McFilter

Distributing and Democratizing Innovation

Careful Industries recently published a green paper: From Hype to Hope: How Networked Neighbourhoods can make innovation work for everyone.

I paused my reading of it as it was clear I'd want to write some notes and thoughts about it, and wanted to wait until I had time. This weekend things freed up enough for that to happen.

It's a good paper; well worth a read.

It also lays out some questions, which have proven useful jumping off points for me to think about, respond to, and build upon. The questions, and a couple of other paragraphs that triggered longer responses from me, are in blockquotes below.

1. Fast followers Are there particular benefits or drawbacks to a “fast follower” approach? What are the limits of assigning fast followers within regions, and might national networks be required to support a range of organisations?

I can see how "fast followers" appeals to policy folk and funders. There is also an acute need for the benefits that (useful, not all is) innovation would bring. However, if you want it to bed in and grow beyond the funding then it's an exercise in culture change and that doesn't happen quickly.

Of course, you might not want the culture change, as that will make folk less dependent on you and/or more resilient and harder to control. I think Rachel does want the changes, but ideally it re-balances some of the power between communities and politicians and funders, and the folk with careers in business- or community-support will be (as they should be aiming to) making themselves redundant. I think that if we make these changes then the country will be in a better place and there'll be more opportunities for all of us, including the politicians, funders and support workers, but there's always an uncertainty to change which can worry people.

Culture change requires people. It's hard to accelerate it with cash—the right is continually running that experiment and their successes take years or decades. On the flip side of the money equation, free and open-source software has won out over similar timescales with almost no funding. People learn the culture from each other; it's easy, and the default, for the existing culture to swamp and drown out the new before it can get established.

I also think the followers language sets up a false dichotomy. The paper rightly opens with a quote about how a "cookie-cutter" approach won't work; having leaders and followers is taking that approach. We're (excuse me while I go throw up a little) exploring the innovation landscape and we want more people joining the search.

For a more concrete example we can look at hackspaces and makerspaces. In some way the newer ones are following the older, but each time they evolve and grow to match their surroundings. Most, but not all, will have a laser-cutter and a 3D printer; some will have a more industrial vibe with lathes, welding gear and CNC mills; others embrace fibre arts with knitting and sewing machines, and CNC embroidery machines; there might be an events space for community meetings and talks; a few have co-working spaces attached, and non-maker/hacker members. Their legal form could be a company limited by guarantee, or a community interest company, or a charity, or...

In reality there are a load of design patterns that each one chooses from and mixes and remixes to suit their own needs. The successes and learnings don't all flow in one direction, the "leaders" can pick up and adopt patterns from the "followers" when they can see an improvement.

2. Funding and investment What would need to be in place for sustainable, regionally managed funds to be viable? What special conditions would be required to support the investment of different kinds of capital? What are the challenges in growing these funds? Might another funding route be more appropriate?

If someone wants to give DoES Liverpool enough money to buy a premises that we'd put into the commons (a CLT or similar), that would be lovely. There are a couple of candidates locally that could work: £750k would let us double in size; for £3.2m we could buy an entire office block to repurpose.

Such a suggestion only really makes sense because we're an established organisation that's grown from nothing to over 4000 sq. ft. of space with no funding and continues to exist 14 years after we were founded. Even with all that, such a jump would be risky and not something we'd take on lightly. We might even turn down such a seemingly generous offer. Hedging it by putting the building into a community ownership vehicle seems a sensible approach from both sides: if the investment does result in killing the patient then at least the community, rather than some property developer, can pick up the pieces and try something different.

As I said earlier, it's hard to usefully throw money at the problem. Again, looking at the concrete example of makerspaces, virtually all of the ones that were set up with external funding lasted only as long as their funding did, and have long since closed their doors.

Four years ago I argued that the most useful approach (assuming you aren't willing to fund UBI or even a better social security net) would be to buy things you want. The problem then is how to find the problems that neighbourhoods need to solve, and how to let those neighbourhoods choose to spend the cash.

3. Define success for inclusive growth How have other successful inclusive growth projects been measured? Are there particular success criteria that would be relevant for the UK, or for particular nations and regions within the UK? How might varying contexts be understood?

Forbid any measurements that include numbers.

Which is better? This slide deck explaining what DoES Liverpool is where you'll hear the names of actual people and businesses that you could follow up on; or a an innovation hub "creating a cluster of over 300 new businesses and over 1000 jobs".

Particularly when the former has helped create more businesses than the latter, with £12m less in funding. Although neither are anywhere near 300 new businesses (though at least DoES Liverpool continues to operate and might still get there)

There's are continual attempts to replicate "innovation" success by building the symptoms of that success rather than the causes. Cambridge isn't a hotbed of tech because it has a science park, it has a science park because it's got lots of businesses that need office and lab space. The property developers have understood the opportunity presented by politicians looking for quick wins, and profited handsomely from it. Maybe that's the real reason for turning everything into numbers—those of us who care about such things take ourselves out of the competition because we can't sincerely claim such ludicrous upsides.

Technology sovereignty needs more than an elite international workforce, it also relies on more people from across the UK being able to adopt and adapt existing technologies and for more people from diverse backgrounds to become innovators, solving a wider range of problems.

Across the UK tech scene, relationships and reputation are a vital currency, brokered by a small number of individuals and organisations who weave networks and broker introductions.

This is very true. There's a London-centric equivalent too, although that's been softened a little since the pandemic with people getting more used to meeting online, and with folk moving out of London across the country thanks to remote-work. It does feel like, at the grass-roots level, the UK tech scene is less well connected than it was in the late 2000s. Back then, barcamps and hackdays meant that the geeks in the UK were very well networked and inter-connected. It definitely skewed towards those with the privilege of being able to spend weekends following their interests, which I'm sure skewed white, male, and younger; but addressing that and building something similar would be very useful.

How would you grow more folk like me? Malcolm Gladwell is much derided these days, but there's an element of the maven role that he laid out in Tipping Point. An element of helping to connect folk and projects, while acknowledging that the link might not be of interest or useful, or at the right time. Collecting people who have an interest in local links, but who also are looking and connecting outside of the network and outside of the local geography. Folk who are open to new ideas and give newcomers the benefit of the doubt while applying critical thinking to what is presented. Those with a confidence (but not arrogance) in their own capabilities that they don't have to dress it up as more than it is, and then who don't see others as a threat.

Years ago, Francis Irving semi-idly proposed that we should look for interesting people, have a chat with them, and also ask them who they thought was doing the most interesting work (project, art, startup, whatever) in the area. Then go repeat the process with those people. And the ones they recommended, and so on.

1. Is there a preferred mix of type of organisations – anchor, frontdoor, superconnector - within a region or a neighbourhood, and what is the interplay between them?

I think a diversity of organisations, of approaches, and of areas of interest is important. At DoES Liverpool we often talk about how the non-geeks and non-makers in the community are just as important. The tech and the making aren't useful if they exist in a vacuum and successful projects and businesses will need more than just a leet coder.

This is also one of my regular reminders that I should reinvigorate the #LiverpoolHannahLinks project that the pandemic interrupted; but that link shows some of the wealth of interconnected projects across the city. Finding useful ways for them to interact and convene more often remains a challenge.

The other important point to make about the interplay of organisational actors is for them to see each other as peers. I often half-joke about there being a mutual lack of respect between us and (certain members of) the Council. Some councillors think we should tug our forelocks because they're The Council; and we think they should listen to us because we're actually making shit happen. Ditto the universities. Thankfully they're all big enough organisations that there are good people who "get it" and with whom we can work, but finding them is hard.

If the aim is to build more than just tech startups (as it should be) then there likely is more of a role for government; but if we expand the leaders to include communities as well as entrepreneurs then I still think Brad Feld's book "Startup Communities" captures the correct dynamics well, putting government and universities as important-but-supporting. This review of the book provides a useful summary.

2. How might partnerships between Networked Neighbourhoods and/or regions be fostered and what are the incentives for collaboration?

The million-dollar question. Can I come back to that?

3. As a Connected Organisation develops and changes, how might support and infrastructure needs vary?

I think recognising that it will change as it develops is an important point. And one that those of us inside organisations don't always remember or even notice.

Like any organisation, you can get away with less infrastructure at the start, when it's small enough that everyone largely knows what's going on. Adopting the tools for the next scale up just before you need them is likely a good aim, as then you might have them sorted for when you actually need them.

I'm a big fan of the maxim that you should have as little process as you can get away with, but no less; and as much process as you need, but no more.

To return to the idea of design patterns for such organisations, then a variety of patterns to apply at varying scales would be good.

I think support that grows as the organisation does would be best. As I said at the start, DoES Liverpool could make good use of a building, and now that we're established (and that point was likely quite a few years ago) I think there's proof to the wider community that such support wouldn't be misplaced.

From the perspective of a volunteer-run consensus-based organisation, support that was patient would help. There isn't a "key decision-maker" you can have a meeting with and then something happens. Similarly, opportunities with short-notice deadlines are likely to be passed up because we aren't going to have the internal capacity to engage with them.

Being open to exploring what the support might look like would also be useful. I remember Andy Goodwin and I seeking out a meeting with the Local Enterprise Partnership to see how we might work together; we started the meeting explicitly stating that we weren't looking for money, and were curious about what other options there might be. They continually brought the discussion round to potential funding bids, as that was (a) how their work was measured and (b) basically the only thing they could imagine.

It could have been people from the LEP working from the co-working space once-a-month to better understand the community, build links, and surface new ideas; or working together to find and raise the profile of local manufacturers (it was the early days of the Indie Manufacturing project); or doing events or other work to find the potential founders for DoES Liverpool-like spaces across the city region; or...

All of that requires a deeper commitment and more work than is strictly necessary. It would also give the space (and credibility) to challenge and push us to achieve more. If nothing else in order to surface what the real barriers are. I firmly believe that the DoES Liverpool community has done a lot of epic shit in its fourteen years, but there are still huge amounts of untapped potential in it.

Imagine organising a birthday party for a group of young children. Would you agree a set of learning objectives with their parents in advance of the party? Would those objectives be aligned with the mission statement for education in the society to which you belong? Would you create a project plan for the party with clear milestones associated with empirical measures of achievement? …

No, instead like most parents you would create barriers to prevent certain types of behaviour, you would use attractors (party games, a football, a videotape) to encourage the formation of beneficial largely self organising identities; you would disrupt negative patterns early, to prevent the party becoming chaotic, or necessitating the draconian imposition of authority. At the end of the party you would know whether it had been a success, but you could not define (in other than the most general terms) what that success would look like in advance.

Maybe I should start posting that quote into any funding application form I can find.

1. What are the most effective theories of change for complex, systemic change happening across multiple domains?

Approaching it as gardening a culture rather than dictating things to do. Turns out I already wrote up my thoughts on that.

We had a theory of change workshop within the DoES Liverpool community as an outcome from one of the early Future Gazing sessions, and it resulted in us publishing (on posters in the space as well as online) the DoES Liverpool values.

Although I think this is our actual theory of change:

2. What are the most directly measurable outcomes for innovation at national, local and regional, neighbourhood, and individual level?

I'll refer back to the Dave Snowden quote here ;-)

However, I will also note that such similar powers of ten-style perspectives are laid out in our periodic Future Gazing workshops, where the community comes together to think about and discuss ways that the space could evolve and grow and how we might impact and help our area, the city, country and planet.

3. How might – or should – this theory of change enable partnership and multi-stakeholder collaboration?

We should be more intentional in inviting outsider friends along to our Future Gazing sessions. They're a good point at which to inject new ideas and perspectives.

Funding and support that's flexible and can adapt to emerging opportunities would be useful. I don't think that would need to be a huge amount, but should be able to buy equipment and pay for people's time (on a project-http://www.mcqn.net/mcfilter/archives/thinking/dont_buy_innovation_buy_things_some_suggestions.html or part-time basis).

Maybe the answer is to find gardeners and give them a budget and no (or minimal) strings.

[I also thought I'd make some more concrete suggestions but this was already something of an epic essay, so I posted them separately]