Amplify Festival 2015, June 1st - Innovation Management
(Image: Rawn Shah, 2015)

Amplify Festival 2015, June 1st - Innovation Management

“In the US, people spend more on crisps than the Department of Energy can on R&D,” said Dr. Norman Lewis, Director of PwC Crowd Innovation, UK. "There is something fundamentally wrong with that."

Speaking at a breakfast at Amplify Festival 2015 in Sydney, Australia, he described how our biggest investment into new ideas seems to focus on looking at ourselves, referring to the billions into the Instagrams, Facebook, and such. 

What happened to supporting the really difficult research and innovations that led to projects like the Apollo missions, or the Large Hadron Collider? Dr. Lewis described the increasing difficulty to fund such projects that can change humanity on a fundamental level.

I had to ask whose responsibility it was to invest in R&D, individuals, businesses, or governments? Per Dr. Lewis, shareholder value businesses have to focus on the short term and driving business—innovation on the incremental scale. Deep innovation on the other hand can take a long time to research, and that needs a different approach.

 

Dr. Lewis sees governments need to take a bigger role into R&D to hold up the long-term efforts. Considering his role in crowdsourcing innovation, I was a little surprised, but I can see the difference between funding the work, and who can perform such deep research. That mechanism is certainly changing beyond permanent academic researchers in fixed jobs, towards a future of dynamic teams and research platforms. 

Amplify is a festival focused around innovation held by AMP, the 160-year old wealth management company in Australia and New Zealand. This 10th anniversary of the Amplify Festival brought 40 speakers from across the world to help businesses in Australia and New Zealand to rethink, relate and rewire to the ongoing and future changes of the world. 

I walked through the Amplify expo area and came across several interesting ideas. The first was a startup named Jurny that focuses on helping job candidates discover their own core values and match them to businesses that share the values. The notion is quite interesting and falls into the area of finding purpose at work and cultures that we find we can fit into personally. Founder Gerhard Diedericks explained that it allows candidates and employees to rate companies but also gives you and understanding of that person’s own values so you have more context and view into why they rated the company as such. It’s almost needless to say people have different values and what one might rate a company is not the same as another. It gives more usable qualitative recommendation data than anonymous systems such as at Glassdoor or other services, through this insight.

I spoke to Matthew Barnett, Head Honcho at Verbate, who has a new survey service based on video feedback. This goes beyond text-based survey tools like Survey Monkey, or text and audio tools like those from Verint or Qualtrics. The added dimension of visual information in video dramatically changes the quality of information you can capture of a survey, such as body language, eye focus, facial expressions, and mood. Like the simplicity of Survey Monkey, it is easy to construct individual surveys, but the reporting can also detect these additional factors beyond the question being asked. Mr. Barnett also indicated that you could strip out the video after it was analyzed, so there are no visuals, just the data. It is an important concern as people often feel more self-conscious when being video recorded.

AMP showed several innovation experiments of their own for how insurance organizations interact with customers. I tried the immersive 3D headset (both Samsung and Oculus Rift) for a new world of information browsing. More compelling was the Virtual Assistant system where you have a person who can help you with your work items, schedules, and questions; a visual Siri, if you must. The Another booth described new ways how AMP can imagine new ways for offering products integrated into online services whether the common social sites, or collaborative economy platforms. For example, you could possibly buy travel insurance before you get into that Uber ride; I could just as well imagine a renter’s insurance product for a housing stay at AirBnb.

See all the days at Amplify Festival:

  • June 1st - Innovation management (Dr. Norman Lewis, PwC), Video surveys (Matthew Barnett, Verbate)
  • June 2nd - Futurism (Stuart Candy, U of Toronto), Healthcare Design (Lorna Ross, Mayo Clinic), Bitcoin (Jon Matonis) 
  • June 3rd -  Ecosystems (John Hagel, Deloitte), Company Transformation (Sanjay Purohit, Infosys), and Strategy Planning (Simon Wardley, LEF)
  • June 4th - Innovating Publishing (Paul Cameron, Booktrack), Education (Heather McGowan), Long-term Innovation (James Moody, Sendle)
  • June 5th - Aging (Michael Hodin, Ruth Finkelstein, Ken Smith, Mark Halverson)

 

Rawn Shah is a Director & Social Business Architect with Rising edge, an independent consultancy focused on work culture, collaboration, and the future of work. He is also Partner at Ethos VO, Ltd., the innovation networked organisation in the UK. He is based in Tucson, Arizona, USA, and can be reached on Twitter, or LinkedIn.



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