Online Masterclass for Dutch Ministry of Defense on the relationship between procurement & innovation.

In this Masterclass I focus on the relationship between innovation and purchasing behavior, from early ideas to 'new things' that eventually become part of the daily routine within operational processes. The new thing must become absorbed by the existing situation to form a new integrated whole.

If you're planning to buy new to-your-organization things, you need to be aware of the current and future 'stakeholders'... all actors who have a 'stake' in relation to the new. Either as operators, users, financiers, managers, etc. If the new is really new to them, then all these disciplines will have to work together entrepreneurially to create a new and adapted way of working. With examples, such as Musk’s SpaceX vs NASA and the dramatic example of Boeing's 787 Dreamliner.

This was in preparation for conference at Kromhout Kazerne (July, 2023)

Transdisciplinary innovation: how to educate for it?!

Talk for TU Delft educators, Meat & Eat (December, 2022)

This talk is about the necessity to educatie our engineering students for being able to address the grand challenges. What is transdisciplinary innovation and how to educate for this. Our regular disciplinaire programs like Aerospace, Civil and Mechanical engineering are to be considered mono-disciplinary. Being able to collaboratie with non-engineering specialisten like finance, legal & management requires some basic understanding of the social-interactive dimension while innovating.

Keynote op ‘hét innovatiecongres van de Rijksoverheid: Innovember’ (in Dutch, november, 2022)

Mijn keynote ging over het werkwoord innoveren als de menselijke activiteit die innovaties voortbrengt. Iets wat we elke dag vrijwel onbewust doen zonder het zo te benoemen … en als we moeten innoveren lopen we tegen allerlei (organisatorische) belemmeringen aan. Wat kunnen we leren van die valkuilen, tegenwerpingen en ongeplande iteraties als we het werkwoord innoveren beter begrijpen?

Inaugural address, Delft University of Technology (November, 2021)

In my speech I discuss the challenges within innovation processes if we are to innovate outside-the-box. These so called, entrepreneurial innovation processes aim at realizing outside-the-box ideas within existing organizations.

I illustrate that the difficulty is not so much in getting these new unexpected ideas, but much more in bending the existing social dynamics to ensure that these new, and often deviant ideas, also get sufficient traction within the existing constellations of routine thinking and routine behaviour. Today's societal challenges require understanding and investigating the phenomenon of innovation on a much deeper level.

For that purpose, I build on James March’s Technology of Foolishness, that is, sensible technologies of foolishness (ToF)! I will illustrate, that the behavior associated with ToF, is pretty much similar to design behavior as well as entrepreneurial behavior. All three are aimed at uncovering and subsequently building new (organizational) rationality.