Managing innovation - creating value from ideas
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
Managing innovation - creating value from ideas
Cartography matters! - the importance of maps in navigating the uncertain journey of innovation
It’s easy to take maps for granted — but we’d be pretty stuck without them. Maps have been one of the most important human inventions for millennia, allowing humans to explain and navigate their way through the world. They seem to have been — independently invented by many cultures across the globe, and they’ve been around a very long time. Fragments etched on tusks or scratched on stones, dating back 25000 years or more all point to maps as something important. Which makes sense from an evolutionary point of view — it would help our survival a lot if we were able to chart where to find food, mark dangers, settle boundary disputes. Especially if we could share that knowledge with others.
What has all this to do with innovation? Quite a lot in fact: maps and map-making provides a powerful metaphor for much of what we do when we try to manage the uncertain journey which innovation involves. There’s probably hundreds of applications of the idea but in this podcast we explore five which spring quickly to mind.
(You can find a transcript of this podcast here)
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