How NASA keeps on conquering space and expanding the innovation space

This week in Houston a group of senior innovation practitioners had the unique opportunity of simultaneously learning more about space and about ourselves. Created and convened by NASA, the Cross-Industry Innovation Summit was a natural evolution of all the passion and experience they have amassed around space, the final frontier. After leading space exploration for decades, this time NASA set out to explore the spaces to do innovation well.

Very consciously, NASA started out with creating mindspace: tapping into their greatest and physically tangible achievements for an inspirational foundation. As a result of seeing and touching the artifacts of the Moon missions or the International Space Station (aka Humanity's cathedral), listening to NASA staff and astronaut testimonials, we can humbly confess that the group was totally geeked out. If inspiration overload is a thing, we were pretty much maxed out, surrounded by all the relics of the space breakthroughs brought by the last decades, while witnessing its future in the making first hand. (New space robot prototypes were tested and astronauts were trained right next to us, to give you an idea.) It felt like going back to your most inspiring moments when as a kid, you were reading science fiction in bed with a flashlight: minds were all flared up for the next phase.

The other space NASA very consciously opened up was the innovation safe space. I will use the term regardless of how much political heat it was getting recently, since we were utilizing it already in our innovation methodology. We have been informed early on by NASA that none of the speeches and contributions will be publicly published. In the Social Media Age that was a highly beneficial move. Vulnerability has been manifested, people with gilded job titles started opening up about about their personal and organizational innovation challenges. Even if we have consciously stayed away from the depth of an AA meeting, it started feeling more like a retreat than any other conference I have ever been to. Candid and clear speech made shields and masks disappear, and participants started seeking true connections and bonds with each other.

So, how did NASA leave other innovation conferences in the dust? Let's get real on that.

We have all been there. Innovation conferences shooting for enormous participation numbers, massive ticket sales, and keynotes who may not have anything meaningful to contribute, but enjoy celebrity status and are expected to attract paying customers. (I remember an SF conference where the famous young actor keynote confessed in all seriousness that he considered himself very entrepreneurial because he sold drugs on the street as a teenager. Come on, folks.)

Also, generally sponsors buy their way into speaking slots and while the audience can't escape getting depressed, no one stands up against one hour egotrips, sales pitches or any other type of self-serving content. A frantic pace of the agenda is coupled with the imperative of looking busy: 2 hour-slots being filled with 2-minute startup pitches each, nonstop, are the best examples of that. The notion of not having time for any meaningful connections further aggravates the toxic tendency of shameless self promo or aggressive selling.

So usually, this is what you get.

Fortunately, NASA's model was the exact opposite of the above flawed approach that we knew all too well. No one was paying, no one got paid. Attendance was capped at 90 people filling one room, invitation-only. Participants were handpicked on a purely meritocratic basis for both in-depth innovation expertise, unique perspective and personality compatibility with the group. A wide array of accents and global perspectives caused a multicultural understanding to permeate the event. Shameless self promo started becoming extinct after the first few hours of shock, followed shortly by its cousins: innovation fluff and corporate lingo. Sooner than later, the group started acting more and more like a community: there was a lot of listening, introspection, building on each other's ideas. I believe these are some of the most important traits that are often forgotten and that make innovation actually work.

Highlights and learnings

After a few more hours, we could start learning from each other 1:1, in groups and through panel discussions with very extensive Q&As. Just to cite a few personal highlights and examples:

• I was fascinated to learn insider tips & tricks from Pasky, CINO of global fintech innovation forerunner @BBVA about their internal NerdASMUS program (a word play after the EU's Erasmus exchange program) that ensures the cross-organizational osmosis of knowledge across all tech groups by constantly rotating and lending key developers to high priority innovation projects.
• I have been blown away by Roman-born Australian Flavia about a near future where our crops and security will be monitored by IoT devices, all connected and coordinated by an army of shoebox-sized nano-satellites of her design and manufacturing.
• We have heard how hyper-personalized sports hydration will become a reality soon from Gatorade's Chris. Miguel from Spain demonstrated how algae will replace a significant portion of our dietary ingredients and how they will revitalize agriculture in remote areas at the same time.

• We have seen movers and shakers making Defense open source, witnessed how millennial and Gen Z scientists transform all components of urban public & private transport, and got inspired how education evangelists from Google build computer science into the very core of all other subjects taught to public schoolers in Phoenix, AZ.

To that, you may say: but I see exponential technology and futurology galore coming out of Silicon Valley any day: how is this any different?

What makes NASA's concoction special?

• While we had a few game-changing startups present, most participants were representing massive organizations: the biggest corporations, governments and academic institutions in the world. These top executives and consultants see clearly the enormous wave of transformation that is coming - or is already here. Their organizations are scared and shocked - as they well should be -, but these people see opportunity everywhere. They have access to the massive resources needed as well as to the right ears: they can make change happen at the systemic level.
• As Paul Campbell from Gore put it very wisely, deconstruction is an often overlooked part of innovation: conscious dissection of ossified structures, roles, mindsets should precede the redesign leading to organizational rebirth. Participants may have started their work around the edges of their organizations, but many of them reached the very core by now and through understanding the work of their peers in other industries, they now see that the next frontier is systemic. They know that the landscape is murky and it will stay so: but by wearing "innovation headlamps" they both show the way and embrace the murkiness. They consciously grow in there as people, as executives and as organizations.
• We know that our jobs are hard - but we have also learned that we are not alone in that. Many of us have to deliver tough quarterly revenue results AND steer both short and long-term innovation.We all know what should be done: but actually doing it and doing it well is where the all the blood and sweat comes into play. The sheer cross-pollination of comparable challenges, workarounds and true solutions in an open, vulnerable, collaborative setting has enormous value.
• As Andrea Mills put it very wisely, buzzwords & lingo only obscure our vision. (Why are we talking 21st century skills", "moonshots", "smartphones", "flying cars" in 2017, if we know that these descriptions are not accurate, truthful or relevant anymore?) Let us put a stopper on the self-serving, neverending buzzword creation & adoption vaudeville - this makes us steer farther and farther from reality and put second-rate minds and fanboys in charge. The biggest innovation breakthroughs I have ever witnessed first-hand could jointly be summarized as "How could we have not seen this before?" Oftentimes, just putting common sense back into innovation could give it a vital boost.
• Millennials bring a new kind of value system and ethical approach into play and this proliferates very quickly. Purpose, planetary scope and social impact are not nice-to-haves anymore for the upcoming leaders. For many organizations, this also materializes as a threat, endangering the status quo and breaking a tacit contract between unequal players that was far from being balanced - and believe me, I am being very PC here. Regardless of being actual millennials or millennials at heart, our participants proved themselves as ethical, caring, responsible humans who boldly showed their genuine selves once they saw that they are not alone in that, and that no facades were necessary. Moreover, I was very happy to see that most participants were as much brilliant intellectuals as innovators. Personally, it was fascinating to witness conversations about ICOs, bitcoin or drones drift easily and effortlessly towards Charlemagne, Brazilian Independence and Vipassana meditation.
• And here's for some shameless self promo: I've found myself saying in my panel contribution that I see innovation as the art of rebalancing. As innovation practitioners, too often we are pressurized to choose between extremes that are positioned as opposites, but in fact that there is no such choice necessary. Actually, simply by choosing, we often commit irreparable mistakes by putting ourselves on the wrong, linear mental track. On the contrary: we should celebrate and integrate opposites. In our innovation practice, why should action and contemplation, speed and depth, openness and safety, fluidity and composure, power and compassion be mutually exclusive? We don't have to choose - and fortunately, participants demonstrated this unique trait of balancing opposing concepts all throughout the event.

I could rave for a lot more, but I do consciously stop and invite all luminaries present (as well as interested people who were not there) to contribute and share their learnings and perspectives in the comments section. A million thanks to NASA CINO Dr. Omar Hatamleh and CTO Dr. Doug Terrier for making this happen and taking it to the next level now, post-conference. Due to their ardent work, we are a sharing community now.

We transform this world - and with each passing day, we know how to do it better.

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