Category: innovation
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Winning the race before it starts
I featured a case study in my most recent newsletter which focused on the theme of changing how the game is played – learning from sports, culture and business examples where the protagonist had flipped the script to rethink norms and gain unprecedented advantage. The example was the Mercedes-AMG Petronas Formula One team, and it’s…
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The Agentic Organisation (redux)
I really believe that AI agents are going to upend everything from organisation design, to strategy formulation and execution, to workflows, to how we interact with data, to how people get stuff done. It’s going to bring such fundamental change that we need to start thinking now about how we can take a more deliberate…
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What Darwin, Faraday and Wollstonecraft teach us about navigating an overwhelming world
I’ve been listening to Human Intelligence, a wonderful podcast from the BBC which features short (15 minute) episodes focusing on ‘brilliant thinkers with 50 stories that celebrate the human mind’. Like one of it’s subject thinkers Socrates, Human Intelligence is concerned with how people think rather than what they think, and I loved the way that they organised an impressive…
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On the Agentic Organisation
The next wave of AI innovation is already upon us, and it’s the era of agentic AI. In fact, OpenAI’s CFO Sarah Friar has already said that ‘agentic’ will be the word of 2025. The pace of progression has been remarkably fast from simple chatbots that were primarily designed to engage in conversation, answer questions,…
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On misinterpreting the diffusion of innovations curve
The diffusion of innovations curve, developed by Everett Rogers, has become a pretty iconic tool in understanding how new ideas, products, or technologies gain traction within a market. Its simplicity is compelling: a bell curve that categorises adopters (or a population) into five groups — innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and laggards. Yet,…
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Tanks, innovation and transformative thinking
One of my favourite models for navigating technological-driven change (and realising the opportunity of technology-driven innovation) is SAMR, which stands for Substitution, Augmentation, Modification, Redefinition. Drawn from education, the framework relates to the fundamental options for how new technology can enhance capability: it can be a direct substitute with no functional improvement; it can optimise and augment without changing the…
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Make the right path the easy path
I was reminded of the quote that I’ve used for the title of this post at a recent workshop with a public sector body. I was talking about the book ‘Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy is Delivery‘ which is a wonderful account of the early years of the UK Government Digital Service and…
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What a 400 year old ship can tell us about technology projects
A couple of years ago whilst I was on a work trip to Stockholm I went to see the famous Vasa ship. It’s a marvel to see, but it’s also a superb monument to the folly of man, particularly when it comes to technology. The Vasa ship, ordered by King Gustav II Adolf of Sweden,…
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On technology acceptance models
One of the critical aspects of navigating technological change effectively is understanding more about how users accept and adopt new technologies. For leaders trying to drive technology acceptance and adoption, and to introduce new ways of working within organisations, or consultants and strategists looking to understand changing contexts and capabilities, it can be really useful…
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Why some innovations take years to come to market
Matthew Syed has a great example of how easy it is for innovative ideas to be frustrated or delayed in his book Rebel Ideas. It’s the story of how the wheeled suitcase came into the world. The wheeled suitcase is one of those ‘why did no-one think of this before?’ inventions but the truth is…