Eyes on the innovation prize
Tim Harford: “In 1737, a self-taught clockmaker from Yorkshire astonished the great scientists of London by solving the most pressing technological problem of the day: how to determine the longitude of a ship at sea. The conventional wisdom was that some kind of astronomical method would be needed. Other inventors suggested crackpot schemes that involved casting magic spells or ringing the world with a circle of outposts that would mark the time with cannon fire.
John Harrison’s solution — simple in principle, fiendishly hard to execute — was to build an accurate clock, one that despite fluctuating temperatures and rolling ocean swells, could show the time at Greenwich while anywhere in the world. Harrison and countless other creative minds were focused on the longitude problem by a £20,000 prize for the person who solved it, several million pounds in today’s money.
Why was the prize necessary? Because ideas are hard to develop and easy to imitate. Harrison’s clocks could, with effort, have been reverse engineered. An astronomical method for finding longitude could have been copied with ease. Inventing something new is for suckers; smart people sit back and rip off the idea later. One way to give non-suckers an incentive to research new ideas, then, is an innovation prize — that is, a substantial cash reward for solving a well-defined problem. (Retrospective awards such as the Nobel Prize are different.)
For decades after Harrison’s triumph, prizes were a well-established approach to the problem of encouraging innovation. Then they fell out of favour, with policymakers instead encouraging innovation with a mix of upfront research grants and patent protection. Now, however, prizes are making a comeback. The most eye-catching examples have been in the private sector: the $1m Netflix prize for improved personalisation of film recommendations or the $10m Ansari X prize for private space flight. Last year Nesta, a UK-based charity for the promotion of innovation, launched a “new longitude prize” of £10m for an improved test for bacterial infections, marking the anniversary of the original prize’s founding in 1714.
But the big money potential is in the public sector. In 2007, several governments (and the Gates Foundation) promised a $1.5bn prize for a vaccine for pneumococcal meningitis. The prize, called an “advanced market commitment”, is structured as a dose-by-dose subsidy rather than one giant cheque. It is being paid out and millions of children have already been vaccinated. Much bigger commitments are possible: before US senator Bernie Sanders began his run for the presidency, he introduced two Senate bills that would have provided almost $100bn a year as medical innovation prizes.
But why are innovation prizes attractive, when the existing system of grants and patents seems to have served us reasonably well so far?…(More)”
Social media and citizen engagement: A meta-analytic review
Paper by Marko M. Skoric et al: “This meta-analytic study reviews empirical research published from 2007 to 2013 with an aim of providing robust conclusions about the relationship between social media use and citizen engagement. It includes 22 studies that used self-reported measures of social media use and participation, with a total of 116 relationships/effects. The results suggest that social media use generally has a positive relationship with engagement and its three sub-categories, that is, social capital, civic engagement, and political participation. More specifically, we find small-to-medium size positive relationships between expressive, informational, and relational uses of social media and the above indicators of citizen engagement. For identity- and entertainment-oriented uses of social media, our analyses find little evidence supporting their relationship with citizen engagement….(More)”
New frontiers in social innovation research
Geoff Mulgan: “Nesta has published a new book with Palgrave which contains an introduction by me and many important chapters from leading academics around the world. I hope that many people will read it, and think about it, because it challenges, in a highly constructive way, many of the rather tired assumptions of the London media/political elite of both left and right.
The essay is by Roberto Mangabeira Unger, perhaps the world’s most creative and important contemporary intellectual. He is Professor of Law at Harvard (where he taught Obama); a philosopher and political theorist; author of one of the most interesting recent books on religion; co-author of an equally ground-breaking recent book on theoretical physics; and serves as strategy minister in the Brazilian government.
His argument is that a radically different way of thinking about politics, government and social change is emerging, which has either not been noticed by many political leaders, or misinterpreted. The essence of the argument is that practice is moving faster than theory; that systematic experimentation is a faster way to solve problems than clever authorship of pamphlets, white papers and plans; and that societies have the potential to be far more active agents of their own future than we assume.
The argument has implications for many fields. One is think-tanks. Twenty years ago I set up a think-tank, Demos. At that time the dominant model for policy making was to bring together some clever people in a capital city to write pamphlets, white papers and then laws. In the 1950s to 1970s a primary role was played by professors in universities, or royal commissions. Then it shifted to think-tanks. Sometimes teams within governments played a similar role – and I oversaw several of these, including the Strategy Unit in government. All saw policy as an essentially paper-based process, involving a linear transmission from abstract theories and analyses to practical implementation.
There’s still an important role to be played by think-tanks. But an opposite approach has now become common, and is promoted by Unger. In this approach, practice precedes theory. Experiment in the real world drives the development of new ideas – in business, civil society, and on the edges of the public sector. Learning by doing complements, and often leads analysis. The role of the academics and think-tanks shifts from inventing ideas to making sense of what’s emerging, and generalising it. Policies don’t try to specify every detail but rather set out broad directions and then enable a process of experiment and discovery.
As Unger shows, this approach has profound philosophical roots (reaching back to the 19th century pragmatists and beyond), and profound political implications (it’s almost opposite to the classic Marxist view, later adopted by the neoliberal right, in which intellectuals define solutions in theory which are then translated into practice). It also has profound implications for civil society – which he argues should adopt a maximalist rather than a minimalist view of social innovation.
The Unger approach doesn’t work for everything – for example, constitutional reform. But it is a superior method for improving most of the fields where governments have power – from welfare and health, to education and economic policy, and it has worked well for Nesta – evolving new models of healthcare, working with dozens of governments to redesign business policy, testing out new approaches to education.
The several hundred public sector labs and innovation teams around the world – from Chile to China, south Africa to Denmark – share this ethos too, as do many political leaders. Michael Bloomberg has been an exemplar, confident enough to innovate and experiment constantly in his time as New York Mayor. Won Soon Park in Korea is another…..
Unger’s chapter should be required reading for anyone aspiring to play a role in 21st century politics. You don’t have to agree with what he says. But you do need to work out where you disagree and why….(New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research)
The Problem-Solving Process That Prevents Groupthink
Art Markman at Harvard Business Review: “There are two reasons most of us aren’t very good at creative problem solving. First, few people get training in how to be creative in their education. Second, few people understand group dynamics well enough to harness their power to help groups maximize their creativity.
Resolving the first issue requires getting your employees to learn more about the way they think… a tall order for managers. The second issue, though, is well within your ability to change.
A key element of creativity is bringing existing knowledge to bear on a new problem or goal. The more people who can engage with that problem or goal, the more knowledge that is available to work on it. Unfortunately, quite a bit of research demonstrates that the traditional brainstorming methods first described by Alex Osborn in the 1950’s fail. When groups simply get together and start throwing out ideas, they actually come up with fewer ideas overall and fewer novel, actionable ideas than the individuals in that group would have come up with had they worked alone.
To fix this problem, it is important to think about the two phases of group problem-solving: divergence and convergence.
Divergence happens when the group considers as many different potential solutions as possible. For example, a common test of creativity is the “alternative uses” test. People are asked questions like, “How many different uses can you find for a brick?” This test requires strategies for considering as many distinct solutions as possible.
Convergence happens when the variety of proposed solutions are evaluated. In this phase, a large number of ideas are whittled to a smaller set of candidate solutions to the current problem.
The core principle of group creativity is that individuals working alone diverge, while group members working together converge. In group settings, as soon as one person states a potential solution to everyone else, that influences the memory of every person in the group in ways that make everyone think about the problem more similarly. That is why groups working together diverge less than individuals working alone.
To fix group idea generation, then, be aware of when you are trying to diverge and when you are trying to converge. For example, early in the process of problem-solving, think carefully about the problem itself. Have your group members work alone to craft statements describing the problem. Then, get them back together to discuss their descriptions. The individuals are likely to come up with a variety of distinct problem statements. The group discussion will lead everyone to accept one or a small number of variants of these statements to work on – this is healthy convergence.
When you start to generate solutions, you again want divergence. Again, have people work alone to start. Then collect people’s initial ideas and send them around to other group members and allow the divergence to continue as group members individually build on the ideas of their colleagues. Because people are still working alone, the way they build on other people’s ideas is still going to be different from how other group members are building on those ideas.
After this process, you can give the resulting ideas to everyone and then let the group get together to discuss them. This discussion will gradually lead the group to converge on a small number of candidate solutions….(More)”
The ‘data revolution’ will be open
Martin Tisne at Devex: “There is a huge amount of talk about a “data revolution.” The phrase emerged in the years preceding this September’s announcement of the Sustainable Development Goals, and has recently been strongly reaffirmed by the launch of a Global Partnership on Sustainable Development Data.
The importance of data in measuring, assessing and verifying the new SDGs has been powerfully made and usually includes a mention of the data needing to be “open.” However, the role of “open” has not been clearly articulated. Fundamentally, the discussion focuses on the role of data (statistics, for example) in decision-making, and not on the benefits of that data being open to the public. Until this case is made, difficult decisions to make data open will go by the wayside.
Much of the debate justly focuses on why data matters for decision-making. Knowing how many boys and girls are in primary and secondary schools, how good their education is, and the number of teachers in their schools, are examples of relevant data used in shaping education delivery, and perhaps policy. Likewise, new satellite and cellphone data can help us prevent and understand the causes of death by HIV and AIDS, tuberculosis, and malaria.
Proponents of the data revolution make powerful points, such as that 1 in 3 births go unregistered. If you are uncounted, you will be ignored. If you don’t have an identity, you do not exist.
Yet as important as this information is, I still can’t help but think: Do we change the course of history with the mere existence of more data or because people access it, mobilize and press for change?
We need an equally eloquent narrative for why open data matters and what it means.
To my thinking, we need the data to be open because we need to hold governments accountable for their promises under the SDGs, in order to incentivize action. The data needs to be available, accessible and comparable to enable journalists and civil society to prod, push and test the validity of these promises. After all, what good are the goals if governments do not deliver, beginning with the funding to implement? We will need to know what financial resources, both public and private, will be put to work and what budget allocations governments will make in their draft budgets. We need to have those debates in the open, not in smoke-filled rooms.
Second, the data needs to be open in order to be verified, quality-checked and improved. …(More)”
Creating Value through Open Data
Press Release: “Capgemini Consulting, the global strategy and transformation consulting arm of the Capgemini Group, today published two new reports on the state of play of Open Data in Europe, to mark the launch of the European Open Data Portal. The first report addresses “Open Data Maturity in Europe 2015: Insights into the European state of play” and the second focuses on “Creating Value through Open Data: Study on the Impact of Re-use of Public Data Resources.” The countries covered by these assessments include the EU28 countries plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland – commonly referred to as the EU28+ countries. The reports were requested by the European Commission within the framework of the Connecting Europe Facility program, supporting the deployment of European Open Data infrastructure.
Open Data refers to the information collected, produced or paid for by public bodies and can be freely used, modified and shared by anyone.. For the period 2016-2020, the direct market size for Open Data is estimated at EUR 325 billion for Europe. Capgemini’s study “Creating Value through Open Data” illustrates how Open Data can create economic value in multiple ways including increased market transactions, job creation from producing services and products based on Open Data, to cost savings and efficiency gains. For instance, effective use of Open Data could help save 629 million hours of unnecessary waiting time on the roads in the EU; and help reduce energy consumption by 16%. The accumulated cost savings for public administrations making use of Open Data across the EU28+ in 2020 are predicted to equal 1.7 bn EUR. Reaping these benefits requires reaching a high level of Open Data maturity.
In order to address the accessibility and the value of Open Data across European countries, the European Union has launched the Beta version of the European Data Portal. The Portal addresses the whole Data Value Chain, from data publishing to data re-use. Over 240,000 data sets are referenced on the Portal and 34 European countries. It offers seamless access to public data across Europe, with over 13 content categories to categorize data, ranging from health or education to transport or even science and justice. Anyone, citizens, businesses, journalists or administrations can search, access and re-use the full data collection. A wide range of data is available, from crime records in Helsinki, labor mobility in the Netherlands, forestry maps in France to the impact of digitization in Poland…..The study, “Open Data Maturity in Europe 2015: Insights into the European state of play”, uses two key indicators: Open Data Readiness and Portal Maturity. These indicators cover both the maturity of national policies supporting Open Data as well as an assessment of the features made available on national data portals. The study shows that the EU28+ have completed just 44% of the journey towards achieving full Open Data Maturity and there are large discrepancies across countries. A third of European countries (32%), recognized globally, are leading the way with solid policies, licensing norms, good portal traffic and many local initiatives and events to promote Open Data and its re-use….(More)”
Public Sector Data Management Project
Australian government: “Earlier in 2015, Michael Thawley, Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), commissioned an in-house study into how public sector data can be better used to achieve efficiencies for government, enable better service delivery and properly be used by the private sector to stimulate economic activity…..
There are four commonly used classifications of data: personal data, research data, open data and security data. Each type of data is used for different purposes and requires a different set of considerations, as the graphic below illustrates. The project focused on how the Australian Public Service manages its research data and open data, while ensuring personal data was kept appropriately secured. Security data was beyond the scope of this project.
The project found that there are pockets of excellence across the Australian Public Service, with some agencies actively working on projects that focus on a richer analysis of linked data. However, this approach is fragmented and is subject to a number of barriers, both perceived and real. These include cultural and legislative barriers, and a data analytics skills and capability shortage across the Australian Public Service.
To overcome these barriers, the project established a roadmap to make better use of public data, comprising an initial period to build confidence and momentum across the APS, and a longer term set of initiatives to systematise the use, publishing and sharing of public data.
The report is available from the link below: Public Sector Data Management Project“
Crowd Sourced Legislation and Politics: The Legitimacy of Constitutional Deliberation in Romania
Paper by Gherghina, Sergiu and Miscoiu, Sergiu: “Constitutional reform is a tedious process that requires long periods of time, a relatively broad consensus among the political actors, and often needs popular approval. In spite of these, Romania changed its constitution once (2003) and witnessed several unsuccessful revisions. The most recent attempt, in 2013, has introduced the deliberative dimension in the form of a constitutional forum. This article investigates the legitimacy of this deliberative practice using a tri-dimensional approach: input, throughput, and output legitimacy. Our qualitative study relying on direct observation and secondary data analysis concludes that while input and throughput legitimacy were achieved to great extent, the output legitimacy was low….(More)”
Can we achieve effective economic diplomacy without innovation diplomacy?
Lisa Rauter at innovationXchange (Australia): “Increasingly innovation is a topic of discussion within Government departments; across agencies; and between governments and external organisations. It is also a strong focus in the development community. At its core, innovation is the development of new ideas, more effective technologies or approaches. Innovation leads to the application of better solutions to improve outputs.
DFAT’s innovationXchange is seeing throughout our conversations with other countries that so many of us are looking at the issue of innovation. …There is a great deal of interest in exploring how we can share information across borders, how we use that information to trigger new ideas, and how we leverage the skills and knowledge of others to achieve better outcomes. Innovation is fast becoming a common objective, something we all aim to embed in our respective organisations, but which we know we cannot do alone. The problems we seek to solve are global and a collaborative, innovative approach to solve them is needed….
This makes me think, is innovation the new diplomatic tool on which we can base new or enhanced relationships on? Can we use the shared goal of doing things better, more cost effectively harnessing the knowledge and capital that sits outside governments to not only have a better impact but bring countries closer together in a collaborative partnership? Could these collaborative partnerships even contribute to increased regional stability?
Innovation is fuelled by collaboration – taking an idea, sharing with others, using their knowledge and creativity to improve the idea, building on it, testing it, adapting and testing again. This collaborative process aligns very well with the intent behind diplomacy – the act of a state seeking toachieve its aims, in relation to those of others, through dialogue and negotiation.
This is already happening to some extent with like-mindeds, like UK and US. But innovation is about risk taking, trying new things and stepping outside of the familiar and comfortable. The emergence of new groupings, like MIKTA, and the increasing engagement of the private sector in partnering for social impact expands the opportunities to learn about other approaches and find complementary skills and knowledge.
This is all about making collaboration, co-creation and through that, innovation a way of working – an approach we can take to working with other states and other organisations. While innovation is the latest buzzword in government and in the development community, it will remain just a buzzword, easily replaced by the next trend, unless we look for opportunities to work with others to co-create and innovate to solve shared problems….(More)”