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Saul Kaplan, Chief Catalyst, Business Innovation Factory
Saul reflected on the themes from yesterday. First, sharing innovation has to be about storytelling. Storytelling being easy to relate, inspiring, and engaging. Second, the notion of audience through social networking, linkedin, Twitter, etc. There is power and amazingness in sharing these ideas in real time. Third, is the courage to take action. The people here are the ones who have acted to work on the big problems we’re going to face going forward.
*Bruce Nussbaum, Contributing Editor at Businessweek, moderated the discussion for this conversation:
David Berry*, Principal, Flagship Ventures
David spoke on the impact of the current financial crisis. There is a delayed impact on venture capital because they have longer time horizons. There is, however, a panic amongst the venture capitals. Sequoia for example freaked out just this week. This quarter alone investments are down 66%, and the whole industry is somewhat prone to going overboard. The VCs that are about to raise funds are in a much different position than VCs that recently raised funds.
As for Flagship, they are traditional in some ways with $800M under management, but it’s non-traditional in the sense that they found their own companies as well. They strategically look for opportunities to build a company in spaces that they think are opportunities. In the energy sector, they are looking at renewable petroleum (sugar + ecoli = petroleum), which takes minutes rather than eons. There are some partners that are interested in this kind of technology, and they aren’t necessarily the big oil companies. States in particular are interested (they want to be the next Texas).
On the biotech side, they are now able to sequence a single cell’s genome. It takes a couple of weeks, but in a few years, it will take only a few days. What we know now is that the DNA you are born with is not the same as you age, and for diseases that are related to mutations like cancer, it will be critical to understand how these mutations are taking place. David said that 90% of all cancer deaths are from metastasices, and we treat the primary cancer, not the metastasices because we don’t really understand them.
John Wolpert, Innovation Consultant, TheThreePercent
John touched on a of of different points, but they do all go together on entrepreneurship within companies:
- John started by talking about the “warp drive problem”: three companies in three different places have collectively solved a problem, but they don’t know even to look for each other. We no longer have the time to take centuries for the random collisions to happen to solve our problems, we need to create places where interactions can cross-fertilization can happen.
- It’s one thing to share innovations (the nouns), it’s another thing to share intentions (the action verbs). If you really want to understand the intentions of a company, you have to be there, on the ground in the companies; virtually is not enough.
- Innovations versus improvements. Innovation changes how people organize their lives and changes the way we see the world; improvement are also great, but don’t change us in the same way.
- He called the corporation as the last bastion of totalitarianism, which makes innovation inherently more difficult.
- He told a story of a philosophy undergrad that taught himself to write some coding language, so they hired him, and they filed 9 patents in 3 months and a lot of that was the intersection between him and the technical team- a testament to the power of idea sharing.
- John’s experience has taught him that the common link between long-lived intrapreneurship programs is focusing on talent first.
- Groups that reach across the company are very hard to kill.
- John talked about his unique formula for innovation. Give an idea 10 weeks to prove the value with small costs and small risk, it’s not as scary to companies.
Again, making it ok to fail so that you can reach further.
Dennis Littky, Co-founder and Director, The Big Picture Company
Dennis told us that someone did a giant survey of high school students and asked them the one word that describes their high school best, guess what it was: boring. The Met is opposite, anything but boring, it engages students in their passions. There are no classes Tuesday and Thursday, the students get internships and mentors. The coursework is on Monday, Wednesday, Friday where math, science, and english are all integrated. Everyone thought they were crazy when they started, but the result was that the Met had statistics that blew everyone away: 97% attendance, 2% drop-out rate, and everyone got accepted to college. They now have 72 schools around the country with this model, thanks the Gates Foundation.
Now the issue is college. If you are a black or hispanic kid from a low-income family, you have a 10% statistical odds of graduating. The colleges are saying, “they’re not ready”, but they’ll never be ready enough. The Met Schcool kids comparatively are either graduated or are still in school at a rate of 70%. So they are starting a college, College Unbound. They are taking the first 10 students in the fall. It’s focused on innovation and entrepreneurship. It’s about following their passions. They will do internships 3 days a week and coursework the other 2. The high schoolers that spoke were very impressive.
David Rockwell*, Founder & CEO, Rockwell Group
The energy to build something is very different from the energy to maintain it, and the energy to maintain something isn’t very creative. Storytelling is the oldest kind of communication. The need to be connected is greater now than maybe it ever has been precisely because we are otherwise so disconnected. He’s interested in storytelling through spaces. His latest mission is reinventing playgrounds via Imagine Playground. Kaboom has hired him to build them all around the country.
