Herding Cool Cats: Lessons from Pop!Tech's Andrew Zolli

Herding Cool Cats: Lessons from Pop!Tech's Andrew Zolli: "

Sure, it's great to hang out at a hot-ticket business conference such as TED, Pop!Tech, or the annual meetings of The Clinton Global Initiative and the World Economic Forum. But these gatherings are steadily evolving beyond the standard conference model. They're going from feeding brain candy to a largely passive audience to creating and engaging communities to accomplish tangible results.

These conferences have year-round programs for their exclusive lists of attendees, to encourage the cross-pollination of ideas from leaders in the worlds of technology, the arts, the public sector, science, finance, and industry — the same carefully curated and diverse audiences who attend the conferences. The common goal: to push the big-think conversations that originate at the live events forward toward action, in terms of effective and profitable solutions for problems such as climate change. These events can serve as models for how to manage open innovation for executives in corporations, non-profits, or government.

Andrew Zolli, curator and executive director of Pop!Tech, held each fall in Camden, ME, offered me a set of open-innovation guidelines. He says he's gleaned these from managing the Pop!Tech event where ideas are exchanged, and now, creating from that base an active, year-round network to tackle specific business challenges. Pop!Tech is launching its first Pop!Tech Labs program this summer, in which top Nike executives will tap the Pop!Tech network to research new, sustainable materials that use less energy to produce than what's available today. Think of it as organized open innovation.



Here are Zolli's tips for managing open innovation among a diverse group of collaborators:

1. Create a social community among the participants. Have them gather, eat, and get to know one another. It's not just fun; it's to make sure they are comfortable before they start to work together.



2. Understand partners' motivations. Have everyone be as explicit as possible in terms of goals and what their individual interests are from the beginning.



3. Use design as a discovery tool, not just as a packaging tactic. Involve creative people — graphic designers, artists — from the outset. They might have new ways of looking at things. Often, they're asked to join at the end of a brainstorm as a means to come up with elegant promotional materials rather than contribute out-of-the-box product or service ideas.



4. Define 'innovation' collectively. What does innovation mean to each participant? Do these concepts match up? It's also important to come up with metrics for measuring innovation early and adjust them often.



5. Understand that failure is a measure of health. Collect stories of what didn't work. Recast these shortcomings as an audit, rather than failure itself. Then figure out how to improve them for future projects.



6. Leverage existing infrastructures when coming up with new ideas. Figuring out what resources are immediately available pushes innovation forward faster and cheaper, rather than inventing or implementing new technologies when coming up with a new product or service. What this means is asking each participant what they can contribute now, in terms of software and hardware, rather than to start from scratch — which can be tempting.



7. Choose a great team over a great business model. A passionate, engaged, dynamic team can adjust to new, unexpected challenges over time. Models can be both more rigid and more transient than teams.

Could other conferences become the engines for open innovation? What conferences will you be attending this year, and how could the communities they assemble go on to solve problems collectively — and year round?

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