Full professor in the field of Design, Innovation & Entrepreneurship.
About Frido
Frido is a full professor at the School of Industrial Design Engineering at the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. He holds a PhD in ‘Innovation Sciences’ as well as a BSc & MSc degree in Aerospace Engineering.
His career in business, prior to rejoining academia, spans from working as a concept engineer in the offshore industry (SBM Offshore) to a materials specialist in the aerospace industry (Alcoa) and management consulting in the field of innovation, technology, and creativity (Innovation Consulting Group TNO).
Frido collaborates intensively with industry and his research is financed by large industry grants and the European Union as well as from grants from Dutch national organizations. He has authored and co-authored 100+ articles, several book chapters, and four books.
“Real innovation requires new cognitive routes, not just by individuals, but for the whole social system with stakeholders in and around the company.”
— FRIDO SMULDERS
Innovating requires new routes… An open door you might think. However, these are not just routes to the market that need to be renewed by new propositions. Real innovation requires new cognitive routes, not just by individuals, but for the whole social system with stakeholders in and around the company. New logic, new routines, new interdependencies among actors, etc.
How innovation actually happens is poorly understood by scientists and largely tacit for the innovating actors themselves. If companies are to innovate their innovation process (necessary in this era), we as scientists need to build a fundamental understanding of what innovating actually is. Such requires academics to redesign their present dominant hypotheticodeductive research approaches.
Vision
Courses
Teaching is approaching a paradigm shift. It is remarkable how much we really know how people learn and what they learn while they embedded in learning processes. Of course, professors and teachers can check what students have learned from what they have taught. But, what else did they learn? What in their learning is still missing? Why does it take so long time to become professionals in the line of work they are engaged in after formal education? And even shift from one profession to another without any formal education? Can we educate at the academic level without a formal program, without teaching anything? What is that they then should learn beyond the books to become academically educated? The fast-moving world requires academically educated actors to know how to stay tuned with these developments, or even cause these fast developments. Challenging questions that are very closely related to innovation and entrepreneurship.
“It is the whole picture that makes the details worth looking at!”
— FRIDO SMULDERS
Consultancy
In 1993, Frido co-founded Mosaic Research & Consulting. The dominant field of its activities is to support people with their innovating endeavors by training and consulting. The research we perform is to create a deeper understanding of the phenomenon of innovating and entrepreneuring. All research is in collaboration with industrial partners because there it all happens. It is a matter of identifying the proverbial ‘elephant in the room’ that describes the nature and variables of what innovating actually is. Once you recognise the ‘elephant’ you will see it everywhere. Or in words of our famous Johan Cruijff: ‘You going to see it when you see through it’.
Mosaic brings these insights to innovating actors in an actionable format ready to be applied to on-the-job innovation challenges. Mosaic brings new perspectives to corporate innovation!