When you think of science fiction, what will pop into your mind? Galaxies, spaceships, and lightsabers? Maybe alien species and robots? Most of us are probably gonna think of the Star Wars movies. Star Wars would have fallen into the category of sci-fi despite one fact; whereas Star Wars is happening “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”, science fiction is about the future, not the past. In this way, sci-fi can actually be quite useful for your business and a guideline for future development and innovation within your company.

Science fiction is about preventing and inventing – preventing potential dangers from happening in the future or inventing ideas or products that the world have not yet seen. Thus, science fiction always poses the question: “what if…?”. What if we will invent a new technology that will make us immortal and superhumans? What if robots will become more intelligent than us and outrule humanity? What if the Earth will get attacked by aliens or we will need to leave Earth because of climate changes? These are examples of potential dangers or possibilities that have been illustrated in the science fiction popular culture for many years, especially in movies and from an American point of view. These imaginary what-if questions might seem pretty spacey and non-realistic to become true, but many businesses are actually getting inspiration from science fiction and are paying sci-fi writers to predict their future. Tech giants like Microsoft, Google and Apple are connecting science fiction writers with their employees and tech developers. This way of imagining future societies and technologies – which may not, but potentially could become a reality – is known as design fiction, and is a useful method for enhancing creativity and innovative thinking.

Within a science fiction approach businesses can explore social phenomena and future technologies. That’s what sci-fi books and movies have been doing for years – predicting possible future scenarios. Just think of the iconic screenplay of Frankenstein from 1931 made by Universal Studios. A scientist and his assistant accidentally create a monster in an attempt to remake a human by putting together body parts and connecting them with electricity. The story, which is originally told by Mary Shelley with her 1817 novel, addresses the potential dangers of the use of technology and is a classic within science fiction. Another classic is 2001: A Space Odyssey from 1968 in which we after a discovery of a monolith that affects human evolution, follow the astronauts Dr. David Bowman and Dr. Frank Poole’s travel to Jupiter in the Spacecraft Discovery One, primarily controlled by the computer HAL 9000. The movie is dealing with existential issues and the possibility that AI will become smarter than us. Issues or possibilities that most companies actually are dealing with on a daily basis nowadays.

One of the most popular and all-time influential sci-fi movies has to be Blade Runner from 1982, inspired by Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?. The former police officer, Rick Deckard, is hunting down replicants (robots who look like humans) who escaped back to the Earth, in the future Los Angeles of 2019. In Blade Runner replicants were sent to build off-world colonies, as global warming and climate changes have been affecting the environment on Earth.

Let sci-fi inspire your business innovation

So where are we in today’s 2019 thinking of the “what if…” questions posed in the mentioned sci-fi movie classics? Have we – for example – created Frankensteins by combining the human body with technology? One might say we have, British Neil Harbisson is officially recognized as a cyborg, a mix of human and technology, as he has an antenna implanted in his skull from which he is able to hear colors. Harbisson is a co-founder of the international organization Cyborg Foundation that defend cyborg rights and helps people become cyborgs. Another example would be ReWalk – a wearable robotic exoskeleton that helps paralyzed people to stand upright, walk, turn and climb stairs. The robotic legs are kind of add-ons to the human body and provide mobility through a computer-based control system and motion sensors.

Also, the what-if question about robots and computers becoming more intelligent than humans is something becoming ever more relevant for businesses. Today, Artificial Intelligence and other Advanced Computer Systems are capable of solving problems the human brain can’t even grasp. Take for example the AlphaZero AI, a chess-playing computer program, that can teach itself how to play chess in less than four hours and even beat the world champion chess program. Pretty impressive, right? Some people even believe that AI in near future will be able to master power over humans and become an all-seeing, all-powerful, super-intelligence, known as singularity.

Finally, the what-if question about the possibility that we will need to leave Earth is actually very much up for debate – Climate changes and global warming is more real than ever, and something we all feel on our own bodies every winter/summer. The planet’s average surface temperature has risen about 1.62 degrees since the late 19th century, Greenland has lost an average of 281 billion tons of ice per year since 1993 and the sea level is rising slightly every year. People all over the world are demonstrating to demand action in the climate debate, and especially schoolchildren and students have started to take action in this by arranging school strikes all over the world in for example Australia, Belgium, the Netherlands and Denmark, and a nationwide strike happening today 15 February 2019 in the UK.

It seems it is not impossible, that we will need to leave Earth and look for other places to live. And we already now see actual frontrunners such as the founder of Tesla, Elon Musk, who – since 2002 – has been creating advanced rockets and spacecraft with operation SpaceX (Space Exploration Technologies) attempting to make a self-sustaining city on Mars. According to Musk, the Earth will soon be out of water and plants and humans will, therefore, need to become a spacefaring civilization and multi-planet species. The goal of SpaceX is to send a cargo mission to Mars in 2022 to confirm water resources, identify hazards, put in place initial power, mining and life support infrastructure. In 2024 the mission is to bring both cargo and a crew to prepare for future flights to Mars and thereby the beginnings of a base to be able to build a self-sustaining city and civilization. Very soon – right?

Science fiction is becoming science faction

It seems that sci-fi is not as fictional as one might think. The what-if questions and predictions about the future from the mentioned science fiction movies are along with many other sci-fi classics in some aspects been foretelling what would happen in the future.

For example, technologies like screen-based video communication, predictive computers and a mix of humans and machines were already imagined by Philip K. Dick in his novels from the 1960s. And in the TV-series Star Trek from 1966-1969, the characters were using flip phones, tablets, smartwatches, 3D printing etc – things, we pretty much take for granted today. In Fahrenheit 451 from 1953 the earbuds was already imagined and virtual reality glasses in Back to the Future from 1985.

Thinking of this, we might start to think of science fiction as science faction – that the imaginary is likely to become a reality. Having this science fiction approach when exploring and developing your business strategy can actually be pretty useful, and no idea is too far out! Try to imagine fictional future scenarios – just like the 2019 Los Angeles in Blade Runner – by this you can examine the use of your product without a huge cost. The science fiction approach and design fiction method gives you and your employees the freedom to think big without the strictures of money or technological capability hampering creativity. 

Both privately and professionally, we possess more square meters with fewer people per dwelling and own more stuff that we choose from an almost exponentially growing number of products and services. People will even cut back on necessities to preserve luxury. We are truly shaped by habits and expectations, which we mirror from other people and organizations thus making the digitally created abundance harder to handle than the industrial scarcity of the 20th century.

If we can’t regulate consumption in our private lives, how are we supposed to do it professionally with almost everything readily available?

This tendency of believing in big is linked to the human and organizational bias of overestimating the value of big things. Throughout history, trusting big things and consolidating families, cities and organizations made sense when we faced famine, wars, and natural catastrophes. Today, large organizations are trying to cope with globalization and digitalization by pouring what seems to be disproportionate amounts of resources into fewer large innovation projects. What is meant as an attempt to de-risk concept development and product launches have the exact opposite effect, thus making many large organizations behave like giant forks in a world of soup.

Unfortunately, organizations approach innovation and digitalization like they are drinking from a fire hose – they think getting a lot fast is the way. Fast is good, everything fast is not.

Clearly, R&D spending depends on industry and lifecycle stage of the organizations but it does not correlate with innovation and business performance. Today, lead times are longer, complexity is higher and resources are more concentrated than ever so new design principles are needed.

At Sputnik5 we believe in SMALL to be a core design principle as the smart inbuilt organizational mechanism for getting the right things done fast in innovation. By small, we mean that large organizations should:

• provide dynamic access to and increase the granularity of resources, i.e. smaller chunks of money, time and (a broader set of) data/tools for more employees
• distribute decision making to small and agile teams to avoid organizational drag
• spend as much time in the before and after phases of an innovation project as during to make sure that the right problem is solved and there are a place and resources for the output in the roadmap (and a contingency plan)
• maintain a prioritized backlog of small problems, possibilities, and processes

Strategically staying small does not mean resizing the overall company and not leveraging corporate resources but it does mean creating a more ambidextrous set up where at least 10% of all projects are a small but high risk and the rest are low risk. An often-copied strategy is long-term planning for the future but that often leads to option-blindness in a wild chase for minimizing risk.

Small is good. Not enough is just right. Think about how you can get as much as possible from as little as possible when doing your next project or designing innovation activities. The next big thing in innovation is a lot of small things.

Who’s selling them? What happened to the baby? Why sell them in the first place? Just six words. Enough to evoke all kinds of possible scenarios. There is definitely an intriguing story behind that ad that makes me feel like finding out more. Just imagine what the seller of those little shoes has gone through.

This ad is the shortest story ever written by Ernest Hemingway, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century; a master storyteller who innovated the way stories could be told. The ad was the result of a sort of hackathon decades before the term hackathon was coined by Sun Microsystems in Menlo Park. This hackathon’s challenge: write a complete story in six words. Hemingway won, hands down, and the story of the baby shoes for sale prevailed (Sun Microsystems didn’t).

Here’s an even shorter story. One told in two words. A story that ignited in the birth to Silicon Valley: “Disposable appliances.”

Sounds insane?

You judge: this two-word story was conceived in 1957 by a team of eight entrepreneurs in what was not yet called Silicon Valley. They needed a powerful, sticky story to convince a very smart tech guy that sand could be used to produce transistors. Their goal was to make him feel he would be missing something big if he didn’t sponsor them. These two words made a brilliant, sticky story. Sand, a material so abundant and so easy to get, that electronics made with it would be dirt cheap – literally. In fact, so ridiculously cheap that appliances made with these transistors would be disposable. You know how this two-word story ends, it is still being told through a needy disposable appliance, made from the silicon in sand, vibrating in your pocket, calling for your constant attention.

Six words were enough to make you feel you wanted to know more about the seller of those tiny shoes. Two words were enough to make Sherman Fairchild feel these entrepreneurs were on to something huge he could not afford to miss. He sponsored them: within two years they had invented the integrated circuit and within ten, the first venture capital firm, Intel and dozens of other companies.

Feeling something?

Next time you think words can’t be powerful think again. “The word,” as Assyrian teacher Ahiqar wrote around 700 BC, “is mightier than the sword.” Words become powerful when they make you feel something. For example, think of one word that meant “food” in 1970 and means “cool” today. Think of one word that meant “jungle” in 1980 and means “everything” today. Think of one word that meant “yearbook” in 1990 and means “connected” today.

These three words – do I really need to say them? – displaced the original top-of-mind meaning they had, and became brands because they tell a story that makes us feel something. Apple is the story of beautiful functionality that makes us “feel” trendy and hip. Amazon, the story of an online store so intelligently designed that it makes us “feel” we can get everything there. Facebook, the story of a world-changing idea that makes us “feel” connected.

The stories that these companies have consistently told (and delivered on) give meaning to their “brands” so that Apple with a capital “A” is not a fruit, Amazon is not a tropical forest and Facebook is not a high school yearbook. Brands by themselves, without a sticky story that substantiates them and makes you feel something, are just words – just ask Hillary Clinton.

No luck?

No random incidents of luck made these common words mean something way more than their original meaning. The stories that gave these three brands their “soul” were carefully chosen, crafted and repeated. Take Amazon. In an interview when his company was just a new online bookstore, the interviewer asked CEO Jeff Bezos if he could think of anything Amazon would never sell. His response: cement; too messy, too hard to handle, no margins. Definitely cement. We will sell everything else but cement.

You see, from day one, this visionary entrepreneur knew that the essence of Amazon went beyond books, beyond an online store and even beyond being a retailer. Amazon would sell and deliver everything, everywhere. His company went on to build the “everything” story that is now the Amazon brand. The same is true for Steve Job’s obsession with elegant functionality and Mark Zuckerberg’s focus on bringing people together.

A brand becomes a compass to make decisions and points companies in the right direction. Their brand tells Apple they should only bring to market products that make you feel trendy and cool. The Amazon brand is the compass that points them in the direction of making everything easily available to you. It is the filter that makes it easy for Facebook to focus on only launching features that connect you with the people you care.

Your brand?

Brands are not limited to products. You and I can use the storytelling power of a brand to live with meaning, be consistent, and make sound decisions. Think of brand Einstein: playful genius; brand Obama: tempered statesman; or brand Michael Jackson: eccentric prodigy. They all used their brand to laser-focus their actions and decisions, and they all exploited it to achieve their goals. None of them was ever inconsistent – they were “on-brand” 24/7.

In this way, a personal brand tells and creates your story at the same time. It is as much an external expression of who you are as it is an internal compass to navigate life. No random luck here either: your brand reflects a story you carefully find, then express and keep repeating. Imagine if we found our brand essence at age 20? We could use it as a filter for big decisions, expertly steering our lives towards our chosen path and consistently expressing who we had chosen to be, no matter what. How’s that for personal innovation!

Got it?

Ernest Hemingway used his brand to write stories that make you feel intrigued. The eight Silicon Valley entrepreneurs used their carefully chosen two-word story to make an investor feel theirs was an irresistible idea. Apple uses their brand to bring elegant products that make you feel you’re buying pure “coolness.” Obama uses his brand to act as a tempered leader that makes you feel you trust him. Now imagine how you could use yours to navigate life and to make us feel when we’re around you.

You’d be in-the-zone 24/7, and we would notice.

Photocredit: Christopher Michel

The Original Haystack Observatory was founded in 1970 and occupies 1,300 acres of hilly woodlands in the towns of Groton, Tyngsborough, and Westford, about 40 miles northwest of the MIT campus in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A group of 100 scientists, engineers and technical personnel conducts the Observatory’s research programs and operations.

The World is a haystack of problem-solution fits with a few needles in it. Building your own Haystack Observatory will increase the possibility of discovering those needles.

If your organisation spends all its time looking for interesting trends and technology or all its time chasing existing and potential customers, you will miss out on most opportunities. If you do neither, same result. A balanced and integrated approach is the best way to navigate the infinite pool of problem-solution fits available.

Any innovation effort – big or small – aims to put good ideas to use. There are two ways to do this:

• Top Down Innovation: You define a relevant problem and look for technologies that can solve it.
• Bottom Up Innovation: You explore technologies and digital platforms and then search for relevant problems they can solve.

In larger organisations Top Down and Bottom Up Innovation should be weighed meticulously against each other. Our experience with designing innovation programs has shown that the difference between the two approaches is not fully understood, that the two ways are rarely combined in a structured format and are often competing for the same resources.

Top Down vs Bottom up Innovation at the Haystack Observatory

Most organisations today claim to be user-centric when doing innovation. In reality, few are organised around the user and rarely deliver what the user truly needs at the right time. Thus, a deep understanding of user needs combined with perfectly timed and scalable technology should be the purpose of any innovation effort.

Defining the right problems and then look for technology, i.e. top down innovation, takes place at the top of the Haystack Observatory where a desire to seek what can’t be formulated guides the time spent gazing at the World (and occasionally outer space). People working at the top of the Haystack Observatory should keep asking why something happens (at least 5 times) in an aggressively non-judicial way to uncover hidden truths or needs. Subsequently focus on what the impact of fulfilling this need might be rather than jumping straight into problem-solving mode. Ultimately, this part of the haystack observatory will align on which problems are the most important ones to solve rather dictating directions or solutions. If you don’t know where to start, pick and combine one element from each of the four levels of the value pyramid below and describe how this would be perceived in user terms.

…or follow the advice of Baudelaire: “Review and scrutinize whatever is natural; and you will find nothing but frightfulness.”

At the bottom up end of the haystack observatory, preferably the basement, time is spent understanding technology that is already democratised and initially indistinguishable from magic (e.g. AR/VR, drones, AI etc.). Bottom up Haystack Observers care less about Hype Curves and Gartner Quadrants and more about exploring technology to the point where it stops being surprising.

Beyond exploring technology, Bottom up Haystack Observers also test digital platforms that successfully enable either Sarnoff, Metcalfe or Reed’s laws:

Again if you don’t know where to start, let the technology choices be defined initially by Funktionslust: the pleasure of doing what one knows how to do well. Or look to Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv, Berlin or Paris for much the same reason the famous bank robber Willie Sutton robbed banks: “That’s where the money is”.

At Innovation Lab we seek out insights on technology and trends across these ecosystems – often acting as the bottom up Haystack Observatory of our clients. We then sprint to find the needles by prototyping and testing solutions that match unmet needs.

How to set up a Haystack Observatory

What is needed: A physical place where Haystack Observers meet to share user insights and technology perspectives. Ideally, somewhere close to real users in order to build and iterate rapidly. Both Top Down and Bottom Up Haystack Observers should be non-conformist generalized specialists with a high degree of fluid intelligence, i.e. “the capacity to reason and solve novel problems, independent of any knowledge from the past”. Fluid intelligence wears off around the mid 20’s unless it is trained. So if your company lacks fluid intelligence, invite or hire people that have it on a quid-pro-quo. Quid being their time and most creative powers, quo being food and access to resources and interesting people and challenges. The Haystack Observatory has its own drumbeat, i.e. a time schedule designed for Top Down and Bottom Up Observers to meet with the sole purpose of combining insights with technology until a needle is found. When a needle is found, Haystack Teams will deliberately start doing the right thing badly and then better. Haystack Needles are built much the same way crusades were planned by justifying the cause (“Why is this so important”), followed by propaganda (“Tell the World”), recruitment (“Get team members on board”), finance (“What is needed”) and logistics (“Plan”). Not the other way around!

The Haystack Observatory should also host in-house innovation sprints and open hackathon-style competitions and facilitate Beers’n’Demos to spread the word on insights and projects. On rare occasions, middle and top management are allowed to bring strategic issues into the Haystack Observatory.

To sum up:

Balance top down and bottom up innovation initiatives
Host both under one roof close to users.
Invite/hire people with fluid intelligence
Use agile innovation formats for combining user insights and technology

If you are considering strategic innovation initiatives and want to know more about weighing top down and bottom up innovation efforts or plan to build a Haystack Observatory, please contact Anders Sahl Hansen.

Some of the frequently asked questions we get from our clients at the moment are:

• How do we design and implement an innovation unit?
• What is the future of content?
• What is the best response to the unbundling of banks? And more specifically:

And more specifically:

• Should we sell B2C in addition to B2B or transition completely to B2C?
• Do we need to move from selling products to enabling peer-2-peer marketplaces?
• How can we leverage AI and IoT to deliver data-driven subscription models?

Since technology is cheap and digitalization have democratized access to new markets and financial resources, most organisations have responded by heavily investing in digitalization – unfortunately, digitalization does not necessarily lead to innovation.

In this short article, we propose 5 different ways innovation efforts can be organised today, ranging from Bricolage to Outpost Labs. But in order to present these 5 different ways, we first need to establish what innovation is and how it can be measured.

Innovation is highly relative on an individual level, but innovation in an organisation, as opposed to business-as-usual, means: “Putting into use ideas that create value for users.”

Innovation may require new technology by addressing new user groups in radically different-from-before ways, but at its core lies value creation. To measure value from innovation efforts in organisations, we should focus on the work we choose to undertake, as well as the projects we reject or abandon. Efforts can be further subdivided into two categories: successful and unsuccessful projects (as measured by value creation and/or learning to organisation). Below is an approximative equation describing how to measure the value of innovation:

Very often, we tend to forget to account for the unsuccessful projects we successfully reject and the ones we did not reject or abandon in due time.

As with species in Nature, organisations need to adapt to changes in their environment, e.g. new technologies, business models, competitors, legislation etc. Some species of organisations are better at this than others. In the wake of the financial crisis, most organisations chose or were forced to lessen the type and amount of innovation projects in exchange for fewer low-risk but big-budget projects. The illustration below visualizes two very different reproduction or innovation strategies from Nature:

1) Oysters: 500M offspring/year, low survival rate, no parental care, short gestation and time-to-reproduce

2) Gorillas: 1 infant every 5th year, high survival rate, extensive parental care, long gestation and time-to-reproduce

All industries feel greater uncertainty regarding the future, so a need to build organisational capacity to answer questions fast arises. Using nature as an analogy we should thus increase the oyster-to-gorilla-ratio. How do you do that? By organizing for agile innovation.

Below we have generalized our research and experience into 5 different organisational models. There are no right or wrong models as long as they reflect internal and external conditions 12 months ahead. In general, though, organisations will evolve from left to right with mounting pressure and often end up combining elements from different models to stay relevant.

Bricolage is what happens in start-ups, maker spaces and garages around the world. Resources are limited so you make-do with what’s at hand and care less for processes.

R&D Department-style innovation efforts perform basic research in core business domains to achieve long-term innovation advantages. Less focus on applications and business models.

Intrapreneurs across divisions will seek to collaborate to push ideas into use by bundling resources and skills around common business problems.

The Strategic Innovation Unit is funded by C-level management to run strategic innovation projects, build innovation capabilities and deliver insights from across industries.

Outpost Labs aim to provide self-sustainable and radically new business abiding by very few rules – sometimes detaching itself completely… much in the same way Inspector Clouseau of the Pink Panther movies hired Chinese manservant Cato to attack him when he least expected it to keep him alert.

The most important building blocks of any innovation effort are great people and ad hoc resource allocation but secondly, you need formats for producing solutions. We have developed a catalog of innovation formats that you can download here:

AIM Catalogue on Slideshare

Determining how to design the innovation efforts in a large organisation would benefit greatly by assessing which agile innovation must-win-battles are important and to which degree you want to change them in the next 3 years.

If you are considering organizing or re-organzing your innovation efforts, feel free to contact us for an informal meeting. If you already have a killer innovation (or the other way around) program, we would also love to hear from you as we are constantly looking for new cases and best practice. Meanwhile, you can always take a look at our Hackathon how-to guide here.

By: JC Velten, Mads Thimmer and Tristan Thimmer

Every year, a city of 70,000 people rises out of nothing for a one-week existance. Then it disappears again. We’re very happy to be part of it, greetings from our most feeble of locations for Innovation Lab:

Innovation Lab Nevada

3 & Explanade

Black Rock City, Nevada 89412

USA

We do not recommend coming by to visit between September 5 and August 25 – as our office staff, along the entire city, is gone to what people here at Burning Man call “decompression,” a 51-week-long period when the 70,000 citizens suffer “post-burn blues,” coping as best as we can in what we call the “default world” to alleviate the feelings of loneliness and separation from our beloved desert city.

A massive MVP

On the surface, this is no ordinary place, you know that. Underneath, it is even more extraordinary, which you definitely don’t know if you haven’t been here. Just having been was the defining factor for Eric Schmidt as he landed the job as Google CEO because the founders are avid Burners, keen participants of the Black Rock City experiment. This is where you could ride self driving cars – five years ago. And see dwarves juggling pancakes at 7 in the morning as the most natural thing. Some call it a trip into a Dali painting, some say it is a prolonged and weird dream made real. Burners think the surrounding world is the dream and the Playa, the ancient beach or former sea bed that now provides the sandy basis for the Burn, is the only unveiled and true place. The typical BRC greeting is “welcome home”.

Burning Man is a massive MVP (Minimum Viable Product, for the non-techie). Burning Man is an experimental city, whose infrastructure – including streets and an electrical grid – is built in the desert out of nothing, every year for more than 25 years, and taken down leaving no trace. Burning Man is also an experimental economy, based on “gifting” where money or trade is not allowed, yet goods and services exchange hands without friction for the benefit of all. Burning Man is an experimental society with rules that work quite harmoniously based on 10 principles that every citizen takes quite seriously.

Innovation Lab @ Burning Man

We transform the inspiration we get from this massive MVP called Black Rock City into ideas and concepts for innovation. Here are some of the highlights of creative stimulus this transformative spot on our planet has to offer to the rest of us this year:

Morphing skull – “C-FIVE” by Laberge, Prismaticamp

A projection mapping art piece meets you in the dark desert night with a spectacle of changing colors, adornments, and effects. From Hamlet’s Yorick address to Damien Hirst’s diamond studded versions, the ultimate symbol of mortality has had pivotal meaning for humans. Here, death is turning into sheer and playful beauty that stuns you image after image as it morphs to the blasting beats.

Digital Yggdrasil

What more appropriate than to make a full size oak with thousands of LED leaves that change with the music and draw crowds to cuddle up or relax in the antishade of the soft colors against the dark velvet canopy if night. This epic village center apparently still manages to draw contemplative humans to its root base.

Live helium ballooned dancing light wire

Often times the most stunning Playa art is the most strikingly simple. At previous Burns it has been a row of helium balloons pitched against a sunrise, visible for miles around, that has had Burners flabbergasted. In 2017, what looks like a giant light snake lures playa people to its base at what must be the most simply yet effective piece of playa art yet. The allured mob then shakes the LED infested tail base and the effect ripples upwards, causing the ligth wire to dance like a hip swinging sick figure to the pounding beats of general playa blasts.

Flying desert eagle

From afar it looks like a giant eagle swooshes across the desert landscape, flapping its wing ends almost to touch the desert sands. Upon inspection, a rope at its center invites participants to pull it and set the wings in motion as it vividly mimics the natural movements of the majestic bird of prey. Again a piece of extremely impressive art that is lifeless and unimpressive until participation brings it to life. Perhaps a principle of all art but here so much more evident.

Event

The artful experiments at Burning Man go far beyond actual sculptures and installation pieces. From the candidly ridiculous like a class that teaches you effective techniques for yelling at your neighbors to solo weddings that offer you a chance to love till death for certain or workshops like you have never heard workshops before flying banner titles such as Crotch Puppets, Narwhals:Unicorns of the sea, Free lasik laser eye surgery or simply Best butt Olympiad.

But workshops are not just a competition in the ridiculous. The cultural links to Silicon Valley forefront culture is clear. You can learn tricks to startup success, the latest in Blockchain progress or how to unleash creativity in your (working) life from true creatives. All is based on more than one way lecturing. Participation is key. Body and mind coherence is key. A workshop on creative writing attended by several Innovation Lab agents started off with a body dance. Awkwardness overcome, it was an ingenious way to invoke natural participation and paved way for open and well received criticism when participants shared their work

What to take away

In essence, Burning Man is a melting pot of the surreal but also the extremely real, promoting a soon to be rare art of presence. Here, experimentation occurs on all levels and unlimited curiosity is given a free spin. The proceeds in a rare worship of way over destination as most is burned in the end anyway. A middle finger in the otherwise widespread face of goalmindedness, product focus and result hypnosis. The fantastic conclusion is a side effect to a fantastic cooperative effort. Success is a result of presence, devotion, discipline, co-creation and curiosity. It is not the result of a premeditated adherence to plan.

So what to take away from a beach party gone mad for almost 3 decades? In a time of automation and the opportunity to outsource mechanical functions to machines and algorithms, we need to reinvent our own roles as humans. Creativity becomes key, and it will be the new prime parameter for continued relevance. The difficulty is of course, how to be creative, how to innovate? And in the vamped up race for upping creativity, how to be creative amongst the supercreative. Here, you need to train your creative muscles and no better place for that exists in the mind expanding, playful real life experiment called Burning Man. Because it is not just about adding skills, it is about transformation, about acquiring new priorities, about changing as a human and about expanding the capabilities of your personality.

Cover photo courtesy of Christopher Michel

Note from our editor:

Last week, our lively post-millennial interns Diego and Marc wrote about how their generation sees innovation and the workplace; and gave us tips on how to design for them. This week, they focus on their collaborative mindset, with Diego debunking some assumptions companies have about social media and Marc explaining how the new innovation formats fit their work ethic. On this article, Marc explores three formats of innovation that are made for the way his generation approaches life: collaboratively and using technology. And although some of these new formats, like hackathons, have been going on for 20 years, it is not until now, as the new generations take over, that it left the realm of code-only competitions to approach innovation for all kinds of problems. Enjoy the words of new wisdom from our youngest ilabbers

Written by: Marc Velten-Lomelin

Innovation is not what it used to be… thankfully.

Hiring the best minds from the best schools and throwing money at their pet projects no longer produces the transformative innovations that companies across all industries, and even government organizations, need to stay relevant and agile. Even the traditional methods of figuring out what customers want no longer work at ensuring you stay on top of your game. Relevancy has never been more fragile and you know it.

Welcome to the world of technology-enabled collaborative innovation that produces the next big thing and solves the world’s most pressing problems.

• 1. Crowdsourcing innovation

When a startup like Bragi raises $3.4 million from strangers to bring to market “A.I. for your ears,” its success doesn’t have to be predicted by a know-all venture investor. Kickstarter didn’t simply invent a platform for funding ideas using the crowd. They invented the most accurate success-prediction funding model ever. The people who paid Danish inventor Nikolaj Hviid $299 for a pair of earphones that didn’t exist demonstrated real demand with their wallets while funding the company, making Bragi one of the “ten most successful companies built on Kicstarter,” according to Forbes.

In 2015 energy company Tesla used the same crowdfunding model and “pre-sold” the non-existent Model 3 to 400,000 customers who paid $1,000 each, not only demonstrating overwhelming demand for a cheaper electric car, but raising big money towards building the plant to actually manufacture it. In 2006, even before Kickstarter even existed, Doritos transferred the creativity for its Superbowl ads to the crowd – having consumers use their cameras to film their ad entries and other consumers vote for the best – saving millions of dollars and time in creative talent from ad agencies, and most importantly, not having to guess what their consumers wanted to watch.

From raising money for a startup to predicting demand for the next Tesla to coming up with the Superbowl Doritos TV commercials, crowdsourcing as an innovative way to bring about transformative solutions is now pervasive. The new generations actually expect it from you. You’re most likely already part of somebody’s crowdsourcing innovation – comments on social media like “I wish this app could do…” go up to the cloud and into big data systems to help companies like Instagram and Linkedin develop new features people actually want without ever having to ask them. Several companies in Europe are applying crowdsourcing principles internally, using platforms like ProjectPad to foster internal innovation and have their employees come up and promote ideas that other employees pay to work on.

• 2. Incubating innovation

In February, Entrepreneur magazine published an article for entrepreneurs advising them that “You may need funding, but the benefits of corporate incubators and accelerators may do more for your startup than the money.” The benefits go both ways. When dozens of people are already working on the next idea that will make your product irrelevant, the best way to survive is by bringing them in to collaborate with your team while they develop their idea. You can also do the same for technologies that make you more efficient and say goodbye to your traditional vendors before they’re gone.

Incubating startups is a low-risk way to pay-to-play and ensure you’re on top of the next big thing before it is on top of you. Time and again, big companies with plenty of resources to innovate simply don’t, and before they know it, the market is disrupted by a bunch of twenty-year olds working from their basement. This is why AirB&B, and not Holiday Inn or Hilton, is the largest hospitality company in the world, or why you order an Uber before even thinking if taxis still exist.

No matter what you do, odds indicate that if you’re a big company, you will not see transformative innovation coming your way until you’re playing the catch-up game to the next Mark Zuckerberg. Unless, however, you expand your innovation capabilities by incubating startups, inviting those needy twenty-somethings to ruffle some feathers around and show your people unexpected ways of doing things better. Check out some of the incubators we run at Innovation Lab here.

• 3. Hacking innovation

Paradoxically, the marketing team at now defunct server giant Sun Microsystems came up with the term “hackathon” in 1999 as a mash up of the words “hack” and “marathon.” Which is exactly what a hackathon is: a group of people competing to solve one issue in an “impossible” amount of time – usually a few days. Since then, organizations of all sizes run hackathons to tackle problems their internal teams have not been able to crack within their normal environments and timelines. Despite the constraints of time and focus, it is actually a rare occasion when the “hack” problem has not been successfully tackled – no matter what the hackathon was about.

Hackathons are used by forward-thinking companies and organizations to innovate in a myriad of areas. For example, earlier this year, Innovation Lab and Siemens ran a two-day hackathon amongst Siemens’ internal team of engineers to make wind turbines more efficient. Just last week Innovation Lab ran another hackathon for Maersk. This one was with outside teams to source ideas for the future of tankers.

Also last week, fuel cell developer Arcola Energy in the UK ran a hackathon amongst teams of 8 to 18 year-old kids to “hack gadgets, appliances and toys to make them move faster, longer or to take first steps as an animate object,” using hydrogen. This hackathon was also sponsored by Toyota and Shell, two companies definitely interested in things that move and the stuff that powers them.

Energizing innovation

From energy sustainability to education and health, the world needs transformative innovation. Us, the new generations that are taking charge, know that collaboration and sharing, magnified by technology as never before, is the way to get you there. Expect to see these new collaborative innovation models proliferate, and new ones sprout as we take over.

Photo courtesy of friend of Innovation Lab and photographer Christopher Michel.

A couple of weeks ago Forbes reported that 928 Harvard Business School (HBS) students received a “climate change challenge” assignment on one of their classes. Their task: “Choose a company or non-profit organization whose operating model is likely to be significantly affected by climate change’s physical manifestations and/or related regulation, including threats and opportunities associated with mitigation and/or adaptation.” This initiative constituted an effort to not only determine how a warming planet adversely affects companies in all kinds of industries but to focus students to come up with innovative ways to thrive despite it.

928 innovative ways to thrive despite climate change

At Innovation Lab San Francisco, we work with HBS and can attest that for them, climate change is serious business. The students posted more than 900 well-researched and documented innovative ideas for very specific companies and organizations for the Climate Change Challenge on a blog especially created for the assignment. HBS wanted to shed light on the specific links between climate change and business so that the future leaders can plan for the new reality. After all, to ensure survival, businesses need to thrive under any conditions.

From big to small organizations, for these MBA students, the implications of a warming planet on the way companies do business are endless. One of the articles of this hackathon of ideas was about how climate change affects Coca-Cola “through three components that make up its signature product: sugar, water, and bottles.” This student analyzed the implications of a warming planet in these 3 areas and gave innovative ideas on how to cope with each, ending with one regarding package, inspired on XPrize: “For the long term, Coca-Cola should create a prize challenge to design the next generation, 100% biodegradable water bottle. Its size warrants this investment. It would be excellent publicity, as well.”

Another student, Spencer Bradley, approached the Climate Change Impact from a completely different perspective. In a post titled “Opportunity in the Drought: Aqua Capital Management and the Market for Tribal Water Rights“, he analyzes how a company named Aqua Capital Management is building a business on managing increasingly scarce water resources in the American West. Bradley explores the hurdles posed by regulation and how this company’s “greatest opportunity lies in their “Tribes” business, which is based on “assisting tribes to evaluate and analyze their water rights and providing solutions to optimize their value.”

If you think these students only explored the impact of climate change in obvious business areas, think again. From your shampoo to your mobile gaming host to your bowl of morning cereal, climate change poses risks and opportunities for the companies that deliver them to you. The titles of some of the 928 articles tell the story of this “diversity” when it comes to climate change impact: “Can Procter & Gamble really improve people’s lives?” “Power Struggles at Amazon Web Services,” “Coca-Cola: Sugar, Water and Climate Change,” “The environmental impact behind a cereal box: How General Mills is addressing climate change,” and “Mother of All Risks: Climate Change and the U.S. Armed Forces.“

No judgments, just business

The description of the “hackathon” assignment produced one of the most interesting lessons from this HBS exercise. It instructed the students to “Describe how the organization is likely to be affected, the steps the organization is taking to address those effects, and describe and justify what additional steps you think the organization should consider implementing.” As a result, all 928 articles focus on business, not on judging the good or bad, or on arguments leading to dead alleys such as wondering if climate change is a hoax or whether humans cause it or not. As professor Toffel indicated to his students, we’re past that argument.

In addition to laser-focused papers on uncovering opportunities and threats on the subject, this challenge produced solid ideas on how not only to deal with climate change and thrive despite it, but how to mitigate it in the first place. Companies like ours, who work on technological innovations to help business and societies thrive in a sustainable manner, can take many lessons from these HBS students. For us, we took the following three lessons, which are the principles behind the hackathons we ourselves put together for our clients:

• There is no problem that can’t be hacked: The business opportunity and the action for climate change mitigation can go hand-in-hand to thrive under a warming planet and slow down human effects on it;
• Laser-focus solves the problem: Breaking the huge problem of climate change into the small chunks that different companies can directly affect by their actions produces a trove of solid ideas that can be implemented in all industries; and,
• Teamwork produces the solution: There is no problem we can’t jointly solve when we decide to work together on practical solutions without pointing fingers.
  When it comes to ingenuity without judgment, which is urgently needed regarding climate change, ask the students for ideas!

Photo courtesy of HBS graduate, Silicon Valley Entrepreneur, friend of Innovation Lab and photographer Christopher Michel.

If you ask the most influential New Bizz trendspotters like Harvard and Forbes, the answer is clear: No! The reason? They are not designed for innovation. When a company reaches a certain size, in which it has found a specific model for achieving its objectives, structure, frames, and processes are formed around this model. Which will work fine – for a certain time. Because of the rapid change in the world of business, both technically and in the ways we work, the once effective model quickly becomes outdated in an environment in which taking risks and embracing innovative ideas coming from within, is necessary for businesses to survive.

Meanwhile, the risks can’t be avoided. Actually, the saying goes: the bigger the company, the larger amount of interested stakeholders, the higher vulnerability to the surrounding environment. As for now, the common view of taking risks within big organizations has a rather negative connotation. Even though risk-taking, higher flexibility and disrupting your own company has proven successful numerous times, still, most larger companies view it as something to be avoided at all needs. Hence, the terms “risk-management” and “crisis-management” are often merged in most of the existing material on the field.

However, doing the same over and over again, not promoting risk-taking within the organization, is at the cost of innovation. Which, in the end, is at the cost of growth. The decline of Kodak is a salient example of this. Once a global powerhouse of technology and innovation, and the original developer of the digital camera, Kodak is the often cited example of how a business can fail to effectively innovate and respond to disruptive technology.

Redefining risk

Things are changing, though. More larger companies has started to embrace, what the leading business developers has pointed out as a necessity for years – they have redefined risk. Classic examples of larger companies doing so are actually quite a few when the term is put in a global context. For example, Adobe has invented a Kickbox toolkit for their employees. The toolkit contains $1000 along with some printed materials about six steps, which Adobe wants people to follow in developing ideas for new products and services. Also, there is a Starbucks gift card and a candy bar, because we all know, that two of the four main food groups of innovators are caffeine and sugar. But that’s a whole other story.

Another great example of risk-taking comes from the established beverage-brand Coca-Cola. With roughly 140 years in business, the company has been practicing a “70/20/10-rule” for some years now. About 70% of their marketing investment is in what they call “now”, or established and successful programs. Then, 20% goes to “new,” or emerging trends that are starting to gain traction. Finally, the remaining 10% goes to the “next”, ideas that are completely untested. Moreover, those 10 are actually considered failures according to existing parameters – but could be successes according to new.

Finally, the global mass media corporation, AOL, has created a program called “Area 51”. The program is designed to empower top employees within AOL by providing an innovative environment within the company’s ecosystem. The employees committed to the program, get up to six months of funding, mentorship and accelerated development with an open door to resources, tools, and support from the talented AOL team and mentors. In other words, the employees get to act like a startup, with AOL giving them the time needed to bring a disruptive idea to life.

And these are just a few examples of ways, in which planning for internal innovation and rewarding the risk-takers, can be done in established and well-grown companies.

Injecting startup culture

One of the more radical moves, a company could do in order to disrupt their own internal culture with the goal of innovation in mind, is injecting startup-DNA directly into their already existing culture. The reason for that is simple: a startup has an extraordinary culture for innovation. According to research by the Harvard Business School, at least 75 percent of all startups fail. Yet failure is integral to the success of those that survive. By accepting the risk of failure, and taking risks anyway, startups are truly free to innovate. Basically, they see risk-taking and the chance of failure, as a necessity to improve their product and/or business. A positive outcome of that mentality is, that startups gain fast insight in the external environment, and are able to constantly tweak, pivot and iterate their business model, design, product or service to fit their market and create customer value. So, the remaining question is, how to implement the startup culture in total and not only in (impressive) steps like Adobe, AOL, and Coca-Cola?

There’s a start-up in the White House basement – and it’s pretty awesome

My favorite example of a company that has done so actually stems from one of the most established institutions in the world – The White House. The US Digital Service (USDS) is an 18-month old startup, located in the basement of The White House. The newly created in-house startup is staffed by some of the country’s best designers, engineers, and product managers. Many are employees of tech giants like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Twitter, who sign up for “short-term tours of duty” to help fix government systems and services. Their tasks include finding ways to giving veterans quicker access to benefits, smoothing out the process for immigrants to apply for a replacement green card, and simplifying student loan paperwork. In doing so, The White House has dared what most established companies still somewhat hesitate about – they have invited people, who have no connection or profound knowledge to the field, which The White House operate within, into their culture

The results, however, are already showing, with the USDS pulling some early victories. A six-person USDS unit has helped create an online platform to replace the United States’ once-onerous paper-based immigration application process. Before they stepped in, the US Citizenship and Immigration Service had already spent $1.2 billion over 6 years to develop an online portal that never launched. Moreover, the USDS has recently released a web design style guide to help government agencies fix hard-to-navigate websites.

Hayley Van Dyck, a co-founder of the United States Digital Service, has given a super inspiring Ted Talk about the new start-up in the White House – go see it here.

With Adobe, AOL and Coca-Cola injecting some of the dynamic, agile and innovative core of a startup culture, and The White House being the Ferrari within the field, one learning lesson from this must be that innovation no longer is a buzzword. More than ever, it is a critical element in fuelling business growth and maintaining market share. Facilitating room for innovative processes by redefining risk and implementing elements of startup culture in the company DNA has proven to be beneficial for companies worldwide. Let me end this blog post by asking you a question. How many new inventions have come from saying: “How can we do exactly what we already do – just better?”….