Issue link: https://tmcpulse.uberflip.com/i/425954
t m c » p u l s e | d e c e m b e r 2 0 1 4 33 I do think Houston is uniquely positioned with energy, health and aerospace expertise. There are huge silos where a lot of innovation is going on with the opportu- nity to improve the exchange and connection between the silos. There are a few examples of where there has been very successful cooperation and cross-fertiliza- tion. Can you imagine what could happen if these silos connected in a much better way? So if innovation is connecting the dots, and you can do that in a better way within Houston, huge things will happen. Many people in Houston share this feeling. It's time that we start to connect those dots and make it happen. Q | What's the process like for GameChangers? Where do these ideas come from and how do you bring people in? A | Shell GameChanger is a global program. Our team running the program consists of 12 dedi- cated technical and scientific experts within Shell. The majority of our team sits in Houston or in the Netherlands. We combine the benefits of support from Shell with the freedom to make our own deci- sions. Our innovators or proponents, as we call them, can come from anywhere and can be anyone. Some great networks and partnerships have started with submitting ideas on our website. Every GameChanger is working with a portfolio of proponents and their projects. We have about 60 projects in execution phase. Projects are distributed among the GameChanger team. In addition to being a sponsor for our portfolio of projects, part of the job is finding alignment among innovators and creative community beyond our industry. How do you find these innovators that have unusual ideas that can have a drastic impact? It's searching. It's hunting. It's being active in unusual places. I think the initiative in the medical center to create an innovation space and an open collaborative space is great. Putting people together is only part of the solution. The real challenge is to make people interact with each other and really try to connect challenges and solutions. That's quite difficult. You can put peo- ple in the same room, and put them in line for the same coffee machine, but nothing happens. You need to do more to really catalyze this dot connection. It often happens by serendipity, that 'wow' moment when sud- denly things click together and something beautiful starts to happen. Too often, this is just a coincidence. It's just a matter of luck to find revolutionary solutions for the large problems in this world. The question is thus, how can you catalyze serendipity? How can you create an environment where this is more likely to happen? The new innovation space in the medical center that was just created is an excellent start and more may be needed. For the full interview, visit TMCNews.org Q | So how is GameChanger doing that? A | About 90 percent of our projects are from external parties from outside Shell. Shell GameChanger is try- ing to experiment with ways to connect with external parties in a different way. There are two difficulties in connecting to external parties. The first one is—where to look? How do you find people who are open to work- ing on our challenges? And secondly, how to communi- cate the challenges we have in our industry to external parties. Where we look is not at the typical energy con- ferences. We experiment with using clever search tools to find 'unusual' parties with expertise or solutions that might be relevant to our problems. We also try to organize events. For example, we host a speed match- ing session, which is sort of speed dating for experts or scientists. You force people to very rapidly dive into the challenges and the issues behind the challenges. In this dot connection on steroids, we hope to come up with completely different solutions that were not on our radar screen. We've done this with medical experts, for instance MD Anderson experts and Shell experts, which was very exciting. The Shell experts didn't know anything about cancer and the cancer experts didn't know anything about an oil reservoir. It led to fantastic collaboration opportunities and led to a project that may generate mutual value. Q | Can you tell me a little bit more about that connection between energy and medicine? A | There are similarities between our business and the medical business. If you look at an oil or gas reser- voir, our business is trying to find where oil and gas are located, how to access it, and how to remove it safely. If you compare cancer in a human body to oil in a res- ervoir you see some similarities—location, access and safe removal. The scale is very different. In the human body you are talking about inches and in a reservoir you are talking about miles. But on a molecular level there are interesting analogues, also, in the techniques we use. We both use imaging to find where certain spots are. It is not only about sharing these practical approaches; it's connecting different ways of thinking, different backgrounds, approaches and fields of exper- tise. More importantly, the exercise removed some perceived differences between the parties involved and opened the door to future collaboration. Q | So what does it take to find those people who may have a good idea but don't know where to go with it? A | A lot of efforts in the innovation space are focused on entrepreneurship. Many universities have entrepreneurship programs and incubator spaces seem to pop up everywhere. How can you help small startup companies? How can you help them test their ideas in the market? That is all very relevant, but there's relatively little effort to address how to come up with out-of-the-box solutions to certain problems. When it comes to making connections, we still seem very dependent on chance and the efforts of some inventors. The space in which GameChanger operates is often not on the radar screen. How can you, in a fast and affordable way, test and prove a concept before starting to burn money on development? How people invent and innovate and how people rapidly test an idea is hardly being taught at universities. If you ask the best innovators 'How did you learn to innovate?' It's often by trial and error. There are many entrepre- neurship classes, but very little on teaching people to invent and be innovators. We are collaborating with Professor Ness from the UT School of Public Health to see if we can define methods to improve invention and innovation. The same applies at Rice University; we are collaborating to see if we can make students much better inventors and innovators. The big problems of this world—food, energy, water, health and education—scream for big solutions. I believe many people are working hard on more evo- lutionary types of solutions. I am not saying that this isn't important and valuable. But what we really need are these out-of-the-box revolutionary solutions. You can't just depend on chance; we need to use methods to get more impactful solutions much faster. This must be very relevant for TMC as well. Q | How does one teach innovation? A | It seems that the current paradigm is that either you are an innovator, a kind of super-creative human, or you're not. There's some evidence that you can train people to be more innovative. Our collaboration with Professor Ness is very insightful. She uses the follow- ing example: We believe it is ridiculous to ask someone not trained in statistics to do statistics. But we believe it is normal to ask someone to be innovative without training. I believe there is a lot to be gained in innovat- ing to innovate and training to innovate.