IDeaLs (Innovation and Design as Leadership)

IDeaLs breaks new ground in powerful ways and at the exact moment when we, as innovators and designers, need new frameworks to lead deep and collective transformations for the challenges and opportunities we are now faced with. By infusing transformation with neuroplasticity, anthropology, design practices and some of the deepest thinking on the collective imagination, this work beautifully reveals a generative sense of shared consciousness, thereby raising our ability to co-construct new futures and nurture truly transformational change. This is an aperture expanding book for all of us.

Transformative Innovation is more than just a well-honed process, episodic investment, or set of promising new ideas – it only works for all of us when it includes all of us. IDeaLs offers a holistic, research-based approach to fostering sustainable innovation by engaging the human, technical, and social systems for lasting change. In an increasingly VUCA world, this pursuit is needed now more than ever before.

IDeaLs is an important book because in reality an innovative and effective organization is a group product. It is the result of co-design and co-implementation by designers, producers, and users. By linking the traditionally separate processes of engineering, design, and group work, IDeaLs aims to link real work to the artistic in all of us. In the end, this is the only way to truly engage employees in the hard work of organizational change.

I have worked as a Professor in Academia as a Vice president in industry. Each community has its own view of reality sometimes with nothing in common. Even researchers who work in company research organizations are often clueless about how their work might translate into business opportunities. IDeaLs stands out as a unique, ground-breaking initiative to bridge this gap. It brings together leading researchers with industry executives, creating a collaborative environment that yields the best of both worlds. IDeaLs merges innovative ways of thinking with practical realism about the real, messy, chaotic world of competition and uncertainty.