Principles for Open Innovation and Open Leadingship

Just found this awesome 27 min talk by Joi Ito on the 9 principles of open innovation. They are not that new – first version appeared in 2012 – but they seem to have matured, like good wine in well kept cellars. Almost every sentence he speaks is tweetable 😉

To help me concentrate on the content, I usually make a lot of notes, and before knowing I almost made the transcript of this talk, so i can as well share my notes.

So, I have no credits on the content. I just did some mix and matching with some other material from others. Like Joi, I have been a DJ, and I have fun in mixing and weaving different themes into some form of new carpet. Highlights are mine.

 

Joi Ito is Director of the MIT Media Lab and many other things (check out this Wikipedia page).

https://vimeo.com/99160925

Here is the sort of transcript, more or less ordered around his 9 principles.

But in his intro, he says also loads of interesting things.

The MIT Media lab 30 years later: Media is plural for Medium, Medium is something in which you can express yourself. The Medium was hardware, screens, robots, etc. Now the medium is society, ecosystem, journalism,… Our work looks more like social science.

Before the Internet (BI) and Post the Internet (PI): Post the Internet, it is about participating responsibly in a system that you can’t predict and whose outcome to your intervention is almost random.

We are moving from “demo or die” to “deploy or die”. It just costs some “sweat equity” and some kids in a dorm room to get things done. Kids are competing with the incumbents. The innovation cost – the cost of trying something – went to nearly zero. Now you can innovate without asking permission, pushing innovation to the edges, and allow grassroots innovation.

Note: I believe “grassroots” innovation is very important in organizations. Last week I was on the judge panel of an internal innovation channel. I saw quite some things that our innovation team explored before, but never succeeded to get out there. With grassroots innovation, you have the buy-in from the fabric of the organization from day-1. It is very “swarmwise”.

Before, the guys who had the money had the power. Now, because the space of startups is so crowded, the VCs have to sell themselves.

Note: I heard something very similar recently in the context of innovation motivations: corporates looking for innovations have to sell themselves to startups.

Diminishing cost of innovation makes those having the money behave a little bit better. Who is thinking about those ideas that don’t start small? Thinking about it as a community. This is less about empowering the individual, more about empowering the community.

Note: “empowering the community”. Wow! Big ideas are usually shared ideas. In yesterday’s post, I mentioned the great Diego Miralles with his story of the Janssen Labs as a story of shared infrastructure. I believe the time is ripe – more than ever – for cooperative structures where we can form “coalitions of the willing” to solve the big community challenges.

Twitter was not a company, it was a feature. It only became useful when linked, when in a system. Can the ecosystem solve the big problems, a complex system with nobody really in charge? In stead of designing that one thing, in a system design is more like growing, giving birth to a child, you don’t know exactly where that child is going, it has your DNA, but hopefully turns into something that you are going to be proud of. Think of it like a gardener: the open internet is the water, the openness, the air that you need, and all of us are the organism that live in that system, to make this thing vibrant.

Then Joi started introducing and commenting some of the 9 principles.

A lot of people disagree with them, but I don’t care. I care about the arguments, I don’t care that they are disagreeing.

Pull over push

You pull from the network as you need it, rather than stocking it and centrally and control it. And agility is what comes out of that. If you have printing presses, and lines of code, and IP, those are all reasons not to shift course, to stick to your map, rather than the compass. All the things we think are assets are in fact liabilities, if you think about it from the perspective of agility.

Compasses over map

Often the map costs more to build than it is worth, because the complexity is so high and it is so unpredictable. Dependence on planning is a weakness.

Practice over theory

When I was looking for funding my first ISP, the investor spent 3M USD for consultants to advise not to invest 600K dollars. If it costs you more money to think about it than to do it, it’s better to do it. And if you do it, it turns out that you get a fact, not a theory. It is important to do things, especially if the cost of doing things is cheaper than talk about it. A lot of times it works in practice and not in theory, you can figure out the theory later. Most of the world deals with things that work in theory, but not in practice, and they try to discredit reality in order to fit with their theory. But “in theory” they say, “theory and practice are the same”

Disobedience over compliance

You don’t win a Nobel price by doing what you are told. You win a Nobel price by questioning authority and thinking for yourself. You want to build an organization that is resilient to disobedience

Emergence over authority

In communities, authority seems to be emergent. Open Source project leaders, tend to be somewhat quite people, with a lot of EQ, how are not naturally trying to grasp power, but end up in power because the followers (@petervan: I would say the fellowers) push them there. In an investment firm with a hierarchy that is based on function and title, you just need a stick to keep the troops aligned. But when you are in a system where you are paying to participate, then you want emerging authority.

Learning over education

Education is what people do to you, learning is what you do to yourself. About degrees and “finalizing my eduction”. I don’t want you to be at the media lab, because you want to get out.

Resilience over strength (part of the Q&A)

In stead of bulk-up and resist failure, invest the same money on recovery and resilience. You tend to try to minimize failure, rather than trying to work on resilience. It’s also kind of a Zen thing too. If you are extremely present and ready for anything, your are in an extremely resilient state. And it you are not present, you are always focused on the future, or the past, you try to build up walls and trying to make sure that you don’t get choved. And it is hard when you are surrounded by other planners in an institution like this (Knite Foundation) you tend to focus on structure, strength versus resilience, the structure vs this bounciness. Again on the Internet, a lot of the pieces are very resilient, when you are in an institution that uses a lot of planning; it is hard to create that interface

Also the Q&A part of this talk was interesting.

On how to share knowledge:

The conference model is a great system. A lot of people have experimented with ways to try to share knowledge, but it seems to be one of the hardest problems because everybody has a day-job, they are very busy, and people are talking sort of different languages, and when you are face to face you can coordinate your language in real-time

On how to you get people who are working on things coordinated?

At the Media Lab we have several approaches: we have this sort of big data, data mining, machine learning, predicting things through causalities and patterns vs something where people are more in charge and people are more active.

There is another version of this talk at TED talks:

The more I listen to Joi, the more I become aware that he is talking about leadership features to navigate our companies in this more then ever unpredictable fast moving world. It was a pure coincidence; right after Joi’s talk, I spotted this great post from John Maeda, about Creative Leaders versus Authoritative Leaders. John Maeda was the President of the Rhode Island School of Design from 2008 to 2013. He is currently a Design Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

This chart represents a summary of the kind of creative leadership that is rising — and needed — in the face of our increasing interconnectedness due to global economies, mobile devices, and social media. In an age where anyone can “friend” the CEO, and where complexity and volatility are the only constants, what should leadership look like? I often say we are now operating within a “heterarchy” though I’ve also cleverly seen it called the “wirearchy.” In any case, it’s a world where I believe the natural perspective of artists and designers — who thrive in ambiguity, fail productively, and rebound naturally — will be become more and more useful in leadership contexts.

The chart was originally created for a workshop at the Davos World Economic Forum in 2009 and became the basis of my book Redesigning Leadership, written with Becky Bermont. In my own observation, there are authoritative leaders and creative leaders everywhere — it’s not something wholly determined by industry, generation, or position. And every leader will need, on any given day, a little bit of both types of leadership.

Makes me think about principles for Leadingship vs. Leadership. See also my post “The End of Leadership” of 1 ½ year ago. Like Joi’s talk makes us reflect on the openness of innovation, Maeda adds the openness of leadingship.