Innovation Explorers

In this episode we’re speaking with designer, educator and thought leader Per Axbom about his book “Digital Compassion as a Driver of Innovation”. As someone who’s been on the leading edge of UX and digital design for the last 15 years Per talks about the need for designers to recognize and understand the negative impacts that digital design can and does have on people. He also shares both insights and tools to break through the willful ignorance of many organizations.

In this episode we’re speaking with John Mortimer who works with public sector organizations in the U.K. and Sweden to help them reinvent their work and redesign their systems. We talk with John about why it feels like it’s so difficult to innovate in public organizations and the impact that the current paradigm of New Public Management has on inhibiting change and improvement. John discusses the many challenges on the personal level for those engaged in the public sector as well as the need to work at a systemic level to actually change things for the better.

In this episode of Innovation Explorers we’re speaking with the provacative Maria Giudice, who founded the design shop Hot Studio and worked as global design director for Facebook and Autodesk. Maria talks about her new book “Changemakers: How Leaders Can Design Change in an Insanely Complex World”, a follow up to her 2013 book “Rise of the DEO: Leadership by Design.” Maria shares with us her strategies for breaking through the friction of inaction and mediocrity and how changemakers, innovators and designers need to be smart about navigating a system in which they may be seen as a foreign element. And she notes that in order to be a change maker, you have to be optimistic about the future.

Over five years, Mike created, led and scaled the Government Digital Service (GDS) as UK’s first Executive Director of Digital and Chief Data Officer. Mike talks to us about the challenges and successes of creating user-driven public digital policies and how public institutions rather than private ones might be better at taking the risks of creating future-oriented solutions.

Inefficient meetings cost us tons of money. How can we redesign our meetings and conversations to make them better? In this episode we’re speaking with Daniel Stillman, designer, facilitation expert, and author of the book “Good Talk”.

In this episode we’re speaking with Tom Goodwin, author of “Digital Darwinism” keynote speaker and digital and innovation thought leader. Tom talks about how he views the world like a big r&d lab and how he tries to help his clients make sense of it all. Tom talks about a new way of describing “disruptive innovation” that is very different from the  way that Clayton Christensen described it and how the act of asking good questions is not only highly underrated but critical in creating innovation and making our world a better place.

How can you spark delight and joy for your users and customers, and not only solve a problem? In our never-ending pursuit of efficiency and profitability it seems we’ve forgotten something extremely human. Rich talks to Lorie Loeb, Professor of Computer Science and founder of the DALI Lab at Darmouth College, and Talia Wheatley, Lincoln Filene Professor in Human Relations and the Director, Consortium for Interacting Minds in the Psychological and Brain Sciences at Dartmouth College. We talk about Designing for Delight and Joy, those small, hugely valuable moments for ourselves and our brains, and the how we don’t really need to spend all of our time “fixing” or “solving” things.

What is the ISO 56000 Standard for Innovation Management, and why should you care? We talk to Kalle Jegers, PhD, on why there is a standard, what it contains and how organisations can use it to enhance its innovations efforts.

This week Kat Zhou joins us to talk about ethical design, how we as “users” are manipulated much more than we think, and what designers can start doing to resist un-ethical design decisions.

Are you suffering from innovation fatigue?-The power of slow and boring innovation. Are you and your colleagues suffering from “Innovation Fatigue” - a common ailment approaching pandemic levels due to overdoses of Innovation Theater? Listen in on our podcast with author, Alf Rehn, Professor of Innovation, Design, and Management at the University of Southern Denmark as he talks about the power of boring and slow innovation, about the need for Radical Patience and how innovation is like raising a child.