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Connecting with BIF to build a community committed to the growth of collaborative innovation is exciting. I’ve worked both on building on-line communities globally, and on building the technology business here in RI. There is tremendous value in a community of people committed to not only exploring the theory of innovation, but also acting on their innovations.
As I explore how connections can be fostered and sustained among many of the BIF constituencies, I am reminded that this community, like all robust communities, will not evolve according to a central plan, or in response to a mandate. Rather, it will evolve according to the needs of its members. We need a structure, but that structure must facilitate connections, rather than prescribe them. Much the way that neurons are connected in our brains to enable thoughts to flow, I see an opportunity to create a connected network through which innovation can flow.
To maximize the impact of our evolving community, we will have to both capture the objectives and respect the limits of participation of each member. The value that people get from being connected with and through BIF will have to help them achieve their own goals – both personal and professional – if we expect to have long-term affiliations. And we do.
My goal for BIF is that 10 years from now, everyone connected with BIF in these early years will feel that they were part of something important in the way that we all fondly recall our participation in successful phases in our lives. When we take stock of the accomplishments that will have had their roots in BIF, we will know that we did the right thing – we acknowledged the value of collaborative innovation, and then actually worked collaboratively and innovated. The three pillars of BIF are Think, Learn, Do. If we incubate and learn from the connections that are enabled by BIF, we will see great things get done.
Posted January 31, 2006 by Cliff Dutton | Permalink
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On January 23 and 24 I had the opportunity to participate in a conversation about entrepreneurship and innovation. The experience confirmed that the U.S. is struggling with many of the same issues as our British and Canadian counterparts, reinforcing the notion that the problems we face in promoting entrepreneurship and innovation are complex and multivariant.
The program, hosted by the British Consulate General’s office in Cambridge, M.A., brought together a group of entrepreneurship and innovation practioners to share best practices and war stories about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to “teaching” people to create new ventures and innovate.
Consensus seems to be that it’s actually not that hard to teach someone how to successfully complete the practical steps involved in bringing a new idea to reality, as evidenced by the success of programming aimed at demystifying business plans, teaching financial management technique, and prepping aspiring entrepreneurs to present to VCs. Not to say these things are easy—but with hard work and practice, these hurdles can be overcome.
What the Brits and Americans both seem to struggle with 1) how to create a culture of entrepreneurship (especially one that accepts failure as a natural part of the learning process and 2) how to teach someone to think like an entrepreneur and act like an innovator.
Although no one seemed to have a definitive answer, there was some lively discussion about how we might begin to address these two issues:
Top Down Verses Bottom Up
What’s the best way to stifle entrepreneurship and innovation? Create a program that over-engineers the experience and doesn’t let the aspiring innovator self direct. It may seem like common sense, but aside from the perfunctory evaluation forms collected at the end of a class or training session, few programs truly let their customers—usually studens or young people—drive their own curriculum.
One notable exception is the great work of Sharon Bamford at the Scottish Institute for Enterprise. Bamford’s student program puts the student at the center of the service delivery model. SIE selects and employs student interns at each of the higher education institutes in Scotland to act at a local level. A well funded lot, they organize their own enterprise societies, events, training, networking, competitions, etc. Bamford often takes her interns “on the road” to help others take full advantage of the “bottoms up approach.”
Creating the Cultural Sea Change
Changing organizational culture is hard, even when it comes to no-brainer ideas like promoting innovation. Where’s the hardest place to change minds? In the very same place where great minds are made—academia. Unless of course, you’re Domineco Grasso, the new dean of the College of Engineering and Mathematics at the University of Vermont.
Grasso recently joined UVM, after launching the Picker Engineering Program—the first engineering program for the all women’s college. The program’s success attracted national notice, and now Grasso is bringing that same kind of energy and focus to UVM’s College of Engineering and Mathematics.
Like education innovators Michael Crow and Dennis Littky, Grasso isn’t just pushing for curriculum changes—he’s advancing a cultural shift that requires more from UVM’s students and even more from its faculty and pulling no punches in the process. The secret sauce? Grasso's transparent and candid approach to addressing the tought issues. If Grasso is successful, he’ll certainly claim his place in the pantheon of American innovation education reformers. [Read an article]
Replace Best Practices with Best People
One downside to getting a bunch of program managers into the same room is that we almost immediately fall back into the “PowerPoint trap"...the always too long and too boring presentations of bullet points and cheeky text, made more tedious by ppt’s “animation” options.
Predictably, the best conversations at this event happened over tea and cookies, not in the lecture room. More importantly, the program only featured program architects and instructors—not aspiring innovators or people who actually participated in the programs being discussed. For me, that meant spending a little too much time talking about what we self selected as best practices, instead of hearing from the people who experienced these practices first hand.
All told, it was a great start to get people from three countries together to talk about how to collaborate and cooperate in our quest to educate and inspire entrepreneurs. Certainly, we should continue to explore ways that we can foster an international approach to enabling entrepreneurship and innovation.
Posted January 27, 2006 by Melissa Withers | Permalink
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This week the Rhode Island Science and Technology Advisory Council (STAC) released 5 recommendations for actions R.I. can take to strengthen its innovation capacity. Three members of BIF’s leadership team—Board of Directors members Don Stanford and Andy van Dam and BIF founder and Chief Catalyst Saul Kaplan—were among those who presented the recommendations to Rhode Island’s Governor and General Assembly.
The recommendations, which focused on increasing Rhode Island’s ability to conduct and commercialize research, support entrepreneurs, and promote public/private partnership, zeroed in on Rhode Island’s unique ability for Innovation @ Scale. Also included in the recommendations was support for BIF’s Rhode Island Wireless Innovation Networks (RI-WINs) project, a public/private effort to make Rhode Island the first state in the country with border-to-border broadband wireless. [Download the STAC report]
Here’s the clincher: the recommendations weren’t about simply throwing more money at the problems Rhode Island faces. Sure, elements of the state’s innovation infrastructure are significantly under funded and often you need to spend money to reap the return on your investments. But the message behind the STAC recommendations was pretty clear: collaboration is the key to making the most out of what we’ve got.
By suggesting that the state use its modest resources to support programs that leverage Rhode Island’s existing innovation assets—like its ability to promote innovation @ scale, facilitate collaboration and use its size as a competitive advantage—the STAC recommendations remind us that innovation often results from new ways of thinking, not just a new ways of spending, reinforcing the notion that sometimes the greatest gains come from connecting existing resources in ways we never may have expected.
Even better, the recommendations were warmly welcomed by the state’s leadership, suggesting that not only is Rhode Island ready to step up to the plate and become and national innovation player, but that the philosophy underlying the STAC recommendations deeply resonated with those in charge of the state’s budget.
Now that’s food for thought.
Posted January 25, 2006 by Melissa Withers | Permalink
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I had the pleasure of talking with Dr. Alan Duncan, Director of the SPARC Innovation Lab at the Mayo Clinic a couple of weeks ago. For those unfamiliar, SPARC, which stands for See, Plan, Act, Refine, and Communicate, was created to generate a new set of ways to meet the needs of patients.
Dr. Duncan and his colleagues are essentially running a live experiment at SPARC which is conveniently located in the heart of one of Mayo’s clinical care facilities. [Sort of an in-the-box approach to innovation.]
In fact, the more I think about it, the innovations SPARC is achieving hail from smack-dab in the middle of the box—within the confines of a real, working clinical practice, with real patients, real doctors and a few mindful observers capturing those unmet needs of the patient.
It’s not a focus group, it’s not role-playing. The lab is isolated enough to give it flexibility for rapid, on-the-fly observation and experimentation but integrated enough to gather instant feedback and provide immediate results to the entire Mayo Clinic.
Basically, SPARC’s methodology looks at the patient process, clinical process and innovation process all at once. This seemingly unnatural approach led me to ask Dr. Duncan how he manages the expectations of the patient with the successes and failures of experimentation. [After all, this is the Mayo Clinic we’re talking about – a renowned place of excellence. Do I really want to be a guinea pig?]
Dr. Duncan said that conceptually, during the planning stages of SPARC, he and his team were very cognizant of this ostensibly conflicting relationship. And they have installed certain patient protocols to help guide the experimentation process. But surprisingly, [or maybe not] once they started rolling, it wasn’t so much of an issue. And here’s the best part, the early curiosity the program generated on the part of its patients is converting over to patient enthusiasm in contributing to help fix the system.
Just how important is the ability to run a live experiment? Early innovation results are encouraging. One of their first successes came via a self-serve check-in system developed for patients to use to announce their arrival at the clinic. It became so popular that the service is being rolled out throughout Mayo's operations.
So what other industries might allow for this type of real-time experimentation? It would seem to me that if patients of the Mayo Clinic, with real health issues, are willing to forgo some measure of expectation for the betterment of healthcare delivery, where wouldn’t a live experiment work?
Posted January 24, 2006 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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I'm a huge fan of Apple Computer. I love everything about them. So it was with great dismay I read BIF Research Advisor Clay Christensen's recent interview with Business Week outlining his case for why Apple is destined to fail, again.
Apple's strategy is based on proprietary technology. And for anyone who has ever read Clay's book, The Innovator's Solution, you know that in the long-term, this strategy spells certain doom for the industry leader.
It’s an odd and challenging place to be – as an incumbent with huge competitive advantage, your market share is growing, your stock is climbing, yet on the horizon looms the threat of industry standardization and product modularity that will eventually erode your dominant position.
Apple’s been in this spot before – losing valuable ground when companies like IBM and Compaq entered the PC world.
So what can Apple do now? Clay argues that Apple should open up their architecture now and get iTunes inside every MP3 player. Otherwise, he says, “they’re going to have to keep coming up with the next cool thing.”
Or, maybe that is their play—a continued focus on developing new markets, new products. Then introduce them to the world, make tons money and move on to the next great innovation.
What do you think? If I work at Apple, the former seems so much more appealing. But is it a viable business model?
For more information on Clay’s theory about modularity, the folks over at the Innosight blog suggest reading “Skate to Wear the Money Will Be,” HBR, 2001 and Chapter 5 in The Innovator’s Solution.
Posted January 23, 2006 by Chris Flanagan | Permalink
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Whether you’re riding high or down and out, innovation finds a way of happening. A recent study from Finland shows that although no company is immune from market downturns, challenging times can actually spur reflection, renewal and even more innovations.
Finland’s 2000-2004 economic downturn hurt. Early stage start-ups suffered as large companies decreased buying from small- and medium-sized enterprises and investments into start-ups in telecom and finance remained low. VC firms had a harder time launching IPOs or finding other companies to buy their investments. They also became more risk-averse and less likely to invest in companies at the earliest stages, creating an equity gap (or funding gap) where startups were had a harder time bridging between government seed funding and full VC investment.
In many cases, the story would stop here. But not for a country recognized as one of the world leaders in innovation (see the World Economic Forum’s Growth Competitiveness Index).
VC firms and startups turned the decrease in investment into an increase in “social capital.” The downturn fostered scrutiny and self-reflection into existing market processes, increasing the “willingness to question, learn and to network among all the players.” VC firms shifted investment requirements from technology to solid management teams, proof of market and consumer interest, and viable business models. This new “social capital” will better prepare market participants for the next economic downturn.
What lessons can we learn from Finland’s experiences? Here are a few:
- Broad economic success matters: Financing for innovation is susceptible to broader economic trends.
- New technology isn’t enough: Viable business models, management and market interest are essential for jumping from invention to innovation, particularly in tough economic climates.
- There’s always hope: Innovators are resilient, not only coping with economic downturns but learning from them.
Read the full text of Tekes Technology Review 172/2005, Business Cycle Effects on Start-Up Finance in Finland (PDF).
Posted January 22, 2006 by Matthew Guilford | Permalink
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