Hazel O’Halloran (Head of Homelessness and Community Investment) recently attended the Disruptive Innovators Network online event 'It's not rocket science - How NASA Innovates with Steve Radar'.
We had several sign-ups across Bromford, all of whom found the event fascinating and provoked some great discussions. Hazel has written a great overview below!Well, I never would have thought that my role would take me to joining a webinar with NASA!! I felt truly humbled to attend the Disruptive Innovators Network online event and to be in the company of Steve Radar, Program Manager for NASA’s Centre of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation
My scientific skills are certainly not something I would consider to be of significance for the work I do, so I was intrigued to find out how NASA innovates and how this relates to social housing – and I was not disappointed!
The world's population has more than doubled in the last 50 years, countries are wealthier, and with more people graduating than ever before, it is hardly surprising that we are experiencing a tsunami of technology. This means there is a high risk to organisations remaining competitive and relevant – and therein lies the challenge.
As we know our sector has multiple complex problems to solve, and to do this we need to innovate, change and adapt. There are certain types of technology that will help us, but humans combined with technology will always be essential to collaborate to find solutions.
However, those humans with the solutions may not work in our sector, and this is where we should consider if we are only looking inwards, into the comfort of our own industry, for expertise and skills to solve our problems. NASA uses ‘crowds’ across all industries to develop the breadth of domain expertise and technologies, and this creates ‘open innovation’.
Those ‘crowds’ are teeming with high levels of expertise and skills, and the richness of diversity within them will enhance the ability to solve problems.
We should also acknowledge that our organisation is small in comparison to the places it serves. Our communities leverage passion and diversity that can bring value to our organisation – if we invite them in to do so.
But in order to benefit from what our communities can do to help us, we first need to be clear on what problems we are trying to solve, which could mean reframing what we are looking for. There were a couple of examples that Steve shared – and the one that stood out for me was about crisps (no surprise, as I love my food!).
The problem: Remove grease from crisps – the current process was to mechanically vibrate the crisps to shake off the cooking oil = broken crisps and wastage.
So, they changed the problem (and generalised for a broader ‘crowd’ to solve): Remove a viscous fluid from a delicate wafer. The winning solution was also a vibrating solution, but it was to vibrate the air around the crisps with acoustics, rather than the crisps themselves. This solution was submitted by a violinist.
By thinking about our problems differently, we can open up other avenues to move us forward. There is, and should be, a cost to requesting the expertise from our crowds and communities to help us. The stats Steve below back up the success of ‘open innovation’.
I appreciate that as we are a not-for-profit organisation, this way of innovating with a potential cost attached may not feel overly comfortable.
However, one of my key takeaways from Steve was - if you have a problem, you should make a list of things that you think are making the problem worse. He advised that he could bet you are doing some of those things on your list – so the cost-free way to solve your problems is to simply stop doing the things that make it worse.
It became evident that the way NASA innovates relates to so many aspirations in our strategy from our place-based working, move to scale, being proactive and agile, and being known as a leader and influencer. Let’s be more NASA and who knows where open innovation could take us – but it’s not likely to be the moon!
The webinar ended with an interesting question about ‘What do you do about Poo in space’…
Cover Image by NASA-Imagery from Pixabay