Unfinished Business Lectures

Were the progressive tendencies seen in the campaign flash-in-the-pan phenomena or do they represent a kind of sea change in technologies of engagement? Scott Thomas and Rahaf Harfoush lead an interactive discussion on how design and new media played an instrumental role in the Barack Obama campaign. Thomas and Harfoush explore innovation in both campaign tactics and political strategy. In conversation, we explore the impact of many forms of openness on participation in the 2008 presidential campaign.

About the Speakers:
Scott Thomas (aka SimpleScott) is constantly seeking the simplest answer to complex problems. In 2006 he began a design collective entitled The Post Family. The group is devoted to supporting each other’s design habits, from silk screen to letterpress, from illustration to blogging, in an effort to “get back to the hand.” In 2007 Scott’s career took a dramatic leap when he was invited to join the New Media team at Obama for America. The chance encounter led him to becoming the Design Director of the historic Obama Presidential campaign. Scott plans to continue designing for social causes that might just someday change the world.

Rahaf Harfoush specializes in creating authentic conversations in the social media landscape. Her clients include British Telecom, Unilever, InnoSpa, and Duke University. She is an avid blogger, writer, information junkie, web evangelist and social network ninja. Rahaf was the Research Coordinator on Don Tapscott’s Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything and contributed to Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World. She recently completed a three-month assignment as part of Barack Obama’s New Media Team at his headquarters in Chicago. Rahaf blogs at TheFoush.com

Are there proven methods for creating the future? With high stakes and higher rates of failure, how do innovation efforts improve their odds? What are the core problems of innovation and who is most competent to solve them?

While many have advocated approaches to innovation that highlight creativity and imagination, brainstorming and "outside the box" thinking, there has been a quiet minority who have argued that innovation must be crafted into a legitimate discipline. Successful innovation, they argue, can not only be measured, it can be scientific. Larry Keeley is an innovation strategist who often wonders why people bother to listen to innovation "experts" at all. After all, since innovation fails about 96% of the time, it seems self-evident that the field has advanced to about the same state as medicine when leeches, liniments and mystery potions were the sophisticated treatments of the day. On occasions when Larry can get someone to listen, he is inclined to reveal pieces of the emerging science of innovation that is at the heart of Doblin's practice. By being obsessive about identifying the root causes of innovation failure and injecting better methods, it is now possible to systematically boost innovation 'hit rates' to between 35% and 70%. That still isn't perfect but it is an improvement of 10-15 times over the pathetic results people try to convince themselves is "normal."

About the Speaker:
Larry Keeley is a co-founder of Doblin and had Jay Doblin as a mentor for a decade. He is current president of Doblin, and a frequent lecturer about frontiers of innovation and strategy. Larry has worked with a wide variety of pioneering enterprises since 1979. A board member for the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he also teaches graduate level innovation strategy classes, Larry also lectures in innovation at Kellogg and University of Chicago. He is a board member for WBEZ-FM in Chicago, where he has been instrumental in charting strategies that have made it the nation’s most innovative public radio station.

Saul Kaplan of Business Innovation Factory says they do. For Kaplan the barrier to delivering better value isn’t technology. Humans and our institutions—both stubbornly resistant to change—impede our ability to network people, resources, and capabilities across organizations. Kaplan calls for a safe, manageable environment to explore new business models, a real world test-bed where public and private sector players can innovate collaboratively without disrupting current operations.

About the Speaker:
Saul Kaplan founded Rhode Island-based Business Innovation Factory (BIF) in 2005 with a mission to enable collaborative innovation. The non-profit is creating a real world laboratory for innovators to explore and test new business models and system level solutions in areas of high social importance including health care, education, energy independence, public safety, and quality of life. Kaplan has served in senior positions with the Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation, Accenture’s Health & Life Science practice and the Pharmaceutical Division of Eli Lilly and Company. He holds an MBA from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The nature of organization lies in its barrier to entry: in how "membership" is defined. This is the raison d'être of organizational culture. This disheartening social fact is all the more lamentable in today's globally interconnected world where our need to meaningfully integrate across disciplines, cultures and firms is more important than ever before. Historically, the prevailing wisdom was to let good ideas "bubble up," but along with the economic myth of "trickle down" it is just and only that, myth! Countering these myths are the proven anthropological approaches that get to the heart of culture, using interviews and participant-observational techniques.... all good, but still very time-consuming. What is needed is a new way to reliably accelerate an accurate diagnosis of an organization and intervene to produce predictable and sustainable (read: healthy) change.

About the Speaker: 
Dr. Karen Stephenson is a corporate anthropologist and a pioneer and "leader in the growing field of social-network business consultants," hailed by Business 2.0 as "The Organization Woman." In 2007, she was one of only three women recognized in Random House's Guide to the Management Gurus. In 2006, she was named as the first Houghton Hepburn Fellow at Bryn Mawr College for her groundbreaking contributions to civic engagement. In 2001, her consulting firm Netform was recognized as one of the top 100 leading innovation companies by CIO Magazine. In 2000 when she was featured in a New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell about the social dynamics of office spaces. A global nomad, she has been sighted at the Rotterdam School of Management at Erasmus University where she currently lectures. This was preceded by 5 years at the Harvard School of Design and 10 years at the UCLA Anderson Graduate School of Management. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at Harvard University, an M.A. in Anthropology at the University of Utah, and B.A. in Art & Chemistry at Austin College, TX. You can read about her company at http://www.netform.com.

In this interactive session Roland Harwood will share first hand experience and lessons learned regarding technical and cultural challenges of designing and running productive networks and innovation communities, both internally and externally. Roland will describe the rise of open business models and describe how organizations such as LEGO, Procter and Gamble, and Oxfam are embracing a radically more collaborative approach. He will make the case that only those organizations that are able to switch their default mode of operation, from closed to open, and from know-how to know-who, will be able to survive and thrive in an increasingly networked world.

About the Speaker:

Roland Harwood co-founded 100%Open, coming from NESTA where he was Director of Open Innovation. Graduating with a PhD in physics from Edinburgh University, he has held senior innovation roles in the utilities and media industries and in addition has worked with 100s of start-ups to raise venture capital and commercialise technology. In addition he has worked as a TV and film music producer for SonyBMG. For more visit — http://www.100open.com

Further information at http://unfinishedbusinesslectures.eventbrite.com