Innovation deepens our knowledge and understanding of the world, it extends our reach and access to resources. More importantly, innovation expands the realm of what we can do with all our knowledge and resources: deliver new goods and products, bring forward new types of organisations and services, and in more general terms develop new ideas … Continue reading Exploring the adjacent possible – The origin of good ideas
Just a few weeks ago, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the decision to award this year's Nobel Prize in Economics to Paul Romer for integrating technological change into macroeconomic analysis. That's a good reason for thinking through the long-term history of innovative activity, for investigating how technological change itself changed over time, and what the future might hold for us.
Innovation is never easy. Regardless of its purpose, you'll always have a lot to take into account: needs and expectations, resource implications, rules and regulations, the state of the art as well as technical limitations of legacy systems. Wrestling with all these constraints can easily distract you from your ultimate goal. To help you find your innovation focus, I'll revisit two conceptual maps I've discussed earlier to develop a hybrid navigation aid that combines the best of both concepts.
Let's face it: your problems are like spoiled brats, just too willing to misbehave. And they can easily afford to be ill-tempered, irrational, incoherent, inconsistent. However, you cannot. Not as an individual, not as a leader, not as an organisation. For you must uphold some level of coherence and consistency to maintain your credibility (and I would add: your self-esteem). How can you achieve that goal if your problems obviously don't play fair?
The Cynefin framework is a sense-making model that can serve as a map to give you some orientation in challenging situations of decision-making or problem-solving. Recently, I took a closer look at how you could read this map and why it is prudent to avoid the Southern domains. Today, I'll investigate the main differences between the Eastern and the Western domains and how those will affect your chances of success.
understanding innovation 