4A's Create Tech

4A’s Create Tech

Conference Recap

Hedda Davidsen

A virtual hair salon, a Latvian revolutionary rock band and some dim sum, Tuesday February 5^th was no ordinary day for me. I made my way to the Convene conference center to attend 4A’s Create Tech – a day filled with keynote speakers, workshops, panels and networking. The day started with Marla Kaplowitz, the President and CEO of 4A’s, welcoming us and sharing some opening remarks. After her, Tim Leake and Charlie Oliver framed the day for us by letting us know what was lying ahead.

At one point Leake asked the room if we like change. Less than a handful of people raised their hand and said yes. He then proceeded to ask us if we think change is good, to which almost everyone in the room answered “yes, change is good”.

“I want you to get up and change seats” he told us. Sighs where heard throughout the room, because people where already comfortable with where they were sitting. Nevertheless, everyone did what he said, and when asked if the new seat was just as good – or even better – almost everyone said yes.

This little exercise set the ground for what our day at Create Tech would entail and deal with: taking a look at a new “Innovation Imperative”.

Leake and Oliver finished off by teaching us that innovation on many fronts is now imperative for all creative businesses, and after Create Tech the room would be able to know about the many dimensions to innovation, everything from adapting to surviving to thriving.

 The first speaker out was Dr. Kumar Mehta, founder of Bridges Insight and author of The Innovation Biome, a book that focuses on helping businesses understand the importance of creating an environment where everyone can be innovative. Dr. Mehta shared the foundational elements that drive innovation, and the framework it takes to manage and scale it. 

Moreover, he included examples from some of the most innovative companies today; Amazon and Apple. He explained that Amazon is truly an innovative company because it lets its workers, on any level, innovate.

“Some years ago, someone, somewhere in Amazon had the idea of Amazon Echo, and in 2014 we could all buy it”, Mehta explained. “Innovation can, and needs to be everybody’s job. A company need not to focus on “the next big thing”, that will only make us miss out on opportunities. Most innovations come from something that’s already out there.”

I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, because I had always thought that being innovative meant that you invented new things. Then he explained the phenomenon of the iPhone to us – all the things the iPhone offer was already out there (GPS, MP3 player, camera etc.), but someone put it all together and made it an innovative smart device.

The next speaker that really stood out to me was Ashley Baccus-Clark, the Director of Research at Hyphen-Labs. Her talk was named “The Brain Game” in the agenda we were dealt earlier in the morning, and it had already before the talk sparked my interest. This was where we were introduced to a reconstructed familiar place, the hair salon. 

Hyphen-Labs create new, innovate technologies based on the three employees’ background in science, and they do this from a Afrofuturist narrative. Baccus-Clark told us that brain entertainment techniques are slowly becoming a part of the mainstream conversation and that’s why they created the transmedia experience “Neurospeculative Afrofeminism” (NSAF). 

NSAF was created to question how these modern technologies and techniques intersect with storytelling, world-building and identity. The hair salon is a familiar place to all of us, and Hyphen-Labs is reimaging it as a brain lab with infinite possibilities where only your own imagination can set the limits.

Around 11:45 we were asked to choose between three different workshops to attend for an hour. The choices we had where; 1. A Voice in the Wilderness: Getting Hands-On with Voice Technology, 2. Creative AI 101, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Neural Network and 3. Creative Dim Sum : Creative Concepts Made Easy.

I chose the Creative Dim Sum workshop, and I was not disappointed. Nathan Phillips, the Co-Founder and Chief Creative Officer of Humans and Taste, did an excellent job at leading the group through an intimidating, but very useful creative session. Creative Dim Sum was a totally unfamiliar concept to me, so I’m glad I got to experience it. 

To make it short, the Creative Dim Sum is a collaborative methodology developed that forces collaborative conceptual thinking that results in new ideas. It included everyone in the room, and it opened for the audience to throw out ideas, thoughts, visions, anything we were thinking about.

Another really inspiring moment at the Create Tech was when Cory McLeod and Greg Swan took the stage and talked about their in-house VR experience they created. The VR experience was about a Soviet-Latvian rock band’s influence on Soviet culture and society in the 1980s. They talked about the bands story, that was inspiring just in itself, and then they told us how they brought that story to life as a mixed-reality experience. 

Their work took them to a Global Scale and they even got to show the Latvian rock band what they had made. This just goes to show that trying new things and starting new projects by inspiring employees and coworkers to learn and collaborate on them can turn into amazing innovations. And that is exactly what we were introduced to in the opening of this conference. Leaving the conference, I now know, from seeing examples and hearing stories, that innovation truly is an imperative for ALL creative businesses; not only in technology, but also organization, social representation and ethical expression.

Thank you to 4A’s Create Tech for this incredible learning experience.