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Fulcra
By RYAN J. A. MURPHY
This is a great talk from Piret Tönurist of the Observatory on Public Sector Innovation.
One of the core issues of the talk is innovation doubt—the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. To paraphrase Piret:
[…] why are we doing innovation at all? Maybe sometimes things are working fine, why do we think about innovation at all? We start off with four questions:
- Do you want to do things better?
- Do you have goals and purposes to fulfill?
- Do you want to address the needs of your stakeholders?
- Do you want to prepare for the risks and uncertainties that the future holds? If you answered “yes” to at least one of those questions, then your job is to do innovation—your job is to be a changemaker.
Also, the talk includes a neat model for different varieties of innovation, image courtesy of this post by Adrian M. Senn over on Medium: 
In the next three years, as many as 120 million workers in the world’s 12 largest economies may need to be retrained or reskilled as a result of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and intelligent automation.
cf. Lee Se-Dol.
This is according to the latest IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) study, titled The Enterprise Guide to Closing the Skills Gap.
Seems like an interesting guide. This metric surprised me:
In 2014, it took three days on average to close a capability gap through training in the enterprise. In 2018, it took 36 days.
I didn’t know this measure existed, but I can see the utility. As knowledge work grows ever more specialized, this time-to-capability can only grow.
In two senses, the work of innovation for public value and social impact is changing in Australia and around the world. What we expect public innovation to do and what we need it to achieve, and how that work should be done, are both changing. And they are changing together while they are changing each other.
It’s true. It’s hard to keep up with the discipline of changemaking, but it’s even harder to keep up with the change that needs to be made. Therefore Martin Stewart-Weeks calls for optimism:
Despite some of the uncomfortable and unsettled conditions, there is real energy in the search for more effective ways to solve the big problems we face in common — managing our complex cities, rewiring large and complex health and social care systems, tackling climate change, searching for better ways to integrate the human and technology capabilities of the digital age and making our communities healthy and resilient.
The speed, intensity and sheer connectedness of these and many other complex, public challenges are giving rise to new methods and tools that can help to tackle them with purpose and skill.
The ever-refreshing Paul Jarvis shares some uncommon thoughts on productivity in Jocelyn K. Glei’s Hurry Slowly podcast.
In particular, Paul and Jocelyn discuss the importance of resilience. Citing research and his own experience, Paul points out that resilience is a more important factor in success than many others.
Obviously, though, enabling resilience is not as easy as simply pointing out how important it is. As they discuss, resilience isn’t something innate—which means that it can only be developed through experience. And this is where things get tricky: who gets to have resilience-building experiences?
In my research on innovation skills, I discovered that resilience was one of three key domains that wasn’t an important outcome for our public education systems. This means that resilience training isn’t necessarily a public good. Only if you’re lucky (or privileged) will you have the chance to build up your resilience muscle.
innovation doesn't happen in isolation.
Great ideas come alive when groups of passionate people come together to inspire, support and collaborate. From Stockholm and Tel Aviv to Seoul and Berlin, and of course, Silicon Valley – we have seen, time and time again, the benefits that such rich ecosystems bring entrepreneurs.
— Innovation must involve all Canadians to succeed
Notes, slides, and the Innovation Auditing guide presented at the talk are found below. The research presented during the talk is discussed on the ▵
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What is innovation? How do we define innovation, its outputs and processes, and what are the skills and competencies necessary to practice and excel ▵
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Thus, Canada should take steps to foster the idea economy. The world is changing, and Canada needs to understand how the tenets of the idea and ▵
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On April 29 & 30, ~300 Canadian youth and youth-serving leaders will convene at MaRS Discovery District in Toronto to explore a strategy for ▵
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Warren Buffett manages to entertain and inform in his 2015 letter to shareholders.
(This quote comes from Mr. Buffett’s discussion on the unpredictable but beneficial technologies that come from market-driven innovation.)