Learning about Innovation Exchange

I'm meeting with colleagues today to share a quick presentation about what we are learning about the Innovation Exchange.  The presentation gets into some of the substance of what the Innovation Exchange is trying to do and some of the challenges we are facing.

For example, at the moment I think we are wrestling with four tensions:

• Open innovation vs secretive match-making - how can we encourage people to share their work and connect with others in a competitive, market context?
• Wisdom of crowds vs expert judgement - how can we harness the knowledge distributed across the system without abdicating responsibility to stimulate innovation and promote excellence?
• Pitching mentality vs co-creation - how can we both enable people to market their work and find supporters while simultaneously being honest about its failings and collaborating to improve it?
• Focusing on national excellence vs Enabling local connections  - how can we help the best work to scale across the system while responding to the question of 'how do I connect with innovators in my locality?'

But just as important as getting some help with those questions, I want to find out the best ways to share knowledge with my colleagues going forward (because I need all the advice I can get).  This page is a great example of the range of tools we are using at the Innovation Exchange to collate and share knowledge (including del.icio.us, SurveyMonkey and wikispaces.  Might any of these be helpful to the Innovation Unit?  Is this blog helpful?  Do you just wish I had emailed you?  Let me know. 

Comments

[David J]

...and now I'm really sad that I made the flip comment about e-mailing us because a) you address that in your blog, and b) the blog is a great place to be sent!

Your presentation was excellent - wise, profound, modest and of generic value. Thanks.

Last thought: we all need to have a much more enlightened conversation about the concept that passes as 'scaling', and it wouldn't hurt for this to be something around which the IU generates some collective IP.