Your Bootstrapping Brilliance™ Toolkit
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Christina Engelbart, Co-Founder / Director; Bootstrapping Brilliance instigator and coach

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Meet Gardner at Virginia Commonwealth Univ (VCU) Hear his story of Bootstrapping Brilliance the Doug Engelbart Way

Overview 1

Bootstrapping Brilliance™ is a practical strategy for increasing the capacity for innovation and systemic transformation in initiatives, organizations, and societies, while increasing their Collective IQ. Also known as Bootstrapping Innovation™, this strategy is designed to help the organization jump the curve more rapidly from the current path of doing business and transforming itself, to a future more brilliant accelerative path. For Lean, Agile, and Design Thinking practitioners, this strategy dovetails to bring added leverage and acceleration at scale. And it serves as a template for what Doug Engelbart envisioned for networked improvement communities (NICs).

Five organizing principles offer strategic insight, alignment, and leverage to increasingly accelerate and expand results:

1. Network your community of stakeholders, innovators, alliances
   Form your group – ask who best to inform your pursuit, join your network, your expedition?
2. Leverage group smarts
   Equip your network – ask how best to engage, interact, capture, exploit your Collective IQ?
3. Target whole capability
   Frame your quest – ask which essential capabilities you will cultivate, augment, improve?
4. Push the frontier
   Launch pilot expeditions – how far out can you push, how fast? - rapid prototyping, 'co-evolution' are key
5. Bootstrap your ABCs
   Improve how you improve to get that multiplier-scaling effect

For a summary overivew, see our Bootstrapping Brilliance Highlights.

Bootstrapping Brilliance is a distillation of Doug Engelbart's strategic vision put to practice. It is essentially the same strategic approach he applied in his own research team for a powerful multiplier effect with continuous breakthrough results, which he continued to refine and teach throughout his career in key lectures and management seminars now available at the Engelbart Academy.

Resources 2

The Basics 2a

You can apply these tools alone, or as an extension to your in-place innovation practice. Strategies like Lean Startup (and Design Thinking, Agile, etc.) lay a great foundation for Bootstrapping Brilliance, and offer a large, inclusive, experience-rich community with easy-to-use tools and loads of case examples. Here are links to the basics of both practices, followed by Bootstrapping Brilliance presentations.

• Lean Startup Basics - a brief introduction, with links to key resources


• Bootstrapping Brilliance Highlights - one page overview


• Watch Bootstrapping Brilliance presentations
  

  Watch Taking the Challenge Forward - Christina Engelbart presents the big picture strategy in her talk at the 2018 event CHM Live: Solving today's great problems? Lessons from Engelbart's Demo @50. [see event site] Here's a link to the short tribute video she references in her talk, shown earlier in the program: A New Paradigm for Humanity's Collective IQ.

  Watch Basic principles of Bootstrapping Brilliance - Christina Engelbart presents the key concepts, using Prof. Gardner Campbell's university 'cMOOC' initiative as a case in point (beamed into Gardner's panel at the NMC Summer Conference 2014). See below Bootstrapping the Future under Case Examples for Gardner's case retold, and #2 in the Doug's lab example for another brief unfolding of Bootstrapping Brilliance.

Case Examples 2b

• Watch panelists discuss their case examples
  

  Watch Bootstrapping the Future - begins with Christina Engelbart presenting overview, followed (@19:20) by Gardner Campbell (VCU), Stephanie Couch (Lemelson-MIT), and Brant Cooper (Moves the Needle). [see event site] See also supplemental playlist of case example shorts from these three initiatives, and more specifics on VCU and Lemelson-MIT at our Community Showcase.

  Watch Solving Today's Great Problems? Lessons From Engelbart's Demo @50 - Paul Saffo moderates a panel discussion of case examples with Erika Gregory (NSquare), Ben Rattray (Change.org), Erika Woolsey (National Geographic Explorer). [see event site] More specifics on these three at our Community Showcase.



• Watch the Case of Doug Engelbart's legendary laboratory in three parts: (1) Watch Doug present the strategic objectives of his research pursuit (3 min.), and with his team demo what they had working operationally by 1968 (6 min) [more at Historic Firsts]; (2) Watch Bootstrapping Brilliance the Doug Engelbart Way - Christina briefly presents how Doug's strategic thinking unfolded, as practiced in his lab, and (@10:20) distills that into the five point strategy for Bootstrapping Brilliance; (3) Watch Doug's Strategic 'Treasure Map' - Christina presents the strategic principles using Doug's lab as a case in point (also presented the emergence of his pursuit, and opportunity for the future), at the 40th anniversary celebration of the Mother of All Demos [see event site].

Learn from Doug Engelbart 2c

• Watch Doug Engelbart presenting
  

  Watch this selection of snippets from talks and interviews: short teaser of Doug presenting at Accelerating Change 2004 | more on The Opportunity | Collective Pursuit | and a brief overview of strategic concepts	Watch Doug on the Collective IQ opportunity | Whole-System Augmentation | World's Organizations on the Human-Tool Frontier | Joining Forces on the Frontier (NICs) | Advanced Outposts | Jeff on the Importance of Pilots | Built-In Scaling Effect
  Visit our Engelbart Academy for more of Doug on his foundational strategic framework as a Call to Action to a variety of audiences - see especially #4 and #5 plus KEY TAKEAWAYS.

More Case Examples 2d

• Bootstrapping Brilliance and the Great VCU Bike Race Book - how one visionary educator launched an award-winning networked learning initiative putting these strategic accelerators to best practice. See also the VCU writeup in our Community Showcase.


• How these rural initiatives in Uganda are already meeting the Engelbart Challenge - see how one innovative residential school for girls in Uganda has put these accelerators to best practice, a case example developed by Patricia Seybold, author of Outside Innovation, founding CEO of PS Group. See summary at our Community Showcase


• NMC: Bootstrapping Innovation the Doug Engelbart Way - see how this innovative consortium of educational institutions applied these strategic principles; read their story, watch their presentation.

Articles 2e

• Internet Pioneer's Greatest Contribution May Not Be Technological - article by the Internet Hall of Fame showcasing Professor Gardner Campbell's case example of Doug Engelbart's legacy moving forward


• Bootstrapping Innovation: Leveraging the Collective IQ to Achieve Powerful Results - press article by Ronni Marshak, Senior Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group, June 3, 2010


• Improve Your Ecosystem's Ability to Tackle Complex Issues - companion article by Patty Seybold, in Outside Innovation, June 6, 2010

Getting Started 3

Start by mapping your team or organization

    Your Bootstrapping Brilliance Toolkit

• Bootstrapping Brilliance Highlights - one page overview


• Bootstrapping Brilliance Map - a self-assessment exercise to map your group or organization in each of the five areas


• Map Your ABCs - a worksheet for mapping your A, B, and C improvement tiers


• Bootstrapping Innovation Worksheet: NMC - a sample detailed worksheet charting the New Media Consortium as a case example

Further Inquiry 4

    For more background

• Doug's Vision Highlights and the Engelbart Academy - the driving vision behind this work, in his own words, with links to each concept and related materials
  
  
• Glossary of Key Concepts - to keep the lingo straight
  
  
• Bootstrapping Organizations into the 21st Century, a simplified summary by Douglas C. Engelbart and Christina Engelbart, 1992 (four pages)


• About Us and our Vision and Mission Statement - making the case