The Innovation Show

Bruce Vojak, co-author of Serial Innovators and founder of Breakthrough Innovation Advisors, explains the Hourglass Model of breakthrough innovation. He talks about reframing problems, practicing deep customer empathy before it was a trend, iterative prototyping, and why work can look unproductive. He contrasts nonlinear innovator flow with rigid stage-gate approaches and suggests using the model to self-diagnose.

Bruce Vojak, author and advisor who studies breakthrough innovation inside mature firms. He explains how a tiny minority quietly creates billion-dollar products. Short stories include the carrot peeler reframing competition and Tom Osborne’s near-dismissal before Always Ultra. They discuss how serial innovators span inventor, champion and implementer roles, the MP5 model, and why politics and customer-driven discovery matter.

Staney DeGraff, Innovatrium co-founder and practitioner guiding applied change. Jeff DeGraff, clinical professor and creative leadership expert sharing stories and frameworks. They unpack why leaders use the wrong mindset, the seven paradoxes of change, the paradox mindset cycle, how innovators get punished or co-opted, and why practice, conflict, and storytelling beat facts.

Jeff DeGraff, professor and creativity expert who co-created the C.R.E.A.T.E. framework, discusses creativity as a learnable skill. He and Staney cover clarifying the real problem, using constraints and small wins, techniques like SCAMPER and analogies, storyboarding to translate ideas, and structured evaluation to pick what works.

Jeff DeGraff, University of Michigan professor and co-author of The Innovation Code, explores how innovation comes from constructive conflict. He outlines four archetypes—Artist, Engineer, Athlete, Sage—and discusses their clashes, lifecycle leadership, blind spots, and how to build cultures that orchestrate tension for adaptive change.

Jonathan Brill, business futurist advising on distributed intelligence, and Stephen Wunker, strategy and innovation author, discuss the Octopus Organization. They explore AI as a disruptive force, shifting from jobs to workflows, distributed decision rights, autonomy with governance, and real-world shifts like rapid product cycles and AI-driven patent workflows.

Barry Nalebuff, Yale professor and negotiation scholar, outlines a simple principled method for fair deals. He explains the “pie” as the extra value created by agreement. Short, vivid stories cover family property, Coke and Honest Tea, domain disputes, and mergers. Practical, ethical, and game-theory grounded tips show how to find the real source of value and split it equitably.

Timo Partanen, strategy professor and former Nokia market intelligence leader, shares firsthand accounts from Nokia's iPhone threat briefings. He discusses early Apple signals, how the iPhone's ecosystem—not just hardware—upended assumptions, Nokia's hardware-first culture and internal blind spots, plus carrier deals, Symbian limits, and why warnings failed to trigger action.

Timo Vuori, Aalto strategy professor who studies collective emotion regulation, and Quy Huy, INSEAD strategy scholar on organizational emotion, explain Nokia's turnaround. They discuss how structured emotion regulation replaced denial and fear. They cover board practices, staged strategy processes, setting kill criteria, and creating multiple options to cool panic and enable radical pivots.

Quy Huy, a management professor studying emotions and organizational change, and Timo Vuori, an organizational scholar on leadership and strategy, unpack Nokia’s collapse. They explore how fear distorted communication and produced collective silence. They discuss Symbian’s technical traps, leadership pressures, coordination failures, and why emotional dynamics mattered more than technology.