Setting up Unexus.org

Knowledge Collection Social Innovation
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At Unexus.org we believe the global shift towards a knowledge economy requires a new form of collaborative innovation. With increasingly limited resources available for traditional research and development, there is an imperative for research institutions, corporations and individuals to collaborate in generating and executing innovative ideas. Our vision is for Unexus.org to provide a platform where the innovators of today build innovation communities to develop, implement and showcase solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges.

We therefore built a global web-based platform for today’s innovators to create profiles and projects to attract ideas, expertise and funding. Each project has a main project page, and may include additional pages containing information relevant to the project. Innovation communities are created around projects from the flow of knowledge around the platform.

We set up Unexus.org in late 2010 motivated by our own desire to create collaborative communities around various knowledge and ideas. For example, I am currently undertaking an Erasmus Mundus Joint Doctorate in international political economy with an interdisciplinary research agenda spanning historical sociology, international politics and cognitive science. I was also writing articles in psychoanalytic philosophy and wanted to create a community of people sharing similar knowledge bases. It was difficult for me to find these people, but now with Unexus.org I just need to create profile pages for what I’m working on and then build the community in a few simple steps.

The website has gained traction and received the support of the Global Entrepreneur Programme of the United Kingdom Trade and Investment Department. We are also collaborating with the Erasmus Mundus Association and the OCEANS Network to help their innovators and entrepreneurs get exposure for their projects and build their own innovation communities.

We have a wonderfully talented and creative team and are looking to build our own innovation community of people who share our vision for building innovation communities to develop, implement and showcase solutions to some of the world’s greatest challenges. In many ways we share a similar ethos to Edgeryders in that we want to showcase the wonderful and inspirational examples of innovators and entrepreneurs in society who providing solutions to problems.

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How does it work?

Hi Justin,

thanks for taking the time to write about Unexus. I like the distributed brain approach. Not so long ago I pulled out of a professional project because the culture of collaboration just wasn’t there. How do you guys build these collaborations and how does the community building actually happen?

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Re: HOW DOES IT WORK?

Hi Nadia, thanks for the comment. That’s a nice way of putting it: a distributed brain. In fact, we’ve often used the neural networks of the brain as a metaphor for what we’re building. One of our approaches to building a culture of collaboration is to award points for certain actions on the site. Users then move up and down our innovation rankings. People and projects performing well then get showcased on our blog: http://blog.unexus.org. Cheers!

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Oh that is a nice blog

Justin I checked it out briefly and it looks really interesting and very close to what we are trying to do with the Shine Some Light missions. In  Edgeryders case it´s members of the community that highlight the work of fellow Edgeryders- so it´s decentralised, is that the way you guys are working also?

I´d like to explore a collaboration here. We have so many additions to the Edegryders Worldwide map that we can barely keep up, and those additions might be people who you might like to include in the unexus network. Maybe do a joint outreach and involve both Edgeryders and Unexus communities in giving one another´s projects visibiilty and some distributed brainpower?

Also, there is another Edgeryder in here, Bert-Ola, who is doing some really interesting work in contexts relevant to Unexus community members.

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Collaboration

Sure thing, I’d like to explore collaboration opportunities. My email address is justin at unexus dot org.

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Put Unexus on the Map

Hey Justin,

Thanks for this contribution, I’m curious as to where are you are based, or from where you are running Unexus.

I’d like to put it on the Future Builders Map here, now at 430 markers:

http://communitywalk.org/citizenschange ( under Edgeryders Social Innovation in Legend).

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Re: PUT UNEXUS ON THE MAP

Hi Noemi, we have team members located in the following cities: Brussels, London, Helsinki, Warsaw, Wroclaw, Bergen and Melbourne. The primary location is Brussels. Cheers!

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Food for thought?

Hello Justin, I too resonate with your idea. In fact, back in 2008, I even set up a community of creatives (not innovators) called Kublai whose members help to write and review each other’s business plans peer-to-peer. It still exists, though now undergoing some difficulties (I left in 2010): it has 3000+ members working on about 500 projects, with tens already out of the pipeline and deployed. Not bad for an Italian-only project. I can testify that communities are a great tool for thinking things through.

However, there are very many such endeavors. They were there in 2008, there are even more now. And, with so many slightly different angled offers just a click away competing for the best and the brightest’s attention, I find that what makes the difference is whether you are going to devote a lot of your own time interacting with the community and priming the pump of social dynamics. Writing good software per se is not going to help you when you project is new and the community still relatively empty.  And in fact, the Edgeryders team eats quite a lot of its own dog food - which is not bad, because we really like the people here.

Is that what you do? Or can you somehow rely on an Erasmus Mundus semi-captive user base that makes your life easier.

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Re: FOOD FOR THOUGHT?

Thanks for the thoughtful comments! Yes most certainly our primary initial challenge is building a captive user base. We intend to meet this challenge by developing a unique user interface along with a precisely defined growth strategy targeting particular knowledge areas. Those two will go hand in hand. Thanks for your interest and best of luck with Edgeryders! There are many points of synergy between our projects.

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Your message to policy makers?

Hi Justin,

Not sure if you heard about the latest here, we’re trying to build collaboratively a handbook  for the community of policy makers based on Edgeryders and young Europeans alike who find themselves at the avant garde of change.

Right now we’re at the point where we sum up how people here in the community are making a living, and of course innovation and entrepreneurship play a big role. Here’s an excerpt from a research policy paper drafted by one of our researchers (open to comments and prone to change), where they also quote you:

Power of the Edgeryders, among others, lies in their “nerve” for innovation; innovation is a mere essence of the processes they are going through, starting from arranging private lives, via education, to professional life. Justin Brown explains how collaborative innovation today presents an added value:#:

“[…] We believe the global shift towards a knowledge economy requires a new form of collaborative innovation. With increasingly limited resources available for traditional research and development, there is an imperative for research institutions, corporations and individuals to collaborate in generating and executing innovative ideas.”

However, innovative minds find it very difficult to act in a restricted world of administrative burdens and a lack of understanding of their resources and potentials. There are many new forms of making economic values that do not receive any support from the standard political and economic establishment. Most of them were a subject of discussion during the Edgeryders June conference. It was of the utmost importance for all contributors to the new entrepreneurial forms to meet with the policy makers and try to deliver their message. Some of the topics, like crowd funding, crowd matching, angel investors, basic income, barter currencies and time banking could indeed be used as “wildcards” in reinventing and boosting European economy.

My question to you, as we now try to make sense of this and ammend the paper where needed: is this accurate enough, would you add something based on your experience with Unexus? perhaps something about your member base, if there are commonalities with Edgeryders, or specificities about young entrepreneurs that you;d like to push forward? I’d like to invite you to come see the conversation we’re having and leave your thoughts…: http://edgeryders.ppa.coe.int/making-sense-edgeryders-experiences-where-do-we-go-here/mission_case/making-living-reloaded

would be great if this handbook will actually turn our own voices into something actionable. thanks!!