Building on the post below, it’s worth understanding the practical benefits of this negotiated appreciation of the nature of meaning and knowledge and why this is especially pertinent to a design-led approach.

Anyone with a passing understanding of design will be familiar with the need to deal with emergent, unfocussed and fundamentally unsolvable problems on a day to day basis (see Wicket thinking).

This comfortableness of good designers with not being in control of processes, use, reaction to, or reading of the design of knowledge exchange activities where the actual knowledge transfer is very much uncertain a pretty comfortable thing to get to grips with.

This is not an academic analysis (although there is a paper I have written about this subject here), it’s the result of the interaction of philosophy with working with over 50 companies in the past 12 months in a series of knowledge exchange events and activities.

The experience from there is that the skill is … digital marketing agencies, to high-tech SMEs to new projects with the nuclear decommissioning industry that the skill is engendering a context and approach that facilitates the flow of information between parties. This can be hard information or softer things like perspectives/opinions.

This is much more powerful than trying to ‘imprint’ knowledge on people, also because you are ‘flowing’ with participants and releasing their potential, the process is more enjoyable for everyone.

Over the past 2 years, I’ve devoted myself to understanding innovation and to an extent I think I’m just about getting there with a paper published in Design Issues (one of the top 2 design journals) reviewing the relationship between Innovation and Design, and through my IDEAS collaboration, am working with some of the top academics working in Innovation in the UK, particularly Prof. J Howells,Director Manchester Institute of Innovation Research (Manchester Business School).

The realisation I’ve come to is that fundamentally Innovation is too nebulous and general a thing to really grasp. There are deep-rooted academic traditions and perspectives for example to the OU and the University of Surrey from 60’s and 70’s and subsequent activity that make it difficult to have an impact in the area, but more, that it’s not possible to get grip on it as an entity it’s too polysemic. Building on this realisation the thing I’m most interested in, and I think is most significant to the broader innovation debate, is the process that enable innovation and fundamentally this means some aspect of knowledge exchange.

I’m always drawn to the fundamentals, the core texts, the paradigms that shape understanding and only then drawing these into design practice not just for grounding in the real world, but also to test and prompt new abstract theories understanding and further applications. An example of this approach is an engagement (tussle) with Michel de Certeau and his tactical/strategic differentiation (see The Practice of Everyday Life for more). I reacted against his rather gloomy assertion that engagement in non-hierarchical ways was inherentl limited to the fleeting tactical engagement with little prospect of progress or impact beyond a fleeting two fingers to authority. In the past I’ve proposed an approach that counter-strategies drawing on Situationist ideas of recuperation, arguing that this itself in itself can be turned to a positive approach, instead of recuperation (or strategic activity defusing radical thinking it can be subverted to make ideas and actions more impactful , engaging and significant.

The reason for this digression is an excellent seminar Jeremy (Howells) gave on Knowledge at a recent research retreat I helped organise for IDEAS. The underlying premise of his seminar was that knowledge cannot by its nature be transferred, so problamitising the whole concept of knowledge exchange or transfer. He argued that only information can be exchanged and it becomes knowledge in the recipient of the exchange. This has profound implications for the nature, fidelity and content of the knowledge that is ‘defused’ between members of any network of exchange.

Jeremy was drawing on economics, philosophy of knowledge and sociology but several members of IDEAS with backgrounds in business and entrepreneurship theory were diametrically opposed to this view that seems very comfertable to someone with my background. The exciting thing for me was the fact that this debate has to draw in notions of authorship and meaning that introduce a new dimension (and one I’m instamatly familiar with), into the debate about knowledge exchange. Things like de Certeau’s concept of proprietary distributed meaning and the value of negotiated meaning and exchange in communities and emerging framework of knowledge or understanding exchange becomes very significant in developing understandings of knowledge exchange in the more generally (ab)used sence.

I spent some time recently working with Dare, a fantastically talented new media advertising agency, anyone who scans the Campaign awards results will know how highly regarded these guys are in the industry and in the wider commercial field. I was at Dare to help them look at their creative processes and how they intend to keep their innovative edge. This problem affects most companies but especially those in the creative sector. I started doing projects with Dare 8 years ago when they had 15 people and were the definition of a guerrilla-marketing agency with radically innovative projects being developed by the seat of their pants – with startlingly good results. Now they are over 200 people and its more difficult to be fleet of foot, when you have the footballer Kaka for 15 minutes for a shoot its hard to be footloose and fancy free.

A group of designers and technical experts came together, really to think about how to keep the gorillas spirit alive, and really preserve opportunities for serendipity with a larger structure. It was an interesting day, largely because there was such a flexibility of thinking and willingness to consider new ideas from the participants. It was also stimulating because there was a palpable sense of tipping point where innovation moves from an implicit, unacknowledged activity towards a appreciation that these things can be brought into the light, without crushing the life out of them.

This is symptomatic of wider debates in the design industry (with some notable dissention from people such as Rick Poynor in his article ‘Down with Innovation’). Some agencies use a very clearly articulated production process such as Prince2 while others are much more organic, one this is for sure though, these sorts of discussions are going to become more common and more important as the design industry matures.

Like an elastic band, I keep returning to issues around innovation. I am in the process of writing a large bid (with many other academics) about the Digital Economy and we want to talk about innovation without repeating the rather stale, well-trampled ground of open innovation, user focused bah blah blah… This is motivated not only for a desire to be distinctive but more importantly to get to grips with what we think is a new mode of innovation activity. We think that innovation is happening more quickly (and accelerating) in virtual/digital contexts and is increasingly outstripping innovation in physical contexts that are more limited by physical logistics and organisational inertia. This is creating a disjunction and further a void between digital and physical innovation that is set to widen in the future, perhaps a s a stimulus for physical innovation and so a coming together, perhaps the start of a major schism.

We are searching for a way to describe this discontinuity, and what we think is a new sort of innovation, not just in the rate of innovation but more aagh I want to say open / democratic / fluid / dynamic. As a placeholder, we are using kinetic innovation, for me this is interesting as it has connotations of energy, movement and (for me anyway) relates to a meta-movement of innovation itself rather than seeing innovation merely as an engine of change.

Having said this I’m also drawn to the term ‘high-tempo Innovation’. This reflects the fast and furious’ and not necessarily high quality, or considered or even productive innovation that characterises at least a significant portion of innovation in the ‘wild west’ of the digital realm.

I have just taken part in an interesting workshop that formed part of the ‘Relocating Innovation’ project at Centre for Science Studies, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University

Facilitated by Lucy Suchman, Laura Watts and Endre Dányi this drew together a very diverse mix of academics from across Lancaster University who were interested in innovation. The relocating innovation project is interesting in its own right (and please follow the link to find out more) but another layer of interest came from the different perspectives the range of participants brought on innovation.

There was a minority of people looking directly at classical innovation studies in the business and management sense and for the most part most of these were in tension with its implicit aims that really continue the modernist aim of progress through new technology and the market. There was a much greater interest in relocating innovation away from (in my view unsustainable) view of the market as controller and incentives. In my own work on user generated content its becoming evident that the old currency models of incentive, activity and reward are becoming tempered with other incentives to innovate around reputation, ethics and other factors, understanding these motivations is a key aim for me.

There were also a number of people using innovation ion the same way that design or creativity is used as a short-hand for the ‘eureka’ moment. It was interesting to see innovation used in this way in otherwise very particular, specific lexicons particular to the specific disciplines.

Apart from this one of the most stimulating ideas (that is taking some time to assimilate properly) is the idea of combating global (hegemonistic) ideas that are not so constructive by localising them in a particular context, narrative, agenda and conversely in the freeing of local ideas to propagate and develop across time and space. More thinking required on my part on this.

This was an exceedingly interesting series of conversations and issues and hopefully these will continue in the future.

Following on from the post below, I have been directed towards Utterbacks et al’s book Design Inspired Innovation, I am in the process of reading this and so far, it is making me very cross! It is rather loose in its language, for example ‘ Modular design is a pre-condition for so called mass customisation’ – what about rapid manufacture? In addition, it also lumps designers and design companies as being the same as ‘users’ in an argument that innovation is shifting towards users over time. This is a massive shift in conventional thinking and highly contentious (translation – wrong) presented in a completely unproblematic way. Having said this I am withholding judgment, I am only 30 pages in so watch this space.

I have been reading and thinking (but not writing) a lot about innovation over the last two weeks. Specifically I have been thinking about the relationship between design and innovation. There are many people, even colleagues who talk about innovation without any relationship to design at all (literary examples of this include the 600 page Oxford Handbook of Innovation and the 500 page Diffusion of Innovation) in this world innovation is a function of business activity. There is another camp, mostly of designers, who see innovation as their home ground (and neither know or care about the other school of innovation studies). Tom Kellys The Art of Innovation and his 10 Faces of Innovation use the term interchangeable with creativity and treat it very much as a sub-category of design practice. This tension is exemplified (but not resolved by a recent paper in Design Studies by Ba1rry Wylant called Design Thinking and the Experience of Innovation. Here the two worlds are mixed without really bringing them together, the result is a rather curdled sludge.

Rick Poynor has just written an article in the International Design Magazine called Down with Innovation. Here he argues that designers have been so successful in promoting design that business has tried accepted this and is now trying to take it away from designers by calling it design thinking or innovation. He undermines this interesting position by going onto argue that the only really important thing is aesthetic sensibilities anyway and the measure for successful design is if it will be in a museum in the future (I think this was a side swipe at things like service design).

From my perspective there is a lot of guff written on both sides of this subject. There are many, many ‘airport’ books aimed at the executive looking for a quick fix. The two titles above are exceptions to this as is a great deal of the research in the book edited by Chesbrough, Vanhaverbeke and West called Open Innovation Researching a New Paradigm. (Warning Chesbrough started the Open Innovation thing off with a book called. you guessed it Open Innovation – this is pretty firmly in airport land, even if the kernel of the idea in there is proving to be very powerful).

Substantial research about innovation and design is not very well developed (or if it is I have not found it yet), partly this is because that designers are trained to weave their creative skills around them in a web of mystique, partly its because I don’t buy the idea that innovation is the same as creativity and the same as invention. The distinction I am aware of (and support – I think) is that invention is the Eureka moment; innovation (and design?) is the motion of that idea into a practical outcome. I am keeping at it but bringing these two worlds together is challenging to say the least.