INTERVIEW: Innovation Writ Large Tara Lemmey

What would happen if organizations looked for innovation at the borders of where technology and society meet? Tara Lemmey knows. She is the past executive director and president of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, one of the founders of the privacy advocacy group TrustE, and the founder and present CEO of LENS Ventures, a network of leading thinkers focused on innovation in technology, science, law, and economics. She works with companies such as Nokia and Intel on next-generation strategies and products. Tara also serves as chairman of Project LENS, a worldwide nongovernmental organization that works to create an environment of cooperation between the government, the public, and the private sector.

Brandon Schauer: As CEO of LENS Ventures, you've been working with leading-edge companies to help them envision future strategies and products, at least in part by reflecting on much larger trends in science, design, public policy, economics, and more. But to do so, you've focused outside of the normal scope of business, to the borders of society and technology where businesses don't typically draw insights from. What's there that businesses are missing, and why is it important to their future strategies?

Tara Lemmey: One of the things that we see is that they tend to be focused on incremental change instead of larger shifts that are happening in their industry space. So the research and development in a good deal of these companies is, "How do you take the current product set or services offered and move them slowly forward?" What we try to do is work on where things will be in the three to seven year time frame —What are those shifts happening and how can they anticipate what those moves are and be prepared for them? This focus frequently leads them into different spaces, places that they wouldn't have normally gone: anticipating demographic changes or psycho-graphic changes, but more interesting sometimes is changes in public policy where what is going to happen in the communications industry, or what's going to happen in telecom, or how people see privacy rights changing, or data assets changing, or the liquidity of information affecting those things. We really try to take a look what these spaces are, as opposed to just saying, "What's the next feature for what you're currently offering?"

Brandon Schauer: Is this something that's a blind spot for businesses? For example, if you pick up a Wall Street Journal you may see plenty of coverage on technology but not on issues like societal trends.

Tara Lemmey: It's a huge blind spot. I think many companies have become tech-centric, so they've become very focused on, "What are the attributes that the technology can provide and how do I make something happen?" What they're really losing is what's happening to the world of citizens and normal people and what are the things that you are going to be able to create that's going to support where people are at in their life stage, where they're at in where the market's moving them to, or where society's moving them to. I think that's a huge blind spot for a lot of companies on the consumer-based side. On the public policy side what frequently happens is they don't think about it in the R&D space — where they think about it is in the General Counsel's office. So it's usually arguing over not wanting something to happen instead of looking at what the opportunities are on a going-forward basis. They don't look at it as an R&D opportunity.

Brandon Schauer: So when you're working with your client and government clients, how do they most effectively incorporate your ideas and research?

Tara Lemmey: We generally work with the CEOs and the Board of Directors initially. Because so much of what we're talking about is outside of the general range of where they normally are, where the current state of business is. Once they say, "Okay, here is where we need to go," it starts with looking at what's an alternative way of starting to bring these ideas forward. I hate to use the word “skunkworks”, because it means that you're doing something on the sly. However, you have to create a means of doing things that is outside the normal corporate antibodies that are going to kill it. That's a big challenge. Many CEOs are trying to find ways of dealing with it and creating new forms of pursuing these business opportunities that keep them shielded for a longer period of time.

Brandon Schauer: What areas of the technology/society border do you see as the generating the most influential innovations? What has your attention?

Tara Lemmey: I think there are some interesting things about where support is going to be required, or how people rethink products and services. That they don't think of services as an add-on business revenue, but people look at is as a much more comprehensive point-of-view about what is the problem somebody is trying to solve and then what is the constellation of solutions. How do you create a trusted, respected relationship so that you can provide a whole constellation of solutions for them? I think we're starting to see that come to the foreground more often. Although in the market right now you don't see a lot of activity in that space. Strong activity will occur with increase in the liquidity of data and the mobility of people, with the capabilities that are starting to happen around identity management or data asset management from a technical side, and a need for the Boomers and the X-ers — who both as a group will be over 40 soon, and who are trying to manage life-at-work situations. These kind of stronger support environments are going be rising up, and I think that that's going to be an interesting space to be exploring.

Brandon Schauer: Can you tell us a little more about what you mean about “constellations of solutions” and how you think business should explore these opportunities?

Tara Lemmey: Right now a lot of things like financial services are cut so that if you talk to somebody who's dealing with investments they'll talk to you about investments but they won't talk to you about other forms of strategies. They won't talk to you about whether or not real estate is an interesting way to go or how you can restructure some of the things you're currently doing or more of a life strategy around that. Well, to do that would require deep relationships with different kinds of organizations.

Or something even simpler: let's say for people who are struggling with weight loss, what are the kinds of collective environments that might be useful? Something might be useful where you have a communication service where you press a button and you can talk to folks when you have cravings and you're about to eat the chocolate cake. That's also tied to your shopping list, which is calculating whether or not this is a good or bad decision for you. It's tied to a service where as you're buying something it's telling you, "Oops, this one's got partially hydrogenated fat and you said you didn't want this." It's tied to a service that's connected with your exercise regiment. It says, "Okay, because you're heading in this direction, this is what you're going to have to do this week." And all of these could be provided by different people. So, whether it's your YMCA, working with Whole Foods, working with an outside doctor's office, working with a support line — what you start see is a federation of relationships and services around supporting you.

That requires a very different way of looking at designing: designing the spaces, designing the environments, designing the way they operate. It also requires business to look at very different revenue streams. It's not just a cut-and-run business development agreement — you bring me deals, I bring you deals. It's a much more tightly woven set of relationships.

Brandon Schauer: Can you tell us about what ProjectLENS is up to?

Tara Lemmey: The biggest work we've been doing over the past few years is that I've been serving as the technology chair for the Markle Task Force on National Security. What we've been doing there is working on how can you take some of these things that have been happening in the private sector space and help rethink the information flow and relationships for the government across agencies and across environments. Starting to reconsider who are the users of the information and how they can be best served and supported instead of thinking about data as being owned by a particular environment. So that's been both interesting and evocative and challenging. We've seen the Task Force as being a great success with the approach being recommending in the 9-11 Commission Report, and with it being written into the Presidential executive order, and now written into the new legislation that has just been signed into a law.

That's one thing we've been doing. We're doing lots of other work with different corporate clients which at the moment I can't talk about because obviously it's where they're heading in the future and they don't really want folks to know.

Brandon Schauer: Can you say a little about the book you're writing, "Resilience: How to Surf the Circumstance in our Complex Times"?

Tara Lemmey: It's a Powers of Ten approach to looking at how we can become more resilient, both as individuals and in society. What I learned in doing the national security work is that as much as we can do to create protections, nothing is foolproof and we live in a very volatile time. Not just from terrorism issues, but from other issues such as climate change and possible bio issues in a global world. The real question is not how you build better fences but how you make yourself more capable of taking what the world is bringing to you and dealing with it. Every time I speak on national security issues I get asked, "What can I do?" This is why this book has sprung up.

Plus I do a lot of work with folks like Andy Weil and the Integrative Medicine doctors. I teach leadership for his program at the University of Arizona and a lot of what comes up for them from a health perspective is how can you be more resilient. It's not about trying to fix a problem after the fact. When you talk about ecological systems, you learn that they're strongly resilient, that they can pull back to tiny pieces of forest or meadows and then regenerate when the circumstances change. For a lot of people, they're not designing their lives that way — as an individual, as a family, as a community, as a region or a neighborhood, and maybe sometimes as a country.

Tara is a member of the Markle Task Force for National Security in the Information Age, where she chairs the Technology Working Group. She is an advisor to the Dr Andrew Weil's Program for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. She is also on the board the AIGA Center for Brand Experience and will be speaking at the Institute of Design Strategy Conference.