vrijdag 3 juni 2011

The Young Foundation: Endorsing Applications with a 21st Century Twist?

Social innovators do not often apply for jobs. They are frequently driven to work in networks, create their own projects in teams, or act entrepreneurially. In the case of the Young Foundation’s position for Director of Communications & External Relations one ought to make an exception. The Young Foundation’s key mission is so close to my own commitments and background that not asking them to dance would be tantamount to spending an entire evening in a Tango salon chained to a chair. As a dancer who gives workshops on Tango as a Metaphor for Innovation and Personal Leadership that is frankly no option.

1. Prompts, inspirations and diagnoses

Like the Young Foundation I passionately believe in the possibility and necessity for entrepreneurship and business with social impact and benefit. Like them, I incessantly follow developments and opportunities in health, education and wellbeing. I recently gave a TEDx talk on the future of education in which I called for “replacing education with innovation”. Last year I published an article about “space and value based innovation”. I also shared a panel with TED speaker Nic Marks, giving a response to his Happy Planet Index on the same day as David Cameron announced that wellbeing was to be measured to steer UK government policy.

Life continues at 65 …

I’m a trend watcher / analyst and regularly write for and am a member of the editorial board of Second Sight trend magazine. A favourite topic is the changing landscape of ageing, and I am part of a think tank group researching the implications of Singularity, population changes and the future of human-machine interaction. As part of my work for Club of Amsterdam I also help set the agenda for public debate around future issues, innovations and their social impact. In a future blog I will tell the story of how the Young Foundations report of 2006 Life begins at 60 – What kind of NHS after 2008? can today be recalibrated in the context of the Quantified Self movement and its impact on self-empowered health monitoring.

Reframing the question and crafting your own answer

Much of my work over the last fifteen years has focused on leadership issues, specifically for youth and young adults. I’ve been teaching at both further and higher education, graduate and post-graduate level since 1997, specializing in media and cultural studies, globalization, entrepreneurship and communications. I seized the opportunity to contribute through publications to the debates over Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge communities. Most importantly, after working as team leader at the KaosPilots Netherlands in 2008/09 and co-initiating the Knowmads School for Social Entrepreneurs in Amsterdam, I branched out into Action-Learning based sustainability education. We received a phone call from a major university one day, asking us to create a course around the economic crisis. We reframed this request in terms of “what can get us out of this crisis?” We designed and ran the ground-breaking 5-months-course Sustainable Leadership & Entrepreneurship, which not only was the first of its kind but has also produced dozens of real-life student projects with clients including ID&T, Puma, and 15 restaurant. We are now the most popular course at said university and a student team recently replaced all light bulbs with LED lights in one of its campuses. Needlesss to say we’ve been using the Young Foundation’s 2010 report The Open Book of Social Innovation extensively.

2. Proposals and ideas

As a freelancer in education, innovation and new media (which I often combine into highly unusual event experiences) I have honed my ability to draft compelling stories that are picked up by the media and resonate with public discourses. Although I began my professional life over a decade ago as a researcher and research designer for UK and European public institutions (examples include Central London Learning Partnership, European Music Office, London Arts Board, National Music Council) and thus had real impact on policy making, I feel it is in my most recent project-led work that my PR skills have come into their own. Two examples stand out. One is the Augmented Reality Ecosystem event I orchestrated, and the other is the Social Innovation Safari I designed and ran with KnowledgeLand last summer.

Augmented Citizens

In 2009 I conduceted a Scenario Planning exercise for my client V2_. Upon analysing the results it was decided to hold an event, which for the first time would bring together the growing community around Augmented Reality. The target was to connect a minimum of 30 people around this niche topic, which was just about to make the transition from micro-to mega-trend. I succeeded in booking the two leading competitors in AR (Layar and Wikitude) for the event and attracted in excess of 130 attendees, finishing off with a waiting list. I deliberately did not invite any press, thus tapping into the current theory that creating a community will automatically attract interest. I was therefore unsurprised, albeit pleased, when Reuters turned up on the day and wrote about our AR workshop, which covered the areas of commercial applications of AR, sustainability, open data and storytelling. I consider it one of my greatest talents to diagnose what an institution needs, design the right combination of ‘medicinie’, run the ‘operation’, and harvest and publicise the ‘before/after’ stories emerging from the ‘treatment’. Complex stakeholder management towards multiple win-win situations is one of my greatest passions. In pursuing sustainable relationships and projects I bring a most healthy dose of humility with me. I internalized this principle during my KUBUS studies at Copenhagen Business School, which revolutionized my thinking around project and resources management. I always, always, always seek to serve purpose, not ego. I aim to work from response, not reaction. Promoting the work of others is second nature to me, as hundreds of students and dozens of clients of mine can testify.

3. Prototyping and pilots

In November 2009 I worked as an external expert for the Deutsche Telekom sponsored innovation camp Palomar 5 in Berlin. By the spring of 2010 I had become convinced that pressure cooker innovation journeys were the way forward, but that too few (if any?) initiatives targeted and brought together the over-thirties, forties, fifties and so forth. Together with KnowledgeLand think tank Director Chris Sigaloff I designed the world’s first Social Innovation Safari. With no budget I succeeded in attracting 30 Dutch and international participants of highly diverse backgrounds and ages by using a smart social media based PR strategy, which included co-creating this video. Our oldest participant was a 60-year-old Cambridge educated entrepreneur from the UK living in Czech Republic; our youngest was a 20-year-old Canadian. One was a Philips employee, another the manager of the Basque Innovation Agency. I concepted the entire look & feel of the Social Safari campaign. Next to my insistence on age diversity I also contributed the DNA value of rapid prototyping to the Social Safari. I cannot stress enough how indispensably important the piloting element in social innovation is to my thinking and my doing in this area. There must be results. Creativity is a necessary but insufficient condition for innovation. I am closely connected to MIT’s world-wide FabLab community and see potential partnerships between an organization like Young Foundation and the social innovation stories and projects emerging from viral projects such as the FabLab movement.

Never fall in love with your own ideas

The final Safari summit attracted close to a hundred people as well as media coverage. Our clients were satisfied and four out of the five real-world challenges the Safari participants worked on are ongoing today. But that doesn’t mean that we ran the perfect Social Innovation week.

4. Sustaining

We’re about to run the Safari again this year from July 17-24, and I have personally been working on upscaling, diffusing and internationalizing the concept. This time we want to attract a number of commercial clients and challenges, and we are developing the business model around the Safari to make it both sustainable and profitable. I draw a clear distinction between entrepreneurship and charity. Entrepreneurship always means creating a reasonable expectation of rewards on your and others’ investment. Social entrepreneurship and social innovation are no exceptions. For this reason I am forever prepared to re-focus or redesign projects towards sustainability even if this means letting go at times. My objective and analytical thinking skills were polished at Rotterdam Erasmus University where I pursued my second set of Master studies in Economics and Philosophy, focusing on Ethics in economic policy (including the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum).

5. Scaling and Diffusing

I believe the time may have come for me to bring what I dare to call my ‘modest magic’ to a wider audience. It’s time to create a bigger impact by bringing my skills and experience to an organization that has a commitment to scaling up in international settings. The ethically sourced diamond I’ve polished myself to become is looking for amplification to shine more brightly. I would relish the chance to throw light onto, help power and help promote through my work people and initiatives that drive value-based entrepreneurship throughout the world. Results run the world, but it is stories that run our minds and hearts to perceive, support and build on those results.

Curiosity Made The Cat

In 1999 when the term ‘multi-media’ was still fashionable I completed a Master degree at the HyperMedia Research Centre in London. There I learnt the enduring basics for understanding web-based communities, non-linear storytelling, virtual information management and Internet architecture. For my final project I content-designed part of StudentUK’s website. The first thing I’d attempt to further enhance the Young Foundation’s website is to give it an interactive, dynamic community feel from the first second it uploads. Looking at a quality painting is very engaging but opening a door for people arouses their curiosity and involves them. To invite people into an unknown space – even though we might discover familiar elements in it – is to involve them and make them leave their comfort zone. Visitors become pro-sumers. Let’s run the Young Foundation Archive Competition: Crowd-sourced stories like the T-shirt designs at Threadless. Let’s be open. For example, the Young Foundation’s existing and potential communities could be asked to write or make a video about OpenEverything, with the specific request to highlight the predictive and pioneering aspects of this 2008 event three years on. Which elements of the initiative have turned out to be visionary and agenda-shaping in 2011?

In the Attention Economy a highly hosted one-day-long press conference experience entitled We’ve Been Saving Our News might have more impact than the traditional press release, although the latter can benefit from degrees of rebranding. Five Reasons Why Not To Write About The Young Foundation’s DIGITAL ACTIVISM Project; or Future 100 Young Entrepreneurs – One Year On (running a micro-funding initiative with the press where people predict success and invest in projects) are just two tasters from a HeartStorm session we haven’t yet had. I would love to facilitate one so Young Foundation shall have plenty more than its currently 611 reasons to tweet. As marketing manager and moderator for the annual Creative Company Conference my team generated 600+ followers on twitter in less than two weeks. The combination of a powerful web presence, social media profiling, above-the-line storytelling and on-and offline community building can ensure that the Young Foundation’s important work is scaled up and diffused at maximum speed and scope, thus contributing to …

6 … desirable systemic change

… must be pursued.

Together, perhaps?

woensdag 4 mei 2011

Make My Day A Memory


Do you remember June 7th 2010? Sorry? Was it your birthday? No? Someone else’s? Maybe? Did the sun shine? No idea? What day of the week was it? Hmm? Did you feel happy? Inspired? Who knows? Did you smile? You’d like to think so? How much money did you spend that day ? Come again? What did the papers say? Can’t recall? Did you learn something? Probably? …. Sure?

Memories are not easily made. Remember
June 7 this year.
For sure.

maandag 26 juli 2010

On Safari: Kennisland and Portal2Dreams run Innovation Safari in Amsterdam


28 adventurers, 6 sunsets, 5 quests, 1 oasis: How The First Urban Innovation Safari Surpassed Our Wildest Expectations

I am post-Safari. It’s state of being. Everything seems possible; there is a bristling energy in my veins. Thanks to 30 amazing people who worked at Kennisland during an extraordinary week of social innovation in Amsterdam this July. By the end of Social Safari 2010 we gave 5 inspiring solutions to 5 satisfied clients and Ombudsman Pieter Hilhorst wrote a ravishing Safari review in the Volkskrant. Here's the story of what happened, and why.

Safari roadmap

3 people and their passions came together at the start of 2010. The mission of independent think tank Kennisland is to make Dutch society smarter. Director Chris Sigaloff and Digital Pioneers project manager Corline van Es wanted to share their social innovation methods with the world. And I had just published an article in Second Sight Trend magazine on the DNA of space-based innovation:

  • Take people out of their usual environment into a highly hosted space
  • Expose them to extreme diversity of culture, background, mindset
  • Work cross-generational
  • Put them through a pressure cooker journey of input and action
  • Spend some actual time together
  • Develop a strong focus on process and product / prototypes / interventions
  • Include a clear value component for innovation that is good for the world.

See the Safari methodology explained at the final event (start at 4:00 minutes).

Safari partners & challenges

And so the concept for the first ever Social Innovation Safari was born with this video inviting Dutch and international social innovators to “Be a tiger this summer”. We selected 28 to spend a week with us to work on 5 local partner challenges. Click on the clients below to see what they asked and the answers they received from the Safari crew by the end of the week:

Jeugdzorg EYE Institute Weekend School Ijburg Mix Academy

Safari participants

So much diversity and talent in the house! We had Tedx speaker Noam Kostucki and co-founder of Seeducation from London. The Basque Innovation Agency sent Carolina Rubio and Telecom/Industrial engineer and open source enthusiast Iker. Simon Lawrence, Cambridge alumni and Executive Director of the British Chamber of Commerce, joined from Prague while Tage Skofield and Mari Nielsen of BCE Impulse brought a fresh Norwegian wind to the Safari 2010. Equally impressive from The Netherlands: Patrick at Insightz, Victor Wolleart from Jonge Honden, Brock of Knowmads, Nienke from Philips, Thieu Besselink and the River Institute, Designers Mylene, Martijn, and Heleen, Hannah of Schrijfbij/The Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Junior Advisor Saar, dancer Yomi, Alex - Gewoon Anders, Peter who founded Public Cinema, Trendwatcher Hortense Koster, Customer Experience consultant Tessa, Public Health student Karlijn. From Belgium/US Christina represented Evolutionize, NGO professional Anastasia joined from Russia, and we had Turkish architect Bet and Bart and Danielle from Kennisland. All profiles here.


Safari journey

What did we do? Day Zero was arrival and welcome day and coincided with the madness of the World Cup Final. We had a Safari table in Boom Chicago to watch it, but first we gathered at Kennisland on the Keizersgracht to brief the participants on the week ahead. We acknowledged that social innovation is not yet completely defined. It is richly interpreted in different places - and so mirrors the Safari's commitment to diversity. For an overview of social innovation read the Young Foundation’s recent report.

Breakfast at 8.30 ushers in Day One of the Safari. Getting to know each other, briefings on the client questions and input on methodology by Kennisland. Next up we board the Safari bus and visit all 5 clients across town. Memorable moments: Real emotion and honesty at Jeugdzorg, Simon and Alex do an on-the-spot intervention in Ijburg interviewing local shop owners. Last stop in the middle of a thunderstorm is Mix Academy. After dinner they host our Tedx inspiration talks. We finish on the rooftop around midnight. No one has slept enough, and no one will for days to come.

Quote of the Day: “I haven’t worked this hard in years” (C.J. Ozer who imports saffron into NL)


Day Two: Joeri tells the story of Kennisland as an example of real life social innovation, followed by input sessions from hosts Chris, Corline and Kwela on the How's and the What's of social innovation. We stress the importance of prototyping (testing, market research, implementation) before the 28 Tigers choose their groups and projects. The afternoon is spent developing ideas and interventions on-the-fly. At 6pm everyone must gather in front of an expert panel BBQ in the Westerpark and present their strategic client plans. We're joined by Kim Taylor of The New Motion who will on Friday provide the gift of an Electric Car to our VIP Pieter Hilhorst.

By 9pm all groups are given a symbolic survial pack and sent away for 24 hours to make their interventions and prototypes. Some choose to re-visit their clients, others make movies or conduct urban research. We don't see them again until 9pm on Day Three when they return to the Kennisland HQ to be greeted with candles, incense and ... foot baths! The 3 organisers go on their knees and wash and massage every pair of feet to say thankyou. We then share stories from each group's 24-hours mini-Safari and welcome our special visitor Dominik Wind from Berlin.








Early morning of Day Four and we choose between a Creative Commons talk, watching the Ted Global livestream, or sleeping in. Dominik of Until We See New Land joins us to share lessons learnt at the Palomar 5 Berlin Innovation Camp 2009 and stays for coaching the project groups towards their final presentations and solutions. The pace is hotting up. At night we make our way to sustainable office Groene Bocht and everyone loves co-founder Aart van Heller's talk on the Groene Bocht's Mission. For some it's their favourite Safari evening: Time to talk, time to interview each other in front of the cameras.

Carolina: "I didn't think it possible to get to results stage in one week, but we did!"

Day Five - the public summit is only a few hours away. It’s mayhem. People will start arriving at 5.30pm and we haven’t done our Golddigging session yet. We do it now. We sit on our hands and knees and make a gigantic mindmap logging our lessons learnt. It will later be displayed in the Kennisland party room. The groups are running around like mad putting the finishing touches to their presentations. I am sent out to Athenaeum to hunt for meaningful gifts for our clients. I choose Jan Rothuizen’s The Soft Map of Amsterdam. I also prepare the secret internal farewell ceremony for the Tigers - The Walk of Trust - and organize the Safari parting gifts: Engraved locks that will be displayed at a secret location in Amsterdam. They symbolise the dual meaning of the Safari journey: First, unlock your potential (creativity), then lock down your ideas around something tangible and doable (commitment to results).




The energy at Kennisland is incredible. We have officially entered the magical state of Flow. People communicate with smiles, eyes, gestures. You can ask anyone to help with anything and they will. News comes in that our VIP has confirmed: The Ombudsman Pieter Hilhorst will attend the summit and provide the closing statement. I run down to The New Motion to arrange for him to be picked up and delivered to Kennisland in the Electric Tesla. Time is running out. And then the house begins to fill up. 5 successful presentations and several moving speeches later the 28 Safaristi present us with an incredible surprise gift. I ask them: "When did you possibly have time to prepare this???"

Participants, guests & Pieter Hilhorst (right)


















Future destinations

At the minimum level an Innovation Safari quickly gathers people around a purpose and enables them to trust and collaborate on an energy level rarely seen in traditional work environments. At the maximum impact level this type of innovation journey produces insights and results that are fresh, useful, applicable. Somewhere in the middle it cross-pollinates knowledge through diversity and generates inspiration and hope. My mission will be to bring Safari-like experiences to as many people and organisations as possible.

In September we will present on the Safari 2010 at Creative Company Conference and Singapore Management University. We're currently exploring how to bring Safari's to Oslo, Bilbao, Dubai, Vienna and London. A Safari aimed at the commercial sector is in planning for Amsterdam. If you would like to partner up or become a participant or receive training on how to bring innovation to where you are, please contact Kwela Sabine Hermanns. We are also on Twitter: Social Safari / Kwela Hermanns



Keep your eyes peeled for Safari updates on this blog and have a look at these links: