In the past two weeks we have shared some Wisdoms on Leadership, Storytelling and the future of innovation. We highly recommend you to take some time this bank holiday to check it out :)


Innovation Assessments for the 21st Century  

Is your organisation interested in understanding what conditions for innovation are like?  Have you conducted an Innovation Assessment? Rui and Bettina believe that the Innovation Assessments available today (even Bettina's Innovation Wave...) have much room for improvement in terms of reflecting and representing the topic - innovation - and being more engaging to fill in.  Indeed, they have written an article about this. Well, that's what Rui and Bettina think. What do YOU think? Would be marvellous if you have the time to fill in a VERY short questionnaire by clicking here.


ILF Friends & Family & Networks

By the way, Rui is a Friend of the ILF and it is perhaps a good opportunity to introduce him here! It is fairly recently that Rui and Bettina met, at ISPIM 2014 to be exact. Like with so many other of the ILF's amazing friends, there is an itch to collaborate! One opportunity has already been realised: sharing thoughts on the innovation opportunity that lies in innovation assessments! Both agree that more fun and games is needed (and not only when it comes to the assessment of innovation, innovations as a whole benefits from being more fun, from being gamified. And that's just what Rui and his company, Continue to Grow, set out to do. Wonderful!

Prototyping a Sustainable Future

If we are not always talking about sustainability ourselves, we certainly hear a lot about it.  One of the certainties of sustainability is that we will never achieve it unless we seriously question and rethink the way we work and live currently.  But what are alternatives?  When a mutual friend alerted Bettina to a project called ‘POC21’ she was immediately fascinated, and asked for an introduction to one of the initiators, Dominik Wind ... it turned out that Bettina and Dominik had already met a few years back in connection with a project titled "Innovation Futures". POC21 is an amazing project, calling for makers, designers, engineers and scientists to apply to become part of a 100+ strong team who get together in a castle near Paris to prototype an open, sustainable future. The deadline is this Friday, the 1st of May.
 
To read the conversation about the project between Bettina and project initiator Dominik Wind click here.
 

 10 Types of Innovation - a new App

Some of you might be familiar with the US-based innovation consultancy Doblin, now part of Monitor Deloitte of Deloitte Consulting, who have developed the 10 types of innovation some time ago. They have now developed an iPad App, also called Ten Types of Innovation, to make it easier for those struggling with innovation to get their head around the InnovationScape, allowing users to test new ideas using the same framework that Doblin has used to simplify the creative process for its own clients. Learn more about it here.

 
Supporting the CrowdSpace 

Dr. Avtar Sehra, a member of the ILF Wider Community, has recently shared with us his new enterprise: Crowdaura is a service solution provider for the crowd economy. They develop advanced crowdfunding and crowdsourcing systems & support services for platform launch, charities, corporates and academics. They are also working as incubators for innovative crowd businesses. They have already kicked off some innovative projects with global partners in the US, Asia and Europe and they are looking to work with new partners on novel ideas and implementation of the technology. So if you think this is something that interests you please click here to learn more and contact them :)
 

Off to new lands for traditional publishers!
 

Looking in from the outside it certainly seems that the publishing industry is slow to catch up with the realities of the 21st century, characterised by DOC: digital, open, collaborative. Much seem to be done 'to' rather than 'by' the industry's existing players.  However, some are brave enough to start changing from the inside out!  Back in 2009 when Anna and Bettina were looking for a publisher of 'The Future of Innovation', most traditional publishers shied away from something where the 'table of content' was not fixed, the identify of authors was not known, and there would be about 150 of them!  Not so Gower, editor Jonathan Norman in particular, was open to the experiment, and where other publishers felt nervous about their plan to publish all submissions on an accompanying website, Jonathan was full of enthusiasm.  Now Gower has launched what we think is an exciting new site on the topic of 'Project Management' which brings together the following:

• All of the content in over 100 Gower project management books, all fully readable online;
• User generated content (articles, videos, slideshares and so on) submitted to and quality assured for relevance and style by the site's curator;
• Eight subject-based question and answer forums;
• Access to the expert authors and their profiles
• By the way, all site users are able to create their profile on the site.

Unlike many other fora this one is being properly moderated.  Interested?  ‘Take the Tour’!