You sit there late one evening and look at your account. Three months ago it was full steam ahead. Customers were calling, invoices were being sent, everything felt like it had finally loosened up. Now it’s quiet. The calendar is empty. And somewhere in the back of your mind there’s […]
Innovation
151 posts
Imagine a room full of people who are extremely up to date. They have read all the reports, listened to all the podcasts and been to all the conferences. They know exactly what is happening in the world. But still nothing happens. When they are about to create something new, […]
Imagine a factory where everything works perfectly. The processes are optimized, waste is eliminated, and every step is carefully improved over time. The results are stable, the quality is high, and the efficiency is impressive. And yet something starts to rub. Someone asks an uncomfortable question. What if we are […]
You have assembled a brilliant team. An engineer from Germany, a designer from Italy, a project manager from Sweden and an entrepreneur from India. The skills are sky-high, the ambitions are too high. You sit down in a room to be creative. Silence ensues. Someone says something cautiously, someone else […]
Imagine a meeting where everyone agrees that they will collaborate. There is a good atmosphere, everyone contributes, tasks are distributed and deadlines are set. The project moves forward and everything feels correct. And yet something strange happens. Once the result is ready, it feels like something we have already seen […]
Imagine that you have built the perfect system. Everything is optimized. No unnecessary steps, no redundant resources, no variations. Every part does exactly what it is supposed to do, in exactly the right way. It is efficient, neat and almost beautiful. And it breaks down immediately when something unexpected happens. […]
It is easy to get carried away by possibilities. New technology arouses curiosity. It opens doors to futures we can barely imagine. Artificial intelligence, biotechnology, autonomous systems and space technology create a feeling that anything is possible. And that is precisely what makes innovation so attractive. But there is a […]
Politicians are often described as those in power. They are elected, appointed and scrutinised for their ability to govern, prioritise and make decisions. This creates an image that they control the development of a country, including innovation. And to some extent this is true. But there is a crucial exception. […]
There is a recurring tension in the world of innovation. On one side is the desire to create, test and share. On the other side is the need to protect, regulate and secure. Many innovators feel that law slows down development. Many lawyers feel that law is what makes development […]
It’s a thought that almost everyone who works with change has had at some point. You see a problem. You think it through. And suddenly the solution seems almost obvious. It could be about the climate, about how organizations should work or about how resources could be used smarter. You […]
System innovation rarely moves at a steady pace. When working to change entire systems, you are almost always dependent on many different actors. Companies. Municipalities. Authorities. Researchers. Residents. Financiers. Each of them has their own logic, their own decision-making processes and their own pace. This means that system change almost […]
In many organizations, problems are treated as if they were technical tasks. Something to be analyzed, planned and then solved. But more and more of the issues we face do not work that way. Climate change. Integration. Energy transformation. Health issues. Digitalization of the public sector. These issues do not […]
We live in a time where change is happening faster than many organizations have time to plan for. Climate change, digitalization, geopolitics, energy transition and new technologies are changing the conditions in almost every sector. The problem is that many innovation methods are based on a fairly stable world. You […]
For most of modern history, innovation has had a fairly clear logic. Invent something new. Produce it efficiently. Find a market. And if the market runs out in one place, there is almost always another. A new region. A new country. A new continent. A new group of people who […]
We’ve all been there. A meeting that lifts. A workshop that feels alive. Conversations flow. Ideas bounce between people. Time flies. When we leave the room, we’re satisfied, energized, and convinced that we’ve just been part of creating something important. We often think that it was our own input that […]
There is a point where more thinking no longer helps. Where more analysis does not create more clarity but rather more delay. That point occurs more often than we think. When the complexity of a system increases, the world changes faster than our plans. The conditions shift. Actors react. New […]
We love simple explanations. Something happens. We point to a cause. We feel satisfied. Sales went down because the market was tough. The project failed because the team lacked resources. I procrastinated because I’m lazy. The problem is that the world doesn’t work linearly. It works in circles. It’s not […]
There is a state that almost all successful innovation leaders share, but which is rarely mentioned in the job description. It is not creativity per se. It is not methodological knowledge. It is a feeling. An inner pulse. A feeling that something has to happen. Now. It is called urgency. […]
The concept of scale has long been used in social innovation to understand how ideas and solutions spread, enlarge or deepen within social systems. In particular, research has pointed to three different ways of working with scaling as complementary paths to real system change: scaling up, scaling out and scaling […]
System innovation may sound technical and structural, but in practice it often starts with something very human. A story. When many organizations, professions and interests are to move in a new direction, reports, calculations and logical reasoning are rarely enough. Rational arguments are important but they are almost never sufficient. […]
Leadership has always been about getting people moving in a common direction. What has changed is the context. When organizations operate in stable environments, traditional leadership is sufficient. When they operate in uncertain, fast-moving and interconnected systems, it is no longer sufficient. This is when the need for innovation leadership […]
In innovation and social development, the concept of ecosystems is increasingly appearing. But what does it really mean to think in terms of ecosystems, and why is it so important? Thinking in terms of ecosystems is a way of seeing the context, relationships and the whole rather than focusing on […]
Many organizations and individuals are trained to interpret changes in the outside world based on a simple question: How can this benefit us? When new technology emerges, when rules change or when societal challenges become clear, people quickly look for opportunities to protect their position or strengthen their competitiveness. This […]
In many organizations the word complexity is used as an explanation for why things cannot be changed. It is said that the problems are complex, that the outside world is complex or that the systems are too complex to touch. But often different types of complexity are mixed together. In […]
Measuring is a fundamental part of organizational management. What we measure tends to get done because we focus on what is visible, explainable, and evaluable. But innovation is something completely different from production and improvement work. Innovation is a creative and uncontrollable process that does not grow from measurement but […]
As societal challenges become more complex, the way we organize innovation, value creation and collaboration is also changing. Traditional organizations with clear boundaries, hierarchies and ownership structures have difficulties dealing with issues that span industries, sectors and geographies. In this landscape, the concept of a keystone organization has emerged as […]
System innovation is not just about creating new solutions. It is just as much about getting the solutions to spread, integrate and become part of the new system. A pilot can be fantastic, but without scaling it does not affect the whole system. By the time a solution reaches the […]
Systems innovation is fundamentally about people. Technology, policies and structures can change, but if behaviours do not, the system will continue to produce the same results. Therefore, the behavioural level is not a side track in systems innovation, but a central hub. Understanding how behaviours are formed, how they spread […]
System innovation occurs in complex, dynamic and often unpredictable environments. This means that traditional measurement methods do not capture the changes that actually matter. Classic KPIs are based on linear assumptions where input leads to results in a predictable chain. In system change, reality works differently. Effects often arise as […]
The Theory of Change has become an established method for describing how a desired future can be achieved through a chain of assumptions, interventions and mechanisms. The method is often used in project logic, social development and sustainability work. Basically, the Theory of Change is about mapping a logical chain […]