Lets focus on the bigger picture here.

Developing our knowledge and then putting it to good use gives us the potential for securing a competitive position- that goes without saying, perhaps.

Living in Europe offers us enormous history, diversity and a constant respect for the make-up of its different cultures.

Europe is a very proud continent forged from this history of competitiveness but it is grappling with its place in the global world where others seem to have a greater present-day advantage.

For many, Europe seems stalled; in jobs, growth and its future space, it seems not so sure on what and where it can effectively compete in a complex and challenging world. There are so many competing voices within, draining vital energy, while others outside Europe are getting on with the job of equipping themselves for the changes taking place to effectively compete in today’s world.

The forging of the European Union needs more ‘heat’ to meld into the force that many want, yet every time it seems to be getting to that required temperature for effecting a real change, someone or something comes along and throws ‘cold water’ on it.

“Herding cats”

Perhaps that idiomatic saying of “herding cats” summarizes many of the discussions and debates that often occur all over Europe, offering up their part of the solution to what seems to me, increasingly an intractable problem. There is this ongoing attempt to control or organize what seems intent on staying uncontrollable or chaotic.

It just seems incredibly difficult to get the required direction or united determination to channel ‘our’ energies, perhaps impossible is a growing feeling that is fuelling even more the nationalistic pride built from centuries of disputes and disagreements in alternating alliances of the day.

Europe in whatever eventual union or collection of entities needs to stop focusing inward as that seems simply not to help. It needs to look outward and recognize the challenges it needs to go after and organize around, that shift the ground it competes on, so it can offer the foundations to build from for many of these individual voices to unite to move all those concerns that need clarity, work and a sense of clear direction. We are focusing on the right aspects to unite behind, to identify with and combine our unique resources.

At present we are all pulling in our own directions, to secure our own piece of the declining economic pie and that is undermining any ability for improved performance.

“Fiddling while Rome burns”

You do get this sense we enjoy “crisis and opportunity”. The institutions and bodies that are set up to lay out the broad direction within the EU, start with good intention and then occupy themselves with a host of unimportant or less important matters and neglect priorities during a crisis. They get lost in the details, determined to defend and spend the budgets and lose sight of the need for clear commercial or social outcomes.

The source of this “fiddling while Rome burns” is the story that Nero played the fiddle (violin) while Rome burned, during the great fire in AD 64. The flaw in this was there was no such instrument as the fiddle (violin) invented in first-century Rome. Equally the events of a fire have been constructed in all the rivalries and conflicting accounts that came after. I get a sense of this today within the EU, we are failing to orchestrate even the violin player, everyone is playing their own tune!

Europe stands at a real crossroads today, where it travels determines its future

It can stay locked up in conflicts, often chaotic decision-making, in its many disputes and simmering rivalries or it can learn from those events across its history and find a different path.

I doubt that path is integration of countries, even freedom of movement or common currencies or a given language. These are ideals suffering from imposition yet we can integrate and combine in ways that allow us as individuals to prosper and grow but also to unite in projects and across challenges that deliver a more promising future.

Grand challenges we can unite behind.
These come from the challenges that should be of the uttermost importance to our future well-being:
1. The long drawn out integrating the digital infrastructure across Europe to bring down the present barriers and allow less of a divide across Europe.
2. The ability to connect across a European energy grid that delivers on security, and is moving purposefully towards clean and efficient alternatives that are economically viable alternatives.
3. The formation of a scientific research community
4. The harmonization of intellectual property to accelerate invention not just protect it
5. The overhaul to our educational system to deliver the required skills we need for the future not based on the past.
6. Putting in place the roadmap to renewables that give investment confidence
7. Adding even more momentum towards key-enabling technologies
8. Having a reusable framework that reduces the ‘throw-away’ culture and mind-set
9. Tackle health and wellbeing in clear, coordinated and integrated ways across all.
10. Redoubling the efforts on food security, sustainable agriculture and land and sea management through a greater agricultural revolution.

I could add a few more but these are all ‘big bites’. We should possible go back to the approach to EU flagship programmes where the big agenda gets the required focus from politicians, bureaucrats, business and our institutions, at every level and engaging in meaningful ways with our broader society, then we are achieving more in ‘common cause’ and integration than where we have been heading recently.

We should push the EU agenda towards delivering integrated models to offer new value and opportunities, the innovation part, as central to achieving the need for new growth and jobs.

These big challenges give us our future, they break down the barriers, they open up our minds to what is the real borders to protect, to push out towards in different ways If we can unlock the barriers and ring-fencing on many of these that are the blocks today, we are laying in the foundation for growth and jobs.

There is nothing new in this appeal but the speed of change occurring outside Europe requires us to shift internal disputes and channel this energy into resolving the big challenges.

Europe needs to shoot for a different moon.

Structural issues are longstanding, we are attempting to protect far too much, we are falling to move towards a ‘creative destruction’ where innovation-lead solutions provide the better alternative in growth and challenge We link to these common causes as they benefit the individual, as well as the communities we are in (national, local, scientific, educational etc).

The push for a common market of ideas and knowledge that are allowed to flow

I detect some positive movement in seizing some of these outstanding big challenges in the way the European Commission is being set up and structured. The new commission structure is pointing to big issues; it is veering away from past integration mantras, wanting to deliver on some of these challenges suggested above.

I just hope it does not extend the list too much or we go down the path of dilution, spreading and stretching our capabilities and resources too thin and ending up with the usual past compromises, all wrought out in eleventh hour late-night deals. Of course this is perhaps wishful thinking and certainly early days.

Can we move out of our fiscal consolidation mind-set? We must

As we continue to have fiscal consolidation, we get rising Euroscepticism. We nibble away not so much at the edges we are actually attacking our core and this is where we are facing the defence of knowledge assets and finding ways to promote by, perhaps, uniting behind our bigger EU challenges.

So where does innovation fit, I’d say front and centre. Every conversation in every boardroom, in every political meeting, at each EU summit and discussion, it is the outcomes we await to hear. These need to be far more centred around innovation in the outcome, not just in nice declarations with little behind them but in cohesive plans that move us towards this agenda of tackling the ‘Big Challenge Agenda’

Scaling and building innovation waves

We need to scale and create the positive waves through innovation. Reality is not in what is going on inside Europe, it is what is happening elsewhere. It is the organization of those knowledge assets to scale and develop the waves of innovation that Asia and America are clustering around in better ways than in Europe.

These can be seen in numerous ways as geographical regions all look for ways to become the dominant force for innovation. Asia, especially China is testing that existing dominance and Europe and others in the West need to embrace that challenge, not attempt to defend against it in legislative efforts but in this necessary knowledge asset re-equipping.

Keeping innovation high on the EU agenda but in new bigger ways
Innovation features higher in national policy than ever before in many parts of the world. Let us all hope Europe does not drop the innovation ball, but cutting its commitments to what has already been hard-fought over, delivered in the Horizon 2020 programme.

Equally let’s not dilute its effort and whittle away its value in thousands of small, perhaps meaningless gestures built on political threat and fragmented thinking.

Getting Europe moving again will need a much bolder vision and then stay focused on funding it if it links into these grand challenges in clear or valuable (experimental) ways that can be a catalyst for others to pick up and run with over the next mile, as innovation is not a sprint, it is a marathon to run, at this big challenge level.

Who is that knocking on my door?
* China has set itself some ambitious innovation targets, in its production of patents, in producing more PhD’s in science and engineering than US institutions or European ones and twice as many undergraduates in these fields than the US.
* China is going about outpacing the US in investments in research and development, it is growing R&D expenditure by 15 to 20% per year, not just to catch up but to drive innovation into its future.
* Asia and America invest more than Europe in R&D at the ratio of 3:3:2. The technology-intensive activity in the Asian region is fast approaching that of North America and Western Europe.
* China’s invention initiatives are producing rapid results as the government seeks increasing actively in cooperation’s with its Asian competitors. Asian countries are mutually fuelling one another’s innovative success
* The precise impact of Asia’s IP expansion is impossible to predict. But its transformative potential is obvious as the commissioners of the patent offices of Japan, South Korea, China and, to a lesser extent, Singapore and Taiwan meet increasingly to define and coordinate their intellectual property (IP) policies although a number of territorial disputes and political divides do often get in the way.

Each of these examples is building future knowledge assets to unlock innovation potential.

* America equally continues to work through a clearer innovation framework than I feel we in Europe seem not to have, or it seems incapable of delivering in our current fragmented view of innovation understanding. We want to spread innovation either too thinly or distort its value and meaning. We need a clear overarching innovation message.
* Take the reports from the “NII Innovate America Council on Competitiveness” or the White House view on “A Strategy for American Innovation” as debate documents or guidance indicators that offer an overarching view of how innovation needs to work and on what is needed to achieve and maintain a competitive position for America, written by both Business leaders and Government officials.

So what’s next?
The European Union has consistently failed to exploit its potential for innovation-based growth. Europe remains less inter-connected in critical areas due to political grandstanding and catering to vested domestic interests.

Does Europe lack the capacity for change as we constantly fail to convert much that seems promising, we are often not commercializing on all our hard work? Others pick up the baton and make the ‘risk’ investments off of the work and initial investments in Europe.

We constantly get caught up in the politics of the day, that seem to continue to divide and rule in old fashion ways, yet technology, science, and innovation are moving at a force and speed we are often guilty of not appreciating its impact or wealth-creating prospective. Innovation does not respect borders, it seamlessly moves across them but we need to forge the infrastructure to allow it to flow in more efficient and effective ways.

It is high time we did understand the real value of innovation, it ‘touches’ us all, we can all ‘feed off it’. We need to mobile around innovation and find the right ways to release our knowledge assets that are residing across Europe in a myriad of guises, waiting for the organizing forces and challenges to unite behind and solve.

We have the latent capability clearly.

**Note : A really useful source of knowledge is this overview of the National Science Board’s Science and Engineering Indicators 2014 highlights some major developments in international and U.S. science and engineering (S&E) that explores many useful indicators in the race of Science, Research and Technology. It’s worth a read.

The post The Real Race is to Invest in Knowledge Assets and Grand Innovation Challenges first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to shake out of our lethargy and really begin to attempt to solve the real issues of our time. Some organizations are clearly working on and trying to draw attention and gain greater engagement but we need a much greater concerted effort to focus on the big societal challenges.

Global warming, rising health issues, finally cracking cancer, malaria, dementia, finding different solutions to the ageing within society. How are we going to tackle the rapidly depleting natural resources, the future conflicts over water, food, or energy . These are big, hairy, audacious gaps to be resolved.

Many are avoiding the need too stare hard into the future as we are not re-equipping everyone with skills that combine inventiveness, innovation and creativity that contributes into their communities, we have got stuck in the “me”. A reality of depletion is racing towards us and it is not a pretty sight.
The growing radical innovation activity gap

We are facing the innovation gap as our problems keep growing linearly yet we must find ways to rapidly scale and deploy our knowledge in new, more dynamic ways. This requires society to learn how to apply effective innovation themselves, not just being whipped up, waiting for the latest gadget or incremental advancement to be put into their hands.

We need to build the desire of wanting to be part of rebuilding society; making our contribution to real advancement or feeling they were there, involved, part of the “times” when this shift to societal innovation was happening.

We need to be collectively moved by innovation and what it can offer.

Technology does hold a vital key, so does the emerging social media for reaching out to critical masses but let’s face it, today we are deploying the best resources (the best and the brightest) not in the area on solving big societal problems but in slavishly churning out the next technology or gadget.

These actually mean nothing unless they become increasingly part of the solutions we really do need urgently, to tackle the big societal issues.

We certainly need communications, platforms, different media techniques and mobility as part of the initial global building blocks to putting in place the infrastructures to solve these societal problems.

We need the tools, infrastructure, methods, and techniques to scale for solving societal problems not the latest incremental improvement for Apple, Facebook or Google. How about providing innovations that can deliver the parts that give us the power to tackle the problems of our time?

We need innovation tools, structures and methods that will allow us each of us to invent, to innovate, and to be creative in finding our contributions and solutions to societal problems. To go and apply these in practical solutions not just simply adopt them.

I liked what Eric Ries, author of the Lean Startup recently said:

“What’s going to make it more likely for someone to start a start-up in the first place?” “Open data is one such thing. If you give people access to the tools, the information about what’s happening in the world, you give them the opportunity to stumble on more novel solutions”

I’d add you give them the empowerment and skills, they will provide the desire and energy.

Then we have the hidden potential behind social media and big data
Can you imagine a world where we all can communicate and contribute into these global societal problems? Combine technology, the internet and social media and you have begun to connect up the parts or the whole planet. The exciting prospect is then ‘feeding’ all this data into finding patterns for solutions. Solutions that are relevant to you, your immediate community but also to the wider ones.

The ability to scale, glocalize, adapt and diffuse
Social innovation struggles today with scale and replicating success in one place and making it work in another. This replicating might be the barrier, perhaps we should not apply other solutions just extract the parts that can work for us. This extraction needs knowing what is valuable to you or applicable, what is not.

The need is to educate everyone to ‘break down’ the context and we need to teach numerous different skills to allow this to work. Then you need to work on where are the synergies that can be tailored and applied to local needs.

Diffusion and adoption comes into the picture here too.

Dealing with value creation and growth but in radically different ways
We seek value creation, most usually by creating demand, pushing for increasing consumption. Growth is measured by our productive gains. Is this the right way to measure ourselves and how we set about preserving our precious resources? No, we need to challenge this, a real paradigm shift that alters our lenses looking out on the world.

Changing our thinking for a new world of preserving our precious resources
Today’s modern economic activity does need challenging and it is through rethinking much of our view of judging success.

Success in preserving, in effectively trading precious resources needs a fresh set of thinking, a new economic understanding.

This thinking is way beyond my preserve, there are far better qualified people to offer suggestions than me on this. All I know is that innovation, creativity and invention must all play their part.

Some of my emerging thoughts relating to where innovation can fit are:

1). Stepping back and putting innovation to its better use
We have a world were transparency is finding its place. We ‘witness’ unfolding events faster than ever, they are nearly instantaneous. Governments are really struggling on this new transparency. We can manage this in new ways, instead of trying to control the flow of ‘selective’ data through repression. We need to open up all the positive activities occurring every day that others can learn from. We need to focus on the positives, not dwell on the negatives.

2). We need to provide places for experimentation
There needs to be places, instruments, resources, knowledge platforms that help us all to discover. We need a dynamic flow to discover needs, expose variability, enable experimentation to happen and construct ways to measure improved performance

3). We need to granulate and customize activities
The world is far to big to manage as one, even our countries struggle in adapting policies. We constantly reduce down the positive impact by this ‘crazy’ compromise of adjusting great ideas to meet the broader position. We need to segment down, we need to allow what has the best impact for a given community to be allowed to happen.

4). We need to put to use the non human aspects to speed up decision-making
Computers, sophisticated analytics, automated algorithms all can play their part in any redesign of our activities to preserve our critical resources. Modelling decisions that have impact within the world need to be more freely distributed. Not only knowing our ‘footprint’ on the planet but bringing together communities footprints and redesigning the sharing of the burden. We can optimize so much to help us develop better decisions, knowing the broader impact placed upon communities and beyond.

5). Innovating the future needs new business models, products and services
The growing movement in a number of more enlightened businesses towards only using renewal resources is gathering momentum. It is changing business models, products and services. We need to change from being a ‘throw away’ society into ones that re-use, repair and don’t chase increasing consumption but work to reduce consumption to save energy, water, critical resources etc. We do need a far more radical innovating agenda.

Connecting into the already under way experiments and improving them

There are many different ways we can apply innovation into tackling today’s real societal problems, there are lots of experiments under-way, we somehow need to connect into them in global ways.

We need to make the real efforts of connecting all these dots – we need to design a world where surplus has to be rapidly replaced with managing dwindling stocks. It calls for a concerted, connected and comprehensive manner where technology, ingenuity and our innate ability to be creative, innovative and determined to discover real breakthroughs that can contribute to solving societal issues.

The place our innovation focus has to go is in global engagement

We need to know far more of where to go, what to connect into, how we can contribute. We need to engage society across a broader agenda of our challenges. Today these are diverse, dispersed, dissipated and disparate set of activities.

We need to bring these together, perhaps to form a new ‘collective’ world organizational as a body that consolidates, connects and diffuses societal challenges. One that is not layered with bureaucracy and governmental nominees but one powered by a new social platform that allows each of us to connect and explore, to learn and engage.

This needs to be built more than likely by the millennial generation, who are clearly seeing societal challenges as their global innovation task to tackle and resolve. They are more than likely better equipped to understand social engagement and learn to connect and deliver the tools to do the jobs into everyone’s hands.

They understand the power of ‘connection’ through today’s application of technology, social platforms and application of the knowledge being learnt and adopted in practical use. We need them to engage and lead.

What do we need to do to lift innovation onto that slope of enlightenment?

We need to first acknowledge our growing global problems that need tackling through more radical applications and solutions.

We need to learn to scale, learn, deploy, apply– we need to put our own intelligence into innovation. We need to move the innovation needle significantly, individually and collectively.

Relying on organizations providing their solutions in a radically different world of challenges where they are stuck in delivering their steady state of ‘ever consuming’ incremental thinking is not good enough.

We need a new evolution and revolution, applying new innovation thinking by putting radical innovation solutions back on the global agenda that reduce our throw-away consumption and focus on preserving what we have.

We need to regain a collective sense of momentum and a belief that we are truly working on something that changes our lives and helps save the resources we need to live in this world.

The post We are not facing up to the big Societal challenges of today? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The innovation party presently feels a little flat.

The numerous delicious canapés to choose from are turning up at the edges as we are becoming disillusioned, just being fed on a present unexciting incremental innovation diet, lacking any real substance.

People are milling around with that bored look on their faces, some are also slumped down checking their watch or smartphones on when is the best time to cut out and find somewhere else to be, rather than be here. Has the fizz gone from innovation?

Are we being moved by innovation anymore?

Is innovation becoming a boring place to be seen for hanging out and being involved? Are we all feel that there is a less creative buzz going around?

Perhaps, it depends for each of us yet collectively you might agree we do feel something is definitely missing. The excitement has left the room, innovation has become too predictable.
I could blame technology or perhaps just Apple- should I?

Innovations have become the next novelty, entertainment or the latest talking point. Apple has become predictable in their format, their focus on sustaining innovation when we all are craving the next big thing. Perhaps Apple will burst into the room and the innovation party suddenly springs back into life. We need something to lift our moods.

Instead we get innovation that is simply thinner than before, faster than the last model, processors that allow up to multi task with even more capacity, increased memory, we hear this has new architecture, even a new retina recognition device and then we all applaud. “Oh wow”, then some stifle a quick yawn.

Then we quickly check our phones for any message from someone else telling us to” get over here it’s all happening” Nothing, an awful lot of innovation has simply become hype. Nothing seems earth-moving; it’s all getting fairly predictable.

Working to the predictable script is not helping innovation

Yes, Apple and Steve Job are to blame, they set the bar high, yet today Tim Cook likes to run the same ‘event’ parties based on the ‘sustaining’ theme, just like the supply chain, delivering on expected and increasingly the predictable promise. Where has the excitement gone in innovation?

Everyone seems to be playing it safe. The truth is we are all to blame, we have over-hyped the word ‘innovation’ and are under delivering on its potential performance capacity for our real need for some radical redesigns of today’s real challenges – global challenges we must solve to survive, let alone thrive.

We are already in or heading for a trough of innovation disillusionment
Where is the excitement gone? It all seems down to getting the news first

We are fed rumours weeks before launches on what we might expect that when we get to the big event nothing is surprising us any more. We are witnessing even more incremental creep; we have lost the effect of serendipity, the “wow” factor, the moment something happened that changed our world.

All we get is that feeling, that peer pressure we must upgrade for fear of missing out or to be seen without the latest. We are on an incremental treadmill and we are the mouse turning the wheel.

When you have been weaned on the bottle of excitement, when you don’t get it you feel flat, bored and start to blame innovation as simply “innovation is dead.” No, it is simply not being allowed to really work any more. Much has become totally underwhelming.

Our business organizations are loving the ‘playing it safe’ routine
Over time our organizations are finding increasing reasons to put off the more radical innovation that is needed.

Incremental innovation is safe, contains all the risks within acceptable levels, so as it allows the organization to keep its fixation on the short-term as its only line of site (and executive pay-off).

“Let others make the investments and ‘we’ can pick them off……hopefully later and we play catch up!”

It is funny how a good few are being caught out on this strategy though and are not learning often you never catch up, you just fall further behind. A fast follower strategy is really hard, think Apple actually.

So do we all have this growing feeling of a lack of real innovation?

The proliferation of advanced insights as news, the ability to spread the word in seconds, the ability to line up, pay on-line and receive your shot of instant update makes it all seem a little mundane, a little boring, where is the innovations of past generations that solved real society issues and problems?

The instant gratification indulges us but leaves us stuck on wanting more of the same – like the craving for sugar.

We are losing the appetite for adventure, we equally are losing the ability to wait, to speculate, experiment and discover. Innovation is being delivered up on a plate; all we have to do is consume it as long as we can afford it!

This loss of sudden discovery undermines curiosity and excitement

Innovation gets exciting when you stumble across something, totally unexpected.

Researchers in a lab suddenly make a connection, that changes and often challenges their thinking, and perceptions alter.

It becomes “game on”. It all becomes potentially exciting. We work for moments like this or should do.

Perhaps we should have a course on serendipity, where we are required to seek discoveries by accident, by learning to listen more to others and their problems so we can make the connections to resolve their problems.

No, lets take out discovery, lets offer up predictability, it takes out fresh learning through experimentation and trial and error. Let curiosity die in wanting to fix something, to figure it out, lets just simply throw it away and buy the latest replacement.

The organizations working on innovation love sequential order.

Sequential order, hierarchies, linear processes all allow for predictability, the ability to see what is coming before you, you can do rational analysis.

This type of thinking ensures innovation can be highly planned out, projects can be well constructed and everyone can fall in line and wait their part along the incremental innovation production line.

The mantra of it being “that much better than the last version” makes everyone feel part of the innovation road show and simply take the incentives being dangled like the carrot to deliver on this “exciting” development.

Innovation is simply missing the big picture, we are stuck in revolving doors.

It is all so marginal, we are back checking our clocks, looking to head out of the door, off to do something else. Again the excitement and buzz around innovation seem to be missing.

Why as we are utterly failing to tackle the real big problems of today and that is not “should we buy another smartphone or which holiday destination to book” or whatever we are being fed as innovation we need when there are really big societal issues that are racing towards us, needing global solutions and that is one hell of a party to get stuck into.

Those have got fizz and enough to get your innovative teeth into.

We need to lift innovation out of this current trough and recognize we have some major problems of the day, that will impact everyone on the planet.

Innovation can be one significant key to combining with others that unlocks all the creative and inventive forces this will require.

We all need some enlightenment, not the latest gadget. Applying innovation that makes a substantial and radical contribution is the party we all should be wanting to join.

The post So are we all all suffering innovation disillusionment? first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The agenda is a collective ‘innovation tour de force’ to solve all of our current ills for our leaders to work through, to begin to find all the solutions necessary.

The three programme pillars of the 2013 session are in themselves a statement of where we are economically and socially and what we need to work though: “Leading through adversity”, “Restoring economic dynamism” and “Strengthening societal resilience”.

The themes are all placing the emphasis on the building, improving, unleashing, rebuilding reinforcing, sustaining and establishing which tells us exactly where our present business and economic woes need to go to be on the economic up.

The rise of innovation

So let’s take a peek at the rise of “innovation” within the preliminary agenda available, it is actually used 47 times within the document but in very specific ways that take it beyond the buzzword into something that has substance.

Those of us working within the innovation space might want to think through each of these in how to contribute to working towards many of the solutions to the goals raised within these innovation challenges. If I was in Davos I would be dizzy from this innovation confrontation.

Innovation becomes substantial in its context

So the veritable list is made up of different discussion prompters over the four days, shown in no particular order just as they come. No wonder GE suggests our leaders are suffering “Innovation Vertigo”

• Unleashing Entrepreneurial Innovation,
• Financing Innovation and Entrepreneurship in China,
• Unlocking innovation through social media platforms,
• Delivering biotech innovations,
• Fostering growth and social innovations,
• Leapfrogging innovation in developing countries,
• Breakthrough research and innovation,
• Fostering anti-disciplinary thinking for breakthrough innovation,
• Creating 600 million new jobs and what innovation will be needed,
• Collaborations with universities spurring innovation,
• Fostering entrepreneurial innovation, in low growth environments,
• New research, technologies and innovation on the cusp of solving some of the world’s major global issues,
• Shaping digital norms by assessing a framework that allows innovation and rewards creativity,
• Scaling social innovation for greater impact,
• Funding corporate growth by unlocking long-term capital through innovation and infrastructure,
• Restoring Europe’s vibrancy by sparking and sustaining innovation-driven competition,
• Embedding innovation as a growth engine,
• Navigating today’s vast network of innovation and knowledge,
• Unleashing entrepreneurial innovation,
• What new funding models are driving innovations for growth,
• How can jazz and improvisation serve as a strategic model for leadership,
• Collaboration and innovation,
• How we need to leverage social technology for innovation for the next generational workforce,
• Build local capacity and innovation ecosystems, ,
• Foster scientific and technological innovation,
• Build on past IP to gain the innovation dividends,
• What needs to be done to make sure intellectual property regimes will boost innovation
• Investing in sustaining innovation for competitiveness,
• Push the global innovation frontier and meet the innovation imperative,
• Prioritize innovations for human development,
• Managing in a world with decentralized innovation,
• Finding new centres of innovation as the next labs,
• Exploring the global innovation heat map for philanthropy,
• How technological innovation are transforming industries,
• Building new national innovation capacity to promote sustainable, inclusive and resilient prosperity, and finally
• Even Clayton Christensen will be there with his insight on how to fix national finances and that is scheduled to be a webcast live on the Wednesday.

So one can only hope that the innovation imperative message will finally get through to everyone attending the World Economic Forum. The one stating innovation is essential but it does need the dedicated focus within its understanding, structures and organization.

As our leaders come down from the mountain, they do need to have an Innovation tablet in their hand and chiseled into their brain “thou shalt do …. as their next steps”

Yes, it does seem innovation is not just back on the agenda, it is the necessary catalyst we all need to solve the acute set of business, economic and societal problems we have.

Those going to Davos, please enjoy but if you do bring back the real imperative and need to innovation as you finally got the message, please recognize it needs an awful lot of managing to understand its parts.

One suggested place is working this through via an Executive Innovation Work Mat series of work outs; it might help resolve the “innovation vertigo” you might be experiencing as discussed in the GE Global Innovation Barometer  released specifically to coincide with the World Economic Forum.

Innovation keeps on coming……………

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