The Minciu Sodas laboratory.

Strengthening Knowledge Policy for Small States:

How can small states participate more effectively in local, regional, and global knowledge partnerships?"


Local innovators for Global enterprises

Research question

How might the creativity of local innovators be harnessed by global enterprises? What are the hurdles, and how might we overcome them?

We propose to connect individual innovators around the world with people of responsibility in global corporations, national governments and large foundations.  This would make the world more responsive and equitable.  

We face major cultural obstacles:
Consider an accomplished innovator, S Bipin Agravat, who proposes, “Here is the thought that  InDiA has wide varity of langauge, traditions, customs, and various life styles even within one state itself so how about that which will allow to share knowledge.  well i M from Gujarat  and  a villger with background of the Technology with one hand and traditional knowldge on the other hand . now this itself make it interesting to know the digital divide.  how to  bridge the Gap for this knowldge divide or digital divide.”

A healthy, creative outlook depends on our participating in more than one culture (as does Bipin, through travel, multiple interests, studies, social networks, languages, books, disciplines). An isolated culture will suffocate, stagnate, disappear.  The advantage of small cultures is that there can be many of them!

Large cultures have the opportunity to absorb influences from a variety of cultures, and become advanced in organizational complexity, distributed in leadership, wealthy in relationships. The disadvantage of large cultures is that they snuff out small cultures, ultimately becoming self-absorbed, homogeneous, and narrow in their creativity. Small cultures must learn to support each other if all cultures are to work together as equals.

The limiting case is the individual as a culture.  Corporations bring together creative individuals, but in the corporate culture they grow blunt.  They need to speak with outsiders.  The Cluetrain Manifesto declares that “markets are conversations” between individuals on either side of the corporate walls.  Individual innovators from around the world should look for ways to participate.

Individuals are creative in the language that they know best.  Small cultures likewise need to have their own activity.  We will therefore organize groups of independent thinkers in different languages: Lithuanian, Tamil, Belarussian, Estonian and Gujrati. We will support each other’s efforts to apply our creativity to local challenges we face.  We will enlist assistants from global cultures in English, Spanish and Russian to help us overcome obstacles and transfer at least part of our creative energy to the global economy.  

We propose to explore the ways by which the creativity of local innovators might actually be harnessed by institutions and enterprises across the world.  We will ask:
  1. How valuable can local culture be as a source of global creativity ?
  2. How much intuition can be transferred across cultures, especially from poorer to richer ?
  3. Where do laws, policies and norms help or hurt this transfer?
  4. Where and how is this transfer best monetized ?

Methodology

We will study knowledge systems by organizing and applying one.

Our laboratory, Minciu Sodas, www.ms.lt, serves and organizes independent thinkers around the world.  We have roughly 30 active and 300 passive participants. We bring together individual projects around shared endeavors.  We work openly to attract enterprises to our endeavors and our members, and then profit opportunistically.  

We will act as a group to open the doors of corporations, foundations and institutions to our participating innovators. Andrius Kulikauskas, Direktorius of Minciu Sodas, organizes us so that no matter how different our outlooks and interests, we may always expect of each other a shared value of “caring about thinking”, and can invest ourselves in each other accordingly. Wealth is relationships. At our working groups, all may watch us work and make use of our results, but only members may participate, which is the key to building relationships.  Membership is awarded to all who demonstrate that they are able to work openly and share freely in ways that contribute to the public wealth.  Andrius’ task now is to expand our laboratory’s value beyond the reach of any single person, and the confines of any one language.  Our knowledge systems, and our organizers, must encourage us to cultivate “caring about thinking” so that on this basis we might all appreciate the wishes of others, both commercial and noncommercial, and respond imaginatively.  Andrius will work as a global organizer to distribute our resources in a fractal manner to 5 local organizers, 25 global innovators, and 125 local innovators to project our vision. (Here we distinguish between global cultures, working in English, Spanish, Russian, and local cultures, working in Lithuanian, Tamil, Belarussian, Estonian, Gujarati). He will coordinate and coach the local organizers, both on-site and online.  As principal investigator, he will map out and monitor the entire chain of transfer of creativity from local cultures to corporate thinkers.  He will identify obstacles, coordinate alternatives, collect results and draw conclusions.  He needs $25,000 as global organizer and $15,000 as principal investigator.
 
We will support cooperation between independent thinkers around the world with special attention to these very different small cultures:
We will assign local organizers for each:
Each local organizer will lead a group of at least 25 local innovators.  Some of these groups are already active, others are assembling, and still others must be started.  They will receive the same resources, but will be expected to use them as locally appropriate.  Each group will contribute some service to the overall project (such as making corporate contacts, coding an interactive website, or designing a knowledge management system).  Local organizers will primarily serve as coordinators.  They will also contribute as investigators by writing a short report on what they have learned about creativity transfer.  Each local organizer needs $5,000 and also $1,000 as an investigator.

Our aim is to reach the corporate world by offering a coaching service by outside innovators for corporate innovators.  This service, for $1,000 a year, will couple monthly phone calls with weekly “idea feeds” that our laboratory compiles for various endeavors.  Our goal, and a measure of our success, is to sell 10 or more corporate subscriptions.  We will gain practice by providing this service at a discount to 15 leaders of influential institutions.  Andrius Kulikauskas will work to expand our pool of global innovators for interconnecting tools for augmenting thinking, structuring social workspaces for fostering endeavors, organizing an economy for working openly, and other endeavors that may evoke corporate interest.  Global innovators will absorb and transfer creativity between our local groups and corporate thinkers.  They will document their observations through their public correspondence.  Each global innovator needs $1,000.

We are organizing this investigation so that our energy comes from 5 groups of 25 local innovators.  They will be enlisted to:
They need to generate a trail of public domain material that can be used to study their creative work.  They will need to organize themselves, with minimal coordination from their local organizer, to take up their local challenges, but also contribute somehow to the other local groups and overall project, and to make some of their creative process available in English.  Each local innovator needs $200.

A challenge for all of our groups will be to attract a mix of people and ways of thinking.  Minciu Sodas has had mixed success at involving women.  We have one working group that is 98% male.  This appears to be a general trend in the discussion of software tools for “thinking powerfully”.  In our other discussion groups that we moderate, and our local meetings in Lithuania, we have observed that when women start to participate, we experience a more enjoyable and productive mix of issues and outlooks.  We have also benefited tremendously from our efforts to reach out to the disadvantaged, as documented in “An Economy for Giving Everything Away” by Andrius Kulikauskas.  Our global and local organizers will dedicate at least 20% of our funds for local and global innovators to those who risk discrimination, including women, but also national and religious minorities, and the socially oppressed.  Where there are no qualifying innovators, then those funds will be dedicated to integrating the disadvantaged through outreach and education.  Our strategy is to set quotas low enough that we might voluntarily exceed them, and learn how to exceed them. Andrius Kulikauskas is charged as global organizer that we all stay ever mindful and keep reaching out.

We are conducting our research to learn as we attempt to make this system work.  We have set remuneration low enough to make sure that all participants have some personal interest also at stake.  This will drive us to make modifications as they are needed.  Methodologically, our fractal system imposes a constant size on the number of awards and the amount of remuneration, and a modular structure that we are exploiting to consider a variety of “small countries”.  This encourages a natural diversity of response and interaction amongst the groups.  We can also draw comparisons with our other groups in English and Spanish that might serve as control groups of sorts.  (We would love to add French).  We are not spending the resources for a “controlled” experiment, nor are we guaranteeing any particular deliverables for the knowledge system.  We will draw conclusions from the reports of our investigators, the public correspondence of our participants, and interviews and questionnaires as needed. We will try to create a knowledge system that works, and also provide a public trail of data along with a report of insightful explanations of what works and what doesn’t based on our variety of experiences.

Results and Dissemination

Our goal is to build, study and point to a knowledge system that links local innovators with global enterprises.

We expect to have groups of local innovators in Lithuanian, Tamil, Belarussian, Estonian and Gujarati at the Minciu Sodas laboratory that stay active after funding has ended. Andrius Kulikauskas will spend at least one month in Minsk, and will make short trips to meet with Estonians, Lithuanian and Russian speakers throughout the Baltic region.  He will work for at least one month from Gujarat, and travel, as means allow, to meet with Tamils in South Asia.  

We will create a knowledge system that serves both our local groups and our global laboratory.  This will include a system of online spaces with databases for members, interests, projects that are open to the exchange of information with organizations such as the Chaordic Commons and the Creative Commons.  

We will have a trail of material in the public domain that all are free to study, especially researchers who are interested in the transfer of creativity.

We hope to have established a coaching service that can justify economically the linking up of corporate thinkers to local innovators by means of global innovators and local organizers.  Alternatively, we hope to understand why this is not possible, or where we have failed.
We would love to place a special emphasis on Canadian innovators and enterprises.  Our collaborative workspace, ms.memes.net, is provided for us by Stephen Danic of British Columbia, inventor of Lucid Fried Eggs.

If our knowledge system is successful, then we will have found an economically rational way for corporations, governments and foundations to reach, fund and integrate individual innovators.  This is especially relevant to the European Union in its enormous effort to integrate and uplift the people of Eastern Europe.  A similar need exists wherever large and small cultures coincide.  We will reveal the economic beauty of an international network of thoughtful people from many cultures.  Imagine having personal contacts with software teams in India, web designers in Belarus, advertisers in Malaysia and grant writers in Eastern Europe.

We will naturally focus our dissemination efforts on the enterprises and institutions that might benefit from our knowledge system.  Our ongoing networking activity will reach a wide array of online business communities.  We will gear our findings towards investors and funders who might profit or otherwise benefit from such knowledge systems.  Our principal investigator Andrius Kulikauskas will present his findings to a relevant conference, and contribute a paper about the key results to the proceedings or else a related journal.

Time Table

We envisage our research to take 16 months with no special restrictions on the start date.  Our schedule is mostly dictated by the developments within our local groups.  Concurrently we will be organizing global innovators who will follow these developments and share inspiration back and forth with corporate thinkers.

Budget

Expenses for Organization of Knowledge System

Income generated by Global Innovators

Expenses for Investigation of Knowledge System

Total Cost = $110,000 = $100,000 - $10,000 + $20,000

 

Evaluation, how will results be evaluated?

As we put together our knowledge system, we will draw a map of how creativity is transferred from local innovators to local groups to global innovators to corporate thinkers, and in the opposite direction.  We will learn about that process, identify the steps and work around the obstacles.  We will study our public correspondence and note transfers of creativity, especially the sparks of intuition, however small, that leap across the chasm between the local and global cultures.  As we succeed to encourage such transfers, we hope to develop metrics to express the quality and quantity of transfer.  A very obvious measure of success will be our ability to sell our coaching services.  

We will also consider other quanitifiables that our correspondence documents or suggests, and can be supplemented with questionnaires and interviews:
We will be able to make comparisons across our groups, and look for underlying factors that may depend on the nature of the “countries” and public policy.

Another measure of success is the ability to attract funders and investors.  This economic structure encourages the overlapping of initiatives.  We will seek funding, for example, from the structural funds that Lithuania is due to receive from the European Union.

Most impressive would be an extension of the fractal principle.  If a clarity of vision can be shared by global organizer, local organizer, global innovator and local innovator, then we have created a “vision transistor” that can respond to funders with compatible values.  The utility of the system grows with the number of layers that it can extend to, each distributing purposeful resources across a wider group of conscious participants.  Imagine each local innovator having 5 global supporters and 25 local supporters.  Each global supporter might be awarded $40, and each local supporter $8, for help they might give, such as answering a questionnaire, or making some phone calls to entrepreneurs or government officials.  The award might take the form of a book certificate or magazine subscription.  Here a $25,000 investment may activate 625 global supporters, and another may activate 3125 local supporters.  At some point a $25,000 investment in a thoughtful network might activate 25,000 people, for example, to turn their television on (or off!), or to buy (or boycott) products.  We have the makings of an alternative currency of great economic effect.  The desire of speculators to invest in the outer reaches of such a knowledge system, and their demonstrated ability to turn a profit, would be a confirmation of its robustness.