Star speakers Sir Tim Berners Lee and Sir Bob Geldof echoed NESTA's call for bigger ideas to emerge from the nation's best innovators
Are we any good at innovation? The message from NESTA's Innovation Edge conference, which took place yesterday at London's Royal Festival Hall, was unhelpfully schizophrenic. Gordon Brown's afternoon cameo was a bullish statement of intent. "I'm an innovation enthusiast," he said. "Countries like ours will succeed not due to our natural resources... but because we have the best creative ideas." But Sir Bob Geldof had already denounced the UK—a country for whom he believed "creative culture is in the blood"—for seemingly running out of innovative steam: "We so fear failure that nobody dare try any more," he said. NESTA's own research did little to clear things up, drawing attention both to our complacency—in relying on a strong technology base—and our pessimism, in not recognising how good that base really is.
NESTA's job is to champion innovation—and to incubate it. Chairman Chris Powell was keen to stress the organisation's role in making sure the biggest of the world's big ideas are British. "We're not looking for one single transformative idea," he said. "We have to make a systemic change. To do that it has to be pulled through by demand." Powell's example was the Fairtrade brand, which he said, reached critical mass at a point when consumers suddenly realised that they no longer wanted "to run producers into the ground." He was right of course, but a far better example was waiting patiently to be patched in by video link, all the way from Bristol, the creator of the World Wide Web, Sir Tim Berners Lee.
On stage, the writer and broadcaster Jonathan Freedland had the unenviable task of interviewing a man famous for avoiding interviews, but luckily Sir Tim was in an expansive mood. He had a pointed message for any bosses short-sighted enough to inhibit their employees' sense of creativity: "Don't micromanage." Sir Tim's own discovery, he reminded us, had come about after his boss had allowed him to continue with research into a new system that enabled researchers to share data between interconnected computers—a sideline project his boss had labelled "vague, but exciting." Freedland asked Sir Tim whether his boss had actually given him specific permission to continue his Web research. "Not yes, but not no", came the reply.
The suggestion that the 21st century's most important invention—the biggest communications breakthrough in history—might well have never left the lab had it not been for the indulgence of a tolerant boss, was left to hang. "Giving employees space to think—allowing them to generalise a solution, that's when [innovation] becomes powerful," continued Sir Tim. "If you tell them what to produce they'll simply start producing your ideas." Truly innovative research, he said, was a pursuit of the unknown. "Don't expect people to tell you what they're going to produce. When the accountants come in and start asking you to justify what you're doing, and you're in a position to tell them, well then that's not research."
Sir Bob Geldof was next to appear, prowling back and forth across the stage like a caged animal. Innovation, he said, is the key to the "perfect storm" we find ourselves in—"but how do you innovate in an asymmetric world...where the richest continent is only eight miles from the poorest?" Sir Bob wanted us to see the bigger picture. He wanted to inspire us to help cure society's ills. "Social entrepreneurs are the unreasonable people that George Bernard Shaw was talking about. Never has innovation been more required than now." This is no time, he said, for ambitious governments to forge ahead, alone. "The political paradigm for this century has to be cooperation. That must be the way we move forward."
Outside the auditorium, proof that NESTA's endowment was being put to good use was clear to see. NESTA, which provides intellectual, as well as financial support, had created a space for a number of its most promising start-ups to strut their stuff. One stand, at which punters were invited to chase and punch a silhouette against a padded wall, was drawing particular interest. Distance Lab was showing off its "sports at a distance" game, which allows physical interaction between "geographically distant" players. It's a kind of Nintendo Wii upgrade, allowing games players to receive a physical, as well as mental, workout.
Other notable attendees included the not-for-profit, healthcare start-up, Patient Opinion, a social networking site for hospital patients, who rate their experience—the idea being that recorded opinions will help drive better quality in the NHS. Also in attendance were Greta Corke, Jon Sawdon Smith and Richard Woods, the brains behind DIY Kyoto, creators of Wattson, a device for measuring energy wastage in the home, "an awareness tool", according to Corke. The company, which will finally launch its hotly anticipated product in September, originally received a £35,000 grant from NESTA and is exactly the type of social—and potentially profitable—innovation that NESTA wants to encourage. "Innovation flourishes when there are a common group of risk takers," said NESTA chief executive Jonathan Kestenbaum. "The popular misconception is that Britain has no hunger for doing things differently." Companies like DIY Kyoto will help him to prove otherwise.
Posted 21 May 2008 : Director.co.uk
