Fresh Takes on Innovation

In a recent BBC News article Technology reporter Jonathan Fildes talks about an extraordinary experiment conducted by Professor Sugata Mitra from India.

10 years ago, he started researching the way children teach themselves and each other with the use of computers and completely without teachers. The experiment started in a slum in India, where Mitra put a computer into the wall of his office and surveyed the children of the slum interacting with the machine.

Today, he has introduced similar experiments in many countries, with great success.

I very much loved the following part of the article:

“I wanted to test the limits of this system,” he said. “I set myself an impossible target: can Tamil speaking 12-year-olds in south India teach themselves biotechnology in English on their own?”

The researcher gathered 26 children and gave them computers preloaded with information in English.

“I told them: ‘there is some very difficult stuff on this computer, I won’t be surprised if you don’t understand anything’.”

Two months later, he returned.

Initially the children said they had not learnt anything, despite the fact that they used the computers everyday.

“Then a 12-year-old girl raised her hand and said ‘apart from the fact that improper replication of the DNA contributes to genetic disease – we’ve understood nothing else’.”

Kids apparently can teach themselves pretty much everything without adult interference, but one thing was highly interesting throughout all experiments: The kids need to be in teams or groups, gathering around a computer. The experiment won’t work as well when a kid just sit in front of one computer.

The power of self-organisation and of teamwork is truly amazing.

I just found this example of a simple and good idea in the BrainStore archives and wanted to share it with our blog readers.

A few years ago, the British Tourist Authority in Zürich asked BrainStore to come up with ideas on how to attract more families to London or England in general.

As usual, we set up a community to come to an Idea Event and to think about this task. When setting up the community, we decided to invite teens, who have a great deal of influence on their families, and the editors of school newspapers (today it would of course be school blogs), who are always interested in reaching their target audience.

The community came together with the task to come up with a fun campaign that can be put into school newspapers as an advertisment.

After reflecting about some clichés around Britain (mind this was a few years ago) which evolved around rain and the quality of food, and after looking at the way other tourist destinations advertise their benefits (usually: very very blue sky) the team was asked to come up with more concrete ideas.

One of the ideas was to create a series of fun postcards, showing Big Ben and a colored sky with unusual objects (pigs, rubber ducks, golden suns etc). The message: We Britains do not need to show blue sky, because we have so much more to offer and that’s way more cool than anything you can experience in any other destination with your family.

The series of postcards was distributed to school newspapers, and the editors created a full page advertisement with the above message, glueing one postcard of the series of four into every paper.

Soon, word spread among teens everywhere in Switzerland that England is a cool destination, and they started to talk their parents into visiting London or England.

What is important about this process is the inclusion of two important groups: teens as influencers for their parents, and editors of school newspapers as credible peers for this audience.