One Institute joins more tightly with another

 InnovaScapes Institute has been a long-term passion for me, as many of you readers know.   We've done some fun things, some not-so-fun things, and even in places some important things.  And it seems to me that the challenges have if anything increased rather than decreased.  So there is plenty to do, even as clients have struggled with funding for projects in this strange anti-science political climate at present.

Along the way, we have worked with many clients and groups, and one such group has periodically been the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) at Maynooth University in Leixlip, Ireland, maybe twenty miles each of Dublin.

I first became acquainted with Maynooth (which is one of the four linked universities of the University of Ireland) circa 2008 or so, when I was working with a nearby Intel Corporation division on a set of collaboration tools.   I headed a group at Intel where our motto was that collaboration with the right set of tools was "Better than Being There" -- that motto earned us a lot of critique and brickbats at the time, but it also predicted many of the specific issues that have been discovered since the Zoom revolution occasioned by the COVID pandemic and consequent lockdowns and travel restrictions.

Via MediaX at Stanford, where I was the director at the time, we composed a workshop for British Petroleum and professional societies in the UK and in Ireland that we titled "Prometheus Unbound"

This workshop strongly advanced the notion that Virtual Collaboration was a tool for "everyone", not just the privileged executives at major corporations (the classic target audience for HP, Cisco, IBM, and virtually every other corporation at the time).   Recall that HP was touting their Halo solution, and Cisco their Telepresence rooms.  Even Webex was focused on the C-suite.  Four years after our workshop, Eric Yuan left Cisco in frustration (they had bought Webex in the meantime, and Yuan was the CTO, but he could not persuade Cisco to drop the big 'rooms' and to shift the target audience to an individual becoming empowered.  Yuan, helped by a retiring exec from Cisco, Dan Scheinman (who agreed with him, so Dan resigned Cisco simulataneously, and funded the start-up now known as Zoom).   

We also worked with IVI three years ago for a couple of United Nations General Assembly presentations centered around highly interactive Multiple Display environments to depict Big Data discoveries for the COVID pandemic in various settings, including of course Ireland's 26 counties.

Well, the great news for this week is that I was invited to become a Senior Innovation Fellow at IVI.  Naturally I accepted, and I look forward to some novel and impactful IVI projects that will extend our investigations and contributions in the Public Health sector through IVI's curent Stay Left, Shift Left,  10x Digital Health initiative   This initiative, described clearly in a recent IJIC article (International Journal of Integrated Care. https://ijic.org/articles/10.5334/ijic.ICIC24544. ) is a compelling story, with a lot of promise but also a wide set of challenges.  

I am honored and thrilled to be invited to join IVI, and I look forward to some very fundamental work in this arena.