Future Here Now

When inadequate innovation isn’t enough

This is a selection from a book I published in 2019 called Everyone Innovates Here. The whole book is focused on making sense of why a lot of our current innovation and entrepreneurship programs aren’t moving the needle significantly for their communities, and how we can build systems that foster more of the kinds of innovation we really need.

You can find the book anywhere you order books. If you can’t find it somewhere, let me know.

So the complaints I am levelling against our current innovation systems are that they’re working from an old model that doesn’t fit the world that is emerging - a world that isn’t quite here yet. 

So what? 

Every major change in how we live and work, you might argue, goes through a transition period. Early personal computers looked like a typewriter attached to a TV. Home heating had to move from the open fireplace through the pot-bellied stove before we could get to forced-air furnaces that work without us having to put wood in them. The first automobil…