IdeaLab — unleash your inner eco-nerd
Have you ever heard of IdeaLab? It is, essentially, an interactive, and highly intensive, week-long workshop session. It involves approximately 30 researchers and practitioners from a range of disciplines and backgrounds and a Panel of Experts (Workshop Director and mentors) away from their everyday worlds in order to jointly construct innovative approaches addressing challenges on a specific topic. Each IdeaLab is unique — reflecting the expertise, interests and passions of the selected participants who investigate complex problems through transdisciplinary perspectives, share knowledge, brainstorm solutions, and identify opportunities for action via design thinking methods.
In the very beginning of March, when COVID-19 was only starting to alarm Europe, I had an unquestionable pleasure of attending IdeaLab focused on ‘Cities for the future: services and solutions’. The subtopics of the call spanned from human interaction with machines; independence from big ICT companies; encouraging democratic engagement in the future city, to green and blue city of the future. The session has been organised by the National Centre for Research and Development.
In this specific case, the main aim of the workshop was to prepare project pre-proposals in groups and present them in front of external mentors, donors, and programme operators who assessed:
a) their relevance in relation to the objective and priorities of the research programme/coherence with the workshop topic;
b) scientific and technical excellence (for example, the ‘wow factor’ — boldness in scientific and innovative thinking);
c) the potential impact through the development, dissemination and use of the project results (for example, in practical solutions, strategies, or social innovations);
d) quality and efficiency of the implementation and management, including team dynamics, quality and implementation capacity of the partnership and contribution to capacity and competence building.
The pre-proposals have then been rated by the Panel of Experts and those with the highest overall scores have been invited to the last phase in which full proposals are to be submitted in order to apply for funding with the maximum amount of EUR 6,6 million. Participants typically have around two months to prepare full proposals in which they expand their initial ideas.
After coming back home from this week-long adventure, I met with a friend of mine who, after having listened to my post-workshop stories, summed up all my reflections in a rather self-explanatory way: IdeaLab seems like a reality show for nerds, in this particular case — for sustainability-oriented nerds. Surely, I am well-aware of how cheesy this sounds, but I could not agree more. IdeaLab is not just a geeky version of ‘Big Brother’; it is an emotional rollercoaster due to its ambitious aims; it is an exhausting task given its requirements on multidisciplinarity; it is a truly demanding workspace for those accustomed to a silent office environment. Yet, it is the most inspiring type of workshop one could ever imagine. After having participated in my very first IdeaLab, I have loads of personal reflections and recommendations for those considering participation. Some of my main takeaways include:
Energy management is key
When you have only five days to come up with literally the best project idea in your life, you need to manage your energy levels accordingly. In fact, there is broad research (for example, ‘The Power of Full Engagement’ by Tony Schwartz and Jim Loehr) explaining why managing your energy is more important than managing your time. When you are sleepy, hungry, or constantly checking your inbox, you will never bring your best performance to the task at hand — full focus on a complex project, as expected from the IdeaLab organisers. Try to think about priorities when you have only five days to shine brighter than ever. Being cautious about how you manage your energy will pay dividends in your IdeaLab performance. And eventually (and hopefully!!!), for the money received.
Transdisciplinarity: thinking inside and outside the box
Transdisciplinarity, or integrated learning in other words, is the most rudimentary level of collaboration across disciplines. At the very least, it allows IdeaLab participants to make connections across disciplines, creating an opportunity for greater depth and complexity, and eventually inspiring everyone to thrive by finding the perfect niche on which they could work within the project. The usefulness of transdisciplinarity (the successor of interdisciplinarity, which does not enable outside the box thinking) is once again very well-evidenced in research.
What is more, one of the key competencies for the 21st century is to position investigators with the skills and habits of mind to be transdisciplinary thinkers. The Institute for the Future (IFTF) has identified transdisciplinarity as an essential skill for the future workforce. In their report on future work skills, the IFTF writes: ‘many of today’s global problems are just too complex to be solved by one specialized discipline (think global warming or overpopulation). These multifaceted problems require transdisciplinary solutions’, and this is specifically what the whole IdeaLab concept is about. What do I mean by that? Perhaps just to stay open for every possibility — I am a social scientist (economist) pursuing my PhD in urban cleantech and smart city developments. Yet, two full proposals I am working on at the moment tackle: a) urban food production (we plan to cultivate shrimp and vegetables somewhere in Poland and Norway), and b) elimination of fossil fuel boilers in Poland, mainly because certain niche experience I have from previously pursued projects, will really come in handy for pilots here. At the same time, I keep working with architects, anthropologists, start-up executives, engineers and water scientists — most likely, the most diversified project team ever.
Technology and innovation can be powerful allies in finding solutions to curb climate change at the urban level, and foster a more sustainable world
Although my IdeaLab was not only about climate-related challenges, the issues of sustainability monopolised almost all project pre-proposals. Hearing all the innovative ideas on how we can make our world healthier and greener, it became clearer than ever that human ingenuity combined with technology has solved many great challenges in the past, and will do so in the future, as long as we are able to organise ourselves into tackling these issues together. Particularly at the urban level.
What strikes me the most is that people representing very different perspectives were all in agreement on this. Local peculiarities of climate change and other environmental externalities remain, perhaps, the greatest challenge still unsolved, but new efforts enabled by data-driven technologies like AI can become the game-changer in this space. In the end, modern technologies are the tools required to turn complex data into intuitive and actionable insights. And local-specific data is the catalyst to large-scale behavioural change. But given limited budgets of local and regional authorities, bold ideas, such as those presented on the last day of the IdeaLab, might be useful only when scaling private investments in climate innovations to meet the targets of the Paris Agreement. Our collective work can only be the beginning. The policy and investment decisions taken today will determine where the world will stand a decade from now.
Conclusions
IdeaLab fosters a very creative and unique work environment where the boldest ideas can become reality. The week-long session forces you to permanently think outside the box to find new insights that may provide the foundations for action offering multi-angle approaches to managing various types of urban-related challenges, particularly those of sustainability. To me personally, the event provided an unconventional arena to meet and unleash new ideas on processes, products and technologies supporting urban societies today and in the future. It was all hands-on deck until the objective was met. Working under high pressure on these time sensitive yet ambitious projects, created countless challenges that were highly rewarding to work through and overcome. My recommendation? If you ever hear ‘IdeaLab’, dive in. I can promise this will be the best reality show you have ever immersed yourself in.
Karolina Zubel
Global Shapers Warsaw Hub
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