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
Episodes
118 episodes
Irresonsible innovation anyone?
Responsible innovation (masquerading under many different labels over time) is now highly visible in conversations around innovation. Whether we’re looking at AI or genetic engineering or geo-engineering we can see the issues being widely debat...
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21:06
Hitching a ride to higher productivity
How one man’s innovation provided the missing link for 20th century agricultural revolution.Harry Ferguson is not a name which instantly springs to mind when thinking of entrepreneurs who changed the course of history. Yet his con...
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26:02
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 ...
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22:41
Impact intrepreneurship - leveraging the power of organizations for social innovation
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. Ev...
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28:40
In the (innovation) soup....
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 c...
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16:27
AI is a no-brainer...
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, t...
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18:19
Irrelevant innovation
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 circumsta...
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18:19
It's not (only) what you know...
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...
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15:42
Beating the scaling innovation blues
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 s...
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4:33
Changing the world, one innovation at a time
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. ...
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18:32
Innovation lessons - from a skateboard!
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 yo...
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17:14
Innovation is rubbish!
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 bu...
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17:27
A Christmas innovation fairytale
Some seasonal thoughts to accompany all good wishes....!(You can find the transcript here)
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7:43
Start-up success - an interview with Faisal Abid, Co-founder and CTO of Eirene Cremations
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 includi...
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35:05
Pathways to scale
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 ...
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19:03
Growing up fast
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...
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30:00
Tell 'em a story - another innovation song
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 ...
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4:39
Prove it to me!
Why evidence is so important for scaling innovationA 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 wo...
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19:04
The entrepreneur's journey - another song
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...
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4:52
Unlocking creativity
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 ...
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20:45
The power of position innovation
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...
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16:32
Crystallising the spirit of innovation
An interview with Hannes Erler, Strategic Director for Innovation Ecosystems, SwarovskiThis 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 g...
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21:10
Why value networks matter in scaling innovation
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 ev...
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20:22
Cracking the innovation code - an interview with Robyn Bolton
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...
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25:54