Creating a home for Serendipity
So far, during the journey of building Impact Hub Birmingham I have frequently been asked two questions. What is Impact Hub Birmingham and why do we need it? I've already addressed the first question here. And now I just wanted to outline my thoughts for the second.
The simple answer to this question for me is, to accelerate serendipity. Create more opportunities for people to bump into each other and thereby creating more connections.
I believe it’s these new connections and chance meetings that will help change the face of our city and the world.
I work in an awesome independent coffee shop, Faculty Coffee, and by working here I've seen first hand the enrichment that actively hosting a space can make. You can strike up a whole range of interesting conversations, from the legal use of tear gas, to the best way to lift a letterpress machine up four floors or even the highlights of the national quilting conference. Every one of these conversations helps you to broaden your own knowledge and also learn a bit more about your customers. Which is nice on a personal level but when you discover they have shared passions or problems it also allows you to introduce these customers to each other. It may be connecting the student looking for work experience in design with the owner of a design studio or introducing a recent immigrant to the city to a retired CEO and watching their friendship blossom.
What happens when you forge these new connections is the really interesting part. People from different backgrounds and with different skill sets are able to talk about new ideas or problems in a more rounded and broader way. They benefit from each others mutual knowledge but they are also in the mindset to be more open and welcome more people into the discussion, thus deepening the connections further. It’s not uncommon in Faculty to start a conversation with one customer and before long everyone in the shop has joined in. Luckily it’s not a big shop, otherwise it might become a bit rowdy!
Recreating this ethos and environment in a work setting is one of the key objectives of the Hub. Through actively hosting our members and helping to form new connections between them we can help to increase the bump rate in the city. If personal creativity in your brain is improved by exposing yourself to new experiences and forming new neural connections then building stronger, more deeply connected communities will lead to more creative thinking in that community. Building a community of diverse, interesting and talented people can therefore be a catalyst for improving the whole communities response to problem solving.
And the most important element to this whole equation is making sure it is a diverse community. Diverse in their skills, beliefs, passions and their problems. As you never know who might have the perfect solution to your problem, or you might have the perfect solution to a problem you don’t even know about. By inspiring and nurturing more creativity in the community we can improve the collective problem solving skills too. And when you set these problem solving skills to work on some of the significant social problems facing our city, and our world, we can start making a real difference.
Top down innovation from big organisations and companies is only getting less efficient despite the levels of investment it receives or however committed management teams are to inspiring innovation. And I think that’s largely down to the fact you can’t force the coffee shop moment or the chat down the pub moment into a system which is based upon targets, sales and management structures. It happens when two friends or colleagues chat about a problem and decide to give something a go, try something out and reach out to whomever is interested in that idea.
What I'm really interested in is fostering serendipity, watching it grow and then tracking it’s progress. It may just be the Data Analyst in me but I want to see how collaboration and new ideas can be inspired. By observing the interactions in the Hub, following developments of new ideas and supporting them when they need help it may be possible to understand which conditions provide the best chance for success. And then replicating this or even teaching people how to be open to the opportunities around them.
Opening Impact Hub Birmingham isn't the most important part of our story, it’s just the first chapter and we want everyone else to contribute and write their own chapters so that we can collectively make the city a better place to be. We don’t just want to make it more liveable, we want to make it a truly lovable city.
If you think you can help us please consider pledging to our Kickstarter campaign or come along to one of our open house events. Even better would be to become one our founding members and bring your passions and problems to our home for serendipity.
