The IC Innovation Club Talking Innovation Interimconsult

Diversity matters when it comes to innovation. The means by which ideas are turned into some form of value is complex and influenced by people in numerous ways based on their lived experiences.
These lived experiences will be linked to a range of factors including demographics and social factors, but also cognitive diversity and people’s day-to-day experiences of life - including their career experiences.
This unique individual mix  of demographics, social context, cognitive diversity, and career experience are what we describe here as ‘Experiential Diversity’ - and an organisation’s capability and capacity to innovate will benefit from an increased understanding of how their experiential diversity is linked to boosting innovation.

We work with innovative start-ups in the tech and AI sectors who often find it hard to create a company, product, and service narrative. Their inclination is to focus on what they see as the innovation – the technical detail - rather than what interests customers most.

You need to know your technology to instil confidence in the customer that your products work, and your service performance is great.
 
But creating a compelling narrative about your company, products and services is equally important when it comes to building relationships and winning business.
 
It's often the stories that people tell about what they do, and why, that matters most when it comes to customer, employee, and supplier engagement.

There is much misinformed hype about apocalyptic scenarios where Artificial Intelligence (AI) becomes more intelligent than humans. But rest assured, whilst we need to accept the fact that the development of new applications made possible by AI will be as disruptive as the industrial revolution, and may be exploited by bad actors, the models that underpin AI, including deep learning using neural networks, will never make machines more intelligent than humans.
It is simply not possible to take the step from what we know as AI today, to what we would describe as ‘general artificial intelligence’ - the human capacity for creativity, innovation and what is widely considered as just being “common sense”.

Creating time to think is a key enabler of innovation. Organisations that create the time and environments for their people to think, and increase the quality of their collective team thinking, can foster a culture that increases innovation – as well as many other benefits.

We need to think differently about how we set businesses up to innovate. Our analysis of funding SME product development and research using the current traditional approach shows we need change - the return on investment is too small. But this can be addressed by investing in innovation enablers, which come at much lower cost.
These enablers focus on making innovation business-as-usual, creating a shared organisational purpose, collaborating to innovate, and creating market contagion - and can make the difference between success and failure.
 
 

Listen to our Railway Industry Association guests’ thoughts on innovation, what it means, what the rail industry is telling them, and what they wished they knew about innovation 10 years ago.
The Railway Industry Association’s Innovation Director, Milda Manomaityte, and Technical Director, David Clarke, joined us for a discussion on the topic of innovation in rail, along with the insights provided by Interimconsult's Making Innovation Happen framework and innovation consultancy experience.