innovation model

Mobile MUSE has been operating for almost four years and we’d love ideas from our communities about future directions. 

During phase 1 (ending March 2005) we built our collaborative applied research Network, implemented the first version of our unique innovation model, and undertook a set of projects that established technology frameworks, rapid public prototyping techniques and research methodologies for mobile cultural media. It was a great foundation of know-how on a variety of levels.

So far my blissful career has embraced pure and applied research, industrial R&D, creative writing, exhibition design, program design, venture incubation, and a wonderful variety of interdisciplinary, multi-sector, and collaborative innovation environments.  I’ve been very lucky. And I have some ideas about the best way to explore the potential within mobile media.

Innovation isn’t easy.  There’s no proven formula.  Companies and campuses, for example, approach it with distinct cultures and constraints.  These are abstractions from the real world to support their commercial and academic requirements, respectively.  Yet mobile experience doesn’t fit neatly into these requirements, and it’s definitely about the real world. 

Around 1990 many friends in traditional media companies discovered the Internet and dove in. It wasn’t easy to swim given all of the new technologies and unfathomed user interface issues. Now I’m seeing my traditional media friends (the web being traditional now too) eyeing the deep end of the mobile ocean and I’m thinking, “Take a really big breath!”  I believe the potential of mobile media is the biggest creative challenge our media-obsessed species has ever faced.

What is so hard?  In one word: “context”.  Context is about ‘where I’m at’ in terms of identity (e.g. personality, preferences), place (location, bystanders, politics, time), community (friends, family, colleagues, services), and purpose (work, learning, recreation, entertainment, shopping, commuting).  The vitality and value of mobile experience are ruled by such contexts.  When theatre made successive transitions to film, radio and TV nobody had to worry about context because these media are about vacations from reality rather than immersions in it.  

I founded and continue to lead the MobileMuse.ca Network so it might be worthwhile to know a little about my mobile motivations, and about what inspires the Network's mission for mobile media innovation at the frontiers of culture.

At different times I've been a cancer researcher, astronomer, observatory director, science museum director, and dot.com CEO.  Beyond Muse, I currently champion a set of very exciting applied R&D projects in learning technologies at the University of British Columbia while leading a couple of start-up companies and contributing to a few public and private boards.  The only subjects I'm close to being an expert on are prehistoric stone circles (the Stonehenges of the world) and Native American cosmological creation myths. My most intimate connection with mobile technologies is that I commute by bicycle everywhere, all year.