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
Innovation is rubbish! - no, not a belated realisation that I’ve been working in the wrong field but an exploration of the ways in which innovation can help meet some of the big sustainability challenges of our time
Changing the world, one innovation at a time - I’ve been working recently with some innovation teams from across the United Nations, helping them think about how to scale their already impressive innovations. And it prompted me to dig a little deeper into the important field of social innovation…
Lessons from a skateboard - if you’d asked me what ollies, decks, trucks and kicktails were a month ago I’d have greeted you with a blank stare. But now I’m an expert, having been drawn in to the fascinating innovation world of skateboards…
Peanut-powered innovation - whilst working with one of the UN teams (see above) looking at radical innovation across the farming sector I was reminded of the wonderful work which Washington Carver carried out at the turn of the last century and how much his insights still have to offer in trying to promote adoption of innovation…
Interviews and perspectives
As part of the UN work I’ve been helping put together a series of podcasts and webinars around the theme and challenges of scaling innovation. You can watch/listen to them here:
The Teaching and Coaching Special Interest Group at ISPIM have been organizing a series of webinars around key themes of interest and Tony Morgan gave a great talk on diverging and converging - you can watch it here.
Katharina de Vita also organized the first of a series of sessions on new teaching tools - as she explained in the invitation: ‘Paper aeroplanes, Lego, musical instruments – what do you bring to the classroom? Do you use fresh and engaging ways to teach your innovation management students? We are excited to announce a series of short taster sessions where you can share one of your most engaging and imaginative teaching sessions, along with the innovative techniques and resources that you use to make the subject come alive’.
Don’t worry if you missed it, there’ll be a recording available shortly.
Research and recent publications
Just published - the new edition of our textbook on ‘Innovation and entrepreneurship’, now in its 4th incarnation and updated with chapters on digital innovation and social innovation, plus many new online resources as support materials
Scaling the summit - a primer. Following our research report on the challenge of scaling innovation this primer offers a practical guide to teams thinking about scaling their innovations.
Just in time to celebrate the 21st birthday of Henry Chesbrough’s valuable open innovation framework for thinking about innovation in a knowledge-rich world comes this extensive handbook covering and updating key themes across the landscape (I’ve even managed to slip in a chapter of my own…) The authors are now highlighting key contributions through a series of online webinar conversations on LinkedIn - see here for more…
Practicing Responsibility in Business Schools - Implications for Teaching, Research, and Innovation, Edited by Bjørn T. Asheim, Thomas Laudal and Reidar J. Mykletun, Edward Elgar - I’ve contributed a chapter to this excellent open access collection of cases and perspectives looking to explore what and how we teach the next generation of organizational leaders
From supply chain learning to learning supply chains - a great collection of papers on this important theme of inter-organizational learning to enhance innovation
Creativity for innovation management, Ina Goller and John Bessant, Routledge Publishers– this new edition of our book exploring the challenges of creativity and how we can develop and deploy these skills
Additions and updates to the resource bank/supermarket
(check out this link to find these and other resources)
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
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 social innovation space - see, for example the NESTA toolkit, the Humanitarian Innovation Guide and the Business model sustainability guide
Other news
ISPIM’s annual conference takes place in Tallinn, Estonia this year - as always a great place to meet people from the many groups interested in innovation management
ISPIM Porto Alegre - part of the ISPIM Connects programme linking researchers and practitioners in Latin America
A useful post on the ways in which we might use storytelling in innovation, with some great tools and examples
Ethan 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…
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