Manchester Rocked

I spent all of last week in the 4th ENoLL Summer School, in the great city of Manchester. Summer school keeps getting better; we had a fabulous time in Helsinki last year, but this year’s event was even more intense and stimulating.

There were too many highlights to be listed here. Some of the key moments, news and touching moments were…

…the research day. The scientific community around Living Labs is growing and showing results.

… the World Bank collaboration meeting. Our Memorandum of Understanding is turning into concrete action plan and joint activities.

…and finally, farewell to Anna Kivilehto, our fantastic network manager. She goes forward in her career as she was headhunted for Laurea Living Labs network. Loss for ENoLL, great news for Laurea. Congratulations Anna, the great news is that you move to Helsinki and I’ll see you more often!

Summer school made a wave; “ENoLL(#ENoLLSS13) has reached more than 77,600 accounts with around 700,000 impressions on Twitter. 111 contributors have been posting more than 420 tweets within 7 days short period.”

See you there:ENoLL Summer School !!!

The travel calendar for the fall starts to fill up. It’s gonna be a fantastic autumn. The first goal is Manchester, where the user driven innovation people gather together for the 4th European Network Of Living Labs Summer School. The previous three events in Paris, Barcelona and Helsinki have been great, and we can expect the same for Manchesher. One difference between the previous editions and this one is the location, which is in the middle of the (beautiful) city.

The summer school kicks off with a research day, and continues through the whole week. It will be also the launch event for the World Bank & ENoLL collaboration – community-driven Living Labs are especially valid way to do innovation int he developing countries and cities.

More info can be found in the summer school website. See you there!!!

City Boy Goes Rural

…Well not really – I am born in Joensuu, which is hardly a city, and raised in Juva, which is even less so. So I am just the right person to join the Smart Rural World Congress in Penela, Portugal, next week. The event is organised by Smart Rural Living Lab, and I will discuss the possibilities and challenges of smart solutions for scarcely populated regions (we are experts in that, as basically the whole of Finland counts as such).

Familiar buzzwords there… Participatory Design, Open Innovation and Design Thinking. Let’s see if they really do as they preach; one of the recognised problems of the Living Labs scene is that despite saying that the activities are user-driven, they are actually producer-driven; the companies rarely are willing to challenge their concepts beyond basic user-testing. The ones who actually do go all the way can get remarkable results, like the famous Lego case.

Anyway, while in Penela, maybe I could do some mountain biking as well. But maybe not as hc as the guys going downhill in the video…

ISPIM Conference Comes To Town

The International Society for Professional Innovation Management – ISPIM – are starting their annual conference in Helsinki today.

I am the first one in the line of fire, as I will be doing THE most frightening speaking task: give a dinner speech. DInner speech sums up the basic fact of performing: the shorter the time, the harder the task. While performing, people build barricades of powerpoint slides or umpteen words (messing upo event schedules). None of that for a dinner speech. It should also be funny. So the task is close to stand-up-comedy, actually. Maybe I should grab a trick or two from Louis C.K.?

I will be speaking about TRUST, STEALING and FORGETTING. More specifically, about trust as the basis for being innovative – for an individual, for a company, and for a nation; about stealing (ideas) as the fundamental way we innovate; and about forgetting (what you think you know) as the core ingredient of learning.

Tomorrow there will be a Living Lab session (session 1.5, 2 pm)  where I will be speaking too. There are great people in the session, like Pieter Ballon of iMinds and Petra Turkama of Aalto CKIR who will be hosting the session. And thank god, there I can hide behing my slides. Tonight, it’s just me (and the flu).

Speaking statistics 2012 – 2013

…well, that happens when you publish demos: I left empty bio pages under the “Speaking” header. Here’s the updated info.

Gathering info is fascinating. Some statistics:

2013 (so far) – 15 major presentations, speeches or moderator tasks in nine different countries. Total time on stage: app. 8 hours. Time spent in airplanes traveling to the events: app. 90 hours. Travel days so far: 23.

2012 – 40 major presentations, speeches or session moderator tasks in 16 different countries. Total time on stage: app. 23,5 hours. Time spent in airplanes traveling to the events: app. 230 hours. Total travel days: 65,5.

The proportion between speaking and airplane is about 1:10. So, telepresence makes sense (but then again, nothing beats F2F communications).

On top of the speaking assignments come project preparation, management and review meetings – app. 20 days more, last year.

Infodev Global Forum, East London, South Africa

I am heading to Africa again, one year after my trip to the World Bank event in Kenya. Now I will speak in the innovation ecosystems track: “This session will explore the relative roles the public and private sectors play in facilitating innovation, innovative enterprises and a productive economy.”

Living labs, open data and community-driven smart cities on the agenda. More insights when I get there.