Wanted: Bold innovations in Health

Last year, I did a keynote at a major health conference in Denmark under the (slight provoking) title: "Innovation in spite of managagement" making a case for under-the radar-innovations empowering the collective intelligence that knows what do do - and leaders who act rather than talk.

Right after I was challenged by several of the heads of both hospitals and health agencies to come up with a design for this type of innovation.

Now – a year later – we have completed 12 pilot projects – and are running 28 new innovation projects in as many municipalities.

The results are amazing: The teams of innovation agents are creating micro innovations across sectors, bypassing departmental borders, and engaging local communities by way of example and action.

Based on simple – but strict - rules of engagement (an innovation manifesto so to say), quit small investments are producing big results. Blå Himmel's manifesto which owe some to U-theory, some to best practice Silicon Vally entrepreneurship  research, sets the frame for the interactions and process: Participant municipalities has to follow simple rules, such as always participating with directors across departments, prototyping before analyzing (and not being "allowed" to ask permission back home for their project), and keeping the scale small for quick returns.

The Sund By organisation (an intra-municipality health forum) is coordinating the projects: Please see the website for some background (in Danish), incl slides from the introduction.

Think Water Sensitive

Water may arguable be the most pressing issue out there. After years of working with innovation in solid waste, health and sustainable architecture, I have turned on water.

In 2012 I joined Grundfos in it's impressive ambition to innovate solutions to the staggering water challenges facing the world. As an executive strategy and innovation expert for Water Supply, I will be helping Grundfos think outside the box and very much need oriented, designing innovation frameworks based on co-creation and stakeholder engagement, and helping create the overall strategic ambition for water supply.
I will think loud on water in this little blog:  Water Sensitive: watersensitive.blogspot.com

Storytelling about innovation: The Kondratieff 6th Wave....

When working as a business designer and trying to help companies innovate for the future, the main challenge I find, is often not one of designing the new future business area or product, but rather one of creating strong ownership and cross organizational storytelling about this future, that allows management to implement. I frequently have the pleasure of teaching MBAs in innovation – and the opportunity of testing first hand how storytelling can enhance operational will to implementation. One of my key entry points to this storytelling is the idea of mega trends: How future business design and innovation must be based on long term trends, rather than short business cycles.

And when it comes to mega trends, one of the strongest with huge business impacts on all – but also one of the hardest to really understand businesswise – is the fall out with nature: The global environmental crisis.

So whenever I come across new ways of telling the sustainbility story and the opportunities for innovation rising from the environmental mega trend, I bring it on board. And recently I have been reading up on older economic theories on long term trends, including the old Russian economist Kondratieff's wave theory. This theory is hugely debated, but as another of my favorite models, Maslow's hierachy of needs, Kondratieff's wave model has an intuitive storytelling quality that far outpaces it's lack of consensus and evidential proof in the world of economics.

Australian outfit "The Natural Edge Project" has caught on to this, and uses Kondratieff to tell the story about a 6th innovation wave: The green wave, that some how strikes the managers and CEOs that I work with as intuitive:

Creativity is the number one need for global organizations in an increasingly complex reality

The last few years (during the crisis), quite a few companies scaled back on innovation initiatives -- and an argument heard was that innovation projects was a luxury good for good times. Preaching (as I was doing) that the opposite is in fact true, was hard in the face of cost control, downscaling, etc. So it is very encouraging to see the newly published survey from IBM:

According to the IBM survey (http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy) of more than 1.500 Chief Executive Officers from 60 countries and 33 industries worldwide, chief executives believe that -- more than rigor, management discipline, integrity or even vision -- successfully navigating an increasing complex world will require creativity.
Global complexity is the foremost issue confronting enterprises. Less than half of global CEOs believe their enterprises are adequately prepared to handle a highly volatile, increasingly complex business environment. CEOs are confronted with massive shifts - new government regulations, changes in global economic power centers, accelerated industry transformation, growing volumes of data, rapidly evolving customer preferences - that, according to the study, can be overcome by instilling "creativity" throughout an organization.
The CEOs see a large gap between the level of complexity coming at them and their confidence that their enterprises are equipped to deal with it. A world of increasing complexity will give rise to a new generation of leaders that make creativity the path forward for successful enterprises.
More than 60 percent of CEOs believe industry transformation is the top factor contributing to uncertainty, and the finding indicates a need to discover innovative ways of managing an organization's structure, finances, people and strategy. The CEOs identified creativity as the No. 1 “leadership competency” of the future.

For more on the survey, please read:
http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/ibm-2010-global-ceo-study-creativity-selected-as-most-crucial-factor-for-future-success-94028284.html
Or the full survey: http://www.ibm.com/ceostudy

Innovation i det offentlige

DIEU har offentliggjort en innovationsundersøgelse på tværs af sektorer, der har nogle markante resultater ikke mindst om den offentlige sektor og byggebranchen. Graf 3 i DIEUs gennemgang (her gengivet med håb om tilgivelse for manglende tilladelse) taler sit eget tydelige sprog.

Sex or innovation

The innovation hype is getting a bit nauseating. A simple googling on [innovation] gets more results than [sex] - both of cause more talk than action, but still: More than sex!!!!