Newsletter
Welcome to another edition of our regular newsletter with updates on ideas, insights and useful resources around the theme of managing innovation. And with it comes our best wishes for the season and the hope that the New Year brings a bright and innovative future.
Contents
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Ideas and insights
Think ‘Singer’ - and the innovation which comes to mind is the sewing machine which bears his name. But dig a little deeper and you’ll find a fascinating story of a man whose passion for the dramatic arts was matched only by his genius for invention and entrepreneurship. Born in Pittstown, New York, in 1811, Singer’s early life saw him hustle through odd jobs, but his heart belonged to the stage—he even ran away at age twelve to join the Rochester Players. Yet, the precarious nature of an acting career eventually pushed him toward a machinist apprenticeship, a skill that would ultimately change the world.
Singer’s early inventions included a patented rock-drilling machine, which he sold for a significant sum, allowing him to return to the dramatic world with his own troupe, the “Merritt Players”. However, it was his 1851 improvements to the sewing machine that cemented his legacy. He didn’t invent the sewing machine from scratch; his gift was in adapting and recombining different elements together with his own ideas. The resulting machine was a powerhouse, capable of sewing 900 stitches per minute, dramatically outpacing an accomplished seamstress’s rate of 40.
Success wasn’t instant. The machines were initially expensive at $125, and Singer joined other would-be sewing machine makers in an expensive legal conflict over intellectual property. But in 1856 the major manufacturers, including Singer, agreed to pool their patents and form the Sewing Machine Combination, and with those legal hurdles cleared Singer and his partner Edward Cabot Clark, were able to pioneer a systems approach to business that anticipated Henry Ford. Singer opened the world’s first facility for mass-producing something other than firearms in 1857, quickly cutting production costs. This efficiency allowed the price to drop from $125 to $30, causing demand to explode. By 1860, Singer was the largest sewing machine manufacturer globally.
Singer’s personal life was just as dramatic as his career—he had a total of sixteen children with four different women in New York alone before fleeing to England with his final partner, Isabella Boyer, who was reportedly the model for the Statue of Liberty. Upon his death in 1871, he left behind a fortune of around $13 million (roughly $400 billion today) and a global company. More importantly, he left the world the sewing machine, a technology that was a powerful symbol of industrial and social innovation, fundamentally redefining the role of women and the home dressmaking business.
We’re in something of an ‘invention crisis’. On one side, you have the latest futuristic gadgets—like a stringless AI guitar or a robot cat that cools your coffee. On the other, you have millions who still lack basic human needs like healthcare, clean water, and shelter. This blog/podcast challenges the direction of modern ingenuity and showcases why hopeful innovation dedicated to social good matters most.
It showcases powerful examples of necessity-driven solutions, including “frugal innovation” success stories, like the model that made cataract surgery affordable for all (Aravind) and the Mark 2 handpump that changed the game for clean water access (UNICEF).
We explore systemic innovations like CMAM (using PlumpyNut) that fight acute malnutrition and the simple ‘plant in a box’ that decentralizes oxygen supply for pneumonia.
And we look at how modern technology is applied for good—from Zipline delivery drones to Community Health Workers (CHWs) using mHealth platforms to close critical care gaps globally.
Innovation is a precious resource. Perhaps we need to rmeind ourselves of the difference between novelty and necessity, and be inspired by the people and organizations actively creating a better, more equitable world.
Ever been cornered at a holiday party, forced onto the dance floor, and realised your best move is... well, the awkward “dad-dance” (or “Murder on the Dancefloor” in my case)? This highly relatable scenario is the perfect metaphor for how many organizations approach innovation. They might get lucky once, stumbling into a great idea, but to repeat that success—to build continuous value from ideas—requires moving beyond luck and developing actual, practiced innovation routines.
Just like professional dancers learn and codify patterns of steps—from the basic waltz to modern, elaborate choreography —organizations need clear, shared behavior patterns for innovation. These routines define how you search for opportunities, choose which projects to back, develop prototypes, and engage with customers.
It’s not just learning to move your feet. There’s a second problem. The “music”—the external environment—is a fast-paced, accelerating mashup of new technologies, new markets, and new rules that can knock your best moves off-kilter. A routine that worked last year might leave you paralyzed this year. This is where the meta-capability known as ‘Dynamic capability’ comes in. It’s the ability to step back, review, refresh, and sometimes completely replace your deep-seated innovation routines to match the changing environment.
Perspectives
There’s a lot going on out there and in this section we try to pick up on interesting stories which shine a light on developments along the innovation frontier and how we think about organizing and managing the process.
The big innovation news item this year has to be that innovation has made it to the Big News stage, at least in the form of a Nobel Prize being awarded for the ways in which our udnerstanding of the central role it plays. This is one of many pieces which explores the contribution of the prizewinners - and also invites a shout-out to many others who’ve toiled in the same field!
It’s worrying to note that we are no longer in a VUCA world - volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous. Now we have to learn to live in BANI world - brittle, anxious, non-linear and incomprehensible! Fortunately we do have some tools to help us navigate and the excellent Cynefin framework originally developed by Dave Snowden has considerable explanatory power. This is a useful explainer video…
A couple of good new books on innovation recently published - Barbara Salopek’s take on future fit innovation and Thomas Durand on technology strategies and how to crreate competitive advntage with them.
I’ve often argued about our need to udnerstand better the mechanics of adoption and diffusion so I’m grateful to Alexander Alexandrov for pointing out this excellent video by Simon Sinek on the topic. and another one here
This is a nice visualisation by Linus Dahlander helping make sense of the patterns of R&D investment over the past decades
In a recent discussion at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, five seasoned entrepreneurs in residence shared the strategies that distinguish startups that thrive from those that struggle when resources are limited. Watch the video to hear what these successful entrepreneurs have to say.
This is a useful toolkit for helping with with futures and foreesight produced by ELRHA, aimed at humanitarian innovators but with wider relevance
Another book recommendation - Martin Curley has been working for a long time in the field of healthcare innovation and his book Stay left, Shift left, 10x offers some radical new thinking explained in this video
This is a thoughtful piece by Andres Rodriguez-Pose and collegaues which presents research challenging the idea that innovation policy is all about laboratories, patents, and research-intensive firms. They argue that in much of Europe’s economic periphery, the real story of innovation lies elsewhere, in the Doing-Using-Interacting mode. DUI covers the everyday ingenuity of small firms, where know-how is improvised on the shop floor, refined through trial and error, and transmitted through networks of trust.
R&D Today has an excellent newsletter and recently did a series of features around where we are with open innovation - successful experiences, remaining challenges and the way the frontier now looks including Wim Van Haverbeke’s new model for ‘outside-outside’ innovation.
this is an interesting review of multiple examples of ‘ignition schools’ - not training grounds for would-be arsonists but an insight into best pracrtice in entrepreneurship support
sometimes it seems that innovation accelerators are everywhere; the question is whether or not they work. In this piece researchers took a systematic look at the World Food Programme’s version and found that it definitely did, offering valuable lessons to others
It’s a mark of how fast AI has moved that what might have been a few ‘footnotes from the AI corner’ a year or so back have now swollen to take over a substantioal part of this newsletter! Here are few useful pieces:
An interesting report from the Centre for Humanitarian Action on the potential benefits and challenges taised by AI innovation in the sector
Roberto Verganti has written for many years about the core role of design in the world of innovation and I came across this piece which looks ahead to what AI might mean in this space
Marek Kowalkewicz is always good value with bis well-informed perspectives on AI. In this piece he looks at the explosion of choice which AI-generated innovation makes possible - and illustrates it by inviting us to visit this website - anycrap.com - where AI will generate a plausible version of any wild product idea you might have!
He also offers some powerful reflection in this piece on the age-old innovation problem of re-inventing the wheel and highlights how AI is helping combat it.
Alan Brown has a helpful piece on five different models for AI application
and finally (snapping at the heels of my own heroic efforts tow rite innovation songs all by meyself) we have AI lowering the barriers to entry to musical takes on innovation - here’s Paul Sloane’s song We don’t need no innovation
and honorable mention to Tudor Rickards, true to his title as Emeritus Professor of Creativity and now shairng his thoughts via some (excellent) songs performed by ‘Tara Turner’ using his lyrics set to AI music!
Additions and updates to the resource bank/supermarket
A quick reminder; if you are a paid subscriber you can get free access to all our online courses, digital downloads, e-books, etc.
For some time I’ve been working with the Institute for Learning Innovation at the Friedrich Alexander University (FAU) in Erlangen-Nürnberg in Germany to produce a series of video films about innovation and entrepreneurship. These are now being released on the FAU YouTube channel and you can find them here via this playlist. Other films will continue to be added over the next few months.
I’ve just finished a new book ‘Effective entrepneurship’ which explores the basics of the start-up journey. It’s designed to help anyone with a desire to make a change happen - whether it’s a commercial venture or a social innovation project. There are extensive links to cases, tools and do-it-yourself learning activities; you can find out more here and it is available here as a digital download. Or from Amazon here.
We’ve designed it as a companion text to run alongside our online course of the same name - more details here
We’ve also now added an ‘AU coach’ as part of the ‘Mastering the craft of innovation’ course which will help explore, deal with queries and generally support users of the course.
We’re continuing to uopdate our case library with new materials and extensive AI support; You can find them all at this link; new additions include:
Trashin
3M
Invention of the lightbulb
Dunnhumby
Pacto Alegre
Tidewave
Cash programming
Sweeping the floor with innovation
Zara
Hella
Aquapax
Eastville Community Shop
DJI drones
M-PESA
Imaging industry
Brighton Beard Company
Liberty Global.
I’ve been writing a few songs (still soldiering on without AI’s help in that direction!) around challenges in entrepreneurship including the challenge of telling a good story, the need to dance your way around the prototype/pivot world of agile innovation (the Innovation Ball) and a song designed to help reflect on key lessons to take on board for the journey to bring your idea to life…