Work space and the summer kitchen

I have a vision for a business strategy + design firm for Portland, that will cull together the rich raw creative talent of our city and marry it with business opportunity. Occasionally, I can even see what it looks like, and my office space definitely has a working test kitchen. Why? Because I can best describe things -- from experiences to people -- in the vernacular of food. Everything takes on a taste, color, feel. Synthesis can be best described in food combination -- sea salt caramels anyone? And because food substances lend themselves to rapid prototyping.

This vision became a bit more robust today when a friend sent me a link to the Salt Water Farm in Lincolnville. She thought I would enjoy their feasts and classes -- which I likely will. But what most struck me was the description of their kitchen:

"The space is designed around the concept of a summer kitchen. Native to the North, these kitchens are set away from the house, near the garden. They are a place where vegetables are gathered on tabletops, summer berries are preserved for the fruitless months of winter, loaves of bread are baked and set to rest, fish are filleted and smoked, tomatoes are left to warm in the sun and where a chef is free to cook as he/she pleases, undisturbed."

To me, this reads messiness and creativity at its best. Beautiful.

Yet, some order is required. Preserving requires sterilization. Space is a prerequisite of dough.

It got me thinking, can we design work spaces that mirror the summer kitchen -- bringing together the messiness of creativity with the order of productivity?

OpenIDEO Forces ME Open

So, I've been sitting on this blog for a couple of months -- unsure if I wanted to commit to it, but enjoying the opportunity to write on a few topics that bring me total joy. Signaling Ownership was one of the first blogs I put down -- noodling on this particular innovation challenge: how do we reward the investment and signal ownership without derailing collaboration and the role of the ecosystem in getting any one innovation off the ground?

Two days ago (Monday evening to be exact), OPENIdeo launched, and to some extent posited one solution -- your personal DESIGN Quotient.

Originally, I thought the site would be another crowd sourcing competition to elicit innovative ideas to social issues. But digging in, OpenIdeo wants users to engage in the entire creative process -- from inspiration, to riffing on that inspiration, to conceptualizing ideas, to riffing on those ideas, to evaluation.

Therein getting at the collaboration aspect of my challenge.

NEXT... as a community user, your participation in the site begins to build your DESIGN quotient -- the degree to which you contribute, collaborate, inspire, and create. At the end of the day, you get a DQ badge to reflect your identity as a designer.

Therein getting at the "ownership" aspect of my challenge.

So... It'll be a lot of fun to participate and see how it works (Scott and I enjoyed a few hours with ball game playing on the site last night), so I'm quite hopeful. Here's a video explaining how it all works:

Introduction to OpenIDEO / OpenIDEO.com from IDEO on Vimeo.

It also convinced me to get off the pot so to speak with this blog.

Today is as good as day as any to go live.
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Signaling Ownership

I had a conversation yesterday with a Maine angel who previously worked in one of the state's innovation programs. "A key issue," she tells me, "is that all of the state programs want to own the entrepreneur, in order to be able to claim their success and demonstrate a good ROI." As such, the programs compete rather than complement; silos form and the ecosystem of support that the entrepreneur really needs to succeed is damaged. Interestingly enough, Saul Kapln called this in his keynote address at the Maine Innovation Economy Summit.

The social innovation space is guilty of a similar issue. Any good social entrepreneur could be claimed by Ashoka, TED, the Acumen Fund, the Skoll Foundation, etc. etc. At GlobalGiving, we called many of these talented individuals "Triple Crown Winners." In the social space, these individuals become "product" which build brand and promise, and demonstrate a good SROI. Same problem, though, while the reputation aspects are important for the entrepreneur's credibility, the competition driven by ownership may damage the complete support the entrepreneur needs.

The human driver is probably a mix of ownership, meaning, and belonging (as well as, of course, the ongoing effort to build a parallel with the private sector ROI). It is a similar set of drivers that, in the retail philanthropic space, find nonprofits creating micro-donation options, e.g. $3 will educate a child in Burma. While helpful for giving the donor a sense of meaning and contribution, it is likely an inaccurate outcome, because the costs of educating children are likely fixed, and $3 is meaningless without the other, say, $299,997 (there are a host of other issues here as well, e.g. $3/child may buy one level of education and $6/child may buy another).

It creates an interesting design challenge, how do we reward the investment and signal ownership without derailing collaboration and the role of the ecosystem in getting any one innovation off the ground?

I'll be interested to see how Kickstarter and Profounder (both enable crowdfunding for private ventures) manage this challenge.