Suggestion for the title

How about adapting the "Guns, Germs and Steel" title.

Jared Diamond, author of Guns, Germs and Steel, famously wrote about the differences across civilizations from the point of view of their different access to technologies.

A brief slice of the book, Guns (weapons), Germs (resistance) and Steel (industrial era tools), were the three key technologies that enabled the European conquistadores to defeat the native Americans.

What I'm getting at is something similar. Take a brief slice of our chapter, and use 3 key ingredients for an innovation climate as our title. So, something like "intrinsic motivation, openness and diversity" but more sticky and sexy. Any ideas?!

More content needed for the physical infrastructure and dynamics sections

We need more content for these sections. Currently, we don't seem to be saying anything original or interesting :(

The physical infrastructure section is conceptually easy, but I don't have time to read Santamaki's thesis or any new material at this point. Someone please improvise!

The dynamics section right now is very general and unless we find some concrete examples to make interesting/new points, I would suggest skipping it for next week's presentation. We could work on this for the chapter to be delivered in Jan 2010. Would you agree?

Suggested revisions for the Case Studies section

I feel that for the case studies we have to distinguish between (1) umbrella organizations such as the DF and (2) their success stories.

Since our major contribution concerns an innovation climate, I propose that we have three subsections discussion initiatives to create innovation climates in three countries.

1. In Finland we can discuss (1) DF, citing SEOS and Powerkiss success stories. (2) For MIDE we have a background and a list of projects but we don't know how successful any of them are. Olli, could you please comment on some of them: what has been accomplished? We still need to get a clear idea of how, as an innovation climate, MIDE is different from a typical academic granting agency. Yrjo said they have been very risk-taking with the MIDE funds and have weighted vision and ideas more than credentials. But that's what every granting agency says such as EU's FP7 :) So, the idea of ambitious/visionary alone makes me a bit skeptical ;)
   Also, I feel we could leave out EIT. It's a hot topic on one hand but on the other it's too early to tell.
   
   
2. I have an excellent example for US. I found this independent non-profit called Business Innovation Factory which is in the Boston area. Their philosophy ties in with 2 important issues we are discussing (1) open innovation concepts/ living labs and (2) a systems theoretic approach. They have two interesting 'customer centric' living labs which they call experience labs. One is an elder care experience project, for old-age homes, assisted living etc. The second is a student experience project. Do see their website! If you have time, you could also see a nice TED talk by their excutive director Mellisa Withers.
   
   
3. For India, I have a very good example as well. I thought of writing about grassroot innovations. One of the great post-colonial examples of 'user-driven innovation' is in the form of innovation taking place at the grassroots. These innovations are largely need-based and developed by people with no formal education. (A famous example from the TED era is a secondary school student William Kamkwamba who built a windmill from cycle parts to power his entire household). In the late 1980's, Anil Gupta, a professor working with sustainable energy resources in India got an idea to tap into these innovations, scale them up to reach the formal world of technology (grassroots -> global), and reward the innovators fairly. The result is the Honeybee Network which has identified and rewarded more than 10,000 grassroots innovations since 1989! Here's a 2006 BBC piece on this network.

So, now to allocate tasks! Could somebody volunteer to restructure the Finland cases in about 500 words in our google doc? I can write the BIF and the Honeybee cases.