HASTAC 2010, Grand Challenges and Global Innovations: "Community, Collaboration, and Innovation"

This podcast, part of HASTAC 2010: Grand Challenges and Global Innovations, explores the theme of Community, Collaboration, and Innovation. Panelists include Radha Nandkumar, from NCSA, Peter Levesque, former advisory board member and current Director of the Knowledge Exchange Centre for the Mental Health Commission of Canada; Bob Ketner, the Virtual Community Manager of The Tech Virtual at the Tech Museum of Innovation, and Maureen Clemmons, a NUCRI associate and recognized speaker on Innovation.  This panel emphasized the collaborative potential of digital projects, and it offered fresh ways of thinking about community in a digital age.

Peter Levesque began the conversation by introducing a communication system that aims to improve mental health care in Canada.  Peter discussed knowledge exchange as a complex interrelation of context, culture, content and capacity.  This knowledge exchange is a value game by which we develop meaning and analysis based entirely from conversations.  Potential benefits of these conversations include changes in programs, policies, people skills, or products.  The core concept of his mission is the idea that knowledge is plural; there is always more than one kind of meaning and value.  Conversations like these promote community as a practice. 

Bob Ketner discussed The Tech Virtual (thetechvirtual.org), an organization that designs virtual museum exhibits in Second Life.  The group meets online to do collaborative design work, allowing museums to collaboratively design exhibits with people from around the world.  Bob asks, What if in your office, you as an intellectual worker were supplied with a computer displaybacked up by an extended network of people that was instantly responsive to your questions or requests How much value could you derive from that?  The foundation of Bob's organization lies in a belief that collaboration with other people makes for better work, and real-time virtual-based tools makes this work as fast and efficient as possible.  Bob shared a recent example of a project they completed at Expolab in Barcelona (www.expolab.net).  This exhibit examines the Internet and how it changes social relationships.  Expolab outlined a general design; Tech Virtual created a virtual design for the exhibit; and Expolab translated the virtual design into a real-life exhibit.  The goal is not to create virtual museums; the goal is to design exhibits virtually that will come to life in the real world.  The organization is particularly eager to collaborate with school programs, possibly partnering with a museum studies group; if you're interested, please contact him.

Maureen Clemmons gave a thrilling talk about innovation that completely revamped my understanding of the term.  She began with a no-nonsense series of questions on the meaning of innovation: What is it? Why do you need it? How do you do it?  According to Maureen, innovation offers new perspectives on solving problems; it is marked by radical rather than incremental change; and innovation is revolution, not evolution.  One example of innovation would be the printing press, which demonstrates the distinctive qualities of innovation: it lowers costs, increases capacity and quality, and improves people's quality of life.  In this way, innovation is something utterly new--but also utterly pragmatic.

What kind of innovations will change our world today?  Right now, we face competition for resources, a rapid development of technology, and multi-media saturation.  There are thousands of great ideas out there; the problem is identifying which projects we should fund.  Because Maureen was pitching her ideas to the people with the money rather than the people with the ideas, her talk focused on identifying and supporting innovators.

To better understand innovation, Maureen continued, requires distinguishing it from creativity, adaptation, and invention.  We know intuitively that there is a difference, but what is that difference?  Creativity is about forming a new combinations of ideas; adaptation stretches existing paradigms a little bit further, testing the boundaries of those systems; inventers develop things that are entirely new. Innovators take these processes one step further, as creative, inventive people who make things happen.  How many times have you had the world's greatest idea and you didn't follow up on it?  The difference between innovators and these other categories of movers and shakers is that innovators implement their projects, bringing them into their communities. 

The best way to talk about innovation, Maureen says, is through stories.  Her favorite story is about the inventor of the phone switch, who single-handedly revolutionized the telecommunication industry.  The phone switch was invented by a mortician, who had to circumvent a dead body to communicate. 

The innovation process moves from creation, to experimentation, to feasibility, to application.  The crucial element in moving through this system, Maureen says, is organizational support for this innovation.  The Wright brothers, for example, had something the other guys didn't have.  What was this?  It was a third, little-known Wright brother.  This third Wright brother was a test pilot, technical advisor, financier, and advertiser.  This brother was the one who facilitated what they were doing.  Her name was Katherine Wright.  Though little-known, her role is absolutely crucial.  We tend to remember the names of the innovators more than the supporters, but the innovators can't do what they do without these supporters, who are the unsung heroes of innovation.

So, where does innovation come from?  Maureen turns to another story to illustrate.  When Joseph Lister was a surgeon, patients had a 50% survival rate.  Scientists thought infections came from oxygen.  He thought it came from something else.  Lister read about Louis Pasteur's theory that microbes that caused decay; he also learned that in India, farmers used carbolic acid in their fields.  Combining these two theories, he started experimenting in his surgeries.  Lister washed his instruments with carbolic acid, and his fatality rate dropped to almost nothing.  Initially, he was laughed at; but after sterilizing his instruments in the Franco-Prussian War and radically reducing his rate of casualties, he finally proved the success of his idea.  Lister's story proves an important lesson: the genesis of an idea itself is not enough; shepherding the idea into the public domain is the crucial step for innovators.  Maureen outlined the Six Stages of the Innovative Process: Need (identify the problem/lack), Preparation (exposure to info, work and motivation), Incubation (do nothing; unconscious processing), Insight (Eureka moment), Verification (test the innovation), Adoption (bring it into the public domain).  That final stage, adoption, is what sets innovators apart.

How do you hunt down innovators?  What do they look like?  Innovators are identified by their behavior--they're less interested in doing stuff better than doing stuff differently; they tend to be tolerant of ambiguity, independent, and uninhibited by conformity; they tend to have good communication skills, imaginative approaches to problem-solving, and a reasonable but not outstanding level of intelligence.  Innovators enjoy art, and they have a wide range of interests; they have strong laugh-lines; and most importantly, they demonstrate perseverance and tenacity, which are the key attributes of innovation. 

Humans are genetically programmed to be neophobic; it is what prevents us from jumping off cliffs for the sake of trying something new.  Neophilic behavior, however, the love of newness, is what creates progress.  Humans are the only primates who exhibit this neophilic play behavior throughout our lives.  Most of us won't be innovators--but we need to learn to be better support systems for the people who are, for everyone's sake.

Maureen asks, as an aside, Why have there been no female DaVincis and Michaelangelos?  Maureen explains that when it comes down to it, women are often forced to choose either their family or their career, and this creates complications and resistance to innovation.  Many women are creative, but historically, they rarely take their work into the public domain.  Innovation takes perseverance, determination, and an understanding of resistance, and our maternal instinct presumably impedes these qualities.  This aside was the only portion of Maureen's talk that left me uncomfortable; I wish that she had mentioned the women in history who have been innovators, and I hope that the future of innovation will reflect a more complex and equitable approach to gender.  Many of the presenters at this conference are proof that innovation is not limited to any one gender, race, or class.

Innovators face a number of challenges in making their ideas come to life.  Maureen explains that change happens when the level of dissatisfaction with the status quo, the desirability of the proposed change or end, and the practicality of the change exceeds the cost of changing.  [She represents this formulaically as C=(ABD)>X].  Innovation can instigate anxiety, defensiveness, fear of valuation, and cultural inhibition; when confronted with change, people will ignore it, stop it, or create a team to study it.  Maureen reminds us that failure is part of innovation; we have to be able to handle and to afford failure.  It is the role of the "champion"--the CEO, the financial backer, the leader, or the support system--to manage risks and uncertainties in the face of failure.

Change needs vision, planning, and competence; innovation is impossible without strong leadership and support.  Even in a large corporation, individual behaviors matter.  Innovation requires more than just the idea-people; it requires the vision, planning, competence, incentives, resources, and action plans of leaders.  Without these support systems, anxiety, suspicion, and confusion can stall progress, create false starts, or limit innovation to more gradual change.  Maureen asks, Who is the most important person on the ship?  Is it the captain? Navigator?  Communications?  No; Maureen says that the most important person is the designer--the person who decides how many people are on the ship, which people are included, what the mission is, what people do and how they do it. 

Innovation is expensive, and it can lead to Analysis Paralysis.  In order to facilitate innovation, we need to identify goals, drivers, resisters; we need to ascertain how to enhance drivers and reduce resisters.  If we have something we need to do, we need to have more drivers and less resisters.  Maureen outlined an arrow system to visualize this movement, which you can find on the podcast at http://www.ichass.illinois.edu/hastac2010/HASTAC_2010/Presentations/Entries/2010/4/17_Community,_Collaboration,_and_Innovation.html.  When an innovator goes out into unknown waters with a new idea, they need a larger community of support to make it happen.  Don't worry if you can't do the math, Maureen says; "there will be plenty of people incapable of innovation who will follow behind you to work out the details."  If you can't be the one to come up with the ideas, then commit yourself to helping an innovator work out those details.

Radha Nandkumar gave closing remarks that felt much more like opening remarks, as he explored a series of definitions surrounding community, collaboration, and innovation.  Community is togetherness, interrelatedness and interdependence for the common good, he says.  Community is collective intelligence.  Community is everyone, everywhere, individually and collectively seeking to improve their quality of life and the lives of others.  In conjunction, collaborations occur when parties who see different aspects of a problem constructively explore their differences in search of solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of what's possible.  Collaborations are neutrally beneficial relationships between two or more parties, working toward common goals by sharing responsibility, accountability and authority.

Collective intelligence is the capacity of communities to collaborate; it is a process of shared decision making; a joint strategy for action.  If the right people are brought together in constructive ways with the right information, they can overcome their own limited perspectives of what is possible.  That, Radha says, is innovation. 

We need to talk, Radha says, about envisioning and enabling community.  It is there and you are in it.  Our grand challenge is to tap into latent community intelligence.  The goal, he says, is to pilot an integrated community information system, and to create sustainable economic growth in the local region and the global marketplace. 

Radha uses a term called InnovAction, which integrates innovation and action; like Maureen, he says, you've got to do something about it.  The goal of the Integrated Community Information Management System is to create an inter-relational database based on the systematics guide to KEEPERRHHATT, which stands for Kinship, Education, Economics, Politices, Environment, Recreation, Religion, Helath and Human Services, Associations, Transportation, Technology. 

Collaboration comes in many forms, Radha says.  The greatest technological potential we have is to advance the interrelatedness of knowledge.  It's all about knowledge and people and how they're connected to one another, he says.  Collaboration is about communicating and interacting, but it is also about trust.  The virtual world gives a whole new space for collaboration, whose goal is to advance the interrelatedness of knowledge and the interdependence of people, and whose purpose is to nurture the spirit of togetherness and innovation. 

What I really liked about Radhas presentation was that he pointed out the value of having a vocabulary to talk about these projects, and that he was boldly optimistic.  Optimism and good communication, I think, are the foundation of any successful collaboration.  We don't have the answers for tomorrow, he says, but we have the direction.  Don't wait for the future; shape it.