You’ll see why this might have been difficult to distil from a conversation at an airport…
Michela Magas is the founder and Creative Director of Music Tech Fest, and Chair of the Industry Commons Foundation.
Michela’s work and training as a systems designer has allowed her to integrate different perspectives and approaches so she can see the possibilities and connect the dots across all sectors. This has made her a much sought-after policy advisor, innovation leader and inspirational speaker at conferences around the world.
Music Tech Fest has become a global community of innovators that has grown to over 7000 experts, makers, academics, artists, engineers, industry professionals and policymakers. MTF brings those innovators together to address grand challenges, experiment, showcase new ideas and collaborate at events around the world. Music Tech Fest came to Umeå in 2015, and has now established itself in Sweden as a platform with a strong social agenda led by Michela, championing inclusion, accessibility and gender representation, with 53% women participants at its flagship Stockholm event, which she achieved by placing women in the lead of all technology areas and putting creativity at the centre.
From that MTF platform and in contexts ranging from international media art galleries to university robotics labs, tech unicorn startups, large industry trade fairs and conference, Michela has launched multi-day innovation labs that have resulted not just in new products, artistic collaborations and research projects, but has also revealed new human talents and possibilities through the application of technologies in new and creative ways – such as hooking the brain of a classically-trained blind Finnish singer up to a neural feedback device that allowed her to control systems and create music through her brainwaves alone. The singer, Riikka, who, in the earlier mechanical age may have been thought of as ‘less able-bodied’, demonstrated that she had the ability to minutely control these systems where others required much more training to achieve far more rudimentary outcomes. Just as the skill of being an elite racing driver requires the invention of the automobile, new human talents and skills like Riikka’s are revealed as we experiment with new technologies and systems.
On first arriving in Sweden, Michela won a European funding application that enabled her to test her ideas about cross-sectoral collaboration and invention. The #MusicBricks initiative took new technologies and tools from top research institutions and put them in the hands of hackers, artists, technologists and makers working in diverse teams, and supporting those ideas to commercial prototype. Due to the project’s success both in terms of its results and the supported projects that emerged, as well as the enormous social media response (in the millions), other industry sectors started to approach Michela asking to contribute their technologies and datasets into the toolkit.
#MusicBricks became the basis and inspiration for the broader Industry Commons concept that now dominates Michela’s work. She is the Chair of the Industry Commons Foundation, overseeing and implementing the methodology that she first developed and presented at the EU’s Open Innovation Conference in June 2017 -the same year she was awarded European Woman Innovator of the Year.
Because all industries are now data industries, the Industry Commons creates a marketplace of data between silos so that companies, teams and individuals can build new innovation using previously unimagined combinations of those datasets and technologies. This allows for entirely new products, services and market sectors to be created while ensuring that intellectual property of the originators is protected throughout. It brings in knowledge from publicly funded organisations like Rymdstyrelsen and academic institutions, and creates standards for interoperability. It’s also a completely new way of doing procurement for industrial materials and brings in elements of distributed technologies that allows for smart contracts, micro-transactions and nano-taxation.
Business Sweden heard about this idea and encouraged Michela to bring it to Sweden and register in Stockholm. Michela established the Industry Commons Foundation with an impressive steering board of innovation luminaries – including Jean-Claude Juncker’s former innovation advisor Bror Salmelin; Martin Curley who had been at the head of Intel Labs Europe for many years; and Anette Novak, the Director General of the Swedish Media Council and former CEO of RISE.
The European Commission has developed new funding calls around the Industry Commons concept and has tasked the Foundation with following through with legacy after the projects are completed. As the Horizon2020 funding scheme comes to an end, Horizon Europe replaces it with an even stronger and broader implementation of Michela’s ideas of the Industry Commons, and of the Cultural and Creative Industries as central to all of Industry in the new connected environment.
Michela is currently running Industry Commons innovation labs around Europe at academic institutions, startup ecosystems and city-led public events, focusing on topics such as Artificial Intelligence, Sound design for new urban environments, autonomous vehicles and IoT embedded devices. The labs are bringing in top experts from around the world including professors who are internet pioneers, lead designers from the automotive industries and directors of innovation agencies such as Vinnova. She’s now on the high-level advisory group for Future Emerging Technologies (FET) in the European Commission, focusing on entirely new and often ‘blue sky’ areas of research that are only just beginning, and she advises on the role of Culture and Creative Industries in the context of EU Industrial Policy.
