take risks in looking for and seizing opportunities for getting outside their comfort zone. In Matt’s book, this is called “provocation” and it’s the key to both serendipity and innovation.

Innovation is fueled by new insight, and insight is created by the serendipitous collision of provocative observations. Required is a “prepared mind” viewing the world through “lenses of provocation” such as the consumer lens, the capability lens, and the related-world lens.

Matt guested during an Innochat several weeks ago, and the .PDF archive of that very spirited chat about serendipity and innovation is here. As a follow-up, I emailed him some specific questions about how his concepts work in collaboration, which he also discusses in his book.

The Science of Serendipity

Q. You talk about the necessity of provocation, of stepping outside your comfort zone in order to find insight that could lead to innovation. In what ways can collaboration be used consciously to provide provocation?

A. Collaboration is different from teamwork in that it has a strong external focus. We collaborate with people we don’t really know and we play in positions that are alien to us. With teamwork, we play in position, normally with colleagues. So inherent in collaboration is the drive to leave the office, loosen the tie, and explore the road less travelled. Who is out there with a new nugget of insight? They surely exist but we’ve got to find them. The more we can see this as a stimulating, uncomfortable, and provocative exercise, the more we will throw ourselves into it.

Q. You say physical spaces for collaborative innovation need to do three things: a) force collision; b) create clutter; and c) allow for flexibility. How would you advise virtual teams to create these conditions?

A. I think giving a virtual team some white space is critical. For instance, get the team together on a conference call or video meeting and carve out 30 minutes of agenda-free time. Just listen as the space is filled with stuff that really counts – a bit like the casual conversation between two colleagues as they ride the elevator to the formal meeting. These are the sidebar moments that can spawn great ideas. Just because you are virtual doesn’t mean they shouldn’t happen.

Q. Are there any benefits specific to virtual environments for finding serendipity and for collaborating, any ways in which virtual environments can be superior?

There are many more opportunities to share our latest, greatest idea virtually. Try getting the team to make three calls this evening to friends and family, ask them for help and even a recommendation of who else you could talk to.  Someone tomorrow morning will come into work with an amazing story of how they connected with this person who had this gem of advice – they followed a trail that paid off, something they would never normally do.

Q. How can open social media networks such as Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, etc., be used so as to increase the likelihood of serendipity?

One of the well-documented issues with using search facilities to make totally random connections is that any digitally-conceived solution is not random – in some way, the algorithm has selected the answer for you based on your preferences. But if your field of interest is tightly defined, then losing yourself on the Net, jumping from link to link, can be highly rewarding.

So let’s say you are interested in solutions to childhood obesity, for example. Give yourself an hour to make as many digital leaps as possible; follow trails that may not seem useful to begin with. You can always back-click out. Maybe you start off reading some medical accounts of obesity. This takes you to some video diaries. From this, you leap to sites for kids subjected to bullying, which in turn takes you to parents’ forums, and so on.  The trick is to keep moving and don’t self-censor.

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So I ran an experiment — I went out with a clipboard and some sticky notes at a Tuesday afternoon session break and asked people to write down what ’3DEXPERIENCE’ meant to them.

This was the first day of the conference, yet my not-at-all-scientific sample had interesting results.  Basically, the people I talked to did indeed “get” it. Here are the responses. Feel free to add your own responses in the comments!

• It can’t happen fast enough — we need the experience in our product design
• I should be able to experience it like a video game
• Customer focus
• Differentiator in the market
• Experience simulation
• See final products in 3D; walk thru a plant site; visualization
• At first I was…meh. But it’s visionary, new to me. A great concept.
• See what you mean — fun!!

So, what does 3DEXPERIENCE mean to you?

*This item was originally posted by Renee Hopkins on: http://collaborativeinnovation.org/what-does-3dexperience-mean-to-you-3dxforum-attendees-answer/

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*This item was originally posted by Renee Hopkins on: http://collaborativeinnovation.org/winning-project-bringing-the-3d-experience-to-the-front-end-of-innovation/

Teachers wrote their session ideas for EdCampATL on apple-shaped sticky notes. (photo by Nikki D. Robertson)

During an Innochat a year or so ago whose topic was innovation in education, a participant dismissed the Clayton Christensen-Michael Horn book Disrupting Class as “Chicken Soup for the teacher’s soul.”

There was at least one teacher present in that chat — my sister Wanda McClure, principal of Amana Academy, a charter school in Atlanta. Predictably enough she was offended. But the participant was correct, in the most positive way possible. Disrupting Class predicts that technological advances will disrupt education as we currently know it. I assumed, and I think others have to, that that meant technology that would replace the teacher.

What has happened instead is that many teachers, some not just inspired but empowered by the message in Disrupting Class, are exploring and experimenting with technologies. Instead of replacing them, help them extend themselves and innovate new ways to teach.

The jobs-to-be-done that teachers are turning to technology to solve seem to be about connection and collaboration, for themselves and for their students. So will disruption in education start with connected teachers creating connected classrooms?

That’s what it looked like to me a few weeks ago when my sister invited me to attend the first EdCamp in Atlanta, #EdCampATL, of which she and Nikki Robertson were co-directors. EdCamps, like all other [insertnamehere]Camps, are unconferences during which participants connect and exchange ideas and information.

Connect and exchange, however, was a mild description of what took place.

The opening keynote address was delivered via Skype. The closing panel was convened using Google Hangouts. In between, participants — primarily teachers and librarians — learned how other teachers were collaborating and how they were bringing collaboration into the classroom.

“Why” was addressed in Tom Whitby‘s keynote: “When I started teaching, I had an 11-teacher network” of whom to ask questions and with whom to connect and collaborate, from whom to learn.  Social networking has increased connection and learning opportunities for us all, including teachers, as I learned.

I led one session on Twitter 101, not selling Twittter as such sessions often are, but demonstrating to a roomful of teachers determined to connect how they could find the people and information with which they were so eager to connect.

I attended another two sessions, one of which was a discussion led by high school French teacher Melinda Sears on collaborative tools for the classroom. An intro to the seemingly vast number of technologies that teachers can use to collaborate with parents and with students. Technologies for the students to collaborate amongst themselves (yay teamwork!), to create. Tools discussed included Edmodo (an FB for classrooms), Storybird, Voicethread.

A session on gamification for the classroom by Catherine Flippen, who explores gamification on her own time and uses the techniques to teach high-school Spanish, was even more head-spinningly full of theory and tools — how and why to consider gamifying lessons, set up alternate reality games, leave clues for kids to find in completing a lesson. Quest-based learning systems. Learning management systems.

More on what tools to use….Edmodo came up again (use for blogs, quests, awards), Coursera (allows teacher to set up badges students can earn); remind 101 (an app teachers can use to text with their students one-way without sharing phone numbers); Celly, to set up back-channel conversations in classrooms; iBuildApp to build mobile apps and widgets, Todaysmeet – another backchannel possibility. closed Twitter for the classroom.

Smackdown was even more dizzying — teachers volunteering to come up and give a two-minute demonstration of their favorite classroom technology and how to use it. And again passing along information — the Forsyth County, Georgia, school system has its own virtual world. iBuildApp is the easiest way to make your own mobile apps for classroom use. You can get approval for an app more quickly and less expensively through Google’s Android app store than through iTunes.

At EdCampATL, about 115 engaged, passionate teachers spent an uncompensated Saturday learning how to connect, better ways to connect, with whom to connect, in order to better perform their ultimate job-to-be-done — teach their students. At the end of the day I had the thought that disruptive innovation in education will arise in just this way — one teacher, one student, one classroom at a time.

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*This item was originally posted by Renee Hopkins on: http://collaborativeinnovation.org/education-will-be-innovated-one-student-one-teacher-one-classroom-at-a-time/

In 2010, websites like Kickstarter began to gain traction with consumers, as quirky petitions for help funding CDs, events, and films began to show up routinely on Facebook and Twitter and in email inboxes. By 2012, a variety of these kinds of sites were popping up and helping to generate relatively small sums, usually in the thousands or tens of thousands. Then in May 2012, startup Pebble Technology shattered the ceiling by raising more than $10 million in a Kickstarter campaign to pre-sell its “smart watch.”

That same month, new research about “crowdfunding” — this new type of crowdsourcing in which an individual, group, or company raises money from multiple sources online — was released by Massolution (the consulting arm of crowdsourcing.org).

The report, Crowdfunding Industry Report: Market Trends, Composition, and Crowdfunding Platforms, which made a big splash in the startup funding world, revealed that crowdfunding has found a huge market — $1.5 billion was raised worldwide through one million campaigns in 2011, a figure that’s projected to double in 2012, and explode in 2013.

In addition to sizing the current market and predicting future market size, the report describes four types of crowdfunding, depending on the business model:

• Equity-based: funders receive an interest in the form of equity in the venture they fund or, alternatively, revenue or profit-share arrangements.
• Lending-based: funders often receive fixed periodic income and expect repayment of the original principal investment.
• Reward-based: funders gain a non-financial benefit in return for financial contributions. Non-monetary rewards often take the form of a token of appreciation or the pre-purchasing of products or services.
• Donation-based: funders donate to causes that they want to support, with no expected compensation (i.e., philanthropic or sponsorship-based incentive).

According to the report, the main source of the growth in 2012 will be driven by reward-based crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter. Equity-based crowdfunding is already strong in Europe, although crowdfunding from unaccredited investors has been restricted in this country.

But starting in 2013, equity-based crowdfunding is expected to increase in the U.S. due to the JOBS Act. Passed in April with bipartisan support, the JOBS Act is intended to create jobs by dramatically reshaping the financing landscape of American business.

Under the JOBS Act, individuals will be able to invest in startups in return for shares of the company. Companies will also be able to amass a larger total number of investors before triggering public disclosure regulations that now require companies to list their shares publicly. The SEC is still working on the specific regulations that will govern crowdfunding activity under the act.

“The passing of the JOBS Act will have a profound effect on the growth of crowdfunding in the U.S. In 2013, we expect securities-based crowdfunding to bring new sources of funding to many startups and early stage businesses,” said Massolution chief executive Carl Esposti in a statement.

Will Crowdsourcing Supplant Venture Capital?

The Massolution report contained research conducted last spring by Gerrit Ahlers and Matthias Knoche, when they were dual-degree MBA exchange students at the McCombs School of Business. Their other degree is from Wissenschaftliche Hochschule für Unternehmensführung (WHU) in Germany.

Ahlers, who came to McCombs to focus on entrepreneurship and finance, began to research crowdfunding as part of his thesis on finance and the Internet under the direction of John Doggett, senior lecturer in the Management Department. While researching, Ahlers connected with crowdsourcing.org and learned they had research underway, so they joined forces.

Though the report is largely based on Ahlers’ research, he doesn’t necessarily agree with Esposti on the conclusion that equity-based crowdfunding will take off.

“I have a finance background and got interested in crowdfunding because it is a new way of financing,” said Ahlers, who is now a consultant in A.T. Kearney’s Berlin office. “My take on crowdfunding is that it is an amazing way to finance the development of new products, foundations, etc. That said, I think that it will be difficult to make money from equity crowdfunding, and that it will take considerable time to build an online venture capital industry.”

Doggett shares Ahlers’ view. “Crowdfunding is a phenomenon that is taking off, so I am very comfortable with the projections [in the report]. I expect that crowdfunding will become a significant additional source of funding for startups, but I don’t expect it to supplant any existing sources,” he said.

He continued, “Traditional investors would be concerned that crowdfunding would create a large number of individual ‘investors’ who would have to agree to any additional funding. That concern can be addressed by giving one ‘mutual fund-like’ investment manager the power to make decisions that commit all crowdfunding ‘investors’.

“If this approach to investment management is included in the initial offering statement, the problem goes away. Given the growth of crowdfunding in the U.S., the ability to raise money this way will give a project even more credibility.”

Crowdfunding Gains Momentum: See Rally.org

Another crowdfunding coup came in June when Rally.org, a startup designed to facilitate crowdfunding, raised $8 million in series A funding. That’s right, Rally, the brainchild of Tom Serres, itself provides a platform for individuals and groups to raise funds for causes through donation-based crowdfunding.

This space is not new to Serres, who founded Piryx.com as an undergraduate at McCombs in 2008. The first use of Piryx was by politicians to solicit donations online, a form of political fundraising that came into its own during the last presidential election. For Rally, Serres raised most of the funds from AngelList, an online platform that connects seed investors and entrepreneurs, making it the largest series A round ever raised online. Some in Silicon Valley saw the deal as a confirmation that crowdfunding is here to stay, though others still voiced concerns similar to those of Doggett and Ahlers’.

Serres believes that those who are patterning equity-based crowdfunding after reward-based platforms such as Kickstarter are missing the point about fundraising for startups. For him, fundraising is more of a process than a rewards-based event — more storytelling and relationship-building — with solicitation a complementary process that’s no less important.

“Four years ago crowdfunding was nonexistent, but in one sense you were always funding from a crowd,” he said. “Communicating ideas to people who might be interested in helping to make them a reality has been going on for centuries, but now it’s on a new medium that’s breaking down barriers to that communication.”

Crowdfunding’s Real Value for Startups

Serres agrees with Doggett and Ahlers that it’s unlikely crowdfunding would replace venture capital for startups. “From the venture equity point of view, crowdfunding isn’t optimal, because it’s better to raise money from investors who know you,” he says, rather than expecting investors to commit on the basis of an online presentation.

“The problem from a crowdfunding perspective is that [rewards-based sites such as] Kickstarter are simply a way to pre-sell a product or a project. You need a stronger reason to seek VC funding — you still have to build the business environment around it.”

To Serres, the value provided by Kickstarter and many other crowdfunding sites is more market validation than access to capital. “It’s a good way to raise money in small amounts, usually less than $1 million.” But more importantly, Serres believes that where crowdfunding adds value is in bringing customers. “Crowdfunding brings the product and the market together for investors to see.

“The issue is more about giving innovators a better mechanism to share their ideas,” he said.  “The $7.9 million I received from Angellist now provides me a mechanism to get the Rally story out” to potential customers and to more investors.

Image courtesy of Texas Enterprise

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*This item was orginally posted by Renee Hopkins on: http://collaborativeinnovation.org/fast-growing-crowdfunding-sites-not-likely-to-replace-vcs/

When the project involves collaborating to create something of value — surprise again! there’s a lot of that happening at any given time — ’start as you mean to go on’ is absolutely critical to create while avoiding frustration, delays, misunderstandings, setbacks, and failure. Failure of an innovation project due to poor communication or lack of communication is an innovation crime, since the main thing to be learned from such a failure is — lack of communication causes problems. We know that lesson already, as I’ve said in this post. Why would we want to repeat it as often as we do?

Note I am not advocating for one framework and one Common Language for innovation. I have my preferences in terms of process and language for innovation, but I’m not willing to sacrifice the success of a collaborative effort for the sake of pushing my language and process on everyone else with whom I might collaborate. Instead I suggest we all look at language from a descriptive rather than a prescriptive point of view.

Let’s start from the very beginning…

When I was a 17-year-old English major at a small college that did not have an instrumental music program, I undertook the challenge of writing arrangements for between-scene music for a production of Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona. The college’s organist helped me find appropriate tunes from the period, so I had the tunes on sheet music.  I rounded up a few fellow students who had played instruments in their high school bands to participate. I had a flute, an oboe, and a guitar to add to my own harpsichord playing.

The problem? I could read music and play keyboard and stringed instruments, but I had never played any wind instruments. I quickly discovered a critical problem — my lack of knowledge about what fingering positions on teh instruments produced which notes in the scale. There was no one around who would know, and this was well before YouTube or the Internet.

The wind players and I needed a common language. We needed to get down to the essence of the miscommunication and build from there. We needed to go back to the alphabet itself, which in this case was the scale, and find a common language with which to communicate.

So one day I met with a flute player in a practice room, played middle C on the piano, and asked, “what note do I write on the scale that will cause you to play that sound?” In this way I learned a critical “alphabet” that I hadn’t known before. Finally I was able to communicate to the wind players what I wanted them to play. (Cue up the children singing, “Doe, a deer, a female deer…”)

Start as you mean to go on, even if it seems to elementary for professionals to discuss terms and how each party uses them.

We’ll be discussing this on #innochat today, and I’ll post a recap and further thoughts later.

*This item was originally posted by Renee Hopkins on: http://collaborativeinnovation.org/collaborative-communication-start-as-you-mean-to-go-on/

“We are using ‘innovation’ 3 diff ways. 1. an overall process 2. a strategy 3. an outcome. Fortunately not tripping up much….”

The next week we devoted an entire chat to a discussion of what the word ‘innovation’ really meant, with amusingly inconclusive results.

I remain convinced that one of the biggest impediments to innovation and collaboration, and an impediment to actually getting better at it, is lack of a common language to describe what we’re doing. Innovation and collaboration will forever remain slippery and mysterious concepts as long as we don’t use the same terms the same way. We can have more than one definition, as long as we specify what those definitions are and understand the ones we and others are using when we talk.

*This item was originally posted by Renee Hopkins on: http://collaborativeinnovation.org/common-language-fuels-collaborative-innovation/

Graphic notes by Dean Meyers from Sir Ken Robinson’s WIFNY talk

Andrea and Jill have already put up some posts; you can see those here, here, and here. We all did video and/or audio interviews, so you can look forward to seeing these in the near future. We were able to speak with Henry Chesbrough, Mohanbir Sawhney, Sir Ken Robinson, and Clay Shirky.

Below I summarize my top highlights from the conference, many of which I’ll blog about in more detail later. We  had an excellent discussion of these highlights and more during the June 28, 2012 #Innochat – you can download the .PDF transcript of that chat here.

#WIFNY Highlights for Me

1. Innovate Collaborate:  Open innovation and collaboration are becoming more common and in some ways simpler, yet more sophisticated in execution. Henry Chesbrough, Mohanbir Sawhney, and Clay Shirky all talked of these specifically and other speakers touched on them in general. Sawhney in particular discussed the value companies evolving past customer co-creation toward innovation ecosystems, then participating in third-party innovation marketplaces.
2. Experiment: Clay Shirky and others spoke of lowering the stakes for failure in experimentation while at the same time ramping up the expectations of learning from failures. Perhaps the best experiment is simply to search for patterns and examine them, rather than start with a specific hypothesis.
3. Care Play:  Social innovation and sustainability seemed a sub-theme for the entire conference. Andrew Winston spoke eloquently on social values, specifically sustainability, and outlined all the reasons why it was not only morally right but also cost-effective for companies to embrace social values such as these. Jane MacGonigal also spoke about the power of gaming to change lives for the better.
4. Bloom: Whether it was “100 flowers” or “1000 flowers,” WIFNY participants got the “let the flowers bloom” message from several speakers, including Guy Kawasaki, that we shoudn’t proscribe innovation. If users other than those you envisioned as your market adopt your product and use it in unintended ways, go with it.
5. Exponentiate: As usual, Ray Kurzweil blew everyone away with his charts and graphs showing the inexorable, inevitable, exponential growth of information technology that will ultimately (in 2035-ish) lead to the singularity – the time when technology and biology will merge in humans.

Image copyright Dean Meyers, who was the graphic recorder for WIFNY. See his entire collection of graphic notes from the conference.

*This item was originally posted by Renee Hopkins on: http://collaborativeinnovation.org/wifny-innovate-collaborate-experiment-play-care-bloom-exponentiate/

Tellier said opportunities for innovation in the defense and aerospace industries include the ability to manage complexity and innovate in a secure and safe environment. And he offered an excellent description of the way the 3D Experience platform encourages collaboration within companies and among companies, suppliers, and other outside parties. Tellier ended by pointing out that the ability the 3D Experience platform offers for designing ever-more-complex products and systems, and then for managing that complexity, is key to Dassault’s next set of offerings for the Defense and Aerospace industries.

This item was originally posted by Renee Hopkins on: http://collaborativeinnovation.org/aerospace-innovations-michel-tellier-vice-president-defense-aerospace-dassault-systemes/

But the mythology chapter is just the warm-up for the book’s very sharp point: The real barriers to innovation are “business as usual” and middle management, and in order to become more innovative, firms need to transform these from innovation barriers into innovation drivers. And Phillips puts his money where his mouth is by spending the rest of the book showing exactly how that can be done.

I sent Phillips five questions about his new book and he kindly provided email answers:

Q: If you had to sum up the main point of your book in a sentence, what would it be?

A: For businesses to succeed in the future, their “operating models” must be rebalanced between efficiency and innovation.

Q: You talk a bit about how middle managers charged with innovation can succeed in the absence of a clear innovation strategy or creation of innovation competency within the company. Understanding that that is the ideal circumstance, what would you say is the best course of action for a middle manager who wants to try to innovate, or start the ball rolling to make his or her company more innovative?

A: I doubt that a middle manager, in isolation, can create an innovation discipline or competence. He or she simply won’t have the attention and the authority to create the processes and rewards necessary to shift the culture. Individual managers can conduct innovation projects, but I doubt that by themselves they can fully engage the business.

That said, if I had to recommend an approach for an individual middle manager, I’d suggest starting with trend spotting and scenario planning exercises, leading to idea generation. In this manner the manager can get his or her team thinking about the future and how to be proactive, rather than reactive. As those becomes a “standard” actions or functions, the team can build on this by adding other innovation tools and processes. The middle manager will also want to change or impact cultural perspectives and attitudes such as how the teams are evaluated, compensated, and rewarded.

Q: Can you talk about how collaboration helps (or hurts) innovation efforts in corporations? Is internal collaboration more/less important than external collaboration (open innovation)? Why or why not?

A: Internal collaboration is important, because the number of people who review and comment on an idea can actually strengthen the idea and build an internal community, which is reinforcing. We recommend building a internal capability for managing ideas before opening up to external partners and customers, so that your firm can manage customer or partner ideas effectively. Eventually, we won’t talk about “open” innovation, because all innovation will include a component of external collaboration.

Q: You say that companies need to create a “Cortez” moment, where they decide there’s no turning back in their quest to be innovative. I’m wondering if the ongoing erosion of the American consumer market in the face of the recession and focus on growth of BRIC consumer markets has created such a moment for American companies. Do you agree or disagree, and why or why not?

A: The Cortez moment is the famous “burning of the boats” leaving no way to go back to the old ways of doing business. I don’t think that many executives are ready to discredit their existing business processes; rather, I think we are in a blame game, blaming the rise of external and foreign competitors, taxation, open borders, etc. There are only a few visible Cortes moments, and we are aware of them because they are dramatic – A.G. Lafley declaring that 50% of products would originate from external ideas, or Jobs cutting over 80% of Apple’s product line. These were acts of visionaries who were forcing a course change and creating specific barriers to returning to the old models. For other businesses to do that, they first have to realize that the old models no longer work. I doubt many firms have arrived at that conclusion yet. Rather, they are blaming externalities for problems in the model.

Q: PG and 3M famously and publicly threw down gauntlets with strong innovation goals. What would you suggest a company focus on in creating such “Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals” (BHAGs)? Percentage of collaboration with outsiders, like PG? Percentage of profits from new products, like 3M? or to your mind is there something better on which companies should put a proverbial stake in the innovation ground?

A: To create such a “stake in the ground,” it is more important that the communication originate from a senior executive or the CEO, be explicit and quantifiable, easily measured and a significant change. Then, it will be important that the corporation commit resources to fulfilling that communication. The goal could be more external innovation resulting in new products, or it could be the revenue generated from new products, or it could result in the entry into a completely new market. The outcome is less important than the implementation.

I wrote recently about the statements of the new CEO of Yahoo. When asked how he intended to improve Yahoo and return it to former glory he stated “innovation”, but didn’t provide any strategy, any investment goals or resource commitments. So his statement appears to be a throwaway line, rather than something we observers can measure and evaluate over time.

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