Process Innovation and Sustainability

The European Union Official Journal stated in 2006 that promoting research, development and innovation “(R&D&I)” is an important objective to its common interest. Research and Development (R&D) has long been a familiar notion in the market process, but Innovation in particular is a recent phenomenon taking on new meanings.

These days, Innovation is often cited to bridge between scientific discoveries and development of services or products with market success. On one end is the field of diverse knowledge, ranging from the precise motions of a sloth to the possibilities of harnessing anti-matter, put together by clever people who see ways to combine discoveries into a unique pattern resulting in useful products and services; on the other end is the market place of consumers buying up whatever it is that they need or want to perpetuate their beautiful lives. In between is this bridge—Innovation, a long and arduous journey starting from creating market ideas, refining the ideas based on market research, raising capital, getting to market, competing and establishing a new value proposition (or improve on an existing value proposition) to the consumers, and then surviving the consumer trends.

A man can get lost on this bridge. It's a big bridge, and neither end has calm waters. Research dollars are ever shrinking driven by market demands that make no sense. The market place continues to be influenced by the media frenzy for narcissistic attentions. Sharks swarm in both ends and currents are unpredictable. Let's face it, Innovation is no vacation. Take health care for example, once a profession that is purposed to heal the wounded and cure the sick, now reduced to a model of innovation for shareholder value, prolonging diseases, or worse creating new ones. To help mitigate our vulnerabilities when sick or injured, policy makers put regulations in place. But the pharma regulatory environment does little to actually incentivize new and improved cures. Instead, it is focused on fierce competitions, development silos, and contributes more to indirect costs on layers of bureaucratic fat making drugs more expensive and less accessible.

So it is a good thing that we are starting to pay attention to the Innovation process, if our goal is to figure out market improvements towards sustainable goals. In all of our current market madness, there is opportunity to improve our existing market infrastructure and the innovation process to change market and human conditions for the better. In fact, talking Process and Innovation in a single context is putting capitalism to the test and incorporating proper balanced social and environmental mechanisms to strive for sustainable outcomes. Here's our common ground: that we are all after the same thing—a better way of getting science to market with a sense of responsible market choices driving forward R&D and impacting our societies for the sustainable better future, together.

Innovation in this sense is all about process improvement, isn't it? In fact, almost every sovereign nation recognizes this for its people. China for example, is in its New Normal of slower economy (down from the double digits to around 5-6%) hoping to achieve some sort of maturity and deliberation in its new market. It is focused on intellectual capital, service based economy, and Innovation. Here at home, the United States is also seeing a new wave of incubators and accelerators and business, college, and private sector alliances to jump start our local economies focused on Innovation. Worldwide, we are seeing alternative funding mechanisms (e.g., crowdfunding, digital currency, etc) and more transactions driven by the new possibilities of technologies and collaborative efforts to bridge R&D with Innovation. A 2006 EU official journal article defines Innovation as “a process connecting knowledge and technology” exploiting market opportunities for new or improved products and services. Like the EU, other parts of the global community recognizes the importance of a process based approach taking on not just economic bottom lines, but also taking on environmental issues, and social justice issues, to Innovate. In this context, risk is a significant factor to consider when identifying market opportunities. Opportunities not just found in the global climate changes that risk the entire earth's ecosystem, but also in the global social changes that risk the stabilities of global economic and governance developments. If we fail to recognize these risks, we would not identify the opportunities where Process Innovation can make an impact to clean the air and water, eliminate global poverty, and deliver sensible health care solutions. But to recognize those risks means we have to put Research, Development, and Innovation together in a context of sustainable developments (focused on environmental, social, and economic risk mitigations).

Process Innovation and Sustainability are therefore one of the same thing. The former is the infrastructure and the latter its substantive content to a path forward. This is a game where we the players can change the way we play for the better. Innovation is not about the cliché game changers.

Innovation is about the people who would want to change the game – ready players.

The Story of (dot) Us

Recently, I started down a path to get a better understanding of open source culture. I wanted to see if the principles can be cross applied to other industries other than IT. Even more interesting of an inquiry is how “open” might fit our sustainability goals. My intuition was red hot on that trail and I was sure I’d find something there. What I’ve found was much more. What I found is a global happening. It was enough for Lauren and me to together take a closer look.

We are still very much on this journey, but the more we learned, the more we realize something very fundamental is shifting. The world around us is transforming. Scientific and industrial revolutions have enabled humankind to look beyond the functional appeals of our environment as we experience the information revolution. We are now looking for better ways together. Our common human experience in civil society has been elevated by the motions of defined, refined, and controlled social improvements. Globally, we have now put in place many process-centric evident-based global civil communities together via the Internet. (For example, Doing Development Differently is carrying on a core principal work doing exactly this with governance. Lauren and I became signatories to their efforts when they launched. Another example is the Open Knowledge Foundation's recent establishment of Open Sustainability - a network to open knowledge and source sustainable developments.)

Our collective consciousness is shifting from assets to knowledge, from scarcity to abundance, from hierarchy to network. We are connecting the dots and drawing up nodes on maps of our human capacity as a whole. This shift from the traditional functional, hierarchical orientation to a process-centric orientation is driven by a demand for efficiency and effectiveness. A primary target of opportunity is to increase information access and transparency. As our collective human experience transitions from hierarchies to networks and from disconnected functional decisions to process-centric development models, we are seeing a reinvention in institutional philanthropy and an emergence of distributed and disruptive social enterprises; both are measurable impact driven. A new generation of free society netizens began to see the world not for its scarcity of resources but for its abundance of knowledge and human capacity to make a difference. They are entering the shared information economy and the global community is beginning to understand the whole is in fact greater than the sum of its parts.

Under pressure, our old market competition model, based in the tragedy of the commons, is being transformed into a new way of strategic positioning to maximize our mutual advantage towards common goals. Put it simply, we are shifting from a labor-based economy to a knowledge-centric global free-marketplace. This has been fueled by the Internet and web 3.0 (collaborative) technologies. It will soon reach a tipping point where even censorship cannot prevent the cascading effects.

I’ve been feeling hopelessly lost for a while now, but the surest way to find a path is to create one. I recently realized that Lauren and I had been trying to create this path with our pathfinder company (BrainBox) that was founded just a year ago. Since then, we’ve applied the process based thinking, impact measuring methodologies, and open source methods, and executed a scaled research study into recycling habits and fostering sustainable behaviors with the City of Cincinnati.

From here, more work is to be done. There is much we want to accomplish. Lauren and I have been working on developing a learning schedule to get to know more about distributed masses' collaborative capacity to solve our sustainability problems, openly.

So. the Story of (dot) Us is only beginning.

/Stay Tuned/

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Ah yes, wisdom.

I think we found our new company model.

the 3D Manifesto

I followed a cookie trail today to PDIA (Problem Driven Iterative Adaptation). At its core, it’s a process based governance development theory that’s also focused on engagement and influence. Intrinsically it recognizes the bifurcation between people and society, the fact that complexity demands systematically factored and analyzed steps or iterations, and encourages learning from positive deviance or good disruptive thinking in an attempt to get people to think and “do development differently.”

It is the exact same thing my wife and I have been doing for a while now. We just don’t have the fancy acronyms and the prestige of “Harvard” to stand behind. We call our little project “BrainBox.”Although our work is slow to gain traction, but at this exciting discovery of the 3D Manifesto we are validated. Yup, that makes a pretty good day


The DDD Manifesto – the BrainBox abridged version.

“Ask, think, create and do; with your ecosystem of empowered stakeholders.” 

 Developments with real results usually involve many players – governments, civil society, international agencies and the private sector – working together to deliver real progress in complex situations and despite strong resistance. In practice, successful initiatives reflect common principles. 

 • They focus on solving local problems that are debated, defined and refined by local people in an ongoing process. 

• They are legitimised at all levels (political, managerial and social), building ownership and momentum throughout the process to be ‘locally owned’ in reality (not just on paper).

• They work through local conveners who mobilise all those with a stake in progress (in both formal and informal coalitions and teams) to tackle common problems and introduce relevant change.

• They blend design and implementation through rapid cycles of planning, action, reflection and revision (drawing on local knowledge, feedback and energy) to foster learning from both success and failure.

• They manage risks by making ‘small bets’: pursuing activities with promise and dropping others.

• They foster real results – real solutions to real problems that have real impact: they build trust, empower people and promote sustainability. 

You can look at the 3D Manifesto here.There’s a pretty impressive list of people who have signed on to the Manifesto and as of today, we have also signed.