Innovation Book: Innovating Emergent Futures

A Book That Disrupts Innovation

Every innovation book tells you innovation matters. Almost none of them answer the question: How do you actually innovate?

‍This one does.

Innovating Emergent Futures replaces the inherited model of creativity – ideate, plan, make – with a fundamentally different approach grounded in emergence, embodied practice, and worldmaking. It is the product of three decades of field research, tested globally, and refined through countless iterations. It lays out an alternative approach: four tasks, fifteen practices, and the philosophical engagements that catalyze them.

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What Changes in Your Practice?

Diane Ragsdale directed the Creative Leadership MA at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. After reading the book and experiencing the approach in a workshop, she dropped the practice of sitting with others and ideating as a way to begin. She saw that radical innovation requires collective embodied making and remaking. The process of pattern recognition, blocking, and probing – once she used it, she began to see ways it could be applied everywhere.

That shift is what the book produces. Not a new set of tips layered on top of your existing practice. A reorientation of where creativity starts and what your role in it is.

Kevin Mackenzie, founder of the BITS Framework, said "the more he worked with the concepts, the more he saw them all around him," embodied cognition, agency in all things, assemblages, and unintended potentiality.

Dan Neitz called it "language for something practically ineffable," insight into why his previous efforts to bring passions into form hadn't yielded the results he'd hoped for.

Curtis Michelson described it as "an approach he'd been intuitively seeking and perhaps unconsciously testing with clients for years."

What these readers share is not an agreement with a theory. It's a qualitative shift in approach. The book gives you a vocabulary and a set of practices for engaging with creativity as an emergent, relational, worldly process – and once you begin to engage in this manner, everything changes. How you enter an environment changes. What you do changes. The questions you ask change. The things you make change.

An Approach - Not a Philosophy

This is not a book of theory that leaves you to figure out what to do Monday morning. It explicates a far-reaching, radical, and pragmatic approach – four tasks, fifteen practices, tools, activities, and 185 hand-drawn diagrams – developed over three decades and refined through global application. We call this the Innovation Design Approach, and it replaces ideate-plan-make with a powerful alternative grounded in emergence, embodied practice, and worldmaking.

It gives you a way to work with complexity, emergence, and genuine novelty that doesn't depend on having the right idea first. It starts with engagement – collective immersion in the world of your question. It moves through disclosure – uncovering the hidden logic of the existing paradigm while simultaneously sensing unintended possibilities. It arrives at deviation and co-emergence – the twin loops of disruptive and developmental change that constitute innovation.

The book walks you through each task with enough specificity to act on – and enough philosophical grounding to understand why it can work.

Diane Ragsdale

Director of Creative Leadership MA, Scholar and Faculty of Creative Leadership @ Minneapolis College of Art and Design

I have assigned this book as a required text for my course Theory and Practice of Creative Leadership because it advances a powerful framework and approach for those who want to lead transformational change. This is a book for those who recognize that to make progress with our most complex chllenges we need to build new worlds (or logics, or paradigms, or sytems) rather than simply improve exiting ones.

lain Kerr and Jason Frasca have basically called out the limits of design thinking for world-building and have created a process for imaging and realizing possibilitiesbeyond the rational limits of current worldviews. This is a must-read IMHO.

Who This Book Is For?

Innovation facilitators and consultants who have sensed the ceiling of ideation-first methods and want a process that can produce genuine novelty, not a better version of what already exists.

Educators and academics who need a philosophically grounded, practically actionable framework for teaching creativity that doesn't begin with brainstorming. Ragsdale assigned it as a required text.

‍Steven Greenstein, a STEM Innovation Professor, said, "bits of radical insight every time I open it."

Organizational leaders navigating complex challenges – climate, equity, technology, systems change – where the existing tools are part of the problem.

Complexity, foresight, and systems practitioners who want a coherent approach to working with emergence rather than trying to manage it from outside.

Anyone who has asked "how do you actually innovate?" and found the available answers insufficient.

As Ben Pearson, an Associate Director at AstraZeneca, midway through his PhD, put it: "From where does the new arise if it must arise from somewhere, but that somewhere cannot already exist as the new? Answer: It involves crows."

What Readers Are Saying

Kevin Mackenzie

Founder @ BITS Framework

Every now and again you discover a book that alters how you engage the world. This is one of them.

lain and Jason have pulled together an eclectic body of theory, disciplines and principles into an alternative and pragmatic set of operating practices. The book draws attention to the limits of ideation and cognitively
led approaches so prevalent within many organizations. They make a strong case for the limits of human centric reductionist based thinking as a means to "discover" novel and useful transformations.The book gives visibility & structure to the always present yet invisible and seemingly unstructured mind-body-tool- environmental systems that afford us our reality.

The more I worked with the concepts expressed the more I saw them all around me - embodied cognition, agency in all things, assemblages, unintended potentiality, emergence, irreducibility etc.

If you are feeling stuck or disillusioned with your existing innovation approach this is a must read.

At the heart of their approach is the creative power of the unintended & its ability to create new worlds. This achieved via an open ended, problem centric, embodied, process led meander that recognizes potentiality within affordances & their emergent effects.

Mani I.

Innovation Design Engineer

"A blend of unusual ideas, and ways of thinking that adds a much needed new voice to the space, which is a sea of blue suits, grey hair, and rehashed ideas from the 50's. What was really refreshing was the exploration of 'Emergence.' Also that you don't prescribe a set and structured path, over being loose and exploring the developing and evolving problem space. Highly recommended."

Read Them All

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We spent a lot of time crafting an innovation playbook as innovative and dynamic as the content:

• 319 Pages of innovation philosophy AND approaches
• 185 Diagrams Hand-drawn diagrams to illustrate possibilities
• 74 Activities and questions
• 64 Tips and suggestions to level up your innovation pracitces
• 27 Enhanced images and explanations
• 15 Practices to generate novel innovations
• 6 Tools for Innovation to get you started
• 4 Tasks: The Innovation Design Approach is broken down into 4 major tasks
• 4 Hacks so you can begin from anywhereA complete process for innovation grounded in three decades of field research – from philosophical foundation to practice.

Hard Copy + PDF = $35 US shipping included.

PDF Only = $25 Not available anywhere else.

International orders: Hard copies shipped outside the US are available only through Amazon.

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When You Want More Than the Book

Join the practitioners who kept going...

If you finish this book and want to discuss it, test it, extend it, and build with the people who are using it – that's WorldMakers - A global community of practice where the radical approach found in these pages becomes embodied, contested, and collaboratively extended every week.

Thirty-plus live events a year. Two weekly podcasts. Shared experiments. A complete annotated bibliography. And a conversation that's been running for years among practitioners across five continents who took the four tasks off the page and into their work.you can begin from anywhereA complete pro

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Innovating Emergent Futures

The Innovation Design Approach for Change and Worldmaking