Last week, Sandbox gave a keynote address and hosted a ‘Social Entrepreneurship’ workshop at the Ivy Leadership Summit at Yale University.  Preparing for the conference, we wanted to do things a little different.  We were asked to share our thoughts on ‘Fearless leadership.’  Instead, we argued the term is misleading.  Observing the Sandbox community,  we made the case that leaders aspiring to change the status quo must fear something.  Sandbox members would point out three fears in particular:

1. The fear of not having an impact.
2. The fear of doing something they are not genuinely passionate about.
3. The fear of being ‘normal’.

To help participants truly engage with our message, we invited everyone to a Sandbox workshop on Social Entrepreneurship.  Our goal was to demonstrate that it’s not only possible to create and act on atypical ideas that have meaningful impact, but it’s actually a lot of fun.  We prepared four general topics in areas such as  promoting good, improving education, raising awareness of homelessness, and improving remittance payments for migrant workers.

With these topics, we formed four groups and encouraged participants to choose a cause they felt most passionate about.  We limited brainstorming time to 30 minutes, asking for a plan with concrete actionable steps that would bring the idea to life.  Here is what happened in less than 30 minutes:

1. Bikes for Cambodia: Moderated by Nettra Pan, the group came up with an effective way to address education and transportation improvement in Cambodia.  The Idea: In rural areas of Cambodia, transportation is rudimentary while schools are distributed widely, making it difficult for thousands of kids to attend school.  The group wants to provide bicycles for children in Cambodia, in this way boosting school attendance.  The group plans to create bicycle rental centers at schools in a given village, through which children will borrow bicycles for a small fee.  Bike companies and individual donors will ‘adopt’ school zones by donating money and equipment (bicycles).  To learn more please join the Facebook Fan page here.

2. Karma Points: Moderated by Fabian Pfortmuller.  The group came up with a way to promote good deeds through an online platform, involving both individual and corporate ‘good doers’.  The idea: Create a network of people who enjoy giving back to the community.  On this platform people will be recognized and rewarded for their day-to-day acts of kindness and compassion.  Companies will donate goods and services that will be awarded based on Karma points.  To learn more please join the the Facebook Fan page here.

3. Sleep in their Shoes: Moderated by Danielle Tomson, the group came up with a way to raise awareness of homelessness while raising money that helps local shelters.  The Idea: Students across the US camp out in their university quads or nearby public parks.  Each student seeks sponsorship from friends/family/companies.  The act will raise awareness and sponsorships will help local shelters.  Students from several universities are putting the plan into action.  To learn more please join the the Facebook Fan page here.

4. Air Cash: Moderated by Paul Gleger, the group brainstormed ways to improve expensive and sometimes unreliable cross border remittance payments sent by millions of migrant workers.  The Idea: create (or expand existing) text message based mobile money transfers.  The idea can first be tested in small towns and university campuses.  The group plans to then scale the user-friendly model into larger markets.  The bigger idea is to create a standard ‘air cash’ mobile currency that is trusted, easily transferred, and recognized as legitimate payment.  The team is currently researching the topic, will develop it further for a university business plan competition, and will connect with a telecom operator in Zimbabwe (thanks to one of team members) to learn more about mobile networks and payments.  To learn more please join the the Facebook Fan page here.

It was exciting to see our keynote message put into action.  From feedback we realized hands on workshops are preferred over traditional panels – after all, learning comes from doing, not just talking.  We also noticed that constrained brainstorming time leads to impressive levels creativity (as we’ve probably all experienced writing term papers last minute We were thrilled to receive positive feedback from participants and we hope to conduct similar workshops in the near future.  What topics should we tackle next? How can we make the workshops even better? Let us know!

Last Thursday, I was invited to Paris to participate to a workshop organized by our friends from Brainstore. Over the last 20 years, they have developed and standardized a creative process, which I was very impressed to see in action. Brainstore has created a real idea machine (see schema above), a system allowing to produce ideas industrially for almost any question you could ask.

On our side, we also earned a lot of expertise on organizing idea generation sessions for our clients over the past year. This way, we could come up with breakthrough concepts and strategies for a major European airport, for a multinational car manufacturer and for a German city. But methods for helping clients with the help of the Sandbox community should be the topic of a blog post of its own. Today, I want to focus on how we use brainstorming on a team level and on a weekly basis.

Brainstorming Friday

Together with the Zurich team, we made a habit of finishing the week with a brainstorming. Every Friday, another team member comes up with a topic and leads the session. Brainstorming like this helps us on different levels:
- motivation & team building: brainstorming is funny and puts everyone on a high energy level
- focus: turning an idea inside out helps us to see clearer what the essential is in it – and to focus on that
- idea creation: the main purpose of the brainstorming remains to come up with new ideas that we can apply to further develop Sandbox

How to get started

How we proceed: the brainstorming is divided into two parts: a warm-up and the brainstorming itself. For the first part, we use several techniques, for example someone takes an object (say a glass) and we try to find as many uses as possible for that object (drink, use it as a pen holder, grow a plant in it, etc). Or we use shapes (see example below) and give ideas about what they could mean (the circle could be an egg, a CD, a Mexican viewed from the top, etc).

During the brainstorming part, the one who has prepared it asks the questions one after another. People say everything that comes to their mind about the topic and when we are out of answers, the facilitator moves to the next question.

Challenges

There are several challenges to doing a good brainstorming and here are the key points:

- Define a theme which is not too narrow, but not too broad either
- Ask the good questions: it should be possible to answer a good question in 1-3 words, without using full sentences, otherwise it becomes a discussion
- Prepare the right setting: a big sheet of paper, a whiteboard, pens, etc.
- Don’t filter the answers: take down everything that is said
- Don’t criticize or laugh at others
- Try out different locations: at your office, in a café
- Try out different times of the day and pick the one that fits you best
- Manage time: if you want to keep the energy high, don’t spend too much time on each question, don’t wait that people have used all their possible ideas before moving to the next question

Try it out with us

Getting to a good brainstorming level requires exercise. If you want to try it out with us, let’s have an open brainstorming session this Friday. If you have ideas of themes we could brainstorm about with you or if you just want to participate, please comment below or just drop me a line: I’ll give you all the information you will need to participate wherever you are based.

Antoine is a Co-Founder and the CEO of Sandbox. He is currently sitting on an Easy Jet flight bringing him from Brussels to Switzerland and is preparing an exciting Sandbox week! Christian will be visiting from London from Friday to Tuesday.

So the year 2009 is over and with it the first decade of the new millennium. A perfect moment to look back and ahead to assess what was and what will be. We already did this for Sandbox with our Year in Review and Roadmap for 2010 blog posts.

But of course, it’s not just about us. What else happened? If you have trouble remembering, this great video from Newsweek should get you started: It summarizes the last decade in 7 breathtaking minutes. To dig a bit deeper, we recommend the New York Magazine’s exhaustive “Encyclopedia of Counterintuitive Thought” for the last decade (including the realization that amateurs are better than experts and that being smart doesn’t get you ahead).

But there was also a lot going just last year. We’ll just point you to this long collection of “2009 lists” where you’ll find everything from the freakiest commercials to the best red carpet moments of 2009.

And what will 2010 bring us? We don’t know exactly, but these ten great business ideas from last year might prove disruptive in this one. We also liked some of HBR’s “breakthrough ideas” for twenty-ten, and we agree with basically all of the web trends predictions that CNN published.

Whatever 2010 wil bring – we’re excited that it’s here!

Image by Hamachii on Flickr

Nico has co-founded Sandbox and is currently working on a list of topics that WE think will be huge in 2010. We’ll publish it here in a few days.

I just arrived back from a mind-blowing week in Berlin at Palomar 5. I have known Mathias and Hans for quite some time now and Sandbox wouldn’t be what it is today without their inputs and contributions on the way.

I wanted to thank everyone at P5 for the amazing days and write down a few thoughts, learnings and ideas from the last 5 days in Berlin. There is much more that would deserve to be told, like stories about mexican-human-mini-golf courses at 4 am, midnight Omelette cooking with Saga or Eddie’s theory of focus vs. broadness on a napkin. Please post your personal stories / ideas / comments below, I would love to hear what you guys thought.

From the presented projects on the overall theme “the future of work”, there were a few things that I had expected: telco-, new technology and large data projects (check this blog post for details). The Data DJ project addresses visualization of data and has huge potential in my opinion! However, there were a few things that inspired me more and that you usually don’t get at conferences: the “human” stuff, the stuff that really matters in my opinion.

“Emotional innovation” is the keyword that stuck with me. Maryanna and Axelle presented a project called Love Lab where they pointed out a true issue: corporate cultures that desperately need innovation and have gigantic potential to improve. While we keep improving the technical solutions and efficiency within corporates it seems to me that many larger companies have grown into de-humanized monsters. Nobody really wants to work there. But they pay well. And it’s just what you’re supposed to do if you want to have a career. However, many people feel that the underlying value system is wrong. Internal politics, hierarchical thinking, fear of change and enormous work hours are just a few aspects of it. In my opinion, this is one of the hottest topics in the next couple of years and will become a true differentiator of companies. The war for talent is on and as soon as the economy picks up it will intensify again. Companies need to create positive, value driven, human environments, where people actually like to work. And it will pay off. People will prefer to work there, they will create better results and customers will be more likely to buy there. That’s at least my opinion. Positive examples for innovative corporate cultures can be found with Zappos (check out blog post about their corporate culture), Holstee (check out their manifesto), and of course Google. Check the website of the Love Lab.

De-Connect: this point is kind of connected to the last point. Life has become more and more complex in the last century, speed has picked up and thanks to technology we have constant access to knowledge, communication, entertainment … and work. Several projects at P5 implicitly talked about de-connecting and “the egg” talked about it specifically; their idea is to build a big Egg in which people can find peace of mind, meditate and just relax. I believe this corresponds to a large need of people to find a positive balance again, a balance between work, life, relationships, communication, technology, nature and personal development.

Random ideas / thoughts that came up regarding “the future of work” during the camp:

1) Sponsor startups / office space for startups: One project called “Startups for Startups” is going to provide tools and mentors to young startups, to help them to become successful. I really like their project and will try to support them with Sandbox. During the dinner I thought: what about if companies would sponsor startups (vs. invest in them), for example by providing office space / internet access / a structured environment / access to experts. In my opinion, the structured environment of a company can be great for a young team that is just about to get started. For me, an office makes a huge difference to structure work at the beginning. It gives you the feeling that you’re really taking it seriously, it allows you to hire intern early on, etc. And the corporate would in turn get a positive young spirit into their offices. I’m aware that there are manly legal and security issues to be overcome, however it can be done. With our startup Holstee we were lucky enough to have Arnold provide us with free office space … at Fifth Avenue in New York City (probably some of the most expensive space possible . We give them feedback and fresh ideas in return.

2) We fail to fail: I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time and it became more obvious to me at the camp in various similar discussions I had with different people. In short, I believe that all of the people at the camp represent our very fortunate young generation of the middle / upper class (mainly western world with exceptions) that in my opinion, whatever they will do in their lives, can’t fail and therefore have a responsibility (not just possibility) to do what they’re passionate about and to have positive impact. I honestly believe that with the education, upbringing and tools that we have, it will be hard to completely fail. Very very few of us will ever be in the situation where they can’t afford food, shelter, even a normal lifestyle. In other words, there is no reason for people to take jobs just for monetary reasons. The only way of failing is, as Saga put it, being mediocre. Let me know what you think, I’m aware that there is a huge personal, ethnocentric bias on that

3) Some ideas how we can leverage social media to create positive impact were posted here already.

What might help the Palomarsters to realize all their ideas:

The guys at Palomar had lots and lots of great ideas. But now comes the most interesting part: making them happen. Here a few thoughts that might help them:

• Create feasible milestones and get a source of pain: most projects have milestones how to move forward. However, from personal experience I would recommend to make them as measurable as possible (not “talk to partners” but rather “having talked to 3 partners”) and set them in such a way that they are really realistic to achieve. Furthermore I would recommend to introduce a source of pain. A process that kicks in if you don’t live up to the goals that you set now. Everyone is very very motivated at this point, but as people go back to “their normal lives”, it seems important that the projects stay high up on the priority list. I think it helps to have someone yell at you if you don’t do what you expected yourself to do. Sources of pain could be: advisory board (see below), someone else at P5, a contract that everyone signs and where you commit to pay 50$ every time you miss a deadline, booking plane tickets to meet.
• Make meetings impossible to postpone. I believe a great source of motivation comes from meeting / speaking on a regular basis. As most teams are split across the globe, they will speak regularly to move their projects forward. However, I have experienced that if people start postponing meetings (“I have so much stuff going on at work, can we do it some point tomorrow?”), the regularity disappears and the motivation goes down as many postponed meetings never happen or happen to late etc. I suggest: make meetings impossible to reschedule and put a fine of 50$ when someone does (and put the money into flight tickets to meet in person
• Build an advisory board: these are great ideas by great young people. I’m convinced that you can find very experienced senior people who would love to support it. I believe that every young project can greatly profit from having senior supporters, for more credibility, more pressure, more contacts, more motivation, more everything Let me know if you want intros.
• Use the Sandbox Network At Sandbox we want to help you guys make your ideas reality. Use our network and let us introduce you to extraordinary people across the globe who make stuff happen. Plus Sandbox allows you to stay in an inspiring environment even outside of P5 and hangout with like-minded people who want to make things happen.

Once again, many thanks to all the P5 people, first of all Hans and Mathias, for the amazing days and till soon.

More photos can be found on the Sandbox page on Facebook.

This blog post is part 2 of the Sandbox Network ‘Palomar 5′ series: a six week innovation camp in Berlin from 9 October – 24 November 2009. To follow the progress of the conference, you can view the official Palomar 5 blog. Alternatively, if you are on twitter, follow hashtag #p5 for real-time updates. You can also check out one of our camp member’s daily video blog on Youtube. (Part 1 is here)

By Max Marmer

Two Thirds of the Palomar5 Innovation Camp has already passed. Four weeks down, two to go until the 2 day Summit, when we will have the opportunity to present the fruits of our labour to an eminent group of thought leaders, politicians, scientists and investors.

Before we dive deep into the Palomar5 experience let me give you a quick overview of the last month:

Our first two weeks, focused on understanding the thought landscape we’re operating in, generating hundreds of ideas for projects mixed in with some intense bonding experiences. Two weeks of intensive prototyping ensued, and now we’re transitioning into storytelling mode for the summit.

The last 4 weeks have been amazing but I was hoping to get more done. But that’s probably just my restlessness to change the world talking. But it is strange how fast a month has flown by.

We had our second “reality check” yesterday, where we all presented what we’ve been working on to many highly respected professionals and received their feedback. Someone asked me how long ago the first reality check was, it felt like ages, a month at least, but in reality it was only two and half weeks.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re trying to describe a prolonged experience and it feels like time has passed incredibly quickly but when you reflect on things you did in the beginning and it feels like it happened a long time ago, it probably means you are doing something right.

The Final Stretch

I have spent a lot of time the last few years learning about frameworks that have supported me in developing visions for a better future, but it has taken time for my entrepreneurial skills to catch up to the size of what I’ve set out to accomplish. The last half a year I’ve become increasingly anxious about pontificating while building takes a back seat. With only two weeks left of the camp part of me wishes more had been accomplished while here. But I have to realize that while we’ve been here a month, real work only started two weeks ago and our last two weeks of focus have been incredibly productive. The end goal of the Palomar5 camp is not to create fully functional products for the summit. Of greater importance to Palomar5 is conveying the underlying vision behind our projects and validation of the experiment of bringing 30 diversely talented young people from around the world and forcing them to live and work together for 6 weeks. Fully functional projects that make an impact are definitely vital for the success of Palomar5, but we don’t want to be another idea factory producing theories and patents; we want our projects to make a mark on the world, but the purpose of the 6 week camp is just to create the gravitational core for these projects to continue to flourish once the camp is over.

The summit should play a huge role in jumpstarting this process, but it all depends on the quality of our storytelling and how well we convey the enveloping experience of Palomar5: the lifestyle, the passion, the big projects and all the little creative projects the flit in and out serving as creative fuel for our bigger initiatives. If we do this well, TED-esque as we all like to say, (it being our common inspiration and the height of sexy intellectualism), we’ll create a buzz around the camp that will accelerate the development of our projects.

The Malzfabrik and Beyond

While we’ve spent most of our days in our stylish cubes dreaming up the next big thing followed by nightly recharges in our sleeping boxes, the weeks have not been without some atypical extracurricular activity.

After an intense first three weeks the Palomar5 team announced a mysterious weekend trip with few details except that we were supposed to bring our passport and pack warm. We speculated about trips to Poland or Holland.

On Halloween morning we piled on our bus unsure of our intended destination. A few hours later we found ourselves at the beginning of 8 kilometer canoeing expedition down a river somewhere in northeast Germany. We exited our canoes 3 hours later to find ourselves on the outskirts of a sparsely populated town with a nearby castle awaiting our presence. In the evening our creativity was out in full bloom as we showed off our elaborate characters including killer Mario, the bloody nurse and cross-dressing men.

Our favorite part of the weekend getaway at the castle was the sauna buried in the basement with plenty of half naked sandboxers to go around. We now request saunas wherever we go.

Other highlights included a Sunday afternoon project constructing an 8 meter mask out of branches and twigs, which was burned in it the evening. And I enjoyed my longest period of silence in a while during a solitary forest walk.

Atmosphere

Earlier this week we attended the ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On our walk back we noticed how this experience felt like the beginning of a new school. We’ve been living together for a month now and it feels like this is just the beginning of a new phase of our lives, which it is, but at the same time our concentrated camp experience is heading into the final stretch. The flight home will be very strange. The following weeks we’ll experience withdrawals as we return to reality, basically from the future. While we’ve been working on inventing the future of work, we’ve also been living it. This experience has seamlessly combined, friendship, fun, adventure and the birth of some really ambitious projects.

One thing I might change if I knew this could last beyond 6 weeks is not working as many hours during the day, I feel like life is cyclical, times where intense focus is required and other times where experimentalism is a better frame of mind. Making the most of my time here has been a higher priority for me. Trying to change the world takes sacrifice; again my restlessness talking.

How we maintain the community after the camp is an issue that looms large in all our heads, both for the continued success of our projects and the friendships we’ve built.

No matter what happens I think we can all say that the camp has inextricably altered our lives. And we’ll look back on our lives in a few years time categorizing our experiences with two denominations: BP and AP. Before Palomar5 and After Palomar5.

The pace of learning at this camp has been so high. I’ve often thought about what kind of person I’d become if every night I could go to bed completely mentally exhausted from the pushing my 3 pounds of grey matter continually past its limits. Palomar5 has given me four weeks of that dream. Everyday we discuss wide-ranging ideas, on many topics like learning, innovation, and culture.

One night Valentin and I were up late debating whether culture or technology was the stronger force driving society forward. While interesting, these conversations rarely lead to anything tangible, but Palomar5 begs to differ. The following day we were discussing how the iPhone achieved widespread cultural adoption so fast with technology so far ahead of what was previously available (normally a sticking point for products ahead of their time) and how our projects could succeed by similarly speeding up cultural adoption. The conversation immediately jumped to a new level as we drew on last night’s debate. Something in both our minds then clicked, “Wow that’s a first! Last night’s debate was enjoyable, but I never thought it would actually be productive.”

What We’ve Been Building At Palomar5

The theme of the camp of was the future of work, but that was just a starting point to sell the project. We’ve been given very little structure, and that’s the way like it. Lack of direction does not mean chaos, at least over the long term, our projects have naturally converged around big themes: Social consciousness, data and entrepreneurship.

These are incredibly important areas where a lot of growth will be made, and it’s even more notable that we were not told to pick 3 these topics, but our internal compasses driven by creative destruction, cycling through hundreds of projects over the last 4 weeks, led us here.

Our vision for redesigning society for digital age and generation is now more palpable with these themes guiding us. What’s notable is that while many of dreamed of redesigning society this kind of re-envisioning around our idyllic yearnings hasn’t always been possible. The industrial era required sacrificing creativity in the name of scalable efficiency, which was necessary to create the infrastructure to raise the quality of life to what is today. But while this era is long past its expiration date, it continues to live on like an infectious bacteria, contaminating our work and lives. So many of us realize it’s time to reinvent society and its organizations from the ground up, we now just need to commit to making it happen. Count Palomar5 in.

Magnifying Glass — Palomar5 Project Sneak Peak

Here’s a sneak peak into the vision of the project I’ve been most intensely involved in:

We’re postulating the future of work is going to have a lot more startups, because that’s where all the innovation is coming from.

The startup accelerator model is a big part of the future innovation landscape, think YCombinator, Techstars, Seedcamp, and now there are accelerators for more than web startups, using basically the same model like Palomar5 and the Unreasonable Institute. We think we’ll see a lot more of these.

The rise of accelerators means that there are now two big emerging markets: Pre and post accelerators.

We’re trying to build many of the tools needed to support startups post-accelerator: expert feedback systems, social network amplification in order to get connected to the right people, just in time learning to acquire skills to overcome new challenges, and repositories of best practices and eventually developing some kind of recommendation engine to streamline and automate the whole ecosystem.

Also, while startups are more innovative because they have freedom, flexibility and autonomy corporations still possess advantages of scale and greater resources.

Startups need to achieve advantages of scale as well, but they will be able to do this modularly and collaboratively. Currently large organizations are organized like big towers, even Google operates like this. But startups will be able to achieve scale and preserve their autonomy by acting like lego pieces. Currently, startups don’t have lego functionality, they’re just rectangular blocks that don’t interface well with each other but we’re providing the knobs and the holes to assemble large towers for particular projects that can easily dissemble at the conclusion of the project and build a new tower.

The prototype for our skill acquisition platform for entrepreneurs has recently been launched. Currently we’re only offering it to alumni of startup accelerators. http://forceforthefuture.com/founders-first/

Conclusion

There’s a lot of uncertainty in many of our lives now, but I love it. Many of us have nothing to go back to, no work to return to, just the opportunity to take the projects and relationships built over the 6 weeks as springboard for the next few years of our lives. It’s easy to get scared by the uncertainty, I still fall victim to it from time to time, but I know it’s really just a sign I’m taking good risks. While it’s comforting to know what life has in store, the predictability is antithetical to impact and growth.

A few nights ago Eddie (Harran) was hopping around in the cube with typical exuberance saying, “I wish could just work with you guys for the rest of my life” “What’s stopping you?” “Well, nothing!”

One of the amazing things about working at Sandbox is that we interact every day with extremely inspiring young people allover the world. Their ideas, their projects and their way of creating new things take our breath away, day by day, may it be science fiction by the Sandbox twins Suresh and Jyoti Guptara, pirate politics by Philippe Nantermod, the Green Soul Shoes project by New York based Sandboxer Stephen Chen, or the idea by our members from the Palomar5 crew to create a 6 week innovation camp in Berlin.

Surrounded by that much of creative people, we can’t help but play around with ideas all the time. This of course happens constantly. But once a week we meet to brainstorm as a whole team and develop ideas on how to make this the most valuable community for young achievers. Ever. And every week we change locations.

Our last team brainstorming session at Cafi Z

Are you working on a big new idea? Are you passionate about bringing the world a bit forward, step by step? Apply to Sandbox, tell us what your next big idea is and meet a carefully selected group of like-minded people across the globe who love ideas. And even more to turn these ideas into reality.