PopTech 2012

Every year, the Pop Tech conference in Camden, Maine brings together an eclectic collection of innovators and thinkers from diverse backgrounds, including science, technology, design, corporate and civic leadership, public health, social and ecological innovation, and the arts and humanities, among others. It’s safe to say that this cross-section of thinkers was well represented at the 2012 conference.

The thought- provoking theme this year revolved around the big idea of “Resiliency”. Over the three days, this central theme was discussed and debated through diverse lenses; resilience to environmental disaster, resilient communities, resilient genetics, resilient economies, resilient climates, resilient cultures and resilient individuals.

Each story presented an inspiring and thoughtful perspective around what enables cultures, individuals and organizations to absorb and adapt to disruptive change through the creation of resilient systems. The idea that resilient innovation is about shifting the discussion from designing systems for risk mitigation to risk adaptation.

Some of the highlights included:

Natural disasters created a relevant backdrop to several presentations. The most meaningful was C.J. Huff's account of resilience and human kindness following the tornados that ravaged Joplin, Missouri. He made the important connection that resilience in this situation is about focusing on the obvious: getting your hands dirty. It’s not just about a monetary donation. Community is the anecdote to disaster and resilience is the requirement that brings it about.

Two interesting tales of personal resilience were brought up. The first was the story of seventeen-year-old, female boxer Claressa Shields, from Flint, Michigan. Through incredible persistence, Shields won the first ever Olympic gold medal for women’s middleweight boxing. The second was the story of Amy Purdy, who lost both of her legs at a very young age following complications from bacterial meningitis. She is now a world-class adaptive snowboarder and has won three back-to-back Paralympic World Cup gold medals. Purdy has since started working for Freedom Innovations, a prosthetic feet manufacturer, as Amputee Advocate. She has gone on to co-found her own non-profit organization, Adaptive Action Sports, for individuals with physical disabilities who want to get involved in action sports.

Social and community innovation was a strong thread throughout the event. Speakers discussed a variety of strategies to enable sustainable economic models in underserved and developing economies, where simple adaptation of technologies such as basic SMS-delivered information about markets, commodities, places to buy and sell and as communication tools to promote community peace as described by Rachel Brown, Founder & CEO, founded Sisi Ni Amani [We are Peace].

From a community innovation perspective, topics ranged from local to country-wide initiatives. For example, Asenath Andrews is reinventing a model for high school in Detroit for teen mothers, providing early education services for the children of those high school moms. Another great example of community innovation is the new community driven constitution in Iceland that rose out of the ashes of economic collapse and is contributing to the country’s recent success. 

Of course, no conversation today could be without a perspective on Big Data. Pop Tech was no exception and for me, this was best exemplified by Jer Thorpe’s incredible visualizations and his expression of the potential meaningful application of data as the tool to shape the way we think about our health, our communities and our economy. As Jer Thorpe stated, “data is the new oil”.

Finally, the conference wrapped with a way to bring together the Pop Tech community.  Pilobolus, a modern performance company enlisted attendees and people form the local community to participate in a large-scale, live performance using umbrellas fabricated with multi-colored LED lights created by the MIT Distributed Robotics Laboratory. It was great way to finish off three days of conversation and inspiration.

Innovation Week Stops by Essential

This past October, Governor Patrick pronounced the week of October 22^nd through 26^th as Innovation Week in Massachusetts to celebrate how the state's investment in education, innovation and infrastructure has made Massachusetts a global leader in the creative economy.  Innovation Week 2012 included coordinated events by organizations such as the Massachusetts Innovation & Technology Exchange (MITX), MassChallenge, UMass Boston, BREW Boston, MIT Technology Review, TiE Boston and Xconomy.  

With multiple conferences and events happening throughout the city, innovation thought leaders from across the world flocked to Boston to take part in the dialogue on design,technology, marketing, healthcare and big data.

As part of Innovation Week, Essential hosted some very special guests at our Boston studio, including Secretary Greg Bialecki and the Massachusetts Creative Economy Industry Director, Helena Fruscio. It was great to have the opportunity to share stories, reflections and insights on the progress that is happening in our hub and around the world.

linking healthcare, technology + design

Exciting news from Essential! Next week, we’ll be hosting Essential Threads: linking healthcare, technology + design at the Microsoft New England Research & Development Center. The first of its kind, this event was created to bolster collaboration, conversation and most importantly, action within Boston’s innovation community.  

The inaugural event will examine the convergence of existing and emerging technologies and trends, and their impact on the design of healthcare systems, experiences and products. Speakers from across the healthcare spectrum, from patient-to-patient information sharing to chronic disease management among other topics, will share their perspectives and insights, followed by a panel discussion moderated by Editor and Co-founder of MobiHealthNews, Brian Dolan. The esteemed group of speakers we’ll be hosting include Dr. John Moore from the New Media Medicine Group at MIT Media Lab , Jeremy Gilbert, Head of Commercial Product at PatientsLikeMe, Anand Iyer, President and COO of WellDoc and Bill Hartman, Director of Research at Essential.

Hear what some of leading organizations in the industry are up to. Add your perspective and be part of the conversation at the event that’s sure to inspire and inform.

More information and registration here.

Can’t attend the April 4^th program? Follow every exciting moment live using hashtag #FutureHC or follow @_Essential.

Essential Heads to Austin

March is finally upon us. To me, this month signifies NCAA Basketball, St. Patrick’s Day and the end of winter. Best of all, March brings one of the biggest gatherings of the most creative, innovative and tech-savvy minds in film, interactive, music and beyond.

Of course, I am referring to SXSW.

While some of the team has attended in previous years, this year in particular is very exciting for us.  Essential’s co-founders, Scott Stropkay and Richard Watson will both be speaking during the Interactive portion of SXSW 2012.

On Sunday, March 11^th, Scott will lead a discussion on A New Culture of Learning, that will feature Heather Staker, Senior Research Fellow at the Innosight Institute and Nicole Lazzaro, Founder and President of XEODesign. The group will explore how new technology, gaming and design will converge with education to create a new way of approaching learning.

Then, on Monday, March 12^th, Richard will be part of the conversation on The Future of Innovation and  Consumer Electronics alongside CEA President, Gary Shapiro and Kevin O’Malley, President of TechTalk Studio. The trio will delve in questions such as how consumer electronics drive innovation in the U.S. and abroad –and what role design plays in consumer electronics innovation.

Not able to attend SXSW 2012? Follow the action via Twitter using #NewLearn and #FutureInno

Wharton Marketing Conference 2011

The Wharton Marketing Conference serves as a forum for the marketing community within and beyond Wharton, providing access to the latest trends and research in the field. The 8th Annual Marketing Conference will bring approximately 500 faculty, students and leading experts from the marketing field together under the theme “The Evolution of Marketing: New Decade, New Advances.” At this year's conference, Richard Watson will be leading a discussion on how non-CPG companies are engaging consumers in innovative ways. Top-level executives and managers from IBM, American Express, Microsoft, SAP and Pfizer will be weighing in on the topic.

Putting the Cart Before the Horse? Social Media for Innovation

Using social media as a tool to generate insights and innovation can be generative, or it can bog you down in mounds of data with no effective or resourceful way to do meaningful analysis. This was my biggest takeaway from the MIT Enterprise Forum panel From Social Insights to Social Innovation. The panelists included Betsy Aoki (Bing), Ekaterina Walter (Intel), Nathaniel Perez (SapientNitro), Marcus Nelson (Salesforce), and moderated by Francois Gossieaux (Human 1.0), and was peppered with social media anecdotes, a few swear words and a slight air of cyncism. Maybe cynicism is a strong word, but I walked away with the sense that in using social media for innovation, we're putting the cart before the horse. We're celebrating a solution to a problem that isn't quite understood.

 The panelists at the MIT Enterprise Forum's discussion From Social Insights to Social Business Innovation, September 21, 2011

Skepticism

The problem we are trying to solve is that we need to come up with great ideas faster, and these ideas need to be beautiful and more in-tune with consumers (because consumers are getting more thoughtful about design). Social media has played a key role in certain facets of product development and redesign. For instance, Betsy Aoki gave the example of eliciting user feedback through social media streams to help fix bugs in initial launches of Xbox Live. However, when the conversation came down to using social media for the purposes of innovation, we got some great one-liners like:

If you pay people $100 to give you ideas, you will get ideas worth $100.

It's death by committee...if you get a lot of ideas, you're going to get a lot of stupid ones you need to weed out.

Social media for innovation is, in its simplest form, an opportunistic use of a well-established and genius appratus for bringing people together. There is already a captive audience that has selected to rally behind your brand (friended you on Facebook, etc.), and to many marketing/design/user experience folks, it seems wasteful to ignore this captive audience. However, social media for the purposes of driving innovation is forgetting one of its foundational principles: the element of surprise! Maybe I'm biased, but I'm all about contextual research, which attempts to seek out those surprises that we could never get through a structured entity that opens the floodgates to data points (not real insights or great ideas). The biggest challenge to the panel is figuring out what to measure in the plethora of data they get through social media. As of right now, what they know they can measure is engagement (how many times people talk about the brand, engage with the Facebook page, etc.) But in terms of sifting through data to find ideas, it's still nebulous. 

Innovation or marketing ploy?

The panel briefly touched on some more successful attempts to reach into the crowd to get good ideas. I won't name names, but some big corporations with newfound interests in sustainability and responsible design have been using social media to reach out, pleading with customers that they need help solving 'big problem x.' Come to find out, many of these pleas have nothing to do with any arm of that corporation that deals with innovation, rather, they are just big marketing campaigns. This plea is just a way to get consumers ramped up behind the brand's new messaging and to test the waters for launching new ideas already created internally. Sneaky, huh? According to the panel, what makes engagement with these faux-innovation initiatives so successful is the fact that they have a dedicated purpose, often use a platform that reaches out to people full of good ideas and have boundaries (deadlines, rules). Sadly, many of these faux-innovation intiatives end up hitting a wall because they were created for the sole purpose of delivering a message, not implementing the crowd-sourced ideas.

So what's the big lesson? Is social media useless when it comes to gathering meaningful insights that could lead to innovation? I'm not yet convinced of its utility. But I do think we should stick with what we know about social media for now: it's a great way to get people to like your brand and want to get to know you. It's very human.

A side note...

As an aside, in this discussion, there was a lot of reference to 'early man' as an explanation for much of the social behavior that we've identified as interesting to design around. For example, the claim that "we humans love status and power" is interpreted from the archaic descriptive social behavior of "seeking out better mates and better food." We love to assert these claims because it gives us permission to be self-defeatist about our 'baser' pursuits. Does saying that we love status and power therefore allow us to pursue status and power with the same zeal that early man would toward better mates and food? I just wonder what's the point of looking backward to explain the contemporary, and possibly inform the future. It's just bad science: we define who we are today by looking at the past. But since we didn't live in the past, we can only understand the past if we've defined it...we're defining something which is based on something that's defined. 

Size Matters

Have you ever wondered why are we so obsessed with ever-shrinking gadgets?

While the basic functions of gadgets remain relatively steady, we focus all of our energy on creating an aesthetic around being small. Is this preference for the petite inherent in humans or is it a fad we’ve been conditioned to crave by competing technology companies trying to out-innovate one another?  

In his article for Humans Invent, Nigel Brown discusses his theories as to why designers are constantly trying to fit the most components into the “smallest” or “thinnest” devices. According to Brown, our cravings for minimalist features date back to cavemen who needed the most portable, efficient instruments in order to survive. His hypothesis is that our obsession with small and efficient is entirely in our nature, even acting as a therapeutic for our oft chaotic and stressful lives. 

As we innovate and develop new products, our devices become smaller, sleeker and more efficient, getting rid of unnecessary, wasteful spaces. We have come a long way from bulky telephone systems and computers that take up an entire room, but we certainly have a long way to go before we start implanting microchips in our bodies. Or do we?