I'd just like to introduce Rob Willmore. He's the founder and CEO of the city, and we met when he was giving a presentation,
the Praxis all conference early in the year and I invited to come back here and talk to us.
So I have you're as impressed as I was Ralph.
So I know monks said this from Facebook, but I would like to thank Tony and Phil and Helen and the team for running such a wonderful event.
I'm not going to ever under applause. I think the VP of research and do that, and I think he's been a phenomenal event.
I've learnt so much with my colleague Will and it's been great to make new friends and the friends we make last forever.
So it's fantastic. So I'm going to give straight to this.
I've been asked the common question. I've been asked since I came here for the last three days as well.
Why do you do what you do? What's the motivation? Why did you make this company?
And it's very simple. It is very deep within populations, organisations, communities.
There are potentially transformative, transformational ideas that never see the light of day.
And one thing that Professor David Gunn said really resonated with me that innovation isn't evenly distributed.
That really did strike a chord and made me feel that it's great to be here to talk about this today.
And this is why because hierarchies have been established over many, many years.
I'm not going to go into the history of these hierarchies came about, but the larger the organisation,
the deeper the hierarchy and the harder it is to communicate and the harder it is to innovate together, which is why you get these things coming in.
You've all seen these, right? I've said them, but we've all have these are.
We're doing it. We don't have the budget. We've tried that, which is a common one.
So how do we get over that and how to get over this?
So I've done this, too. I'm so busy getting on with the latest piece of research, that piece of work latest sale.
I forget to look around and see what is available.
And that's why this this summer has been amazing, because it does make us all come out of our environment,
get out of our shells, talked with each other and see what's going on.
We'll all take something back. So the way that I decided to address this was through crowdsourcing.
It's called many things I learnt to practise, practise or that you call this co-creation in your sector and I call it the democratisation
of innovation because it does bring everybody together and give them an opportunity.
I'm going to do one bit of an intro to my product. The way it works is it's in the cloud.
It allows anybody to set a challenge on multiple challenges and then they invite an open cohort to come in to address those challenges.
That cohort can be in the same building. It can be in the same country. It's often around the world and distributed.
These people never normally see each other,
so it's a good way of coming together and collectively addressing challenges to bring solutions out of those challenges.
This diagram illustrates it perfectly well for me, this is by Hugh MacLeod from a company called Gaping Void,
and I was looking I did a speech in, I did a TED talk five years ago, I was looking for a picture to illustrate the problem.
You see information and in everybody's head or in everybody's department, I put each piece of research.
There is a wonderful piece of information, but unless you connect those dots and you connect those nodes, you don't get knowledge.
If you connect the nodes and the dots, you get usable and applicable knowledge.
And this is what I set out to do with crowdsourcing. So what I'm going to do now is stop boring you with talking about theory,
and I'm going to walk you through a few things that we've done over the last two years micro-level and a massive country,
city level and the world wide level.
And one of the first things that we really got into was creating innovation competitions for the World Wildlife Fund and the World Wildlife Fund.
Traditionally, big applications for grants to go and do big, hairy,
audacious projects like working in the Amazon rainforest or looking after elephants or saving the polar bears.
But they had a hunch that there were lots of organisations out there in the broader ecosystem that had wonderful ideas,
but probably didn't have the financial impetus to actually fulfil those ideas and take them to fruition.
So wonderful green tech and clean tech research and technology that given a boost given some money,
could be utilised in the pipeline to solve the problems of the World Wildlife Worldwide Fund for Nature, which I've called or addressing.
So we set up something called the Innovation Challenge, and this is a snapshot of my product.
But basically the way it works is the World Wildlife Fund say if you can get through each of these criteria,
we will put you into a final award and we'll give you two hundred fifty thousand dollars to go and we'll give it to you.
Not only do to not invest in you, give it for you to go away and deliver your programme over the last three to four years.
Sorry, they've now given away five million dollars.
The impetus of that five million dollars because it's distributed into these green tech and clean tech companies
has a broader impact than some of the bigger money they give in bigger tranches to more focussed projects.
So it's a way of bringing together research with the money to deliver it.
And that research is done and all that reach that is appraised by this peer review stage going to process, and it works.
So we thought, well, if we can do it with the World Wide Fund for Nature, how about could we lift the economy and transform a city?
And we were approached by the city of Montreal.
They had an inkling that their economy should be left by engaging, tapping into a broader community of business and citizens.
But I'm going to let the video do the talking.
It all started in 2012 when Jock Minor, president of BMO Financial Group, distressed by Montreal's gloomy future,
commissioned a report on seven international cities that had been reinvented.
His goal was to demonstrate that Montreal is also capable of a turnaround.
That is how I see Montreal, a large movement to give Montreal new prosperity was born.
It began by mobilising citizens and encouraging them to submit to self led projects that could benefit the Greater Montreal area.
The high point a large rally in fall 2014, bringing together project leaders committed to making their projects a reality as the
project entailed creating a new citizen movement success would hinge on notoriety.
The campaign was first launched on the website by a blog Influential Montrealers submitted posts for publication.
The icy Montreal web site was launched soon after giving Montrealers a platform where they can submit projects,
vote for their favourites and even make comments.
The site received more than 130000 visits, 7000 users created profiles and 17000 votes and comments were registered in just six months.
Twenty three thousand Facebook fans and 3000 Twitter subscribers join the conversation on social media,
but video capsules were also produced to promote projects and their leaders.
These were shared on social media and appeared in the pre-roll on the leftist group's website.
Print advertising was placed in major Montreal dailies and across the West Ham network.
There were also radio ads broadcast on an LG ninety eight point five and Virgin Radio on November 17, 2014.
Numerous initiatives were deployed to make the day a success, including a social media brigade of 15 people and a live web broadcast of the event.
On that Monday, the Zhihua mobile hashtag topped the list of trending topics on Twitter.
In Canada, 1500 people from a variety of Neilia political, cultural, entrepreneurial participated in the event.
The event generated more than 200 mentions in media, but more importantly,
See Montreal received more than 300 project submissions, of which 180 were selected for formal engagement.
The implemented strategy created a broad movement that potentially reached 80 percent of Montreal's adult population.
So with this, we got the feedback from the economics team in Montreal.
They estimated that they could be 80 percent, which is phenomenal.
So simply going out and doing this crowdsource open innovation programme, as they said with government citizens universities,
they engaged a groundswell of the population and they delivered for their city.
It would not have been done any other way if they hadn't designed teams. Open innovation and co-creation.
So we thought, well, if we can do it for Citi, can we do it for the world?
So we were approached by the United Nations to help them to co-create an open, innovate their own projects.
We do it now. It's still running. There's one money now. I'm in Busan in September, doing the outputs right?
And what it really is, it's it's very simple. The youth of the world are invited to come into a platform and to address the issues of the world.
The are related to the Sustainable Development Goals of the UN,
which many of us know to come in and apply ICT projects that might turn into enterprises to deliver against so sustainable goals.
Again, the UN is used to putting big money projects into into big, idealistic projects,
but they had an inkling they should try and go with with a groundswell they the world.
Every year, a number of engaged parties come together.
They go through this innovation competition and they're given money to deliver these projects.
So this is young people being able to start sustainable businesses all around the world and the coming together using my platform.
Often they never meet. I'll never come to the UN and they are driving value in their own regions.
Again, one of the things I've learnt from this conference is place.
And the thing about places, if you can do something and apply research or applying entrepreneurial spirit or deliver value in place,
you're actually helping your own community, which is the start of helping the broader world community.
And then we thought, well, if we can help the youth of the world, maybe we can help the mayor of Rio, so take the Olympics.
And I got a call from the mayor of Rio. We didn't really think it was him.
We thought it was a blanket and thought it was a joke. So we didn't speak to the guy.
You rang back again to the public through to me. It was the mayor of Rio, Eduardo Pérez at the time, and he said, We saw you speak at the UN.
We had a major riots at the World Cup when we had the World Cup because our population felt
disconnected and disenfranchised because they couldn't afford to go to see the matches.
They had physical rights. And they said, We don't want those again.
How can we engage the population of Rio de Janeiro in order to find out what they really want from the Olympic legacy?
So that's what we did. Our platform was put life and the population of Rio de Janeiro's engaged, knowing that some people wouldn't be connected.
The instant they took iPods out, as well to literal town halls, they went to the favelas.
They showed the ideas that had gone off the platform to the population as well.
The feedback was put into the platform and ultimately something pretty magical happened.
It turned out that's about 18 of the projects that recommended the Rio.
We're going to do the many B anyway, but someone in government the forgotten to communicate it to the population.
We were talking about communication earlier. But equally, four or five other projects were major transformational projects,
infrastructure, roads, lighting playgrounds, safe places to walk in the city.
So they focussed much of the money on infrastructure rather than sustaining the stadium
on the velodrome because the people didn't really want the stadium a velodrome.
They wanted the legacy to have a full long term impact in their communities.
So by engaging the community, that's what happened. They got their legacy.
They wanted. I won't go through all that.
So let's move into something that's probably closer to your heart, which is a way to use it to engage research with industry.
And we've done this a number of times that in fact we do it constantly.
But the first one we did was with École Polytechnique Federale delusion.
I can't believe I got the name. How can we engage with industry to create value from knowledge exchange?
And again, rather than me? Go on about it, I'm going to play a video. Oh.
As a researcher on an academic institution, we have a big hurdle convincing people to share ideas.
So I think it's important to talk about a win win because obviously we're not
we're not selling our services where we're in academic and research institution.
So it's really about creating contact with industry.
We've understood now that the challenges we face as an industry are too great for any single country.
For the. And so we've decided that we should open up our innovation and work collaboratively.
And you know, we looked at a lot of platforms before finally moving to Cardiff credibility.
And the big thing for me is the simplicity at the front end of power of the back end, which was really nice.
And Facebooks was the contact we had with the companies and the relation during all the process.
One thing is very good is in Cardiff City's to the fact that just several stages where you can put Trinity in after that to an idea selected,
you can then improve and narrow your choice by giving staff from one to five so that you can really
make a fair decision between you and your ideas in death or serious competition between those two.
So you always want to improve.
You always want to answer the comments from people, you know, for the others to really understand what you mean in the end and get votes.
And that's really challenging. I think traditionally the process has been you patent and you publish.
And what we're trying to do is to say to people, OK, we're not trying to to sell our intellectual capital because we need to protect that.
But what we're trying to do is to get people upstream, really to try and get more ideas on the table.
I'm thinking across disciplines, which is really important funding ideas that might have an application in a
completely different area and really getting the community working together.
I personally am convinced that this is a big part of our future,
that to solve the complex problems we face nowadays, the the news is very different than thinking.
People working together also may be coming from different regions worldwide.
We will never have all that brain power in company. So yes, I think we should use this more often.
You certainly don't get what you expect, so you get different approaches frequently, potentially new solutions to old problems.
And this platform really gives us a way to bring people out of their specialities thinking about the bigger picture and working together across this.
So that was our first foray into essentially an orgy of change,
and it didn't lock those seven serendipitous creative collisions people who might not normally work together at,
as we were saying earlier in the conference, arts and sciences, bringing them together to create solutions.
And so we got bold and we decided to see if we could work with an entire university.
And we worked with a lot of universities in Asia-Pacific and one of them, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.
We talked to them for about a year, and they decided they want to embed it across the whole of their campus and that
whole of their student to research lifecycle from undergraduate to postgraduate.
And again, rather we go on about it. There is a really great video that goes into the detail of that.
Swinburne Research and Innovation Strategy has placed innovation at the core of what we do through translational research,
through co-creation, but in particular through our Swinburne Innovation Precinct.
The Innovation Precinct has a number of objectives, but the underpinning objective is really to create an innovation campus and innovation university.
So what we are looking at is just bringing together the whole organisation to do innovative things and try new ideas.
But in the early days we struggling with how can we connect with this, with this very diverse community in a university?
How can we get a lot more people involved?
So some kind of virtual platform that's built around new ideas around innovation was what we were looking for and we came across a crowded city.
So we've used disappeared as a virtual environment to connect people with ideas to generate the dialogue across the campus,
across students and staff, across researchers, around ideas and around co-creation.
What we are now doing is trying to make the most of those ideas and realise commercial potential.
Last year, as the as the first step,
we tried the ideas jam and we were just tremendously excited by how successful that was and how many people got engaged.
But the thing that I was very reassured by, I put my idea up there and then the next day, someone that someone liked it.
And all of a sudden I had a couple of followers, people making a few comments, a bit of encouragement.
I just thought that was terrific.
Being in a sort of research bubble and especially in psychology, we often bounce around ideas between ourselves and some of them come to fruition,
and some of them don't with the ideas because it was a platform in which loads
of different people from all different areas were able to participate in,
I got feedback that I haven't really considered before.
So sometimes as a psychologist, when you're asking other people, we're so close to it, we don't see the outside perspective.
It was fun as well. It broadened my networks within Swinburne because I got to meet people that I wouldn't have ordinarily crossed paths with.
I didn't know what to expect, so just logging on, it seemed really fresh and visual, it was easy to use.
Being able to monitor the votes and the engagement, it was something that you you really, I guess,
responded to us quite excited about, about being able to share that idea with the responses that I got.
It's been very really puts a lot of emphasis upon innovation.
So it's very important for us to have one person get it, which was all about thinking outside of the square about innovation.
So we created a new first unit called Innovative Business Practise.
So we looked at that crowd to see and we thought that could work. And the rest is history, basically.
Once we introduced into the first unit, it was a new medium. It was a new way of exploring skills around innovation, and it went really,
really well and provides a great foundation for the Typekit unit for faculty of business and law.
We're using proceeds. It's the first time has been used in a higher education curriculum context.
We had to look at the subject design. We had to look at assessments.
We had to look at how would we integrate Christie into the subject and make it work.
So the students have reacted in a really positive light.
It's a real interest, and the feedback coming in this semester is really enjoying the interactivity.
The idea behind the subject we're doing is almost like an incubator for social entrepreneurship.
In our Week 12, we had an industry networking event, so I'm going to show you where we come in.
We're running to try to.
Essentially, that was invented completely within curriculum, create completely, research completely and engagement with industry.
So the whole lifecycle of a student coming in to a student applying that knowledge and even to experience was amazing.
At the end of that video, it talks about how in the curriculum people have put forward ideas and industry has come
in and they then been employed by industry because of the ideas they put in the platform.
And again, moving on to this one. So the IKEA programme, so I work on IKEA on a mental IKEA cohorts,
but we were approached by Queen's University Belfast and the North by Northwest Consortium with Innovate UK in order to create a
platform that would allow teams to convene and come together to create ideas that would then be put forward to the IKEA programme.
And then with the IKEA programme, people come in and evaluate those ideas and then they would go forward to the normal IKEA programme.
So essentially, it's about convening, bringing people together to build teams,
bring ideas to coalesce them and put them through to the ideation programme to then put them into the full IKEA programme.
And we've been running that now for two years, and we're in many universities and it's getting great actors.
So moving on then to the last thing I to talk about, which is the research and innovation organisation, which Ukraine my pose here.
And we're using chronicity of these and kind of see with us to address the Big Challenges Research Fund.
We've been working with them to again use chronicity to engage researchers in the UK and developing countries,
predominantly Africa, to bring together researchers to create sustainable delivery from that research,
into driving enterprise into driving, helping with the issues of sustainable power, food, health,
poverty and Ukraine arise, funnelling that money because of their hunch into that into those projects.
And it's working now. We've got the video, but I'm not going to play it because you all know what the UK Research Council does.
So I'm going to skip over that. So I'm going to move straight to my final slide.
So I've talked about all of these opportunities for co-creation and innovation.
I've talked about it in cities and communities. I've talked about driving sustainability in World Wildlife Fund and engaging enterprise.
I've talked about it in a world economic methodology.
The UN and I've talked about it in driving effective research in connexion with enterprise and sustainable outputs.
So I'm going to come back to my final slide. The reason we put crowd together was to connect all of this useful information,
connect people like you as well with each other in order to drive this sustainable delivery and make knowledge work.
So thank you. I went over a bit the final Typekit question.
Oh, great. Superb. I think we're going to have questions for Tony.
You can go first, I think quick. Yes. Someone else has a question, dear. So tremendous presentation.
Thank you so much. My pleasure. Questions about these things.
Because, you know, to me,
one of the big challenges with efforts like yours that offer services is how do you communicate to the people to provide the inputs?
So, you know, you talk about the penetration on getting responses. There's so much information.
There's so much noise out there. How are you able to to coalesce and get those respond?
You know, people to do something disruptive, which is respond. And that's entirely right.
It's all about getting people in there to make it happen because you can have the best ideation platform, but you've got to bring people together.
So the last seven years, that was our initial challenge.
It was how do we bring people together via traditional engagement of telling people and letting them know in organisations
through to putting out social media calls into the cone of the social media networks and also by word of mouth?
So each of the projects we've been doing, it starts at the top.
So you have to get the people who are able to make decisions about how they might
apply money or how they apply resources to show that engagement is worthwhile.
So, for instance, I don't think we will ever go any of the citizens of Rio to come into our platform unless the mayor had said, It's my policy.
I want to talk to you all. Nobody had done that before.
So it has to come from the highest possible level in order to essentially, we talked about hierarchies earlier to actually give permission to engage.
And that's a weird psychological thing, but that's how we do it. And that and then the mechanism for making it happen are the standard emails.
The standard talks, a standard putting up social. But equally, it's the feedback loop.
So I'll cut to the end of this story. The fact is, you can get enough people into a platform,
but unless you give a feedback loop about what's actually happening with the ideas and the collaborations,
and unless you get outputs, they're not sustainable. As platforms, you've got to get wins and a win can simply be, we're not going to do that.
But in Nigeria, over there is very similar. So we're going to do that.
Why don't you collaborate with that person?
So even if they don't say when there is a winning mentality in life, we point them together to work and can be.
So it's starting at the top in terms of permission to do. And then it's a feedback loop in order to show value and appreciation for their input.
How do you work with incentives in order to get the value built time of people participating?
So yeah, so I was at a conference in New York about law and what they were doing in law firms now.
And so use my platform.
Some use others as they are giving a portion of billable time so that that bill, they said, Well, you've done that, let's call that accrued.
Take that time and go and innovate. So again, coming back to commission, that's quite right.
It's about the incentive to actually do something while you're doing your day job.
Certainly in working research, development and working universities, you academics, teaching and research time, etc., etc. So just like a lawyer,
if you give permission to somebody, say within academia to say, write a lot that time,
I know you're doing it, that this is a valuable and everything else.
Equally, on the other side of that, we have incentivization that can be as simple with Proctor and Gamble.
They use it for product development marketing programmes. They will give away vouchers for those products.
And it's amazing how many people will come in and contribute for a voucher with the UN.
And they incentivise a number of organisations by giving iPads to those schools and
institutions to drive engagement because if you give them something to do it on,
they're going to do it. So incentivization is incredibly important. Be it buying our time and allowing it and give them permission,
giving away an incentive that's tangible or giving away something that enables people to get into open innovation.
Those are the ways I've seen it done. So one last question to this one.
So it's really interesting, it talk, thank you. I mean, how did you get from the inputs to the outputs?
You're just someone have to sit there and trawl through 100000.
I put 100000 inputs and make something of it or that does your platform actually provide any means for at least sifting some of that?
Yes, artificial intelligence or whatever. So, so yeah, they we have algorithms in the background that do that.
But equally, we have an innovation process set up in order to funnel the process.
So we are machine learning artificial intelligence, allowing some assessment, but then they go to the stage goes to do essentially self qualify.
And at the end of it, you have a a a level of ideas that are seen by the system and by the peer group to be the ones that might be the most useful.
So you don't have to go through a hundred thousand ideas, though some of our customers choose to do that.
Some of our big retail customers around the world will take all the data from the system through our API,
stick it into their business intelligence machine and crunch it like crazy.
So this system can do it with the assistance of people, and you can export the data into standard systems doing its work.
OK, thank you. Thank you.