deliberately or inadvertently stealing the IP of a small creative company or even academics? “But actually much more challenging than that was just culturally, opening up an organization to people outside it. In 2009, when we were star ting up, [open innovation] was still quite new and counter-intuitive, and not the way most big organizations were geared. I think that’s changed,” says Harwood. Building blocks One of their most high prof ile projects, and the one of which he is most proud, was an open-innovation challenge launched with Lego, called Lego Ideas. Initially Lego’s more than 10,000 employees were invited to come up with ideas for new Lego sets, and those that gained wide support would be put into production. The program, now r un internally by the company, became open to all Lego customers. Typically, over a million people post ideas for new Lego products, the community votes on their favorites, and any that get to 10,000 votes are formally reviewed. For those ideas that become bona f ide Lego products, 1% of the revenue gets shared with the creator.
“It’s very commercially successful for Lego. It’s a brilliant way of unleashing their customers’ creativity and ideas and coming up with brand new things that they’ve never thought of,” says Harwood.
In 2018, after a decade with 100% Open, Harwood felt it was time to turn his attention to a different set of challenges. While open innovation was bearing fr uit for many businesses, he wanted to use his skills to work on more socially driven problems, and particularly the innovation and change that is needed to deal with the climate crisis and the move to a carbon net-zero economy.
“I think lear ning to navigate t ransitions is a skill that we all need to work on individually, but also as organizations, as a society, and the economy at large,” says Harwood, who has made this the focus of his new network Liminal. “I’ve been fascinated with l a n d H a r w o o d
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Implementing innovation Roland Harwood on change, cooperation, and collaboration.
I think physicists and scientists understand that no-one can solve big fundamental scientific challenges on their own. You need to collaborate, you need to be open, you need to share the concept of liminality for many years—which means the grey area between more cer tain states.”
Liminal brings together about 120 “interesting, creative and entrepreneurial” people in a loose network to work with external organizations on creating the mechanisms for change within their establishments. Its f irst major project was with the United Nations and NESTA to develop a collective intelligence “playbook”—a series of methods for getting people to work together to solve problems.
The community is now also working with Hitachi on decarbonizing energy and t ransport networks. Hitachi is a huge company of 300,000 people and r uns large portions of the world’s energy grid systems and freight movement logistics. It has committed to achieving carbon neutrality by 2050. Liminal has been helping them design processes needed for the t ransition to net zero, as well as developing a system to allow Hitachi customers to innovate and decarbonize.
The projects Liminal is taking on need a “high tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty,” and Harwood says his Ph.D. has prepared him well for this type of environment. He remembers str uggling with the t ransition from being an undergraduate where the answers are at the back of the textbook, to a Ph.D., where your job is to f igure out what the questions are and write the answers for others to lear n from. “[My scientif ic t raining has] given me the confidence to embark on problems where I have no idea what the solution might be, or into spaces where it’s not even clear what the problem is that you’re solving, which is invaluable. Had I not done a Ph.D., I probably wouldn’t have had the conf idence to embark on some of the things I do now.”
Harwood also thinks other sectors could lear n from physics when it comes to collaborating. “Physicists and scientists understand that no-one can solve big fundamental scientif ic challenges on their own. You need to collaborate, you need to be open, you need to share. If you look at something like CERN, it’s a multinational, multilateral, highly collective endeavor. We need cooperation at that sor t of scale, around climate [and] around other issues. Physics is ahead of the curve in working in this kind of way.” We are clearly now in a time of change, which is the theme of Harwood’s podcast On the edge. “I feel like the old certainties of technology, democracy, and capitalism are breaking down and I think new ways of working, new ways of organizing, new ways of living are being experimented with,” he explains. At the moment he is happy to live with a level of uncertainty in the direction Liminal will take him: “I have no idea where it’s going. But I’m enjoying it for now.”
Rachel Brazil is a science writer based in London, UK, Twitter @rachelbbrazil
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APS Careers 2024 in partnership with Physics World
