Not the weirdest week I have ever spent, but probably in the top 5!

It was an early start in London because I was taking part in the second day of the Learning Without Frontiers conference – see http://www.learningwithoutfrontiers.com/lwf-london-2011/ .  This is organised by Graham Brown-Martin, who we had met during the analysis of the opportunity for an Innovation Platform in “education”, and who Digital Man has used as an assessor for his part of the LaunchPad.  Graham is definitely at the “direct action” end of the educational establishment and organizes this conference as a challenge to the more established meetings such as BETT that happen afterwards.  Graham’s self-appointed task is to challenge the educational establishment to understand that it has to change, and his rhetoric is moderately confrontational. His choice of speakers reflects his personal interests and we only realized afterwards how we fitted together!  It is also worth noting that he was very strong on the “no business attire” rule but then turned up in a very sharp purple suit – but didn’t wear a tie!

First up was Karen Cator – a very articulate US Department of Education woman, who was (presumably) supposed to demonstrate how other countries “get” the education challenge/opportunity.  She managed to avoid the politics of the situation, stressing that in the USA, education was a non-partisan activity.  Next up was Iris Lapinski, from DCI Europe – see http://cdieurope.eu/.  She started with a neat demonstration of how education rewards a fast answer to a simple question, rather than a full exploration of a complex problem.  The young padawan, sitting next to me, was pleased to see this approach!  Her focus was on getting schoolchildren to write Apps to address problems once they had been more fully defined, and used 2 examples to make her points.  Good use of theatre as well. The third speaker was Theodore Gray.  After helping found Wolfram Research, he wrote the book about the periodic table before turning it into the Elements app for the iPad – see http://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/the-elements-a-visual-exploration/id364147847?mt=8.  I bought this to help me remember what I learned as a chemist.  Hidden away in his talk was an interesting thought process about how e-books are able to offer what he called “enrichment” as well as information.  His assertion that text books were dead, and that their business model had been partly responsible probably sent shivers down the spines of the various educational publishers in the room.

After the break, Saul Nasse, the Controller of BBC Learning used a series of pre-prepared videos with talking heads to avoid having to give a presentation.  (Note to self…)  His basic argument was that broadcast had changed education and so all new communications technologies would do the same.  I wasn’t convinced…  I used my talk to question whether we wanted to be disrupted and make the point that technology enabled people to change how they did things but that those people had to make the decision to do so.  I was followed by Evan Roth – self-confessed badass mother-f@*ker (he said it, Graham repeated it and it works on Google – see http://evan-roth.com/).  His role was to put the case that, outside of school, children were exposed to role models who were very disruptive and very interesting.  The presentation was full of wonderful examples of rebellion, but I wasn’t sure how he made money, and I couldn’t get that thought out of my mind!

We then held a short workshop – shortened because the overall organization of the conference was not the sharpest.  We got a cross-section of about 40-50 people to answer the question about what they wanted to do and how it might work, and it will be written up as another contribution to our thinking and a way of engaging with the community.

Following the aftermath of the session, it was interesting to note that the various forms of feedback (verbal, twitter and blogs) split the community.  There were those who thought that we didn’t belong in the educational space (shades of early days in healthcare) and didn’t understand that they were special.  In one blog the counterpoint of Evan and my talk got compared to the difference between Tomorrow’s World and Dads Army, and I was accused of propagating a “capitalist view of education”.  Then there were people who understood the points I was making and wanted to talk to us about how to help.  And then there were the people who actually don’t want to change and wish Graham would not make them think!

We had a team think about the workshop and the interaction, and FL and Zoe were scheduled to have dinner with the speakers on the Tuesday evening, so I look forward to that feedback as well.

Tuesday started in London, but the majority of the UK working day was spent travelling to Boston.  This was a Golding recommendation – to build links to both the Boston Consulate-General and the MIT Sloan School.  I was initially not keen, but he persuaded me.  He was right!  I got there about 7.30pm UK time for 2 excellent meetings organized by the local SINners.  The first was with Mark Trusheim and Ernie Berndt of the Sloan Management School on the subject of stratified medicine.  They had obviously spoken with Joe and Angela and knew of the young padawan, but seemed sadly uninformed about the basis of the Technology Strategy Board.  Once we got over that, the conversation was productive and they were already interested in joining a UK based consortium (with no funding for them, they understood) to further their understanding.  They are trying to compare how basic healthcare models impact on the implementation of stratified medicine!  Mark will be in the UK soon and is looking to meet with Paul, Graham and Zahid!

That led into a long conversation with Chris and Laura of the Boston Consulate-General about interaction with the Technology Strategy Board.  It is obvious that they had worked out that there would be value in a closer interaction, but weren’t sure how to better engage.  They have some interactions but largely borne of accident, and were looking for a design step!  After a while we fastened on the opportunity to use _connect by setting up a space shared by the Technologists, the SINners and possibly the KTN Directors.  We also need to make sure anyone who is travelling connects with the local SINners and takes advantage of local meetings they can set up – if the quality of the links into MIT are anything to go by, it would repay a small upfront investment of time!

After a quiet meal and a long sleep, I woke up to watch the promised blizzard materialise!  By breakfast, the snow was 6 inches deep, and Boston (including MIT) was officially closed.  This made a hasty re-arrangement of the meeting necessary, and so a reduced bunch of people met in a hotel salon about an hour later than planned as various MIT and Harvard people came in covered with snow!

After introductions by Chris Ilsley (Consul and SINner) and Fiona Murray (MIT Sloan School ex-pat Brit!), the first presentation, by Ruth Reed, president of RIBA got us started.  Ruth and I had been on the same plane out and so had already discussed an aspect of architecture we had run into during our Low Impact Buildings activities.  Because design is “outsourced” to architects, and the contract is often fixed price, there is a disincentive to innovate.  If the architect is innovative and the contractor or user benefits, the architect doesn’t get paid any more.  If, on the other hand, the architect innovates and it goes wrong, they will be sued!  The presentation, which focused heavily on the Stirling Prize, showed the value of a post-hoc prize in such a business model.  The pictures were also really cool!  Talking to Ruth afterwards, she wasn’t very aware of our Low Impact Buildings activities, but was very interested to find out more!  Next up was Stian Westlake from NESTA.  He gave a talk that heavily featured NESTA activities but he made a passing reference to our activities that I milked for all the attention I could get for us!  

After a basic food court lunch, we went into the examples.  After an introduction from Karim Lakhani, we started with the Saltire Prize – see http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/Business-Industry/Energy/Action/leading/saltire-prize.  Examined coldly, it sounds like a waste of money.  In 2017, the company that “can demonstrate in Scottish waters, a commercially viable wave or tidal stream energy technology that achieves the greatest volume of electrical output over the set minimum hurdle of 100GWh over a continuous 2 year period using only the power of the sea” will win £10m.  The discussion was around the fact that the level of investment to achieve the goals was significantly larger than the £10m prize, that the likely winners were probably already in development (so it wouldn’t encourage new entrants), that they would therefore probably aspire to this performance level already and that they were probably being funded by UK based agencies and government departments.

Next up was a bizarre micro prize system used by Local Motors – see http://www.local-motors.com/. Despite a neat presentation on what will probably remain a sub-optimal business model (neatly skewered by a Harvard professor!) no-one was really sure if this was a “prize” at all.  More interesting was the MIT Clean Energy Prize – see http://cep.mit.edu/featured/gearing-up-for-the-2011-mit-clean-energy-prize/.  A classic stage-gated competition with a single final stage winner, this sounds a lot like the way we are going and got a lot of support around the room.  There was a long conversation about the appropriateness of various competition and prize mechanisms and our experiments with Collaboration Nation, LaunchPad and the Composites Grand Challenge all had the academics salivating at the thought of the learned treatises they could write if they got hold of our data.  This final point was also not lost on Stian, who suddenly became my best friend, much to the amusement of the famously skeptical Fergus, who was “being” Philip Rycroft at the meeting.

After a short break for Starbucks from the shop downstairs, we settled into how we would design a competition to encourage energy efficiency in commercial buildings.  Some really good ideas surfaced and were recorded (literally, they recorded the whole event), but the issues of problem ownership kept surfacing. The meeting finished with regret that the weather had limited attendance but a real feeling of community between the participants.  And the snow had stopped!  Fergus ran off to catch his rescheduled flight to Washington (apparently to spend 4 hours at the airport and get out after midnight!) and the visitors were taxied to a restaurant near Boston Common for a further exploration of the how “encouragement of innovation” could be achieved.  

The next morning, I left the hotel before 6 o’clock moderately confident that the 8.15 flight would fly because the plane had landed the evening before and British Airways would want it back in London, but mildly apprehensive that the taxi could get me to the airport!  I was not disappointed.

Friday was a day off to meet some old friends, but I had to get back for a telephone interview about the Future Health Mission at 9 o’clock in the evening.  I managed that but as I settled down, the cancellation came through because Forbes had a better offer.  C’est la vie!