It is with great joy that we present the innovation book: Innovating Emergent Futures - The Innovation Design Approach for Change and Worldmaking. A book born of immense frustration from superficial approaches to creativity and innovation. This book challenges all the standard assumptions about creativity, innovation and design and offers an entirely new approach to radical innovation as novel worldmaking.
What a gift! This book and the work of Jason and lain is profound in my opinion. Seeking to give language and insight to something that is practically, if not literally, ineffable.
This book scratches a deep existential itch for me..and is helping me think much differently why my previous efforts to bring specific passions into form didn't yield the results I had hoped for.
Super exciting to have new tools to take up the process of birthing something novel that makes a difference for others. Chapeau!
Tired of wasting time and money buying 300-page business and innovation books that should have been at most a 20-page blog post?
We’ve been there many times — so we get it — the world of business and innovation books is a wasteland of overhyped filler and pointless cliches delivered with that fake Ted-talk world changing profundity.
Innovating Emergent Futures is not another one of those self-aggrandizing innovation books. It is loaded with actionable insights that will empower any project, company or organization to disruptively innovate, develop novel worlds and solutions, and embed an ecosystem of innovation across an organization.
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.
Innovating Emergent Futures is more than a book about innovation. It’s jam-packed with historical and philosophical understandings of innovation and creativity leveraging scientific insights from Embodied Cognition, Complex Systems Theory, New Materialism, Evolutionary Theory, the Ontological Turn in Anthropology and much more to actually make you a more impactful innovator.
The book doubles as an innovation workbook. Walking you step by step through the award winning innovation Design Approach providing an in-depth blueprint for you the reader to co-evolve novel innovations, paradigmatic change and a transformative differentiation.
For anyone who wants to get inspiration and wants to see things from a different angle. Whether you think you are creative or not, this book will help you consider things you haven't before.Be warned, this book isn't meant to be just read, you need to apply the principles. I like to set aside time everyday and apply the techniques in my work and life. It's not a book to give you shortcuts, you have to work for it! Highly recommend!
Yes we teach at a university, but this book is not the product of academic studies far removed from the real world. This is what we’ve learnt in the field. We’ve prototyped countless versions of it globally over the last decade, and built it on 20+ years of cutting-edge field research, testing, and development - it has been used to transformatively engage the most vexing challenges of the 21st century, develop alternative business models, and new fields of possibility.
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.
Everyone agrees that innovation is the pillar of a successful business.
And there are many innovation management books out there that focus on the importance of innovation. They focus on the principles of innovation. The virtues of an innovative organization. That innovation can diffuse and insulate an endeavor from its competitors. And many take the easy way out focusing on ideation.
We agree – all of these points and elements of innovation are critical to an organization's success.
But the majority of these innovation books don’t answer the question they leave us asking: how do you innovate?
Innovating Emergent Futures is the answer. It’s how to innovate.
It’s practical innovation methods are based on philosophy, backed by science and offer an innovation process consisting of a series of tasks, tools, and questions to innovate. Anything. Products, services, social challenges, climate crisis’, and beyond.
The Innovation Design Approach is an innovation playbook for teams and organizations that don’t want to talk about the importance of innovation. They want to innovate novel solutions to their most vexing problems.
This powerful book is a must-read for anyone who wishes to transcend reactive and constrained approaches purporting to be innovation and move toward imagining wholly new possiblities that transcend problem solving and move into generative and creative worldmaking.
NOTE: Hard copy orders that require shipping outside the U.S. can be purchased via Amazon
We spent a lot of time crafting an innovation playbook as innovative and dynamic as the content:
BONUS - buy directly on this site (instead of Amazon) and we'll send you the innovation book PDF version immediately, along with special access to bonus material. You can get started reading right now as we gently package your book, serenade it with innovation blessings and ask our fearless postal workers to hand deliver your book - straight to your door.
Note: This digital PDF is not available anywhere else.
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.
This book is one of the best finds of my PhD so far. Thank you lain Kerr and Jason Frasca
We've all read business books that are nothing more than a glorified blog post. We're deeply frustrated by them too. We purposely designed this book to deliver value cover to cover.
So, If you find this book fails to deliver less than 20 pages of value - any 20-pages - not just the first 20-pages - we will refund your purchase. Just send a message saying so...
Innovative Emergent Futures, by lain Kerr and Jason Frasca, is itself an innovative approach to creativity and its publication is timely.
With uncertainty in high relief after a pandemic, socio-economic unrest, and geopolitical shifts, a new approach is required to meet and create the future.
The book launches by first accounting for the history of concepts like "creativity" and "ideas" in the western world. Clarifying that creativity has been human centered, awaiting inspiration, highlights the inattention to novelty continually surfacing in the emerging natural world.
Kerr and Frasca continue to delineate what that means, providing a reorientation to innovation and creativity by expounding, and literally drawing, a new process. With all of that as a needed basis of understanding, the authors then take the reader through actually using the process.
It is here that the book cements its distinctive approach to innovation by actually guiding one through the activities of emergent innovation from the middle of the entanglement.
This work is highly recommended, not only to understand the arguments of how ideation has limited creativity, but to use as a guiding workbook through one's own innovative life activities.
Loved the book? Hated the book? Want to throw in your two cents? Super! We've been chatting up the book with friends and colleagues over on LinkedIn. Join us there, read what others are saying and be sure to share your thoughts.
Here are some highlights:
Thanks lain Kerr and Jason Frasca & for an amazing book. I love the way you demystify 'creativity' and the practical ideas you offer for stimulating design innovation. Your critique of the conventional "ideate" or "God Model" of creativity aligns well with an Ecological Approach - where cognition is not something that happens inside a head, but rather something that emerges from the coupling of perception and action.
This book is a must read for designers and others who are interested in exploring the potentials of new technologies to make our world a better place.
Innovating Emergent Futures is a window into a world of possibilities that emerge from new capabilities (agencies) applied in novel ways. This is not about the usual incremental creativity that slightly improves existing ways of doing things, but rather aboutwhole new worlds of potential that can only be realized with a fundamentally different approach. Given that the most pressing problems we are facing today are of our own making, it's clear this new approach is badly needed.
I'll just come out and say it: the world of innovation is congested with titles that have no real innovation to offer, merely repackaged approaches that aren't bold enough to leap over the paradigm-shifting threshold. Then there's Emergent Futures Lab. Miles ahead - and I know this first-hand, having benefited from their workshops over and over.
This book presents a set of tools and practices that delivers novel paradigm shifts, transforms thinking, fosters an innovation culture, produces radically creative outcomes, disrupt fields, empowers you to rethink questions, and make new worlds possible - it's a total re-invention of innovation!
I've said this to you guys before, but again, congrats on the book, it's dope.
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.
The mix of Systems, Design thinking, futures, and concepts, but with elements of sense-making, is a really interesting and thought-provoking blend. The inclusion of a purposeful period of deviation from what already exists, in the process is fascinating.
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.
Most thought leaders are very rigid about recommending one over the other usually. I appreciate you're equipping readers with creative resilience through periods of uncertainty, but enabling
them to think for themselves and adapt their models to their needs, not by squeezing them through a cookie-cutter structure or method.
Stories and creative visuals are also a breath of fresh air. So much stuff in the design space can be visually stale and cheesy. "There is nothing new under the Sun, but there are new suns." Dope. Highly recommended.
Sending out overdue kudos to lain Kerr and Jason Frasca > for their beguiling book of "anti-innovation" provocations called 'Innovating Emergent Futures'.
Diverging from the inherited Western tradition, their Engage-Disclose-Deviate-Emerge practices are an approach l've been intuitively seeking and perhaps
unconsciously testing with clients for a while. Now and then one finds a book that nudges one on.
This was one of those books for me. Kerr and Frasca's
model is naturally less linear and more circular, less top-down and more bottom-up. In short, they've hit on something more aligned and adapted (exapted) to our chaotic and complex times.
The big deal being, for creating something radically new in kind ('world-building'), something 'disruptive' in the broadest sense, their approach unlocks more creative abundance, which by the way, is located less in our heads, and more in our hands and our social interactions.
They are pushing against quite a bit of prior innovation canon but I believe innovators of all stripes can find some nutritious food in here. (they use cooking metaphors a lot actually) The work is deep, penetrating and at times abstract and esoteric. It's also beautifully hand illustrated by the authors themselves.
For all you network-centric, complexity-oriented, agile/lean transformation-minded, serendipity-seeking and problem-finding practitioners out there, this might be a book for you.
Amazingly fresh look at innovation and change for entrepreneurs!
I'm so excited it's finally available!! If you're looking for a completely new and novel perspective on innovation and the world around you, you'll find it in here. It's the perfect read for creatives, innovators, entrepreneurs and anyone looking to think outside of systems and uncover new paradigms. One of my favorites!
This book is strong fresh air, blowing traditional thinking about creativity and agency away. It resonated a lot with my evolving and emerging world view. It's a full of food for thought smorgasbord, and an invitation to learn through action. This is one of the most disruptive -and possibly seminal- books i've run into.
Being a crazy creator and disruptor myself, I wish I had the chance of being a fly in the wall while it was being created. I'm sure there're going to be some adjacencies and opportunities for interacting with the two co-authors. Kudos to you guys!
I recommend the book 'Innovating Emergent Futures' to everybody who would like to better cope with 'world-making' innovation (like business model innovation for sustainability).
It nicely fits with the resilience loop from C.S. Holling and includes many hands-on recommendation to make progress towards fundamental solutions. The strong call for engaging and probing resonates well with me. Well done, lain Kerr and Jason Frasca!
'Innovating Emergent Futures' is a beautiful provocation, dense with lessons that will continue to reveal themselves long after a first read.
One from the book I often return to: there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.
This is more than just learning a technique or using a tool. It is a transformative approach to surpassing the status quo and evolving through an unconventional, holistic process, one that will change your life forever.
You can't beat a bit of serendipity where 1+1 gives you eleven. Innovation and creativity are bandied about quite a bit in business. Both reads combined deliver a powerful new innovation playbook.
Innovation is seen through a distorted lens today.
It's partnered with the iteration of products or buckets of data to validate whatever steps along the way. Both provide no true-north direction for real innovation. What we call innovation today should be really called development change.
"Innovating Emergent Futures" book takes the above lens, smashes it to pieces and provides a fresh new view on how to approach innovation and succeed. A view that has, in some ways, always been there, hiding in plain sight.
Our world is complex; we seek a cause for things that happen and why things are the way they are. We fashion solutions and 'innovations' from this rationale.
We deny, implicitly or explicitly (if you're smart enough), that many things are highly independent, random and almost mysterious. Yet, nature and the world before us and long after is profoundly creative, it
creates and innovates spontaneously, and we have to find a way to capture that.
"The Creative Act: A way of Being" book tells in Rick Rubin's own words how he manifests a creative approach to help artists innovate towards something
new.
He presents beyond the usual methods to find new ways forward. A creative act that any sector or industry can use in a timeless piece of writing. He also pays attention to the team's synergy being necessary, if not more important, than the talent of the individuals.
If you truly want to innovate, you must drop your current tools and take a deep breath. There is a different way to innovate and avoid getting caught in the endless cycle of trying to be better. There's no love in that; it's a world of pain ...if you're trying to deliver true innovation.
Both books aim to nurture an abundance mindset; the mindset of scarcity (the better game) makes us lose sight of great innovation and collaboration. They have inspired me to create new workshops on category design, helping teams with strategy and an abundant mindset where innovation can be captured as it happens around us.
While Bruce Lee said, "be like the water", I find myself a few times a day saying to myself, "be like the crow." Wha??? you might say.
Well, you have to read the book and posts from Innovating Emergent Futures to understand.
NOTE: Book orders shipping outside the U.S. can be purchased through Amazon
