This post is first and for all about my experience on the R&D management conference, but it builds up to a story on Drupal too.

Several different thoughts made me come to the idea to use AI as a way to blur the boundaries between what is artificial and what is aggregative. Lately I’ve come to the impression that artificial is the condition to aggregate intelligence, but it has no direct relation to intelligence itself. Thus AI as used for strong AI, should stand for Aggregative Intelligence. Let me explain the thoughts that got me to this point.

In one of my working papers on the global brain I ran into trouble to find a good abbreviations. The idea is to update IT-alignment by a focus on crowdsourcing. The idea is as old as my research on novelty regulation. We don't need to build intelligence: we can query it. So my first idea was Intelligence Querying, which would become IQ-alignment … ok, that would be a good way to create confusion. If I'm going to create confusion it could be better have a good reason for it. So I decided to got for AI-alignment, where AI stands for Artificial-or-Aggregative Intelligence.

Crowdsourcing works by aggregating amateur intelligence to expert intelligence. One of the experiments of my former advisor created an aggregation from kinder-garden intelligence to adult intelligence. My own novelty regulation model is to get from non-intelligence to some intelligence by aggregation. Indeed, their is only aggregation of intelligence. It doesn’t seem a satisfying answer.

In another working on bootstrapping I’m transforming the notion of Artificial by Herbert Simon to a more general term. He defines Artificial as human made as opposed to spontaneous, but if your investigating the emerging of intelligence, it should become system made as opposed to spontaneous. A system doesn't need to be intelligent to make other parts, not even for self-replication. In this sense what does artificial actually add as value?

We can understand the artificial by looking how we create laboratories to investigate a specific hidden feature: by creating an artificial condition so that the feature comes observable. In our attempt to understand the hidden feature, we mechanize the artificiality to make the feature more robust and autonomous (for more research on this see Bruno Latour). Indeed, artificial intelligence is exactly what we got with expert systems. They are making the artificial conditions to mechanize some intelligent processes. Ironically it seems very improbable that such research will lead to understanding intelligence itself. As intelligence is aggregated.

It may seem as artificial is quit trivial feature, but we don’t see it that way. Artificial is what makes novelties emerge, not just intelligence. Could we say that the artificial is not important? How would the world look if we only know how things work and not have created technology with it? It wouldn’t be satisfying either. We need both, hence I suggest to create a blur by making AI stand for Artificial-or-Aggregative Intelligence. We may say that our brain is the artifact that creates the condition to aggregate intelligence. I like to make a metaphorical gag with it:

Our minds are like whirlpools, while our brains are like toilets. A day is nothing more than a very long flush. To wake up, we flush our brain, and it stops running until we fall asleep.

Professor Manuel Castells gave a talk about the global crisis of capitalism on 28 October 2009, the talk is online. The first hour of the talk is an interesting and detailed outline of the crisis, but not the reason I’m blogging about it. On the last 10 min he gives a vision of the new-new economy. Before the crises we where in a new-economy and now we are in something else. The reason I’m blogging is that we already know what the future is, as it has been around for a while, but the collective was blind to it.

When Manuel Castells gives his vision in the last 10 min, my direct impression was “hey, I know that ... I’m living it (or wanting to) !” Going form open innovation consortia, open source consortia, fare-trade consortia, creative commons, the green revolution and quality of live initiative (like happiness economics). My second impression went to my research, this is a good example of selective variety. The principle of selective variety has been defined by Francis Heylighen (1992) "Principles of Systems and Cybernetics: an evolutionary perspective”: The larger the variety of configurations a system undergoes, the larger the probability that at least one of these configurations will be selectively retained. A classic example (Francis explains), is the danger of monoculture with genetically similar or identical plants: a single disease or parasite invasion can be sufficient to destroy all crops. If there is variety, on the other hand, there will always be some crops that survive the invasion. Back to the topic in this blog, it is an economy that survives by selective variety.

Just like the dead of the dinosaurs was the rise for mammals, so will (hopefully) be the downfall of global imperial capitalism be the rise of global open business ecosystems. For the past 6 years, I’ve taken up the position that a radical future is not a long-term plan. The future is always here, mostly it is simply marginal. It may be technological premature (see disruptive technologies) or it may be a small subculture. Like most consortia mentioned above. Now with the dinosaurs dead, we do see these subcultures rise to new powers. At least it is currently getting recognition (f.e. Drupal). To have it grounded will probably take more time. Today many people loss there jobs and such radical change does require pragmatic actions, the thread of survival is a powerful force against the inherit resistance to change (listen to the last 10 min of the presentation to understand the motivation).

There is however one big flaw in the vision if you ask me. It does not take into account the changes of its own actions. As Bruno Latour (1999) puts it: “Actions are slightly overtaken by what they are acting upon”. We can only know it when it is overcoming us, but we can guess. One big question I’m having right know is why does it all need to be this painful? I hope one big lesson society takes out of this crisis is to avoid for once and for all such disruptive change. Not by surprising it, but by creating an institution for “requisite variety” to create a change demanding mentality (instead change aversive). Requisite variety was first introduced by Ashby (1958), but the version of Heylighen (in the same paper mentioned above) is a correction: The larger the variety of actions available to a control system, the larger the variety of perturbations it is able to compensate.. The way such an institution would allow a free flow of evolution is that it would create more variety to investigate alternatives. Again, marginal experiments have been all around us for a while, but recently they get taken more seriously. They are called “sandbox” in software development, “community initiative” in governmental development, “new markets” for business, “participatory action research” for science, etc.

Many of the elements we have been using comes from evolution, but it is frustration how often it is used as metaphor by people who know so little of dynamics of evolution. For example, the liberal principle is very ofter justified by “natural selection” as “the survival of the fittest”, which gets oversimplified to the survival of the strongest. Fit is not equal to strong ! A very good example is symbiosis (domestication) between aphids and ants. The ant soldier protects the aphids and farms the honeydew by tapping the aphids. This configuration is fit as both agents are more specialized in there work. In a similar way there is nothing strong on a free market, by that philosophy, you alway need to be afraid of loosing your investments. Do we want an economy of fear? (Sadly conservatives want this) I’m guessing every sensible person likes a fit economy. In a complex adaptive system, which we inhabit, it is needed to have fitness by specialization and regulation like the ant and the aphids. But unlike the ants, we are explores too ! So give us an adventures economy full with mystery and stories in a safety ensured environment. Notice, I’m not using “risk free”, we like to take risks as it leads to adventure, but we like to survive the adventures too. We need an adventures economy in a similar way as we have adventures vacations.

After giving several presentations in September, we have begone to visit companies to investigate how innovation is happening there. The idea is to find the AS-IS situation and compare it to some of the literature. I won't be writing about the specific cases, the companies and the people we work with should be able to evaluate that first. I can talk about the methodology.

It is not my intention to create boring questionnaires, but to experience the full complexity of the innovation process. The method can be called Participatory learning based on action research. I know it more from antropology research, just observer or being a participant is a quite different story. The participatory method should lead to an improvement for the partners too, this is very important aspect.

I'm also a bit inspired by the concept of repurposing. There is the story of Gutenberg and his discovery of the printing press. The story goes that Gutenberg had the idea, but could not create it. Only by being on a wine exposition and seeing a wine press did he found a breakthrough on his vision. Repurposing has been important during my whole research, it was a key aspect of my master thesis too. The expected outcome from this participation is a breakthrough on how to create a web2.0 tool for the Enterprise Innovation planning ... still a long way to go !

Currently my mind still overloaded as is my to-do list, notes and mailbox. It will take a while before I have processed one whole week of non stop idea creation. Let me tell a bit of how the event got organized. In the morning there were presentations by invited professors. In the afternoon three Phd students presented there work. It would take more time than I have at the moment to tell about all the splendid stuff we experienced. Let's just say it would be a lot longer then my last blog to express it all. Any how I think many of the elements will get addressed later on and I'll use the EIASM tag to bring all the blogs together. I just wish everyone on the school last week the best and hope we will stay in contact. Now I need to focus on my task at hand this week I need to give a presentation and next week. Also the next academic year will start and there is plenty administration to do.

A week ago I had the best conference ever, now with the exams and its administration behind me I can finally blog about it. I must say, with the tight schedule (208 presentations in 5 parallel tracks, each having only 15 min presentation time) I was skeptical about the time to discuss the topics. However the breaks and the social events in the evening did provide quite some time to talk. I've connected with some amazing people.

There is still quite some reading to do. The talks where so fast, you had little time to do anything else that follow the presenters. I've scribbled down some notes and try to remember what it was about. It would also take too long to discuss all the interesting presentations, so lets skip it and go to the social events. Of course our talks where always about innovation or related topic, you know I can't stop talking about stuff as discontinuous innovation, creativity, cognition, novelty, complexity, evolution ... but also crazy ideas about politics etc.

During the first night we had a buffet, this is where encountered Rob Drew and Brett Still who I would get to know better during the rest of the conference. I connected quite fast with Rob because of our background in Artificial Intelligence. Rob would give a presentation the other day about mixed-groups, something quite related to bootstrapping and I still need to contact him about possible future collaboration. I guess I've been talking to Brett the most during the conference, mostly on the first and the last day. Brett's interest in the conference was one from a governmental point of view and we had conversations in such a broad range it would be impossible to give a summary here. The bottom line is, like Brett says it "we had a meeting of minds" and I hope we can keep the conversations alive. I had a similar experience on the second and the third day, this is why the conference was so great, so many people I could find thinking about the same problems.

The second day I've found Andre, by then I had checked the list of participants and noticed he came from Belgium, even partly from the same university. We talked a lot during breaks and on the gala diner that evening, in again a beautiful setting with great food. The second day was the first day of the conference and I had to give my presentation. Although the time was a problem I received good response and this is how I got in contact with Dirk Balfanz. I noticed that we had a bit of a problem as I hadn't been able to see Dirk's work yet, but he was going to present the other day. Sadly the switching between rooms was not synchronized and I got half-way into his presentation. He was so kind to present me his work and we had a very long and deep discussion in the afternoon about virtual-enterprises. I still got a lot work to do there, but hope we can collaborate on the concept.

During that evening of the second conference day (so the third evening), we had again a great diner and some absolute fabulous whine. I was sitting with my girlfriend on a table with 6 other people we didn't know. How coincidental that the person sitting next to me was Bruce Vojak, who wasn't only interested in innovation management, but we connected on the whole "cognitive force behind the hard problem of innovation" as well. Probably some people around the table would have found us asocial, but if you find some one who has been on the same quest, you just can't stop. I'm astonished to be fair. Not in my wildest dreams would I have expect some one to have used the "driving a bike" metaphor and use cognitive Gestalt-example to explain innovation. I even found a very good cognitive example in one of the papers he send me. I've expected to find partners at ISPIM, but didn't expect to find the something so close to the core of my work. I hope we can work closely together.

I still got to talk about the last day. I've missed Mike Jackson's presentation, but noticed the similarities with my Enterprise Innovation Planning, after reading he's paper I'm again astonished how close the concepts are. He mixes "complex adaptive systems" with Web 2.0 technology too, that was more or less what I was coming to present on ISPIM, but then from a more theoretical perspective. I hope there is some room to collaborate on the EIP project. I was already suggested to talk with Semon Dewulf for my project and he was a keynote presenter. That gave me a good idea what he is doing and we agreed that I would visit him. I've even been on the conference untill the very last possible moment (without loosing my flight). To participate in Wim Vanhaverbeke's workshop. I know Wim for a while now, he has helped me a lot in the past year with some suggestions. The workshop was a great experience as well. As should be clear I've met some great people and saw some great presentations. I'll probably have my hands full trying to keep it all in motion, but I'm hopeful and ... what a great experience it has been !

Lately all this dam spam is getting past the checkup tools. So I've deactivated the comment until I can find a way to block the spam again.

I was just a bit surfing the web for Clayton M. Christensen new work and listened to a blogcast on his recent book Disrupting Class. In the blogcast he talks about disrupting class by using computers, but argues that it is not yet good enough to compete with universities and should compete with non-consumption. This surprised me, as I'm not competing with non-consumption but with new-market consumption with my WSDB course.

Today I've finally written out one of the exercise on drupal. It is a simple drupal module tutorial to show the interaction between users. The exercise introduces hook_menu, hoop_perm and hook_comment. The text is but a draft, tomorrow I'll check if my students can make sense of it.