Blog

It's January of a new year! It's the time for new year's resolutions and fresh resolve to achieve those goals that remained elusive at the end of last year. Achieving a challenging objective often requires taking a new perspective. Since my new year's resolution is to blog more, I wanted to start out the year with a blog about 12 key areas where we've seen first-hand, working with organizations around the globe, the impact that taking a new perspective can have.

A well-known saying, probably misattributed to Einstein, says that "insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results." If there's an objective you had trouble achieving last year, maybe this year you need to come at it from a new perspective.

I presented at the ISPIM Conference in 2020 (ISPIM: International Society of Professional Innovation Management) on how co-production can bridge the gap between academic research and industry use-cases creating shared, collective intelligence. Co-production in this context is people with different skills and areas of expertise working on a common goal. By sitting at the intersection of these divergent perspectives, co-product marries aspects of each viewpoint, bringing ideas born in research to life in industry.

Cleaning data is often the primary job of the data scientist, and not necessarily the one they signed up for.  While getting the "words" right with computers is important, it is not fraught with the nuance that getting words right with humans is. Across disciplines the same word can have entirely different meanings and this miscommunication is only one aspect of team building that can go awry.

Innovation requires collaboration, but due to the current state of our filter bubbles, collaboration is stuck in a rut. Data science utilizing knowledge graphs and team and portfolio optimization software can help us climb out. It can increase the scale, the intentionality, and the nuance of how we collaborate. With the right data and algorithms, we can use software to optimize our teams and facilitate innovation.

Human Resources... HR... Human Capital Management, no matter what you call it, people are the beating heart of any organization. Taking a data driven approach to mapping the skill-sets of the people in your organization not only allows Leadership to optimize team formation, but provides an opportunity for hidden talents in your people to emerge.

You can find all sorts of “how to” treatises on assembling a team built for innovation, and they all include some subset of the following concepts - bring in experts, make sure they are diverse, have wide-ranging skillsets and have them be people who aren’t afraid to buck the system or go against the flow. Then don’t distract them with mundane tasks and give them enough time and money to actually accomplish their innovation mandate.

Unlocking team creativity during a pandemic.

The goal: investigate huge amounts of research data in new ways. The pool for teams: neuroscientists, data scientists, and software developers. The result: answering questions we didn’t even know we had.

Ever work in a place where you looked up to everyone there because they are experts at whatever they do and can pretty much solve any problem that arises? That’s what working at Exaptive is like. It’s a mix of expertise across various computer/data fields that works very well. Ever felt like you didn’t belong in a place like this?

Within a group, a team, a network, or organization that relies on members being connected to one another, connections can be based on a number of factors but almost always rely on the availability, awareness, and mobility of knowledge or information essential to the group. How does information move within a group or across groups? We are interested in identifying catalyzing actions that occur in group interactions to facilitate the ease of information and knowledge exchange and the establishment of new connections of members in the group. Research suggests that ideas have value to the extent that they can be shared with a new or different audience (Burt, 2004). This research also suggests that individuals who can establish new connections within a group bring competitive advantage to the development of new ideas within that group. In our experience, the purposeful translation of ideas to new audiences reduces serendipitous connections and takes advantage of certain individuals’ natural tendencies to broker these connections.