Innovation Archive

Bring it Un!

July 23, 2010 | By
Don Ball
Bring it Un!

In just the past two months we’ve been fortunate to be able to host four “unconferences” at CoCo. It started in June with fontconf, an event devoted entirely to digital typography. Then in July came UnSummit, an event with a focus somewhere in the vicinity of marketing and technology. Finally, we had Real Food Minnesota, which tried to bring together growers, chefs, food bloggers to talk about organic, local and sustainable food movement. These events were great successes in their own rights.

Now we’ve been asked to host two, possibly three additional unconferences. Which is nothing but good news. What better home for unconferences than CoCo?

So, bring it! Do you have an idea for a unconference? Please let us know. We want to be the home base for unconferences in the Twin Cities. We’re happy to make our space available (on a DIY basis) on weekends or evenings. If your idea needs some development, we can help you think it through. And when your unconference is ready for prime time, we’ll help you get the word out.

We do have some thoughts and questions, however, about the future of the unconference format in Minnesota.

Attending a true unconference takes a bigger leap of faith than many of us are used to. The way it works is that an unconference is organized around a central question, like “What’s the future of public transportation in Minnesota?” But no agenda is determined or published before the event. Instead, the agenda is crowdsourced (often by an experienced facilitator) on the day of the event, as participants identify the discussions they’d like to have in response to the central question. And did we mention, there are no presenters? There are definitely discussions. Lots of energetic discussions. But no presenters.

So, there’s the difference: the whole model of an unconference is based on everyone answering the big questions themselves, whereas a traditional conference model is based on everyone listening, often quite passively, to a few peoples’ conclusions. It’s centralized planning versus democracy.

It’s interesting to note that fontconf, UnSummit and Real Food weren’t true unconferences. They split the difference between conference and unconference formats. They crowdsourced the agenda and then published it beforehand, so that attendees knew what they were getting into. In the case of UnSummit and Real Food Minnesota, this wasn’t the organizers’ first instinct. Both conferences tried going all-out “un.” But as time progressed, they were worried that attendance would be too light if people didn’t know ahead of time what would actually be discussed and who would be leading the discussions.

So, it would appear we haven’t quite embraced “un” yet. To be sure, we all seem to have enjoyed the loosely structured and participatory nature of the unconferences we have had. But most of us are yet to experience the full, democratic power of a true unconference.

If you’re an organizer, part of the trick is to let yourself off the hook for making the meeting what you think will constitute a success. One of the principles of an unconference is that whomever shows up is who was meant to show up. Another one is that whatever is discussed is what was meant to be discussed. This isn’t  just New-Age hippyspeak. It’s about stopping yourself from trying to engineer an outcome (lots of attendees, big-name speakers, etc.). Instead, the goal is to get out of the way so that attendees can create a successful event through their participation. This is one reason why unconferences want to be free (or close to free).

So, who wants to do a full-gonzo, no-holds-barred unconference? It’s certainly not a requirement for holding your conference at CoCo. But it would be great fun, a great learning experience – and potentially a way more powerful experience. Will you be the first one to give it a try?

Creative commons photo by richard winchell

Real Food Minnesota

June 29, 2010 | By
Don Ball
Real Food Minnesota

July 17
9:30 a.m. – 5 p.m.

Real Food Minnesota is a free event with a practical focus. For those with a new interest in learning about the food you buy and eat, we hope to unveil the mysteries of selecting and preparing healthy, delicious, and ethically-produced “real” food. Already comfortable in co-ops and your kitchen? Come hear about new ways to learn about food via the web, emerging sources of local ingredients year-round, and some of the great food communities being built throughout the Twin Cities. There will be:

  • Guided tours of the St. Paul Farmers Market with tips on how to buy fresh ingredients
  • Food prep demos with experienced chefs
  • Discussions led by folks doing cool things in the local food scene (topics include urban farming, the ethics of eating, and more)
  • Opportunity to chat with other curious and enthusiastic eaters, and to learn about ways to get more involved with our local food system

Join us for the day, or come and go for the session(s) you are interested in. No experience necessary…just come hungry to learn!

Learn more and register at the Real Food Minnesota site!

CoCo visits Steelcase

May 30, 2010 | By
Don Ball
CoCo visits Steelcase

Earlier this week, Kyle and I went on a road trip to Chicago and Grand Rapids, Michigan. We were on a quest to see the state of the art in collaborative work spaces, as designed by Steelcase, the world’s largest commercial furniture maker.

Did you know that Steelcase owns the industrial design consultancy IDEO? Well, neither did we until recently. And as it turns out, IDEO’s human-centered design process has had quite effect, not only on Steelcase’s product line, but its prognosis for the future of work, a future in which cubicles and corner will give way to open, flexible floor plans where workers can work, meet and socialize freely. This is being driven by pressure to reduce real estate costs (the 2nd largest cost for most organizations, after payroll) as well as increased mobility among workers, thanks to laptops, mobile phones and even increased acceptance of telecommuting.

What does it all mean? That someday most corporate offices will look like coworking spaces! Only, from what we saw on our field trip, the work environments and collaborative technologies that Steelcase has developed are light years ahead of the humble Ikea sticks we’ve been able to assemble at CoCo.

Below are some highlights from our trip, in which we visited Workspring, a collaborative offsite meeting center in Chicago’s River North neighborhood, followed by Steelcase University and Steelcase headquarters, both in Grand Rapids Michigan. Enjoy!

Workspring


Entrance.


Meeting space with a media:scape unit, which allows meeting participants to share one or more laptop screens.


Meeting room with a double media:scape setting. Notably, this table has an unusual bowed shape that ensures good peer-to-peer communication as well as screen visibility.


The hallways at Workspring are designed with seating/standing areas that allow meeting participants to have ad-hoc conversations, which research shows is just as important to the collaborative process as the meeting itself.


More casual seating areas in the hallways.


The view from Workspring. A private courtyard? This is a rare setting in Chicago’s Loop!

Steelcase University and headquarters

Steelcase University is a former manufacturing plant that is now a training center for the company’s employees, customers and dealers. Just as importantly, the university serves as a living laboratory, where Steelcase can try out new work and meeting settings using its product lines and prototypes.

First, a note on the lost art of hospitality…

Coming to Steelcase University, we didn’t know what to expect. Perhaps we’d get to look around, sit on some furniture…who knows. But to our astonishment, the whole day had been thoroughly planned out, including chef-catered meals and a meeting with the company’s SVP in charge of new ventures.


They even took the time to put our website up on the big screen!


This was the dining room where we were served a killer two-course breakfast. The chef was personally on hand to tell us what he had prepared.


Debra Shrontz, a 30-plus-year Steelcase veteran, was our guide for the entire day. She personally made sure that we had a great experience.


The first course included steel-cut oatmeal with cranberries. At about this time, we had to ask: had Steelcase mistaken us for a couple of Fortune-100 procurement managers with multimillion-dollar budgets? Nope. They hadn’t. This is just how Steelcase treats visitors: by attending to all the details that add up to a great experience.

After breakfast, we progressed through different areas at Steelcase University and the nearby headquarters.


Diner-booth-like seating is a common sight at Steelcase. The high seat backs help enclose the space and make the setting less like a lounge and more like a workspace.


Same story in the company’s executive suite, where a large kitchen/coffee area provides ample room for impromptu information exchange and casual meetings.


Another type of furniture system we saw is called “Post and Beam.” As the name implies, it’s a series of posts with crossbeams that together help define areas, which can then be used or formal or casual meeting spaces, work enclaves or whatever. In the picture above, you can see two meeting areas. To the left, a perforated curtain serves as a visual “wall” that provides a subtle sense of privacy.


Another Post and Beam setting.


Partway through the day, we were lucky enough to talk to Frank Graziano, who, as the head of Steelcase’s Futures group, is the company’s resident futurist. He sought us out in a far corner of the building, where we proceeded to have an hour-long chalk talk about collaborative work trends, social networks and lots more!


Finally, we toured one of Steelcase’s office buildings where they were in the midst of performing an experiment on themselves. This looks like a coffee lounge, but it’s actually a mobile work area that once held cubicles for some 70 employees. Now, the same number of workers use these and other seating areas to work on their laptops, drink coffee, socialize and have meetings. Sound familiar? See, like I said earlier, eventually everyone will work in a coworking space!


Another view of the same space. Note the countertop in the background, which was full-up with focused workers typing away on their laptops.

So, all in all, a pretty inspiring trip. While we don’t have corporate offices, we learned a number of lessons that are applicable to our own collaborative space, including the importance of hospitality and customer experience. What’s more, before going, we were pretty firm in the opinion that the people side (community, networking, etc.) of the equation was far more important than environmental factors, such as decor or furniture. Now, I’d say that we’re looking at both sides as equally important.

Finally, a huge thanks to the folks at Steelcase, including Darren Shavor, Debra Shrontz, John Malnor and Frank Graziano for their tremendous hospitality. And last, but not least, thanks to Kris Hansen of Target Commercial Interiors for having made the initial introduction!

CoCo’s going corporate!

April 28, 2010 | By
Don Ball
CoCo’s going corporate!

The strangest thing has happened on the way to the coworking revolution. It seems that coworking (and all that gooey collaborative goodness inside) is not only appealing to freelancers and consultants, but to corporate folks, too.

Since we’ve launched CoCo, we’ve been approached by a handful of corporations, often by the groups responsible for innovation or change management, and often with a similar question: “How can we get in on this?”

Now, you might that coworking and collaboration are anathema to the button-down, risk-averse, by-the-book style of many corporations. But these are strange times we live in. And it doesn’t take a genius to see that innovation has become the order of the day. Not just as a one-time thing, but as a permanent way of doing business. As a result, many companies are asking, “how can we make innovation part of our culture?”

One way innovation happens is through the thoughtful, deliberate and continuous introduction of new ideas, new processes, new technology and new team. And, well that’s what we’re trying to put together at CoCo.

So, long story short, we’re gonna run with this whole idea of corporate coworking. Or better put: that a coworking space is just the environment where corporate innovators can try on new ways of working and meeting, with the goal of bringing these ideas back to the nest. Or perhaps never going back to the nest! (see ROWE)

We still have to finalize some text and post it on our site, but below are some of efforts we’re contemplating on the corporate side. We’d love to get your feedback on whether you feel these offerings would be meaningful.

OOO passes – As in “get Out Of the Office.” The idea here is to help corporate employees recharge their batteries by getting away from the cubicle farm by taking a work vacation at CoCo. Could managers offer OOO passes as rewards or incentives – or simply because it fuels innovation?

Corporate DayCamps – We already run DayCamps that are open to the public. The model would be the same: an authority on a given subject would give a presentation and then moderate a peer-to-peer conversation amongst attendees. But are there topics that would be of interest to managers from different non-competing companies? The answer’s probably yes, but obviously we’ll need to cue up speakers and subjects that are particularly meaningful to people working within larger organizations.

War rooms - Project teams that need to focus, or want the stimulation of a new and creative environment, could camp out in one our many worksites, which would be equipped out with big whiteboards, work tables and lounge furniture.

Corporate sponsorships – What if a handful of companies pitched in to make coworking free? With a good number of sponsored coworking seats, we would be able to hand-pick leaders in different disciplines and invite them to be part of the community. We might call them “CoCo Fellows.” Think tanks work roughly on this model. Only this would be an innovation tank. And once a quarter, we’d convene a daylong conference in which our sponsors and the CoCo Fellows get together and do a deep dive on an issue of the sponsors’ choosing.

Innovation Labs – Ideation and creative problem solving are central to innovation. But how do you innovate on command? Drawing on previous consulting experience, we’re refining a methodology that will take advantage of collaborative meeting approaches (and our resident genius coworkers) to help companies generate, evaluate and implement breakthrough ideas. Each Lab would take place at CoCo over multiple consecutive days and would involve peer-to-peer meeting approaches (see Open Space, DeBono, etc.), rapid prototyping, operational assessment and internal communications planning.

We’ve got a few more ideas in the hopper, but this should be enough to get the ball rolling. What do you think? Do you toil for a large corporation? In your position are you feeling the pressure to innovate? If so, would any of these ideas hold some promise for helping you meet those demands?

Photo credit: freedigitalphotos.net

Coworking and cubicles

March 18, 2010 | By
Don Ball
Coworking and cubicles

When we launched CoCo way back when, we talked ever so briefly about the potential of inviting corporate workers to spend time in a coworking environment. It was one of those ideas that gets thrown out there…and then quickly dropped. “Yeah, like that’s ever gonna happen.”

But as it turns out, we might not have been too far off the mark. Within the next week, we’ll have a corporate department actually take up residence with us for a couple months while their office digs get shuffled around. Meanwhile, another major corporation in town has asked us about conducting offsites and coworking – apparently in hopes of getting a boost of creativity and insights into our work culture. So, perhaps there are some cubicle dwellers who see benefits in getting out of the office.

But what about the many corporate workers who don‘t work in cubicles? Telecommuters? Sales reps? ROWE workers? A USA Today article about coworking suggests that the benefits of coworking – namely working with adults – might hold some promise for corporate nomads as well:

A new study of 3,600 telecommuters commissioned by Microsoft revealed their No. 1 complaint was lack of face-to-face interaction.

So, tell us please: If you are a corporate denizen or a telecommuter, do you see value in occasionally taking the team in a different environment (different than a hotel ballroom, for example) for ideation, problem solving or other creative meetings?  Or for individual employees to occasionally work offsite? How useful would it be to make connections with other smart people from outside your organization? Honestly, we’d love to hear from you – particularly about what ideas you have for bringing coworking and the cubicle closer together.

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We would also appreciate any feedback on some of the new services we’re thinking of offering:

  • Team coworking – where a department, workgroup or project team could visit CoCo for meetings and collaborative work sessions. These meetings could be facilitated (we know a few good facilitators of various stripes!) or not.
  • Corporate daycamps -  an invitation-only event* that includes breakfast, a morning lecture/discussion on a hot topic, followed by a day of coworking (and very likely some good conversation and cross-pollination.)
  • Private offsites – like the above, an organization could have its own daycamp, in which we would provide breakfast, a lecture/discussion and an afternoon of coworking in a private room, or in our open areas.
  • Speaker’s Bureau – we’ve already had some great speakers at CoCo. The topics they’ve covered include social media, IP law, blogging, marketing strategy and GTD, to name a few. We want to formalize this somewhat by creating a stable of speakers in different domains, who are available to speak authoritatively to visiting corporate groups.**

* Why invite-only? One of the issues we anticipate is that corporate employees might have trouble (or perceive too great a risk) mixing it up with the competition. So, our idea would be to invite employees from like departments at non-competing companies (e.g., Target, UHC, 3M and Ameriprise).

**If you are an expert in your domain and would like to be part of our Speaker’s Bureau, please contact us. Our goal would be to have a short list of 10-15 experts who are visible and credible and would bring value to our guests. (In case you’re wondering, yes, it would be a paying gig.)