Connect and Collaborate: disrupt boundaries and find a common language

Uploading Innovation has been developed with NESTA (The National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) to help explore the role of collaboration in generating innovation and to inform the development of a new national programme, NESTA Connect, that will formally launch in May 2007 and is designed to encourage co-operative approaches.

Core to NESTA Connect is a simple but powerful concept; that innovation happens through collaboration, rather than in isolation. In other words, innovation is a ‘contact sport’. Our focus will be upon finding and supporting unexpected, novel or extreme collaborations that disrupt the boundaries between different disciplines, organisations and places. As with any meeting of individuals or organisations, it is critical that they can find a common language, so that they can communicate and collaborate. This is what NESTA Connect is all about.

We know that we cannot begin such an endeavour without tapping into and harnessing the extraordinary network effects of the Web to connect people to one another, to promote co-creation and harness collective intelligence. We are now developing a strategy, which will explore how collaborative innovation can be optimised online. We expect to have the details of our plans finalised in spring 2007 and Uploading Innovation has been convened to bring together 120 of the leading online collaboratives to inform this strategy development.

Our approach

We’re developing a series of practical projects that will act as a laboratory to explore how innovation can be stimulated by collaboration that disrupts boundaries. NESTA is in a unique position to pursue this agenda given our explicit interdisciplinary remit and our ability to take calculated risks where others will not or cannot.

NESTA Connect will broadly operate through a 2 stage process that a) creates new, unexpected or extreme connections, and then b) supports the development of the resultant projects. The programme will be structured around 3 interconnected themes of organisation, interdisciplinarity and place, as follows:

1. Organisation – Value or supply chain innovation between different types of organisation. For example, linking corporates, suppliers, universities and consumers.
2. Interdisciplinarity – bringing together researchers from different disciplines to review and solve specific problems or find new opportunities or knowledge that falls between existing disciplines.
3. Place – we want to find out if collaboration (on- and/or offline) is influenced by where people live and work. In particular, we’re keen to explore the impact of the emerging web-enabled social networking culture on businesses, educators, artists, scientists, creatives and entrepreneurs.

Getting involved

We plan to launch NESTA Connect in May 2007. In the meantime, we are very keen to talk to any potential partners about our plans and opportunities for collaboration. Please contact us as at connect@nesta.org.uk