How TO INNOVATE INNOVATION

“Are we there yet?”

Sam Bucolo (Professor in Design Innovation at UTS in Australia) asks us, in the title of his book on design led innovation. We like to invite you to explore the same question over the next couple of months and set the agenda for several projects to innovate innovation.

Innovation methodologies like Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile were already developed decades ago, suggesting new approaches and methodologies to guide and facilitate innovation. The approaches helped us to make innovation more human centered, encouraged creativity and advocated prototyping and short cycled experimentation at an early stage.

But our world has drastically changed. We are now facing new, and perhaps even bigger challenges. Challenges for which we are currently unable to find solutions.

New technologies and science brought innovations that seem only limited by our imagination. But challenges on sustainability, energy, healthcare and education, present us at the same time with huge ethical and social dilemmas. Dilemmas that need systemic change and go well beyond the scope of separate organizations.

To work on such challenges, as Mariana Mazzucato also argues in her latest book “Moonshot economics”, businesses, governments and ngo’s, will need to collaborate, design and realize systemic change together.

So, are we there yet? We feel we are not. We think we need to innovate innovation.

But what are the current and up-coming bigger issues in design and innovation?
What environments, what frameworks, approaches, tools and interventions do we need to work on such issues, to collaborate and make a real difference … together?
We are about to start a series of activities, a facilitated discourse over the next couple of months to explore and debate such questions, identify the issues and co-create new approaches and methodologies.

We hope you will join us in this journey,

contribute your perspective, share with us the challenges that you see, bring your experiences and your ideas on how to collaborate and work on more challenging topics. We go through the journey step-by-step. After each activity, you decide if you want to continue the journey and join us in the next step.