Tag Archives: IRI

A chance to game the future Sept. 25 and 26, 2013 starting 9 am PDT

Thanks to David Bruggeman at his Pasco Phronesis blog (his Sept. 20, 2013 posting)  for featuring a 36-hour conversation/game (which is recruiting players/participants). It is  called  Innovate 2038  and you do have to pre-register for this game. For anyone who likes a little more information before jumping into to join, here’s what the Innovate 2038 About page has to offer,

About Innovate2038

The traditional paths to research and technology innovation will no longer work for the critical challenges and new opportunities of 2038.

Increasingly constrained resources, the rise of mega-cities, and rapidly shifting developments in business processes, regulations, and consumer sentiment will present epic challenges to business as usual.

At the same time, opportunities will abound. Emerging fields like 3D-printing and additive manufacturing, synthetic biology, and data modeling will catalyze the next generation of products, services, and markets—if research and innovation can lead the way.

But managing all of these research and innovation efforts will require new tools and technologies, new skills in project and talent management, new players and collaborations, and ultimately a collective re-imagining of the value proposition of research to society.

Innovate2038 is a 36-hour global conversation based on IRI’s extensive IRI2038 research project to uncover new ideas and new strategies that can reinvent the very concept of R&D and technology innovation management for the 21st century.

On Sept 25 & 26, 2013, Innovate2038 will take place in corporations, labs, classrooms, but also hacker-spaces, online innovation communities, and networks of researchers and makers, in countries around the world.

Innovate2038 will bring together current leading voices together with emerging and below-the-radar new players that will be increasingly important to the practice of research and innovation.

The platform to support the conversation is itself a signal of the future—a cutting-edge crowdsourced game called Foresight Engine, developed and facilitated by the Institute for the Future. It’s designed to spark new ideas and inspire collaborations among hundreds of people around the world. [emphasis mine]

In as little as five minutes, you can log on to share rapid-fire micro-contributions that will help make the future of research and innovation heading out to 2038.
For a day and half, you can compete to win points, achieve awards, and gain the recognition of the leading thinkers in technology management today.

Pre-register right now as a ‘game insider’ to be the first to know about the game leading up to the Sept 25 launch.

David notes that this ’36-hour conversation/game is part of a larger project, from his Sept. 20, 2013 Pasco Phronesis posting (Note: Links have been removed),

… This is part of the Industrial Research Institute’s project on 2038 Future, which focuses on the art and science of research and development management.  That project has involved possible future scenarios, retrospective examinations of research management, and scanning the current environment.  The game engine was developed by the Institute for the Future, and is called the Foresight Engine.  The basics of the engine encourage participants to contribute short ideas, with points going to those ideas that get approved and/or built on by other participants.

Here’s more about the  Industrial Research Institute (IRI) from their History webpage,

Fourteen companies comprised the original membership of the Institute when it was formed in 1938, under the auspices of the [US] National Research Council (NRC). Four of these companies retain membership today: Colgate-Palmolive Company, Procter & Gamble Company, Hercules Powder Company (now Ashland, Inc.), and UOP, LLC, formerly known as Universal Oil Products (acquired by Honeywell). Four of the first five presidents were from the six charter-member-company category.

Maurice Holland, then Director of the NRC Division of Engineering, was largely responsible for bringing together about 50 representatives from industry, government, and universities to an initial organizational meeting in February 1938 in New York City. The Institute was an integral part of the National Research Council until 1945, when it separated to become a non-profit membership corporation in the State of New York. However, association with the Council continues unbroken.

At the founding meeting, several speakers stressed the need for an association of research directors–something different from the usual technical society–and that the benefits to be derived would depend on the extent of cooperation by its members. The greatest advantage, they said, would come through personal contacts with members of the group–still a major characteristic of IRI.

In more recent years, the activities of the Association have broadened considerably. IRI now offers services to the full range of R&D and innovation professionals in the United States and abroad.

I went exploring and found this about the game developer, Institute for the Future  (IFTF) on the website’s Who We Are page (Note: Links have been removed),

IFTF is an independent, non-profit research organization with a 45-year track record of helping all kinds of organizations make the futures they want. Our core research staff and creative design studio work together to provide practical foresight for a world undergoing rapid change.

….

Here’s more about the Foresight Engine , the “cutting-edge crowdsourced game,” from the IFTF website’s Collaborative Forecasting Games webpage,

Collaborative Forecasting Games: a crowd’s view of the future

Collaborative forecasting games engage a large and diverse group of people—potentially from around the world—to imagine futures that might go unnoticed by a team of experts. These crowds may include the general public, a targeted sector of the public, or the entire staff of a private organization. And the games themselves can range from futures brainstorming to virtual innovation gameboards and even rich narrative platforms for telling important stories about the future.

Foresight Engine

IFTF has a collaborative forecasting platform called Foresight Engine that makes it easy to set up games without a lot of investment in game design. In the tradition of brainstorming, the platform invites people to play positive or critical ideas about the future and then to build on these ideas to forms chains of discussion—complete with points, awards, and achievements for winning ideas. While the focus of the platform is on Twitter-length ideas of 140 characters or less, a Foresight Engine game does much more than harvest innovative ideas. It builds a literacy among players about the future issues addressed by the game, and it also provides a window on the crowd’s level of understanding of complex futures—laying the foundation for future literacy building. It shows who inspires the greatest following and often surfaces potential thought leaders.

It’s always interesting to dig into an organization’s history (from the IFTF’s History page,

The Institute for the Future has 45 years of forecasts on which to reflect. We’re based in California’s Silicon Valley—a community at the crossroads of technological innovation, social experimentation, and global interchange. Founded in 1968 by a group of former RAND Corporation researchers with a grant from the Ford Foundation to take leading-edge research methodologies into the public and business sectors, IFTF is committed to building the future by understanding it deeply.

I wonder if Innovate 2038 game/conversation will take place in any language other than English? In any event, I just tried to register and couldn’t.  I hope this is a problem on my end rather than the organizers’ as I know how devastating it can be to have your project encounter this kind of roadblock just before launching.