[MUSIC]
So networking minds is important because it unlocks solutions that you would never
come up with by yourself, and you would also miss with other like-minded people.
So the idea is if you can pull in the brain power of diverse points of view,
if you can harness cognitive diversity, you can build solutions,
build companies, build outcomes, create new ideas,
that otherwise would be unavailable to you and the people immediately around you.
There are different tools to network minds, just like there's a conversation
about what is open innovation, how do I collaborate, and I'll outline a couple.
[MUSIC]
Prize competitions are not new.
Charles Lindbergh won a prize for flight.
Margarine, the fire extinguisher,
there are lots of different things that came out of old school prize competitions.
The new thing about price competitions is the online platforms and forums.
So I can put out there, hey,
I have $500 if anyone can solve my problem, there's the prize.
Or $1,000, or $50,000, or the x prize, there's a huge prize competition.
There's a company called InnoCentive, that rolled out of Eli Lily, and
this is for solving pharmaceutical drug problems, originally.
All of these individual companies are trying,
with their own scientists to solve disease problems.
And InnoCentive Alf Bingham said, no let's have a big platform for seekers and
solvers, those who are seeking solutions and those who are solving.
And there's research showing the farther you are away from this expertise
the more likely you are to solve these problems.
So the kid in Romania, the 15-year old, yeah,
that might be the brainpower you need to solve a problem that's sitting in
a pharmaceutical company in Boston, for example.
Online collaboration and awarding prizes has a bunch of reach.
So if you want to network minds, prize competition is one way.
[MUSIC]
>> A flash team is a project team.
You can come together work on one project and then disband.
This is enabled through all the online communication that's out there in
different ways.
You can pull the engineer for one project.
Hourly Nerd is a company out of Harvard Business School recently.
You can hire a nerd by the hour to be a consultant for
whatever project that you have that you need to solve.
And these flash teams, the idea at a big company like IBM, we're seeing across
the entire company, people come together in their smart cities initiative for
a couple weeks, and then go back to their traditional jobs.
A flash team can come together, solve a problem, if that working arrangement
worked well, many of those people will want to come and work together again.
If it didn't, you disband and go on with life, and go back to doing other teams.
But this is enabled very much as an online collaboration or
a networking of brain power.
[MUSIC]
So a third way that you could online reach out and
grab smart minds, Is through the gamification of work.
So you can build a game, and not just for entertainment,
but for solving a problem or building a product.
If you can make it fun, you can often get a lot of other people to play.
And in the playing of games together you build trust,
you build relationships, and you can crack problems.
So an example there, out of the University of Washington, is folded.
So this is a protein folding game, it's much like Tetris, and
human beings can see in three dimensions, so this is a three dimensional game.
The computer, just big data, things cannot see three dimensions as well.
So University of Washington set up a game, saying,
hey help us fold these proteins and figure out all these different things.
And people played the game against each other, and in two weeks they
figured out one of the protein folding things for the replication of HIV.
It had taken years and no one had figured that out.
So in a game format, harnessing minds from across the globe to play a game,
these scientists have solved part of a problem that they want to have solved.
[MUSIC]
If you think about physical space, space can be a lever, and
this is really important.
In the room that you're sitting in, in your office, or in a class room,
if it is one person standing in front and lines or rows of chairs,
that is a one to many model, and that is not networking minds.
That is one mind going forth and saying what it knows.
If you instead configure space to be round tables of three or
four or five people, and vertical use of walls.
If you write on walls, three or four or five people can see that, and
people can brainstorm and solve a problem together.
If you write on your own little note pad in front of you as we have with
traditional education, and in business note taking everything else,
only one person is really seeing that.
So if you want to harness the brain power of more than one person and
certainly a group of people, use three dimensional space,
use small configurations of people,
use different office cubicles are not networking minds, right?
Figure out how you can use space as a lever to influence other people to bring
their ideas forward.
[MUSIC]