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Innovation doesn't just happen. It's not like the cartoons - a lightbulb flashes on above someone's head and that's it. No - it's a journey and we need to understand how best to prepare for that journey, whatever kind of value we are trying to create. This podcast is about some useful lessons we might take on board to help develop our capabilities.For more, see my website:https://johnbessant.org
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Leading experts in innovation & entrepreneurship discuss about their recent work. Find out more at www.wiley.com/go/innovation
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Impact intrepreneurship - leveraging the power of organizations for social innovation
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Send us a Text Message. We've got a huge challenge around social innovation - to help fix the planet with all the things that we're doing to it and all the things that are happening it's going to take a lot of effort. More precisely a lot of innovation. Even the Secretary-General of the UN has said we can only hit our Sustainable Development Goals …
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Send us a Text Message. ISPIM — the International Society for Professionals in Innovation Management — was founded in 1974 to create a community of practice around innovation management. It was an early response to the challenges of actually making it happen — and it remains one of the best meeting places to mix-up academic researchers and teachers…
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Send us a Text Message. 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 mag…
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Send us a Text Message. We spend so much of our time thinking about important innovation but maybe we should spare a thought for what might be called ‘irrelevant innovation’? And explore round the edges of this phenomenon — is it all wacky stuff or are there circumstances where it has more to offer? Is it a matter of framing, are we missing an inno…
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Send us a Text Message. Innovation is a multi-player game. The image of the lone hero innovator is a myth. Even celebrated soloists like Thomas Edison or James Watt had their army of assistants working behind the scenes. Alexander Bell wouldn’t have been able to bring the telephone to the world without being able to demonstrate the device by having…
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Send us a Text Message. Another innovation song.... Last week I was helping run a series of workshops supporting social innovators from across the United Nations system in thinking through how they were going to scale their great innovations now that they had successfully piloted them and proved their value. Scaling innovation isn’t easy but it’s i…
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Changing the world, one innovation at a time
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Send us a Text Message. Necessity may the mother of invention — but in today’s world she’s a pretty fraught mum, trying to deal with thousands of kids tugging at her skirts, pulling at her arms and wrapping themselves around her legs. All screaming out for attention. We’re not short of challenges which affect the very basics of trying to live our l…
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Send us a Text Message. What have ollies, decks, trucks, popsicles, cruisers and kicktails got in common? If you’d asked me that back in December I would have quietly assumed you were from another planet. But now I’m happy to say I’m in a good position to enlighten you… They are all terms used in skateboarding, a subiect in which I;ve had a crash c…
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Send us a Text Message. Why waste recycling and reuse may represent a valuable entrepreneurial opportunity… There's a well-known piece of Yorkshire wisdom, ‘where there’s muck, there’s brass’. Waste needn’t be a problem to be hidden away — buried or burnt to get rid of it. Instead there are real opportunities in waste — as plenty of innovators have…
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Send us a Text Message. Some seasonal thoughts to accompany all good wishes....! (You can find the transcript here) If you'd like to explore more innovation stories, or access a wide range of resources to help work with innovation, then please visit my website here. You can find a rich variety of cases, tools, videos, activities and other resources…
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Start-up success - an interview with Faisal Abid, Co-founder and CTO of Eirene Cremations
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Send us a Text Message. Start-up success - or not? Faisal Abid shares some fascinating insights into the do's - and don't's of trying to launch and grow a new venture, drawing in particular on his experience in founding and growing a number of businesses including AI start-up zoom.ai and his current work with Eirene Cremations where he is trying to…
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Send us a Text Message. Taking an innovation from a small-sized success story to something which delivers value at scale is not an easy one. The Holy Grail of impact has a lot in common with that elusive quest pursued by King Arthur’s knights, taking them along strange paths, meeting with dragons and disasters and lasting a long time. Similar odds …
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Send us a Text Message. We talk a lot about learning by doing in the agile innovation process, especially in the context of start-ups. But it’s hard to capture that learning as you go along when so much else is happening as you desperately try to find your way through the fog of uncertainty. Which is why it’s really valuable to have someone who run…
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Send us a Text Message. Innovation is all about trying to convince others — people to help develop your idea, sponsors to back you, markets to buy in to your great new thing. So it makes sense to spend time and effort crafting a tale which will draw them in, intrigue them, capture their attention. Of course you don't want to oversell but as long as…
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Send us a Text Message. Why evidence is so important for scaling innovation A good idea will sell itself, right? Unfortunately not – Emerson was spectacularly wrong when he suggested that all you needed to do was build that better mousetrap to have the world beating a path to your door. History is full of examples of innovations that, whilst being …
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Send us a Text Message. I'm running a course on entrepreneurship and was looking for a way to help students remember some key milestones on the journey - value proposition, minimum viable product, prototyping, business model development, etc. So trying it out in the form of a song.... You can watch it on my YouTube channel here, complete with lyric…
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Send us a Text Message. For our ancestors, creativity was a matter of survival. Not being big, strong or fast meant that if we couldn’t think our way out of a problem (like an approaching predator), then we’d not be around for long! Dealing with the daily struggle to survive required us to be innovative, and the key to that was the ability to imagi…
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Send us a Text Message. How creating experiences for underserved markets can be a key innovation strategy It’s summertime, at least here in the northern hemisphere and chances are that August is a holiday month. Which might well see you sitting somewhere and watching an exotic sunset, glass of something suitably refreshing in your hand. As you see …
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Send us a Text Message. An interview with Hannes Erler, Strategic Director for Innovation Ecosystems, Swarovski This wide-ranging interview looks back at how a major European company grew over a hundred-plus years from a small engineering start-up to become a global player in the fashion, jewellery and accessories business through constant attentio…
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Why value networks matter in scaling innovation
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Send us a Text Message. There comes a time in innovation when you realise you might have taken on something a bit too big. No matter how hard you throw yourself into the challenge, creating value from your idea is going to need a little help. Changing the world, or even a small piece of it, takes a lot of push. That’s the moment when you realise yo…
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Cracking the innovation code - an interview with Robyn Bolton
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Send us a Text Message. It's hard to disagree with the idea that innovation-led growth is of paramount importance, but how often do we associate it with taking risks and learning? This episode offers an enlightening conversation with Robyn Bolton, founder and ‘Chief Navigator’ of Milezero, a consultancy specialising in helping organizations think t…
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Send us a Text Message. Time plays a surprisingly important role in innovation, both as an enabler and as a shaper of the process and its outcomes. For example, the early development of reliable timepieces allowed accurate navigation which opened up the possibilities of global trade; without that the whole Industrial Revolution might have been a mu…
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Send us a Text Message. These days innovation spaces have become something of a fashion accessory; no large organization can afford not to be seen without having one. And start-up spaces have followed a similar trend; there’s been an explosion of support to try and tap into this potential source of local economic growth. On the surface these look l…
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Underground innovation - how giving people space can amplify innovation efforts
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Send us a Text Message. We know today that smart companies who care about innovation invest in the capacity for innovation — R&D and market research, future scoping, etc. Organized innovation, buying themselves options on the future. All good — but maybe only focusing on the formal means potentially missing out on what might be happening undergroun…
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IMPACT - Building values-based innovation cultures for sustainable business impact – an interview with Prof. Dr. Henning Breuer
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Send us a Text Message. Sustainability matters - of course. You'd have to be living in a bubble not to be aware of the wide-ranging conversation on this theme. But how to translate the rhetoric - whether it be the UN or EU's sustainable development goals or the aspirational strategies of businesses - into something practical? That's the focus of th…
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Send us a Text Message. Mexico City, Olympic Games, 1968. The stadium is packed, the wider world looks on via TV coverage. Everywhere there’s an air of expectancy but also an awareness that at such high altitude it’s going to be hard for athletes to beat their best. Records are there to be broken, you have to hope for something special. And in the …
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Send us a Text Message. Close your eyes and imagine for a moment a computer room in the early days of the industry. Chances are you'll picture large wardrobe-sized metal cabinets whirring away with white-coated attendants tending to the machines. And it won't be long before your gaze lands on the ubiquitous spools of tape being loaded and unloaded.…
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I'm in love with Chat-GPT - another innovation song
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Send us a Text Message. I'm in love with Chat-GPT Another innovation song, inspired by an article in the Journal of Product Innovation Management by Frank Piller and colleagues, in which they put Chat-GPT through its paces as an innovation assistant. It performed surprisingly well at diverse tasks including search and analysis, trend spotting and i…
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Send us a Text Message. How machine learning is transforming the innovation game Machine learning has its roots back in experiments with ‘artificial intelligence’ in the 1970s but has come to represent a powerful technological trajectory as the idea of mimicking human neural networks and their learning capabilities has been explored. And now we hav…
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Send us a Text Message. What do Mickey Mouse, vacuum cleaners, air travel and light-bulbs have in common? More than you’d think, especially if you look to the originators of those widely different things. All of their innovators spent a great deal of time being knocked back, living through failures and generally struggling to take their ideas forwa…
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Send us a Text Message. 2022 was a record year for home delivery of parcels and packages. After the Covid-19 lockdowns the idea of remote shopping became an even bigger reality and changed the behaviour patterns of millions. It’s a habit which is hard to break — even when there are increasing disturbances in the delivery end of things like strikes …
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Send us a Text Message. Christmas, as my 6 year old never tires of reminding me, is coming. Never mind that technically it’s a month away and forget the efforts I make, Scrooge-like, not to allow any trace of the season to cross our threshold until at least 1st December. She excitedly points out that everywhere — the TV and online adverts, the shop…
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Send us a Text Message. Birds do it. Bees do it. Even educated fleas do it….. Well, I’m not sure about the last one but someone somewhere has probably done some research on the topic. We humans certainly do it, especially when we’re young. I’m not talking about falling in love but about extending Cole Porter’s observations to a different world, som…
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Send us a Text Message. Season of mists, mellow fruitfulness — and those rare but wonderful days when the sun smiles down benignly. I was strolling in the park, absorbing the warmth, my attention was taken by an ice cream. Or rather, to the face of a toddler who was very happily getting himself around an eminently lickable cone, with the usual resu…
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Send us a Text Message. Have you ever felt the urge to kick the photocopier? Or worse? That time when you desperately needed to make sixty copies of a workshop handout five minutes before your session begins. Or when you needed a single copy of your passport or driving licence, it’s the only way you can prove your identity to the man behind the des…
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Send us a Text Message. This one was written in part as a contribution to the retirement celebrations of the Father of Open Innovation, Henry Chesbrough ...... Here are the lyrics: Open innovation 1. We’ve been innovating now for quite a long time It’s the big thing that has helped us to survive Find new ways to do things, keep on learning down the…
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Send us a Text Message. Multiple independent invention is surprisingly common — there have been many research studies highlighting the pattern. Examples include the blast furnace (invented independently in China, Europe and Africa) and the crossbow (invented independently in China, Greece, Africa, northern Canada, and the Baltic countries). And the…
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Send us a Text Message. Innovation fails — sometimes spectacularly so. It’s hard enough when that failure comes early on during the start-up phase — that brilliant idea which somehow isn’t quite as brilliant when it collides with the first few encounters with the market. And when no amount of pivoting is going to save it. It’s hard but it’s a matte…
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Send us a Text Message. How innovation management is changing and why we still need strategy There’s no shortage of scary headlines reminding us of the looming challenge of digital transformation. The message is clear. On the one hand if we don’t climb aboard the digital bandwagon we’ll be left behind in a kind of late Stone Age, slowly crumbling t…
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Why creative conflict matters in innovation
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Send us a Text Message. One of the huge cast of characters created by the wonderful humorous writer P. G. Wodehouse was Wilmot Mulliner. Perhaps not so well known as Jeeves and Wooster he’s nevertheless an interesting subject. We’re introduced to him at a difficult time in his life; he’s employed in the burgeoning film industry, working for Mr Schn…
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Send us a Text Message. Innovation is all about knowledge spaghetti. Just like a plate of pasta innovation involves many different strands. Only this time we are talking about knowledge - technical knowledge, market knowledge, legal knowledge, financial knowledge and so on. They need to be woven together to create value. And these knowledge strands…
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Releasing the power of users - why healthcare innovation is going to depend increasingly on the insights of patients
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Send us a Text Message. These days there are very few certainties but this is one of them. We’re all going to depend increasingly on healthcare innovation for the quality of our future lives. Keeping ourselves healthy, coping with chronic ailments, living into old age with dignity and independence. We all want this — and we’re going to need all the…
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Send us a Text Message. The suggestion box sounds like a very old approach to the challenge of high involvement innovation - how to engage the majority of people in an organization in the innovation agenda. It conjures images of dusty boxes tucked away in the corner into which people have long since given up posting ideas. But its successors - coll…
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At the Innovation Ball - another innovation song..
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Send us a Text Message. Innovation is all about uncertainty - no-one knows quite what's around the corner. So there's a limit to how far we can plan to work with it - and instead we need to develop the skills of agility. As this song suggests, it’s a bit like learning to dance.... Dancing at the Innovation Ball The thing with innovation, this is so…
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Making innovation count - why measurement matters
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Send us a Text Message. The great management writer W. Edwards Deming had a powerful introduction to his talks on quality management. Pulling out a dollar bill and waving it in front of the audience he would point out the wording: ‘In God we trust’ — and then go on to comment that in business life the same principle could be applied, but with the a…
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Not invented here? Why letting go is sometimes the hardest part of innovation
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Send us a Text Message. History is full of examples of innovations which, despite their promise, have been resisted by established players – the ‘not invented here’ effect. And although we’re familiar with the problem it doesn’t seem to have gone away; there are still plenty of examples to be found across today’s innovation landscape. One candidate…
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Send us a Text Message. Here’s a challenge. Close your eyes and try to visualise an entrepreneur. There’s a good chance that what you’ve come up with will be one of the usual suspects — Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Jack Ma, perhaps some of the older versions like Steve Jobs or even Thomas Edison. Hopefully there’s a fair number of women represented, play…
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Send us a Text Message. What kinds of skills are going to be needed in organizations as they move towards an increasingly ‘phygital’ (= hybrid physical and digital) world of operations? Why are the skills of creativity, innovation and entrepreneurship becoming so important? And how might people be trained on a continuing basis to acquire and deploy…
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Delivering digital transformation - an interview with Alan Brown
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Send us a Text Message. The challenge of digital innovation is everywhere. It’s hard to escape the talk of ‘revolutionary impact’ or ‘digital disruption’ or the need for new strategies to cope with ‘digital transformation’. But what’s really going on, where are the big questions we should be addressing and how might this affect our approach to inno…
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Moving to an online world of innovation training
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Send us a Text Message. Podcasts are a bit like London buses. You wait a long time and then three come along all at once! This week we feature more in the series around the challenges to education and training in innovation , creativity and entrepreneurship - the main theme of the VISION project. We’ve already seen that there are likely to be signi…
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