The wonder of the world is so much deeper than we are. I dreamed last night of steel foam. Today I searched to see what I could find and easily located this engineering website where I learned that such a thing exists, is being tested, and is perhaps being used. Here's a link to the site and a PDF of the presentation.

I have also wondered about how we could grow steel so that the complex structures of living plants might somehow be fostered in physical space the way it is in computer generated graphics, simple rules iterating, randomizing, erring and correcting. The rusty stalagmites that you see on old ship wrecks and submerged iron structures means that it must be somewhat possible.

Probably, I should quit reading Christopher Alexander before going to bed. 

Thinking Cities - 21 minute video

Although this is a commercial video produced by Ericsson, Thinking Cities outlines at least some of the key aspects of urban development and city planning that we are facing today. One of the biases is developed cities (not much is said about informal development even though it is the most rapid area of city growth globally). Geoffrey West, Carlo Ratti, Mathieu Lefevre along with a handful of others feature as the narrators of the changing global urban patterns.

I was most interested in the social city angles as well as the trash tracking project as both relate to my own research interests in mapping social capital in urban settings. Though West is very much criticized in some circles, I applaud his efforts to try and understand if they are variables and constants in city growth, development and change. The angle is interesting even if it will end up being refined or changed over time. Ratti's work is also well worth paying attention to, particularly where it can be integrated with other research and planning processes.

I've been following InnoCentive from early on, ever since I first came across it in the burgeoning field of collaboration thinking and practice. For those of you who may not have heard about InnoCentive, this brief video is a great explanation of how it works.





I am interested in InnoCentive at two levels. The first is participation as a solver and potential seeker. The second is as a platform. I think the second is far more important and more profound. As a functional brokering of problems and problem solvers that is commercial, sizable, substantive, and growing, we must keep iterating this platform in ways that suit other settings. 


Here are some possible platform spaces for this to be expanded into (or grown as there are some entries in some categories already):

• Think tanks (there are 6500 globally and the number is growing)
• Universities (Yaffle.ca is a good example but there must be much more it these kinds of projects)
• Disenfranchised PhD grads (this pool must be tapped, coordinated and motivated to apply their knowledge to current challenges)
• Libraries and databases (where search rankings and other trending data are married to people who are working in those areas or who could work in those areas)
• Intellectual capital in the developing world (those who don't have institutional access but who have a great deal to offer)
• Other educational spaces (imagine a richly connected network of schools at all levels where real problems were being contemplated by all kinds of students around the globe)

Detroit: Renewal - Not Just Decay

Detroit is the stormless Katrina of the north and often gets bad press for all that's wrong with it. We love success stories almost as much as we love success stories gone bad. Detroit is a complex enough landscape, human and otherwise, to support any number of story lines. Thanks to Jeff Neven for passing on this video that gives us a more nuanced view. I really liked the contrast of the old school and new school - selective journalism has often just talked about the abandoned building without reference to what's across the street.

Creative Places + Spaces

This short Artscape video considers how connecting across traditional barriers and divides is an important discipline for innovation.

Vertical Farming

This series of concepts on the Chris Jacobs website for high-density vertical farming is really intriguing to look at. I first read about this at work while going through a new issue of WIRED. What about putting these things in the middle of existing farming centres that are not too far from cities? There may be fewer issues and a bit less NIMBY but perhaps the economics of doing that would make it even tougher to sell than in cities.

I also think this would be a great way to make use of brownfield spaces in our cities - places where the soil is contaminated and can't be used in its current form. Build vertical farms in those spaces while remediation takes place below the ground with new technologies and sufficient safety measures in place. These brownfields are often in commercially valuable areas or near economic corridors.

Like many innovations, success comes from bringing together a number of drivers in such a way that a new, high value proposition emerges. Hopefully that will happen soon and we will be able to see some high-rise towers of food spring up. Having grown up on a farm, it would be interesting to take an elevator to the 21st floor to do some weeding or to dig potatoes.

Innovating Under the Radar

The IBM Business Innovation Centre had this interesting session on challenging an industry leader without ending up in the line of fire - or, if your competition is huge and you're small, don't go toe-to-toe.

A video session available here and a PDF of the session is here.

Google: monster whiteboard

I've long been a fan of whiteboards and the gang at Google have long been proponents of using the flexible and somewhat randomized feel of a communal whiteboard to get ideas, plans and thoughts into a specific space via writing, lines, idea maps, paper taped to whiteboard, etc. Here is a shot of the uber-Google whiteboard map.

OCAD Launches Strategic Innovation Lab

Last night I was part of a diverse gathering of people who made their way from as far away as Barcelona to attend the launch of OCAD's new Strategic Innovation Lab (sLAB). Those in attendance included art students, senior OCAD leadership, MaRS representatives, government officials, business leaders and others who were interested in how social innovation might bring about good for others. In addition to hearing about the sLAB vision from Lenore Richards (Executive Director) and Bob Logan (Chief Scientist), participants were given a chance to be part of a workshop facilitated by Dave Gray of Xplane that enabled us to explore as a group what our vision for the future of sLAB might be.


I was part of a group that reflected visually on collaboration, leading to an exploration of 'it takes a village to raise an idea' complete with drawings. The survival or death of ideas is something that Randall Collins explores in his Sociology of Philosophies. This was a less onerous exploration and did not occupy the thousand-plus pages that Collins exploration covers.

IBM Innovation in Action - online summit

Last week I had a chance to attend the IBM Innovation in Action  summit that was hosted as a webinar. Don Tapscott and an assortment of IBM strategy gurus talked on various dimensions of business innovation that impact all social enterprises. The top guy for IBM Canada delivered a session on the next 5 big things that will impact us in the next 5 years. 

Don Tapscott ran through material familiar to Wikinomics readers. I liked the virtual Exhibition Hall where you could 'walk' around and chat with various IBM people who were managing the booths.  I had a good conversation with Brian Eatock at the Enterprise of the Future booth. We talked about the future of business relationships given the range of digital communications tools available today. I suggested that the next big thing might be Customer Intelligence Management (CIM) where we learn how to better tap into the collective knowledge not only in our own networks or organizations but across the digital matrix. I think personal relationships built through face-to-face will remain critical despite the other tools available. 

In my office we did a small experiment to see who we sent the most emails to over the last six months. Turns out that a high percentage of our email communication is with people who are in close physical proximity as we work on projects, give updates, send questions or share interesting things we come across. Even outside of business, a majority of the most-called numbers tend to be with people that we cross paths with regularly. Brian and I might cross paths somewhere but for now, these kinds of virtual connections, like passing contact at real-time trade show, can only go so far without other more enriched communications encounters.

Pepper in the Pot

I've been reading through Peppers and Rogers Rules to Break and Laws to Follow. They articulate strong core ideas about efficiency, innovation and the organizational manifestations of greatness and dysfunction along these lines. Don spoke at a Canada Post Direct Mail seminar I attended recently and I asked him if he thought there was more innovation in organizations now than has been the case in the past.

 

The book partly answers that by pointing to the rapid expansion of technological innovation. My interest is on the social ingenuity side of the ledger - the challenges we face in finding more adaptive social and organizational structures. It would have been good to speak at greater length about it but the book provides some great examples of business enterprises that really get it right and others that have floundered.

There is brief mention of complexity theory but the themes underneath their discussion traffic through many ideas that are driven by complex systems thinking.

Innovation Networks

Innovation projects are blurring the boundary between those who are inside an organization and those who are outside. Social media has long (in internet time) leaped this boundary and there are no signs of it slowing. Here are some examples of places where people with ideas and expertise can get involved in projects for large organizations without every becoming part of the larger borg.
Nine Sigma allows you to respond to RFP's from a range of industries. Innovation Exchange (UK) brokers solution providers and enterprises that need innovation. Innovation Exchange (Ireland) is another variation. MITX is MIT's innovation exchange interface.Innovation Relay Centres operate in 71 locations throughout Europe and South America. Your Encore is a brokering site for retired experts who have capabilities that companies are eager to tap into.These enterprises utilize the high-connectivity of the web to better match problems to people who can solve them without them needing to become formal employees.

Pioneers and Process

I came across this interesting quote from a researcher who sees a significant weakness in having your peers OK everything you do. If nothing else, it points out the significant challenges that pioneers face in any industry or sector:

The main problem is that peer review, the bureaucratic god of science without whose blessing research cannot be funded, has been deemed infallible. That's not too bad in the mainstream where everyone more or less agrees what the most important problems are. Pioneers, however, rarely agree with anyone and this rare breed are now wrestling to scrape enough funds together to test their ideas.
- Professor Braben, Chief Executive of Venture Research International Ltd.