(OFF) Thanks very much...
(David Price) This is the ever-shrinking presentation.
It was originally 25 minutes, last night it was 23,
now it's 22.
I've got a 40-minute presentation. I'm just going to speak twice as quickly.
No, I'm only kidding, it's only 20, 22 minutes.
And I've got a thing to time it to make sure I don't go over.
About four months ago, I was diagnosed with cancer of the colon.
And what was it, seven weeks ago, I had the operation
which kind of went okay, got rid of the tumor.
But when the colon was reconnected, it sprung a leak
and I got a thing called sepsis, which I later discovered,
is fatal in 60% of the cases.
What essentially happens with sepsis is
the organs start to pack in, one after the other,
so my heart was fibrillating,
I lost, kidneys stopped working,
lungs stopped working, so they put me on a ventilator.
And my wife Claire who's here somewhere
was told to bring the family around, because they didn't expect me
to get through the weekend.
As you can see, I survived, and this is actually the first talk I've given
since I was in intensive care.
I was in intensive care for a week.
So, when a sick, no, no honest. (Applause)
But when I say I'm delighted to be here, I'm not just being polite.
(laughter)
I'm talking existentially rather than conversationally.
But I wanted to start with that story because, in that process of the journey
from diagnosis to operation, I met with some remarkable people:
on forums and interest groups, but I also visited and interviewed people.
So I interviewed some people in the Netherlands
who are treating their loved ones, who've got end-stage cancer.
They are lay people, computer technicians,
who, frankly, conventional medicine's given up, they're stage 4,
they said there is nothing more we can do,
so they're administering introvenous cocktails of drugs,
some of which are approved, some of which are off-patent,
some of which are off-label.
I visited a clinic, here in Germany, which I can't name, because
they're kind of operating in the shadows in fear that they'll be closed down.
And what it seemed to me, once I looked beyond health
is that this is a phenomenon which is happening
in all kinds of areas of public life,
that we're seeing what I call people-powered innovation.
And I think it presents a real challenge for institutions and organizations.
So, why is it important?
I think it's important because it's kind of a natural consequence
of the issues I talked about in my book "Open,"
where, now that we're able to share and exchange knowledge,
we're now at a point where we want to do something about it,
and we want now to be more in control of our own lives.
But I think it's particularly important for the people who are in this room today:
educators and human resource people
Because one of the things that we're seeing is a major shift in the way
in which we accredit knowledge and competencies.
I don't know if any of you have read Phillip Brown's excellent book
called "The Global Auction," but he talks about how our graduates are facing
a high-skilled, low-income future
because of globalization and a whole range of other issues.
And recently, Laszlo Bock who is in charge of People Operations at Google said this,
"Your degree is not a proxy for your ability to do any job.
"The world only cares about and pays off on
"what you can do with what you know
"and it doesn't care how you learned it."
So my point, I guess, is that unless we change the product,
we risk being dis-intermediated.
By that, I mean learners can find other ways
to get the knowledge and skills that they need.
And let's face it, the product hasn't really changed much in decades.
So I'd argue that the best way to stay relevant
is to involve users in the process of innovation.
So this is what I mean by people-powered innovation,
a process where users lead users, accelerate innovation
by either advocating for new products or services,
tinkering with existing products and services,
or creating new products and services from scratch.
That's my kind of working definition, based partly
on Eric von Hippel's definition of people-powered innovation.
So here's some examples.
The potato crisp, the humble potato chip
was invented in 1853 by a chef called George Crum
who worked at a restaurant in Saratoga.
Now he gets the credit for inventing it, but I think it should go
to the disgruntled diner in that restaurant
who kept sending the potatoes back, said that they were too thickly sliced.
And this kept going backwards and forwards
and eventually George Crum got really pissed off about this
and cooked them as thin as he could, burned them to a crisp,
smothered them in salt and then sent them out.
And the diner loved it.
So he thought, oh, we're on to something here
but he didn't take out a patent: in fact, none of these examples have been patented.
So, 1853, we've always had people-powered innovation.
In fact, you could argue that up until the Industrial Revolution,
that's all we had, we had people-powered innovation.
But if you bring it a wee bit more up to date
I don't know if you know the story of the skateboard
but it was something that surfers, facing a window when they couldn't surf,
it was the best kind of substitute.
So they took a pair of roller-skates, chopped them in two,
put wheels on either end of a plank of wood, and you had a skateboard.
So the skateboard industry is now worth $4.8 billion a year.
And a similar story happened with the mountain bike.
It was basically cannibalized from other forms of bikes
and developed entirely by users.
To bring it even more up to date,
I don't know if you're aware of this thing called Patreon?
It's been set up by Jack Conte who is a musician.
Certainly, he wouldn't have thought himself as a kind of entrepreneur
but it kind of recreates in the digital age
the 18th century notion of patronage for artists.
So you pay up artists, because you like their work.
And it has been a hugely successful venture for Jack.
And then one of the few companies that have really latched onto
people-powered innovation at a very early stage
is Proctor & Gamble, who have developed a thing called Connect and Develop
and that service now, which brings in innovations
from outside of the organization,
that constitutes about half of all their innovations.
So much so that Proctor & Gamble say: "Proudly found elsewhere."
That's their motto.
And I wonder how many of us working in universities could say the same thing,
or how many of us who are learning officers in companies?
So, where do we see people-powered innovation?
Well, you can go to any maker space and you'll see it,
visit forums or interest groups, even groups like Anonymous,
whatever you may think of their philosophy,
you can't deny their ingenuity and innovation.
And I've looked at a number of examples
and I've identified four common characteristics.
I'm going to quickly go through them.
The first is need. The second is "Jugaad."
Don't worry if it's not a familiar term to you.
Third is the hacker ethic and the fourth is a sense of agency.
Right. Very quick examples.
It's a cliché, but it's a cliché for a reason,
that invention is indeed the mother of necessity.
And you get people-powered innovation where the need is greatest.
So it's no accident that some of the most innovative things that we now see
now are happening in the developed world in slums and favelas.
So 85% of mobile transactions have actually originated
in developing countries.
And 50% of them were created by users.
And if you think about it, that's kind of paved the way for things like
Apple Pay and Samsung Wallet.
The first use of mobile banking was actually in the Philippines,
and what people did there was to take pay-as-you-go top-up vouchers,
take the code from them, text them to their friends and family
in other parts of the Philippines, and they used it as a kind of currency.
But they're not just turning air time into money,
they're turning shit into money too.
This is a genuine sign, I didn't make this up
but it says, if you can't read the bottom it says,
"Shit Business is Serious Business".
And there's a guy in Lagos in Nigeria
and Lagos has a big public health problem
because people are using the streets as a toilet
but there is a graphic artist called Isaac Agbetusin
who invented a thing that he called the Dignified Mobile Toilet.
They look like the kind of Portaloos that you see on building sites
but he's designed it, built it, delivers it to communities
and then they charge people ten cents to use them.
But that's only part of the story, because then the waste is collected
and turned into biogas which is sold to energy companies.
It's ingenious. He's getting profit at both ends of the transaction.
So that leads us to the second characteristic.
And it's this word "jugaad". And if you're not familiar with it,
it's a Hindi term which kind of means it's making the most of what you've got.
So I don't know if you can see the photograph on the right.
That's an ox-powered two-story truck.
During the rainy season, of course people get drenched
so somebody found the cabin from an old truck, put it on.
There are people on the top deck of the truck, people on the bottom,
and they're staying dry. Making the most of what you've got.
But it's also this sense of "jugaad" as meaning "good enough".
What you see on the left is the world's first clay refrigerator.
It was created, again, by just an ordinary user.
And of course it doesn't work as well as a powered refrigerator
that we might have in the West.
It's cooled by cold water which cools the clay.
But when you've got temperatures of 45, 50 degrees in summer,
it's good enough. It keeps the produce cool enough
to be used, and it doesn't go off.
Here's some very quick examples of jugaad as well.
Guy on the top left, he's frying his breakfast
while he's listening to his MP3 player. (audience laughing)
Guys on the top right have designated the compartment a sleeper compartment.
They took a blanket and put it up as a hammock.
Guy at the bottom right. This is fascinating.
He's turned what we call in the U.K. a flip-flop, Australians call them thongs,
he's turned it into a gun holster.
I don't know what he's doing with the other flip-flop.
And the guy on the bottom left has invented a kind of hands-free kit.
(audience laughing)
It's just a handkerchief with a mobile phone.
I hope to God he's cut a couple of holes out in the front.
But what we're seeing is that jugaad principles
are now being adopted by Western countries.
And if you think about it, a company like Google
when it talks about everything's (mumbles), fail fast and integrate
that's a kind of jugaad approach to innovation.
And when jugaad meets the next characteristic,
I think things get really interesting.
So when you combine a hacker ethic with jugaad,
I think you then start or rub against what I would call
one of the biggest blockers to people-powered innovation,
and that's kind of over-strict regulatory framework.
And it's put there on the premise of protecting us and maintaining quality.
Now I'm assuming you all know the story of Wikipedia, so I'll give you
the truncated version.
When it was first started, it was called Newpedia
and they commissioned a bunch of academics to write articles
which were then going to be peer-reviewed to maintain the quality.
And two years into its existence, Newpedia had to close
cause it had a grand total of 25 articles, cause people had spent all that time
arguing about whether the article was good enough.
So it became Wikipedia, and as you know, Jimmy Wales then said,
"To hell with this. I'll make it open source.
"Anybody can write this. It will be good enough.
"And people can hack it and improve it."
But what's less commonly known is that Wikipedia wasn't
the kind of direct successor of Newpedia.
It sort of forked, and alongside Wikipedia was a thing called Citizendium.
Now, could you just put your hand up if you've ever used Wikipedia?
Yeah, pretty much everybody.
Can you put your hand up if you've used Citizendium?
Yes, and that's because they insisted on peer review.
And if you go on the Citizendium website, they've got something like 160,000 articles
which have been commissioned, and 106 of them, I think it is,
have actually been released for citation.
So, I don't know what's happening for all the rest, but it seems to me
there's a lesson here for academic publishing
because I don't believe peer review, unless it's open source,
does anything other than obstruct research and innovation and not advance it.
So here's an example from education, from education
which is what I'd consider to be jugaad in the hypothetic.
There's a college in London called the School for Communication Arts.
It's run by a maverick called Marc Lewis, and it serves the advertising industry.
Now, it provides tertiary-level courses but they're not degrees
because he can't get validated.
Why can't he get validated?
Because Marc invites people to hack its own programs,
and he does it via this. There a thing called the Curriculum Wiki.
So if you're in the advertising industry, and you think that there's
a particular skill that's being developed, or there's some new processes and practices,
or if you're a student, or indeed a member of the public,
you can put up on the Curriculum Wiki what you think should be taught,
and Marc and his staff there will guarantee to turn that
into a set of learning outcomes with a syllabus.
And they'll have it up and running within six weeks.
Now of course, that means that it can't get validation,
because in the U.K., universities want to know
what your program's going to be in five years' time.
He doesn't know what they're going to be doing in five weeks' time,
but he doesn't care because all the students get jobs.
They've got 100% employability rate.
So that's a case of, I think, the kind of regulatory frameworks
that we've got coming up against innovation and people-powered innovation.
And it seems to me that that sense of urgency is really important.
In most examples of formal learning, it seems to me we've promoted
a kind of learned dependence.
We're the experts. You're the learners.
And if you want to progress to the next level,
then you're going to need us.
And then along came the biggest, disruptive innovation
since chewing gum in education, and that's YouTube.
And everybody suddenly went, "Hmm, maybe we don't need you guys
"as much as we thought we did."
And YouTube begat MOOCs.
And then the new mantra became "Any lecturer that can be replaced
"by a YouTube video, will be."
But whilst MOOCs and online learning allow learners to hack their education, sort of,
they don't yet build community or a sense of learner agency.
And I believe that building learner agency will be the next big development
in learning, because that's what we see in social learning now.
And learners expect that that agency in formal learning
is also going to be there.
So, it's not hard to do.
We just need to adopt social learning six key motivations
which I talk about in the book.
And there's a whole other talk to go through these
but I'll just quickly list them.
So, a sense of do-it-yourself.
There's a great deal of autonomy in social learning.
You all know that because that's how you communicate.
I know I'm preaching to the converted here.
Second is immediacy.
There's what Lillian Katz called a horizontal relevance about learning
because you're getting the knowledge that you need now
to solve the challenge that you've got
rather than just in case at some point in the future.
There's an obvious sense of collegiality, do it with friends.
It's now the case that if you're on Twitter or Yammer,
you've probably got your closest collaborator on the other side
of the world, rather than on the other side of the office.
And then, there's a sense of playfulness about all of this stuff.
Then we get into the contentious ones.
Do unto others.
Now, I know that social media has got bullies, has got trolls,
and there are bad people out there who do bad things,
but that's the stuff that gets reported.
What doesn't get reported are the million random acts of kindness
which happen every day because of that sense of generosity
which is powering the learning.
And similarly, for the last one.
There's a high visibility about the learning which is happening
in the social space which isn't being replicated, I would argue,
in the formal learning space.
Companies and universities get very nervous about the learning
being open to the rest of the world.
But I think these six qualities of social learning are
the means by which those communities develop a sense of agency.
And I'd argue that we need to think about how many of these
we can bring in to our formal learning programs.
And it's really encouraging to see the presentations that are scheduled
for the next couple of days, particularly the ones which
are about peer learning.
So they're the four kind of common characteristics
behind people-powered innovation.
I'm now, only got a couple of minutes left, so let's just finish
with perhaps three things that we could do
to develop more people-powered innovation.
First is don't be afraid of the pro-am.
The poster boy these days for the pro-am is this kid.
Just put your hand up if you recognize this kid.
Oh, not many. His name's Jack Andraka.
When he was fifteen, he came up with a biomarker
for pancreatic cancer because the need was there.
A close member of his family died of pancreatic cancer
because it wasn't spotted early enough.
So Jack came up, did all his research on Google and Wikipedia.
He calls them a teenager's best friends.
And then he reached a point where he needed lab space.
So he wrote to 200 universities in America
and 199 of them turned him down.
They couldn't see what a 15-year-old could possibly tell them
about pancreatic cancer, I mean, he didn't even have a master's.
So how would he possibly be able to help them?
Now fortunately, one did, and that was Johns Hopkins.
And it's ready to go into production now, this biomarker.
But here again, he's come up, he's incredibly frustrated
because he's come up against regulatory framework
which is not allowing this thing to be made available
because of the ridiculous clinical trial system that we've got.
And it's going to be five, possibly ten years,
before this is now made available.
And as Jack says, "How many more people are going to die
"as a result of that?"
So that's one, don't be afraid of the pro-am,
and obviously, de-regulate where possible.
Welcome those education hackers.
But then finally, I think we've just not got to be in denial about this.
Since "Open" was published, I've worked with a lot of companies
and universities, and I go in and I tell them about the risks
of being dis-intermediated.
But I sense this kind of collective denial going on.
And it's understandable because for a long time,
learners had nowhere else to go.
And we've had a kind of monopoly for the past hundred years or more,
but the time to open up education is here and it's now,
and we have to involve users in redefining what we do.
So I began by talking about my recent cancer treatment.
And when I was first diagnosed, I had my first meeting with the oncologist.
And as you can imagine, I had done a ton of research
because I'm a hypochondriac, I don't mind admitting it.
The only consolation about being a hypochondriac
is that eventually you're proven right. (audience laughs)
So I was talking to the oncologist, and I said, "What are the alternatives to surgery?"
"What are going to be the side effects of chemotherapy, if I have to have it?"
And he was getting more and more frustrated.
I asked about holistic treatments.
Eventually, he kind of snapped at me, and he said,
"Look, just have the surgery. Don't overthink this."
Now, when a doctor tells you to not overthink it,
I would strongly recommend you find another doctor,
because that's the kind of Apple philosophy.
You know, we've done all the research and the design.
You should just be grateful that we're letting you buy it.
But one of these forums that I was on, the one I was telling you about
that are operating kind of on the boundaries,
go on there regularly, and this oncologist joined in on the conversation.
And people woke up smart, and they said,
"But we never get professionals coming on this forum."
And the oncologist said, "Well, it's really important
"that this dialogue takes place."
And I remember what he said.
He said, "Those who seek answers need to be part of this solution."
So I hope you'll think how you can bring more people-powered innovation
into your own learning programs, and enable people to be part of the solution.
Thanks very much for listening.
(applause)
- David, thank you very much, indeed. You're great, at 23 minutes,
so thank you very much indeed for making that happen.
And some of these questions actually will be applicable
for Cory and for Ian as well, so you may want to pick them up
in your remarks too.
But let me just reflect some of the comments that we've been getting,
and there you can see the address.
I can take many more if you want.
This one from Alejandro Molini.
The shift to a new age of opportunity, what exactly is this shift towards?
- Well, I think that's a bigger question.
That's a question that I asked myself when I looked at the overall theme for today.
But certainly as far as the thing that I was talking about, for me
it is the shift toward knowledge is becoming more open.
It's a curious kind of battle which is constantly taking place
cause I think Cory will be talking to some extent about institutions
and how they're making it difficult for that knowledge to be shared.
But I think what we've seen over the past ten years, is a desire
for people to have more control over their lives,
and the implication behind all that, which is why I think dis-intermediation
is such a powerful implication.
If you're part of the music industry, you never thought that you'd be done out.
If you were a travel agent, you never really thought that people
would want to organize their own holidays.
If you're a taxi driver, you probably didn't see Uber coming.
But that to me is part of that shift.
- What about this comment from Maria Ebro?
A very interesting talk, but how do you ensure confidentiality?
How do you balance control versus innovation?
- Yep, there is no easy answer to that.
And when I talk about regulatory frameworks, of course you wouldn't want
to get on a plane and wonder if the pilot was actually somebody
who previously was sitting in the back row.
There are some needs for that regulatory framework,
but I think we've gone too far.
And now that knowledge is everywhere, it's possible that
the next big breakthrough that's in a lot of these areas
will come from laypeople.
I just think that what happens currently is that we shut those people out
of the conversation, and we need to work them, as Proctor & Gamble did.
- But do you see this as a genuinely serious problem, is view of balancing
control and innovation?
- Absolutely, but we were just talking about this earlier when we
were talking about the Google DNS thing, and Google then potentially have access
to a lot of confidential information.
There's almost a sense in which, I think, the younger generation,
anybody under the age of 20-25 has almost given up on the notion of confidentiality.
I think people, and it's not always in their best interests, but I think people
are recognizing that perhaps they've just got to give some of that information away,
and you have to trust some of those organizations.
But there's no easy answer to this.
I think it's constantly in play, it's constantly in flux, this tension.
- All right, I'm trying to reflect as many of your thoughts as are coming to me
in the moment, so we're moving all over the place.
What about this from Alex Anesteciadas.
Where do we see people-powered innovation going now?
- I'd love to see more of it in education because I think it is one of the areas.
- How can that be achieved?
- How can it be achieved? It can be achieved by strategic decisions
by organizations that they're going to work with.
I just started working with the largest bank in Ireland, and they took
a conscious decision their services hadn't changed much in about 30 years.
And so they need people to help them redesign those services.
But that has to come from the senior management,
recognizing that in most cases, the rate of innovation
cannot possibly keep up with the demand for change
that customers are exercising.
- There's a comment here which is really based around the generational challenge,
I suspect, from Ben Fisher.
How do we get all teachers now to work with this new reality, the new media,
the new digital space, to work with these new opportunites?
And it's something which I'm sure Cory and Ian would address as well.
Your view, David, at the moment.
- What I always say, and I do a lot of work in schools, and when people are trying
to bring in new innovations, particularly technologically-based ones,
is work with the enthusiasts and don't waste your time with the people
who are just not going to want to change no matter what happens.
We were having a conversation with a colleague from Australia.
I can see people have got the scars where they've tried.
Colleague last night had just that problem.
You know that there are some people, and you can see the challenge.
They're in their 50s, 60s, and they've just decided they've learned enough stuff.
You know, it's like the Homer Simpson thing.
Every time I get a new piece of information, some more stuff
has got to go out of the brain to make way for it.
- You're being very defeatist, aren't you?
- I'm not. I'm just know that if you want innovation to happen,
you've got to protect it and nurture it,
and that the best way to do that is to create a safe space for innovation.
So I've worked in schools that will create these innovation pods,
and they have a simple rule where they say, "You don't have to be part
"of this innovation if you don't want to. The only thing you can't do
"is to say anything or do anything which is going to prevent it from taking place.
"If you don't want to be part of it, then at least step out of the way."
So I think that, because it's really hard
to get new innovations to happen in education.
Education has always progressed incrementally, and the problem is now,
the world's moving so fast that that incremental shift
isn't going to cut it anymore.
- This is coming through as a theme which I'm sure is in the back
of almost everyone's mind in the audience here, the delegates,
but this is continuing this, David.
How can we integrate the shift in the organization's core as mainstream?
How can we change the working way of people,
change, appreciate the opportunities?
I'm interpreting now, this question.
- Well, again I come back to involving the learners.
I've kind of been involved in music education for a while
because I was a musician before I got a real job.
And one of the programs I introduced was pretty radical
because it was about starting with the kids' musical interests,
and at the time, teachers said, "But we don't know anything
"about hip-hop."
And I'd say to people, "You've got a pair of ears. You can help these students."
I think what happens is that when educators see the impact
that it's having on students, that innovation is having on their lives,
you hope that most of them will accept the need to change.
And in the process of changing, it seems to me that
you're not just changing the pedagogy,
you're changing the relationship with your students.
And that is the big emotive pull, it seems to me, for educators.
When you become a learner alongside those students,
that fundamentally changes the nature of that relationship.
But we've become so used to seeing educators as the experts
that most people are terrified of taking that particular hat off
and putting the learner hat on.
- All right, David, one last question.
When will companies step up to the plate, based on something
you were saying earlier, and truly hire based on competence and not degrees?
That's from Daniel Evans, last question.
- Yeah, well, Google has now got, I think, Cory would know this.
Is it 14% of their hires now don't have a degree?
- I don't know the number, but what they've decided
is that they can get around the tight labor market,
where they're competing with Facebook for every new hire
and bidding them up, by hiring people Facebook wouldn't hire,
people without degrees who nevertheless do good work.
And they did double-blinded experiments internally
with their HR department that showed that the degrees
were irrelevant to the performance.
And so, they're doing what's commercially smart.
- Yeah, and I think there's a kind of trickle-down effect,
so Ernst & Young have said they are no longer going to hire people on degrees.
They've got other ways of assessing their competence and capability.
So I think we'll start to see this, increasingly so.
And also, as the currency of the degree, as what it means, diminishes,
and I do believe it will diminish, I think that people will start to say,
"Well, hang on, why are we simply hiring on the basis of a degree?"
So, I think it will take time, but it's on its way and it's inevitable.
- All right, David, thank you very much indeed.
- Thank you.
(applause)