The Exponential Shift: Ci 2016, some takeaways …
Featuring over 40 global leaders, innovators and thinkers the 2016 edition of the Creative Innovation Conference, held in Melbourne over three days in November, was primed to explore ideas and pragmatic solutions for the ‘great problems of today’.
This year a UTS ICI posse blew in to Melbourne for the annual ideas fest — comprised of UTS Professor of Innovation and Creative Intelligence Charles Walker, Monique Potts, Cynthia Macnee and Leah Lucas — to soak up the diverse ideas and philosophies that underpin the practice of some remarkable thinkers, inventors and creators.
Piquing the interest of Monique Potts (Deputy Director of the ICI Unit) was Deputy Vice Chancellor, Research and Innovation and ARC Georgina Sweet Laureate Fellow Professor Tanya Monro from the University of South Australia and Stephen Scott Johnson author of ‘EMERGENT — The Future of Culture’.
South Australian Scientist of the Year, Telstra Business Women of the Year and Prime Minister’s Malcolm McIntosh Prize for Physical Scientist of the Year — and also one of Australia‘s most accoladed physicists, best known for her work in photonics — Tanya Monro proposed that to be truly innovative organisations need to be authentically diverse and allow boundary-crossers to thrive.
Tanya’s perspective is that in order for Australia to thrive into the future our capacity to innovate ‘first-in-world’ solutions to emerging problems is imperative. Solutions that can be exported to boot.
“Delivering more of the same, even with improvements, will not deliver the jobs and growth needed to counteract the contraction of current industries.”
Innovative businesses have multiple diverse links to other businesses and research organisations, Professor Monro has said previously, operating in ways that allow them to stay on top of emerging opportunities and threats. They have an appetite for growth and maintaining the status quo is the antithesis of innovation.
For those looking to lead innovation, Professor Monro has a go to list:
- be curious
- be creative
- be persistent
- be patient
- be resilient
- be open to change
- be willing to learn from mistakes.
Stephen Scott Johnson is all about agility and curiosity colliding. In order to embrace change in today’s complex workplaces ‘extraordinary agility, acumen, and intuition’ are required.
Global influences and greater inter-dependencies along with rapid change fueled by technology and the shedding of buffers and barriers to collaboration are converging sometimes volatilely, says Stephen, and no one is immune.
Adamant that a shift has to take place from the command and control paradigm to one of co-creation Stephen shared his models of leadership that fosters a community of kindred spirits and the move away from institutional power to collective power including his Culture Quadrant.
We are entering an era of synergy and T shaped boundary crossers, who are simultaneously deeply vertical and broadly horizontal …
