Just back from my first TED. Have watched the videos over the past couple of years and have heard first hand accounts from past participants, so was looking forward to living it in real time.

We organised a workshop in parallel to the TED U(niversity) sessions. The new Drivers of Change cards were one of the gifts given to the 700 participants and the aim of the workshop was to introduce people to the cards and how they could be used to help people generate ideas worth spreading. The feedback on the day was excellent and we have several people to follow up with post event. The results of the TED group voting are on the DoC voting application with details of the voting and photos on flickr.

Thanks to the TED guys for showing the results of the Drivers of Change workshop votes on the main stage at TED Global. Bruno gave an excellent overview of the results and mentioned the pointer to the open voting set at vote.driversofchange.com/ted-global-2009/

I went native at TED and reverted to pen and moleskine so below are a few notes which act as reminders for things i want to chat to people about and talks that i want to come back to when they are online. They are listed time linear since that is how my moleskine works.

Stefan Sagmeister - two things stuck in my mind - the very cool Casa da Musica dynamic identity, take a look at Brand New's explanation and his approach to the seven year (itch) sabbatical which he justifies by describing how he is pulling forward 5 years worth of retirement and interspersing it in yearly blocks (the sabbaticals) into his work life. Great idea - but how to reintegrate with clients upon our return?

Gordon Brown was surprise speaker and has generated much discussion in the media (and at the event). His talk was very polished, he made the woman next to me cry, and he got a standing ovation. He also got slated for insincerity and auditioning for his next job. Either way "the power to communicate across borders" enabled by the photograph and the increasingly convergent phenomena of the internet in making these stories told in real time was an interesting theme.

Evan Grant, seeing the sound of nature as patterns in the sand - excellent talk, well worth watching again when on-line. He introduced me to Cymatics and had my mind racing with applications I want to try.

Rory Sutherland - an ad man at Ogilvy, he usually speaks at "TED Evil". A fun presentation to watch - he suggests that engineers should not have spent 6 billion to build CTRL to reduce journey times but should have invested in making the journey so enjoyable that people would not notice the time they spent on the train. His suggestions included using the 6 billion to pay for super models to serve free champagne to all! Great story about the new Diamond Shreddies.

Mathieu Lehanneur - showed a great piece of product design where a kids asthma device inflates over night so that the kid has to take his medicine in the morning to "look after" the inhaler.

Rebecca Saxe - fires a magnetic pulse into her brain to deactivate a group of neurons that controls her moral perspective of other peoples actions. The Pentagon are calling but she is not taking their calls...

Henry Markram - "the drugs developed today are largely emperical" he is building a model of the brain so that they can start to simualate how the brain works. Need to watch this one again to figure out how this "actually" works and am interested in the implications for the Artificial Intelligence community.

It was good to see Manual Lima presenting visualcomplexity and Candy Chan had an interesting talk on community information architecture experiments - unseen conversations in neighbourhoods - worth a look for those interested in urban information systems.

One of the really inspirational talks for me was 89 year old Elaine Morgan making a compelling case for questioning facts that we assume to be correct. She wants the academic world to reconsider the aquatic ape theory.

Another great Urban Info project was the Mannahatta Project presented by Eric Sanderson. They have geo referenced historical data of 17th century Manhattan to bring into focus the ecology today and "plan for the urban ecosystem of the future". Great presentation, bought the book.

Architect to watch Bjarke Ingels showed two great projects which stuck in my mind - Danish pavillion for the Shanghai expo (they are flying out the mermaid) and a local housing development that creates a little mountain in the flat landscape - note to self, pick up a copy of YES IS MORE / AN ARCHICOMIC ON ARCHITECTURAL EVOLUTION (ISBN 8799298805).

Itay Talgam - what kind of leader are you? - an excellent presentation using clips of conductors showing different styles of leadership. It needs the visuals to explain - one to watch on video.

ones i need to watch again are:
Loretta Napoleoni
Misha Glenny
Parag Khanna

Had a really interesting evening at the at abrahams event hosted by Arup on the theme of "collaborleaders". at abrahams is curated by abrahams and Claire Curtice Publicists with this event chaired by Sophie Howarth from the School of Life. The evening highlights were Philip Sheppard playing an impromptu cello solo and then later joining Steve Lodder and John Etheridge to show how three musicians can come together and improvise a piece of music - collaboration at its best. The video below is a bit shakey - i had to improvise ;-) but watch how the three are continually watching each other - to quote one of the general observations from the evening "the non verbal communication amongst the collaborators was visible".

atabrahams impromptu collaboration from Duncan Wilson on Vimeo.

Other highlights included:

re the cello "it's a Banks probably made near here in 1750" i wonder which of todays tools we will be using in 2250

re workshops - can you be forced to collaborate or do have to want to collaborate?

re architect and designer - "the collaboration only involved about 4 hours of working together with each other" but then many hours of the teams working together towards the finished product

re can it be built - "not yes you can, but yes we can"

re the ego in the collaboration - the economist does not have signed articles it is a team effort by the editing staff.

and finally... a poem by Roger McGough for the egotistical collaborator

The Leader

I wanna be the leader
I wanna be the leader
Can I be the leader?
Can I? I can?
Promise? Promise?
Yippee I'm the leader
I'm the leader

OK what shall we do?

I spent the weekend at the Yahoo Hackday last week. As Crave puts it

"The idea behind it was simple: you've got exactly 24 hours to hack together the most interesting, innovative, useful or fun piece of software or hardware, using developer tools from Yahoo, or anyone else for that matter. "

David Filo opened the event, I learnt alot about the Yahoo API's available - a great way for them to show me what i could be using... and thought the talk by Rasmus Lerdorf on hacking with PHP was great.

Next steps - how to organise a hackday at Arup for the virtual design, BIM, GIS and intranet communities...

Thanks to David at Oracle and Roland and David at Nesta for taking the time to get together a bunch of corporate bods who are tasked in some form with trying to nurture innovation in their respective organisations. The group is still reasonable embryonic with a few different agendas becoming clear. I am keen to catch up with others to discuss what Arup are doing and to learn about the approaches and lessons learnt in other corporate contexts. At the other end of the spectrum the group were also keen to pool resources on identifying SME's start-ups who they should be investing in "it takes too long to use normal networking techniques to monitor and assess all the new start-up out there..." Not quite sure how the latter applies in my environment yet, but one to watch.

Inevitably a couple of ideas to pursue came out of the session. Great chat with Chris Parker from Ordnance Survey. Talked about the possibility for some open innovation activity around their new OS open space API, their GeoVation project ["GeoVation will let government, business, community and individuals work together to develop ideas that benefit society, make money or both."] and an upcoming hackday that may be of interest to the Arup GIS community.

Of interest via Kelvin Pitman, Director of Open Innovation at Crown Technology, was their "problems we want solving" section of their website.

Have just finished pulling together and writing up the second in a series of internal Arup workshops on innovation. The series are sponsored by our Europe Region Design and Technical Executive and are aimed at stimulating thought around innovation amongst some of our senior leaders. It was fun to research the *overview of innovation* presentation since it has been a few years since I have had to talk about this stuff. One book I came across was The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun. (I actually picked up a free copy of this book at Scifoo 2007 but had not read it until recently). I loved the stories around the myths and found it a very useful way to describe the effort that normally goes into innovating. I couldn't attend the innovation reading circle meeting around this book but Nico has a great overview page as per usual and links to a Googletalk by Scott Berkun which is worth a watch if you don't like reading books...

Google Tech Talks: Scott Berkun, May 14, 2007

The one big change to my presentation was the inclusion of the latest trends in Open Innovation. Arup are keen to explore this further so if you are interested in an open innovation project, maybe around the theme of real time building performance data in the built environment, then let me know...

I had fun reading the Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. It had been on the list to read for a while since the ideas in it (at least from what I had heard) reflected the strategy we had used in creating the Drivers of Change programme at Arup. If you go and speak to enough people then themes (drivers) that concern them start to emerge. The Drivers of Change 2006 book and the upcoming *Rainbow* set are the result of this collective wisdom. Here is my review.

Other books discussed at IRC07 were:
Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell (Penguin, 2006)
The Long Tail: How Endless Choice Is Creating Unlimited Demand - Chris Anderson (Random House, 2006)
See Nico's great page.

Inspired by what i saw at product design firms like IDEO and manufacturers like 3M we tried to set-up a materials showcase in R&D at Arup. The basic idea was to collate samples of interesting materials, technology or even products and have them on display around our offices / project areas. It never quite established the inertia required to keep it living. Stumbled across inventables today via the SciFoo wiki - sounds like a great venture...

The third innovation reading circle reviewed The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History since 1900 by Professor David Edgerton (Profile Books, 2007) Held at the offices of LBi near Angel. The session was chaired by Nico with an introduction to his book from David.

The main thesis of the book is that we do not understand what the important technologies of the twentieth century are. The book proposes an alternate (controversial) view to the current textbooks on histories of technology. It argues that the most significant innovations and inventions are often the ones built on old / traditional ways of doing things rather than the linear progression of hyped new technologies.

I was surprised that I did not find much to disagree on in the book. As an engineer, geek, partial neophiliac and foresighter I have all the credentials to be the stereotype targeted in this book, but I could not find an argument that made me uncomfortable. In the discussion around the question of *what is the author arguing for?* I was unclear as to what the next steps need to be. Whilst the argument that current policy strategy can lead to the funding of white elephants I wasn't clear what the proposition for how it could be done differently was - I think it was the need to focus on the here and now innovation in addition to the long term invention.

My take away from the book was the unknown truth of history - for example the argument that world war II was won by horses, big guns and small arms, not fighter planes and atomic bombs. If this is true then why do we invest so much in the development of these red herrings?

Things to change: when assessing innovation a common assumption made is that there is no comparable alternative, to understand the significance of an innovation it is essential to understand the implications of use - how the innovation will change things that people do. Some comparison to the alternatives (even if the alternative is that it does not get done) is useful to understand potential benefit. Could this be applied to assessment of internal investments?

Interesting tidbit: the second biggest global killer of people (after malaria) is the automobile (around 1 million people per year - pg 27 - would love to find stats reference to support that).

Professor Edgerton is Hans Rausing Chair at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine Centre at Imperial College London.

The second innovation reading circle event theme was User-led innovation. The titles discussed were:

* Democratising Innovation Eric Von Hippel (The MIT Press, 2005)
* We-think: The power of mass creativity Charles Leadbeater (Profile, TBP 2007)
* The Ten Faces of Innovation Tom Kelley and Jonathan Littman (Currency, 2006)

Nico Macdonald did an excellent job of hosting the first Innovation Reading Circle today. The theme was sustainability, design and society, and the main title to be discussed was *In the Bubble: Designing in a Complex World* John Thackara and Bruce Sterlings *The Shape of Things To Come*
The objective of the Innovation Reading Circle is to develop a rich, well-informed, interactive public discussion around innovation (considering technology, design, society and organisation), drawing on and contributing to related discourses. I look forward to the next event...