Total Innovation Podcast

52. Samuel Arbesman: Decay, Wonder and Where Knowledge Lives

Samuel Arbesman is a complexity scientist and writer. He is passionate about bringing together seemingly unrelated ideas from science and technology. Samuel works with companies and founders that recognize that the future happens at these boundaries, in such areas as open science, tools for thought, managing massive complexity, artificial intelligence, and infusing computation into everything from biology to manufacturing. Samuel’s scientific research examines such areas as scientific discovery and network science. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, and he was previously a contributing writer for Wired. Samuel is the award-winning author of Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension and The Half-Life of Facts. His most recent book is The Magic of Code. In addition, Samuel is a Senior Fellow of The Silicon Flatirons Center at The University of Colorado, and a Research Fellow at The Long Now Foundation. Previously, Samuel was a Senior Scholar in Research and Policy at The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a Research Fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University.

51. Samuel West - The Honest Truth About Failure

Innovation is lonely work. Sam West built a museum of failure to make visible what organisations hide — and found it gives people permission. Working in innovation is lonely. You're usually pushing against the culture, not with it. You're the person asking "why not?" in rooms full of people paid to say "because." You try things that don't work, often in public, and the organisation's instinct is to move on quickly and quietly rather than ask what happened and why. In startup land there are spaces for this. F**k Up Nights — actual events where founders get on stage and tell the audience what went wrong — have become a real phenomenon precisely because there was nowhere else to say it. The relief in the room when someone is honest about failure is palpable. You can feel people exhale. Corporate innovation doesn't have that. It has words about failure — "we celebrate learning," "there are no bad ideas," "fail fast" — but not much else. The language of failure tolerance is everywhere. The actual practice of it is rare. And the people doing the hard work of trying new things inside large organisations often feel like they're doing it alone, without cover, in an environment that will quietly hold it against them if it doesn't work out. Samuel West, Founder and Curator, The Museum of Failure; Organisational Psychologist; PhD in Organisational Psychology, Lund University, has spent a decade studying exactly that gap. He built a museum full of things that failed — from global corporations to billion-dollar bets — precisely to make visible what organisations prefer to make invisible. The effect it has on people is not what you might expect. It doesn't make them cynical. It gives them permission. When you see that Apple, Google, and Procter & Gamble get things catastrophically wrong, something shifts. The fear shrinks a little. The risk feels more possible. He has also, as it happens, lived through a very public personal failure of his own — declared bankrupt over the museum itself. Which gives him a credential that no PhD can provide. This conversation is for anyone who has ever sat in a post-mortem and felt like nobody was really saying what happened. For anyone who has ever killed a project and felt they had to pretend it never existed. For the person who is doing innovation work right now and wondering why it feels so unrewarding even when they believe in it.

50: Simon Hill - 50 Episodes In: Lessons from the Innovation Frontline

50 episodes. 4 seasons. One stubborn question: what does it take to make innovation work? Simon Hill looks back at the lessons so far.  One stubborn question: what does it actually take to make innovation work? In this special milestone edition, host Simon Hill steps out from behind the interviewer's chair to look back at the conversations, characters and ideas that have shaped the Total Innovation Podcast so far. From Aidan McCullen and the polyvalent players of Toulouse Rugby Club, to Steve Rader running 850 challenges for NASA with a team of just twelve, to Gina Lucarelli's 90 UN accelerator labs built on "directed improvisation" — Simon revisits the moments that stuck. Along the way he draws out the threads that connect rugby pitches to lunar missions and Faroese entrepreneurs to financial services boardrooms: innovate where you differentiate, know your planted foot, reward the right kind of mistakes, and never assume the best answer lives where you expect to find it. It's also a chance to reflect on Expected Value, Simon's book on closing innovation's measurement gap, and the central thesis behind the whole series — that innovation rarely fails because of bad ideas. It fails because of bad systems. Part retrospective, part manifesto, this is a reflection on making the invisible visible, and a marker on the road to the next fifty.

49. Mike Butcher MBE: Tech, Truth and Finding the Path

MIKE BUTCHER (M.B.E.) IS THE FOUNDER AND EDITOR OF PATHFOUNDERS. HE WAS FORMERLY THE EDITOR-AT-LARGE FOR TECHCRUNCH [https://techcrunch.com/] FOR 18 YEARS. HE HAS BEEN A TECHNOLOGY JOURNALIST SINCE 1995. HE HAS WRITTEN FOR UK NATIONAL NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES AND BEEN NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE IN EUROPEAN TECHNOLOGY BY WIRED UK. HE HAS SPOKEN AT THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM, WEB SUMMIT, AND DLD. HE HAS INTERVIEWED TONY BLAIR, DMITRY MEDVEDEV, KEVIN SPACEY, LILY COLE, PAVEL DUROV, JIMMY WALES, AND MANY OTHER TECH LEADERS AND CELEBRITIES. MIKE IS A REGULAR BROADCASTER, APPEARING ON BBC NEWS, SKY NEWS, CNBC, CHANNEL 4, AL JAZEERA, AND BLOOMBERG. HE HAS ALSO ADVISED UK PRIME MINISTERS AND THE MAYOR OF LONDON ON TECH STARTUP POLICY, AS WELL AS BEING A JUDGE ON THE APPRENTICE UK. GQ MAGAZINE NAMED HIM ONE OF THE 100 MOST CONNECTED MEN IN THE UK. HE IS THE CO-FOUNDER THE NON-PROFITS TECHFUGEES.COM [http://techfugees.com/], TECHVETS.CO [http://techvets.co/], AND STARTUP COALITION [https://startupcoalition.io/].   HE WAS AWARDED AN MBE IN THE QUEEN’S BIRTHDAY HONOURS LIST IN 2016 FOR SERVICES TO THE UK TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY AND JOURNALISM.

48. Gina Lucarelli: Grassroots Innovations: UNDP Accelerator Lab Network

Gina built the world’s largest network of social innovation labs at the United Nations and currently teaches at Harvard University Graduate School of Design.  The innovation lab network that she built was the United Nation's largest investment in sustainability innovation (115 countries). Her work is taught as a Harvard Business School Case Study (Fall 2022), received the Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award, the 2023 SXSW Innovation Award, Apolitical's Public Service Team of the Year (evidence-based policy-making) in 2019, was covered in the MIT Sloan Review (Summer 2020) and depicted in For Tomorrow, an award-winning documentary on grassroots innovation available on Amazon Prime. A ride or die optimist, she has 20+ years of experience in the global sustainable development sector working on civic participation, human rights, entrepreneurship, reducing inequalities, climate action, food systems, informal economies and sustainable development across the board. She writes, speaks and represents the United Nations on sustainability innovations regularly, including through a new course she designed for the Masters in Design Engineering program at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Graduate School of Design (Integrative Frameworks: Innovation in Global Problem Solving).