The job I have (and love!) is “Head of Innovation” at SWIFT (www.swift.com), and co-founder of Innotribe (www.innotribe.com) – SWIFT’s innovation arm. In my particular case, I lead a small (10 people) team – or should I say squad – of incredibly talented people whose overall mission is to “enable collaborative innovation” in the company and also in the financial industry surrounding SWIFT.

I’ve in the job long enough now (3 and a half years) to know that every “head of innovation” out there has a different mission and objectives. Some are like me (enabling), some are about new product development (R&D), some are about skunkwork “under-the-cover” projects, some are about people and culture.

Of course, I do meet them at our Innotribe events and other occasions such as conferences. What I meant by networking in the introduction of this post is something different. A forum where a quality discussion started at an event can continue and a place where we can share experiences and help each other. Where we keep in touch.

I remember when I started my job. Lazaro Campos, my CEO, told me:

“I want the company to be more innovative and creative”

And right after he told me -

“Go away and do it”

He is like that . I remember going into a period of deep research. What does it mean, to be innovative? Who is who in innovation? What conferences should I go to? Who should I talk to? I remember I would have paid top dollar to have some enlightened advice and yes, sometimes I wished for a fellow “shoulder to cry on”.

So here we go – I have created a Yammer community called “The Innovation Sandbox”.  This should be the place where “young” heads of innovation can find coaches, where “experienced” heads of innovation can find inspiration. And also, where heads of innovation of any kind can find a partner for a beer when visiting a city where they don’t know anybody, and get some ideas as a bonus.

DM, tweet, email me to get access. And you will be able to invite other fellow heads of innovation. Let’s see where this takes us.

Why this name – the sandbox? It comes from this post, where I explain my own “recipe” of how to innovate in established companies.

Just a final word on why I’m doing this now.

This idea was simmering in my (long) list of to-dos somewhere far down from the top. You know what happens with these, don’t you?

Well, I mentioned coaches earlier in the post. There’s one person out there who very kindly and periodically provides some advice to me.

Tony Fish, of AMF Ventures and also the author of the “My Digital Footprint” book, is one of our Innotribe Enablers. For those of you who don’t know what this means, suffice it to say he is on a team of very experienced people who advise the Innotribe team on the projects we do. As such, Tony observes my team and me periodically. And he is kind enough to provide to us and me, on top of his business advice, some coaching about how to do things. Very simple advice, straight to the point.

He asked me recently:

“How do you keep in touch with your friends?”

Meaning my peers. And he sort of electrified me to dig this to-do from the long list and bring it to the top.

The other influencer here is Leo from zenhabits.net. I’m a long time follower of this blog, and the one lesson I have learned there is that all major changes start always with very small, easy steps.

So while I had (and still have) some big ideas in mind about networking the “heads of innovation” community, I figured I’ll start small.  A very easy step.

“The innovation sandbox”  yammer community. See you there.

I’ll not elaborate on the project they are working on – I’ll leave it to them to talk about it . Suffice it to say that they are interested by the history of SWIFT. And so they talked to me mostly as an old hand of the company (this coming April it’ll be the 24th anniversary of my joining SWIFT).

So we went back to some very old history – why and by who SWIFT was created, the expansion, the SWIFT I and II networks and some difficult times around that, the SWIFTNet network for which I was the chief architect, my own career coming from IT to Product Management to Sales to Marketing and now Innovation.

At a particular moment I felt this intriguing feeling and went into kind of observation of the conversation. Here I am, head of Innovation, always looking forward and – in fact – very rarely looking back.

The moment lasted a bit, as in slow motion …

But of course, talking about this “long” past, looking at the last 37 years of SWIFT, we all got inspired and started taking about the next “long” future of 37 years

Those of you reading my blog know my opinion – that we are in a period of change equivalent to the printing press and that the deep driver of this change is the digitizing of everything around us, and in fact us as well and the economy around us. And this will and must drive a massive wave of innovation in the financial industry.

The full story of how I see this change happening and what are the opportunities brought by it is in this prezi.

It is rare for us to look “long”, so thank you very much Susan, Markos and Maria-Eugenia for the opportunity.

It all comes from an aHa moment I had around September last year. I’ve been watching for several years many “scribes” (illustrators) in the context of my work (for example the people from The Value Web), and notably my team members Mariela (@mela_atanassova), Martine (@mdeweird) and (most recently) Dominik (@ddebuyser). What they do is give a totally different, fresh perspective to things by drawing rather than (only) writing.

So, on this one particular day in September last year, I was updating the “white board” of my team (a board in my office capturing our activities and plans), and I figured it’s…. very boring. I was wondering on how to make it more exciting, and it’s where the aHa struck – scribe it! Make it more authentic, fun, attractive, drawing rather than writing. Do it like Martine, Mariela and Dominik would!

So I jumped in the pool, erased the whole boring mess on the white board, and started jotting. Very quickly, some memories came back – in my early teens, my friends and I were doing some tagging! Mind you, not on the walls of my native Belgrade, but at our school on specially prepared surfaces. So some drawing memories flooded back.

So, what happened?

Well, I won’t share with all of you on the wide internet our new white board – after all, as open as we Innotribe are, we still have to keep some secrets so that we can surprise you all However see below for other examples.

Since that aHa moment, I practiced. In the way I work, I tend to draw and erase a lot, try things, so very quickly i settled on my iPad as the tool of choice, where you can draw and erase as many times as you wish. I bought one of these pens, some apps, and experimented a lot. Then I started illustrating some events – here are some examples to date: compass summit scribings, the “essence of innotribe” prezi, and the recent “castle and the sandbox” post.

Most recently, I also started another exercise, capturing some scenes of particular importance, or surroundings that felt particularly good. More paintings than drawings. Here are some examples.

 Fall evening in NYC

Meeting

Home

Cordoba, Spain

All of it is fun, and hopefully provides a more entertaining approach to some work topics, or just is plain different.

All (positive ) criticisms welcome!

Kosta

The central idea that emerged is one we called the “Castle and the Sandbox”.

Consider the core business of your well established company as “the Castle”.

The castle is solid, with thick walls, long lived. As is your core business. But the castle is not very agile. The goal of the people in the castle is to make sure the castle serves its purpose – they are focused on optimizing, not innovating.

What do you think happens to this person when she talks to the people in the castle?

Usually, the castle people will not be very friendly to this person. IN fact – the more unfriendly the more her idea is disruptive. They might pour burning oil on her!!

“Large, well established companies face a number of inherent structural disadvantages when trying to pursue blue sky business ideas” – said Anthemis Group‘s Sean Park and Udayan Goyal. Anthemis Group is a specialist investment and holding company, focusing on joint ventures at the intersection of markets, finance and technology. One of the recent and notable investments of the group is Bank Simple (recently renamed to just Simple).

This is true of established companies, but also of larger communities such as financial services. Of course Innotribe knows that. The UK Government as well: Dr. Chris Sear, of the Financial Services Knowledge Transfer Network,  explained how this organization, sponsored by UK Government’s Technology Strategy Board,  uses the open innovation approach to foster innovation in the entire sector. We in Innotribe are ourselves absolute believers in open innovation as our key principle. But Chris also explained that when ideas are there, it is not granted that anybody will do anything with them! There’s a castle in the industry as well!

So: if the castle is not the most suitable place for innovation, where should it be? If you go back to when you where a child, where was it that you could play, experiment and do all sorts of crazy things?

The sandbox of course!

I introduced the idea of the “incubator” – a protected place where people with ideas can “play”, or to try out their ideas, without impacting the castle. Very much like the sandboxes of our childhoods. The incubator is the place where you can try, experiment, fail, try again, fail again, and eventually learn and succeed. The key ingredients for innovation.

Innotribe runs an incubator – for SWIFT and also for the financial community. I explained this program, which is funded, located in a particular place, supported by specialists and experimented people available to coach intra-preneurs from SWIFT and entrepreneurs from the financial industry. If you are interested by the Innotribe incubator or you think you have an idea that could be a candidate for incubation, please see this link.

Udi and Sean presented as well their approach to incubation, called “strategic venture acceleration” – the idea is to create a “Newco”, a venture between and established company and Anthemis Group, and drive this venture through a 3 step process extending over about a year, with a view of a clear “go/no go” outcome. They said this approach provides a way to incubate blue sky and disruptive ideas with a minimal financial risk to the investors.

As is usual in Innotribe sessions, something new emerged, when the panel was answering questions from the audience – the “3 Ps” of innovation. I’ve illustrated it below.

Preparing for this session, the Innotribe team was thinking on how to illustrate an incubator for the audience – how to make it real for them? That’s where I thought about the Innovation Warehouse in London (www.theiw.org). Our friend Tony Fish, a big supporter of Innotribe, invited me earlier this year to see this place, where young (and less young ) entrepreneurs can come for office space, advice, fellow startup support. A no frills place with very little hierarchy and administration, and full of people with sparks in their eyes and passion. So we took some 45 of SOFE participants in a bus and went to the Innovation Warehouse. I could see some were kind of overwhelmed, some were impressed, and some were … getting down to business!

I’m a big admirer of Tony – a very very successful entrepreneur. But on top of that, he impressed me so much when he explained how being a co-founder of this place was his way of “giving back”. #respect

We also ran a number of workshops with SOFE participants, including the big finale one where we asked them to build their own incubator. Here is the result – and I can certainly say we learned a lot but also had fun!!!

(cross-posted on Innotribe blog. Drawings by @copernicc)

There are many people that qualify (which is good, as I’m going to run this thread for a long time!).

I’ll start the first of the series with Bernard Lietaer (www.lietaer.com and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lietaer)

Bernard was part of the “Future of Money” stream at the recently held Compass Summit (www.compass-summit.com). The stream was sponsored by Innotribe, and I had the pleasure of introducing Bernard to the crowd.

Let’s first flash back to the past.

Back in 2009, the Innotribe team started looking at the “long” aspect of finance, inspired by the long now foundation (www.longnow.org). We were interested at the “long finance” aspect, basically focusing on the resilience of the financial system. Resilience is a term dear to SWIFT, and we wanted to explore some long term implications about its meaning.

Rather immediately, when you start considering the long finance, the discussion comes about money, or, more appropriately, about value and how it is expressed. And this is where I inevitably meet Bernard.

I did invite Bernard to Innotribe@Sibos Amsterdam in 2010, where we started the Long Finance discussion, but unfortunately he could not make it (he is a busy person, I can tell you!). So we sort of drifted apart for a while.

Back to now. When considering the “Future of Money” subject we were planning for the Compass Summit, Bernard’s name immediately spring back to my mind, and I contacted him.

We finally met in person in California, right before the beginning of the Summit (this is strange, as Bernard lives in Waterloo in Belgium, about 5km from SWIFT headquarters…. But as I mentioned, he is somewhat of a migratory bird, difficult to catch).

Bernard is an interesting mix of academic (expert on currencies) and practitioner (central banker, fund manager, contributor to the Single European currency- the euro), associated to a great story teller, writer (he is the author of the “Future of money” book and numerous writings) and professor, as he explains things simply and in a way many people understand. And an innovator, and out of the box thinker- as he has designed the C3 (commercial credit Circuit), that is being used in Brazil and Urugay (Have a look at his TEDx talk for a summary of C3 – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nORI8r3JIyw)

In addition, I quickly discovered in California that he is, like me, an amateur of fine food!

You may be, as we say in french, “pour ou contre” (in favor or against) his theory. I know he has supporters and I know he has detractors. But what cannot be denied is his scientific (almost mathematical) approach, the strength he puts behind his proposal and his passion.

In a nutshell – he has something to propose to improve the financial crisis we are going through. He is out there proposing a different approach. And I believe this is something worth recognizing.

If you assume (as I do) that we’re going though a period of change equivalent to the printing press or the steam machine, then ask yourself the question – is the money we use today, designed and maintained over centuries, designed for an agricultural and industrial age, is that money going to take us where Internet and social media are taking us?

This is the subject and, shall I say, battle of Bernard.