Open Alchemy

Open Alchemy from NESTA Connect on Vimeo.

Open Alchemy is a collaborative innovation project between diverse, non-competing UK clients of Oracle: Arup, BBC, BP, BT, Cancer Research UK, the Department for Transport, Interbrand, Lloyds TSB, NHS, Pfizer, Rolls Royce, Unilever, Virgin Atlantic and Vocalink.

It’s a novel new way to link up a supplier’s customer base to create major new technologies.

To kick off, the participating companies were asked to consider a series of issues that had a global impact, providing a common starting point for idea generation. These issues included:

Virtual Authenticity
Who do we trust more - CNN or Wikipedia? How, why and where will new brands be more authentic than existing ones?

Secure global identities
What will be the impact of absolute secure individual digital identities beyond banking, immigration and border control?

Small and distributed
Everything is shrinking and becoming less centralised - power, devices and networks - where is this taking us and what can we do?

Contextual content
As location-based services and customer data morph into personalised information provision, who wants what data where, and why?

NESTA and Oracle designed an online collaborative tool to make it as easy as possible for participating companies to brainstorm ideas and invite suggestions from their colleagues.

Reaction Chamber

The corporates met in June 2008 for a 24-hour collaborative workshop at NESTA, called the Reaction Chamber. Each corporate came armed with their top three ideas, based on the issues above. These ideas acted as a starting point for further idea generation.

The corporates also worked with a range of SMEs, entrepreneurs and experts in each of the four areas. This was facilitated by a team from Innovaro.

By the end of the workshop, the group selected the best ideas from those put forward, and used them to generate a series of commercially viable concepts.

Participants continued to collaborate to work up five of these concepts into business plans, capable of being taken forwards into new products and services.  

Nurturing ideas

Innovaro was engaged to facilitate follow-up workshops which are still taking place.

Details of emerging new products and services are still under wraps, but the most significant outcome so far is a major new collaboration between the NHS, BT, Pfizer, Oracle and Cancer Research UK. This experimental group are working to deliver a wellbeing service of national scale and significance.  

Reaction Chamber participants

Partners

	Oracle Oracle is the world's largest enterprise software company. It helps customers to manage their business systems and information with reliable, secure, and integrated technologies.
	Innovaro Innovaro is Europe’s leading innovation consulting and insight firm. It is facilitating the Open Alchemy process, using its methodology for future-growth mapping.