Hack the MIX Hackathon

To stimulate creativity and innovation, there is tremendous power in collective imagination, intelligence, effort and intrinsic motivation. To hack the MIX, these concepts need to be facilitated within the MIX Community to mix and mashup ideas and enable more people to contribute where they have the most intrinsic motivation and feel they can add value. Collectively, these efforts would help build upon the current success of the MIX.

To accomplish this, the MIX should mashup concepts from books such as the “Coolhunting – Chasing Down the Next Big Thing”, ”Coolfarming – Turn Your Great Idea into the Next Big Thing” and ”Swarm Creativity – Competitive Advantage through Collaborative Innovation Networks” written by Peter Gloor and Scott Cooper and “Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities” by Christian Terwiesch and Karl T. Ulrich.

In the Coolhunting and Coolfarming books, Gloor and Cooper describe the roles of Coolhunters, Coolfarmers and Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) in developing new ideas and spotting new trends. Coolhunters observe communities and society to discover new trends and trendsetters. Coolfarmers get involved in the actual creation of new trends by nurturing and cultivating new ideas. These individuals get personally engaged in the process of creating cool trends, but do not have to control the new ideas to make them succeed. Finally, Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINs) are created by individuals that share an intrinsic interest in something and are motivated to work together in swarm creativity to bring a shared vision to reality. To spot new trends, Coolhunters just need to look for the Coolfarmers.

The “Innovation Tournaments” book describes the notion of an Innovation Funnel that depicts how “a series of tasks and filters are used to winnow myriad raw opportunities down to a few exceptional ones”. While the tournament concept might not be the right metaphor for the MIX, the concept of an Innovation Funnel involving a sequence of tasks and filters could be useful.

In an Research & Technology Executive Council (RTEC) article, the notion of an “idea beacon” was mentioned. The RTEC used the “idea beacon” term to mean “share information with well-connected partners in a way that motivates these partners to bring R&D executives high-quality ideas” and “signaling the kind of innovation ideas your organization needs will help avoid the expensive hunt for ideas by making it easier for partners to more quickly bring you the best ideas on their own”.

The concept of an Idea Beacon that could work within the MIX would be somewhat different. Rather than expecting “partners” to bring the best ideas on their own, an Idea Beacon would establish a point of focus on a potential area of management innovation (ex. organizations, budgeting, leadership, strategy, etc.) to help bring people with different skills and perspectives together to focus on the subject area for the benefit of the MIX as a whole. Anyone within the MIX could then participate in an Idea Beacon to increase everyone’s understanding of it, to ideate and help develop innovative solutions to problems/issues/needs within that space. The term “Idea Beacon” would represent something that attracts information, thoughts and perspectives … and provides an aggregation point for COINs to form around generating ideas and incubating innovative solutions.

The idea of COINs forming around Idea Beacons based on the intrinsic motivation to participate is compelling. So is the challenge of finding ways to enable those COINs to develop the trust and familiarity needed to form an intellectual flow as a group to facilitate ideation and innovation. Just like new scientific knowledge often builds upon existing scientific knowledge and concepts, the imagination, ideation and innovation lineage needs to be captured and perpetuated.

In addition to the Coolhunters and Coolfarmers, there is also a need for Coolsensors (people intrinsically motivated by opportunity discovery) and Coolcooks (people intrinsically motivated by mixing and mashing opportunities and ideas more than fully developing them). As a starting point, the thousands of MIX story and hack submissions that have been received would be the source for the initial mixing and mashing.

Hopefully, this illustrates a potential approach for involving the MIX Community more in mixing and mashing up ideas and this could help lead the MIX to develop more aggregated, inspiring and high-impact management innovations in the future.