My career in technology, research and innovation cultures over the last twenty years has been shaped by two central ideas – diversity and collisions.

My first vivid experience of this was trip to MIT’s Media Lab in Boston. At the time, I worked for Orange’s Technology Research team, scouting the world for startups and ideas we could invest in and acquire. Visiting Media Lab was a revelation. The lab existed as a nexus point between MIT’s various schools, creating a diverse, serendipitous and experimental culture which created ongoing opportunities for people from those schools to encounter each other’s works.

The second inflection point came as I left Orange to work on translating what I learned in Boston, to developing the technology ecosystem of Leeds. In working to launch the city’s first coworking space at Old Broadcasting House, I came across the work of Tony Hsieh and the Downtown Project – a large scale placemaking project, to transform downtown Las Vegas into a creative and innovative hub.

Already a successful entrepreneur and designer of a humane and innovative corporate culture as the CEO of online shoe retailer Zappos, Hsieh would speak of harnessing the 3 C’s – collisions, co-learning and connectedness. Collisions in particular became a metric that became a quantifiable, human-scale measure of the health of an innovation place. Hsieh would relate that he could spend 1000 collisional hours a year in Downtown Las Vegas – each a serendipitous encounter, where people could randomly run into each other and share ideas.