By John Bessant
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 jo
... more
The podcast currently has 118 episodes available.
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
Send us a text
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
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
Send us a text
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
Send us a text
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
Send us a text
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
Send us a text
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
Send us a text
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
Send us a text
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
Send us a text
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
The podcast currently has 118 episodes available.