Tag: program officer
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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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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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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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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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Female Factor
Science is a subject available to both genders and yet women, if not directly discouraged, haven’t been as encouraged to pursue it as a field of study. Girls are steered toward languages and the liberal arts, implying that maths and sciences are better left to the boys. It’s a stereotype that’s been torn down and…
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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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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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In the Sandpit
What happens when diverse groups of researchers are forced to catalyse and collide and collaborate? Questions arise that wouldn’t otherwise have been posed, and partnerships form between people from very different scientific disciplines. That’s what often makes the output of Sandpits (aka Ideas Labs) unique and innovative