Innovation is the major strategic challenge for just about every organization today. But it is an elusive goal. This great post by Brad Kolar on his The Question of Leadership blog advises, “Want to innovate? Stop trying to be innovative and start solving problems.” He talks about the fact that successful innovation does not start intentionally. It starts by identifying hard problems and getting to work on them. Solving problems creates value.

This is a hard thing for organizations to swallow. They are accustomed to the command-and-control approach where making something a goal is the first step to getting it done. I’ve seen companies that have as a shared goal “to become more innovative.” This means that the personal goals of everyone in the organization include something about “being more innovative.”

But a manager cannot order someone to innovate! He or she has to create the environment where there is enough freedom and the right resources so that their employees can and will innovate. In this view, the manager’s role is to help frame the problem, convene the conversation and get the right people to the table. Continue reading »

Larry Downes had a great blog post a couple weeks ago on The Writers Strike and the Battle for Virtual Value. Downes points out that the traditional media, with whom the writers were negotiating, have not figured out how to make money on the internet. Nevertheless, he asserts, they spent over $2 billion fighting about “revenues that do not yet exist from channels that have not yet been created.”

Contrast this with the recent New York Times editorial by songwriter and author Billy Bragg, The Royalty Scam. Bragg tells the story of Bebo, the social-networking site that grew to 40 million members in two years and, in Britain, apparently ranks with MySpace and Facebook in popularity.

A couple years ago, Bebo founder Michael Birch asked to meet Bragg after Bragg had lobbied MySpace on its proprietary rights clause. Birch assured him that Bebo would always put the interests of artists first—although this “support” never included any kind of royalty to the artists contributing content. Last week, when Bebo sold to AOL for $850 million, Bragg observed:

The musicians who posted their work on Bebo.com are no different from investors in a start-up enterprise. Their investment is the content provided for free while the site has no liquid assets. Now that the business has reaped huge benefits, surely they deserve a dividend. Continue reading »

I resolved to start blogging about intangibles when I read a recent article in Fortune about soybeans called, “How Brazil Outfarmed the American Farmer.” The article explained how the Brazilians have used cutting-edge technology and well-designed market networks to become a dominant player in the soybean market. I saw this as just the latest proof that, as Thomas Friedman put it, “The World Is Flat.”

I believe that we have a lot of work to do to learn how to manage the intangibles that determine the winners and the losers in this “flat” world. And the American farmers are just the latest in the long line of businesspeople on the losing end of the intangibles game.

Fortunately, around the same time, I met Denise Caruso, who runs the Hybrid Vigor Institute and edits this blog. We became acquainted after she wrote a wonderful piece in the New York Times, “When Balance Sheets Collide With the New Economy” which highlighted the inadequacy of financial reporting to deal with the knowledge economy.

Denise explained how knowledge intangibles are invisible in financial and managerial reporting. They are also often passed over in decision making—in the assumption that “soft” issues cannot stand up to the rigor of traditional analysis.

But it is the soft issues that count. Continue reading »

The U.K.’s Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) functions something like the late lamented U.S. Office of Technology Assessment, killed off by Newt Gingrich back in the ’90s. They regularly publish brief but fairly comprehensive, interdisciplinary reports with cross-sector relevance on trends in science and technology.

POST recently published three POSTnotes entitled “Ecological Networks“, “Smart Metering of Electricity and Gas” and “Autism“. The first two POSTnotes for 2008 were on “smart” materials and systems, and synthetic biology.

You can subscribe to the POST reports yourself, by sending an email to: mailto:post@parliament.uk.

“Ecological Networks” considers the possible conservation benefits of ecological network implementation in the UK. Ecological networks are intended to maintain environmental processes and to help to conserve biodiversity where remnants of semi-natural habitat have become fragmented and isolated. Continue reading »

Today’s ‘Inside Higher Ed’ blog posted an interesting analysis of tenure versus interdisciplinary research. Nice to see these issues getting aired on a broader stage, although the argument sounded familiar to our ears.

In 2001, Diana Rhoten and I wrote Hybrid Vigor’s first white paper on roadblocks to interdisciplinary practice, that included tenure as well as several other factors that continue to relegate interdisciplinary scholarship to 2nd-class (or so) status.

It’s called ‘Lead, Follow, Get Out of the Way: Sidestepping the Barriers to Effective Practice of Interdisciplinarity.’ You can download it here, or here:

http://www.hybridvigor.net/interdisciplinary-practice/publications/lead-follow-get-out-of-the-way

The WELL, one of the oldest online communities still in existence, is hosting me as guest author for a two-week conversation in its ‘Inkwell’ book discussion topic about Intervention — and whatever topics come up as a result of talking about technology, innovation and risk. It’s been underway for several days now, and will continue until October 31st.

So far much of the conversation has been focused on deliberative processes for assessing risk, and we are just starting to wade into deeper waters with talk of the precautionary principle and whether or not Hillary could manage to re-start the Office of Technology Assessment without wrecking it with politics.

You don’t have to be a WELL member to read the conversation, but if you aren’t a member and want to start prodding me with some questions, just send an email to <inkwell@well.com> to have them added to the thread.

The host of the conversation is the redoubtable Jon Lebkowsky, a Texan who I’ve known for many years from the technology world who now writes a regular column for Worldchanging.com.

Hybrid Vigor’s co-founder Diana Rhoten has just published an op-ed in the journal Inside Higher Ed that should be of interest to anyone who is trying to understand how interdisciplinary research works in the real world.

An excerpt from the article, which you can read in its entirety here:

… As researchers interested in interdisciplinarity as an object of study, we have both been asked repeatedly about gender as predictor of participation in or success with interdisciplinary practices. We have also been confronted by scientists telling us that we should not encourage junior women to conduct interdisciplinary research because “women have a hard enough time as it is, you need to keep them focused on rigorous science or they’ll never be taken seriously.” After a growing store of anecdotal data to the point, we started to ask ourselves why we weren’t looking at gender and began listening to our peers and readers. …

Rhoten and the co-author of the article, Stephanie Pfirman, are co-chairs of a workshop at Columbia University next month on Women, Minorities, and Interdisciplinarity: Transforming the Research Enterprise.

Hybrid Vigor’s co-founder, Diana Rhoten, program director at Social Science Research Council, recently sent me a copy of a fascinating paper that she and Stephanie Pfirman (of Barnard College) published in the journal Research Policy, called “Women in Interdisciplinary Science: Exploring Preferences and Consequences.”

I am still so cranky at the recent story in Nature about how for-profit journal publishers like Elsevier and Wiley want to kill open-source journals like Public Library of Science that I’m tempted to ignore copyright restrictions and post the PDF here out of spite, but she asked me not to.

And I can’t find a @#$% link to it online, so if you aren’t already a subscriber, write Elsevier and complain ask them nicely how you can get a copy. The reference is Research Policy 36 (2007) 56–75.

Here’s the abstract:

For at least a decade, U.S. funding agencies and university campuses have promoted the expansion of interdisciplinary research. At the same time, federal and local programs have sought to increase the participation of women and minorities in science, mathematics, and engineering. Research has focused on each of these trends independently, but very few studies have considered their interaction by asking how intellectual preferences for and professional consequences of interdisciplinary science might be influenced by gender, race, and/or ethnicity. Focused specifically on gender, this paper considers the expectation that women will be more drawn to interdisciplinary research, and explores the learning styles, work preferences, and career behaviors that might anticipate and/or explicate gender differences in interdisciplinary science. Principal mechanisms by which researchers engage in interdisciplinarity – cross-fertilization, team-collaboration, field-creation, and problem-orientation – are tested for evidence of gendering using preliminary empirical data from three studies. The results of this exploratory analysis offer clues about possible tendencies and raise questions about the potential costs and benefits for those who adopt them.

At the moment, Diana is on sabbatical from SSRC, where she’s the director of the Knowledge Institutions program. Apparently her idea of taking a break is to move to WDC for a year; she was invited to help start and direct a new program in the National Science Foundation’s Office of Cyberinfrastructure.

… a.k.a. “what else I was doing while I wrote Intervention.”

Based on some ideas that I started exploring with Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon shortly after I wrote my first paper on risk and genomics, in early 2004 we got funding from the National Science Foundation to see if we could get started on designing a new methodology for assessing emerging bio-risks.

The project was called “Understanding Genomics Risks: An Integrated Scenario and Analytic Approach,” and it was funded through NSF’s Decision, Risk, and Management Sciences program.

Our primary focus was on the risks that might result from growing and harvesting transgenic pig organs for transplants, a.k.a. xenotransplantation. (The pigs in question have been genetically altered so their biochemistry doesn’t trigger a rejection reaction in humans. This isn’t theoretical.)

The centerpiece of the xeno project was a day-long meeting at UC Berkeley, hosted by Steve Weber, director of the Institute of International Studies. We brought together a panel of experts that included an agricultural ecologist, an economist, an MBA/MD, a medical anthropologist, a political scientist, and a zoologist and vet who’d been a senior executive at USDA, and got them talking about the problem.

What they came up with is at the core of Chapter 11 in Intervention, “Putting Pigs to the Test.” Most people who’ve read it — as well as the panelists who attended the meeting — have said that it makes a pretty compelling case for why we need to change how we conduct risk assessments for new biotechnologies.

The entire story of how we got to that meeting in Berkeley didn’t make it into the book, but I wish it had. It’s a terrific object lesson in collaborative problem-solving and decision making. I’ll either post it here at some point when it makes sense, or maybe I’ll see if I can publish it in a magazine or a journal somewhere.

In any case, the project was quite successful. As a result, we got:
a) a tremendously promising start on this new methodology for emerging risks;
b) a paper in the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty; and
c) a chance to use the work in a different and even more critical setting: evaluating the risks of avian flu.

In regards to (c), and to make a long story short, in the fall of 2005, one of the xeno panelists recommended me to a group of people (specifically, Global Business Network and Larry Brilliant) who were designing a meeting on avian flu called Pandefense 1.0.

Pandefense 1.0 was an interdisciplinary “think tank” and exercise in emergency preparedness for a possible avian flu pandemic. It brought the world’s top flu and vaccine experts, epidemiologists, bird specialists, animal pathologists, and public health professionals together with leading thinkers from philanthropy, academia, business, scenario planning, decision theory, risk communication, and the investment community.

Its goal was to explore the wide range of consequences — public health, economic, political and cultural — of an avian flu pandemic, and most importantly, to identify and alert decision makers and the public to the interventions that could be taken immediately to avoid or mitigate a disaster.

Hybrid Vigor’s participation in Pandefense led to an invitation to co-edit a special Forethought section, called ‘Preparing for a Pandemic,’ in the May 1, 2006, edition of Harvard Business Review. Here’s the editor’s letter introducing the section.

Of course, I dragged Baruch Fischhoff into participating as well, and this led to the publication of yet another paper, in a new journal called Global Public Health.

The upshot of all of this activity for me, personally, was a growing belief that the risk assessment methods I’d been studying and working on with Baruch had the potential to have a tremendous positive impact on getting out in front of emerging infectious diseases, in addition to the benefit it could bring to the assessment of commercial biotech products.

I’m now working on raising the money to fund a couple of new projects in this area with several of the people I met at, and through, my involvement with Pandefense.

Wish us luck: this kind of work is of critical importance, and it is ludicrous how difficult it is to get funding for prevention and preparedness, unless it directly provides cash to a specific industry.