When you look at the detailed results of a couple of recent elections or referenda, you’ll find clear symptoms for a serious divide between voters in cities and voters in rural areas. Just take the following three examples, which all occurred over the last twelve months: the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom in June … Continue reading Disrupting politics
It's always useful to look back what happened, to analyse the past and try to learn something from it. But the real fun comes when you unleash your imagination, apply some of the learning and think about what could likely happen in the future. And that is actually my plan for this summer break: to think … Continue reading Ready for disruptions?
Over the past few weeks, I've discussed how our innovation endeavour has become too focused on known problems. We have submersed ourselves in the bubble of the known problems to an extent that we are largely unprepared to deal with the unexpected. And that self-imposed myopia creates serious challenges. My argument essentially went through three steps: our established structures work very well for … Continue reading Dealing with unknown problems
It's no surprise: for problems that have been around for a while, we usually develop certain structures to deal with them efficiently. Think about structures as organisations like companies or research laboratories, or processes like quality assurance or even the scientific method. Each of these established organisations and ready-made processes are designed for a purpose: to solve a specific known problem. And that's what … Continue reading How our innovation structures deceive us
There's a lot of talk about the Digital Revolution and the effects it had, has, might have. Let's take a step back to put things into perspective: Could it be that this revolution is a lot larger than we usually think? Are we currently experiencing the beginnings of a major transformation not only of our technological base, but of the very … Continue reading The Third of the Grand Revolutions
understanding innovation 