Geoff Mulgan - 11.04.2012
There is huge interest around the world in new tools for speeding up the generation and development of ideas. Many of them are in use in and around Nesta, including crowdsourcing, design methods and collaboration platforms of all kinds.
Quite a few try to systematise the stages by which ideas become more precise, more workable and then grow, and I'm one of many people who have designed tools to nurture ideas from fragmentary ideas through prototypes to business models and scale. I'm convinced that parts of this process can be made more systematic and taught. But certainly not all; and every method brings with it important challenges and tradeoffs. This matters greatly for Nesta because one of our options for the future is to become much more explicitly a vehicle for helping people turn ideas into impact - whether they are inventors, creative artists, public officials or charities.
Here are a few of the important choices and issues that any method faces:
How open and how closed? Some people will be willing to make their ideas very visible to others at an early stage. But others with good reason want to keep a degree of secrecy. There may be a valuable IP to protect; they may not want to alert competitors or incumbents; and they may want to develop the idea in privacy. Any platform which insists on too much openness may miss out on really radical ideas.
How much to involve specialists, and how much to involve the crowd? The wisdom of crowds argument implies that the more people can see, comment on and contribute to an idea, the better it will become. But experience suggests that this isn't quite right. Often what works much better are smaller groups of specialists refining an idea. Many very open platforms end up with huge numbers of banal or uninteresting ideas.
How much to incentivise? Will people only develop ideas if there is a clear financial incentive for them? The great majority of evidence suggests that this is wrong. Incentives have some effect, but it's marginal. More important is recognition. But getting the right mix of rewards clearly matters a lot.
How well do the best people and the best ideas fit together? The premise of some models of entrepreneurship and social entrepreneurship is that the best people will have the best ideas: back the people and their ideas will change the world. But experience suggests that there is only quite a loose correlation between the quality of talent and the quality of ideas. Often an idea will thrive best if it's taken forward by someone other than its inventor. And often innovators need to be weaned off their favourite ideas and encouraged to adopt better ones. This is why intermediaries play such an important, and often subtle, role which mixes coaching, support and challenge. It remains unclear whether any of the online platforms can do this.
How generalist? Will the most successful ideas platforms cover everything, or will they be dedicated to specific fields? We're approached fairly regularly by organisations aspiring to be dominant creative platforms - Googles or Facebooks for creativity. None of them yet have a compelling offering. And it's not at all obvious that a monopoly platform would be a good thing or viable. My guess is that most people involved in ideas are inherently distrustful of monopolies - and that a messy ecology of competing platforms is much more likely than one dominant one.
How pure? Most really good ideas start off at best half-baked. The models of crowdsourcing that seem to be working best either have very well defined problems and solutions, or else have multiple stages to help turn half formed ideas into more useful ones. Many of the best ideas are hybrids, and syntheses, but bringing the right mix of elements together turns out to depend on teams with deep knowledge, not just eureka moments.
Exploring what works best in accelerating ideas is going to be a running theme for us - it's a field where there are many claims, but not all that much evidence, so watch this space.
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plbrake
26 Apr 12, 11:05am (11 months ago)
Outsource innovation and product development for specialists
I think it's a bit tragicomic, to read in this otherwise excellent article that context, the starting point, the foundation, the right staff, the best external networks, money and the selection of the best ideas provides the best living conditions for successful innovation and rapid product development !
It should simply be known knowledge - just as it is for all other industries that the right tool is half the work.
The sad thing is simply that if we in the western world do not soon have taken us together and choose to outsource innovation and product development for the very few and very specialized players in the field - so ends many of our good intentions with a mediocre result.
The very first step to take, is to dispel the widespread use of the term "not invented here".
The next step is to use the wealth of idea originators, both individualists and innovation consortia - that can easily contribute to significantly increase revenue, profit and community development around the globe, if they just get a call from the companies are missing tomorrow's "blockbuster"
Take the first step today and the next tomorrow - it's not so difficult!
pra
18 Apr 12, 12:46pm (11 months ago)
Speeding up ideas
I'm not at all sure that I accept the idea that we can systematise very much of value in the process of having good ideas. Companies often adopt this approach when they have failed to hire, or foster, creative people. If you want to produce better innovation, simply get *more* ideas by hiring smarter people who don't follow the rules (See Bob Byers at Stanford for more). As evidence, take a look at my blog. A new idea every day for 5.5 years: http://iotd.patrickandrews.com
Mike10613
18 Apr 12, 12:34pm (11 months ago)
Ideas
I think often innovators need a writer or designer to express the idea for them. Some new ideas like crowd sourcing can be half baked but work if they are altered very slightly. Raising investment in very small amounts might not be feasible but people might invest a larger, but not large amount if they can see it as a investment with a financial return or a return that benefits society.
14 Apr 12, 2:11pm (11 months ago)
Generation of ideas & innovation
Hi Geoff,
My own experience is not quite the same as your article which generally follows the widespread belief that university research will produce the innovation and industry will exploit it.
I did a mature student degree at Liverpool University when I was 40 years old and I made lots of friends with post graduates and lecturers because I didn't have a lot in common with younger students. I was surprised to find few staff with practical industrial experience or up-to-date knowledge, many had continued from degree to PhD to lecturer and never worked outside a university environment.
I found some very advanced and interesting projects but standing alone and not quite addressing some of the problems I new existed in the various heavy industries where I had worked as an engineer for 20 years.
I already had my first patents at that time, and I found time to make presentations to various VCs, bankers, company executives, but I always found a reluctance to test an idea, and often a lack of understanding of both the idea and the application.
Bit of a niche really, I'm talking of a solution to a problem in oil & gas and after 15 minutes I can see a row of blank faces on guys who are accountants, lawyers, fund managers, with no idea what it is I'm talking about. They play safe and say no.
Lots of examples from history, the top ranks in the RAF were slow to recognise the gas turbine proposed by Frank Whittle, none of the vacuum cleaner manufacturers wanted to even test James Dyson's idea of a cyclone, and no one thought Trevor Baylis was serious with a clockwork radio.
Right now I've got hundreds of ideas and inventions, and a few are being developed at UK universities, but it's taking months to make any progress. Not inspiration or genius, just solutions to problems I've met over my life in engineering.
So my take on this is that there is no shortage of ideas and innovation, but there's a huge gap between the guys with the money and the guys with the ideas. There's a thousand Frank Whittles and James Dysons out there but the people at the top have no way to recognise them.
In fact they are prevented by the barrage of old schoolboys, croneys, the rich & priviliged, the loud, articulate & well connected who soak up all the funding on pointless "cutting edge" technologies.
A new innovative idea always sounds crazy to the average fund manager so he shuns away, I've so much experience over 40 years of watching the faces of technical managers and company bosses as they struggle to see any possibilities in a new idea.
Typical at the moment is a proposal at Aberdeen University to seal an oil well blowout from the top instead of drilling a second well. We would think it has a 90% chance of success. If it is a success it would mean that BP could have sealed off the Gulf of Mexico well in 3 weeks instead of 3 months. We are not sure that the funding for a simple proof of concept from ITF will be forthcoming. With £20,000 I could have it built and tested in a couple of months.
I have a hundred similar engineering ideas, and I'm sure there are thousands of others out there. But who knows which is which?
If I'm trialling a professional footballer I need knowledge & experience of the game, if I'm interviewing a car mechanic I need to know what questions to ask, and here lies the problem.
When I check the background of the government ministers, the Technology Strategy Board, Enterprise Boards and Nesta, I see very few experienced practical skilled engineers. A few like to call themselves engineers or scientists and some have had a priviliged route to board rooms in engineering companies, but they have never been in a factory or on a construction site to do a days work.
This makes it very hard to recognise innovation, and new ideas,and how best to develop them.
13 Apr 12, 1:19am (11 months ago)
Generation of ideas & innovation
Hi Geoff,
I've been very active on this subject on the Technology Strategy Board website. Lately I've tried to get a more historical angle on all the masses of innovation talk on the various websites.
I have a blog looking back at how the giant global companies got started during the last 100 years, it's entitled "Why _connect is not working" at https://connect.innovateuk.org/web/engineertony/blogs
In another thread with David Bott, Director of Innovation Platforms in the Technology Strategy Board I have traced what has happened since the war with the National Research Development Corporation in 1948, and the National Enterprise Board in 1975. It might seem that we've been saying and doing the same things for over 60 years. It's at:
http://www.innovateuk.org/content/blog/picking-the-right-races-and-shortening-the-odds.ashx