7 Lessons on Innovation from the Future Insights Conference

Recently, I attended the Future Insights Conference. The conference was packed with seriously insightful speakers, and it’s taken me a few weeks to come back down to earth after such an inspiring event. In my role as Innovation Manager in the Future Technologies team at Zespri, I attend several sector specific conferences each year, and these are always valuable opportunities to meet with others in the horticulture space. The Future Insights Conference was quite different as it focused more broadly on Science and Technology Innovation. I knew there weren’t any horticulture-specific presentations so was a little worried about the transferability of the learnings I would gain. I can confidently say that I am so pleased I went and am very grateful for the experience.?

This event reshaped and reinvigorated the way that I think about Innovation, and I’ve returned home bursting with ideas. What I found fascinating was that, despite the diversity of speakers, there were some clear themes that emerged across the varied discussions. There were so many learnings, and I have picked out seven to share here with you. These were:

1.???? Success is dependent on communication,

2.???? Understand your governing equation,

3.???? Seek failure,

4.???? Shorten your learning cycle,

5.???? Design for systems (not point solutions),

6.???? Your environment matters, and

7.???? Delivery is king.

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1. Success is Dependent on Communication

Okay, this seems obvious. It’s important though because the language you use and the stories you share directly affect your funding, access to research support, decision making, and end user adoption.

Almost every speaker talked about the importance of understanding and connecting with your audience – right from the very first speaker, Johannes Baillou the Chairman of the Executive Board and Family Board of Merck. I get it, you are so deep in your research that it’s easy to think that everyone understands why your work is important and what all the acronyms mean. Or, that you went over this with the Steering Committee at the beginning of the programme of work so they should know. Sadly, this isn’t going to cut it.

Springer Nature, the science and research publishing company, understand that there is a disconnect between Scientists and the general public. What they are doing, in partnership with Merck, is rolling out a Science in Shorts programme. The headline is, tell the world about your research in 1 minute, win €5,000. From memory, every round they choose multiple winners. These are all filmed on a mobile phone so that they can be shared on social platforms. The one’s I watched, hit the mark of making complex topics understandable and interesting.

Another ‘OMG’ example was ?Katja Krause from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science who absolutely nailed the art and science of communication in her presentation. She did this by integrating a personal story of her mother passing with what could have been a potentially boring topic, “The Utility of Science”. Before Katja started talking about her topic, she provided some background of her mother, her family, and the social environment (e.g., the fall of the Berlin Wall and the opportunities this created for their family). At this stage, I was like, this is interesting but am I in the right place. Katja then jumped into her presentation ‘proper’ with the, might I say, the best slide deck I have seen in a while. Halfway through, she loaded a slide that read, ‘Interlude’. We then returned to the story of her mother and a serious health issue she was facing. At this stage, I was hoping for a good outcome and was connecting the dots between her personal story and the core presentation about the utility of science. Katja then returned to talking about the utility of science, and then ended with an outro of her mother’s ultimate death. It was a sobering story that shifted my understanding of the humanity in, or reason why, we do science.

A question for you: How might you help your funders and end users understand the ‘why’ of your work? And, in less than 1 minute.

2. Understand your Governing Equation

This is about acknowledging that whatever you are trying to solve for has a fundamental equation for which there is one or more constraints that limit your ability to succeed. By understanding your objective, and then the underlying equation and the constraints, you then know where to focus your investment.

A super simple example that Steven Chu, Nobel Prize winner (Physics) and former U.S. Secretary of Energy, mentioned was the profitability of petrol stations and how this is likely to remain the same for charging stations for electric vehicles. That is, profit is made through in-store purchase. So, the core equation relates to the time it takes to fill your vehicle. Petrol stations need the fuelling time to take long enough for you to buy something in-store but not too long so as you prevent the next customer from driving in to fill up. This then defines for example, how many pumps a petrol station should have and how fast (or slow) EV charging ports should be.

A science-based example is work Shahaf Peleg, FBN Dummerstorf, is doing on anti-aging. He talked about how the traditional push for anti-aging research is focused on diet, exercise, environmental stressors, and the like. The problem with these approaches is that they do not speak to the governing equation. That is, a significant portion of the body is dedicated to processing food. The consumption of food creates waste products that advance aging. And importantly, from a functional perspective, we consume food for energy. This means that the problem we need to solve for is energy generation that either doesn’t require food or requires significantly less food. If you’re interested, Shahaf and his team are working on an interesting approach of delivering light into cells to create energy independent of food. Does this sound too good to be true? In mice, his team have demonstrated increased longevity and the ability to run longer and harder on the mouse wheel.

A question for you: what is the one constraint that is your doorway to success?

3. Seek Failure

In general, we humans like to succeed. As an early side note, our reward mechanisms are also geared almost only for success. From an innovation perspective, this can lead us to doing research that is designed to succeed. Sound good? Not so much. When your science hits the real world, things are significantly different from the lab or your field trials. People do irrational things with your solution and the environment and use cases for application are constantly changing. The best time to find out that your solution doesn’t work is as early as possible in your R&D process. Most definitely not when you’ve released it as a commercial or operational solution. This means that we must specifically design experiments for failure. If you’re a Design Thinker, you might phrase this as, “how might my wonderful idea turn to custard?”. Focus on hardcore tests that identify and resolve real world potential points of failure.

Marc Raibert, founder and chairman of Boston Dynamics provided a great example with their seriously cool robots. Early on they learnt that they needed two distinct mindsets – one to build the robots and one to destroy them. From the testing videos he showed, it sure does look like fun to be in his ‘destroy’ team. Picture in your mind, asking a robot to open a door while a team of people are doing everything they can, to prevent the robot from opening the door. I’m surprised the robot didn’t activate Terminator mode to remove the pesky humans. The goal is to learn through failure as early and as quickly as possible (and not falling into the allusion that you know what you’re doing). This has enabled Boston Dynamics to develop extremely robust and practical robotic solutions. A couple of side notes – he’s a fan of capturing video footage of the failures and making time for fun (check out the YouTube videos of their robots dancing).

A question for you: how does your organisation support failure (in order to learn)?

4. Shorten your Learning Cycle

This one is particularly relevant to Innovators in the primary sector where you are solving for a problem that occurs once in a season (often a year). That is, you get one learning cycle a year. Many speakers talked about the artificial testing environments they created to enable them to test multiple times a day and every day of the year. These artificial testing environments can be physical or virtual representations of the live environment.

The obvious outcome is shortened R&D timeframes, or more precisely, a reduced time to a commercial solution. The more subtle outcome is better overall solutions.

In terms of better solutions, Sven Behnke from the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universit?t Bonn, demonstrated this in teaching robots to develop dexterity in their ability to grip objects. Traditionally, you would develop this ability through material design, code, and physical objects. Sven’s team created a system that generated randomised 3D point clouds for the robot to pick up in a virtual testing environment. How good was this? Well, it helped them win a $10M XPrize.

A question for you: what change could you make that would enable you to test your ideas or solution at least once a week every week of the year?

5. Design for Systems (not point solutions)

Innovators often have a continuous stream of requests for quick wins and or questions like, how small can you go just to get started. These requests lead to point solutions, which very rarely solve the underlying problem. Presenters spoke to this from two perspectives – consider the full system for which you are innovating within, and secondly think about scale from the beginning.

These two perspectives, while nuanced, are similar in that both must consider the system or full operating environment. This is critical if sustainability is important to you or your business as sustainability requires system and full lifecycle thinking right from the beginning of solution development. You cannot add in sustainability or longevity at the end.

A great example of this was the work of Evonik in their development of biosurfactants. Ralph Marquardt, CIO Evonik Operations GmbH, talked about how they sought to understand how nature developed their own surfactants from a full lifecycle perspective. They then identified the constraints within this natural system from the perspective of commercial scalability. This provided the focus for innovation. The core of their solution is a brand-new biotech production process. The result, they are the first company to develop biosurfactants at scale for use in detergents and household cleaning products. Their REWOFERM? biosurfactants are the most environmentally compatible surfactants on the market. For example, these biosurfactants have Renewable Carbon Index (RCI) of 100 percent and they outperform all conventional surfactant products in water toxicity tests.

A couple of side notes that Ralph mentioned: don’t depend on existing processes to create something new, establish demonstration plants (sites) even if they aren’t commercially viable (e.g., where the process or technology only makes sense if it were 10x bigger), define scale up challenges early and design to resolve these from the beginning (you don’t just scale at the end).

A question for you: how long would it take you to draw the system in which you operate and to identify the key relationships between the functional components? Bonus points if you actually do this.

6. Your Environment Matters

Deep down everyone at the conference spoke about this, some more explicitly though. One person that spoke at a large scale on this topic was Jelena Begovic. She’s the Minister of Science, Technological Development and Innovation for the Republic of Serbia. Jelena has a goal of creating a European centre of excellence for Science and Technology in Serbia. Her approach is about partnering to create an environment for success. Practical examples include, building infrastructure to make it easy for people to study, work, and live in proximity; making coding mandatory in schools in Serbia, asking the big-name tech companies how they would build the best R&D labs and then building these. Results? Science and Technology PhDs are now flocking to Serbia.

If you don’t have the influence of someone like Jelena, there are still other things you can do to create impact. Take Lauren Gardner from Johns Hopkins University, who won the €1M Future Insight Conference award for her work on leading the Global Covid-19 Dashboard. Two critical success factors for Lauren that enabled her to succeed were organisational support and trust. Practically, this mean that she was able to make quick decisions, openly share data, access funding, and convince PhD students to stay and work on the project because it was the right thing to do even though they wouldn’t have time to publish any academic papers for three years. If you didn’t check out the Global Covid-19 Dashboard during the pandemic, it was sort of a big deal. It was receiving on average 1 billion views a day, which rose to a peak of 4.5 billion views per day as people become more interested in the pandemic. In contrast Amazon.com gets around 2.5 billion views a day. Amazon works with standardised data, they set their own data exchange terms, and they have significantly more people and money involved. Compare this to a starting team of 2 at John Hopkins, which grew to 12 over three years and the requirement to ingest and process non-standardised data to create a live Global Covid-19 Dashboard.

One last snippet on your environment from Abraham (Avi) Loeb, Professor of Science at Harvard University. Avi talked about the importance of seeking and associating with higher intelligence. While he was talking about seeking out extraterrestrial intelligence, for most of us this translates to finding the best people in your field and then finding a way to spend time with them.

A question for you: who in your circle extends your thinking?

7. Delivery is King

This one will be short. In the words of Robert Langer, the hardest thing in innovation is delivery. I am sure that many of you reading this will understand the pain here. Robert recommends planning for delivery early and choosing, or looking for, solution options that simplify delivery. Who is Robert Langer? He’s a Professor at MIT, the father of drug delivery mechanics, has licenced his patents to over 400 companies, and unsurprisingly a Billionaire. Oh, and he has also received over 220 major awards.? He is one of 5 living individuals to have received both the United States National Medal of Science and the United States National Medal of Technology and Innovation.? He also received the Charles Stark Draper Prize, considered the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for engineers, and the 2008 Millennium Prize, the world’s largest technology prize. Did I say that there were some seriously clever cookies at this conference?

You made it to the end – legend! An important consideration for the seven lessons that I have outlined, is that it’s easy to read through these and say, well that was obvious. The real question is, are you doing these things? If you are, you move from legend status to superhero. I love talking with people that are pushing the boundaries on the doing front – send me a message if you’re one of these folk and I’d love to chat about what you’re doing and how we might superhero together. ????