The Innovation Show

If you could make a change—any change you wanted—what would it be? Would it be something in your organization or your industry? Maybe something it’s in your community or throughout society as a whole? Creating true change is never easy. Most startups don’t survive. Most community groups never get beyond small local actions. Even when a spark catches fire and protesters swarm the streets, it often...

I was MC for the tech stage at the Fifteen Seconds Festival in Graz, Austria. I had the pleasure of meeting the brilliant Phaedra Boinodiris. A fellow with the London-based Royal Society of Arts, Phaedra has focused on inclusion in technology since 1999. She is the business transformation leader for IBM’s Responsible AI consulting group and serves on the leadership team of IBM’s Academy of Technol...

Helen Edwards joins us for part 2 of a 2-part episode on her book, "From Marginal to Mainstream Why Tomorrow’s brand growth will come from the Fringes – and How to get there first.” Her book shows why businesses, marketers and entrepreneurs need to break free from their 'mainstream inhibition' and turn their attention to the margins - to confront, evaluate and embrace the 'strangeness' of behaviou...

Helen Edwards joins us for part 1 of a 2-part episode on her book, "From Marginal to Mainstream Why Tomorrow’s brand growth will come from the Fringes – and How to get there first.” Her book shows why businesses, marketers and entrepreneurs need to break free from their 'mainstream inhibition' and turn their attention to the margins - to confront, evaluate and embrace the 'strangeness' of behaviou...

Our guest is the author of 15 books, over 160 practitioner articles, and over 60 Darden cases, etc. dealing with innovation and learning. Every time I catch up, he goes and writes another book. He has become a dear friend, thought partner and mentor. He honoured me by asking me to pre-read the manuscript and offer an endorsement, and this is what I wrote: “A life-changing book written by an old so...

Metaphors show people how to look beyond the surface levels of life, to an enlightened truth. This book attempts to point to something deep, spiritual, and powerful. Metaphors, stories, and musings speak to the heart, not to the brain. Listen with your heart; that is where we all find inner truth. It is a great pleasure to welcome the author of “Life is a Metaphor: Metaphors, Stories and Musings f...

The aim of mind-wandering, odd as it might sound, is to improve the efficiency of your generative model. As ordained by the Free Energy Principle, a model is only efficient if it uses the minimum resources necessary to perform the work of self-organisation. That boils down to finding the simplest model that successfully predicts sensory samples of the world. The simplest model does not arise natur...

We caught up with Dr Robert Hogan during his 2023 worldwide tour. Robert challenged decades of academic tradition to demonstrate personality’s impact on organisational success. He pioneered the use of personality assessment to improve workplace performance. One of his key findings is that organisations should look for humility in a leader rather than charisma. A humble leader channels energy into...

Today’s book offers a comprehensive approach to extraordinary problem-solving. Conceived by a super-creative quartet of top-tier business consultants, the book builds upon a novel premise: What if you framed problems as if they were games of profound significance? How might you design something new or reimagine the old, particularly when competition increases, technology disrupts, change accelerat...

Today’s book draws on a decade of research and 50 case studies to present six mindsets that help business leaders and nonprofit equivalents be more confident and creative about strategic problem-solving and be successful where others are afraid to act (or act recklessly). The concept is modelled after innovative companies such as Patagonia which are not afraid to step out into risk using small mov...

Today’s guest discovered that over 10 years, just 1 in 12 companies managed to jump from the middle tier of corporate performance—where 60% of companies reside, making very little economic profit—to the top quintile, where 90% of global economic profit is made. This movement does not happen by magic—it depends on your company’s current position, the trends it faces, and the big moves you make to g...

What is it about the top tech product companies such as Amazon, Apple, Google, Netflix and Tesla that enable their record of consistent innovation? Most people think it’s because these companies can find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire but rather how they enable their people to work together...

Disciplined Entrepreneurship will change the way you think about starting a company. Many believe that entrepreneurship cannot be taught, but great entrepreneurs aren’t born with something special – they simply make great products. This book will show you how to create a successful startup through developing an innovative product. It breaks down the necessary processes into an integrated, comprehe...

Does this sound familiar? * Are you always one prototype away from a solution but never seem to get there? * Do you spend most of your time fixing problems that you did not anticipate? * Does it seem like everything is going well right up until launch, when it all falls apart? * Are you getting very little return on the resources you deploy? * Does the performance of your product in the market rar...

Very few large companies manage to avoid stalls in revenue growth. These stalls are not attributable to the natural business cycle. Our guest's careful analysis reveals that most such stalls directly result from strategic choices made by corporate leaders. In short, stoppages in growth are almost always avoidable. This extensively researched book analyses the growth experiences of more than 600 Fo...

C.S. Lewis once said, “Good and evil increase at compound interest. That’s why the little decisions we make every day are of infinite importance. the smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may go on to victories you never dreamed of” This quote came to mind as I pondered today's book. Just as the good things we do compound over time, so too...

This is my guest appearance on The Disruptive Voice Podcast. Exploring the theories of disruptive innovation across a broad set of industries and circumstances with academics, researchers, and practitioners who have been inspired and taught by Professor Clayton M. Christensen. In his book, Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organizations, and Life, Aidan McCullen wr...

Today’s guest painstakingly curated this collection from some of the world's most inventive minds, including d.school and IDEO founder David Kelley amongst others. She is with us today to share some of those assignments to spark our creativity because a common characteristic of our audience is - without a doubt - curiosity. It is a pleasure to welcome the Executive Director of the Stanford d.schoo...

In Chapter 5 of Tushman and O’Reilly’s "Lead and Disrupt", the authors share how Cypress Semiconductor used a similar venture funding model, complete with a one-page business plan, for initial funding to grow $40 million in businesses. With their approach called a “Federation of Entrepreneurs”, Cypress is a great case study in ambidextrous leadership. In June 2019, Infineon Technologies announced...

In Chapter 5 of the Corporate Explorer, Binns, Tushman, and O’Reilly share how a Corporate Explorer created a new business inside the consulting and accounting firm Deloitte. His new unit, Deloitte Pixel, uses the “wisdom of crowds” to solve complex management problems. His first experience of the power of crowds came when he was part of a self-organised community that came together to provide rel...

There is no formula for immunity to disruption. Invincibility is an illusion. However, one factor explains why some succeed at corporate venture building. Our experience working with midsize and large legacy firms has shown us that innovation is as much about leadership as it is about the method, strategy, organization, and culture. Leaders who ignite and sustain an exploration spirit are more lik...

Why do successful firms find it so difficult to adapt in the face of change – to innovate? In the past ten years, the importance of this question has increased as more industries and firms confront disruptive change. The pandemic has accelerated this crisis, collapsing the structures of industries from airlines and medicine to online retail and commercial real estate. Today, business leaders are o...

In part 2 of our Tushman and O'Reilly series, Charles O'Reilly III explores the importance of cultural alignment in encouraging change. We focus on the cases of DaVita, Microsoft and AGC. 00:01:17 Origin Story 00:05:20 Ideate, Incubate, Scale 00:07:37 Culture 00:10:50 The Tyranny of Success: Gunfire At Sea 00:24:20 The L.E.A.S.H. Model 00:21:45 Organisational Culture Change: How Microsoft Transfor...

In part 1 of our Tushman and O'Reilly series, Michael Tushman examines how leadership, culture, and organizational architectures can be both critical facilitators of innovation and, not uncommonly, formidable obstacles. They demonstrate how to clarify today's critical managerial problems, use culture and commitment to promote innovation and implement strategy, and deal with changing innovation req...

Our guest is an American scholar, educator, and religious leader who has been a general authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints since April 2015 and was the church's seventeenth Commissioner of Church Education from 2015 to 2019. He served previously as the 15th president of Brigham Young University–Idaho from 2005 to 2015 and as the Harvard Business School (HBS) dean from 199...