It's the end of another season. Alex and Wais take some time to reflect.

Empathy, empathy, empathy, it's the heart of innovation. Apparently. The problem with empathy is that innovators don't truly empathise, instead, they pick and choose feedback that meets their own preferences rather than the broader picture that better reflects the needs of the user. Indi Young addresses this by providing a better understanding of empathy and offering some approaches to utilising it without falling into familiar traps. Alex and Wais dip in to learn how to empathise...

There are many creative agencies but only one of those agencies is called IDEO, the granddaddy of them all, which traces its history back to 1978, the year after Star Wars was released. IDEO became a named entity in 1991, since which time they've popularised the idea of human-centred design, a process that seeks to empathise with users and embed the understanding that falls from this within the product design process to create better innovations. That's not what this book is about, but it is...

Way back in the mists of time, before even the first iPhone was released and kickstarted a seismic shift in digital innovation, Scott Berkun wrote The Myths of Innovation, in which he explores why we have innovation all wrong. Alex and Wais dip into the book and find out what innovation looked like before lean startups and business model canvases were a thing.

In this episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex and Wais follow up their previous episode about Business Model Generation with a look back at Osterwalder's follow-up, Value Proposition Design.

If our recent fixation with innovation started anywhere, it was with Osterwalder & Pigneur's Business Model Generation which popularised the idea of business model innovation through the introduction of the business model canvas. Alex and Wais reflect on the book's legacy and relevance to the innovation landscape today.

In this episode of the Innovation Book Club Alex and Wais take on the beast that is ChatGPT and consider how it's going to change how we use the web, our work and our lives. This conversation was recorded in January 2023.

Alex and Wais discuss Eric Ries' game-changing book The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses (2011). The book (finally) offered software developers and technology entrepreneurs an alternative to the resource-heavy and time-consuming waterfall methodology and has since become a staple of any startup. But is it all its really cracked up to be?

In this final episode of the second season of the Innovation Book Club, Alex and Wais reflect on the ideas they’ve discussed over the previous seven episodes and how it’s helped to widen their understanding of innovation. They also talk about trainspotting briefly. No links this time, but why not give us a 5-star review on your podcatcher of choice.

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss an academic paper, ‘Ideas are born in fields of play: towards a theory of play and creativity in organisational settings’ by Charalampos Mainemelis and Sarah Ronson. The premise of this article is that play is used in organisations in two ways, either to divert us from the tedium of work or to engage us at work and promote our creativity. Play, therefore, is key to innovation, but the authors argue that we don’t know how to harness play effectively or...

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss Scott E Page’s book The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy. Scott Page argues that diversity in teams is not only the right thing to do from a social justice point of view, but it’s also the right thing to do if you want to create a successful business. This is because diversity is additive, it brings wider perspectives to complex problems, which means that you’re more likely to deliver better solutions. You can watch...

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss Nilofer Merchant’s concept of ‘Onlyness’. Nilofer Merchant argues that at the heart of all ideas are human beings, but we have created a world in which powerful and entrenched hierarchies overlook those ideas that do not align with their own values and experience. Ideas, Merchant argues, are a product of our ‘onlyness’, they are the result of our own history and experience, visions and hopes, and this is what makes them unique. To give our ideas power...

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss Woody Wade’s book Scenario Planning: A Field Guide to the Future.  Once the preserve of large-scale businesses with their own future-thinking departments, Woody Wade’s approach makes scenario planning both accessible and efficient for everyone. This approach allows organisations to better anticipate a future that is different from the present and align their innovation efforts to this future. You can watch Woody Wade’s presentation here:...

This retrospective article looks back at twenty years of disruption and argues that we’ve actually become confused about what disruptive innovation is, how it works, and the contribution it makes to innovation success. As a result, we get disruption all wrong. The authors use the example of Uber to explain how it’s not on a disruptive trajectory and shouldn’t be referred to as a disruptor. You can read the article here: shorturl.at/hmARX If you’re enjoying the Innovation Book Club, please...

In this episode, Alex and Wais discuss ‘Know your customer’s “Jobs to be Done”’, a 2016 HBR article by Clayton M Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, and David S Duncan. The authors propose that innovation success has less to do with the quality of a particular product and more to do with whether that product ‘does a job’ for the user. The key to innovation, therefore, is to focus on the job, which sounds simple enough but requires the innovator to uncover complex social, emotional and...

In this first episode of the second season of the Innovation Book Club, Alex and Wais discuss ‘Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research vs. Technology and Meaning Change’, an article by two giants of the design industry, Roberto Verganti and Donald Norman. The authors were both interested in exploring why successive incremental innovations implemented over time never lead to radical breakthroughs. In fact, the opposite is often true. The key to unlocking this conundrum lies in the...

In this episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss the paper ‘What creates advantage in the ‘social era’?’ by Tim Kastelle, Nilofer Merchant, and Martie-Louise Verreynne. From the authors: “We have observed the economy move from one where centralized organizations initiated value creation to one where that same value creation develops with the help of multiple outside, contributing networks. This tectonic shift means that all modern industries now have a...

Note: This episode won’t make much sense unless you’ve listened to the rest of the season first, so best to start there. In this final episode of the first season of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad share their reflections on what they’ve learned from the previous seven episodes. No questions for you this time, you get an easy ride. Contact us: [email protected] or [email protected]

In this episode, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Stephen Vargo and Robert Lusch’s seminal paper Evolving to a New Dominant Logic for Marketing which was originally published in the Journal of Marketing in 2004. Abstract: Marketing inherited a model of exchange from economics, which had a dominant logic based on the exchange of “goods,” which usually are manufactured output. The dominant logic focused on tangible resources, embedded value, and transactions. Over the past several...

In this episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss a Vice documentary based on Jeremy Rifkin’s book The Third Industrial Revolution. The book blurb: “The Industrial Revolution, powered by oil and other fossil fuels, is spiralling into a dangerous endgame. The price of gas and food are climbing, unemployment remains high, the housing market has tanked, consumer and government debt is soaring, and the recovery is slowing. Facing the prospect of a second collapse...

In this episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Joseph Schumpeter’s ideas on Creative Destruction. From Investopedia: “The term creative destruction was first coined by Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter in 1942. Schumpeter characterized creative destruction as innovations in the manufacturing process that increase productivity, describing it as the "process of industrial mutation that incessantly revolutionizes the economic structure from within,...

In this episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Warren Berger’s noted book A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas. The book’s blurb: “In this groundbreaking book, journalist and innovation expert Warren Berger shows that one of the most powerful forces for igniting change in business and in our daily lives is a simple, under-appreciated tool--one that has been available to us since childhood. Questioning--deeply,...

In the second episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Peter Drucker’s seminal article, The Theory of the Business, originally published in Harvard Business Review in 1994. The blurb: “Peter F. Drucker argues that what underlies the current malaise of so many large and successful organizations worldwide is that their theory of the business no longer works. The story is a familiar one: a company that was a superstar only yesterday finds itself stagnating...

In this first and pilot episode of the Innovation Book Club, Alex Drago and Wais Pirzad discuss Steven Johnson’s book Where Good Ideas Come From: the Natural History of Innovation. Here’s the blurb: “Where do good ideas come from? And what do we need to know and do to have more of them? In Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson, one of our most innovative popular thinkers, explores the secrets of inspiration. Steven Johnson has spent twenty years immersed in creative industries, was...