Silberbauer Says:

So. We’ve been very negative about the ECCIX conference on this blog. We feel like the two grumpy, old men from the Muppet Show. We’re pretty sure we were not alone – but maybe the most outspoken. During the closing ceremony a gentleman stated that “Some have enjoyed this immensely – others have enjoyed it differently”.

And that sums it up. There were some very good presentations and a lot of very competent people present at the conference. We experienced both entry-level courses in how to search on Google and African tribal dancing, and some of the best speakers on innovation in the world.

But the fact is, even though there were some bright moments, the overall impression weren’t that amazing. There was a potential for an amazing conference here, but now it kind of feels like the conference of missed opportunities.

A positive attitude and openmindedness is needed when you’re working in a creative environments, but creativity is also about making decisions and having the courage to kill your darlings. We have both been playing music all our life, and as a musician you know, that if you want the crowd to listen and give into the music, then you cannot let the audience down for one single moment. If you want the audience to participate and co-create an amazing experience, then you have to pick the very best tunes and leave the rest at home. You need to make a hard selection and to … yes a cliché – kill your darlings. (and we’ve heard that killing your darlings is soooo hot right now

In other words, the conference should have been more focused on quality instead of quantity.

The Last Keynote

Last keynote was given by Kirpal Singh from Singapore Management University. It was about management as a an important player in creating an innovational environment. What was interesting when listening to Mr. Singh was his opinion on how our notion of innovation and creativity were based western culture and on our fundamental positive values as progress capitalism, democracy and focus on the individual. From a non-western point of view, though, innovation and creativity could be seen as being disturbing elements in a stable society . An interesting observation and a very necessary cultural understanding if the goal is global innovation.

Our closing remarks

Will we attend the 11th ECCI??
Well, this answer must be a clear and confident: “It depends!”

Judging from our experience at the ECCIX, academics, artists and one-man-businesses may have a point attending ECCI to network in a very nice atmosphere. But for professionals working with branding, communication, new media and or web and who don’t necessarily need to expand their current networks, ECCI could be a waste of time. We would prefer a real creative conference with cutting edge designers and creatives instead.

But we would recommend hiring the LEGO RobotLabs team to take you through a great innovative exercise. And – did we mention – we really want one of those Mindstorm sets for christmas

And besides that, if you got the chance to hear Rob Austin, Scott Isaksen, Joe Tidd, Jørgen Knudstorp, Ernest Gundling or Kirpal Singh then go for it. They are really worth it!

This is Statler and Waldorf from ECCIX, signing off.

The Texan Airforce Colonel and explorer Rolf C. Smith Jr. told us how to apply the metaphor (in Texan: ‘Metafurr) of an expedition to our lives and to our projects. A way to story-tell your way through a difficult project.

The most entertaining parts were definitely his stories from numerous safaris in Africa and rock climbing expeditions. No doubt that this guy has a drive to explore that we all could learn from.

This talk should have been a part of the Grand Opening. Col. Smith described the conference as an expedition we were all to participate in. But the keynote would definitely had worked better as a great kickoff at the beginning of ECCIX than at the near-end.

Uffe Elbæk from the Chaos Pilots opened with the first workshop.

When listening to Uffe Elbæk one question comes into mind: Why do ‘revolutionaries’ always talk as if the world is standing on a tipping point and that we’re living in the most important generation of all time”? Haven’t the world always been on a tipping point? When were the safe days?

Anyway,

Uffe’s presentation consisted of three parts:

1. A critique of the present Danish political environment with the statement: “Creativity yes! But in what kind of political context?”

2. 25 pieces of advice:

1. Embrace Chaos
2. Be lustful
3. Sit less
4. Wipe out habits
5. Give the best away
6. Drop plans
7. Be good to others
8. Beware of those who are perfect
9. Be greedy
10. Be playful
11. Be disciplined
12. Ask anyone
13. Flip graphs
14. Look up from your computer
15. Exploit each other
16. Ask questions
17. Ask stupid questions
18. Drop weaknesses
19. Take more risks
20. Beware of political correctness
21. Defer critique
22. Don’t be sure you can figure it all out
23. Slow down
24. Think in fairytales
25. Believe in happy emotions

We would like to add: “26. Save the whales” and “27. Don’t go nuts if you’re a squirrel“.
Or in other word, a list of the obvious doesn’t make it enlightening!

The third part of Uffe’s presentation was a 10 minute music video. It was a kind of Late-nineties-Sting-meets-Bono-in-Africa-thing. This being the 25 years anniversary of MTV it was rather difficult to get excited by it and a great illustration of how creative “methods” can grow old.

Then: Playtime. We joined the RobotLabs workshop run by LEGO Mindstorms [Update: the event was hosted by RobotLabs itself, not LEGO]. Now – this was fun. The assignment was to program a pre-built robot to solve as many tasks as possible in a small model world. The theme was Energy, so “coal”-bricks were to be moved to a certain position, windmills must be pushed across the landscape and a petrol car should be moved to make room for a hydrogen car.

It was a classic team work experience, but the pressure was on as we had very little time to program the robot. Also, to win, the group had to prioritize the assignments: Some assignments were worth a lot of points – others almost no points. so this was about creativeness, yes: But also it was about business objectives. The groups that did not go for the easiest way to solve the problems that paid the most points lost. Even if their solutions were creative.

Needless to say: Our group (Silberbauer Bros. and Christian from FLSMidth) won the contest that day. Always nice to have en engineer close at hand when it comes to robots.

The Mindstorm products are truly innovative and the LEGO [Update: Robotlabs] workshop succeeded in showing what innovation is all about: Creativeness and teamwork – but also a clear goal and clear business objectives.

Great to see that a product we’ve played with from the age of 2 still re-invents itself without loosing the “thing” that made it fly then. It still flies. Must… must… must have Mindstorm for Christmas.

Tuesday’s first keynote was served by Ernst Gundling. He talked about the importance of differentiating between kinds of innovation, but also stressed that we must be careful not to believe that radical innovation (disruptive innovation) is entirely different from line extension (incremental innovation improving on an existing product or service). Often, radical ideas surface from incremental improvement of existing products. The iPod cannot be considered a disruptive invention – the iPod only succeeded because of an excellent infrastructure, a broad product line, continuous development and gradual innovation.

It’s a great point, we think. Everyone talks about disruptive innovation and often focuses of the genius factor that creates that one, revolutionary design. But innovation is just as much about line extension. As Jørgen Knudstorp said yesterday: Innovation is also about continuity.

A brilliant case from Guntling is the 3M product line. For decades 3M has built upon the concept from the original Post It sticker and through line extension / evolutionary innovation created tape that is strong enough to glue together jet engines, photo printer Post Its, etc. Line extension, sure – but also brilliant and disruptive ideas.

One of the best presentations so far.

Just to get this off our chests: ECCIX really needs to get its priorities right. The double 3rd keynote (with Niels Due Jensen, CEO, Grundfoss and Jørgen Knudstorp, CEO LEGO Group) didn’t start as scheduled. Instead came a little surprise: This being a conference on creativeness and innovation, we were all going to dance to an to the rhythm from an African drummer. That stole 20 minutes from the schedule – the exact same 20 minutes that we were lacking in the end of Knudstorp’s talk. Therefore the ECCIX host had to cancel all questions from the audience. Being late, however, didn’t prevent the same host to rambling on for another 10 minutes. What were they thinking?

Anyway: It was a pleasure listening to Niels Due Jensen’s presentation on innovation at the Danish pump-manufacturer Grundfos. He is a charming guy and that he turns up at events like this shows that Grundfos is walking the talk – as Knudstorp would later state as an absolute necessity for surviving as a company in a globalised market. Grundfos has built innovation into the structure of the company. For instance an innovation team trained in innovative and creative methods is stand by for all development teams to call upon. Also, more than 10 % of the revenue is channelled back into R&D (according to Jensen this is a serious figure for a company like Grundfos). Not the least, Grundfos top brass is all for innovation and creative thinking. Chairman Jensen being present at ECCIX shows that – without a completely dedicated top management innovation just won’t happen, he says. And his closing remark: “Don’t imitate – innovate… For heaven’s sake” summed up the presentation very well.

Jørgen Knudstorp was clear cut and to the point – no manuscript or slides. He talked about LEGO Group’s four main frontiers toward 2020: 1) To constantly adapt to a changing world without loosing the continuity; 2) to innovate a new platform business model; 3) To enter and thrive in the digital realm and 4) To continue executing rapidly.

Knudstorp has transformed LEGO from a very large enterprise (10.000+ employees) to a smaller, more agile company (the goal is 3.000 employees). It’s now a platform company more like IKEA with the LEGO Group at the center.

Knudstorp stressed repeatedly that innovation is not about being funky, trendy, fun or anything like that. It’s about corporate survival in a rapidly changing world. It maybe all we have left as all our production is getting outsourced to Asia.

We’re hoping that the people behind the ECCIX conference have heard Knudstorp’s message and that they in the next couple of days will pay more attention to the valuable knowledge that the Keynote speakers are sharing with us, instead of focusing on African dancing. It’s not that we don’t enjoy a creative atmosphere for learning. But the attempt to create an atmosphere should not be more important than the essential content. That’s a misconception of both creativity and learning.

Scott Isaksen and Dan Phillips described a very interesting case on innovation with the enticing title “Reducing Time To Revenue”, who can say no??

Dan Phillips works for Alcatel-Lucent who’s clients – like all others in the telco industry – are desperate about finding that new product that can win back the customers from the competitors and the software based services.

Phillips made clear that his industry is conservative by nature and that most innovation has been done inside-out without any end-user influence.

He hired Dr. Scott Isaksen and Creative Problem Solving Group to facilitate the innovation proces. CPSG uses their proprietary GEMagination-proces to bring out user needs, transform these into ideas and finally concepts ready for prototyping.

Phillips laid down the background for the project and Isaksen took us through the steps (needs, ideas, concepts, prioritizing concepts and corp. read out) that has given Alcatel-Lucent six revolutionary (so they say) concepts in six months.

The purpose of the method is to address un-met and unarticulated end-user needs and to focus on immediate monetization of the innovation. The presentation was very convincing and Isaksen/Phillips’ approach to creativity and innovation seems to be very professional and operational. A shortfall of the method might be it’s focus on product innovation, it could be interesting to know if the method was applicable to other kinds of innovation like organization, marketing or value chain innovations.

All in all an inspiring breath of professionalism…. keep it coming!

Peter Hessedahl from Danfoss Universe took us through the megatrends of the new millenium: Connectivity, Individuality, Participation, Acceleration, Demographic and Resource depletion. We flew through slides on Web 2.0, new media, the democratization of the digital production tools etc.

For someone absolutely new to the user revolution, web 2.0, long tail and the rest of the popular buzz, this might have been an eye-opener of some sort. But to the rest of us this is extremely basic knowledge. Unfortunately Hesseldahl tried to cover too much ground for his 40 minutes time slot and we sadly never got to Demographic and Resource depletion. Hesseldahl had gotten about halfway through his slides when the chairman shut him down. Better planning should be expected from a speaker at a high profiled conference.

The second talk on this track was about what the Danish newspaper Børsen does to get a part of the digital market. A debate arose on whether free newspapers are “good” or “bad ” for people compared to “real” newspapers. It turned into a very old discussion on how to force “the people” to read the good stuff instead of the bad stuff. Especially to someone from the media business this discussion seemed very trivial.

Looking forward to hearing Dan Phillips and Scott Isaksen next.

Rob Austin, Prof at Harvard Business School is a seasoned presenter. By describing the business case of the VIPP trash bin (a trash bin that sells for $500) he pointed out that the design and quality factors are more important than ever. Rob’s part of the keynote was pretty basic but well-delivered and with a few strong points on what happens when business meet great design.

Danish designer Marianne Stokholm introduced to the design case of the Delta PLUS telephone (launched in Denmark 1987). She made the argument that products need to be more than just functionality and features. That’s so right, but it shouldn’t be new to anyone remotely into design or branding. We think that hearing more about Stokholms hands on approach to the design process would be quite interesting, but as many designers she felt compelled too take a too philosophical approach to the subject.

Where Rob Austin excelled in showing – though briefly – how design and creativity and business are linked, Stokholm’s talk became pseudo-metaphysical: Words as holistic and yin-yang came up more than once. To us, her view on design seemed a bit old-fashioned as she describes aesthetics as something in which only a superfluous society will indulge …as if designer products are only for us rich westerners. Luckily a member of the audience could inform her that people in the third world are also fascinated by aesthetics and do buy nice designer products besides commodities – and sometimes instead of commodities. A very good point!

The keynote started to sidetrack when members of the audience brought up their own agendas. A very entertaining gentleman spoke on microloans. A great little talk but a bit off topic here. Another member off the audience stated that emotions has a great influence on consumers and their choice of product. Well… we weren’t flabbergasted by this insight. We think Nike and Apple are both aware of that fact. And we just realized that we do in fact love our iPods.

To try to their quite different talks meet, Austin and Stokholm had drawn a chalk line around themselves on the floor. Austin had “the business island” and Stokholm took the designer’s and artist’s point of view. Why does this conference continuously stress the differences between the money men in dark suites and the real creative people? The story of creativeness and innovation is not bipolar.

I wish that Rob Austin had been given the entire 1½ hours to himself. Then none of this holistic gluing-together would have been nessecary and we could have gotten a better insight into his excellent ideas instead of a glimpse into a 20 years old design case.

So, we joined a session called “Paperjam: Art, creativity and Innovation”. This session was chaired by Robert Austin (plain overkill, by the way).

The format was a bit confusing: 3 researchers took turns presenting each others thesis. The quality of the research done varied to some degree. It was our impression that while Ms. McCleod and Ms. Buffa had done some really interesting anthropological studies, Titiana Chemi had some challenges separating her role as a consultant from her role a researcher. It appeared to us, as if the enthusiasm towards the job as a facilitator for creative processes had taken over the academic reasoning.

But of course, we haven’t read her thesis – so who are we to judge, we just attended the paper jam.

All three speakers displayed an innant fascination by the arts and by artists as a group. An almost romantic notion of the bohêmian artist, not motivated by material incentives. Especially Ms. Chemi seemed to regard the arts as an almost magical catalyst for innovative and creative thinking. We fear that this kind of unreflected view upon creativity may further part the fields of management and creativity instead of closing the gap.

Charlotte McLeod opened the session by presenting the thesis of Patricia Buffa on Experimentation and Innovation in the Visual Arts. Buffa has studied different subcultures in Milan – for instance street artists, trying to find out how these urban ‘incubators’ keep developing and spawning trends and artists. Also, she studied how the members of these cultures interact with each other and with commercial art galleries. The question is: How can businesses tap into these creative hot houses without destroying the unique and dynamic environment of them?

Next: Tatiana Chemi presented the work of Charlotte McLeod. She had studied the background of a large group of advertising creatives: What were their childhood like? From which demographic segment did they come? And what do they have in common? One of the thing they all had in common is that they all have felt marginalized in some way or the other. Money is not the driving factor for them – intrinsic motivation such as peer recognition is. We wonder, though: Are these qualities associated with advertising creatives only? Or are they simply common motivating factors for most professionals – including scholars and managers for that matter – we all want our job to be more than just a paycheck. Interesting presentation none the less.

Finally Patricia Buffa presented Titiana Chemi‘s thesis (confused now? We were!). Chemi is doing what she calls action research being both a consultant and a researcher. Her idea is that applying artistic methods – and introducing real life artists as catalysts – she can improve a client’s innovative process. By setting up workshops where employees and managers meet artists she suggests that the creativity potential of the company will increase. One question that comes into mind is: How will Ms. Chemi prove that the “artistic” practice is what does the trick? Maybe it’s just that bringing together people tend to make them laugh and get creative together. Is this just a way of proving that your average team building sessions actually work?

Our conclusion on this session is that we should be very careful to canonize art as an catalyst that will magically enhance a business’ innovative powers. Creative methods, out-of-the-box-thinking and an open discourse should not be confined to extraordinary workshops facilitated by external consultants and Real Life Artists but must be integrated into the way we innovate on a daily basis. We must not to alienate ourselves from these basic principles of creation by labelling it as ‘artistic’.

It’s improving greatly. Joe Tidd and Scott Isaksen (authors of Meeting The Innovation Challenge) has just given the first keynote about the dualism of creativity and innovation.

A general discussion followed. Is creativity enough to be innovative? Probably not. Proper innovation won’t happen without a business approach to creativity.

As a member of the audience said: A conference on creativity will be populated with clown, actors and a few public relations people trying to get an idea for their next campaign. A conference on innovation will comprise a lot of black suits. Wonder what kind of conference this will turn out to be? How many clowns and how many suits?

To really appreciate this talk we guess you must have read Tidd and Isaksen’s book.

We’ll both spend the next four days attending ECCIX - a conference for creativity and innovation, and right now we’re trying to get through the ‘Grand Opening’ of it.

It too soon to say anything about the event as a whole, but the beginning seems most like a parody on the opening of the Copenhagen European Song Contest. Faulty Powerpoint presentations and business men in old jeans thinking that creativity is all about funny hats. And very nervous presenters to say at least. Oh well. Let’s see, it can only get better – Maybe they’ll even manage to get the mics working during the day.

More to come from ECCI X 2007 in Copenhagen.