Radical Innovation & Interdisciplinary Teams –EdBoard

The GovLab Editorial Board Meetings (“EdBoard”) showcase news and events that encourage thought and discussion about The GovLab’s work.
EdBoard is a twice-weekly opportunity for The GovLab team to reflect on how approaches and technologies could help solve problems differently with an eye toward ensuring our work creates real-world impacts. More than anything, EdBoard is about getting people engaging.
Each EdBoard is led by one or two members of The GovLab team. Recaps of each EdBoard meeting are posted on our blog each week.

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Friday, July 18, 2014

During today’s meeting we discussed the technical report “Radical Innovation: crossing knowledge boundaries with interdisciplinary teams”, that presents in-depth results of “successful interdisciplinary innovation, focusing on the personal experiences of the people who achieve it”. Inspired by the paper we asked ourselves:
How can we at the GovLab foster the creation of new systems within which innovation can occur or new questions be asked?
As a team we came up with the following reflections:

• Innovation occurs within an environment where asking questions and not-knowing is accepted and even fostered;
• We have to remember that every day we have the chance to reinvent ourselves;
• Simple strategies like open spaces can generate moments of innovation by creating “forced collisions” where team members naturally engage with one another;
• There can’t be interdisciplinary teams without interdisciplinary people – that is, each of us have to (or should naturally desire to) experience a kind of forced migration to learn from other disciplines and understand their native language/rationale;
• Interdisciplinarity doesn’t equal creativity, which depends on the participant’s innovative nature;
• Boundaries help (time, money, deliverables) but there must also be time and patience for serendipitous  moments to occur (understanding serendipity as the article does – not meaning “chance” but having “the skill and knowledge required to take advantage of unexpected events.”); and
• Best ideas come when we are our own user, i.e. when we can’t take it anymore and force ourselves to find an effective solution for a problem that personally and urgently concerns us.

Finally, our EdBoard finalized with several ideas/moments that will give the team the opportunity to interact with apparently unrelated topics or issues of the GovLab’s interest, i.e. through our book club or the Ideas Lunches we regularly host.
Do you have best practices or ideas for generating new processes or obtaining new solutions? Join our conversation!
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