Managing innovation newsletter
Welcome to another edition of our regular newsletter with updates on ideas, insights and useful resources around the theme of managing innovation. (You’re receiving this because at some stage you’ve indicated interest in my work, via the website, LinkedIn, etc. If you’d like to continue to receive this Newsletter please subscribe via the button)
Contents
Ideas and insights
Navigating uncertainty - 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 blog/podcast we explore five which spring quickly to mind.
AI is a no brainer - 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. This blog piece reviews what we’re learning about its implications for innovation management
Striking an innovation chord - I’m currently recharging my solar cells and generally relaxing by Mediterranean shores, with my eyes gently closed. And listening, 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. But whatever the journey there’s a pretty good chance a guitar will feature somewhere in the mix.
Which reminded me of this piece I wrote to explore the fascinating innovation history of that instrument…
Interviews and perspectives
Impact intrapreneurship - we’ve got a huge challenge around social innovation. If we’re serious about trying to help fix our planet with everything that’s going wrong with it then it’s going to take a lot of effort. More precisely, a lot of innovation. It’s one of the few things around which we can get consensus. 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.
Swimming in the innovation soup - some reflections on ideas and inspiration emergignf rom the recent ISPIM Conference in Tallinn.
Open Innovation Thursdays - a great initiative to bring key contributors to the recent Oxford Handbook of Open Innovation and their ideas around open innovation to a wider audience via a series of conversations hosted by Marisol Menendez
Research and recent publications
The Scaling value playbook - a practical guide for creating innovation networks for impact and growth. Something my colleague Ian Gray and I have been working on over the past two years, trying to draw practical tools and advice from the experiences of many different innovators on their journey to scale. There’s a companion website with a variety of tools, cases and other resources.
Additions and updates to the resource bank/supermarket
(check out this link to find these and other resources)
The innovation navigator, an approach developed by Benoit Gailly and colleagues at the University of Louvain in Belgium with a wide range of useful resources on their website….
Nick Himo’s YouTube channel which has some excellent video materials on innovation, especially linked to the business model canvas
Some ISPIM conference-linked resources.
Christian Thurnes ran a great workshop on improvisation - Improvation - at the recent conference and also shared some helpful resources including his TikTok-Challenge, an AI-Explore-workshop by SAP AppHouse and other resources also offered by SAP here
Design Dash - some helpful tools around the design thinking workshops which Carina Leue-Bensch shared
We scheduled a series of workshops, all of which were designed to be interactive, entertaining and useful. You can find more details via the links:
How should we be using GenAI in our teaching?
Click the links for more details, and don’t worry that you missed them - we hope to re-run many of these as online events in the near future.
Links to useful toolkits - one of the important ways of transforming useful innovation research and experience into practice is through the use of tools - frameworks to help with thinking and action. There are some very helpful resources out there and we’re trying to build a library of useful links including some which we’ve found useful in working in the sustainability and innovation space - for example the extensive resources offered by the Network for Business Sustainability
Downloadable open access resources from the IMPACT project, the GAMIFY project looking at the use of games in innovation management and the VISION project, looking at the changing landscape for learning and skills/capability development around innovation
Mastering the craft of innovation This online course has been running for four years and has been used by a wide variety of students on courses around the world as well as by individuals with an interest in how to manage innovation. Their feedback has been extremely helpful and I’ve now launched a streamlined and updated version; the next stage is to develop further trans-media courses with more focused content and even to try and recruit AI as a co-pilot to work with students! Watch this space…
Introducing entrepreneurship - extending my new series of short videos introducing key themes in developing entrepreneurship capabilities
Other news
Bringing Innovation to the Classroom: A Showcase of Innovative Teaching
When: 9th September (13:00 - 14:30 BST; 14:00 - 15:30 CEST)
Where: OnlineEthan Mollick continues to offer some great perspectives on AI and his background as a professor working in entrepreneurship means there’s always a strong innovation management flavour to his thoughts. He’s now drawn together valuable resources such as key prompts on another website, More useful things… and his book ‘Co-intelligence’ is finally out, well worth a look. Together with his partner he has produced an excellent series of videos to help introduce the topic to anyone with an interest in TCI - worth checking out!
Bernard Marr has a useful feature on the way BCG uses AI to augment its consulting work, including extensive journeys in the direction of innovation
Very useful McKinsey piece on the challenges of scaling innovation
Watch/ listen/ learn with me
There’s now an updated and streamlined version of the Craft of Innovation - click here to explore
I’ve written quite a few books and articles over the years but these days I’m also working hard at developing other channels. So if you’d like to watch more of my stuff, please click here for my YouTube channel
And if you’d like to listen, I’m podcasting here and you can find me on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and other major sites