Worth your time — September edition
This month’s summary of noteworthy articles and videos is here to inspire you and tickle your innovation muscles. In September we are focusing on the amazing abilities of us humans to reinvent our organizations and environments continuously, if you let us.
Let’s take a deep dive into three inspiring pieces of what kind of innovation we might need more of to stay relevant and fit for the future.
- Frugal innovation (Navi Radjou)
How do you solve problems with no budget? Witnessed all over developing countries, frugal innovation is the natural, renewable resource of human creativity to fix big problems through smart, cheap solutions. It’s also on the exact opposite side of how innovation is treated nowadays — with big spending budgets, no constraints and doing more with more. This thought-provoking article hosts multiple mind-blowing examples from MPesa, CompteNickel, to clay fridges, of how people solved their problems with a “less is more” approach. Additionally, Radjou outlines three principles in more details to get you started on your “jugaad” (Hindi word used for bootstrapped inventions):
- Keep it simple
- Do not reinvent the wheel
- Think and act horizontally
2) As systems collapse, people rise: Seven faces of an emerging global movement (Prof. Otto Scharmer)
This articles focuses on the rise of global youth movements in 2019 we have been seeing, e.g. Friday For Future (FFF) and Extinction Rebellion (UK). Scharmer not only shares his take on why we are experiencing this phenomenon now, namely three axial shifts in a) politics, b) economics and c) learning and human development. As a caveat he exposes a blindspot or missing link in today’s learning environment landscape: deep (i.e. transformational) and broad (i.e. systemic) eco-system innovation. A highly interesting article to ponder about, question or challenge.
3) The next phase of business sustainability (Prof. Andrew J. Hoffmann, U of Michigan)
The last of the three articles on innovation focuses on business model innovation in the face of the ongoing sustainability movement. Hoffmann argues that we need a shift in the way businesses respond to market shifts. In his own words: “ Instead of waiting for a market shift to create incentives for sustainable practices, companies are creating those shifts to enable new forms of business sustainability.”
The proposition:
Move from Sustainable Business 1.0 (Entreprise Integration) to Sustainable Business 2.0 (Market Transformation). To achieve this transition, companies first need to rethink business strategies systemically and then re-conceptualize the business model as a whole. As, for example, the automobile industry is entering an era of becoming a “mobility provider”, they will need to completely rethink the concept of idle car time (parked car). Once there are less parked cars, we need to rethink road systems, parking spaces, etc. It’s a systemic opportunity (or challenge — if you are more the glass half empty type of person).
As you can see, innovation is lurking at us at different levels within our society and organizations. Hopefully the culture you have created is a little more open, transparent and entrepreneurial than this:
