Managing innovation - creating value from ideas: Recent Episodes
john
Innovation doesn't just happen. It's not like the cartoons - a lightbulb flashes on above someone's head and that's it. No - it's a journey and we need to understand how best to prepare for that journey, whatever kind of value we are trying to create. This podcast is about some useful lessons we might take on board to help develop our capabilities.For more, see my website:https://johnbessant.org
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Why high involvement innovation matters more than ever — and how to make it happen
We’ve always known that employees could be a source of ideas, especially in terms of improving the processes in which they work. Suggestion schemes have been around in some form or other back in the mists of time. Elements of the approach can be found in the medieval guild system where it was used to help develop and improve craft skills and practices. It was an idea which the eighth shogun of Japan, Yoshimuni Tokugawa tried out in 1721 with his ‘Meyasubako’, a box placed at the entrance of the Edo Castle for written suggestions from his subjects. And the British navy pioneered a similar scheme in 1770, asking its sailors and marines for their ideas — significantly reassuring them that such suggestions would not carry the risk of punishment!
The challenge in what we can call 'high involvement innovation' is not about the what but very much about the how. How to move from the rhetoric, the motherhood statements about every employee being creative and able to contribute to actually making it happen. It’s all very well saying, as one manager memorably told me, that ‘the beauty of it is that with every pair of hands you get a free brain!’ — the big question is how to mobilise this. And how to sustain the initial enthusiasm and momentum for the long haul?
This podcast reflects on what we've learned around this challenge.
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Send us a text
Responsible innovation (masquerading under many different labels over time) is now highly visible in conversations around innovation. Whether we’re looking at AI or genetic engineering or geo-engineering we can see the issues being widely debated and discussed. Organizations, public and private, are increasingly measured on their commitment to thinking and acting responsibly in terms of key themes like sustainability and social responsibility. This has prompted a growth industry around helping develop strategy statements and corporate positions in the responsible innovation space — and in making sure this image is widely promoted.
RI has moved centre stage — and it’s not just words. There are regulations enacted to control the rate and direction of innovative activity and adoption, there are multiple research journals exploring issues raised, there are toolkits and consultants able to deploy them, there’s even an ISO standard around it. RI is very much part of the fabric of innovation thinking in 2024.
Which is where the problem comes in. By moving centre stage RI becomes something impossible to disagree with. It’s a slogan which hangs there above us, an important and good thing, along with ‘motherhood’ and ‘apple pie’. And the risk is that we swap slogan for substance; RI becomes a bit of a religion to which we all pay lip service. Try and imagine any organization today (public or private sector) talking about its ‘irresponsible innovation’ or its disregard for sustainability and the future of the planet. It’s impossible. The words are everywhere — but the meaning and action may often be missing.
This podcast explores the challenge this poses and suggests that we need to rethink the narrative around RI, to reframe it as an essential, much as was the case with the 'quality revolution' in the last century.
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
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How one man’s innovation provided the missing link for 20th century agricultural revolution.
Harry Ferguson is not a name which instantly springs to mind when thinking of entrepreneurs who changed the course of history. Yet his contribution to the world of agriculture was on a level with that of Steve Jobs in terms of providing the enabling platform which allowed the full impact of a technology - in his case the tractor - to be realised and to contribute to a massive upsurge in agricultural productivity,
This podcast examines his contribution against the background of the emerging mechanization revolution and in particular his development of the dominant design solving the puzzle of how to connect new power sources to the tools which enable agricultural activity.
You can find a transcript of the podcast here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Send us a Text Message.
It’s easy to take maps for granted — but we’d be pretty stuck without them. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world. They seem to have been — independently invented by many cultures across the globe, and they’ve been around a very long time. Fragments etched on tusks or scratched on stones, dating back 25000 years or more all point to maps as something important. Which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view — it would help our survival a lot if we were able to chart where to find food, mark dangers, settle boundary disputes. Especially if we could share that knowledge with others.
What has all this to do with innovation? Quite a lot in fact: maps and map-making provides a powerful metaphor for much of what we do when we try to manage the uncertain journey which innovation involves. There’s probably hundreds of applications of the idea but in this podcast we explore five which spring quickly to mind.
(You can find a transcript of this podcast here)
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
We've got a huge challenge around social innovation - to help fix the planet with all the things that we're doing to it and all the things that are happening it's going to take a lot of effort. More precisely a lot of innovation. Even the Secretary-General of the UN has said we can only hit our Sustainable Development Goals through innovation.
But innovation is not going to happen by accident; it needs change agents - entrepreneurs - who are going to help make the difference. This interview with Heiko Spitzeck who is Professor of Corporate Sustainability at the FDC Business School in Sao Paolo in Brazil looks at a particular kind of social entrepreneur who works in the context of a larger organisation. Leveraging the resources and capabilities of such institutions to help scale innovations for social impact. He calls them ‘impact intrapreneurs’ and he’s just published an excellent book, ‘The corporate hero’s journey’ in which he looks at the phenomenon and illustrates it with many compelling stories of such individuals.
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
ISPIM — the International Society for Professionals in Innovation Management — was founded in 1974 to create a community of practice around innovation management. It was an early response to the challenges of actually making it happen — and it remains one of the best meeting places to mix-up academic researchers and teachers, policy makers and practitioners, consultants and anyone else wiht an interest in making innovation happen. And this year’s conference, with its 500 or so people swirling around, offered a kind of all-in-soup for ideas with plenty of flavoursome mouthfuls to be had.
This podcast takes a look at a few of them...
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Long fuse, big bang. A great descriptor which Andrew Hargadon uses to describe the way some major innovations arrive and have impact. For a long time they exist but we hardly notice them, they are confined to limited application, there are constraints on what the technology can do and so on. But suddenly, almost as if by magic they move centre stage and seem to have impact everywhere we look.
Which is pretty much the story we now face with the wonderful world of AI. While there is plenty of debate about labels — artificial intelligence, machine learning, different models and approaches — the result is the same. Everywhere we look there is AI — and it’s already having an impact.
Not least in the area of innovation management. What impact is AI having — and what might the future hold? It’s certainly implicated in a major shift right across the innovation space in terms of its application.
But perhaps the real question is not about AI-enabled innovations but one of how it affects innovators — and the organizations employing them?
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
We spend so much of our time thinking about important innovation but maybe we should spare a thought for what might be called ‘irrelevant innovation’? And explore round the edges of this phenomenon — is it all wacky stuff or are there circumstances where it has more to offer? Is it a matter of framing, are we missing an innovation trick or two by dismissing such ideas too early?
This podcast offers a suggested outline typology, a first shot at mapping the territory — feel free to add your own examples and categories….
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Innovation is a multi-player game. The image of the lone hero innovator is a myth. Even celebrated soloists like Thomas Edison or James Watt had their army of assistants working behind the scenes. Alexander Bell wouldn’t have been able to bring the telephone to the world without being able to demonstrate the device by having Mr Watson on the other end of the line when he famously told him to come in from the next room….
Ask any entrepreneur and they’ll tell you about the networks they needed to bring their ideas to life; creating a valuable solution isn’t a simple lightbulb moment but a complicated journey drawing in resources, ideas, time and energy, (not to mention money), most of it coming from other people. Deconstruct any successful start-up and you soon have a cast of characters on stage, taking their bows as the audience recognise the shared creativity which has made the performance possible.
And once we get beyond the initial pilot, the hard work really begins. The journey to scale is a tough one, takes time and has to negotiate some uncertain conditions on the way. The evidence is very clear, it’s a team effort and it needs plenty of external help.
‘Complementary assets’ is the technical term for the answer to the question of ‘who else and what else do you need to scale your innovation?’. The key point about them is that they lie beyond what you can bring to the party. By their nature they represent resources you need to find and work with; the trick is in assembling suitable partnerships to deliver them.
This podcast explores the challenge of assembling and working with networks to deliver innovation value at scale
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Another innovation song....
Last week I was helping run a series of workshops supporting social innovators from across the United Nations system in thinking through how they were going to scale their great innovations now that they had successfully piloted them and proved their value.
Scaling innovation isn’t easy but it’s increasingly important if we’re to have real impact with our ideas. It’s got a lot in common with mountain climbing — a visible goal but a long journey through very uncertain conditions to get there. It needs a strategic approach, a clear idea of the pathway to the summit which we’ll follow and plenty of preparation and pivoting to help us get there.
In particular we should pay attention to three key questions:
· Have we got a solution which is ‘scale ready’? Is our innovation stress-tested to make sure it is replicable, adoptable, ‘rights ready’ and otherwise configured to be scaled in different contexts?
· Have we got an organization in place which can build on our strong innovation team but also grow to meet the very different demands of scaling? Do we have the right structures to help us retain fast, flexible and inclusive decision-making? Have we got cash flow models which support us on the journey, balancing new sources of revenue and reducing our costs?
· Have we got a value network of ‘complementary assets’ — the ‘who else?’ and ‘what else?’ that we need to bring our innovation to scale? Can we find relevant partners, form them into an ecosystem and then align their varying interests to get that whole to perform, delivering more than the sum of its parts?
One way of helping the participants in our programme to think about and reflect on these challenges was to create a short song with the highlights embedded in the lyrics. So in the spirit of helping reinforce the learning I thought it would be worth sharing — you can find it here….
And you can find the lyrics here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Necessity may the mother of invention — but in today’s world she’s a pretty fraught mum, trying to deal with thousands of kids tugging at her skirts, pulling at her arms and wrapping themselves around her legs. All screaming out for attention. We’re not short of challenges which affect the very basics of trying to live our lives — getting enough to eat, clean water to drink, a roof over our heads and some peace to allow us to sleep at night. It might look neat and tidy to package these up into something like the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals but we shouldn’t forget that beneath those critical targets for change lie thousands of things that need improving.
In other words we need to “….be bold, be revolutionary… and disrupt… because without innovation, there is no way we can overcome the challenges of our times.”Wise words and an urgent call to action from Antonio Guterres, Secretary-General of the United Nations. And of course he’s not alone; the case for social innovation on a global scale is clearly made every time you open a newspaper or scan a news website. The question is not one of whether or not we need innovation but how to deliver it?
This podcast explores some of the ways in which social innovation is being organized to try to help deal with the major challenges facing our future.
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
What have ollies, decks, trucks, popsicles, cruisers and kicktails got in common? If you’d asked me that back in December I would have quietly assumed you were from another planet. But now I’m happy to say I’m in a good position to enlighten you…
They are all terms used in skateboarding, a subiect in which I;ve had a crash course courtesy of taking my daughter to lessons in the art at our local skateboard park. Turned out to be an education for me too; while sheltering from the noise of kids shouting encouragement and challenge at each other and the rumble of wheels over plywood ramps and chicanes I sipped my coffee and thought about some of the innovation lessons it was demonstrating….
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Why waste recycling and reuse may represent a valuable entrepreneurial opportunity…
There's a well-known piece of Yorkshire wisdom, ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’. Waste needn’t be a problem to be hidden away — buried or burnt to get rid of it. Instead there are real opportunities in waste — as plenty of innovators have already found out. Think for example of Earl Tupper whose efforts to turn the black sludge emerging from 1940s oil refineries paid off when he created the bright shiny plastic kitchenware which bears his name.
Rethinking waste in this way takes not only money but the classic entrepreneurial skill of reframing — of seeing what others don’t see. At its core, the Trash-to-Cash business model is all about reimagining waste as a valuable resource. It requires an open mindset but also a long-term vision; the changes which might make such a business model viable may take time to materialise. But somewhere in that future of uncertainty about resource availability, concern for pollution and an increasingly strong regulatory framework lie the seeds of significant opportunity.
(This podcast was co-funded by the European Commission's Erasmus Plus Programme.
Project Number: 621672-EPP-1-2020-1-DE-EPPKA2-KA
This communication reflects the views only of the authors, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein)
You can find a transcript here
And a video version here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Some seasonal thoughts to accompany all good wishes....!
(You can find the transcript here)
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Start-up success - or not? Faisal Abid shares some fascinating insights into the do's - and don't's of trying to launch and grow a new venture, drawing in particular on his experience in founding and growing a number of businesses including AI start-up zoom.ai and his current work with Eirene Cremations where he is trying to disrupt a long-established and very traditional industry.
You can find a video version of this podcast here.
And more about Faisal here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Taking an innovation from a small-sized success story to something which delivers value at scale is not an easy one. The Holy Grail of impact has a lot in common with that elusive quest pursued by King Arthur’s knights, taking them along strange paths, meeting with dragons and disasters and lasting a long time. Similar odds of success too.
Having spent a long time focused on the challenges facing start-ups the innovation spotlight is now moving to the question of scaling – and there’s a helpfully growing body of knowledge and codified experience around this theme. Including the important decision about which route to take for the journey to scale.
Choosing your preferred pathway to scale is a key first stage on the journey; fortunately there’s a wealth of experience available from previous attempts and some important lessons on which we can build. In particular we need to see the choices available as lying on a spectrum where we trade off additional external involvement with giving up a degree of control.
This podcast explores some of those options and their respective strengths and weaknesses
You can find a transcript here
And a video version here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
We talk a lot about learning by doing in the agile innovation process, especially in the context of start-ups. But it’s hard to capture that learning as you go along when so much else is happening as you desperately try to find your way through the fog of uncertainty.
Which is why it’s really valuable to have someone who runs a successful start-up which is now scaling well to share their insights . And even more so if they’ve managed to capture it in the form of a book which carries some really valuable lessons which have been learned the hard way!
This podcast features Zach Rattner, founder and CTO of Yembo and author of ‘Grow up fast!’, a great book which captures some powerful learning about innovation and entrepreneurship
You can more about his book here
And the video version of this interview here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Innovation is all about trying to convince others — people to help develop your idea, sponsors to back you, markets to buy in to your great new thing. So it makes sense to spend time and effort crafting a tale which will draw them in, intrigue them, capture their attention. Of course you don't want to oversell but as long as you've done your homework and the foundations are firm you’ll benefit from creating your particular version of a castle in the air….
Which is the message I’m trying to get across in the latest instalment of my long-term project to capture the key lessons of innovation and entrepreneurship in the form of a song….
You can find the lyrics here
And watch a video version here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Why evidence is so important for scaling innovation
A good idea will sell itself, right? Unfortunately not – Emerson was spectacularly wrong when he suggested that all you needed to do was build that better mousetrap to have the world beating a path to your door.
History is full of examples of innovations that, whilst being good and proven solutions, more than just a gleam in their inventor’s eye, stubbornly refused to scale. There are plenty of them in the world of commercial innovation – and in the field of social change, innovations designed to have an impact and change the world, it’s even more difficult.
One of the challenges is around the role of evidence. At its simplest we adopt new things because we see some benefit in them, they make our lives easier, more comfortable or better in some way. That’s what gives rise to the S-curve shape which you can find associated with any innovation – it isn’t a case of all or nothing, adoption takes time. And one of the key influences on that is the role of evidence.
You can find a transcript of this podcast here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
I'm running a course on entrepreneurship and was looking for a way to help students remember some key milestones on the journey - value proposition, minimum viable product, prototyping, business model development, etc. So trying it out in the form of a song....
You can watch it on my YouTube channel here, complete with lyrics
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
For our ancestors, creativity was a matter of survival. Not being big, strong or fast meant that if we couldn’t think our way out of a problem (like an approaching predator), then we’d not be around for long! Dealing with the daily struggle to survive required us to be innovative, and the key to that was the ability to imagine and explore different possibilities.
And it’s pretty clear that creativity — the ability to come up with novel solutions to problems — is going to be even more in demand as we approach the future. The word is everywhere — creative industries, creative people, creative leaders, creative organizations and so on. But it’s not just a fashion label — in a world where we face some pretty tough challenges, it’s a truism to say we need all the creativity we can get. Whether we’re a solo start-up entrepreneur, a member of a team tasked with helping the organization to think ‘outside the box’, or someone trying to change the world through social innovation this creativity stuff is going to be needed.
So it’s good to know that we already have the most important resource to help deliver it — the 1.5 kilos of pinky-grey stuff between our ears. It comes as standard equipment with any human being and our brain — and the amazing ability it has for imagination — is the key.
Trouble is that creativity, whilst really important, is also shrouded in myths which cloud our understanding of this key resource. This blog - and our new book - explores what we know about creativity and how we might sharpen our skills in deploying it.
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
How creating experiences for underserved markets can be a key innovation strategy
It’s summertime, at least here in the northern hemisphere and chances are that August is a holiday month. Which might well see you sitting somewhere and watching an exotic sunset, glass of something suitably refreshing in your hand. As you see that golden disc slip below the horizon and the wonderful display of red shifting colour begins to settle towards nightfall you might spare a thought for the memory of Tom Gullick who died this month. Because for many of us jetting away to our exotic location might not be happening were it not for his innovation efforts….
An avid bird spotter (he held the record for the most birds (over 9000) spotted by an individual) he was a bit of a Don Quixote figure, not least because he took up residence in La Mancha in Spain and pursued a conservationist crusade during his later years, saving at least one species of duck from extinction.
But he has another claim to fame — as one of the founding fathers of the low-cost travel experience. His bird-watching abilities gave him good observational skills and led him to spot an opportunity in classic entrepreneurial fashion — and then to go after it with a passion.
This podcast explores his experience as an innovator and the underlying idea of what can be called 'position innovation' - changing the market context in which an inn ovation is placed and the stories we tell about it
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
An interview with Hannes Erler, Strategic Director for Innovation Ecosystems, Swarovski
This wide-ranging interview looks back at how a major European company grew over a hundred-plus years from a small engineering start-up to become a global player in the fashion, jewellery and accessories business through constant attention to innovation.
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
There comes a time in innovation when you realise you might have taken on something a bit too big. No matter how hard you throw yourself into the challenge, creating value from your idea is going to need a little help. Changing the world, or even a small piece of it, takes a lot of push. That’s the moment when you realise you need ‘complementary assets’ – the ‘who else?’ and ‘what else?’ pieces of your innovation jigsaw puzzle.
It's a challenge at the very beginning – how to put together a network of people and resources to bring your idea to life? But it’s an even bigger challenge when it comes to scaling innovation – how to get widespread adoption of your ‘best thing since sliced bread’ innovation.
That's going to involve a multi-player game. We’ve learned that to create value at scale needs a network – but importantly one which goes beyond the sum of its parts. Systems have ‘emergent properties but these only emerge if there is an organizing energy to enable the process.
This podcast explores some of the challenges involved in putting such a 'value network' together - and , once you’ve found the partners, getting them to work together to create and deliver shared value.
You can find a transcript here
And a video version here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
It's hard to disagree with the idea that innovation-led growth is of paramount importance, but how often do we associate it with taking risks and learning? This episode offers an enlightening conversation with Robyn Bolton, founder and ‘Chief Navigator’ of Milezero, a consultancy specialising in helping organizations think through their innovation challenges. Her core beliefs capture their approach well:
- Innovation is something different that creates value
- Innovation requires curiosity, courage, and commitment
- Any organization can innovate, and any person can be an innovator
- People (even your customers and your boss) decide with their hearts and justify with their heads
- Ideas are a dime a dozen. Decisions are priceless. Action is perfection.
Drawing on her extensive experience working with amongst others Procter and Gamble, Boston Consulting Group and Clayton Christensen we explore a wide range of topics including the often misunderstood concept of failure in innovation, the role of innovation labs in fostering a controlled environment for experimentation and the significance of shifting our language from failure to learning. We look at the challenges that established organizations face when navigating disruptive shifts and we speculate the future of innovation in a constantly shifting context and stress the importance of cultivating a learning mindset.
You can find a transcript of the interview here.
And a video version here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Time plays a surprisingly important role in innovation, both as an enabler and as a shaper of the process and its outcomes. For example, the early development of reliable timepieces allowed accurate navigation which opened up the possibilities of global trade; without that the whole Industrial Revolution might have been a much smaller affair because the 'workshop of the world' would only have been able to trade in local markets.
Or the role played by time-and-motion studies which underpinned the development and spread of mass production as a model for manufacturing and service organizations during the early 20th century. The focus on saving wasted time also provided a key input to the development of 'lean thinking' which has had a huge impact on productivity.
But we shouldn't be too preoccupied with saving time; sometimes we need to spend a little more of it to enable good ideas to emerge and flourish. That's a lesson which organizations like 3M and Google have learned to their advantage - giving people time and space is a key innovation enabler.
This podcast explores the key role which time plays in thinking about and working with innovation.
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
These days innovation spaces have become something of a fashion accessory; no large organization can afford not to be seen without having one. And start-up spaces have followed a similar trend; there’s been an explosion of support to try and tap into this potential source of local economic growth. On the surface these look like a welcome developments, innovation finally moving centre stage. But the reality is that very often these ‘adventures’ are little more than physical spaces with a slogan, perhaps brightened up by a few coloured bean bags on the floor or a chic location in a converted factory or warehouse.
What we know from research is that providing such space can make a huge difference — but we need to have an operating model which is geared to providing support and creating a mechanism to repeat the innovation trick. We need operating ‘routines’ which help foster and support various aspects of the innovation process and which create a community of practice for organizations who take up residence inside them. Managed well innovation hubs, labs or whatever else you want to call them can operate as ’boundary spaces’, creating an environment for shared creativity, connection building and continuing interaction across different communities.
This blog looks at an example of a successful innovation space, the Instituto Caldeira, in Brazil and explores how it has helped create a vibrant community for start-ups and established organizations to progress their innovation ideas.
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
We know today that smart companies who care about innovation invest in the capacity for innovation — R&D and market research, future scoping, etc. Organized innovation, buying themselves options on the future. All good — but maybe only focusing on the formal means potentially missing out on what might be happening underground. Because by their nature people are innovators, prone to experiment and tinker around, frustrated with aspects of their work which they think a little hacking around the edges might help them with. Why not tap into this as another source of innovation?
It’s not just the benefits in terms of the possible product and process innovations which it might lead to. It’s also a powerful motivator, something which can help retain and inspire employees. Allowing people time and space to explore communicates a core company value — — it’s an invitation to tinker to hack things, to play around. And it has certainly paid off for 3M and many other companies - as this podcast explores.
You can find a transcript of this podcast here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Sustainability matters - of course. You'd have to be living in a bubble not to be aware of the wide-ranging conversation on this theme. But how to translate the rhetoric - whether it be the UN or EU's sustainable development goals or the aspirational strategies of businesses - into something practical?
That's the focus of the IMPACT project which is exploring new ways of putting stakeholders’ values into action and showing how sustainability challenges can unlock innovation.
This podcast is an interview with Professor Henning Breuer, project leader of IMPACT and explores the origins and achievements of the programme.
You can find out more about IMPACT here
and a transcript of the interview here.
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Mexico City, Olympic Games, 1968. The stadium is packed, the wider world looks on via TV coverage. Everywhere there’s an air of expectancy but also an awareness that at such high altitude it’s going to be hard for athletes to beat their best. Records are there to be broken, you have to hope for something special.
And in the high jump event they weren’t disappointed. The record for men’s high jump had hovered around 2.23 m for several years. But a young 21-year-old was about to change that; Dick Fosbury, representing the USA broke this with a height of 2.24 m and won the gold medal.
The ‘Fosbury flop’ as it quickly became known opened up new possibilities for the sport; within ten years it had become the dominant mode for all jumpers and helped move the world record to 2.45 m which was set in 1993 by Javier Sotomayor. These days anyone attempting the high jump has come to resemble the ‘fish flopping on the deck of a boat’ as one newspaperman described Fosbury’s Mexico model.
What Fosbury’s feat reminds us of is the power of reframing in innovation. Innovation can take place anywhere along a continuum from doing what we do better — incremental — to doing something completely different — radical. And it can cover what we offer the world — product or service — and the ways we create a deliver that offering — process. That gives us plenty to keep us busy in our innovation day.
But sometimes we can reframe, look at what we’re doing in a different way, identify novel approaches.
You can find a transcript of this podcast here
And a video version here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Close your eyes and imagine for a moment a computer room in the early days of the industry. Chances are you'll picture large wardrobe-sized metal cabinets whirring away with white-coated attendants tending to the machines. And it won't be long before your gaze lands on the ubiquitous spools of tape being loaded and unloaded. Which might give us a smug feeling as we look at the storage options for our current generation of computers - probably based on some incredibly fast access high-capacity solid state flash drive.
But the tape drive hasn't gone away. In fact it's alive and well and backing up our most precious memories. Look inside the huge data farms operated by Google, Apple, Amazon, Microsoft Azure or anyone else and you'll find large computers - and lots of tape. Thousands of kilometres of it, containing everything from your precious family photos to email backups to data from research projects like the Large Hadron Collider.
This podcast explores some of the innovation history involved and highlights some lessons for innovation management today.
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
I'm in love with Chat-GPT
Another innovation song, inspired by an article in the Journal of Product Innovation Management by Frank Piller and colleagues, in which they put Chat-GPT through its paces as an innovation assistant. It performed surprisingly well at diverse tasks including search and analysis, trend spotting and idea generation. Their conclusion was that this technology would work best in hybrid mode - in other words, in a human/AI partnership.
Hence this song!
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
How machine learning is transforming the innovation game
Machine learning has its roots back in experiments with ‘artificial intelligence’ in the 1970s but has come to represent a powerful technological trajectory as the idea of mimicking human neural networks and their learning capabilities has been explored.
And now we have generative AI, which does what it says on the tin — generates something new. And this brings the uncomfortable challenge to our perception of ourselves as the only ones capable of creativity — generating novel and useful solutions to challenges.
A quick review of the growing literature on ‘artificial creativity’ shows that there are grounds for worrying. Machine learning models can now ‘create’ music, literature or visual art to a standard which makes it increasingly difficult to detect its non-human origin.
With the advent of models like Chat-GPT has come the recognition that many fields are likely to be impacted by these developments. This podcast explores the possible impact on how innovation is undertaken — and by whom.
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
What do Mickey Mouse, vacuum cleaners, air travel and light-bulbs have in common? More than you’d think, especially if you look to the originators of those widely different things. All of their innovators spent a great deal of time being knocked back, living through failures and generally struggling to take their ideas forward. None of them have a history of instant success- it was hard work and persistence.
So one of the key skills in managing innovation, whether at a personal level or embedded in the way our organizations handle the challenge is going to be perseverance.
This podcast explores the theme of perseverance and the importance of pushing through and draws out some lessons for managing innovation to support the process.
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
2022 was a record year for home delivery of parcels and packages. After the Covid-19 lockdowns the idea of remote shopping became an even bigger reality and changed the behaviour patterns of millions. It’s a habit which is hard to break — even when there are increasing disturbances in the delivery end of things like strikes and negative publicity surrounding how packages are actually handled and delivered. Estimates of the market size for this activity vary widely but suggest that it is worth close to $500bn worldwide.
But where did this revolution begin and what’s the innovation history behind remote retailing? For that we need to go back a couple of hundred years and locate ourselves in the beautiful hills of Powys in Wales. In the valley alongside the river Severn is the small town of Newtown, a market centre since the 13th century. And in 1856 the home of Pryce Jones, a draper’s assistant who rose to take over the business in which he worked. And for which he had big plans....
You can find a transcript of this podcast here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Christmas, as my 6 year old never tires of reminding me, is coming. Never mind that technically it’s a month away and forget the efforts I make, Scrooge-like, not to allow any trace of the season to cross our threshold until at least 1st December. She excitedly points out that everywhere — the TV and online adverts, the shop decorations, even some of our early bird neighbours with their flashing light displays — everywhere the signals are unmistakable. ‘It’s nearly here!’
Which prompts her to write lists, long and getting longer, of gift ideas in case Santa is short of the relevant information about this year’s must-have items without which a six-year old’s world can never be complete. I feel like King Canute, water lapping around my ankles as I desperately try to stem the tide, inevitability fast approaching on my horizon.
In a desperate attempt to distract myself from these seasonal waves I began thinking about the kind of list I might put together for a would-be innovating organization. Assuming there was an innovation equivalent of the old gentleman at the North Pole what might he be working on with his elves right now? What are his stock-pickers pulling off the warehouse shelves and loading up on the sleigh? What might be on the must-have list for an innovation Christmas?
So here’s the result. If you’re looking for inspiration for your seasonal innovation shopping here’s a few ideas that might help. (And if you believe in an Innovation Santa they might be useful items to add to the ‘what I’d really like’ list you’re about to send up the chimney)
(You can find a transcript here)
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it….. Well, I’m not sure about the last one but someone somewhere has probably done some research on the topic. We humans certainly do it, especially when we’re young. I’m not talking about falling in love but about extending Cole Porter’s observations to a different world, something up there in terms of importance — playing.
Play is a basic animal behaviour and it’s worth asking the evolutionary psychology question of why? Wasting time and energy isn’t a good idea for the survival of any species. So why do human beings play?
Turns out that play is a pretty valuable device. As psychologist Peter Gray suggests play enables us to:
· practice skills that are essential to our survival and reproduction;
· learn to cope physically and emotionally with unexpected, potentially harmful events;
· reduce hostility and enable cooperation;
· generate new, sometimes useful creations.
And it’s that last element which makes it particularly relevant for innovation. Play may be fun — but it has a serious purpose. Our ability to imagine and create lies at the heart of our emergence as a successful species, whose main gift is not in size or strength but in our ability to adapt to hostile and uncertain environments. We innovate, find solutions and alternatives if our first options are blocked off.
This podcast explores the ways in which play is becoming a key tool to help us with the challenge of managing innovation
You can find a transcript here
If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here.
You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources - as well as my innovation blog.
Or subscribe to my YouTube channel here
Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness — and those rare but wonderful days when the sun smiles down benignly. I was strolling in the park, absorbing the warmth, my attention was taken by an ice cream.
Or rather, to the face of a toddler who was very happily getting himself around an eminently lickable cone, with the usual results. We probably don’t really have to worry too much about the dietary impact of ice cream in situations like these because 80% of the foodstuff was being liberally spread around his face, across his clothes or dripping sadly to the floor. Which prompted the idle thought (it was a very warm and lazy afternoon) about the possibility of non-melting ice cream and from there to reflections on the general pattern of ice cream innovation…..
You can find a transcript here...
Have you ever felt the urge to kick the photocopier? Or worse? That time when you desperately needed to make sixty copies of a workshop handout five minutes before your session begins. Or when you needed a single copy of your passport or driving licence, it’s the only way you can prove your identity to the man behind the desk about not to approve your visa application? Remember the awful day when you were struggling to print your boarding passes for the long-overdue holiday; that incident meant you ended up paying way over the odds at the airport?
Given the number of photocopiers in the world and the fact that we are still a far from paperless society in spite of our digital aspirations, it’s a little surprising that the law books don’t actually contain a section on xeroxicide – the attempt or execution of terminal damage to the lives of these machines.
Help is at hand. Because whilst we may still have the odd close and not very enjoyable encounter with these devices the reality is that they are getting better all the time. Not only through adding a bewildering range of functionality so that you can do almost anything with them apart from cook your breakfast, but also because they are becoming more reliable. And that is, in large measure, down to something called a community of practice. One of the most valuable resources we have in the innovation management toolkit....
You can find a transcript of this blog here
This one was written in part as a contribution to the retirement celebrations of the Father of Open Innovation, Henry Chesbrough ......
Here are the lyrics:
Open innovation
We’ve been innovating now for quite a long time
It’s the big thing that has helped us to survive
Find new ways to do things, keep on learning down the line
It’s what keeps you and me – and companies – alive
We’ve learned how we can manage it, how to repeat the trick
All about the structures and routines
But the world still keeps on changing, so we need to change with it
Innovate our model, look through a new lens
Chorus
Open innovation, these days it’s the name of the game
Open innovation, some things will never be the same
Put knowledge into motion, manage knowledge flows
From outside in to inside out, and everywhere it goes
Building knowledge networks but staying in control
And don’t forget the IP above all!
It’s what you know and who you know and how they all connect
That’s the innovation challenge of our time
Learning knowledge trading, we have to give to get
For that we need a whole new paradigm
That’s where our good friend Henry first came into the frame
Throwing down a challenge to the rest
Laying out the ground rules to play a whole new game
And giving us a label for the quest
Chorus
But it’s more than just a paradigm, it’s more than empty words
Open innovation needs community
It’s building up relationships, mapping out new roads
Networking to link A with B and C
It’s research and publications, built from rich conversations
It’s conferences, workshops, seminars
And most of all it’s people sharing their ideas
In classrooms, companies – and bars!
Chorus
Finale:
So next time someone says to you, ‘we need to innovate’
And asks your advice about what is going on
Just explain in no uncertain terms the best recipe to date….
With open innovation you can’t go wrong!
Chorus
Multiple independent invention is surprisingly common — there have been many research studies highlighting the pattern. Examples include the blast furnace (invented independently in China, Europe and Africa) and the crossbow (invented independently in China, Greece, Africa, northern Canada, and the Baltic countries).
And they reveal an important home truth about how innovation actually happens. It’s not the Archimedes moment, a flash of inspiration given by the Gods at bath time. Instead it’s a process of hunting, of being open and aware of opportunities as needs and means converge.
The idea of ‘closeness’ is key here — as things mature, knowledge accumulates so we get to a tipping point where something is bound to happen somewhere. Like crystallisation the supersaturated liquid is ready, it just needs the seed — a speck of dust or some other impurity and the crystal starts to form.
As this podcast explores...
You can find a transcript here
Innovation fails — sometimes spectacularly so. It’s hard enough when that failure comes early on during the start-up phase — that brilliant idea which somehow isn’t quite as brilliant when it collides with the first few encounters with the market. And when no amount of pivoting is going to save it. It’s hard but it’s a matter of squeezing it for useful lessons for the future and then throwing it in the bin. Chalk it up to experience and try again.
But what happens when you’ve gone much further down the road? When you’ve put in the hard yards, prototyping, pivoting and finally launching? And when your early efforts seem to have yielded success? When it does seem as if people value whatever it is that you’ve created from your idea?
You could just relax, take the (small) bouquets which come from succeeding at something, those plaudits from family and friends. But most likely you’ll recognise that, nice staging post though it is, you’re really only halfway along the journey. Because for your idea to have real impact you are going to need to scale it. And that’s where a whole new set of challenges come into the frame.
You can find a transcript here
How innovation management is changing and why we still need strategyThere’s no shortage of scary headlines reminding us of the looming challenge of digital transformation. The message is clear. On the one hand if we don’t climb aboard the digital bandwagon we’ll be left behind in a kind of late Stone Age, slowly crumbling to dust while the winds of change blow all around us. On the other we’re facing some really big questions — about employment, skills, structures, the whole business model with which we compete. If we don’t have a clear digital strategy to deal with these we’re going to be in trouble.
And it’s not just the commercial world which is having to face up to these questions; the same is true in the public sector and in the not-for-profit world. The digital storm has arrived.
Whether we ride it out or get washed up on the beach will depend on how well we manage this wave of innovation - which is the theme of this podcast
(You can find a transcript here)
One of the huge cast of characters created by the wonderful humorous writer P. G. Wodehouse was Wilmot Mulliner. Perhaps not so well known as Jeeves and Wooster he’s nevertheless an interesting subject. We’re introduced to him at a difficult time in his life; he’s employed in the burgeoning film industry, working for Mr Schnellenhamer, the head of the Perfecto-Zizzbaum Corporation, a film studio. And he’s not a happy man.
His role is that of a ‘Nodder’ and, as Wodehouse explains, this is similar to a Yes-Man except lower in the social scale. He is expected to nod in agreement to what the chief executive says but only after all the Yes-Men have said yes. Perhaps not surprisingly, he’s getting a little fed up with this role.
Wilmot is a wonderfully comic creation but also a reminder of what we don’t want in our world of creativity. We know good ideas don’t come from a single person — perfectly formed. They benefit from challenge and argument - which is the theme we explore in this podcast.
You can find a transcript here
Innovation is all about knowledge spaghetti.
Just like a plate of pasta innovation involves many different strands. Only this time we are talking about knowledge - technical knowledge, market knowledge, legal knowledge, financial knowledge and so on. They need to be woven together to create value.
And these knowledge strands are held by different people, inside and outside the organization. We have to find them and connect them, link them together to enable us to innovate. Whilst we can superimpose structures on it to help us with this task we shouldn’t forget that we’re really working with knowledge spaghetti.
One very powerful model is based on the idea that everyone in the organization has something to contribute to the innovation story – high involvement innovation. Here we’re working on the belief that even small strands of knowledge can be important and if we could bring them in to the story we’d make significant progress.
Which history tells us we can.In countless embodiments the principle of high involvement has been shown to pay dividends.Ask people for what they know that might help solve problems around quality, cost, delivery, etc – and there’s no shortage of good ideas in response.
But it’s not just the raw return on investment which collaboration platforms offer – thought these benefits are impressive. Their real value lies in the way they enable ‘emergent properties’ – the innovation whole becomes much greater than the sum of its parts.
They give us new and powerful ways of working with the knowledge spaghetti. Not only can we handle the sheer scale of the knowledge challenge and focus it towards key objectives but we can do so in ways which yield surprising additional benefits. They effectively turbocharge our innovation system. As this podcast suggests...
You can find a transcript here
These days there are very few certainties but this is one of them. We’re all going to depend increasingly on healthcare innovation for the quality of our future lives. Keeping ourselves healthy, coping with chronic ailments, living into old age with dignity and independence. We all want this — and we’re going to need all the help we can find to help us get there.Which helps explain the huge and growing healthcare industry and the explosion of start-ups in this space. Healthcare innovation matters.
But look again at that first paragraph. This is not a sector we can be entirely objective about, looking in through the window at it. It’s about us, it concerns each of us as individuals, with all the diversity that implies. We all have a stake in healthcare innovation but we’re also aware that one size isn’t necessarily going to fit us all. So there is real scope for our voices to be heard and our ideas to be used. A classic opportunity for user innovation - as this podcast explores.
You can find a transcript here
The suggestion box sounds like a very old approach to the challenge of high involvement innovation - how to engage the majority of people in an organization in the innovation agenda. It conjures images of dusty boxes tucked away in the corner into which people have long since given up posting ideas.
But its successors - collaboration platforms for innovation - carry out essentially the same task. The difference is that they do so in highly interactive fashion, and act not only as a place to capture ideas but also to develop, shape and implement them. They represent a powerful tool in the innovation armoury - although, as this podcast suggests, their effective implementation requires much more than just technology.
You can find a transcript here
Innovation is all about uncertainty - no-one knows quite what's around the corner. So there's a limit to how far we can plan to work with it - and instead we need to develop the skills of agility. As this song suggests, it’s a bit like learning to dance....
Dancing at the Innovation Ball
The thing with innovation, this is something you will learn
It never goes the way you want, you’ve got to twist and turn
The road ahead’s uneven, one way streets and plain dead ends
And there’s always something nasty hiding just around the bend!
But there ‘s one thing you can rely on, one thing we know for sure
Innovation’s quite predictable – it follows Murphy’s Law!
Chorus
So be quick on your feet and light on your toes
Learn to do the dance
Going round in circles is just how it goes
When your partner's name is Chance
Three steps forward, two steps back
And don’t forget to turn
Never mind when events try to push you off track
It’s just what you have to learn
It’s no big deal if you trip or you stumble
Don’t be afraid to fall
Intelligent failure’s the name of the game
At the Innovation Ball!
The best laid plans o’ mice and men do oft times gang agley
What the poet, Robbie Burns, was really trying to say
Is that things don’t always work out right, no matter how hard you try
So you need to learn to live with it, instead of asking why….
Of course you need a project plan, of course you need a team
But remember with even the best of these things are never what they seem
Chorus
Learning to dance this waltz might seem as hard as it can be
But if you keep on, persevere, it’s easy as ABC
Fail fast, fail forward, and pivot – capture what you’ve gained
Pick yourself up, dust yourself down and then go round again!
It’s build, test, review, build, test, review, and build, test, review, once more
Never mind if you’re feeling all battered and bruised from all the times you hit the floor!
Chorus
The great management writer W. Edwards Deming had a powerful introduction to his talks on quality management. Pulling out a dollar bill and waving it in front of the audience he would point out the wording: ‘In God we trust’ — and then go on to comment that in business life the same principle could be applied, but with the afterthought ‘…everything else we should measure’. His argument was simple; if we want to control something we need to make sure we measure it.
And that’s as true of innovation as any other business process. Although it can appear to be about inspiration, intuition and risk-taking the fact is that it’s a process and needs managing as such…..
You can find a transcript here
History is full of examples of innovations which, despite their promise, have been resisted by established players – the ‘not invented here’ effect. And although we’re familiar with the problem it doesn’t seem to have gone away; there are still plenty of examples to be found across today’s innovation landscape.
One candidate might be UAVs – unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. They’ve changed the face of aviation-based services in a wide range of industries from agriculture to zoo-keeping, yet the mainstream aviation industry is still cautious about their adoption. Is the challenge in the technology itself – or in the questions it asks about the way we’ve always done things in the past?
You can find the transcript here
Here’s a challenge. Close your eyes and try to visualise an entrepreneur. There’s a good chance that what you’ve come up with will be one of the usual suspects — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, perhaps some of the older versions like Steve Jobs or even Thomas Edison. Hopefully there’s a fair number of women represented, players like Oprah Winfrey, Beyonce or Ariana Huffington; after all statistics show that 252 million entrepreneurs out of approximately 582 million in the world are female.
But that's not the only kind of person who acts as an entrepreneur - in fact we're all potentially playing the role, as this podcast suggests.
What kinds of skills are going to be needed in organizations as they move towards an increasingly ‘phygital’ (= hybrid physical and digital) world of operations? Why are the skills of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship becoming so important? And how might people be trained on a continuing basis to acquire and deploy these skills inside a large international organization?
In this podcast we speak with Dietmar Schloesser, responsible for digital innovation within the TÜV NORD group who shares his experience and learning around these and other questions. In particular he comments on many of the themes raised in the VISION project exploring the future of learning and skills development, in which his organization have been enthusiastic and insightful partners.
You can find a video version here
And you can find out more about TUV NORD here
And more about the VISION project here
The challenge of digital innovation is everywhere. It’s hard to escape the talk of ‘revolutionary impact’ or ‘digital disruption’ or the need for new strategies to cope with ‘digital transformation’. But what’s really going on, where are the big questions we should be addressing and how might this affect our approach to innovation management?
This podcast features an interview with Alan Brown, Professor of Digital Economy at the University of Exeter, author of the influential book ‘Delivering digital transformation’, and a well-known writer and speaker on the topic. In it he explores some of the key issues surrounding the effective use of digital innovation, drawing on themes which he regular talks about in his excellent blog series ‘Digital economy dispatches’.
You can find out more at his website
And you can find a video version here
Podcasts are a bit like London buses. You wait a long time and then three come along all at once! This week we feature more in the series around the challenges to education and training in innovation , creativity and entrepreneurship - the main theme of the VISION project.
We’ve already seen that there are likely to be significant shifts across the landscape in terms of technology, expectations, curriculum, evaluation and overall student experience. But how will this play out in the lives of key actors in the process?
This is the first of three interviews conducted by Olga Kokshagina, one of the researchers on the VISION project and co-author of the open access book on the project. (You can find more details here). In it she speaks with Gijs van Wulfen, a well-known speaker, writer and trainer in the field about some of the dramatic changes affecting his world in trying to equip people with the skills for handling innovation and entrepreneurship. Significantly his whole business model was massively disrupted by the effects of the Covid 19 pandemic which has meant he has had to rapidly reshape his work to suit a world in which almost all training now takes place online and remotely. (He’s tried to capture this experience in an excellent new book which explores the ways in which organizations can rethink their innovation processes for an online world).
This is the story of the development of porcelain, a series of innovations which enabled the creation of beautiful artefacts and a global industry. They represent a kind of alchemy, transmuting a handful of earth into weisses Gold - white gold.
You can find a transcript here
The development of skills and capabilities to work with innovation is becoming essential — they are no longer the province of specialists but something we all need to acquire and practice. In an earlier podcast we looked at the changing landscape for learning about innovation and entrepreneurship., drawing on the VISION project, a major European study looking at this question. At its heart is a vision of how things might develop over the next ten years and it poses challenges around what we might start doing now to secure a positive future.
But whilst we have an idea of what's up ahead the reality is that the future isn't predetermined. It’s a 'design space' within which different versions of the future are argued out and shape - a bit like stretching and shaping dough before we bake it.
So in this podcast we'll listen in on a debate around the different ways in which the future of learning about innovation and entrepreneurship will be shaped - and look at some of the barriers we might need to overcome to get there.
You don’t get to be 150 years old just by being lucky. German pump-maker Wilo is paused to celebrate its big anniversary next year and it owes a great deal of its survival and growth to innovation, something it has worked hard to build into its culture. Founded in 1872 as a brass and copper foundry the business has grown to become a typical ‘hidden champion’, quietly getting on with its business of becoming world-leading in its field, providing a wide range of innovative pumping solutions for a global market.
In this interview with Sven Grave, Head of Innovation, we explore a little more about how the company continues to benefit from the ideas and insights of its employees.
You can read more about the company here
And visit their website here
Innovation matters — of course. It’s the driving force behind economic and social change and underpins our evolution as a civilised society. And with the kind of challenges we now face it’s also clear that the development of skills and capabilities to work with innovation are also becoming essential — they are no longer the province of specialists but something we all need to acquire and practice. They are becoming life skills — but developing them across the population raises a big question — how? What are the relevant capabilities and how to enable learning and skills development? How to teach them, who, along which channels, etc?
Those are the questions being explored in the VISION project — a major European study looking at the changing landscape for education and training around innovation , creativity and entrepreneurship. At its heart is a vision of how things might develop over the next ten years and it poses challenges around what we might start doing now to secure a positive future.
The past is another country — they do things differently there. But so too is the future — we know it will be different and the VISION forecasting and futures process has explored a wide range of issues. In this podcast we’re going to look in more depth at some of the key dimensions for change — what will differ and by when?
You can find a transcript here
Watch any group of kids at play and you can remind yourself that this is something which comes naturally. It should do; evolutionary psychologists are pretty clear that the ability to play (and therefore imagine and simulate a variety of situations) developed as an important adaptive mechanism. Kids play because they are hard-wired to do so; reward circuits in the brain reinforce the experience with suitable chemicals to ensure it is seen as something pleasurable which they will want to repeat.
It’s not just kids; all mammals display similar behaviour and it raises an important question. Why? Play is costly in terms of energy so why have they evolved to retain this capacity? The argument is that play is not accidental but instead serves several important purposes:
It enables them to
· practice skills that are essential to their survival and reproduction;
· learn to cope physically and emotionally with unexpected, potentially harmful events;
· reduce hostility and enable cooperation.
· generate new, sometimes useful creations
All of which could be pretty useful in the process of coming up with ideas and turning those into value — innovation. This podcast explores how play might be a key resource for working with innovation.
You can find a transcript here
Sometimes it’s the simplest ideas which change the world. A metal box which can be easily loaded and unloaded transformed the pattern of world trade and the economics of shipping and distribution. Brainchild of Malcolm McClean the idea of containerisation is one of those innovations which changed the world.
McLean was a tough entrepreneur who’d already built a business out of trucking. He’d learned the rules of the innovation game the hard way and knew that having a great idea was only the start of a long journey. Realising the value at scale would take a lot of ingenious problem-solving and systems thinking to put the puzzle together. He needed complementary assets — the ‘who else?’ and ‘what else?’ — to realise his vision. And he understood the challenge of diffusion — getting others to buy into your idea and enabling adoption through a mixture of demonstration, persuasion and pressure.
But he wasn’t the first to come up with the idea; that distinction probably goes to another systems thinker who played the innovation game well throughout his unfortunately short life. And, like McClean, he can take a big share of the credit for transforming the pattern of world trade, this time in the 18th century. This podcast looks at the innovation work of James Brindley, canal builder, millwright-engineer and innovator extraordinaire.
You can find a transcript here
The sustainability challenge.
Maybe you’re a pessimist, seeing dire threats in global warming, worrying about the rate at which we’re using up the planet’s resources, concerned at the way we’re carelessly throwing the litter of our thoughtless consumption for later generations to pick up.
Or maybe you’re an optimist, seeing new opportunities in this changing world perspective, shifting to low carbon solutions, cleaner energy and smarter homes and cities. Unlocking new technological possibilities to reshape the way we are able to interact and survive.
Either way it’s likely that innovation - right across the spectrum, from new products and services, through new and improved processes to rethinking our underlying business and social models – will be involved. And this raises some important questions about how we approach the management of this – is it simply a case of business as usual or do we need to adjust and extend our routines for handling the challenge?
This podcast explores some of these issues.
You can find a transcript here
Try this. Get hold of a group of people, mostly strangers, and have them gather at the opposite side of a large room. Now run very fast towards them and, just before you reach them, leap off the ground and let yourself fly through the air.
Sounds a crazy thing to do and one which is not too healthy if they fail to catch you — yet it is a typical warm up exercise in the world of theatre. Groups of actors gather together to try and create a theatrical experience which will be memorable, drawing an audience into a journey of imagination. And in order to innovate in this fashion they need some core skills around building a sense of support for each other as they take risks and explore new ways of delivering that experience.
Flying through the air and hoping someone will catch you is a powerful way of developing that sense of support — and it underlines a key element in our understanding of what makes for effective innovation. We need a sense of psychological safety.
This podcast explores that idea.....
You can find a transcript here
See my website here for more like this
‘Houston, we’ve had a problem here’. John Swigert’s famous words, delivered in a voice as calm and clear as the mountain air in his native Denver home. But to the Apollo 13 mission controllers thousands of miles below in Texas this fired the starting gun in a race against time. At 2am on 14th April, 1970 an explosion in the main oxygen tanks and the failure of a major part of the electrical system suddenly put the Apollo crew’s lives at risk. The extreme conditions in which they had to work to repair it required rapid creative thinking on the part of a large group of people on the ground and aboard the ship itself.
As the drama unfolded the whole world watched, holding its breath. This wasn’t a simple case of pulling a ready-made solution off the shelf; instead it required exploring the nature and dimensions of the problem, redefining and shaping it. Only then did the solution route become apparent, emerging gradually as a direction worth travelling in.
Sometimes it's worth spending time exploring and reframing innovation problems before we begin to solve them - as this podcast suggests.
You can find a transcript here
It’s sometimes easy to forget that even the world’s largest companies were once start-ups. And a key feature of start-ups (the successful ones) is that they are fast learners.
This blog looks at the way in which this fast learning, coupled with a willingness to embed and reinforce successful practices, can build innovation capability for the long-term. It can even grow a globally successful corporation with over a hundred years of innovation history - with the help of a banjo player or two along the way...
Click here for the transcript
See my website: https://johnbessant.org/ and follow my blog
And follow my online course here
And my audio course here:
We need innovation more than ever. But we also need to be able to make it happen effectively, to be able to repeat the trick. There’s too much at stake to trust to luck; we need to learn to manage the process. Which puts a premium on thinking about how we approach supporting the learning of these life skills for the future. How can we enable different learners in different contexts to master the craft of innovation?
In this situation having a picture of the future and the ways in which we can help people master the craft of innovation becomes rather important. Not least because the future has yet to happen; the better we understand and explore it the more we can can identify desirable scenarios and then ‘back-cast’ from them, roadmapping our way to relevant policy and practices which we can introduce today.
That's the thinking behind the VISION project - a ‘Knowledge Alliance project within the EU’s Erasmus Plus scheme. Using an integrated and proven suite of tools for systematically exploring the future the VISION team engaged with over 120 stakeholders, built a variety of scenarios and explored them in depth through workshops, webinars and other tools to create a detailed picture of the emerging challenges and opportunities in this space of learning facilitation around innovation, creativity and entrepreneurship.
This podcast is the first in a series which explores the landscape around learning to manage innovation in the future and shares some fo the insights from the research.
You can find out more about the VISION project here
And read the transcript of this podcast here
This project has been funded with support from the European Commission, Project Number: 612537-EPP-1-2019-1-SI-EPPKA2-KA. This podcast reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.
Time for another innovation song....
This formed part of my keynote session with Tim Minshall at the R&D Management conference last week. Their title was 'Innovation in an era of disruption' and Tim and I were exchanging ideas on how we might learn from the many innovation responses to the current pandemic crisis - and carry some of those lessons forward. Cue for a song to distil some of the key messages......
You can find a transcript below:
Innovation’s always been about surprises
The game’s no fun without that
Just sometimes you can have too many surprises
When they come all at once they can knock you flat
It’s worst when they come at you from different directions
And then seem to land all at once
Your carefully planned innovation systems
Start to buckle with the force of their punch
There’s the one’s that sneak up on you, unawares
And the ones that jump out in plain sight
The ones you see coming from over the horizon
But you think, I’m OK, just sit tight
If we can just keep our heads down, somehow muddle through
Then we’ll get back to what is normal and nice
Let the dust settle, relax into our armchairs
After all, Lightning never strikes twice
Which is fine - until the next time those alarm bells start ringing
And the panic stations buttons getting pressed
It’s then we get to wishing we’d done some more preparation
Some way to help avoid the stress
So how can we innovate out of a crisis
Can we prepare ourselves for the next wave?
What kind of lessons could we carry forward?
How can we learn to behave?
Chorus
We need imagination
We need collaboration
Knowledge integration
Mobilise what people know
Focused inspiration
Improvisation
Lots of exploration
To get some innovation to go
If we want to stay alive, we’ve got to learn to duck and dive
There’s lots of things that we should try and do
Loosen up our minds, leave certainty behind
Being agile’s what is going to pull us through
Learn to work with what we’re given, frugal innovation
Sometimes it’s the case that less is more
Rapid prototyping, probe and learn’s the right thing
There’s lots of different roads we can explore
If we listen to the crowd, broadcast the problem far and loud
And listen to the answers coming back
Get them looking at the problem from their different perspectives
We might just find the answer that we lack
We need Re - combination, Re - configuration
Re - framing everything we know
Re-evaluation of our final destination
Pivoting’s the way to go
So next time a crisis hits you and you wonder ‘what can we do?’
Here’s some innovation thoughts to bear in mind
Use your creativity, build a capability
Develop routines for the non-routine - it’s got to be worth trying
We need imagination
We need collaboration
Knowledge integration
Mobilise what people know
Focused inspiration
Improvisation
Lots of exploration
To get some innovation to go
ISPIM - the International Society for Professional Innovation Management - holds an annula conference which is always a good place to bump into new ideas and people in the world of innovation management. Unfortunately this year's event, like that of 2020, was confined to virtual space instead of taking place in the fascinating city of Berlin. But that didn't stop it being another stimulating few days - this podcast contains a few of my reflections...
You can find a transcript of this podcast here
and more details about iSPIM and links to presentations here
An interview with Henry Rose Lee
Variety is the spice of life - and diversity is the driver of innovation. There’s a great deal of research which highlights the value of different ideas and insights coming from diverse perspectives and the power of bringing them together in the innovation mix. But how can we build this into our approach to managing innovation?
In this interview inter-generational expert Henry Rose Lee explains how today’s organizations contain a fascinating mix of generations which represents a huge potential resource. She also looks at some of the challenges in mobilising such diversity around the core focus of innovation.
You can watch a video version of this interview here
And you can find more about Henry's work and ideas here:
The idea of learning a craft offers us a useful metaphor for the world of innovation. We know it’s not magic - creating value from ideas doesn’t simply happen when a light-bulb flashes above someone’s head. It involves a journey, one as fraught with uncertainty and nasty surprises as any of my interstellar jaunts. And whilst each journey is unique there’s a pattern to them which is shared; innovation involves key stages from ideation right through to capturing value. Whether we are in the public or private sector, working in a start-up or part of a large established organization the same challenges emerge.
Making the journey is going to require considerable skill if we are to avoid crashing somewhere along the way. But learning these skills doesn’t have to be a matter of trial and error alone. Just like in the medieval Guilds there is a wealth of accumulated experience which can be passed on as we make the journey from apprentice to Master.
You can find a transcript of the podcast here
To find out more about my online course' Mastering the craft of innovation' please click here...
‘With every pair of hands you get a free brain!’ This flash of the blindingly obvious underpins the growing awareness in organizations of the huge potential their employees offer in terms of contributing to the innovation story. But mobilising such high involvement innovation wasn’t always easy - until the arrival of powerful collaborative platforms to enable it. These days organizations can engage thousands of people, not just amongst their workforce but out into their supply chains or customer base. Collaborative innovation offers organizations of all shapes and sizes – public, private, commercial and not-for-profit – the chance to accelerate and focus their innovation efforts.
But success is about much more than adopting and deploying a powerful tool; it requires skills and capabilities to use it well. In this interview Colin Nelson, Chief Consulting Officer for Hype (a major provider of innovation platforms) talks about the opportunities and also the strategic challenges for organizations exploring high involvement innovation.
You can find a video version of this interview here
Metacognition. Sounds a good word and it's certainly an important one. The dictionary defines it as ‘thinking about thinking’, self-awareness, our ability to oversee what we are thinking and doing. It’s not a new idea - the Greeks had it pretty much nailed (literally) to the arch over their oracle at Delphi. If you want advice on how to approach an uncertain future begin with this recipe - ‘Know thyself’.
But it's more than a self-improvement motto. It's a key neural capability, one which has helped us evolve and survive as a species. Even though we’re smart enough to find solutions to problems of a hostile environment there will still be situations where we need to reframe, to question what we’re doing and perhaps try a new tack. And that needs metacognition - the ability to think about how we are thinking.
It’s also rather important in the world of innovation. We’ve learned the hard way that it’s not enough just to pick a promising innovation idea and then press the ‘go’ button and hope. We need the capacity to step back and review, checking whether this is till the right thing to do. And sometimes we need to reset the entire model we use for organizing and managing innovation.
(You can find the transcript to this podcast here)
Diving deep for innovation
For many years Gavin McClafferty was Innovation Manager with Subsea 7, a major player in the highly specialised world of deep-sea engineering services. Laying down and looking after pipelines and cables thousands of feet below the surface of some of the world’s roughest water poses plenty of innovation challenges. And solving them is something which requires focusing as many creative minds as possible.
Gavin’s experience in taking an open collective innovation approach, drawing in ideas and experience from a wide network spanning many different sectors convinced him of the value of this approach. It led him to set up his own company specialising in enabling connections, brokering innovation conversations and bridging between technical worlds. Tapping into this emerging model of collaborative innovation has helped unlock value running into millions of dollars and creating thriving networks of ideas between sometimes unlikely players.
In this interview he talks about open collective innovation and some of the challenges in enabling it.
You can watch the interview here
For more information
Email: gavin@1981ventures.com
Website: www.1981ventures.com
We often talk about innovation being a survival issue - but in the context of humanitarian aid it takes on a very literal meaning. Crises, whether natural or man-made, require rapid problem solving if agencies and aid workers are to avoid the huge negative impacts of such disasters.
For a long time humanitarian innovation (HI) took place in a responsive mode, often on an ad-hoc basis; the focus was on the innovations themselves rather than looking for an underlying process which could be mobilised to generate a steady stream of solutions and enable learning between projects. But these days there’s widespread recognition of the importance of learning to manage innovation as a repeatable process, one which builds an important capablility which (sadly) we’re likely to need in the future.
In this interview Abi Taylor shares some of her experiences working as Innovation Manager with ELRHA’s Humanitarian Innovation Fund.
(You can find a video version of this interview here)
Amongst all of the interest in platform models it’s worth looking at the potential they might have for social innovation. Can we create an ecosystem to help enable better linkage between social needs and means, one which allows the development of innovations across it?
There’s a lot of talk about ‘getting back to normal’ after the pandemic. And whilst that’s something we fervently wish for there may also be elements of ‘Covid-life’ that we might want to hold on to. Things like the crowdsourcing of ideas and efforts around solving important problems, the spirit of co-operation and shared focus, and the sense of communities caring for each other. Platforms like LetsLocalise - a social venture helping to build communities around schools - point the way to models for helping us do so.
(You can find the transcript of this podcast here)
Continuing my quest to put key innovation management themes to music, here's another song. Lyrics below:
You like to think you’re sitting on top of your technology
Your gadgets are smart and cool ‘cos you do lots of R and D
Your software’s fast - your data’s the best
Your packaging’s great - you can ignore the rest
There’s only one problem left at your door
Folks don’t want your product any more….
Chorus
So you need…
Dynamic capability
In innovation it’s got to be
Dynamic capability
At the heart of your philosophy
You can’t rely on the old routines
To deal with problems you’ve never seen
In innovation the key to creation
Is to keep on building up your……
Dynamic capability, Dynamic capability
Are you really using all the knowledge that’s out there?
Trying new ways to open up, learning how to share?
Not all the smart guys are working for you
You need to network, let ideas flow through
If you’re not ready to trade what you know
It won’t be just your innovation that’s closed!
When Henry Ford started making cars, we didn't have a voice
But now we don’t just want Model T’s – we want lots of choice!
We’re all looking for customisation
Out on the streets the word is ‘co-creation’
Users can innovate, give them their say
But if you don’t listen they’ll just walk away!
Next time it starts to rain and you reach for your folding umbrella spare a thought for Slawa Duldig. She was the Viennese sculptress who invented and patented the device back in 1929 and it's been keeping people dry ever since. But the birth of this, like so many innovations, was not in the research labs of a large company but as a result of her frustration with the large heavy and clumsy umbrellas of her time. Along with many user innovators her concern to solve an annoying problem led her to create a solution from which many more of us can benefit.
This podcast looks at user innovation of this kind and tries to draw out some lessons for innovation management.
You can find a transcript here.
It's easy to think of innovation as being all about creative freedom, experimentation and exploration. But we also need to recognise the need for what Peter Drucker called 'the discipline of innovation'. This podcast looks at the challenges in balancing innovation activities to maintain a healthy balance and looks at some of the messages around the need for maintaining 'dynamic tension' in our approaches.
You can find a transcript here
The kitchen blender has a lot to answer for. These days there are plenty of experiments with what you can cram into the jug and then blur into a fine emulsion – not all of them entirely edible. It’s the ideal lockdown toy, but whilst it might permit all sorts of interesting smoothies it would be a slightly odd mind which decided to try and make one up out of egg white and titanium dioxide. Doesn’t sound like it would delight the taste buds – but then again it might have other uses, not least as a source of innovation.....
This podcast looks at the surprising history of Liquid Paper and the way its inventor, Betty Nesmith Graham, turned her frustration at work into a successful global business.
You can find a transcript here
Where do innovations come from? Research suggest that there are many different sources, some working to create opportunities ('knowledge push') and some channeling various kinds of demand signal ('need pull'). This song offers some ideas about the different ways in which innovation can be triggered......
You can find a transcript and video version here....
Catharina is the CEO and founder of Innosabi, a successful software business specialising in the innovation field. In this interview she talks about her new book 'Connect the dots' which has the subtitle 'Agile innovation and collaborative ecosystems'.
You can find a video version of this interview here
I don’t know about you but I’m spending a lot of time listening these days. As my physical room to move about contracts (thanks to lockdown) so I’m enjoying taking voyages inside my head, carried along by music. The choice of vessels in my harbour is impressive; I can embark on a whole series of different journeys depending on my mood – jazz, classical, soft folky reminiscence or driving angry rock. Whatever the journey there’s a pretty good chance a guitar will feature somewhere in the mix.
But how did the guitar get here? And what role did innovation play in the process? This podcast takes a look at these questions....
You can find a transcript of the podcast here
An interview with Christoph Krois, Open Innovation Manager at Siemens in which he talks about the opportunities and challenges in deploying open innovation across a large transnational company
You can also watch the interview here
Continuing my quest to put key themes in innovation management to music here's a sideways look at why organizations should look again at the value users can bring to their innovation process....
You can find the lyrics/transcript here
Natalie Turner is a writer, speaker, innovation consultant and coach. In this interview we explore some of the core themes in her book 'Yes you can innovate' and look at some of the challenges facing organizations trying to innovate in today's complex and difficult environment
The humble brown paper bag might seem an unlikely place to look for inspiration about innovation. But this sturdy workhorse of the retail world is making a comeback, driven not least by concerns about the impact plastics waste is having on our planet. In this podcast we take a closer look at the surprisingly rich innovation history behind it....
You can find a transcript of the podcast here
An interview with Lynne Maher, Clinical Director for Innovation, Ko Awatea , Auckland, New Zealand
Innovation in healthcare affects us all. And implementing change in such a complex system is often difficult. In this interview Lynne reflects on her extensive experience of trying to manage and enable innovation in a number of different settings and shares some advice for others working in the sector.
You can watch this interview here
When Earl Tupper invetned 'Tupperware' he pulled off some impressive product and process innovation, turning waste from oil refining into bright housewares with a powerful seal which made them perfect for storing food. Yet the product didn't really sell - until he encountered Brownie Wise and her sales magic. At the heart of this fascinating success story of scaling innovation is the Tupperware party sales model - essentially setting out the basis of what we recognise today as 'social marketing' via networks.
This podcast ezplores the story; you can find a transcript here.
One of the challenges facing innovation managers is to help create the kind of culture in which innovation becomes 'the way we do things around here'. It's easy enough when you are working with a specialist team of innovation professionals - but what happens when you try to involve the whole workforce? And how do you do this in a large global organization with thousands of employees all around the world?
This is the challenge Sarah Kelly, Senior Innovation Manager at Liberty Global faces on a daily basis and in this interview she explains a little more about the role and how she plays it.
(This is a new departure for the site - the first in a series of interviews with key actors in the world of managing innovation).
Users are often a very powerful source of innovation - providing we listen to them!
Lyrics below:
If you need some inspiration
When you’re wanting innovation
Ask the crowd, they’ll shout out loud
“U – U – Use our ideas!”
When it comes to diffusion
There’s a really neat solution
Bring the users along, you can’t go wrong
Just U-U-Use their ideas!
In a world of co-creation, customer emancipation
There is this new big thing , Customizing
Let’s innovate…!
Democratizing innovation
Is the latest big sensation
Let the users lead, they know their needs
Just U U Use their ideas
No R&D or marketing Let your users do their own thing
Build a community and they’ll soon be
Your eyes and ears!
Henry Ford, gave us no choice
But now we’ve found our own voice
On a Facebook site we can get it right
We know what’s best – so just invest
Listen to us – don’t make a fuss
And U U Use our ideas….!
Peanuts might sound an unlikely source of insight into how we can learn to manage innovation. But - as this podcast shows - there's a lot to this particular legume. Something which didn't escape the attention of George Washington Carver, the man who did so much to promote it as an alternative crop to poor cotton farmers and helped engender an agricultural revolution in the USA. Carver's legacy goes well beyond peanuts - he was a pioneer in helping understand how to enable diffusion of innovation, and a passionate advocate of sustainable farming practices.
Something a little different in this podcast - the beginnings of my quest to put innovation ideas to music!
There's plenty of discussion about early adopters and other segments of the population in terms of their approach to adopting new ideas. But this song looks at the other end of the spectrum - the 'laggards' for whom any kind of change is not necessarily welcome....
You can find the lyrics here:
Diversity matters in innovation. Particularly because it allows us to access a wide range of different viewpoints which can contribute to the innovation task both in terms of improving the front-end design and also by accelerating diffusion downstream because ideas developed with user input have a better chance of being compatible
But if we're going to involve users we're going to involve diversity we need to find methods to make sure we can deal with our aspiration towards inclusivity we need the tools and the methods to bring people in.
This podcast explores the theme of diversity and inclusivity in innovation. You can find a film version here
and a transcript here.
London Bridge isn’t falling down. In fact it’s in excellent health considering it straddled the river Thames for two hundred years before being dismantled, shipped halfway around the world and re-erected, stone by stone, in the middle of a lake in Arizona. If you were to take one of the pleasure craft which now ply their way across Lake Havasu you might find yourself looking a little more closely at those stones as you pass under one of the five wide arches of the bridge. It might be worth doing so because they have a fascinating innovation story to tell….
You can find a transcript of this podcast here
And a video film of it here
This episode looks at the opportunities for innovation in both incremental (do what we do but better) and radical (do something completely different) fashion.
It forms part of a series of resources to help learn about the ways in which we might master the skills and build capabilities in innovation and entrepreneurship.
For more details please follow this link:
https://johnbessant.org/the-craft-of-innovation-2/
We’re only just beginning to get a measure of how much innovation begins with user ideas. Studies by NESTA in the UK, for example suggest that close to 10% of product innovations and 15% of process innovation begin in this fashion – and that’s almost certainly an underestimate.
Users are a hidden ‘front end’ of innovation, highly motivated, prepared to experiment and tolerant of things not working right first time. So whatever we do – whether we’re a commercial company trying to launch new products, a public sector authority trying to improve services, a social innovator trying to work with disadvantaged people – it makes sense to try and bring this perspective to bear.
This podcast explores some of the challenges and opportunities in user innovation. It is based on a keynote talk given to the annual conference of the European network of Living Labs earlier this month.
You can find a transcript/blog version here and even a song about the topic here!
Innovation is, by its nature, uncertain - we don''t know in advance whether or not it will work, if the market will be there, if some other elements in the environment will shift. But we can build capabilities to help stack the deck in our favour, to enhance our chances of success. And the good news is that we have over 100 years of research into experiences of what makes for success (or failure) on which to draw.
This podcast is part of a short course on innovation management - if you'd like to learn more please see my website here
Innovation involves a journey but it's not a case of 'one size fits all'. Different contexts require different variations on the core framework we use to plan and make our journeys - as this podcast highlights
This forms part of a course on 'The craft of innovation' - you can find a transcript and much more on my website here
How we think about something shapes what we do about it. What we pay attention to, what we give resources to, what we manage. So it makes sense to check out whether the models we're using to work with innovation are as up-to-date and robust as they need to be.
This podcast explores that theme.
It forms part of a course , 'The Craft of Innovation' and you can find more details and a transcript of the podcast here at my website
No-one knows exactly but it’s a pretty fair guess that at any moment several hundred million people are communicating with each other, working, sharing, living big chunks of their lives via internet conferencing platforms. Doctors diagnose, businesses operate, music and theatre happen, parliaments sit – all in virtual space. But where and how did this technology emerge?
This podcast looks at the birth of the internet and explores some of the udnerying innovation lessons
For a transcript and more innovation resources see my website here
Twenty five years ago work in a research institute in Germany made it possible to compress audio files into a size manageable enough to broadcast and share - ushering in a wave of innovation which shook the music industry to its foundations and laid the foundations for today's world of streaming. This podcast ( the first of two) looks in more detail at the birth of the mp3....
Transcript/blog version here
And a YouTube film version here
We spend a lot of time worrying about the ‘front end’ of innovation - how to create new business models around products and services. But what happens when the project succeeds, and the new product or service is launched? If a new idea is to have impact (commercially or socially) then it needs to move to scale. People have to adopt it in large numbers, the ideas need to spread, the concepts diffuse. And it’s here, on the journey to scale, that we find a number of roadblocks, potholes and other obstacles to long-term innovation success.
This podcast explores some of the challenges on the journey to scale and some of the signposts which might help navigate the journey.
(You can find a blog version of this podcast here with transcript, and a film version here. And see my website for more useful resources around innovation management).
Bicycles are big business. It’s hard to get an exact figure but estimates suggest there are around 2 billion bikes in the world today – and after Covid-19 there might be a few more. People in lockdown have been turning to bikes as a form of exercise and as an alternative to public transport and they’re doing so in such numbers that waiting lists for new bikes run to three months or more.
But bicycles weren’t always around and perhaps it’s worth reflecting a little more on their history, not least because it can teach us some useful lessons about innovation. In particular how (or not) to manage it for impact and scale.
(You can find a transcript of the podcast on my website at https://johnbressant.org)
When you’re in the middle of the swamp and the alligators are snapping at your legs you can be forgiven for not giving too much precious headspace to thinking about plans for draining the swamp. But assuming you get out of that scrape in one piece it might be worth it.
The same is true for our current experience of a crisis-shaken world thanks to Covid-19. Even though there are very pressing concerns it might be useful to pause for a moment and try to draw out some insights and lessons which we might be able to leverage in the future, helping to create organizations which are a little less fragile.
(You can find a transcript and blog version of this podcast here)
People often use this phrase when talking about an innovation and the impact they hope it will have. But what’s the story behind sliced bread – and does it have any useful lessons for innovation managers today?
(For a transcript and blog version click here)
Innovation often makes us think about dramatic shiny new products emergng from high tech sectors. But we shouldn't forget that even the most mundane context can provide the trigger for change - and that change can have sigificant impact in our lives.
As this tale of the humble vacuum cleaner explains....
(for a transcript of the blog and more information see my website here).
If we’re serious about wanting a culture of innovation its probably useful to start by exploring what that might involve….
This episode ( the second of two parts) looks at how we might begin to develop the core values and behaviours we'd want to see in our innovation culture.
If we’re serious about wanting a culture of innovation its probably useful to start by exploring what that might involve….
This episode ( the first of two parts) looks at what mike make up an innovation culture - the core values and behaviours we'd want to see. And in the next episode we'll look at how we might begin to develop these......
Whether you call them innovation hubs, maker-spaces, fab-labs, accelerators or hotspots you can hardly turn a street corner or a magazine page before you bump into another example. The names may vary but the underlying idea is the same – a place where people can meet to get inspired and supported by each other, to articulate and co-create.
All of these ventures are built on the belief that innovation (particularly of the radical, game-changing variety) needs somewhere to incubate and flourish, ideally well away from the busy day-to-day mainstream. Spaces where ideas can grow, be prototyped, experimented with and ultimately taken to scale.
But there’s a risk that many of these labs are being set up simply because it is the fashionable thing to do. Expectations run high but the very ease with which they can be established means that it is also simple to close them down again.
This podcast looks at some of the challenges in creating effective innovation spaces - places which are much more than a chillout space with some beanbags on the floor and whiteboards on the walls.
This podcast looks at one of the challenges in staying ahead of competitors through innovation - how to stage memorable experiences which provide meaning for consumers? And how to build a community within which such a process can be maintained through co-creation and storytelling.
(I wrote this before the Covid-19 pandemic wrought havoc with the travel sector. But perhaps some of the themes within the podcast might resonate as organizations struggle to rebuild that industry, placing emphasis less on quantity and more on creating experiences through travel).
If you'd like to read/hear/watch more on these themes please visit my website, www.johnbessant.org
I first wrote this as a blog piece back in the middle of last year when the only crisis we had to wrry about was Brexit here in the UK. But the undelrying message - that crisis can provide powerful opportunities for innovation - remains important even as we confront a massivley more serious challenge to all of our lives.
This episode looks at the role of innovation as a way to enable survival and growth in organizations.
It forms part of a series of resources to help learn about the ways in which we might master the skills and build capabilities in innovation and entrepreneurship.
For more details please the this link:
https://johnbessant.org/the-craft-of-innovation-2/
This episode looks at how maintaining focus may not always be the right strategy for innovation
You can read the blog version at www.johnbessant.org
This episode looks at the importance of mental models about how innovation works - and the need to keep reviewing and updating those models
It forms part of a series of resources to help learn about the ways in which we might master the skills and build capabilities in innovation and entrepreneurship.
For more details please the this link:
https://johnbessant.org/the-craft-of-innovation-2/
This episode looks at the many reasons why innovation makes a difference - to individuals, to organizations, to sectors and to the whole of society.
It forms part of a series of resources to help learn about the ways in which we might master the skills and build capabilities in innovation and entrepreneurship.
For more details please the this link:
https://johnbessant.org/the-craft-of-innovation-2/
As any budding entrepreneur filling in their business model canvas will tell you, we need to think about the market and work on what our target segment will value. And that may take a lot of testing and pivoting around our original value proposition to shape and configure it to the point where it's going to diffuse to scale.
So far, so obvious. But this word ‘value’ is worth exploring a little more deeply. The Cambridge English Dictionary defines it as ‘…..the importance or worth of something for someone…’. And clearly much of the CES glitter is, in its nascent form, not valuable because the things on offer feel far from our daily lives, glimmers on a horizon of what might be but a long way from our current reality.
But value isn’t just a label we attach to things, it’s also about our core beliefs around what matters. That Cambridge definition goes on to suggest that value is ‘….the beliefs people have, especially about what is right and wrong and what is most important in life, that control their behaviour’ Values viewed in this way are critical to the question of whether or not we adopt innovations.
Brief introduction to the idea of innovation and the role entrepreneurs play in making it happen.
(part of online course 'The craft of innovation'.
For more details see https://johnbessant.org)