Last week, Austin Tech Alliance hosted a “town hall” ideation gathering to discuss the threat of coronavirus during the upcoming SXSW Conference and Festivals and beyond. Members of the innovation community from healthcare, technology, and public policy came together to share their expertise and identify best practices and proactive measures that the Austin community can take to protect and prepare the city from the threat of COVID-19.

After hearing from professionals about the state of the virus and what processes and procedures public officials were planning to implement to control it, members of the community voiced their concerns and participated in a Voltage Control led session to workshop their fears. Note: during the session the group stopped to watch the live broadcast of Mayor Steve Adler announcing the cancellation of SXSW. Although SXSW was cancelled, the Hack Coronavirus event was used to address the threat of the virus in every day life as well as preparing for future events in Austin.

We’ve recapped the event below:

State of the Virus Address

The event was moderated by Evan Smith, CEO and Co-founder of the Texas Tribune. First, Rep. and Health Educator Donna Howard of the House Appropriations Committee spoke about the importance of establishing turnaround efforts so that the city can respond more promptly and effectively when the community is in need.

Then, Courtney Toretto delivered a statement for Congressman Lloyd Doggett, stating, “Community spread may be extensive, and disruption of everyday life may be severe.” He went on to explain that administration failures in Washington to properly handle the outbreak of coronavirus does not mean that we can isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. He advocated for initiatives to be made to allow people to get tested without cost and shared a few preventative measures for citizens to protect themselves, including adequately washing their hands and preparing for potential isolation.

Mayor Steve Adler then assured all attendees that administration is assessing daily risks of mass events, like SXSW, University of Texas’ new student orientation, the rodeo, etc., and how they will affect the Austin community. While the possible cancelling or altering of mass events such as SXSW will have significant economic impacts, he said, the only voice present at the table in the public health conversation is that of medical professionals.

“The only question is: what do we need to do in order to keep the people that live here the safest?” -Mayor Adler

He also iterated that the Public Health Officer and the Public Health Director carefully chose a panel of the top infectious disease specialists to answer this central question, and it was decided that what they say and recommend is what the city is going to do.

Panel: State of the Virus

Shakeel Rashed, Director, Accelerator of Capital Factory, moderated a panel discussion of three health professionals who explained the nature of the virus and its symptoms (debunking fake news), preventative measures for people to take to protect themselves, as well as the processes and procedures the medical community is taking to contain the situation. The panel included: Dr. Elizabeth Douglass, an Infectious Disease Specialist at Dell Medical Center, Dr. Spencer Fox, a Data Scientist at Yonder, and Nicholas Yagoda, Associate Chief Medical Officer at CommUnityCare.

The panel informed the room that it is important for the public and administration not to panic, and instead plan with Austin Public Health to create protocols and processes to best protect the city. Coronavirus, they said, isn’t new to us, but its rapid spread is. Therefore, it is imperative that we act with common sense and caution by educating human behavior–informing people with accurate information about the virus and how to properly avoid and deal with it instead of acting from fear.

Voltage Control Session

Voltage Control’s President Douglas Ferguson and Chief Product Officer John Fitch led a workshop that addressed and investigated the group’s worries about coronavirus. They felt it was critical to confront the emotional- and fear-based boundaries that influence or stifle behaviors during this time.

“The thought of using our tools to help the community mitigate a serious threat to our wellbeing and happiness spoke to me deeply.” -Douglas Ferguson

They invited the community to explore what frightened them the most about coronavirus to expose their fears and surface their deepest concerns. They used improv prototyping to improve various risky or critical encounters as it relates to public events.

Through several rounds of possible real-life scenario prompts–like what to do if someone sneezes on you in public or how to effectively communicate with someone who appears to have symptoms and wants to attend an event–participants were able to test and observe behaviors that served them well and others that did not serve them well.

This method allowed participants to move past the audible instructions to see and feel, enabling them to internalize the behaviors they need to mimic in daily life in order to combat their fears. Douglas and John felt it was critical for the group to consider and practice potential behavior changes if they expect to change them for a more positive, fear-free outcome.

After exploring these feelings and encounters, the session closed with everyone promising their biggest and boldest ideas and concepts for solutions. These ideas were given to the Hackathon for consideration.

Hackathon

For two days after the Ideation event, Experience Director at Mutual Mobile, Jessica Lowry, led a free Hackathon, bringing the tech community together with Mutual Mobile and Capital Factory to develop an intelligent way to detect the risk of exposure to coronavirus. Although SXSW was cancelled, the Hackathon was used as an opportunity to solve the wicked problem of how to help ensure Austinites and out-of-town visitors stay safe and informed about COVID-19.

A team of ten people of diverse backgrounds and skillsets focused on how to help inform the homeless about the virus through more accessible and contextual information tailored to their needs. According to Jessica, the best idea was to create toolkits that could be distributed at public libraries and public bus stations. The process would operate like Meals on Wheels, but with the addition of partner locations, like libraries. A user would go to the responsive webpage or physical location and either access instructions to build a kit or pick up a donated kit depending on their needs.

“I’m very proud of our small, but mighty, Hackathon team.” -Jessica Lowry

Hackathon group team leader Merida Elizondo shared her experience of the event:

“Even with SXSW canceled, chances are COVID-19 will touch our community. Jess at Mutual Mobile helped facilitate our early design thinking session and pointed out that since we were not working within the confines of solving for SXSW, we could shift our focus. Narrowing our scope was a big part of the challenge. With two days and a prompt that fed into the broader issues we face as a community, we hoped to create a resource hub that would be scalable… It was a whirlwind weekend filled with purpose and design that I hope will have an impact on how our community faces COVID-19.”

The Coronavirus Ideation event successfully informed attendees about the state of coronavirus and the efforts city and public health officials are taking to protect and prepare Austin for it. Community members’ concerns were also heard and workshopped with the help of Voltage Control, and the session encouraged effective behavior to navigate the virus’ threat, now and in the future. The Hackathon then produced innovation solutions to address the concerns of coronavirus in the Austin homeless population, further creating opportunities to help the community.

Executive Director of Austin Tech Alliance, Sarah Ortiz Fields, expressed the imperative value of hosting the event and bringing the public together:

“It’s important for us to invite the community, health care professionals, technologists and government officials to participate and create solutions that can inform and educate the public. Austin can be a best-in-class city by stepping up to help other conferences and cities around the world learn from our experience.”

The post Hack Coronavirus: Ideation appeared first on Voltage Control.

This is part of my series on thought leaders in the innovation space. Check out the end of this article for links to others in the series.

Let’s start with a great anecdote that Peter Nicholson shared with me. When Elon Musk was just a student at Queen’s University in Ontario, Peter was working for a big bank in Toronto. Elon called up Peter out of the blue and said he was looking for a job for him and his brother. They had lunch, and Peter ultimately gave Elon a job. (“I’ve never known anyone who had the combination of vision and determination,” he says.)

As this tidbit indicates, Peter is a fascinating guy to talk to, whether about innovation or anything else. With his unique expertise in government policy, education, and business, our conversation on innovation took unexpected twists and turns.

Before we dive in, here’s some background: Peter was born and raised in Nova Scotia, educated in physics and mathematics, and has served in numerous posts in government, business, science, and higher education. His public service career included positions as Deputy Chief of Staff, Policy, in the Office of the Prime Minister of Canada and as Special Advisor to the Secretary-general of the OECD in Paris. His business career has included senior executive positions with Scotiabank and with the telecom holding company, BCE Inc. in Montreal.

The Drive-Through Window

From the very beginning of our conversation, Peter took me through an equation-filled journey of economics. It is a perspective on innovation that we rarely see. As the former policy strategist to the prime minister of Canada, he has a more global view that is very intriguing.

The equation that he shared with me is called The Growth Accounting Equation, and it’s used to measure how different factors influence economic growth. This equation was relevant because Peter was talking about his view that: “Innovation is really the fundamental driver of economic growth…[This is] because it is the ultimate source of productivity growth.”

However, Peter was quick to clarify how he defines productivity; he doesn’t mean people working more: “The notion of productivity conjures up bad images for workers …People misunderstand it as: ‘I am being driven to work longer hours, do more for less?’ And it doesn’t mean that at all, it means: getting more valuable output from the unit of labor input. It doesn’t mean working longer or harder. It means working smarter.”

“[Productivity] doesn’t mean working longer or harder. It means working smarter.”

He gave an excellent, and unexpected, example of this smarter, more innovative way of doing things — the drive-through window. “Somebody got the idea that if you knocked a hole in the wall, and put in a bit of cheap communications equipment and hired an extra person…you could enormously increase the seating capacity of your restaurant without any extra cost. So, that was a big win-win. The capital input is very small. There’s a little bit of extra labor that you have to put in, but the output at the end was vastly exceeding those inputs.” To Peter, this is one of the defining characteristics of innovation: when the rewards greatly outdo the money or effort.

Lessons from Canada

When we hear about innovation today, we often get a very U.S.-centric point of view. But, because Peter is Canadian, he shared his thoughts on the innovation space in Canada and, particularly, how it has been shaped to where it is today: “Canada’s always had terrific technological competence…But, had never, ever developed this focus on the end customer. It is also reflected in the fact that Canada has no consumer brands at all.” Why is this? Peter chalks it up to simple supply and demand.

He says: “Canada’s role in the North American economy has been upstream at the commodity end. The US has some raw materials but it relies hugely on Canada.” Peter sees Canada’s focus on raw materials (vs. end products) as fundamental to where it is today. “The US has got enormously sophisticated end products and Canada has virtually nothing.” He’s even seen how this has impacted the current Canadian start-up world: “I have spent time with incubators in Canada and what you hear…[is that the] biggest gap in start-up culture in Canada is not just marketing but simple sales skills…they have not developed the business skill set that we associate with an end customer focus and a marketing focus and a branding focus.”

“The takeaway from that is that where you end up specializing, over time, has a big effect on the cultural approach to innovation…”

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Getting Fisherman to Agree

I asked Peter to share a story of successful innovation, and in keeping with our conversation, his example was one-of-a-kind. “It’s a good example of a tremendously valuable innovation that wasn’t in the least technical,” he said. The story was about a fisherman. To cut to the chase (and likely to overly simplify!), Peter read about how catch limits in the Canadian fishing industry was leading to fisherman spending too much on bigger and better boats, an oversaturated market, and plummeting prices.

Peter took matters into his own hands: “I said well, what we’ve got to do here is create a property right. And the way to do that is to give each individual fishing enterprise a certain percentage of the quota and then they can catch that in the most efficient way that they want. They don’t have to race. It totally changes the incentive structure.”

“The key was to get people to agree, that alignment piece. That’s 90% of my work.”

But to make this idea work, he had to get the five fishing companies together. Which he did one day, gathering all of them in one room. And in an afternoon, he succeeded in getting them to agree to how they were going to allocate their fish stocks. Peter said of this personal feat: “Here’s a great process innovation, which has had tremendous economic impact…the key was to get people to agree, that alignment piece. That’s 90% of my work.”

Don’t Miss the Internet

As well as hearing personal stories of success in innovation, I also love to hear stories about what didn’t work. With Peter’s background in Canadian telecom (he used to work for the holding company that owned Nortel), he shared his perspective on the time in the 1990s when the telecom companies were transitioning to the internet as the main form of communication. As Peter explained, all of the leading global telecom companies “failed to make the transition to the internet protocol form of communication. How did this happen? It wasn’t because these companies didn’t know, didn’t understand the technology.”

Instead, Peter cites that the reason these companies missed the boat was because they didn’t want to disrupt their major customers: “Their big customers, the people that were supplying the quarterly financial results, were the old wireline companies and… the major customers did not want this disruptive technology…it was really going to vaporize their business model but, of course, it was going to happen anyway.” One of the lessons here, from someone who was there as it was unfolding, is to not to worry so much about cannibalizing or disrupting your current business that you miss the much bigger opportunity.

I hope you enjoyed this synopsis of my conversation with Peter Nicholson. If you want to read more, check out my articles about two other innovation experts: Gary Hoover and Kellee M. Franklin.

The post The Man Who Gave Elon Musk a Summer Job appeared first on Voltage Control.