The Innovation Show

This mind-opening episode summarises some of the groundbreaking analysis of the business, economic, and technological trends of today to predict what the world will look like in 2030 – and how the Coronavirus pandemic will accelerate each of these major trends. Some examples stats from the book and the episode: Birthplace of the next industrial revolution: sub-Saharan Africa The reason: 500 millio...

Today’s focus is a Playbook that helps innovators and entrepreneurs to harness new, extreme ideas despite complex business barriers. This visual guide provides insight, practical solutions and reusable canvasses to help innovation managers, CEOs, Chief Innovators and directors of innovation labs to develop breakthrough ideas. We welcome, authors of, "The Radical Innovation Playbook: a practical gu...

This episode is about getting to grips with how to actually change your behaviour so you stay curious a little bit longer. It sounds like it should be easy, but it's not. You have to tame your Advice Monster, that part of you that jumps in to offer up ideas, opinions, suggestions and advice. And it's taming your Advice Monster that's at the heart of this book. But there are also some specific coac...

Our guest was used to giving orders. In the high-stress environment of the USS Santa Fe, a nuclear-powered submarine, it was crucial his men did their job well. But the ship was dogged by poor morale, poor performance and the worst retention in the fleet. One day, he unknowingly gave an impossible order, and his crew tried to follow it anyway. He realised he was leading in a culture of followers,...

For millennia, dominant groups have had the habit of framing themselves to be the best, deep down: the more powerful they become, the more power begins to be framed as natural. When you see how power has shaped the idea of race, then you can start to understand its meaning. In Superior, celebrated author Angela Saini explores the concepts of race and caste, from their origins to the present day. E...

Ozan Varol reveals simple strategies from rocket science that you can use to make your own giant leaps in work and life - whether it's landing your dream job, accelerating your business, learning a new skill, or creating the next breakthrough product. Today, thinking like a rocket scientist is a necessity. We all encounter complex and unfamiliar problems in our lives. Those who can tackle these pr...

Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less productive, and more likely to divorce. In one study, time stress produced a stronger negative effect on happiness than unemployment. Our guest offers us a playbook for taking back the time you lose to m...

There is a painful gap between what people want and what they actually do. The disconnect between want and do has been blamed on a lot of things — but we blame it on ourselves for the most part. We internalize the cultural message of “It’s your fault! Our guest is here to say: It isn’t your fault. creating positive change isn’t as hard as you think and when it comes to change tiny is mighty. We we...

In business, government, and every area of contemporary life, leaders today are struggling to find workable solutions to greater and more complex challenges. As a former senior Pentagon official and CEO of a billion-dollar company, our guest has seen firsthand that the current model for solving diverse problem sets no longer works. Organizations and individuals need to adopt an entirely different...

Our guest today brings us a powerful blend of cross-disciplinary research and battle-tested tools to help you diagnose, design, and implement a reinvention system that allows your company to stop combatting or resisting change – and instead helps you turn every disruption into your greatest opportunity. We welcome author of "The Chief Reinvention Officer Handbook: How to Thrive in Chaos" Nadya Zhe...

The future will get even more perplexing over the next decade, and we are not ready. The dilemma is that we're restricted by rigid categorical thinking that freezes people and organizations in neatly defined boxes that often are inaccurate or obsolete. Categories lead us toward certainty but away from clarity, and categorical thinking moves us away from understanding the bigger picture. Sticking w...

“The relationship between the organism and the environment is transactional—the environment grows the organism, and the organism creates the environment.” ― Alan Watts Creativity isn't all in your head. Sometimes it's in what's around you--especially when you're at home.   For over twenty years, scientists have been discovering connections between our physical surroundings and the creative mi...

“If you could learn to squeeze the vibrancy and beauty out of each moment of your life, would you say yes to a practice that could get you there?”, that is the question our guest asks of us. She then takes us through her technique to do just that. A technique she teaches to first responders, veterans and those who have suffered trauma. It is a please to welcome, author of Neurosculpting: A Whole-B...

Friends matter to us, and they matter more than we think. The single most surprising fact to emerge out of the medical literature over the last decade or so has been that the number and quality of the friendships we have has a bigger influence on our happiness, health and even mortality risk than anything else except giving up smoking. Our guest is the world-renowned psychologist and author who fa...

This episode is an intimate and inspirational exploration of Stephen Hawking— the man and the physicist. It is also a story of friendship, written by his friend also a physicist and renowned author of multiple titles including: Subliminal, Elastic, Euclid’s Window, Feynman’s Rainbow, The Upright Thinkers, War of the Worldviews with Deepak Chopra and 2 books coauthored with Stephen Hawking. It is a...

Our guests are Silicon Valley design veterans: One created the first Apple mouse The other designed the award-winning Apple PowerBook and the original Hasbro Star Wars action figures! 13 years ago they founded the STANFORD LIFE DESIGN LAB The course - the most popular at Stanford - has led to a global franchise and a New York Times and worldwide bestselling book: Designing Your Life, published in...

GRAMMY-recognized #1 hit songwriter, Cliff Goldmacher shares how to explore, shape and sell our ideas by teaching us how to write songs. Doing so helps develop the essential skills of: Lateral thinking Creativity Communication Empathy, Collaboration, Risk-taking and The diffusion of ideas for better innovators. It is a pleasure to welcome the author of: "The Reason For The Rhymes: Mastering the Se...

One of my favourite episodes of all time. This genre-shattering attempt to answer the question of human behaviour by looking at it from every angle. Our guest starts by looking at the factors that bear on a person's reaction in the precise moment a behavior occurs, and then hops back in time from there, in stages, ultimately ending up at the deep history of our species and its genetic inheritance....

Your business’s success depends on how you prepare for the future. While business leaders of the past looked in the rear-view mirror to predict the road ahead, we must look at the greater forces affecting the social, business and economic world today—megatrends. Our guest today is here to share a fresh, holistic way to think about tomorrow by preparing for it today: He calls it DRIVE. The DRIVE fr...

When facing a rhino that’s about to charge, doing nothing is seldom the best option. Yet all too often that’s exactly what happens. Danger rarely comes as a complete surprise; instead, it follows many missed opportunities for taking precautions, reading and responding to warning signals. The impulse to freeze is hard to overcome. Sometimes the grip of denial is so strong that we do nothing at all;...

The Nocturnal Brain: Tales of Nightmares and Neuroscience with Guy Leschziner You can survive longer without food than without sleep. The fact that sleep is fundamental to life is unarguable, but in modern society, at least until recently, we have taken for granted that sleep simply happens, and is a necessary evil to allow us to live our waking lives. Recently, however, there has been a shift in...

The Digital Age will raise the question of how humans will stay relevant in the workplace. To stay relevant, we have to be able to excel cognitively, behaviourally, and emotionally in ways that technology can’t. Our guest believes, this requires us to become Hyper-Learners: continuously learning, unlearning, and relearning at the speed of change. To do that, we have to overcome our reflexive ways...

Startups have changed the world. In the United States, many startups, such as Tesla, Apple, and Amazon, have become household names. The economic value of startups has doubled since 1992 and is projected to double again in the next fifteen years. For decades, the hot centre of this phenomenon has been Silicon Valley. This is changing fast. Thanks to technology, startups are now taking root everywh...

There are two stories you hear about making a living as an artist in the digital age, and they are diametrically opposed. One comes from Silicon Valley and its boosters in the media. There’s never been a better time to be an artist, it goes. If you’ve got a laptop, you’ve got a recording studio. If you’ve got an iPhone, you’ve got a movie camera. GarageBand, Final Cut Pro: all the tools are at you...

The context of business has changed so rapidly over the past few decades that it may be time for a new lexicon. At the very least, it's time to challenge some of the established thinking about strategy and competition that used to drive business advantage - but no longer does. In this episode, strategy expert and Columbia Business School professor Rita McGrath takes on one of most fundamental and...