#cross-sector

[ramonvullings]

My article in the booklet for NASA’s cross-industry summit! 🚀  The Cross Industry Innovation Summit brings together a select number of top innovation executives from the world’s leading institutions to discuss innovation across various industries. See the booklet (PDF) with the article.

[ah-network]

Cross Sector Collaboration

Working across sectors is essential to improving the reach of the creative and health sectors.  As professionals, we can’t all be experts in everything, so it’s best to turn to the people that are to develop relationships, conversations, and productive communication to better help one another.

But how do these partnerships get started and how can they be made to be  effective for both parties?

Understand why you’re doing it - paying lip service to a certain field/sector, using it for anecdotal reasons, or as marketing capital will always work against your best intentions. Is there expertise you need that would be valuable to your aim, and do you have expertise to offer that could help another organisation? What prompted the initial thought of collaborating across sectors - do you have a mutually beneficial project in mind? Understanding your motivation will help you to clarify your needs and wants out of the collaborative relationship

What do you need? Is it expertise? Knowledge? A particular skill set? Be clear on this. This will help to ensure you approach the right organisations/individuals, and also prevent potential frustration further down the line when you, or they realise they don’t quite fit the bill.

What can you give? Do you have a platform in the community that could be beneficial to the partner/individual you’re working with? Is there knowledge, expertise or perhaps contacts that may be beneficial to them? Discuss this. Partnerships and collaborations are a give/take relationship and need to be structured as such. 

Clarify what you’d like the structure of the relationship to look like. Is it informal? will you need a structured contract? If it is a funded project, consider the requirements of your funding provider.  Consider organisational partners’ concerns.

Identify risk and accountability - which party will be responsible for what aspect of the project. What would happen if what needs to be delivered isn’t delivered? What risks are involved in the partnership/collaboration - are all needs/wants from both parties being addressed? Are there gaps? Is the trade-off even for both parties? Working across sectors means there will be gaps in both parties knowledge - identify these gaps and address them to prevent risk, later down the road.

This is a short list of considerations to take into account, but the biggest takeaway is to communicate.  

Approach people, talk to each other, make new friends!

Don’t be afraid to approach an individual or organisation you’d like to work with.  Have an introductory conversation/email.  Contacting someone and saying you’re a fan of their work and want to know more is flattering and always a positive - don’t hesitate to initiate the working relationship and have a conversation to set the tone.  

Everyone likes coffee/tea and cake - an informal meeting to chat about things can break the ice and build what can be a great, mutually beneficial relationship.

Likewise, don’t be afraid to ask questions and make it a learning experience.  building your knowledge about new subjects, different approaches, and the types of involvement cross-sector organisations and individuals can offer will build the options available for you or your organisations creativity.  Embrace this, be open to new ideas and listen actively and with a big head of curiosity.

[ramonvullings]

Talking about ideas. What is an ideaDJ? Ramon Vullings at the the EUEW conference in Bonn, outlining what an ideaDJ is.

[ramonvullings]

65% of CEOs willing to switch sector A survey by search firm Executive Access says 65 per cent of candidates are keen to move out of their industries into other sectors. The occupants of the corner office, who are managing disruption in their companies, appear keen to explore new industries and move out of their comfort zones. Read the whole article here.

[ramonvullings]

DroneDJ... everything drones 🚁 The website DroneDJ.com keeps track of everything drone related. Interesting to see this cross-sector technology reaching new highs (and lows).

[remawadee]

http://www.remawadee.com/nakorn-sawan/10317.html

[ramonvullings]

Find truly breakthrough ideas by combining concepts from different industries, fields & disciplines.

There is a misconception on where good ideas come from. In most cases, really good ideas come from something existing which is then adapted to another area. Cross-industry innovation is the clever way to jump start your innovation efforts by drawing analogies and transferring approaches between contexts, beyond the borders of your own industry, sector, area or domain.  See the whole article here.

[ramonvullings]

Cement truck meets disco ball

Merry X-mas with this great combination art installation (video). #WorkHardPlayHard