In the past few weeks I’ve shared a few examples of how science is gradually opening up.  We’ve had the likes of Harvard using crowdsourcing methods in their research into diabetes.  In a similar vein was PCORI project from Michigan, that aims to get patients involved in the medical research process more than they currently do in their role as pharmaceutical guinea pigs.  Or you’ve got the German based social network for scientists to hang out on and collaborate on projects.

Whilst the bulk of the science done around the world remains very much in the old school, these kind of efforts do represent an interesting shift.  Adding their considerable grist to the mill in the past few days has been Mozilla.

They’ve announced the launch of the Mozilla Science Lab.  It’s a project that they hope will apply the open source principles that much of the web was founded upon to scientific endeavour.

The aim of the Science Lab is to foster an ongoing dialogue between the open web community and researchers to tackle this challenge. Together they’ll share ideas, tools and best practices for using next-generation web solutions to solve real problems in science, and explore ways to make research faster, more agile and collaborative.

So in other words, they want to encourage the kind of open and collaborative tools that I highlighted at the start of this post.  Their initial goals are of the low hanging fruit variety.  They’re teaming up with Software Carpentry to try and improve the digital skills amongst those in the science community.

It leads me to wonder if they’re playing catch-up a bit on a community that is already making great use of social tools in their research.  As the saying goes, the future already exists, it’s just unevenly distributed, and there are already plenty of positive deviants out there doing great things.  Hopefully Mozilla can help spread the awareness of those isolated projects, and aid the more mainstream science community in following suit.

You can keep up to date with the project via their Twitter feed – http://twitter.com/mozillascience

The illusory superiority bias is one of the more commonplace in society.  If you haven’t come across it before, it’s the psychological reasoning behind our often false sense of self-confidence.  In plain English, we often think we’re much better at things than we really are.  It’s one of the reasons why performance management systems such as Work.com are so effective, because they use other people to provide the appraisals, and those people often have a much better grasp on reality than we do.

A nice study that typifies the delusions so many of us work under was conducted by Development Dimensions International.  They were looking in particular at innovation, and in particular how innovative we believe our behaviours are.

They asked approximately 1,000 professionals about innovation in their workplace, and in particular their own experiences of the innovative cultures where they worked.  Half of those in the study were managers, whilst the other half were not.  Would the opinions of the managers match up with those of their team?

You won’t be surprised to learn that the answer is a firm no, but what may surprise you is just how far the disconnect was.  For instance, when asked whether their leader demonstrated unwavering openness and appreciation for unique ideas and opinions, just 43% of employees agreed.  A whopping 78% of managers thought they demonstrated these traits though.

The trend continues.

When asked whether employees are encouraged by their managers to expand their understanding of business trends and emerging issues, just 51% of employees agreed vs 77% of managers.

A similar lack of awareness was evident when looking at how mistakes are dealt with.  Just 47% of employees thought managers helped them learn from mistakes, vs 77% of managers.

Likewise, just 42% of employee thought their managers took the ideas they produced and championed them to senior management, which was a stark contrast to the 75% of managers who believed they did this very well.

The report went on to share what they believe the managers key role should be in the innovation process.  They break it down into four pieces.

1. They inspire curiosity
2. They challenge current perspectives
3. They create freedom
4. They drive discipline

Sadly, despite most managers believing they did all of those things, most of their team didn’t.  On the off chance that you’re one of those managers that has a slightly tighter grasp on reality and would like to improve your own performance when it comes to innovation, the report concludes with four steps you can take right away to get things moving.

1. Senior Management Sets the Pace
2. Choose the Right Leaders
3. Develop Innovation Leaders
4. Build a Business Process for Innovation.

Find the full report here, and an executive summary of it here.

Article originally appeared at Work.com

Crowdfunding is stretching its tenticles into an ever increasing array of areas.  One area of particular interest is that of student finance.  Around the world universities are charging ever higher tuition fees.  With developed countries struggling with recession, state support is being removed, passing the burden onto the students themselves.

Of course, the idea of students turning to the web for financial support is not a new one, but efforts have often been on the seedier side of selling certain services on eBay.

Upstart aims to change that.  They’re a crowdfunding company, where the investment is not in a project or product, but in you.  The company, which recently itself raised $6 million in fresh funding, exists to help students finance their university studies by offering investors a stake in their future income.

The offering has all of the hallmarks of traditional crowdfunding sites such as Kickstarter.  Candidates publish a profile of themselves that describe their potential and also what they intend to use their investments for.  Investors, who also have profiles of their own, can then offer cash to those who catch their eye.

In return for their investment, they will receive a percentage of that person’s pre-tax income over a fixed number of years.  This figure is typically determined by the individual when they create their profile, with the figure going as high as 10%.  Individuals can also set a cap on how much is repaid to investors.

Upstart alone has already seen around 50 individuals secure investments of around $1.4 million using their site.  They’re far from alone however.  In America Pave offers a similar service, whilst in Germany Career Concept do a similar thing.  There is even a Latin American alternative called Lumni.

An additional feature of such sites is that as well as providing investment in promising individuals, investors can choose to mentor and support them in their formative years.

Suffice to say, such methods of funding are still but a drop in the ocean of student finance, but they do represent an interesting alternative to traditional finance options.

Modern conferences are increasingly interactive affairs.  It’s common for events to have Twitter walls throughout the venue where delegates, speakers and sponsors alike can share their thoughts on the days events.

As a means of encouraging more engagement it’s great, but do such online conversations result in larger followers for those that participate?  That’s the question Nesta, a UK innovation charity, wanted an answer to.  They used LeWeb 2012 as their test bed, as thousands of people descended on London for one of Europe’s largest technology events.

They teamed up with Trampoline Systems to gather data on the Twitter activity of 80% of event attendees.  These accounts were examined before the event, during it, and afterwards to try and gauge the impact the event had on the connections people made.

The results make interesting reading, both for event organisers, and for those looking to attend (or indeed speak at) events.  They found that the rate of new followers increased by 15% in the three months after the event.  This was even more pronounced for speakers at the event, who saw their rate of new followers increase by 26%.

The suggestion is clear.  Attending the event caused attendees to seek out and gain new followers faster than would otherwise have been the case.  What’s more, the number of replies and retweets increases significantly in the month after the event, compared to the month preceeding it.  So people that connected to each other during the event, sustained that relationship after the event.

Suffice to say, the research isn’t able to explain the quality of the connections made, but in many ways, that isn’t the point of such events.  They exist to trigger new thoughts and bring people together around a common interest.  Once the connections are made, it really is up to the two protagonists as to what they do from there on.  If you’re either an organiser or an attendee though, it certainly provides some interesting food for thought.

I wrote earlier this month about the Harvard Catalyst project, whereby ideas for scientific research into diabetes was crowdsourced via the Innocentive website.  The hope was very much that this approach would be the vanguard of a new method of sourcing research ideas.

That may now be the reality.  The Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI) has asked researchers from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor to scale up a prototype of just such a platform.  The site, known as WellSpringboard, is the winner of the PCORI Challenge, a $40,000 competition to find novel approaches to connecting researchers with interested patients.

The platform is a simple one.  A person has an idea for a research project.  They then record a video explaining their idea.  WellSpringboard then post this video to the site, give it a funding goal and then promote the idea via their social media channels.  Once enough people have funded the project, it is then opened up to researchers who apply to carry out the research.  These applications are reviewed by a combination of the general public and a board of scientists.  So it’s a combination of crowdsourcing ideas and crowdfunding the research.

“We want to bring the public’s voice into the world of health research, to allow them to ask for answers to questions that are most important to patients of all ages and the people who care for them,” Matthew Davis from the University explains. “We also want to make it possible for researchers to join the virtual exchange of ideas that can attract broad public attention and investment. Researchers will be able to apply for the funding raised by the public, through a scientifically rigorous review process that involves scientists and non-scientists.”

They hope that even if people don’t wish to contribute financially, they could do so in other means.

“Even if someone couldn’t contribute financially, they could still say that they are willing to take part in the study, if that’s possible,” explains Davis, who notes that researchers often struggle to find enough people to participate in their studies.