Wanted: Bold innovations in Health

Last year, I did a keynote at a major health conference in Denmark under the (slight provoking) title: "Innovation in spite of managagement" making a case for under-the radar-innovations empowering the collective intelligence that knows what do do - and leaders who act rather than talk.

Right after I was challenged by several of the heads of both hospitals and health agencies to come up with a design for this type of innovation.

Now – a year later – we have completed 12 pilot projects – and are running 28 new innovation projects in as many municipalities.

The results are amazing: The teams of innovation agents are creating micro innovations across sectors, bypassing departmental borders, and engaging local communities by way of example and action.

Based on simple – but strict - rules of engagement (an innovation manifesto so to say), quit small investments are producing big results. Blå Himmel's manifesto which owe some to U-theory, some to best practice Silicon Vally entrepreneurship  research, sets the frame for the interactions and process: Participant municipalities has to follow simple rules, such as always participating with directors across departments, prototyping before analyzing (and not being "allowed" to ask permission back home for their project), and keeping the scale small for quick returns.

The Sund By organisation (an intra-municipality health forum) is coordinating the projects: Please see the website for some background (in Danish), incl slides from the introduction.

Think Water Sensitive

Water may arguable be the most pressing issue out there. After years of working with innovation in solid waste, health and sustainable architecture, I have turned on water.

In 2012 I joined Grundfos in it's impressive ambition to innovate solutions to the staggering water challenges facing the world. As an executive strategy and innovation expert for Water Supply, I will be helping Grundfos think outside the box and very much need oriented, designing innovation frameworks based on co-creation and stakeholder engagement, and helping create the overall strategic ambition for water supply.
I will think loud on water in this little blog:  Water Sensitive: watersensitive.blogspot.com

Peaceware revisited

In 2008 Anders Michelsen from Copenhagen University and Lars started the Peaceware-project in Sri Lanka, and I am very happy to see how Anders and some great people via Danish Refugee Council, has now succeeded in establishing The Somaliland Telemedical System for Psychiatry - a national Mental Health Care in Somaliland based on telepsychiatry. A very important project with some great perspectives for the use of ICT. Please visit and donate: http://peaceware-somaliland.com/

Sort your trash can – open innovation

I was recently asked by Vestforbrænding (Denmarks largest waste management company) if Blå Himmel would design and lead a competition-format, that was to result in creative and aesthetic ideas for a future trash can for sorting private waste. This developed into an international open innovation- and design competition named; ”Sort your trash can”. Both American, European and Asian design schools has been invited to take part in this project.

With the open innovation style competition Vestforbrænding is blazing new paths. Opening it's processes to young talent, and entering into an open dialogue, the company radically changes the closed traditional processes of engineering solutions. With an emphasis on co-creation, the web-based idea competition promises to be an innovative new way for Vestforbrænding to get closer to it's users. With ”Sort your trash can” it is possible for everyone to have direct influence on the trash cans outcome by commenting on the designers ideas, which are available on the online innovation-platform join.dk. Join is a free online portal that focuses, as the slogan puts it, on designing together. join.dk is one of several great Web2.0 open innovation platforms flourishing, proving to be a both creative and cost-effective method to get in touch with a global talent pool.

The competition runs now and until the 28th of october. Read more about the competition at http://www.sortyourtrashcan.com/, and see the creative contributions at http://join.dk/#designs/all

Logo

Retreats: Ledelse, mindfulness og integritet

Jeg møder i mit daglige arbejde med innovation og forretnings-udvikling utallige topchefer og ledere, der lever på grænsen til stress og som ikke udlever det potentiale de har p.g.a. manglende forbindelse til deres dybeste styrker og integritet. De seneste år har jeg været mere og mere optaget af, hvordan de barrierer ledere oplever i forhold til innovation og kreativitet – og det stress de oplever fra den stigende kompleksitet i forretningslivet omkring os (ja i livet i det hele taget) – ikke kan fjernes med blot flere systemer eller analyser, men kræver en hel anden personlig tilgang. En tilgang hvor den personlige integritet og klare kontakt med sine indre formål guider ledelsesbeslutninger.

Jeg har derfor i det stille udviklet og afholdt retreats for ledere, der ønsker at komme i balance og lære nogle simple værktøjer til nærvær baseret på mindfulness og meditationsteknikker. Jeg har været så heldig at finde sammen med en af landets allerdygtigste personlighedstrænere, Roxana Kia, der besidder en dyb og fantastisk evne til at bringe det bedste frem i mennesker (Læs mere om Roxana Kia her).

Vi afholder sammen en retreat to gange om året for alle, som har brug for at komme ned i tempo og fordybe sig, og det er magisk og meget smukt hvilke transformationer deltagerne går igennem med  indsigter og fred til resultat. Du kan læse om og tilmelde dig retreaten her samt læse små beretninger fra tidligere retreats.

Du er altid meget velkommen til at kontakte mig med spørgsmål.

BridgeSpinner

In the winter of 2010-11 I led an investment round and total reconstruction of a truly innovative startup: BridgeSpinner. The company has invented a revolutionary gaming console for  the game of bridge - the worlds maybe most popular card game. Bridge has not been innovated since it's creation in the beginning of last century, and where Poker has undergone massive change in the last 10-15 years and is now attracting young players with exiting game play, Bridge has stalled. This is now changing with online offerings, and whole new possibilities are opening up.
The BridgeSpinner uniquely and literally building a bridge between the social offline game play with real cards and four friends around a table, and the digital online univers with its vast community and learning offerings. Its kind of an advanced internet-enables card shuffler and game registrator. This allows everybody to play multiplayer games, participating simultaneously in tournaments around the world and accessing game data to improve your game and learn the tricks.
The company is mow on the road with a new business plan and great partnerships and if all goes well launches in US at the end of 2011.
I now serve as chairman of the board and co-owns the company with some very dynamic, talented and visionary folks.

eCouture by Lund

I've taken a stake in a wonderful fashion company: eCouture by Lund with the talentet costume designer Johanne Helger Lund at the helm. Johanne's design are truly and daringly feminine – and to top if off all created in nontoxic eco-cotton, silk etc. with very high regards for the production proces.
We hade created a whole new radical strategy for eCouture, building on the strong and true story in Johanne's design to break drastically with the traditional ways of doing fashion business.
eCouture now has one of the biggest loyal Facebook followings in the Danish fashion industry, with a 100% focus on Johanne's dedication to real women – daring to dress in red.

Storytelling about innovation: The Kondratieff 6th Wave....

When working as a business designer and trying to help companies innovate for the future, the main challenge I find, is often not one of designing the new future business area or product, but rather one of creating strong ownership and cross organizational storytelling about this future, that allows management to implement. I frequently have the pleasure of teaching MBAs in innovation – and the opportunity of testing first hand how storytelling can enhance operational will to implementation. One of my key entry points to this storytelling is the idea of mega trends: How future business design and innovation must be based on long term trends, rather than short business cycles.

And when it comes to mega trends, one of the strongest with huge business impacts on all – but also one of the hardest to really understand businesswise – is the fall out with nature: The global environmental crisis.

So whenever I come across new ways of telling the sustainbility story and the opportunities for innovation rising from the environmental mega trend, I bring it on board. And recently I have been reading up on older economic theories on long term trends, including the old Russian economist Kondratieff's wave theory. This theory is hugely debated, but as another of my favorite models, Maslow's hierachy of needs, Kondratieff's wave model has an intuitive storytelling quality that far outpaces it's lack of consensus and evidential proof in the world of economics.

Australian outfit "The Natural Edge Project" has caught on to this, and uses Kondratieff to tell the story about a 6th innovation wave: The green wave, that some how strikes the managers and CEOs that I work with as intuitive:

Creativity is the number one need for global organizations in an increasingly complex reality

The last few years (during the crisis), quite a few companies scaled back on innovation initiatives -- and an argument heard was that innovation projects was a luxury good for good times. Preaching (as I was doing) that the opposite is in fact true, was hard in the face of cost control, downscaling, etc. So it is very encouraging to see the newly published survey from IBM:

According to the IBM survey (http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy) of more than 1.500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, chief executives believe that -- more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision -- successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity.
Global complexity is the foremost issue confronting enterprises. Less than half of global CEOs believe their enterprises are adequately prepared to handle a highly volatile, increasingly complex business environment. CEOs are confronted with massive shifts - new government regulations, changes in global economic power centers, accelerated industry transformation, growing volumes of data, rapidly evolving customer preferences - that, according to the study, can be overcome by instilling "creativity" throughout an organization.
The CEOs see a large gap between the level of complexity coming at them and their confidence that their enterprises are equipped to deal with it. A world of increasing complexity will give rise to a new generation of leaders that make creativity the path forward for successful enterprises.
More than 60 percent of CEOs believe industry transformation is the top factor contributing to uncertainty, and the finding indicates a need to discover innovative ways of managing an organization's structure, finances, people and strategy. The CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.

For more on the survey, please read:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-2010-global-ceo-study-creativity-selected-as-most-crucial-factor-for-future-success-94028284.html
Or the full survey: http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy

Social Software og Fortællesamfundet

Hvert sekund oprettes der en ny Blog på internettet. De bedste historier og billeder fra bomberne i Londons undergrund og fra Tsunamien i Sydøst Asien opstod ikke hos CNNs rapportere, men med kreative individers brug af mobile kameraer, blogs og emails. Halvdelen af alle videoer set på nettet i 2006 var brugergenereret.

For tre år siden havde ingen hørt om YouTube – og alle talte om hvordan de store mediekonvergensen gav muligheder for de store nyhedstjenester at vise vidoer på nettet. Og da digitaliseringen i midten af 90erne for alvor gik sin gang gennem medieverdenen var troen på at ”content is king” det gennemgående forsvar for at avisen, eller tv-stationen nok skulle klare sig.

Men nu viser det sig, at indhold skabes bedre og mere relevant af dem vi før så på som forbrugere: læsere, seere, lyttere, brugere.

For et år siden overhalede det brugergenerede YouTube alle de store medier og når nu langt flere end fx cnn.com og bbc.co.uk tilsammen, jvf nedenstående statistik fra Alexa.

YouTube er ligesom MySpace nu på top 5 over de mest brugte sites. Og begge sites er få år gamle. Digg.com, hvor indholdet skabes og redigeres af brugerne, er allerede nu efter blot et år på nettet større end New York Times’ site. ”Share, discover, bookmark, and promote stuff that's important to you!”

Ikke mindst teenageres medievirkelighed er en endeløs strøm af kreativ udveksling af unik kommunikation gennem en lang række medier, ikke forbruget af forprogrammeret indhold.

Generation Y (født efter ca 1975) udlever i ekstrem grad bevægelsen fra ”Fortæl os noget” til ”Vi vil fortælles!” til ”Vi vil fortælle!”. Vi er for længst gået ind i et historiefortællende samfund.
De nye generationer udfolder sig gennem interaktive social softwares og nettjenester som MySpace, YouTube, Facebook, SecondLife – verdener hvor den sociale udveskling og individets handlinger er afgørende, og ikke individets forbrug.

Også de nye søgemaskiner viser vejen: Googles algoritmiske søgemaskine-logik er stadigt altdominerende, men Generation Y er til sociale søgemaskiner: Pandora.com, digg, the esp game, etc

Undervurdér ikke den kreative urkraft, det sociale net udtrykker: Det er langt mere end en bobbel. Den enkelte tjeneste vil komme og gå, men fortællekraften og –behovet er noget langt mere grundlæggende, som vil forandre hele vores kultur.

Innovation i det offentlige

DIEU har offentliggjort en innovationsundersøgelse på tværs af sektorer, der har nogle markante resultater ikke mindst om den offentlige sektor og byggebranchen. Graf 3 i DIEUs gennemgang (her gengivet med håb om tilgivelse for manglende tilladelse) taler sit eget tydelige sprog.

PeaceWare – ICT, design, and social entrepreneurship

[PeaceWare]: Going global; Design and ICT for development

BlåHimmel has co-sponsored an academic/private sector/NGO partnership to examine the potential for global partnerships for developing innovative solutions to ICT design problems in the developing world comprising business, civil society and research.
Lars went with Anders Michelsen from Copenhagen University on a research trip to Colombo to work out the concept together with our partners there: A small innovative IT company: Infoshare. The project is now establishing the institutional framework, presently represented by:
- The Aarhus School of Architecture, – a Danish design and architecture college, now developing a strategy for global engagement, and with a commitment to mode 2 research and process design.
- InfoShare, Sri Lanka, a non-profit technical support organization providing web media services and application development to GOs and NGOs in the development sector.
- Zentropa WorkZ – an innovation company in Copenhagen (part of Zentropa, Scandinavia’s biggest film group), specializing in idea development and innovation processes based on methodologies from the creative industries.
- Department of Arts and Cultural Studies, University of Copenhagen, focusing on central aspects of modern culture based on studies of visual culture, aesthetics, theater, art, design, music, relating to computer media and the internet.

Working premises of the pre-project:
- Tagcloud: process-design, open-source, civil-society-2.0, creative-commons, network-economy, global-entrepreneurship, sustainable-development
- New innovation formats for sustainable development is needed.
- Social entrepreneurship provides a progressive and sustainable alternative to the donor driven development system.
- ICT design in development has big potential for direct positive social impact.
- “Mode 2 research” is on the agenda in research and business, but concrete models, not least for global mode 2 needs to be developed and role models established.
- A true interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral (triple helix) structure, will provide the biggest potential for innovation.
- New media technologies can provide both a working method (ie. internet networks and cscw), and product focus.
- Design must be seen in an expanded view where by the novel research agenda of involving e.g. culture, anthropology, management, constitutes a potential for contributions to new innovations formats.
- Denmark has potential for system exports (process design); Danish social entrepreneurship on a global stage however has still to be developed.

Kraftwerk - Note Book

An early glimpse of convergence between digital music and digital graphics...

Meeting places for social entreprenuership

A team at Zentropa WorkZ came up recently with quite nice idea for a design4development portal – a simple setup directly connecting a community of industrial designers with private donors with social entrepreneurs in 3rd world contexts.

The portal will allow specific industrial designs targeting specific needs (for instance tents, solar panels, water cleaners) to be formulated, designed and proposed as solutions.

The iffy thing is that the goal is an implement able design with full production plans, and startup capital (from donors) for a local social entrepreneur to actually setup and implement production of the design.

The donor-donation-implementation triangle becomes very transparent with a lot of storytelling attached, bypassing the anonymous GO or NGO run donor-facilitation scheme.
And most important doing it with an entrepreneurial zeal that actually may bring some real value creating global networks up and running.

Agile networks

Products and processes in all industries are increasingly under pressure to become more agile, flexible and fast. An old note I took down from Mckinsey&Co some years back propels: “New management approaches are required that are centered on speed to increase system performance…..shorter development cycle…….competitive edge comes from crafting the entire company into a single coordinated machine, rather than seeking isolated advances in individual functions” (unfortunately I didn't reference the quote then) . Focusing on speed Mckinsey and the whole row of management consultants advocate the use of multi-functional teams and projects.

Having worked in the arts and later the media industry for decades, it is pretty obvious thatboth design and implementation would be a trademark of the multi-functional teams running projects in the networks I'm part of.
Thus a huge opportunity could be in what could be termed “meta-innnovation”. The media project networks has great creative capabilities – the innovation happening inside single projects is considerable. These agile processes in the projects might be turned into a generalized innovation logic. Innovation process in a typical media project may as process provide a model for product development in other areas. Creating unique products using “agile manufacturing techniques” is the focus of innovation in broad sectors – media have worked with this type of process for decades.
Turning to New Media this is already happening. In 3rd generation web projects (as practiced by some of the pioneering innovative web companies such as Razorfish and Icon Medialab (before they grew biiiig and somewhat stale)) a “web” of actors including partnerships with customers to create new types of value propositions rather than just “web sites”, based on the project organization of the media.

The trick seems to be to somehow formalize these webs. The role of institutions in project organizing is to provide basic societal infrastructure for the projects but also – and more important to mobilize latent networks, so that the muddled interconnectiveness can be replaced with active linkages.
An organization as Zentropa WorkZ may see it’s job as establishing a system in which episodic project collaborations may be formalized into more enduring project networks.

But how - if not through an advanced ownership structure....?

Sex or innovation

The innovation hype is getting a bit nauseating. A simple googling on [innovation] gets more results than [sex] - both of cause more talk than action, but still: More than sex!!!!

SBC

SBC is offering premium fully serviced flexible offices in the Eastern Europe countries, for midsize or smaller, mainly foreign companies.

SBC helps it's clients to set up their business and office, fast, easy and cost effective. The main target group is the growing segment of SMEs going international; international companies establishing themselves in new cities. The main markets are immature Eastern European cities with high growth rates.

SBC believes a main driver for choosing office hotels are psychological: The need for comfort, safety, social interaction, and image. Especially for foreign companies this is important.
The other main driver for the office hotel market is the ‘plug-and-play’ feature: The ease of setting up offices with facilities that actually work in a new town. This especially is true in immature markets, where infra-structure is still somewhat unreliable.

SBC is owned by the entrepreneur B. Schultz, and three business angels including Blå Himmel.

Nokuko

Nordisk Kunstkonservering tilbyder alle de serviceydelser som en samling kræver, på højeste faglige niveau: Fra aktiv konservering/restaurering af kunstværker til rådgivning omkring bevaring, køb, vedligeholdelse, ophængning, installation, transport og opbevaring.

I Nordisk Kunstkonservering arbejder højtuddannede kunstkonservatorer for virksomheder, museer, offentlige institutioner, forsikringsselskaber, auktionshuse og private. Nordisk Kunstkonservering har specialister indenfor maleri, skulptur, vægmaleri, grafik og bygningsornamentik. Firmaet har opbygget en særlig ekspertise indenfor moderne kunst og nutidskunst, der med sine hyppigt ukonventionelle materialer og metoder, stiller særligt store krav til konservering.

Nordisk Kunstkonservering samarbejder med nogle af de mest fremtrædende museer, laboratorier og værksteder i Danmark og i udlandet.

BizArt

BizArt var en succesfuld kunst-gruppe, der i perioden 1989-1996 skabte en lang række internationale monumentale og succesfulde kunstprojekter i offentlige rum med kritisk fokus på massekommunikation. Idag er BizArt et forum for nogle af de oprindelige medlemmer: Ole Mølgaard, Jesper Søholm og Lars Lundbye.
BizArt har stået bag en række projekter der udfordrede grænserne mellem kunst og offentlighed, herunder
» Paradise Europe’s omfattende reklamekampagner på billboards og i de elektroniske medier, udstillinger på museer og internationale gallerier i New York, Köln, Madrid, Rom og København.
» Portraits of Exile: store reklamelyskasser nedsænket under vandoverfladen i Holmens Kanal i København (1995).
» Gadetegn med 100 danske kunstnere på billboards i København (1992).
» Diffus portal: En monumental omhegning af København med røg (1996).
» 1996 Tidskapsler – et fuldt interaktivt offentligt kunstværk, hvor to tusind tidskapsler blev lavet af lige så mange subkulturelle grupper (firmaer, fore¬ning¬er, landsbyer, klubber, etc. – i alt 16.000 aktive deltagere) i det storkøben¬havn¬ske område.
» Trafiklyrik: et lyrik- og kunst¬-tidskrift, der i 1990-92 udkom en gang om måneden på 5000 busreklamer landet over.
» BizArts WestPoint – et kunstnerrefugium på den caribiske ø Roatan (1994-97).