Futures Thinking, Entrepreneurship and Innovation

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Futures Thinking, Entrepreneurship and Innovation

• Chris Yapp
• Head of Public Sector Innovation
• Microsoft UK
• cyap_at_microsoft.com

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Aims and objectives

• Explore the meanings of innovation
• Understand the ideas around innovation
• Apply to your own areas of interest
• Link innovation to futures thinking and
  entrepreneurial behaviour

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Social Inclusion and Forecasting
The telephone has proved very successful in the
West in places where distant farmhouses are
connected by wire, as it enables them to
give each other timely warning of the approach of
tramps. It is also useful in cases of fire and
sickness Scientific American, May 1900
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Forecasting?
Cinema is an invention of no economic
consequence
Louis Lumiere, 1896
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The end of

• everything that can be invented has been
  invented
• Charles Duell, Commissioner US Office of
  patents,1899

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Peter Senge
Todays problems are the result of yesterdays
solutions
The Fifth Discipline
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Futures Thinking

• Contingency planning
• Scenarios
• Systems thinking
• Complexity theory

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Innovation

• Generating value from ideas
• The intersection of invention with insight
• A Process of Social Change

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How to fail as an Entrepreneur

• The Two Golden Rules
• Passion without system
• System without passion

Tom Peters
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Rules for Stifling Innovation

• Regard any new idea with suspicion - because it's
  new, and because it's from below.
• Insist that people who need your approval to act
  first go through several other layers of
  management to get their signatures.
• Ask departments or individuals to challenge or
  criticise each other's proposals. (That saves you
  the trouble of deciding - you just pick the
  survivor.)
• Express your criticisms freely, and withhold your
  praise. (That keeps people on their toes.) Let
  them know they can be fired at any time.
• Treat identification of problems as signs of
  failure, to discourage people from letting you
  know when something in their area isn't working.

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Stifling Innovation

• Control everything, carefully. Make sure that
  people count everything that can be counted,
  frequently.
• Make decisions to reorganize or change policies
  in secret, and spring them on people
  unexpectedly. (That also keeps people on their
  toes.)
• Make sure that requests for information are fully
  justified, and make sure that it is not given out
  to managers freely. (You don't want data to fall
  into the wrong hands.)
• Assign to lower-level managers, in the name of
  delegation and participation, responsibility for
  figuring out how to cut back, lay off, move
  people around, or otherwise implement threatening
  decisions that you have made. And get them to do
  it quickly.
• And above all, never forget that you, the
  higher-ups, already know everything important
  about this

Rosabeth Moss Kanter Change Masters
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Plans and Planning

• Stable Times
• Turbulent times

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Why do we get it wrong?

• Today!!!
• Prisoners of Language
• Timing
• Unintended consequences
• Sources of Innovation
• Ask the wrong question/people?
• Culture
• Events

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Not understanding today

• Societies taboos
• Poor data for emerging trends
• Examples
• Police
• Paedophiles
• Education
• International/global interconnectivity

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Problem Types
Do we know where We are going?
YES
TASK Operational Management
TASK Process Development
NO
YES
Do we know How to get There?
TASK Direction Setting
TASK Concept Creation
NO
After Eddie Obeng
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Try it with Education..

• O Overall
• C Curriculum
• T Teaching
• A Assessment
• L Learning
• B Built environment
• S Soft structures
• ..

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IFFs Seven Prompts

• Re-perceive the present
• Focus on the near term
• Real learning is a disruptive technology
• Be patient
• Discovery rather than application
• Seek balance and integrity
• Nurture the spirit

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IFFs 10 things to do in a conceptual emergency

• Design for transition to a new world
• Give up on the myth of control
• Trust subjective experience
• Take the long view
• Form and nurture integrities
• Practise social acupuncture
• Sustain networks of hope
• Converge ideas and action
• Re-perceive the present
• Move beyond an Enlightenment consciousness

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Prisoners of Language

• 1,000,000 cars
• People will always want shoes
• Classroom of the Future
• Library with no books
• 5 Computers

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Your task..

• Get to know the people around you by..
• A structured random conversation..
• The TASK is
• You meet again in a year and can reflect on a
  year in which youve been successful in
  innovation. Whats happened?

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The cards!!!

• If you want to speak pick up a card
• Read the card out loud to the group then develop
  from there
• You may link what someone else has said before to
  mesh the narratives
• You may not respond without picking up a card
• If in doubt ask me

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Timing

• Inevitability-Predictability
• Risk and uncertainty
• Unforseen barriers
• Social factors
• Long-term skill developments

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Timing
In the Future blind People will Be able to drive
cars
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Results

• Probability 0.9 with some 0.2
• Today with Resources 1-3 years
• In practice 3-10 years
• In reality 10-100 years

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Unintended Consequences

• Counter-intuitive result
• Interaction between different parts of system
• Targets distorting the system performance
• Performance measures reducing performance
• Injecting resources without involvement of key
  people

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Drucker Innovation and Entrepreneurship

• Incongruities
• The Unexpected
• Demographics
• Process need
• Mood and meaning
• New capabilities

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A Rose by any other name..

• Bouba
• Kiki

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Learning from the edgeSynesthesia
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IT and Creativity

• Combinatorial
• Exploratory
• Transformational

Source Margaret Boden, Univ of Sussex
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Values of the Information Society?

• Competitiveness with social inclusion
• Risk management over minimisation
• Lifelong Learning for all
• Social Innovation over Technological Innovation
• Smallish is beautiful
• Participation over representation
• Interdependence over independence
• Value-added with values

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Social Innovations of the Industrial Society

• Limited Liability Company
• Co-op, Mutuals, Friendly societies, Building
  societies
• Trade Unions
• Schools, Libraries, Museums, Redbrick Uni
• Police, Fire Services
• NHS
• Local Authorities
• .

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Social innovations of the Information Society

• Post Office
• BBC
• BT
• OU
• .

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Classes of Innovation

• Incremental
• Step-change
• Radical

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Demings 4 prongs of transformation

• Improvement in product or service
• Improvement in process
• Innovation in product or process
• Innovation in process

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Diffusion of Innovations
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Technology S-Curves
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Extreme examples

• Slow burner
• Fashion
• Killer app

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Sources of Innovation
Manufacturer Active Process
User Active process
Source Eric Von Hippel, MIT
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Why do some innovations take longer to diffuse?

• Price too high or low
• Skills availability and cost
• Marketing
• Reputation
• Barriers to entry/exit
• NIH
• Cultural issues

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Why do some innovations take longer to diffuse?

• Homophily
• Heterophily

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User Active Innovations in IT

• WWW
• Astronomy
• Environment
• Human Genome
• AIDS/HIV
• Cancer
• Entertainment
• ?Open Source

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Who do you ask?
What do you teach a child at 5 years old So
that they will be IT Literate at 20?
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Core to the problem..

• The different disciplines involved
• The hardware doesnt exist
• The software hasnt been written
• Some of the key companies havent yet been formed

So who do you ask?
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Organisational culture

• Specialists and generalists
• Personal credibility
• Tolerance of uncertainty
• Story telling
• Leadership

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Organisational Roles in Innovation

• Sponsor
• Product champion
• Organisational champion

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Public Policy Challenge
Speed
Universal Access
Local Determination
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An example
How will student top-up fees impact housing
policy?
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The New Renaissance

• Information explosion
• City state
• Blurring of arts/humanities/science/technology
• New concepts

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Some potential areas?

• Criminal Justice
• Health
• Education
• Transport
• Local and regional government
• Science Policy
• .

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Remember

• Technology enables change
• Culture shapes change
• Policy delivers change
• Outcome depends on interactions..