Tim Brown IDEO Europe tbrown@ideo.com

Like many other i3 projects, the Maypole project relies strongly on collaboration between academic departments, consultants and corporations. Tim Brown, Director of the design company IDEO Europe, is one of the partners in Maypole. He talks about the challenges and rewards of collaboration across different environments and cultures, and how the process could be made easier.

Tim Brown: IDEO has offices all over the world, so collaborating across countries is not unusual for us. But what is new, and what has been a challenge at times, is collaborating with a number of countries all at once. The main thing we've learned about collaboration over the years is that it works best when you can actually work together intensely for extended periods of time. But within i3 — and this may be inherent to the way it is set up — it has been difficult to bring people together for more than a day or two at a time. That can prevent ideas forming quite so naturally, and it's probably caused some inefficiencies in the project from time to time. On the other hand, there are many positive sides to having so many different places and viewpoints involved; in the case of Maypole it has definitely resulted in insights coming into the project that wouldn't have come in to the project otherwise.

Another challenge has been the difference between consulting or industrial environments on the one hand, and academic environments on the other, in terms of pace. At IDEO we are used to working fast, partly because we're very expensive; in academic institutions things tend to move more slowly, partly because of their calendar. On one level that's been frustrating for us: if we had done all the project work within IDEO it probably would have taken us six months instead of two years. But the positive side is that it gives you a chance to reflect on ideas, and that can be important.

Another difference concerns the general approach of the different environments, and their priorities. We're a design group, so we're interested in making things, getting interesting ideas out there. Whereas some of the universities, especially the research universities, are much more academically rigorous. That can obviously cause differences in opinion in terms of what we should be focusing on, or how we should think about ideas. But understanding, integrating and exploiting different points of view is an inherent part of any kind of interdisciplinary project, and very much part of the learning process.

In my view, all these things make the role of project leadership very important, and if we were to do it all again we would want to think more about that. The administrative side of project leadership works extremely well within Maypole, but that in itself is not enough, especially for people who have never worked together before. I know that the first time you bring teams together to collaborate it can be difficult: they have to find the right sets of relationships, and that takes time. For an interdisciplinary multi–locational team this process of learning how to work together is an even bigger challenge — you're probably just getting there just as the project ends. The role of project leadership is critical in this respect, and I feel that, in our consortium at least, we could have thought more about the creative content side of leadership. Our approach, on the basis of what we've learned over the years, is that we make the project leader absolutely the most important person on the project, someone who has lot of authority and control. But the qualities necessary for this kind of leadership — knowing how to get the very most out of everybody, being able to listen to everybody's point of view — take a lot of training and a lot of experience.

So it's not enough to bring together a bunch of interesting people and hope for the best; the concept of project leadership has to be thought out really well. I can only speak for Maypole but I would suspect that the same holds for other i3 projects; it seems to me to be fundamental if you want to provide value for money (and in the case of i3 there is a lot of money involved). There might be an opportunity for the i3 organisation to think about how to best support this concept, and develop a best–practice for project leadership of multi–locational, collaborative projects, a centre of knowledge about how you manage and lead them.

So project leadership could be an area for focus in the future. Another area concerns the successful exploitation of findings and results within i3. When you have big corporations, consultancy organisations and academic institutions all in the same consortium, as is often the case in i3, this becomes a complex issue. My feeling is that it should be given more careful consideration at a very early stage: if it hasn’t been addressed before the project starts, there will inevitably be friction between academic researchers wanting to publish papers, consultants wanting to get the ideas out there, and corporations wanting to hide it all away and exploit it later. Again one could imagine i3 becoming a centre of excellence for effective exploitation paths. That way it could have a much bigger impact on European business and the wider world.

Part of the challenge lies in changing the way big corporations think about intellectual property (IP). Collaborative projects and private IP don't really work well together. There are some interesting models in the US, like the MIT Media Lab; and at the Media Lab copyrights and the like are available to the public, so we could learn from them. I would say that i3 needs to set a few ground rules for these matters, because otherwise they give rise to an interminable process of negotiation and renegotiation within every project, taking up valuable time at consortium meetings and causing stress.

I imagine this must be an issue with other Esprit projects too; but one difference between i3 and other Esprit projects is that so much of the content of i3 is not about technical intellectual property but about ideas, about how people do things. This can be of great value, but a lot of companies find it difficult to deal with IP of that kind: everybody knows what to do with patents, but i3 is producing other forms of IP. Knowing how to support that, and make most use of it, is an interesting challenge.

Has being a part of i3 changed the way we work? In some respects not all that much, because we do quite a lot of research projects anyway. But normally they're for our clients, and what i3 has done for us is make it very clear that doing our own R&D is really valuable. Consultants don't do that kind of thing very often, partly because the business model is one that doesn't support it very well, and partly because it's a big investment.

We spend most of our lives doing R&D for other people, with the problem being framed by them and their market place. i3 has given us the opportunity to frame it for ourselves, and although that has been very difficult at times, there has also been huge value in the insights that we have gained from it. In the case of Maypole we've learned a lot about children and the way they communicate; and some of these things are extremely useful for us in other areas, other projects we are working on. So although i3 is a huge investment for us, because of how much it effectively costs us to participate, it has turned out to be worthwhile.

With thanks to everyone in the Maypole project for their contributions.

atOOn-ment

Tim Brown is responsible for the overall direction of IDEO Europe. His main interest is to create great designs and innovations through a user-focused process with multidisciplinary teams. He is a prolific speaker at international conferences and is also involved in education, currently at the Royal College of Art.

One of the products recently developed by IDEO is atOOn, a musical companion and communicator for children. atOOn responds to the environmentin which the wearer moves, and to atOOn devices being worn by other children. It creates new kinds of social interaction between children and provides a focus for games, swaps and jokes.

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