Category: Blog
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The Village Grows: Considering the Community of Creative Practitioners
Knowinnovation’s origin story can be traced back to the CPSI community. KI was born out of the need to adapt the tenets of creative problem-solving to interdisciplinary science. What’s more, KI has given birth to a few offspring of its own: Innovation Bound, which takes the KI approach into the corporate world, and Inclusive Innovation,…
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The ALS Cure Project: Writing the Roadmap to a Remedy
How personal loss sparked a coordinated international effort to accelerate ALS research ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, is a devastating, incurable neurodegenerative disease the causes of which are not known. Over time, the disease robs its victims of the ability to control their muscles and most experience a slow, excruciating decline. It is also devastating…
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Navigating the Challenges of Interdisciplinary Research: A Closer Look at Knowledge Integration
In today’s ever-evolving landscape, interdisciplinary research (IDR) has emerged as a critical tool for tackling complex societal challenges. This blog post delves into the distinctive challenges faced by IDR, focusing on the crucial aspect of knowledge integration. By understanding the unique hurdles posed by diverse disciplines, we can pave the way for more effective and…
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Technology-Driven Future of Cancer Research
Virtual Jumpstart connected synthetic biologists with cancer researchers to create novel therapeutic approaches Lab-engineered cells are injected into a patient where they latch onto a tumor and deliver a lethal therapeutic payload. Another type of synthetic cells attaches to the inside of a person’s intestines and becomes detectable using ultrasound if they encounter cancerous cells.…
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Coming Together (Virtually) for a Healthier Africa
Scaling a 350-person meeting to 1600+ participants required inventing new virtual networking tools and interactive experiences One thing we love about working with scientists is that they are motivated by trying to make the world a better place. They see problems, such as the need to apply the latest in data science to improve public…
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KI’s Virtual Journey
When going virtual became the new normal in 2020, our clients and potential clients had to confront the core question: “Can teams of scientists work together and be creative online?”
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Accelerating Science With Big Data
Many scientific fields have yet to realize the potential of Big Data. That’s where NSF’s Harnessing the Data Revolution (HDR) comes in — from improving our chances of detecting dark matter to resolving the tree of life. The HDR All-hands meeting brought together principal investigators to share best practices and discuss how to grow the community.
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Realizing the Benefits of Basic Research
It takes more than innovative science to get funding for basic research these days. Researchers applying for grants must also demonstrate the “So what?” of their science. In addition to convincing grant reviewers of the intellectual merit of their proposals, scientists must also show the potential for broader impacts and how they plan to work…
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Next-Level Bioelectric Medicine
How the first all-virtual Ideas Lab brought experimentalists and computational modelers together to accelerate bioelectronic device development In recent months, some scientists have found themselves asking: “Do we let this pandemic slow down the science that could help people live healthier lives?” Last month, organizers, mentors and 29 researchers decided the answer was ‘no’ and…
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Empowering Ambassadors of Science
Researchers who collaborate with others must be able to describe and discuss their work with fellow scientists, both within and outside their area of expertise. We’ve noticed that those who work best on the cross-disciplinary teams that form at KI events are not just translators, but ambassadors. They are sensitive to differences in language and…
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Big Single-Cell Science
Creating a molecular map of the human body requires unprecedented coordination—and virtual meetings proved they could deliver It sounds like science fiction: a searchable Google Maps-like app of the 30 trillion cells of the human body. But, that’s exactly what teams of scientists around the world are working together to create. Their efforts have been…
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CAREER Workshop Goes Virtual
The decision to go virtual was for organizers of the 2020 NSF Engineering CAREER Proposal Workshop. Sure they’re a group of tech-savvy engineers, but they had never offered a multi-day event online before. Eventually, they decided they needed help with the tech side of things so that could focus on the event and with making…
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Reducing Opioid Deaths
The State of Connecticut sees a disproportionately high number of opioid-related deaths. In response, UConn’s Institute for Collaboration on Health, Intervention, and Policy held an Ideas Lab to bring together a diverse group of academics and stakeholders to come up with innovative ways to address the problem.
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Breaking Down Silos to Stop COVID-19
Scientists across the country are focused on stopping, treating and developing a vaccine against COVID-19. For those things to happen, the science must go on. But how can researchers collaborate at a time when labs are shutting down and there are restrictions on meeting face-to-face? Researchers at the University of Utah’s Immunology, Inflammation & Infectious Disease…
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You Too Can Go Virtual
KI shares a decade of virtual event experience to help scientists adapt during the pandemic The response to the COVID-19 pandemic seems change daily. It’s clear, however, that life as usual is not an option for anyone, including scientists. Researchers are being asked to shut down their labs and work from home. At the same…
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Beyond the Skin-Pinch Test for Scleroderma
Researchers blame a low-tech skin-pinch test, in part, for the routine failure of potential scleroderma drugs in clinical trials. Modernizing the evaluation of potential drug therapies was the focus of the three-day Scleroderma Diagnosis Sandpit hosted by Scleroderma and Raynaud’s UK February 26-28, 2020 at the Wellcome Collection in London.
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Plotting the Course for Systematic Biology
Systematic biologists study and classify the diversity of life on earth. What they do is at the heart of evolutionary biology and, some would argue, biology as a whole. The Society of Systematic Biologists met January 3-6, 2020 at the University of Florida, Gainesville. Their conference, SSB 2020: Systematics in the Swamp, included a KI…
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Remodeling the House of Science
Today’s young scientists are under enormous pressure. Setting up new labs, teaching courses for the first time and conducting publication-worthy research all at the same time can take it’s toll. But, some young researchers are learning about — and putting into practice — collective leadership, which they hope will lead to a much-needed institutional makeover…
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Resolving the Tree of Life
Scientists have long used physical traits to shed light on evolutionary relationships. Sometimes this has worked, like using lactation to group mammals. And, sometimes, it hasn’t: people once thought bats were featherless birds! Today, evolutionary biologists rely more heavily on molecular-based phylogenies to resolve relatedness. But, what they haven’t been able to do is address…
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Biology’s Jupitershots
The Reintegrating Biology workshop series uses KI’s methods of deliberate creativity to identify new research questions that could be addressed by combining approaches and perspectives from different subdisciplines of biology, the key challenges and scientific gaps that must be addressed to answer these questions, and the physical infrastructure and workforce training needed.
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Managing Shifting Marine Species
Our love affair with the ocean runs deep. Humans love to live next to the sea, honeymoon on islands and dream about summer road trips to the beach while tapping away at our keyboards. During lobster and crab season, we enjoy the food, community and culture of the Northeast U.S. Likewise, we celebrate shrimp and…
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How to Catch a Glimpse of Dark Matter
Scientists think that about 25 percent of our universe is made up of stuff you can’t see or feel. They’ve named this non-luminescent mystery material dark matter. Some think dark matter is hot (HDM) while others think its cold (CDM). And, yes, some say – you guessed it – warm (WDM). The cold theory has…
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Predicting Human Performance
Scientists have been grappling with the problem of predicting human performance for years. They know that a better understanding of human performance would allow us to do everything from improving the well-being of medical students to changing the way athletes train, perform and recover. Now, a wealth of new technology is promising to fundamentally change our basic…
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The Trilemma Challenge: Food, Health & Ecosystem
Feeding the planet in the 21st century means doubling production of food, feed, fuel and energy while at the same time making food systems sustainable, inclusive and more efficient. It’s a food-health-ecosystem trilemma. CSU researchers are forming interdisciplinary teams in order to come up with innovative ways of meeting the challenge.
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Getting Smart in the Sandpit
After facilitating many a Sandpit (aka Ideas Lab) for academic researchers, we wondered if our methodology might work for a development problem? Inclusive Innovation was born to find out. Here’s what we learned.
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The Language of Creativity
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. This raises our attention to the fact of how much we rely on language to convey meaning,…
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Walk this Way
Walking, it seems, is now a tested method for coming up with creative ideas. It probably doesn’t surprise you that standing up and stretching your legs and getting some aerobic activity to move your blood around might help your brain to conjure up more options. But now there’s research from Stanford University’s Graduate School of…
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No Agenda Survives Human Contact
It’s not that we don’t have a design for the workshop. Nor is it that we’re keen to keep our participants in the dark. Our experience is that no published agenda survives human contact. So as soon as there are people introduced to the process, things change, slow down, speed up, go a different direction.…
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Connect and Catalyze
The team of mentors – there can between three to five at an Ideas Lab – usually represents a range of different academic perspectives that have some bearing on the question that’s central to the event. Their expertise is essential, but an equally important attribute for a mentor is to be ambitious about the science,…
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Portable Recording Devices
We often refer to Post-it notes as portable recording devices, just to put in perspective why we stick to using them. It’s one of the easiest, fastest ways to get a group of people to put their thoughts together and then sort them out, collectively. Quickly, a group can organize a wall of hundreds of…
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Talk to Strangers
People from other disciplines, other departments, other universities. They are interested in a domain that is not exactly your science. It may be a neighboring branch of science with obvious parallels or overlaps but still with an approach that is different from yours, or it might be from a very different universe, a science that…
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Energy Management
It is interesting that in this day and age of climate change we are all very aware of the discussions about “energy conservation” and we make a concerted effort to turn off the lights of an empty office, to walk rather than drive to the shop, and turn down our house temperature by a degree…
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Ideal Participant Pool
KI’s Ideas Labs are intense and immersive, bringing together people of diverse backgrounds and disciplines in order to generate ideas for radically novel research proposals. Our process 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…
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Tolerating Ambiguity
It‘s usually in a moment of feeling blocked or stalled that there’s a fierce temptation to seize the nearest reasonable solution. This is when we need a tolerance for ambiguity. It means staying in uncertainty, or staying with the question, despite the discomfort of not knowing the answer, or not knowing where we’re headed. It…
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Just Say Yes
The KI method depends on a unique skill that scientists may be unaccustomed to: deferring judgment. It is the capacity to set aside your opinions temporarily and accept a new or odd idea and take the time to develop it before dismissing it. If you can overlook the flaws of a suggestion and play with…
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Throwaway Data
During the creative problem solving process, there’s a stage when we encourage people to capture all the information about the problem we’re trying to solve. We’ll ask them to write down any piece of information about the challenge that might be pertinent. At this point, the client – or stakeholder, or problem owner – will…
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Frugal Innovation
Scarcity can be a major driver for innovation. A bleak economy can thrust companies, organizations, universities – and entire countries – into an austerity mode. In the context of a changing economy when it seems everything has to be faster, better and cheaper, there’s a type of innovator who’s thriving: the jugaad innovator. Jugaad is…
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A Sandpit Tale
Knowinnovation has been facilitating Sandpits and Ideas Labs for a number of years, and this has has given us the opportunity to witness the emergence of some fascinating science. In many ways, KI is like a midwife, creating an open environment for different perspectives to collide, which leads to new questions that ultimately provoke new…
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Make Room
Where you meet sets the mood for your meeting, which is why the space matters. Put people in the same old meeting room and the chances of getting the same old output are pretty good. If it’s a big open room with an inviting seating plan around round tables, with long walls of white paper…
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Failure Teaching
There is a common belief that most significant learning comes from our failures. And yet there are mistakes that we seem to repeat, over and over again. Is learning from failure overrated? A few years ago, researchers at MIT suggested that we may not learn as much from mistakes as we do from success. But…
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It’s Down to Preference
Some people thrive in a group setting, and their creative flow is sparked by the frenetic and popcorn-style of a fast meeting with lots of ideas, or even if it’s not fast, in an environment where ideas are exchanged and developed by a number of people. Others think better when they’re operating solo. They solve…
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Size Matters
Group work can be clunky and cumbersome. You have to spend longer clarifying the objectives, aligning resources and getting people on board. Sometimes, it can seem nearly impossible to achieve the consensus necessary to advance within a task. Groups are a powerful mechanism to produce innovative solutions, but getting to that product can be arduous,…
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Leading Creatively
One widely used definition of creativity describes it as the generation of ideas that are both novel and useful. There is nothing wrong with this definition, it accurately describes a class of ideas. But for some reason, despite the equal weight of the words useful and novel in the aforementioned definition, novel ends up getting…
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Networking for Novelty
The network of people around you is an important resource. This pool of who you know, and who they know – and all the accumulation of collective knowledge of the people within your reach – can make a difference in your ability to do the things you dream of doing.
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When is a Sandpit not a Sandpit?
into a shorter period of time? Do breakthroughs happen in the same way, or is there a minimum time required to achieved innovation? In an attempt to answer these questions we’ve designed a shorter event, a Mini-Sandpit or a Jumpstart. It is literally that – a jumpstart to enable the right people to come together…
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Be Deliberate
Creative ideas sometimes come as a surprise, but they don’t have to be an accident. Instead of waiting for good ideas to arrive at random or by luck; we can hunt them down. When you use a creative process – whether it’s for a short meeting, a 2-day or week-long workshop or a 3-year project…
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The Productive Dissident
Deviance has an important place in the innovative process. We don’t challenge norms without a little (or a lot) of deviant thinking. And the single best way to discourage inventive, out-of-the-box deviance is to prohibit disagreement and probing questions. We need a little clarifying, critical judgment now and then. The trick is to cultivate a…
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Equating Procrastination
A skilled procrastinator can be highly innovative, inventing all sorts of reasons not to do something, conceiving clever excuses to delay starting or not to have finished. If you have to rely on someone who’s expert at this kind of delaying, it can be maddening. If you’re the procrastinator putting off your own projects, it…
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Brains and Soul in Equal Measure
So much depends on getting the right people in the room. A workshop designed to produce innovative outcome can fail – even with the perfect agenda design and the most astute facilitators – if the people who’ve been assembled don’t have the right spirit and motivation to help it succeed. But how do you get…
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Wondering Mind
A subtle shift in language provokes our thinking and makes our brain more nimble. Instead of complaining about what doesn’t work or isn’t happening, the problem posed as a question starts a chain reaction that ignites our curiosity. We realise it’s not so much about naming the problem, it’s more about wondering what are all…
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Right, then.
Still there you are in some meeting, ostensibly about cultivating novel solutions to a chronic problem and the standard assumptions are upheld – sometimes even defended – usually by the person who thinks they know better. The person who needs to be right, gets to be right – but often at the expense of novel…
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Defining Brainstorming
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…
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When Toys are Handy
The playful gizmos and gadgets we bring along help make the conference room look less sterile and corporate, but the toys are not just for show. If you’re a tactile person, being able to squeeze a rubber ball, or twist the beads of a wooden wand, fumble with a Rubik’s cube or stack tiny colored…
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Right People in the Workshop
The alchemy that results in a successful workshop depends on starting with the right ingredients. We have found that one of the most important of these elements is the people who are invited to attend. Here’s are a few tips on recognizing the best — and less-than-ideal candidates for a creative team science workshop.
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Sweet Solitude
The KI process depends on people with diverse research backgrounds coming together, getting to know one another and exchanging novel ideas. But, sometimes getting the most out of group thinking and new ideas means individuals need to take time in solitude to let these ideas sort themselves out.
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Do You Feel Lucky?
Lucky people deliberately choose to make their life diverse and different. Unlucky ones tend to stick to routines. So one way to instantly improve your luck, and your creativity, is to change things up. Do it differently. Eat lunch at a different place. Shop at a new store. Walk home a different route. And while…
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Another Brainstorming
If it’s a productive brainstorming session, it can give the participants a real sense of accomplishment and group ownership of an idea, which can only enhance the sense of team – much moreso than a rigged teambuilding event. If the session if lively and humorous, the laughter reduces stress and creates a good working climate.…
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The Naïve Mind
If your team is fairly expert, it might help to invite a non-expert who may be especially fluid or creative, but who’s in the dark about the subject at hand. Their questions often end up redefining the problem, and because they are unencumbered with the conventional wisdom, they are freer to think of wild and…
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A Smaller Sandprint
Our initial problem statement: How to minimize KI’s carbon footprint? We invited the participants at a Sandpit on energy efficient design to offer suggestions first of all on how we could measure our carbon output, so we have a benchmark against which to improve. And then we invited any ideas they might have about controlling…
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Innovate this Week
World Creativity and Innovation Week has been happening since April of 2001, and is meant, according to co-founder Marci Segal, “to help people celebrate their capacity to use their creativity to make the world a better place, and to make their place in the world better, too.” There are events this week in Canada, the…