85. Fluid Systems, Firm Results: Architecting The First Mile of the Innovation Ecosystem
Apr 23, 2025
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Teri Schindler, Co-founder and CEO of Herzog & Schindler, shares her extensive experience in building innovation platforms. She discusses transforming the chaotic "first mile of innovation" into an accelerator for breakthroughs. Teri emphasizes the importance of 'structured serendipity' for fostering collaboration and highlights a government initiative that evaluated 500 health ideas, showcasing the need for interconnected ecosystems. The conversation also covers the role of AI and blockchain in enhancing idea exchange and the significance of bridging digital communities into real-life engagements.
The chaotic first mile of innovation can be transformed into an accelerator of breakthroughs through structured processes and cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Open innovation fosters community engagement, allowing diverse stakeholders to contribute to idea generation and creating richer ecosystems for innovation.
Digital ecosystems are shifting towards specialized, purpose-driven communities that prioritize meaningful interactions and foster trust over traditional broad platforms.
Deep dives
Understanding Open Innovation and Ecosystemic Transformation
Open innovation is reshaping modern landscapes by promoting collaboration and the sharing of ideas across organizational boundaries. This approach actively seeks diverse inputs from external sources, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and iterative development. The emphasis on community engagement allows various stakeholders to participate, leading to richer ecosystems that drive innovation. By integrating structured processes within open innovation frameworks, organizations can create environments where novel solutions flourish, particularly in sectors driven by rapid technological advancements.
Challenges of the First Mile of Innovation
The first mile of innovation is often chaotic and marked by uncertainty, characterized by the challenge of identifying relevant questions and potential breakthroughs. It relies heavily on serendipity, indicating the importance of structured processes to guide exploration in this phase. Organizations like DARPA have recognized the limitations of conventional approaches, emphasizing the need for broader engagement to tap into untapped ideas and perspectives. By leveraging community-driven platforms, innovators can streamline this initial phase, improving the efficiency of idea generation and matching them with relevant contexts.
The Role of Structured Serendipity in Innovation
Structured serendipity combines guidance and randomness to enhance the innovation process, creating opportunities for overlapping ideas and connections. Platforms like Polyplexus exemplify this by facilitating interactions among diverse participants, enabling the discovery of novel solutions through collaborative inquiry. By fostering evidence-based discussions and promoting cross-disciplinary engagements, such platforms accelerate the pattern recognition crucial for innovation. This structure aids in winnowing down ideas effectively, ensuring that the most viable concepts rise to the forefront of consideration.
Leveraging Community for Health Transformation
The ARPA-H example showcases an innovative approach to health transformation by engaging a diverse community to generate impactful ideas. By inviting input from various stakeholders, including practitioners and researchers, ARPA-H aimed to crowdsource groundbreaking concepts to improve U.S. health. The structured framework allowed for efficient feedback collection and meaningful community involvement, leading to over 500 submitted ideas within a short period. Notably, the interactive voting mechanism helped identify promising initiatives, demonstrating the effectiveness of community-driven exploration in addressing complex challenges.
Rethinking Digital Ecosystems and Community Dynamics
Digital ecosystems are evolving, moving away from broad platforms to more specialized, purpose-driven communities that offer meaningful interactions. As trust in larger platforms wanes, there is a growing demand for systems that prioritize dialogue and collaboration. By creating organized spaces for professionals to converge on specific inquiries, the efficacy of ideas and relationships strengthens, resulting in richer engagements. This shift signifies a fundamental change in how digital interactions are structured, emphasizing the necessity of thoughtful architecture to support enduring, productive communities.
The complex challenges of our interconnected world demand new approaches to discovery and collaboration.
In this powerful episode from NASA Convergent Aeronautics Solutions Project in collaboration with Shoshin Works, innovation expert Teri Schindler tackles how the traditionally chaotic "first mile of innovation" can be transformed from a bottleneck into an accelerator of breakthrough solutions.
With decades of cross-disciplinary expertise spanning DARPA research projects, Emmy-winning media production, and pioneering work in global sports distribution at the NBA/WNBA, Schindler brings a uniquely qualified perspective to innovation systems. She reveals how siloed expertise across disciplines is hampering our ability to solve critical societal problems at speed and scale. With knowledge publications doubling every 12 months and talent distributed unevenly across institutions, our old systems of connection are failing precisely when we need them most. Through evidence-based frameworks designed to create "structured serendipity," Schindler demonstrates how introducing the right connective tissue between disciplines creates the essential conditions for transformative discovery.
Highlights:
ARPA-H's innovation breakthrough: 500+ ideas from all 50 states in just 10 days revealed critical blind spots in women's health while fast-tracking a $25M investment in revolutionary personalized medicine technology
The collapse of connection: Research confirms broadcasting platforms are failing at meaningful knowledge exchange, with purpose-driven communities delivering 40% higher signal-to-noise ratios in discovery networks
Productive friction: Evidence requirements in knowledge networks democratize access beyond elite institutions while dramatically increasing idea quality, transforming how cross-disciplinary breakthroughs emerge
Building the innovation interstitium: Creating the essential connective tissue between disciplines that enables accurate ecosystemic intelligence in our most complex societal challenges
The poly-intelligence revolution: Flagship Pioneering's framework for integrating human creativity, computational scale, and natural systems to create renaissance-level problem-solving capabilities in previously siloed domains
Guest: Teri Schindler, Co-founder and CEO of Herzog & Schindler and the owner of Polyplexus.com
Hosts:
Dyan Finkhousen, Founder & CEO, Shoshin Works
Marco Annunziata, Co-Founder, Annunziata + Desai Partners
Series Hosts:
Vikram Shyam, Lead Futurist, NASA Glenn Research Center
Dyan Finkhousen, Founder & CEO, Shoshin Works
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