The future of innovation – beyond 2009

I’ll be involved in the panel discussions at the next InnoFuture Momentum on October 13th, 3:30pm to 6:30pm, in Telstra’s Executive Briefing Centre, Level 18, 35 Collins Street, Melbourne.

We are all fascinated by the future. The future always looks brighter. The prospect of a promotion, developing a winning product or promotion, bigger budget, new government incentive … tomorrow, next quarter, next year … If we realise that there is no future, only what we do today, we can focus on innovation that will result in a better future. Risk, courage, learning from parallel industries and cultures, harnessing our talents… Thinking with an open mind how to create a better world …

The events is structured around a series of industry panels, one of which I’m responsible for.

Innovation has been seen as an arms race—the race for more ideas, more content, more investment, more involvement. If we can see more ideas, get access to more content, get more of our team involved, if we can get it earlier in its lifecycle, then we might be the ones with first mover advantage. However, modern communications technology means than ideas are no longer scarce but freely available. New generation media empires, such as TED, have industrialised the idea collection process, creating vast idea smorgasbords for us to graze on. Today’s challenge is synthesis: understanding what problems are interesting, selecting the ideas which add value to a solution (as not all ideas are created equal), and then bringing together these ideas to create something new. How do we step out of the ideas arms race, creating the space and time our team need to synthesize these new, innovative ideas when presented with a challenge?

We also have an interesting group of participants on the panels (including myself):

  • Ilya Joel-Pitcher, EDS a HP Company
  • Mark Toomey, Infonomics
  • Hafeez Bana, Deloitte
  • Nicole Keating, GHD
  • Neville Christie, CEO Institute, Innovation Group, and discussion moderator

Hope to see you there!