Heat3

Innovation is now a field of practice—not just the result of random brainstorming, says Judith Rodin, the President of the Rockefeller Foundation. Speaking at this year's Clinton Global Initiative, Rodin cited new ways the collaborative Web is making it possible for social advocacy groups to replicate and harvest new ideas in their fight against hunger and other civic ills.

Rodin referred to three emerging social-sector approaches to innovation—what she called "user-driven" innovation, Net-powered "collaborative competition" and crowdsourcing. User-driven innovation, she said, is all about identifying practices that work and then replicating them throughout a community. Rodin shared the story of how this was used recently to help tackle malnourishment in a Vietnamese village:

“We found three or four incredibly well-nourished kids in a completely impoverished village over the course of several days. In those few families, we found that the mothers didn’t wash out the few small shrimp and crabs that were in the rice paddies. Their children were the only kids in an otherwise carbohydrate-based diet that were getting some protein. Once we observed that user-driven innovation, we taught people throughout the village to follow this process, and that practice spread in Southeast Asia.”

Crowdsourcing also can help, Rodin said, citing a recent effort by InnoCentive, a company with a database of more than 175,000 of the brightest minds in science, engineering, technology and business, to develop a solar-based mosquito repellent. Rodin said the repellent ended up being less expensive than bed nets and more economical to produce. She said a company in Houston posted the challenge and a company in New Zealand solved the problem. It is being taken to scale in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Explained Rodin:

“The solution is a small, cone-shaped little instrument that had parafin wax and human sweat, that at the end of the day melted and absorbed heat. People who were using it wore sweatbands around their arms during the day and took them off at night and put them on a panel close to their beds. The combination of wristband and a water-based repellent (on that panel) gave the scent and moisture and heat level that felt like the human body.”

Third, Rodin cited Ashoka, an organization that invests in social entrepreneurs worldwide, as a leader in "collaboration innovation." She said Ashoka's 2008 global water challenge asked people to compete for the best solution; competitors openly posted their suggestions so that others could build on their ideas and offer collaboration. The winning solution, she said, did not come from one individual but through the collaboration of 54 different companies. It is now being taken to scale with a $1 million grant from Coca-Cola.

Rodin said the social sector must embrace a "willingness to take risks, to experiment and to fail." But if advocates don't also measure their impact, she said, "[they] won't find the resources or the political will to take [their ideas] to scale."

Among other CGI highlights Wednesday:

* An early morning panel on social innovation agreed that the world's antiquated education system is broken: schools, panelists agreed, are celebrating old values and teaching mostly Industrial-Age skills rather than training tomorrow's citizens how to be entrepreneurs, innovators and global problem-solvers. Bill Drayton, CEO and founder of Ashoka, told attendees: "The skills people need now are very different from what people are getting in our schools and education system. We have a diverging society where a small elite has mastered the competencies of empathy, teamwork, and entrepreneurialism, but what happens to the 98 percent of the population who has not?" In 10-15 years, he said, "everyone will need to be a change-maker and an innovator." Companies, he said, won't be able to compete unless young people have been "trained for the revolutions we've been looking for."

* Jack Ma, the 45-year-old CEO and founder of China's leading Internet firm, Alibaba, said investment in small and mid-sized firms—now his nation's business "grassroots"—would be the source of economic growth and innovation in China's future, not state-run enterprises. "I think 70 percent of jobs and innovation will come from these smaller firms," he said, urging new state and global policies that would put small business in China and around the world on the same regulatory footing. Traditional, larger firms, he said, tend not to "contribute as much to the dynamism of the marketplace."

* Former Vice President Al Gore urged CGI attendees to phone or visit their friends and contacts in the U.S. Senate to pass climate change legislation, "even if it's not 100 percent perfect." Gore added: "The United States must play a crucial role and in order to do so, the president has to be able to go [to the December United Nations conference on climate change in Copenhagen] with a credible bargaining position ... The crucial step in solving the climate crisis is actually now to get the United States Senate to pass legislation."

CGI continues through Friday. Watch this space for more highlights. To catch the live Webstream of some of the conference sessions, click HERE.

—By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: © Urbanhearts - Fotolia.com.com)

Explorations

Digital visualization wunderkind Jonathan Harris has just launched his latest art and technology effort. Called the Sputnik Observatory for Contemporary Culture, it's a Web site and blog that grew out of a two-year collaboration with New York-based Sputnik, Inc., an organization that documents contemporary culture through intimate, previously unpublished video interviews with hundreds of leading thinkers in the arts, sciences, and technology.

A range of innovators, including Vint Cerf to experimental geographer Trevor Paglen, game designer Will Wright, science writer Philip Ball, and theoretical physicist Michio Kaku, among others, share "some of the most provocative human ideas to have emerged in the last few decades," Harris says. [Harris, himself, is featured, explaining his 2005 "We Feel Fine" project, a real-time survey of human emotions on the Web.] Adds Harris:

"The central premise of the Sputnik project is that everything is connected to everything else, and that topics and ideas that may seem fringe and even heretical to the mainstream world are in fact being investigated by leading thinkers working in fields as diverse as quantum physics, mathematics, neuroscience, biology, economics, architecture, digital art, video games, computer science and music. Sputnik is dedicated to bringing these crucial ideas from the fringes of thought out into the limelight, so that the world can begin to understand them; the site itself aims to highlight the interconnections between seemingly disparate thinkers and ideas, using a simple navigational system with no dead-ends, where every thought leads to another thought, akin to swimming the stream of consciousness."

Harris says there are about 200 videos on the site, and will be thousands more added over time. [Sputnik is a Russian word that means "co-traveler." It was the name the Russians gave to the robotic spacecraft missions they created in the 1950s to launch, in 1957, the first human-made object into Earth's orbit.]

(Illustration from Sputnik Observatory site)

It's Getting Crowded in Here

Thanks to the rise of social media, more people are having their say about things. The audience has begun talking to the stage: consumers, more and more, are talking to the producers; activists/donors are talking to the nonprofits; citizens are talking to the media. The information flow has reversed. The result? A cacaphony of input and ideas, from the ground up. Across society, says Charles Leadbeater, social media are fueling the "rise of the amateur professional." Here's an animated whiteboard that Leadbeater made to explain what he means. He shared it last week in Amsterdam, at the third annual PICNIC idea-fest:



Leadbeater is the author of the book, We Think, about the impact of social media-driven mass innovation.

Clay Shirky, the author of Here Comes Everybody, also spoke at PICNIC this year. I caught up with him before the conference and I got his take on the rise of mass collaboration and mass innovation. Shirky wonders whether society's traditional institutions are ready to handle this surge of mass input. New types of leadership, he says, are needed to manage it all:

"There's a general awareness now that the Net isn't simply a decoration on contemporary society. It's a challenge to it. A society that has an Internet is a different kind of society than one that doesn't, much like a society with a printing press was very different than the one without it. Unlike all of the media revolutions in human history, though—the printing press, the telegraph, moving images and sound, and finally the ability to harness broadcast—the Internet creates groups. It moves us into a world of two-way groups.

Group action in society just got easier. This is a big deal. Freedom of speech, assembly and religion are all now the same freedom. We are living now through the largest increase of human expressive capability in history."

The significance for nonprofits and other advocacy groups? "A big part of the traditional organization is going to be comprised now of people you have to convince rather than command," Shirky told Cause Global. "Where the organization is headed will be set partly by management and partly by the members, and it's something employers will have to learn to live with."

For more big thoughts—the top 10 trends stemming from social media shared at PICNIC this year—click here.

(Illustration by istock.com)