Collaborative Innovation at NASA

NASA - With Collaborative Innovation, Everyone Is a Winner

4/14/13 1:26 AM

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With Collaborative Innovation, Everyone Is a Winner

08.03.11

By: Chey Parker It all begins with getting over thinking that you’re the only smart person in the room, according to Bernard Meyerson, the vice president of innovation at IBM. Meyerson spoke on collaborative innovation during the August Colloquium on Tuesday at NASA Langley's Reid Conference Center. He explained why it is essential for industry, government and academia to work together to produce a smarter planet and the information technology to serve it.

"Collaborative innovation is where you get a bunch of incredibly smart folks together who put away all their essential differences to do something with the best possible outcome, independent of where the idea came from or where the idea will possibly go," Meyerson explained.

His message urged businesses, universities and government agencies to embrace teamwork and accept the fact that many heads are better than one.

Click to enlarge Said Bernard Meyerson: "The people ... who are most successful are very aware of what they don't know. If you know what you don't know, the first thing you do is find people who know it." Credit: NASA/Chris Rink

"The people who are really successful are not the people who think they know it all," Meyerson said. "In fact, the ones who are most successful are very aware of what they don't know. If you know what you don't know, the first thing you do is find people who know it."

This is what IBM had to do in the early '90s, when its darkest days almost resulted in company failure. During his presentation, Meyerson said that, while Microsoft and IBM are top competitors, they had to work together to produce new technology for the Xbox360 game system. He added that mating "elephants" don’t always get along but can work together to produce something astonishing.

"IBM fell into the trap of thinking 'oh, we’re so smart we can do it ourselves,' " Meyerson said. "You just have to become an adult, put aside your differences and work jointly."

Although Meyerson said collaborative innovation is not a new concept, it is a new culture for many companies.

Click to enlarge On Tuesday, Bernard Meyerson presented "Collaborative Innovation: Novel Approaches to UniversityIndustry-Government Partnerships in Creating a Smarter Planet" in the Reid Conference Center. Credit: NASA/Chris Rink

"Collaborative innovation has been around for a while," Meyerson said. "This is not a new phenomena, it's a recognition. It's formalizing what should have been known a long time ago."

Meyerson said the key to innovation is working on a culture that rewards the team and the individual. People cannot be afraid that if they work on a team there won’t be enough credit to go around.

Organizations that do not embrace collaborative innovation are failing and will continue to fail, according to Meyerson.

http://www.nasa.gov/centers/langley/news/researchernews/rn_AugColloquium.html

Meyerson discusses the importance of collaboration. > Meyerson audio (.mp3)

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NASA - With Collaborative Innovation, Everyone Is a Winner

4/14/13 1:26 AM

Read Transcript "Organizations that are ego-dominated eventually fall by the wayside," Meyerson said. "If you can’t work together, (you are limited to) just one person's achievement as opposed to those of a team."

Many organizations find it difficult to work together to create technology that has never been thought of or attempted. But Meyerson explains that collaborative innovation can be very natural.

"Collaborative innovation almost always works well because, remember, that's where all parties have a good reason to work together," Meyerson said. "Disasters happen when people just won't admit they lack expertise and insist on doing it themselves anyway."

In 2006, IBM invited its employees, friends and family, as well as some of their competitors, to participate in the "Innovation Jam," which resulted in the launch of 10 new businesses. The "jam" brought thousands of people together to produce creative ideas that the company then filtered for the most innovative. From the jams, IBM created a series of grand challenges.

"You have to pick a grand challenge that captures not only people’s (imagination), but recognition as it being important, if not critical, to do," Meyerson explained. "If you can capture people's imagination and they recognize the value, they'll buy in."

Meyerson insisted that collaborative innovation can unlock the door to altering the future for the better.

"What if you could legitimately say 'I can accurately predict the future?' " Meyerson asked.

He told the audience about the grand challenge of predicting a traffic jam with great accuracy due to "revolutionary big data analytics." IBM has done that in places such as Singapore.

"Preventing a traffic jam captures people's imagination," Meyerson said. "Imagine if you could do things like that with medicine."

"Big data analytics" is predicting complications with premature babies in Toronto.

Meyerson explained that these grand challenges cannot be accomplished by a single individual or company. He tells of a time when individual inventors could make a big difference by doing what he calls "foundational work." Inventors could invent "a" something, such as a light bulb.

"We're so far past that. We're working on systems of systems," Meyerson explained. "I don't care how brilliant you are, there's someone else out there with a skill you need, with data you need, and if you really want to make a big bang go find it."

With research and development costs rising, maintaining revenue to develop and build new technologies is becoming increasingly difficult. But Meyerson said he believes that if industry, government and academia collaborate, all of the necessities of researching, developing and building will be provided. Government may provide funding and a potential customer, academia provides intellect and industry provides a means of operation.

"It’s so many incredible road blocks," Meyerson said. "You need an incredible team to bring all the skills to the table to solve some of the problems you encounter."

Meyerson insisted that teamwork drives innovation and is the only way to continue the work to produce a smarter planet.

"If we can't do this together, we can't do it at all," Meyerson said. "When any one of us succeeds, we all succeed."

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