Hi, I’m Garry van Patter and I’m the Director of Innovation Acceleration Labs, at Scient.
I thought it might be interesting to give you a sense of Scient, because we are dealing with organisational issues ourselves and trying to help everybody in the company become more innovative.

So this is a quote from our fearless leader:"The Internet is a technology, not a business plan." And I thought that this was pertinent to some of the conversations that have occurred in the last six months or so. So here are approximately ten quick facts about Scient.

It’s a company that is two years old, a public company at this point. We have grown organically, meaning we have not acquired other organisations, we’ve gone from two people to 2000 people in two years. Our original focus was creating new economy e-businesses, and we are finding ourselves being asked to do more and more large-scale projects. Which we are starting to call next economy e-enhanced businesses,a much different type of work that we have been involved with in the past.

We do everything from strategy to customer experience to the technology side of it, and of course implementation. We build stuff, as we say at Scient. Part of what we have is deep internal industry knowledge within the company. Already we have 13 offices around the world.

Ninety-five percent of our clients are large corporations. We used to work with small clients and still like to work with small clients, that’s where a lot of the innovation happens, but we’re being asked to work with larger and larger organisations. We have created and launched 37 end-to-end e-businesses since we were created.

Scient culture is built around values, it’s not a rule-based organisation. Innovation is a Scient value. Our culture changes with every individual who enters the company, but the values do not change. As was best defined a few minutes ago by John, the Scient innovation is expected to happen everywhere. It’s not just happening on the projects that we do for clients.

Clients are faced with a lot of different dynamics. Let me just touch briefly on a couple. One of them is that technology is imperfectly, I think, continuing to transform the world. The other one that clients are grappling with is that complexity is rising, in terms of the day-to-day issues that they are dealing with. So in the old days, the CEO used to be able to handle most of the problems personally, but those days are long gone. What they’re finding is that they’re facing problems where they have to get multidisciplinary teams together and work on them. So we ask ourselves, what skills and tools are required to do this kind of work?

Simultaneously we are seeing time-frames compressed, so a lot of our clients are used to what we call sequential processing, meaning that in the old economy one department handed its work to the next department, and so on. And that required different skills. Today, there is much more parallel processing, and that presents tremendous challenges to the teams.

In the old days, the designer was often at the end of the sequential process. Meaning that you were often considered form-givers, and so we have been educated many of us, in terms of that need and that skill-set. But today we have huge opportunities to be sitting at the table at the beginning of the process. So what we have to look at is what design schools are not teaching designers, because I think there’s tremendous opportunity to not only participate at the beginning of a project, but to learn how to lead at the beginning of the project. So if you’re there from the beginning, what you have to know is much, much different from what you used to have to know when you were a form-giver.

So we are seeing clients shift focus. They are still interested in e-business, of course, but they’re increasingly interested in e-enhanced business and continuous innovation. They see Scient as the model for how to do these things. In the short period of time we have become the model for how to work together collaboratively, people come to the Lab and they’re very interested in what we’re doing. That model really came from the work that Elizabeth Pastor and I were doing before we arrived at Scient, working with clients and trying to help them become more innovative and figure out why they weren’t using the information that they were generating.So we are looking at whole brain information, whole brain process, whole brain teams and what we call the whole brain environment.

One of the things that we’re trying to do is to get multiple disciplines working together. So we have people from the best business schools, the best design schools, the best technology schools - but who have not worked together before. My background is in architecture and information architecture, so I consider myself to be in the understanding business, meaning making complicated things understandable to people. You foster innovation through understanding and inclusion. That means, don't departmentalise. Don't have a bunch of people who are ‘the design people’, or ‘the creative people’ while the rest of the company are doing the uncreative work. Consider everybody to be a creative person. We should shape information in such a way that it includes everybody.

So in short, what we teach is that there’s a difference between the what and the how, the content and the process. At Scient we have tremendous knowledge around the e-business, the what of that, and we have a particular proprietary process which we call the Scient approach, in other words, ‘How do you do that?’ ‘How do you build that system?’ and where the lab is really focused is on the underlying logic. And so the training that we do is not just specific to where we happen to be in the marketplace now, but where we happen to be going in six months from now. It allows us tremendous flexibility. We find many design companies are still focused around what we call fairly framed-up problems, or opportunities. So in other words, someone might say, how might we build a website? But because of the uncertainty in the economy, many clients don’t know what they should do. We help them figure that out.

How might we define innovation? We can talk about it having two personalities, pattern-breaking and pattern-optimising. In many organisations they talk about innovation as only the pattern-breaking part, so innovation in many places is about coming up with something new that has never been done before. That's a very important part of innovation, but only one part. It's what we call, ‘Seizing the Unknown’. That’s inventing a business. The other kind of innovation we call ‘Perfecting the Known’ that’s we call pattern-optimising or running a business.

This really started when Elizabeth and I were working with some futurists in a large corporation. They were generating all sorts of information and nobody was using it, the product designers weren’t using it, and they asked us to figure out why they weren’t using it. So we started to look at these questions: how might me explore the connections between information and innovation? How might we shape information to include everyone? And how might we shape innovation to include everyone? We started looking at what we roughly called ‘innovation DNA’.

So we talked to some really interesting people, and we managed to identify different problem-solving styles, or thinking styles. Some people are what we call pattern disrupters, and some are pattern optimisers. Going on from this, we identified four quadrants, or personality types, based on the two approaches.

A generator, for instance, is good at scanning the environment. John Thackara is probably a generator, he’s great at seeing the trends in the environment, and coming up with new ideas. He’s probably not so great at following through on some of the detail, so he needs people to help him with that.

Conceptulisers: there are probably many conceptulisers in the room. Information designers tend to be conceptualisers, I happen to be a conceptualiser, we are the people in the world who see connections between fairly disperate things, we are the dot connectors of the world.

Optimisers tend to be great at making decisions. Conceptulisers don’t like to give up ideas. So we have 100 ideas, we don’t want to give up any of them. Optimisers help us select those ideas, among other things. Finally, implementers are really great at going forward without having all the details.

All of us are combinations of these four quadrants, but most of us are particularly strong in just one of them. We do this exercise to see who is good at what, and it helps us see that we need each other. One person is not good at everything from the beginning to the end.

There’s a relationship between the thinking styles and the information preferences that we found interesting to consider. Some people prefer to relate to pictures, symbols and diagrams. Other people relate to words, numbers and formulae. So when we were doing the analyses of these fairly large enterprises about why people weren’t using certain types of information, we see this same mistake, or oversight, repeat itself. So often in the information we would find there are tons of words, there’s a lot of detail, but very few images and no real overview.

Many organisations don’t profile their people, so all they know is where a person went to school, not what she’s good at, or not good at, so we’re probably forming unbalanced teams. And then if the information is the wrong format, they won't use it.

So the message is to build a whole brain system, whole brain process, whole brain information, whole brain teams. The problem solving process sits on top of profiling process. And once people see the relationship between the two things, they really realise that they’re best at the beginning of the project, or best in the middle of the project, or best at the end of the project, or whatever.

So in closing, I think that as we go forward we’re going to see a lot of people trying to figure out how to compete in terms of understanding, clarity, simplicity, orchestration and innovation. Scient just recently announced that the New Economy is dead and the Next Economy is upon us - with all the multitude of challenges that goes with it. There's a white paper on ‘What’s next for the Next Economy?’on our website. That’s all!