Is it possible to crowd source pandemic innovations by creating an “open source” style online collaborative space where anyone can contribute ideas/solutions and work asynchronously at scale towards the biggest problems we face?
I am really interested in exploring this idea and these are my first steps towards trying something out.
Keep reading if you might be interested in learning more or participating.
Often people have great ideas but no way to take action.
So in times like these, what can we do to connect the dots and speed the pace of moving from problem identification to solution implementation. How do we connect the right people, and how do we do it while social distancing?
Innovation is hard — Why?
Because it relies on series of things to happen and at each step we may not have the skills or ability to continue.
1. An area of unmet need must be discovered (we call this an opportunity space)
2. Someone needs to explore and understand that opportunity space in order to discover many more granular problems/needs that could be solved. Those problems need to be reframed to get to the root, and prioritized so the most impactful things get focus.
3. Problems don’t always have obvious solutions and so we need structured and rigorous ideation/brainstorming frameworks that lead to potentially novel and effective solutions.
4. When interesting solutions emerge we need to evaluate them with experiments and prototypes (often learning things that push us back to steps 2 or 3) and we must do this quickly so we can adjust our solution or abandon it if its not any good.
5. Finally, our solutions get to a point of full implementation or execution.
Now, normally the entrepreneurs of the world would be the ones trying to find these areas of opportunity and working to create novel solutions but in normal circumstances they do it in the context of commerce and as a result it tends to be a very closed form of collaboration (SLOW and COMPETITIVE).
We need to act differently. In these times of chaos shouldn’t we be opening up this process and doing everything we can to match people who have found really important or hard problems, with people who are good at developing solutions and then making those concepts freely available to people who are really good at testing, building, or implementing them?
In order to react at the pace of the current situation — which is to be solving in hours and days not weeks or months — we need to be able to do this Asynchronously, very quickly, and at a really large scale.
So what would this look like?
Well, in the spirit of starting small and moving fast, here is my prototype on how we can take a step towards this idea.
I have created a simple Mural board that I am making openly available to anyone who wants to contribute their observations of what is currently affecting us all.
Click here to access the board and contribute
The idea is that anyone can contribute — add or move things around, form groups, create categories etc and all of this helps us understand the data and we can then start choosing areas to focus and others can start reframing those problems etc. Eventually getting to a place where ideas are emerging, and solutions are available for people to try.
Other examples are emerging like https://helpwithcovid.com/ this very cool resource allows folks to join teams focussed on problems that need to be solved.
Is it possible to take it a step further?
Layer on top of this the reality that large numbers of people are not able to work right now (with more to come). Maybe this is a place where they can start to contribute? It doesn’t always take training or high levels of education to identify a problem or see a novel solution and it can be really beneficial to have completely fresh eyes on things.
Maybe certain problem/solution spaces emerge that are important enough that large businesses or governements sponsor those who are contributing on them and some of these folks can create some form of short term income (big audacious idea… I know, but who knows?) which will be good for both their mental and financial health.
This is my experiment, my way of trying to coordinate some response to all this. Help me to see if it can grow into something useful.
Here is what you can do
- Please, Share this post with someone you might think is interested.
- Click here to join my online Mural board and contribute new post-it notes or move things around. (Note: You do not need to create a mural account, simply choose to join anonymously.)
- Join a team at https://helpwithcovid.com/
- Contact me if you want to help – jason@jasoncyr.ca
Shelter in place, wash your hands, and look out for one another!
