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
At first glance, innovation and foreign policy seem worlds apart. Researchers, entrepreneurs, and business people on one side, ambassadors, diplomats, and policy makers on the other. But they have more in common than first meets the eye. And more need to collaborate than ever before.
In the previous post, I introduced a graphical overview of innovation's inner workings, embedded in a circle of useful knowledge that innovation draws from, and contributes to. That chart might create an impression of innovation as a messy, even unwieldy process. To highlight the structure underneath, today I'll dissect it a little further. A simplified storyline of … Continue reading More sketches of an innovation
We all know that successful innovation is not easy to achieve. And still, we sometimes seem to hope that the 1% inspiration is more important than the 99% transpiration. Well, it's not. But instead of using a thousand words, this time I've tried to cast the story into a single graphic. Using my earlier working … Continue reading Sketching an innovation
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
understanding innovation 