How To Build Research-Industry Networks

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COINs 2010 Opening Conversation

Image © Alice Merkel on Flickr

How To Build Research-Industry Networks with Conversations, Communications, and Collaboration

 Written by Betsey Merkel

Research-industry networks develop knowledge in research and business for collaboration and capacity building. The COINs 2010 Conference is an example of how to build this type of strategic engagement for competitive network advantage.

As a co-sponsor of the COINs 2010 Conference, I-Open worked in collaboration with the Savannah College of Art & Design (SCAD), MIT's Center for Collective Intelligence, and Wayne State University College of Engineering Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, in Savannah, GA USA.

This second international and highly interactive program presented training, workshops, paper presentations, and keynote conversations of research and industry leaders focused on aspects of the emerging Science of Collaboration. 

As a result of the committee's support, we were able to dedicate a six-month pre-conference period to share specialized communications and develop on-line  community.

Broadcast Conversations

I-Open introduced the concept of broadcast interviews and conference conversations to the COINs steering committee to strengthen programming and develop conference experience.  

We chose Livestream as our provider, having worked the toolset to broadcast Northeast Ohio conversations since 2006. Livestream offers a sophisticated  library widget (shown below) which is easily copied to blogs and websites.

 Within less than 30 days of uploading content to the COINs Conference channel, archive broadcast programming had attracted nearly 100,000 viewer minutes.

Technology tools, like the Livestream widget, enable sharing knowledge at levels appropriate to the development of networked collaborative communities.

What the Livestream Channel looks like when embedded: 

Communications

Frameworks are a good first step to organize strategic communications in environments that are otherwise information complex.  

Frameworks establish community values, roles and relationships. They serve as a high-level perspective on categories of investment, and offer starting points to community engagement.

The Swarm Creativity Framework was designed to loosely guide the organization of knowledge shared by the COINs 2010 conference community in support of the emerging Science of Collaboration.

 The Swarm Creativity Framework is a heuristic model of investment based on categories of knowledge  important to strengthen the discipline, Swarm Creativity.  Categories are associated here for the purpose of generating creative economies, of which collaboration is an integral capacity.

The Framework is featured in the COINs 2010 Conference Instructions document below and is a transfer of the Innovation Framework, a successful model of investment in Open Source Economic Development.   COINs 2010 Conference Instructions

 

In addition to what we share, how we share information is important.  

Contextual transmedia communications distributes information across dedicated social media infrastructure. Each platform has it's own thematic community, interests and preferred multimedia.

The publishing process used to engage with the tools, leverages values-based storytelling. This influences strategic thinking and social behavoirs of the 'meta' community.

The map shown below visualizes how information was shared to attract and connect COINs 2010 online community.

Coins2010_ctc

Collaboration

Collaborative workspaces develop community by sharing communications, connecting resources, increasing transparency, and organizing project work.  

Workspaces sustain and amplify conversations between meet ups so project development can continue. 

The Swarm Creativity workspace sponsored by I-Open for conference collaborators, is shown below.

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In Summary

The development of research-industry networks is paramount to engage locally based, globally connected economies for competitive regional advantage.

Further, investment in the strategic orchestration and management of dedicated process to support creative approaches to knowledge sharing is critical. This, coupled with data management, content marketing, and continuous technology innovation cultivate collective intelligence.

The COINs 2010 Conference offers a tested, comprehensive and sophisticated example of how research-industry conversations, communications and collaboration access the innovation capacity of community.

Working this way, universities and colleges can act in partnership with business and government, each occupying a unique leadership position within a larger, collaborative initiative.

My highest praise goes to the COINs Steering Committee, academic leaders from Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Center for Collective Intelligence, Savannah College of Art & Design, and Wayne State University's College of Engineering, who despite unknown outcomes, supported and adopted these creative ideas early in conference planning.

How Futuring Helps Us To Know What To Do Now

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Double Doors

Image © Alice Merkel on Flickr

Bruce LaDuke, Question Scientist, Integral Futurist, and Managing Director, Instant Innovation, LLC, provides an introduction to the cycle of knowledge creation and it's connection to enterprise development.

This overview addresses how Futuring and Knowledge Advance help us act smarter and see new opportunities. 

Watch live streaming video from iopen at livestream.com
As your Livestream viewer opens, review the Integral Futuring slides below in this window to visualize Bruce LaDuke's process-driven method to advance knowledge.

LaDuke Posters2

Learn more about Bruce LaDuke's life work, "The Answer is in the Question" at Social Text.

Learn the wisdom of civic leaders across these I-Open communities:

Copyright 2011 Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License Betsey Merkel and The Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open), 2563 Kingston Road Cleveland OH 44118 Phone: 216-220-0172 Web: http://i-open.posterous.com/

Challenging Jumpstart: A New Conversation About Regional Entrepreneurship

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Good Bubbles

Image © Alice Merkel on Flickr

Marc Canter, CEO of Broadband Mechanics (BBM) is a 25+ year veteran of the software business. Marc was the co-founder of MacroMind, which became Macromedia and helped to develop the world's first multi-media player, the world's first multi-media authoring system, and the world's first cross-platform authoring system while at MacroMind. More about Marc here.

Today technology Guru Marc Cantor posted the article, "Challenging Jumpstart". This interesting article questions the operations of Jumpstart, the Northeast Ohio economic development organization recently cited by The White House as a model for replication across America to advance national innovation and entrepreneurship. Marc points out - and backs up in detail with organizational leadership and awardee email correspondence - that the present Jumpstart organization lacks serious levels of transparency and accountability about how and what percentage of regional and Federal tax dollars (upward of $1B+) are being awarded to fund Northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs. If Jumpstart and other regional organizations tasked to address regional poverty and joblessness via their stewardship of regional assets, innovation and entrepreneurship to generate jobs and prosperity, word out on the street wouldn't be "3 out of 5 folks in Northeast Ohio live in poverty".

Here's an excerpt from Marc's article:

"For several years now, what concerned entrepreneurs throughout Northeast Ohio have been calling for is greater responsiveness and transparency from Jumpstart (Ohio), an organization largely funded by taxpayers. Now, as we see Jumpstart (Ohio) spinning off Jumpstart (America) and moving on to tackle issues of national economic importance (while we continue to face staggering historical unemployment here at home) many entrepreneurs in our community are left scratching their heads."

If organizations adopt habits of transparency and accountability public funding would actually reach down to turbo charge the real powerhouse of Northeast Ohio's regional economic and job creation machine -- our expansive, courageous, brilliant regional network of entrepreneurs.

Learn more about Northeast Ohio entrepreneurs and the widespread innovation already here - invisible because it's under connected and under supported at the levels open innovation requires - in I-Open's Civic Wisdom Libraries on LivestreamVimeo and You Tube.

Read Marc's blog post, comment and participate in this important new conversation with Northeast Ohio entrepreneurs and Jumpstart - and hopefully joined by other regional education, economic and workforce development organizations - to implement better ways of connecting regional assets, resources,  and support services to advance Northeast Ohio's entrepreneurs.

Read Marc's blog post, and if you are so inclined, share this note with your networks. E-mail/ask Marc Cantor (on Facebook and Twitter) what you can do to strengthen transparency and accountability for prosperity building in our Northeast Ohio region, other regions in the nation, and perhaps the world.

Bring the best of the I-Open community's collective Brainpower to this important new conversation. Share your knowledge and expertise by posting to Marc's blog post examples and comments of how you strengthen transparency and accountability.

If every region's economic development organizations adopted the new practices and tools of Open Source Economic Development - openness, transparency and collaboration - entrepreneurs would be connected and regions would be cultures of bubbling-up thriving sustainability.

Connecting Children, Learning and Justice

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Interpretation

Image © Alice Merkel on Flickr

Perry White, Founder and Executive Director, Citizens Academy of Cleveland, Ohio, talks about his passion to connect children, learning and justice in the video below. Since 1999, Perry has led what is now a transformative model of charter school education, and one of the top-performing urban schools in the state of Ohio with a national reputation for successful students.

"I think many people settle and tend to let themselves off the hook,” said Perry White, a former social worker who founded the Citizens’ Academy charter school in Cleveland in 1999 — naïvely, he now recognizes — and has overseen its climb from an F on its state report card in 2003 to an A last year. “It took us a while to understand we needed a no-excuses culture,” he said, one of “really sweating the small stuff." - New York Times, Education, May 1, 2010 Article Here. 

Connecting Children, Learning and Justice from I-Open on Vimeo.

Reference Links
    •    Citizens Academy http://www.citizensacademy.org/

Learn from the wisdom of civic leaders across these I-Open communities:

    •    Facebook I-Open http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Open/170817416694?ref=ts
    •    Flickr     http://www.flickr.com/people/iopen/
    •    Friendfeed http://friendfeed.com/iopen
    •    Livestream http://www.livestream.com/iopen/
    •    Posterous http://i-open.posterous.com/
    •    Scribd http://www.scribd.com/I-Open
    •    Slideshare http://www.slideshare.net/IOpen2 
    •    Twitter http://twitter.com/iopen2
    •    Vimeo http://tiny.cc/106p0
    •    You Tube http://tiny.cc/j5rse
 
Copyright 2010 Betsey Merkel and I-Open. Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works. Institute for Open Economic Networks (I-Open) 4415 Euclid Ave Suite 301 Cleveland, Ohio 44103 USA

 

COINs2010 Conversations in Collaboration: Global Teaming

 

 

 

The 2nd Annual International COINs2010 Conference  is coming to Savannah, Ga., USA  | Oct. 7-9

CONNECT ON THE NETWORK MAP

Visualize your network by registering on the COINs2010 website. Connect with your acquaintances and friends and grow your network into a galaxy.


WORKSHOP HIGHLIGHT: Creating Conditions for Effective Global Teaming

There are many reasons why companies form global teams to work internationally and interdependently towards a common goal.  Global teams can be created to develop global strategies, or to work locally to execute these strategies, or both.  Multinational corporations often create global research and development teams to benefit from site-specific scientific expertise that is not available in one location, but is spread around the world.  Still, other companies create global teams in specific functional areas, like sales and marketing, and then have representatives of that function from around the world collaborate in teams.  This enables the organization to benefit from a diversity of perspectives and services that can match or fulfill the needs of a global client, wherever that client might be located.  No matter what the reason for the formation of a global team or what form the team takes, leaders and team members must address the complexity of global teamwork by architecting new ways of collaborating. These factors must be considered and managed in designing and forming global teams to perform successfully.  Stakeholders, team leaders and team members can actively participate in creating conditions prior to the start-up of a team that can provide and enhance the likelihood that the team will achieve its objective. view more workshops.

 

REGISTER ONLINE at COINs2010.com

Registration rate is $180 (US Dollars) and includes pre-conference full day Coolhunting Workshop and Condor 3 month-trial.

 

 

This is a COINs2010 DESIGN ETHOS Intersection Event

 

 


Things are really heating up for the COINs 2010 Conference in Savannah, Georgia!

Get Connected  -- Log in to COINs 2010 and find yourself on the Connect Map, an emerging open knowledge network of research and industry leaders from around the world. Connect to people and ideas advancing innovation for creative competitive advantage. Go Here.

Log In and Register! We look forward to learning more about your important work in education, economic, and workforce development for communities and regions. Go Here.

Industry Topics included -- health care, design, transportation, creativity, education, technology, government, business development, and media. Go Here.

Skills Training -- Conference registrants receive a no-charge, half-day pre-conference Coolhunting Training Session led by Galaxy Advisors team and Peter Gloor, Chief Creative Officer and Founder Galaxy Advisors, and research scientist MIT Center for Collective Intelligence. All participants receive a complimentary six month trial of Condor, the dynamic semantic social network analysis tool. Go Here.

Practitioner Workshops -- Join us to learn about global teaming, social network analysis, innovation diffusion, and new practices in collaboration to accelerate your efforts to build enterprise. You will be joined by global thought leaders, students, and industry practitioners. Go Here.

We look forward to participating in new conversations with you about creativity and collaboration to advance business development!

See you online and in Savannah!