Open Innovation Exchange

I don't wish to distract the team from preparations for tomorrow's interview at Cabinet Office, but the wonders of automated  ego search alerted me to interest in the Exchange from online community guru Howard Rheingold. Interviewed at the Terra Nova blog, which explore virtual worlds like Second Life, Howard picked up on an item I wrote. He says:  read more »

It has been suggested that we use stories, in our interview, to illustrate how the OIE would work in practice eg how people would first connect with the OIE, how they would interact with the OIE over time, how the OIE would support them in the 'innovation to action' process and so on.

I have had a go at such a story and posted it here. Are there any other story tellers out there?! We think we need three. If you have an idea for a story you can leave it as a comment to this entry or, if you are registered, use your blog to write the story yourself.

From Mike Alderson at Open Eye: Chat - Closer encounters of the Third Sector kind:  read more »

At 1:30pm David Wilcox posted our first stab at the Questions we might be asked at interview and how we would respond (to some of them) and by 8:30pm 92 people had read them . . . you can read them and advise us here.

As you may imagine, we are more than delighted to be shortlisted as one of four teams for interview, out of 21. We face that interview next Tuesday, June 12, and would really welcome your help. We want some tough questions.
Our interview team will be meeting tomorrow for rehearsals, when we'll try and work out what we want to say, and what we may be asked.
We wondered how best to do that. Do we keep our best ideas to ourselves? Nope. We got so far by doing things in public ... why stop now?
We made a start on some Q and A here. Please take a look, and add any comment, questions - or indeed answers. This is still co-creation.

The 21 bids have been read and 4 have been selected for interview and ours is one of them. Well done everyone! Here is the email from John Craig received today:  read more »

Insights into when the sort of approach used for the Open Innovation Exchange may work, or not, via Anecdote: When to use open source techniques:

"Nicholas Carr has written a thought provoking piece in Strategy+Business on the limitations of open source approaches. In a nutshell, open source approaches work best when people are refining something that's already been created and where the problem can be divided into chunks so lots of people can work on it at the same time (e.g. fixing bugs in Linux). Creating the idea in the first place is best done by an individual or small group. "

I think that accords with our experience here. The bid development worked because Simon - and Jane - Berry pulled it all together, and other people took a lead on work packaGES. A wider group contributed smaller pieces

As I've written here, Paul Miller from Demos and The School of Everything has picked up on the Open Innovation Exchange and the nomination for the New Media Awards:  read more »

Roland Harwood over at the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts suggests that Difference drives innovation...  read more »

This collective, open effort to put a bid in to run the Innovation Exchange has been nominated for an award under the 'Modernising Government' category of the New Statesman New Media awards by Nick Booth at Podnosh. He explains why he made the nomination in his article 'Open source tendering - New Model or New Madness' which can be read here. There is an audio interview with David Wilcox, our mentor in all of this, at the end of the piece, which is excellent.  read more »