eekim.com: EEK Speaks

Tue, Nov 07, 2006

Don Nielson on Societal Innovation #

The HyperScope crew attended SRI's 60th Anniversary celebration at the Computer History Museum last night. The main event was a panel discussion moderated by PaulSaffo. Participating were SRI luminaries DougEngelbart, PhilGreen, DonNielson, and PaulCook. (LHD)

Saffo closed the discussion with the question, "If you had a large sum of money to change the world, what would you do with it?" DonNielson had a wonderful response. He said that he firmly believed that it was impossible to do top-down social innovation. Societal change occurs when good people do lots of interesting things, and some of those things just happen to meet certain societal needs. (LHE)

JeffShults and I made this same question the central exercise of our "Tools for Catalyzing Collaboration" workshop last April. Curiously enough, all four teams came up with proposals that were about catalyzing bottoms-up innovation. Several of our participants came from foundations. (LHF)

It's good to see this philosophy starting to spread, but it's much easier said than done. By definition, creating an emergent space implies uncertain outcomes. People have a very hard time grappling with that uncertainty. (LHG)

Tomorrow, I fly to Baltimore, then Raleigh for two projects that are very much about emergence. One of them is Imergence (formerly 1Society), which I still haven't talked much about yet. Trust me, I'm not hiding anything, I've just been really busy, but I hope to write more about it soon. It's been a very satisfying experience so far, not just because of the great people involved, but because of the opportunity to shape the proposal with ideas that I've been formulating and refining since founding BlueOxenAssociates almost four years ago. (LHH)

/collaboration | Posted at 11:15pm

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EEK Speaks

A blog about collaboration, community-building, and the various goings-on at Blue Oxen Associates, with occasional digressions on food and other vital matters.