Your Bootstrapping Brilliance™ Toolkit
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Christina Christina Engelbart, Co-Founder / Director; Bootstrapping Brilliance instigator and coach
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Meet Gardner at Virginia Commonwealth Univ - check out his case example (below)
"A five-point strategy for yielding more brilliant outcomes in your projects, teams and organizations, leading to more brilliant organizations, communities, and societies, and a more brilliant world."

Overview 1

Bootstrapping Brilliance™ is a practical strategy for taking your initiatives, teams and organizations to the next level. Also known as Bootstrapping Innovation™, this strategy is designed to help jump the curve more rapidly from the current path of doing business and transforming itself, to a more expansive, accelerative future path. It's a template for implementing Doug Engelbart's Strategy for Bootstrapping your ABCs and networked improvement communities (NICs). And for Lean, Agile, and Design Thinking prac­ti­tioners, this strategy easily dovetails for added leverage. At its core, Boot­strap­ping Brilliance is about improving how you improve, increasing capacity for innovation and continuous trans­formation, while pro-actively increasing Collective IQ.

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 goals – 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.

If the dream of improving human destiny isn’t enough, how about the thought that the companies that adopt the best Collective IQ improvement strategy will have a significant competitive advantage. Wouldn’t you want your group to have the highest Collective IQ?
Doug Engelbart

Resources 2

The Basics 2a

You can apply these tools alone, or as an extension to your existing innovation practice. Strategies like Lean Startup (and Design Thinking, Agile, etc.) lay a robust 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 some basics, followed by Bootstrapping Brilliance presentations.

  • Lean Startup Basics - a brief introduction to one popular strategy, 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

Learn from Doug 2c


Press 2d

Getting Started 3

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Start by mapping your team or organization

    Your Bootstrapping Brilliance Toolkit

Further Inquiry 4

    For more background