Following my previous blog on Innovation, I recently participated in an on-line forum on the Future of Innovation, hosted by Re-Imagi, and facilitated by Jesper Christiansen from NESTA, a UK-based think-tank. You can read about it here, including the infographic output of the discussion. As a result of working with my fellow Re-Imagineers, I developed some ideas on what I call the “Innovation Dichotomy”, which I shared last week at an Re-Imagi event on the Future of Financial Services, hosted at NAB Village in Melbourne.

The Innovation Dichotomy revolves around an over-emphasis on technology, as illustrated by the following:

1. Innovation is heavily tech-led, but design thinking is very much human centred and is all about mapping people’s’ needs;
2. Innovation is often based on digital disruption, and is mostly about devaluing existing processes, de-layering management levels, and increased automation; and yet human skills (cognition, empathy, client-facing, service delivery) are going to be in increasing demand;
3. Innovation usually happens in tech-labs and silos (external and internal), but it will be people (employees, customers, stakeholders) who actually implement the changes – so there has to engagement through alignment of values and purpose.

And as one of our participants at NAB Village commented, if the organisational culture and communications are not right, any innovation-led change will be destined to fail.

Finally, Re-Imagi will be in Sydney this week, so get in touch if you’d like to find out more: rory@re-imagi.co

Next week: The Day of the Mavericks – the importance of intrapreneurship