Although the Knowinnovation team facilitates a number of different kinds of workshops and events, we’re probably most known for running Sandpits and Ideas Labs. These 5-day events, very intense and immersive, bring together people of diverse backgrounds and disciplines in order to generate ideas for radically novel research proposals. KI has developed a process that helps these extreme ideas emerge, but there’s another very important component to the success of these workshops: the collection of participants in the room. Here’s how we counsel our clients to organize a group for one of these events. Keep reading »

Knowinnovation is typically brought in to help with collective creative projects, getting groups of scientists or academics or field workers to collaborate. But we know that when people leave our workshops, the creativity doesn’t stop. In fact, it has to kick into a higher gear to finish the work that was started, motivated by the individual rather than the group dynamic.

We’ve described what kind of workshop environment helps a group work more creatively and productively in a workshop scenario, but after that, when you return from an event, what do you go back to? Is it the kind of space that optimizes your thinking and your creative output? Keep reading »

At just about every KI-facilitated event, there comes a moment when we have to talk about terminology. This is especially important with multi-disciplinary groups. Every type of science has a robust language of its own, rife with acronyms and jargon that make for efficient communication amongst peers within the field but can be confusing, misleading or off-putting to people from other disciplines.

Very often, we create a wall of definitions and invite people to think of all the terms that might be pertinent to the topic of the workshop. Then we ask people to define these words and phrases. The conversation that ensues sometimes turns into a debate, from which emerges a clearer understanding of the term, or else multiple definitions. For instance, at a workshop on synthetic biology, the physicists and mathematicians started using the term vector – a quantity having direction as well as magnitude – which confused the biologists, who were thinking epidemiological terms in which case a vector is a living carrier that transmits and infectious agent. I think the computer scientists had their own definition, too.

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What would the world be like with “frictionless” creativity? What if we could easily engage with practically anyone, anywhere, at almost no transactional cost? How would that impact our capacity to connect with and catalyze our creative colleagues all over the world?

Without geographical constraints you could access talent from anyplace around the globe, while staying put in exactly the place where you choose to be. The economic costs of an office could be eliminated, or at least the expenses of meetings and business travel could be minimized. The environment would thank you for reducing your carbon footprint. Yes, you’d have to account for the cost of people’s time, but that could be classified as an investment with a potentially high return, especially if innovation can thrive, despite – or as a result of – the diverse perspectives of a virtual team. Keep reading »

A recent Newsweek article sparked an age-old debate between two camps in the innovation field: those for and against brainstorming. The term dates back to 1930s, when Alex Osborn first employed organized ideation in the advertising agency he headed. In his book, Applied Imagination, published in 1953, Osborn defined brainstorming as “a creative conference for producing a list of ideas – ideas which can be subsequently evaluated and further processed.”

Five years later, in 1958, Yale University conducted a study to test brainstorming and concluded that brainstorming individually was more effective than brainstorming in a group, but it was widely misinterpreted as “brainstorming didn’t work.” The Yale study created a debate that has percolated for fifty years. Does brainstorming work or not? Does a group generate more and better ideas than the same people would if they were working individually? Keep reading »

A recent Sandpit on the topic of energy efficiency gave us reason to pause and consider the carbon output of our own work. Given that we travel to hotels or meeting venues to work with our clients, and that very often the people we work with are collected from far-flung locations to come together for innovation workshops and sessions, it dawned on us we might be churning out a fair amount of CO2. Keep reading »