Total Innovation Podcast

Samuel Arbesman is a complexity scientist and writer. He is passionate about bringing together seemingly unrelated ideas from science and technology. Samuel works with companies and founders that recognize that the future happens at these boundaries, in such areas as open science, tools for thought, managing massive complexity, artificial intelligence, and infusing computation into everything from...

Innovation is lonely work. Sam West built a museum of failure to make visible what organisations hide — and found it gives people permission. Working in innovation is lonely. You're usually pushing against the culture, not with it. You're the person asking "why not?" in rooms full of people paid to say "because." You try things that don't work, often in public, a...

50 episodes. 4 seasons. One stubborn question: what does it take to make innovation work? Simon Hill looks back at the lessons so far.  One stubborn question: what does it actually take to make innovation work? In this special milestone edition, host Simon Hill steps out from behind the interviewer's chair to look back at the conversations, characters and ideas that have shaped the Total Inno...

Mike Butcher (M.B.E.) is the Founder and Editor of Pathfounders. He was formerly the Editor-at-large for TechCrunch for 18 years. He has been a technology journalist since 1995. He has written for UK national newspapers and magazines and been named one of the most influential people in European technology by Wired UK. He has spoken at the World Economic Forum, Web Summit, and DLD. He has interview...

Gina built the world’s largest network of social innovation labs at the United Nations and currently teaches at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.  The innovation lab network that she built was the United Nation's largest investment in sustainability innovation (115 countries). Her work is taught as a Harvard Business School Case Study (Fall 2022), received the Fast Company World C...

Martin Eriksson has spent three decades helping organisations figure out why they're stuck — and what to do about it. He's been building digital products since 1994, built SaaS before anyone called it SaaS, and has worked his way through companies of every size and stage: The Financial Times, Monster, Huddle, Covestor, Cazoo, and most recently as Product Partner at EQT, one of the world&...

Vladislav grew up in Russia. He left to pursue a doctorate in Italy. He has worked in industrial automation, certified himself across robotics and control systems, served an internship at Bosch Rexroth, and built a career working on the kind of complex engineering problems that most people would find impenetrable. And then, sometime in 2024, he heard a rumour. About a place — almost mythical in th...

Fernanda Torre is a recognized expert in sustainability-driven innovation and CEO of the consultancy Next Agents , whose mission is to create value for people and the planet—both now and into the future. She is also the co-founder of One Global Action , an international initiative that fosters capacity-building and collaborative innovation to tackle major sustainability and ESG challenges. Fernand...

Sonia is a global executive, board member and strategic advisor with over 20 years of experience across Europe, USA, Asia Pacific and Latin America. Bringing a blend of commercial strategy, technology leadership and innovation expertise, with a focus on enterprise-level decision-making, long-term value creation and responsible growth. She's led and overseen digital transformation, product inn...

Marta started her journey in innovation in 1998 as the product manager of the first idea management platform, which became a market leader and served global customers such as Pfizer, Cargill, Belgacom and many more, to which she also consulted on innovation best practices. Subsequently, Marta moved into corporate technology consulting, then back again into innovation management with a Spanish star...

Robyn Bolton works with leaders of medium and large businesses to help them navigate uncertainty and confidently grow revenue. At MileZero, she has worked with companies including Medtronic, Ariadne Labs, and Teachers Pay Teachers to transform deep customer insights into viable businesses. She has also worked with organizations including Alexion, Sanofi, and The Cable Center to build their innovat...

Recognised as a Trusted Advisor, Tom works across the Public, Private and Defence Sectors, enabling organisations to establish the foundations to innovate, while leverage the capabilities of a diverse partner ecosystem; from startups to hyperscalers, in order to experiment, scale and commercialise new solutions. Tom is a member of the British Standards Institute (BSI) committee for Innovation Mana...

Súsanna Laursen is one of the driving forces behind the Faroe Islands' emerging innovation ecosystem. Based in Tórshavn, she works at Hugskotið — the Islands' startup incubator, founded in 2014 by the municipality of Tórshavn — where she supports early-stage founders and helps shape an environment where bold ideas can take root in one of the world's most remote and distinctive place...

Dr. Alexander Osterwalder is one of the world's most influential thinkers in strategy and innovation. A Swiss entrepreneur, author, and speaker, he is best known as the co-creator of the Business Model Canvas — a deceptively simple one-page tool that has been adopted by millions of practitioners across the globe, from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies including Mastercard, Nestlé,...

This is final episode of this season and the closing chapter in the Expected Value Story. In this episode, we look at the future of innovation. Innovation without adaptation is just novelty. The future belongs to those who can continuously evolve their innovation system.  Over this season, we've followed Freya and her team as they've moved from good intentions and busy innovation to clea...

In this episode we explore chapter fourteen from metrics to mindsets. Thus far in the story we have seen that the numbers look great. XV across the portfolio was strong. Strategic fit profiles were improving, kill decisions were happening faster, reallocations were smooth. On paper, Freya's innovation system was working exactly as designed. And yet something felt off.  In this episode we expl...

In this episode, we move to Act 4, where the spotlight moves from frameworks to people. Freya's team can score ideas, prioritize bets, and balance the portfolio. But now they face the harder challenge, embedding innovation into the culture itself.  We'll see how they bridge the gap between potential and performance, turning XV into realised value, and we'll explore the table of just...

In this episode we step into chapter 11, learning loops and dynamic resourcing, where Freya discovers the fundamental truth at the heart of innovation performance. Namely, the value of an innovation is directly proportional to how much we learn from it, irrespective of whether it succeeds or fails.  This chapter begins with tension. A major project is under scrutiny, the CFO demands evidence, and...

In this episode, we explore chapter 10, Lines of Trust, which takes us beyond governance and into the invisible systems that make innovation work or fall apart. Freya and her team have built structure. The XV model, the fit radar, the S-curve, and a new three-tier governance system. On paper, it's perfect. But in practice, something's missing.  When one small decision crosses an unseen l...

This week's exclusive release from Expected Value, the system to prove, measure, and scale value. In this episode we enter Act 3, Total Portfolio Intelligence.  Most organizations don't suffer from a lack of innovation, they suffer from a lack of innovation clarity. Ideas live in spreadsheets, sandboxes, and slide decks. Some get launched before they're ready, others never see dayli...

“Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens in cycles” In this chapter, we're diving into one of the most powerful and often misunderstood forces shaping innovation performance, the S-curve. Innovation doesn't happen in straight lines, it happens in cycles. Technologies evolve, markets shift, and every idea follows a natural rhythm, from emergence to acceleration, to maturity...

"Innovation without alignment is just novelty. Strategic alignment without innovation is just stagnation. The magic happens at the intersection." In the chapters so far, we've moved from understanding value to learning how to measure confidence and timing. Now, in this next chapter, Operationalizing Strategic Fit, we complete the picture. Because innovation isn't just about wha...

“If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough.” Albert Einstein Innovation has no shortage of frameworks, toolkits, or canvas templates. But too often, those tools complicate instead of clarifying. They add noise instead of structure. They create motion without meaning. Act II is about changing that by introducing a coherent system, not just more frameworks. This e...

In this second episode we move from illusion to understanding. Chapters two through four unpack the real performance gap in innovation and introduce the X V system, a data-informed way to calculate the expected value of ideas. We explore how confidence, value, and time sensitivity come together to create a measurable forecast of innovation performance.

After a summer break, welcome back to season three of the pod. It's going to be a special season. I recently launched my latest book, Expected Value: The System to Prove, Measure, and Scale Value. And thanks to our sponsor Wazoku, across this season, you'll hear the full audio version of the book. It's a story, a system, and a toolkit designed to finally answer the question that eve...