These are the slides from my talk at TEDxUQ from March, 2014. You can see the full video of the talk here.

The business environment is changing – adapt or perish, some say. But there’s a third choice – invent the future ourselves. Here are three skills that we need to help us do this.

Which location has a better mobile payment system: Kenya or Silicon Valley? The answer is Kenya, and we can learn a lot about innovating more effectively by looking at why this is the case.

Ideas from Carol Dweck, Hayao Miyazaki and Ira Glass help us figure out how to grow our talent.

Mary Meeker’s annual report on internet trends shows how the market for smartphone operating systems has been completely transformed in eight years. This holds some important innovation lessons.

If we want to change the world, we have to communicate our ideas clearly. This is challenging. I learned some lessons about how to do this in giving a talk at TEDxUQ this year.

Successful innovation requires not just finding great new ideas, but taking advantage of them too. This means that we have to strike a balance between executing older ideas and searching for new ones.

Great new ideas usually need great new business models to work. The Technology Readiness Level and the Investment Readiness Level are two tools that you can use to help you get your great new idea ready for the world.

If we want to be more innovative, learning how to ask better questions is a key skill to develop.

We often think of new ideas fighting with older ideas, but the truth is that new ideas never work without building on older ones.

What happens if we think of our organisations as idea-processing networks instead of widget-producing machines? To start with, everything changes…

Things don’t always go the way we plan – and if we’re innovating, we shouldn’t expect them to. Here are some ideas for coping with this.