What Innovation means to the Future

I have met across with these presentations talking about Innovation which I have found them quite interesting to share,Let me show you which ones...

The first one talks about Innovation in Bilbao,although is more linked to the first lab on Innovation sited in Bermeo,Denokinn and this is what we can see:Social Innovation Park in Bilbao

The second one talks about what Innovation means to the future in the next presentation called Innovation and the Future

and one presentation more which just talks about simply definitions linked to Innovation which it is called To understand Innovation in 5 minutes.

What are the things these presentation have in common? Let me know your opinion about this question,if you want.

THINK, DO AND INNOVATE

TDI >>These are the three letters from the world of automotive industry which served as an inspiration to summarize and auto-qualify his goal as new President of Innobasque: TDI ( Think, Do and Innovate), facing the TT, where Transparency and Traceability have characterized the leadership of Pedro Luis Uriarte's previous presidency, according to Guillermo Ulacia.

Think, do and Innovate.Let us think about this sentence.It is true...Think + Do =Innovate... The humankind history is characterized by the course of the history of Thought and Science (Read History of thought and Science by Ludovico Geymonat). Innovations are the results of this process emerging over thousands of years, and they have been intertwined in ways more or less parallel, depending on which of them stepped of the development accelerator.

Small inventions gave place to larger ones, small improvements gave rise to new products, sometimes unheard ideas, original or rare, resulted in new ways, new perspectives. Now and then we listen to someone saying that we can not reinvent the wheel or there is nothing new under the Sun..., but, now and then, we can be surprised by new products, services or processes, as we can see, for example, in Theo Jansen 's kinetic works.

From the moment that pressing social needs appear, it is clear that something is wrong with the current pace of life we have today: construction bubble, political corruption, financial crisis, compulsive and irresponsible consumerism, economic growth in some economic sectors to the detriment of others, instability or lack of quality employment, rising unemployment, etc.

Since well before the current recession, the economic and social system has been showing symptoms of mismatches and inconsistencies, but that has not been sufficient to make this situation critical. A whole series of factors happening simultaneously has been needed to occur a bankruptcy on a magnitude greater than previous historical crises and to sound the alarms of the economic, historical and even sociodemographic analyses, which atempt to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

It is therefore now time to rethink things, consider about the current situation, and reflect on how we can solve pressing problems that surround us and act in a different, innovative way.

Innovation >> press RESET,please

According to John Kao's comments, we could say there is no way to Innovation, Innovation is the way.But this way starts by pressing down the reset buton, which means we must think about everything from a beginner's point of view. And this is how it is, especially nowaydays, with the current global recession.The recession, according to him, does not represent a cycle.It represents a reset, an emotional, social and economic reset that we must regard as like an opportunity rather than a danger.

For him, Innovation is not a question of territory. During his speech, we could see a new global map of Innovation where we can find big, medium and small countries: Canada, the United States, Chile, Brazil, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Germany, France, Denmark, Sweden, Russian Federation, China, South Korea, Japan, Israel, India,Vietnam, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

He explained that if it is true that Innovation has spread worldwide, this does not mean this must be related to the type of country, whether it is bigger or not...The question is the impact of Innovation in the world, but not in terms of scale, just in terms of effiectiveness.

That is why I20 was created, where the most influencial people from those different countries were borught to discuss further the different subjects related to Innovation, like Economic growth, Sustainability and Wellbeing that are the most important points to bear in mind.

I20 and the Large Scale Innovation Institute consider that Innovation has some caracteristics which are:

-Innovation, must edge away of large, emerging waves of innovation and closer to which that involves an ecosystem of participants from public, private and NGO stakeholders.

-Innovation must be at the level of society, it can be in a city, in a region, in a country.

-Innovation at a worlwide level, where "wicked" problems require Innovation at the scale of global systems.

Innovation is Creativity applied to a purpose to emphasize value.It is the ability to continuosly achieve of a desired future state. It's the engine of social progress and prosperity. Innovation is the key to obtain the future we decided we want.The thing is how we ensure we can get it?

It is not only a question of investment in technology. Investing in the appropiate technology it is only a step, but we need additional factors such as understand that working together around the world can be good for all parts of the team. There is more and more Innovation by means of collaboration.

And the big problems can be seen as opportunities for working together on them to try to solve them: Green Innovation, Sustainability, Energy, Smart cities, e-Education, Security, Wellbeing, Government-2.o, and so on.These are the biggest arenas for Innovation, according to John Kao.

A collaborative job is necessary. But to work together we must learn to do it, because there is something that can appear whenever or wherever, the unexpected factor.This means that,even if we are working in the best organisation, with the best equipment, the best technology and so on, there is always something unexpected that can emerge, at a personal, organisational or national level.

This be in this case, Innovation is a question of anticipating to the posible problems or circumstances that can appear.

These opinions from John Kao were given at the opening of "The Week" which is the brand name for the Science,Technology and Innovation,Quality and Excellence week which has been extended to last 13 days.

At the opening, Pilar Kaltzada was the presenter and introducer of speakers: Pedro Luis Uriarte(Innobasque ), Txema Guisasola (Euskalit), Bernabé Unda (Basque -Industry department) and Patxi López (Basque Government -President).

Expect the unexpected and the Black Swan

One book has brought me to another.I read some time ago, and I have reread this summer,Expect the Unexpected (or You Won't Find It): A Creativity Tool Based on the Ancient Wisdom of Heraclitus from Roger von Oech...and looking for more information about it, I came across The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable from Nassim_Nicholas_Taleb.You can read more from his homepage "fooled by randomness"

The Von Oech's book is about how we can rethink things in order to increase our Creativity and capability of Innovation.The author, one of the most celebrated thinkers on creativity, uses thirty epigrams (thinking of any kind expressed brief and acuity) of the presocratic philosopher Heraclitus as a springboard towards innovation. Every thought is accompanied by puzzles, imaginative examples and amusing anecdotes to serves the author for intriguing questions that destroy old habits of reasoning and stimulate the imagination. Roger von Oech thus teaches to turn our expectations, transform the change to our favor and avoid the trap of "the more,the best"; to find creative answers to the more complicated problems. For anyone, from executives from large companies to students or artists, seeking a new approach to the solution of problems or help to make difficult decisions, this book authoritarian invaluable

On the other hand, talking about The Black Swan, here you are an interview between Taleb and Punset (spanish) and some other details about it.

Some other interviews are here:

-What's a Black swan?

-Secrets of the Black swan

-Predicting Crisis: Dr. Doom & the Black Swan

A Black swan is an unlikely event, whose effects according with the author's criteria:
-are a surprise.
-have a major impact.
-and, After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight, as if it had been expected.

Today is the aniversary of an event like that with the 9 /11 terrorist attack , Other Black Swans are Google or You tube.As Eduard Punset says:" What should not recognize the phenomenon of Black Swan until they occur? According to Taleb, human beings we are become obssesed to find out specific, when we should focus on the generalities. We are incapable of actually estimate opportunities, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrating and categorize, and not what quite open to reward those who know imagine "impossible".

That's why The Black Swan it's worth reading, cause it opens us a new way of thinking using a non-philosophical epistemological approach in which explains, decision theory based on a fixed universe or model of possible outcomes ignores and minimizes the impact of events which are "outside model". For instance, a simple model of daily stock market returns may include extreme moves such as Black Monday (1987) , but might not model the market breakdowns following the September 11 attacks. A fixed model considers the "known unknowns", but ignores the "unknown unknowns".

He gives the rise of the Internet, the personal computer, World War I, and the September 11, 2001 attacks as examples of Black Swan events, but we could add as well the Holocaust in the World War II, March 11 ,2004 attacks ,etc. What do you think about it?

Alan Barrell visits Innobasque

Yesterday afternoon, we had the opportunity of listening Alan Barrell's comment on what we need on nowadays society to develop further entrepreneurships educational programs,like they do there in Cambridge University.

As he said, in a changing world with a global financial crisis,we should focus our attention on what does it constitute a major characteristic to be in a major geographical area for this subject.Here in the Basque Country ,we do have Science/Tech parks, -and he was very impressed of what we are doing here, not only by the buildings but also by the companies which they work in them- so we´ve got some things quite well done in this domain.But, according to him, we could improve our networking policies.

He has a lot of presentations on his website, but the one who was showing us yesterday was that he used in Hosei (Japan) during a symposium in Japan focused on Regional Innovation, Incubators ant Universities on February 26th,2009. Following it, Alan Barrel explained how the Cambridge University as an academic and traditional institution,was a bit against technology before some initiatives that a group of people wanted to start up, but later on we could find that first Science Park in the 70's. Hence,This was the first point or the pole position of an amazing more and more large netowrk of different initiatives that have become companies related to biotechnology, info-technology and nanotechnology.

His current work on technopolicy network describes how a network can join Science Based Regions at different stages of development with researchers, strategists and incubators.