She is the UK Head of Delegation at the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) TC 279 for innovation management, where she sits on the advisory group for communications and engagement (AGCE) and has actively contributed to the drafting, development and refinement of ISO 56001 (The first global auditable innovation management system standard), ISO 56002 and ISO 56007 (Idea and opportunity guidance). She is a technical expert committee member for the British Standards Institution (BSI) for design and innovation management.

Her sectors include fintech, transport, IOT, FMCG, pharma, to marine, mining, infrastructure and more in both B2C and B2B markets. She has been a leading design mentor for the UK KTN Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF), a £1.5 billion fund that supports cutting-edge research to address challenges faced by developing countries. She also developed a design thinking training methodology funded by the UK Government in conjunction with Imperial College London's Dyson School of Design Engineering, which significantly improved indicators of performance for SMEs.

Victoria is agile certified, a qualified industrial designer, and an expert trainer on the full suite of ISO 56000 for INNOVATEUK Edge Specialists on behalf of BSI. She has published and presented her research papers on innovation competencies and standardised innovation management systems at the International Society for Professional Innovation Management (ISPIM).

After leading a management buy out 8 years ago, she was at the helm of a boutique innovation management consultancy, Tenshi Consulting Ltd., ensuring daily operations and the ongoing success of the business. She recently successfully exited and has founded her latest endeavour - Verity Merit.

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After publishing his groundbreaking first book, "24/7 Innovation" in 2001, Stephen left Accenture to become a full-time innovation speaker and advisor. Since then, he has published six books, including his latest, "Pivotal", released in 2024, and "Invisible Solutions" in 2020. Stephen has spoken in 50 countries and works with major companies like 3M, P&G, Marriott, Nike, and Microsoft to enhance their innovation practices through keynotes and advisory services.

In our first episode, we chat with Aiden McCullen about total innovation—what it is, why it matters, and how to achieve it. Check it out here.

For more resources and insights on innovation, be sure to explore related tools like the Wazoku platform, which supports the innovation processes Stephen champions.

Visit Stephen's website for more information, or connect with him on LinkedIn.

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In this episode we explore what happens when an innovation system starts to become a performance, when confidence scores are given without doing the work, when learning is claimed without reflection, and when people walk through the beautiful structure you've built like it's a museum, admiring it but not living it.

 We'll follow Freya and Axel as they shift the focus from metrics to mindsets, recentering everything on real challenges that matter, using AI as a cultural sense-making tool, identifying cultural lead users who already embody the behaviors you want, and rewiring rituals so the organization celebrates realized value, not just innovation activity. 

If you've ever felt your dashboards look great, but your innovation culture is quietly drifting, this chapter is for you. It is about turning your system back into a tool, restoring truth over theatre, and closing the gap between expected and realized value.

As a Lecturer at Wharton, entrepreneur, and global executive, Greg helps organizations overcome resistance to change. He is recognized as a top innovation blogger and a leading digital transformation influencer. 

You can find Greg’s blog at www.DigitalTonto.com, check out his LinkedIn profile

For more insights into fostering innovation and transformation within organizations, check out this report on the importance of systems thinking in corporate innovation. 

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From breakthrough ideas generated by unexpected human solvers to Wazoku’s emerging synthetic crowd, the episode explores the next big leap in innovation: hybrid collective intelligence. What happens when human experience, judgment and creativity are combined with the speed, scale and breadth of machine intelligence?

It is not humans versus AI. It is about orchestrating both to explore more possibilities, solve harder problems and move from discovery to impact faster.

This episode brings Season 4 to a close. We are taking a short summer break, but the Total Innovation Podcast will return with Season 5 later this year, featuring a new line-up of conversations and guests.

Today she's the co-founder and CEO of Nterprisers, and she's here because she thinks we're telling ourselves the wrong story about American manufacturing.

There are hundreds of thousands of manufacturers scattered across the country — small, mostly family-owned, almost all privately held. They make the parts beneath the parts: precision-machined components, specialty fabrication, the tooling and subassemblies that quietly hold up the whole economy. And here's the strange thing — most of them are nearly impossible to find.

The tidy story goes: the factories closed, the work went overseas, the industry declined. Deepa will tell you that story is mostly wrong. Manufacturing didn't disappear — it became invisible. The companies are still there. The skills are still there. The knowledge built up over decades is still there. What thinned out was the connective tissue — the dense local networks that once let manufacturers, suppliers, engineers, lenders, and investors find one another.

Her core belief is simple, and I think rather profound: we cannot strengthen what we cannot see. Visibility comes before connection. Connection comes before integration. And integration comes before growth. Before highways, there were maps. Before marketplaces, there were the humble systems that let people find each other in the first place.

Working in innovation is lonely. You're usually pushing against the culture, not with it. You're the person asking "why not?" in rooms full of people paid to say "because." You try things that don't work, often in public, and the organisation's instinct is to move on quickly and quietly rather than ask what happened and why.

In startup land there are spaces for this. F**k Up Nights — actual events where founders get on stage and tell the audience what went wrong — have become a real phenomenon precisely because there was nowhere else to say it. The relief in the room when someone is honest about failure is palpable. You can feel people exhale.

Corporate innovation doesn't have that. It has words about failure — "we celebrate learning," "there are no bad ideas," "fail fast" — but not much else. The language of failure tolerance is everywhere. The actual practice of it is rare. And the people doing the hard work of trying new things inside large organisations often feel like they're doing it alone, without cover, in an environment that will quietly hold it against them if it doesn't work out.

Samuel West, Founder and Curator, The Museum of Failure; Organisational Psychologist; PhD in Organisational Psychology, Lund University, has spent a decade studying exactly that gap. He built a museum full of things that failed — from global corporations to billion-dollar bets — precisely to make visible what organisations prefer to make invisible. The effect it has on people is not what you might expect. It doesn't make them cynical. It gives them permission. When you see that Apple, Google, and Procter & Gamble get things catastrophically wrong, something shifts. The fear shrinks a little. The risk feels more possible.

He has also, as it happens, lived through a very public personal failure of his own — declared bankrupt over the museum itself. Which gives him a credential that no PhD can provide. This conversation is for anyone who has ever sat in a post-mortem and felt like nobody was really saying what happened. For anyone who has ever killed a project and felt they had to pretend it never existed. For the person who is doing innovation work right now and wondering why it feels so unrewarding even when they believe in it.

The innovation lab network that she built was the United Nation's largest investment in sustainability innovation (115 countries). Her work is taught as a Harvard Business School Case Study (Fall 2022), received the Fast Company World Changing Ideas Award, the 2023 SXSW Innovation Award, Apolitical's Public Service Team of the Year (evidence-based policy-making) in 2019, was covered in the MIT Sloan Review (Summer 2020) and depicted in For Tomorrow, an award-winning documentary on grassroots innovation available on Amazon Prime.

A ride or die optimist, she has 20+ years of experience in the global sustainable development sector working on civic participation, human rights, entrepreneurship, reducing inequalities, climate action, food systems, informal economies and sustainable development across the board.

She writes, speaks and represents the United Nations on sustainability innovations regularly, including through a new course she designed for the Masters in Design Engineering program at the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Graduate School of Design (Integrative Frameworks: Innovation in Global Problem Solving).

Fernanda serves as Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of the Boards Impact Forum, the Nordic chapter of the World Economic Forum’s Climate Governance Initiative, where she co-leads training programs on Board Oversight of Sustainability and Responsible AI for Value Creation.

She is the co-author of the book AI Leadership for Boards: Leading Responsible AI for Value Creation, published by Springer Nature, which explores how boards can shape innovation, risk oversight, and strategic renewal in an AI-powered world.

Fernanda is affiliated with the House of Innovation at the Stockholm School of Economics and teaches at the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship (SSES), where she leads programs on strategic innovation, foresight, and entrepreneurship.

With an award-winning background in graphic and experience design, she has worked across industries and institutions, including Stora Enso, the Stockholm Resilience Centre, and Karolinska Institutet. She holds an MBA with distinction (President’s List) from SSE, an MFA in Experience Design from Konstfack, and a BA in Graphic Design from the University of Porto.

He is the founder and CEO of Strategyzer, a platform that provides organisations with the tools, courses, and frameworks to systematically build new growth engines and more powerful business models. His books — including Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design, Testing Business Ideas, and The Invincible Company — have collectively sold millions of copies in nearly 40 languages.

Alex's mission is to make innovation more scientific and less random, helping leaders move beyond collecting ideas to actually measuring and delivering innovation value at scale.

We'll see how they bridge the gap between potential and performance, turning XV into realised value, and we'll explore the table of justice, a transformative way to judge decisions by evidence, not emotion. 

This is where innovation becomes lived, not just measured. 

When one small decision crosses an unseen line, Freya discovers what no framework can capture, that governance only works when people believe in the intent behind the decisions. 

This chapter explores how trust becomes the hidden infrastructure of innovation. We'll see how Freya learns to map the sensitivity lines that exist between people and functions like HR, finance, IT, legal, and how she builds a trust layer that connects structure to belief. It's a story about what happens when logic meets emotion, when process meets perception, and how the true power of innovation lies not in control, but in connection.

In this chapter, we're diving into one of the most powerful and often misunderstood forces shaping innovation performance, the S-curve. Innovation doesn't happen in straight lines, it happens in cycles. Technologies evolve, markets shift, and every idea follows a natural rhythm, from emergence to acceleration, to maturity and eventually decline. Understanding this rhythm changes everything. It explains why confidence fluctuates, why value grows and then stabilizes, and why timing can be the difference between leading a market and missing it entirely. In Surfing the S-Curve, we'll explore how Freya and her team connect the life cycle of innovation to the XV model, transforming it from a static formula into a dynamic living system. This is a chapter about movement, timing and foresight, because the real art of innovation isn't just creating something new, it's knowing when to let go, when to optimize, and when to jump to the next curve.

 In corporate innovation and intrapreneurship, Pavlo has developed scalable corporate startup ecosystems using unique gamified engagement models where employees invest in their colleagues' startups. He has designed and led corporate acceleration programs focused on sustainable innovation, achieving over fifty percent employee engagement in corporate innovation initiatives and generating significant returns on investment with millions in newly created profits. Through his work, he has facilitated the launch of more than thirty corporate sustainable startups.

 Pavlo is passionate about organizational transformation, sustainable development, self-organized teams, and harnessing both individual and organizational purpose. He focuses on developing employee agency, vertical leadership development, new business and product development, and innovation management. His methodological approach helps companies to drive comprehensive organizational change and innovation.

 His personal experience of leaving Ukraine due to war and rebuilding in Germany adds real-world examples of resilience and transformation that inform his methods for helping companies navigate innovation and change in an increasingly urgent global business environment.

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Explore how Wazoku helps organizations like those supported by Pavlo Ryzhiy turn past innovation failures into measurable success through sustainable innovation programs, employee engagement models, and strategic transformation.
Learn more about Wazoku’s approach to corporate innovation

Jayshree was appointed 3M’s first ever Chief Science Advocate in 2018 and is using her scientific knowledge, technical expertise and professional experience to advance science, communicate its benefits and the importance of STEM fields to drive innovation.

She is also a member of Carlton Society which is the 3M Science and Innovation “Hall of Fame.” Jayshree is the fourth woman and first female engineer to be inducted. In 2020, she was awarded Society of Women Engineers (SWE) highest Achievement Award. She is also the first-ever winner of a Gold Stevie® Award in the new Female Thought Leaders of the Year – category in the 18th annual Stevie Awards for Women in Business in 2021. In 2025 she was named to the prestigious Thinkers50 Radar list featuring 30 people those whose ideas will help shape the future of orga

Recently, he has been leading a global industry coalition made up 4000 global leaders in the open talent and innovation industry to start a non-profit trade association, The Center for the Transformation of Work with the goal of Transforming work for a billion people by 2025.

In his past life, John was the chief innovation officer of Havas, when Havas purchased his open advertising agency, Victors & Spoils, in 2015. Winsor founded V&S after introducing the advertising world to the practice of co-creation in his role as vice president and executive director of strategy and innovation at Crispin, Porter + Bogusky. Winsor had merged his company Radar Communications, the world’s leading open strategy and research company, with CP+B back in 2007. Other companies Winsor founded include Sports & Fitness publishing, sold to Conde Nast, and the Gravity Games, sold to NBC.

John's most recent book was, “Open Talent: Leveraging the Global Crowd to Solve Your Biggest Challenges,” published by Harvard Business Press.

He is also the author of “Beyond the Brand,” “Spark,” “Flipped,” and the best-selling “Baked In,” winner of the 2009 800-CEO-READ Business Book Award in marketing. Winsor is also an advisor to the Digital Initiative at Harvard Business School, and a regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, The Guardian, Forbes and Digiday.

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Her leadership roles have ranged from country director of a team of 154 colleagues during an Ebola outbreak to regional technical advisor for human-centered design and social marketing in Southern Africa. She has worked on products, such as HIV self-testing kits and micronutrient-enriched porridge, and services like male circumcision and community warehouses for smallholder families. She has a knack for finding and cultivating her colleagues' hidden skills and uncovering the important details that influence what makes for a satisfying client experience. She tells good stories and works towards a world where people most affected by crisis and poverty have to power to shape their own future.

See how she’s driving real-world impact through open innovation on the Wazoku Crowd. 👉 International Rescue Committee Showcase

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He is very driven to jump start innovation, because organisations struggle with the start of innovation in their day-to-day hectic business. He is a business economist with a master’s in management consultancy. During his career of thirty years, Gijs has worked as a fast-moving consumer goods marketer, a boardroom consultant, a large group facilitator and as a keynote speaker. Through his informal personal style, infectious enthusiasm and persuasiveness he gets people to move beyond their borders to make their organization innovative again.

Gijs is also the author of the innovation bestseller “The Innovation Expedition”, which has been published in English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, Chinese and Japanese. Gijs furthermore founded the FORTH innovation method, which provides structure to the chaotic start of innovation, while still fostering creative thinking. The FORTH method helps businesses to generate well-constructed new product, service, and business model concepts. To date the FORTH innovation method has been implement in 100+ businesses in Asia, Europe, Africa and North – and South America.

Gijs van Wulfen is renowned for his structured approach to initiating innovation, notably through his FORTH innovation method. Wazoku offers resources that align with his methodologies, focusing on structured innovation processes and fostering a culture of innovation.

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The 8 Pillars of a Successful Innovation Strategy

This whitepaper outlines key components essential for a robust innovation strategy, emphasizing the importance of structured processes and clear objectives—principles central to the FORTH method.

 Nadya has helped such organizations as The Coca-Cola Company, ENRC PLC, IBM, CISCO, Erste Bank, Henkel, Knauf Insulation, Vienna Insurance Group and many others to reinvent their products, processes, and leadership practices.

 She served as the Coca-Cola Chaired Professor of Sustainable Development at IEDC- Bled School of Management, an executive education center based in the Slovene Alps, where she continues to teach courses in leadership, strategy, change management, design thinking, and sustainability. In addition to IEDC, Nadya has taught in other business schools, including CEDEP-INSEAD (France), Case Western Reserve (USA), and IPADE Business School (Mexico).

 As a speaker, Nadya has shared her insights with audiences worldwide through keynotes, panel presentations, and workshops. She has delivered three TEDx talks in Austria, Slovenia and the US. Over 100,000+ professionals saw Nadya speak publicly.

 As an author, Nadya has written two books (“Embedded Sustainability: The Next Big Competitive Advantage” in 2011 and “Overfished Ocean Strategy: Powering Up Innovation for a Resource-Deprived World” in 2014) and contributed to five others. In an effort to reinvent corporate approaches to sustainability strategy, Nadya and her co-author Chris Laszlo coined the concept ‘embedded sustainability’, which was virtually non-existent when they started in 2009. Today, it produces 25+ million Google search results and has become a staple for corporate sustainability efforts.

Learn more about how Wazoku's Total Innovation platform supports businesses in driving sustainable, transformative change at Wazoku. 

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Read Tim's ebook Unlocking Impact from Open Innovation here

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In 2015, Steve was named as one of 20 Challenge Mentors for U.S. Government Services Administration’s (GSA) Prizes and Challenges government-wide community of practice. Steve has worked with various projects and organizations to develop and execute over 100 different challenges. He speaks regularly about NASA’s work in crowd-based challenges and the future of work both publicly and internally to the NASA workforce to promote the use of open innovation tools.

Steve has a Mechanical Engineering degree from Rice University and has worked at NASA’s Johnson Space Center for 33 years. Prior to joining CoECI/NTL, Steve worked in mission control, flight software development for the Space Shuttle and International Space Station, command and control systems development for the X-38, and led the Command, Control, Communications, & Information (C3I) architecture definition for the Constellation Program.

To see how organizations like NASA have successfully used Wazoku's platform to solve complex problems, check out their customer stories on forecasting solar events and improving the performance of Kevlar. If you’d like to speak with someone about starting a challenge of your own or learn more about how Wazoku can help you, request a demo here. 

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In this episode, Bea shares her professional journey, starting with her academic achievements, including a strategic innovation degree from Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and an MSc in African Studies from the same institution. Her career path, marked by various influential roles, has shaped her innovative approach in the corporate world.

The discussion delves into the concept of Challenge Driven Innovation (CDI), where Bea explains its significance and practical application in today’s business landscape. Learn about Bea’s role as an advisor on CDI and how she implements these principles at Lloyds Banking Group. For those interested in further reading, check out the Wazoku resource on CDI: Organizing for Innovation.

Discover the current innovation projects at Lloyds Banking Group, led by Bea, and the strategies she employs to overcome challenges and foster a culture of exploration and innovation. Bea’s insights from the Corporate Explorer Fieldbook provide valuable lessons for corporate innovators, emphasizing practical approaches and key takeaways from the book. For more details, explore the Corporate Explorer Fieldbook: Corporate Explorer Fieldbook.

Looking ahead, Bea shares her thoughts on the future of corporate innovation, emerging trends, and technologies that will shape the industry. Aspiring innovators and corporate leaders will find her advice on cultivating a culture of innovation particularly inspiring.

Tune in for a thought-provoking episode filled with actionable insights, practical examples, and strategic advice from one of the leading voices in corporate innovation. Don't miss the opportunity to connect with Bea Schofield on LinkedIn: Bea Schofield LinkedIn.

Subscribe, leave a review, and follow us on social media to stay updated with the latest episodes and innovation insights.

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In this opening episode, we set the stage for the system that redefines how innovation is measured. You'll hear the forward, the introduction to Act One, The Problem with Innovation Performance, and Chapter One, The Innovation Illusion, where we meet Freya and her team as they confront the uncomfortable truth about why so much innovation fails to perform. 

Most organizations don't suffer from a lack of innovation, they suffer from a lack of innovation clarity. Ideas live in spreadsheets, sandboxes, and slide decks. Some get launched before they're ready, others never see daylight. But the real problem is this. Few organizations truly understand how all that activity adds up. 

Act three is where we make the shift from managing individual ideas to orchestrating a coherent innovation system, from counting experiments to building strategic insight, from interesting activity to strategic advantage. 

In this episode, we'll explore chapter eight, strategic layering, where Freya learns how to connect innovation directly to business strategy, risks, and efficiency, turning her portfolio into a living map of value. And in chapter 9, Portfolio Governance and Decision Rights, we see how she evolves from decision bottleneck to system architect, building a governance model that balances freedom with control and turns decision making into a measurable source of performance. 

This is where innovation becomes visible, governable, and scalable. This is total portfolio intelligence.

In the chapters so far, we've moved from understanding value to learning how to measure confidence and timing. Now, in this next chapter, Operationalizing Strategic Fit, we complete the picture. Because innovation isn't just about what's valuable or urgent, it's about what's right for your organization to pursue. This is where Freya and her team take the X V system to its next level, transforming a formula into a true decision framework.

He was the winning solver in the International Rescue Committee’s “Phosphorescence Technology for Lighting” challenge—a challenge we heard so movingly about in our conversation with Carla Lopez from the International Rescue Committee in an earlier episode in this season of the podcast.

This episode is all about light: not just the technical or aesthetic side, but light as dignity, safety, and human innovation. 

Furthermore, Torre is a Visiting Teacher affiliated to the House of Innovation at the Stockholm School of Economics (SSE), faculty in the Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship (SSES) where she teaches Trendspotting and Future Forecasting, and directs the global program on entrepreneurship education SSES Learning Lab Roundtables.

Torre is moreover the Operations Director and one of the founding members of Boards Impact Forum, the Nordic chapter for the Climate Governance Initiative from the World Economic Forum.

Torre has done research on the intersection between AI and innovation, both in the launch of new projects as well as the corporate governance of exponential technologies. Additionally, Torre is a Swedish Expert in the international technical committee for the development of the ISO standard on Innovation Management. She is also a founding member of the Speculative Futures Chapter in Stockholm.

Drawing from his hands-on experience leading global businesses across consumer goods, specialty chemicals, and industrial products, Paul now serves as a strategic advisor helping companies harness the power of business ecosystems, collaborative innovation, and co-creation. His practical approach combines deep ecosystem expertise with real-world business savvy, enabling organizations to stay ahead in rapidly evolving markets.

Based on his 14 years in Asia and leadership roles across multiple continents, Paul brings unique cross-cultural insights to help businesses design and implement successful ecosystem strategies. As a "transition to business ecosystems and innovation advocate," he guides organizations through the challenges of ecosystem adoption while fostering sustainable innovation and growth.

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Connect with Simon and Kyle on LinkedIn:

Simon Hill, CEO & founder, Wazoku
Kyle Basler- Reeder, Open Innovation Leader, Exxon Mobil

Described as “a rare polymath with deep expertise in tech, marketing and psychology”, Nathalie draws upon a rich background in human behaviour, web design and the arts, to offer a unique vantage point from which to examine the complex challenges we face today. Having studied psychology and worked as a web designer early in her career, her frustration at the lack of a comprehensive framework through which to understand online behaviour, led her to write what has since become an international best-seller, Webs Of Influence: The Psychology of Online Persuasion (Pearson).

Adopted as the go-to manual by business leaders and universities alike, Webs Of Influence has been translated into 7 languages, and alongside her new book, Business Unusual: Values, Uncertainty and the Psychology of Brand Resilience, serves as the cornerstone for Nathalie’s work with clients including Google, Accenture, Unilever and Harvard Business Review, among others. A popular speaker, consultant and facilitator to Fortune 500 companies, Nathalie has lectured at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions (from Cambridge and UCL universities, to Lund and Hult business schools), and her experience as a skilled communicator has seen her present at SXSW, host the Guardian Changing Media Summit and hold main stage interviews at the Web Summit.

Learn More: Ethical AI Innovation: Insights from Natalie Nahai - Wazoku

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Tom is a member of the British Standards Institute (BSI) committee for Innovation Management, and is actively contributing to the ISO 56000 series of Innovation Management standards.

Three realisations shape what he's building now. Every company chasing adjacent growth runs into the same structural walls. Everyone reinvents the wheel, even though decades of evidence-based frameworks are readily available. And those frameworks are nearly impossible to apply in practice, let alone scale. Node 42 builds them into software, jobs-to-be-done above all, using knowledge graphs to give mid-sized companies a digital twin of their market.

He set up in Ravensburg, near Lake Constance, on purpose: close to the German Mittelstand hidden champions he's serving, far from the noise. At 42, with a family and a quarter of a million in pre-seed raised, he's an unapologetic Clayton Christensen believer and proof that experience can be an asset rather than a delay.

Aidan is the host and founder of the  Innovation Show, the most subscribed to innovation podcast, which boasts Bill Gates as a listener and advocate and features on Irelands national broadcaster RTÉ . 

He reinvented himself after a 10-year career after rugby with over 100 caps for Leinster, Toulouse and London Irish and is a full Ireland Rugby International.

Aidan speaks and runs workshops globally on disruption and change for organisations such as Mastercard, Epic Games, Endemol Shine Group, Agilent Technologies, CBC Canada and Toyota and in industries from Pharma to Fintech.

Aidan is the author of the book, “Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life” which features a Foreword by Visa founder and CEO Emeritus, Dee Hock.

Connect with Aidan on LinkedIn
Connect with Simon on LinkedIn

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Discover how Wazoku's strategic update for 2024 is revolutionizing innovation with their new interconnected suite of tools, enabled by AI and crowd intelligence.

Read the full blog to learn more!

This chapter begins with tension. A major project is under scrutiny, the CFO demands evidence, and Freya realizes the team has been learning, but not showing the learning. What follows is a profound shift from reporting activity to reporting confidence, from fixed plans to dynamic resource allocation, and from rigid portfolios to living systems that adapt at the pace of evidence. 

We explore how Freya builds learning velocity, tracks X V deltas, reframes killed decisions, and introduces dynamic resourcing that moves money, talent, and attention to where learning is happening fastest. 

It's the moment where innovation stops being a bet and becomes a learning engine, and it sets the foundation for accelerating the journey from expected to realized value

Over this season, we've followed Freya and her team as they've moved from good intentions and busy innovation to clearer decisions, better evidence, and real value. But no system ever stands still. The world keeps changing, and the real question becomes how do we change with it without losing what we've built? 

As we prepare to say goodbye to Freya, she is asked a simple but powerful question, what's next? And her answer isn't about more ideas or bigger bets. It's about building an organization that can keep learning, adapting, and creating value, even when the future refuses to behave.

He is author of Digital Darwinism which shines a light on the future by exploring technology, society and lessons from the past so you can understand how to adapt, what to embrace and what to ignore. Tom Goodwin proves that assumptions the business world has previously made about "digital" are wrong: incremental change isn't good enough, adding technology at the edges won't work and digital isn't a thing - it's everything. If you want your organization to succeed in the post-digital age, you need to be enlightened by Digital Darwinism.

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Wazoku
Building a Culture of Innovation Resources

Learn more about Harry’s work at Seafreight Labs and how innovation is driving solutions in humanitarian challenges: https://www.seafreightlabs.com/

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Samuel’s scientific research examines such areas as scientific discovery and network science. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Atlantic, and he was previously a contributing writer for Wired. Samuel is the award-winning author of Overcomplicated: Technology at the Limits of Comprehension and The Half-Life of Facts. His most recent book is The Magic of Code.

In addition, Samuel is a Senior Fellow of The Silicon Flatirons Center at The University of Colorado, and a Research Fellow at The Long Now Foundation. Previously, Samuel was a Senior Scholar in Research and Policy at The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and a Research Fellow in the Department of Health Care Policy at Harvard Medical School. He completed a PhD in computational biology at Cornell University and earned a BA in computer science and biology at Brandeis University.

Dr. Juan Martin is an Intensive Care Consultant at Newham University Hospital NHS Trust, a Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, and a Medical Writer at Scienda Group. With over 17 years of experience as a successful innovator in the Wazoku solver ecosystem, Dr. Martin has developed groundbreaking solutions across multiple disciplines.

Originally from Aragon, Spain, Dr. Martin began his medical career in biochemical pathology, which opened doors to research opportunities. He later earned his PhD and MBA, becoming the youngest medical director of Spain's largest private hospital company before relocating to the United Kingdom with his family to pursue new challenges.

Dr. Martin's innovative spirit has led to numerous award-winning solutions in fields ranging from dentistry to pharmaceutical development. His approach blends professional medical expertise with personal experiences and natural curiosity. Whether drawing inspiration from his kitchen experiments, his children's insights, or his patients' needs, Dr. Martin embodies Enzo Ferrari's philosophy: "If you can dream it, you can do it."

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I speak to those on the ground floor, the strategists, the analysts, and the unsung heroes who make innovation tick. From technology breakthroughs to cultural shifts within companies, I'm on a quest to understand how innovation breathes new life into business.

Join me as we explore the narratives of those shaping the market, those writing about it, and those doing the hard work. This is "Total Innovation," where every voice counts and every story matters. 

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Powered by Wazoku, helping to Change the World, One Idea at a Time. 

He's been building digital products since 1994, built SaaS before anyone called it SaaS, and has worked his way through companies of every size and stage: The Financial Times, Monster, Huddle, Covestor, Cazoo, and most recently as Product Partner at EQT, one of the world's largest private investors. Along the way, he's advised over 150 companies on the thing most of them were missing: not better tools or frameworks, but the connective tissue between their strategy and the people doing the work.

Today, Martin works as a board member, strategic advisor, and leadership coach — helping founders, CEOs, and product leaders build the clarity their organisations need to move at pace. His most recent book, The Decision Stack: How Strategic Alignment Unlocks Organizational Momentum, distils everything he's learned about what it actually takes to align an organisation from vision to execution.

As the founder of ProductTank, co-founder of Mind the Product — together, the world's largest product community, active in over 200 cities — and co-author of Product Leadership (O'Reilly, 2017), he has helped define the product management discipline and shaped the practices of a generation of product leaders.

Súsanna is also co-founder of TONIK itself — the event you're at right now. TONIK was born out of a conviction that a small island nation doesn't have to think small. By blending technology, art, and meaningful human connection against the backdrop of the Faroese landscape, TONIK has become a gathering that draws founders, investors, and creative thinkers from across the Nordics and beyond — and sends them home with new collaborations, new friendships, and a new understanding of what's possible at the edge of the world.

Her work is rooted in a simple but powerful idea: that the same qualities that make the Faroe Islands distinctive — resourcefulness, creativity, the habit of wearing many hats, and the necessity of solving your own problems — are precisely the qualities that make great innovators.

Brought to you by The Infinite Loop – Where Ideas Evolve, Knowledge Flows, and Innovation Never Stops.

Brought to you by The Infinite Loop – Where Ideas Evolve, Knowledge Flows, and Innovation Never Stops.

Innovation has no shortage of frameworks, toolkits, or canvas templates. But too often, those tools complicate instead of clarifying. They add noise instead of structure. They create motion without meaning.

Act II is about changing that by introducing a coherent system, not just more frameworks.

This episode marks the beginning of Act Two, operationalizing innovation value. We follow Freya's team as they put X V into practice for the first time.

Subsequently, Marta moved into corporate technology consulting, then back again into innovation management with a Spanish startup.

For the past six years, Marta served as a Strategy and Innovation manager at NatWest bank, where she implemented an intrapreneurship programme and oversaw the delivery of enterprise-grade AI innovation solutions.

Outside work, Marta is interested in social innovation and robotics.

She currently lives in Edinburgh with her family.

This experience inspired him to create Nordic Tech Week, a week-long series of events in Stockholm designed to open doors for students, aspiring entrepreneurs, and newcomers to the tech scene. The flagship event is set to be the world's first fully open tech conference, hosted at Kungsträdgården, one of Stockholm's most iconic parks. The conference features panel discussions, free startup demonstrations, and networking opportunities aimed at connecting future co-founders, employees, and employers.

A strong advocate for "the new Nordics" concept—bringing together the Nordic and Baltic regions—Ludvig believes these regions share bold global ambitions and common values around sustainability and ethical tech scaling. His mission is to ensure that the insights and connections typically reserved for closed-door meetings become accessible to everyone who wants to understand where technology is heading and how to navigate the future of tech in this unified Nordic-Baltic ecosystem.

Prior to Depop, Runar was part of the founding team that built mobile social network ZYB and successfully sold it to Vodafone Group where he went on to hold several leadership positions including the group’s Global Head of Product. Runar enjoys building and expanding community-driven companies that drive positive change. At YunoJuno he is championing flexibility and empowerment as the future of work.

If you're inspired by the insights on innovation and scaling shared in this podcast, discover how Wazoku helps organizations turn ideas into action. Learn more about the importance of systems thinking in corporate innovation by visiting this resource, and see how Wazoku supports businesses in building vibrant innovation ecosystems.

Brought to you by The Infinite Loop – Where Ideas Evolve, Knowledge Flows, and Innovation Never Stops.

But that's not the real story....

Because there are a handful of stages in the world that carry a kind of gravity. You know the one I mean. Three letters that have come to stand for the best ideas humanity has to offer, delivered in a way that stays with you long after the lights come up. Very few people ever get to stand on a stage like that. Fewer still get to build one.

He is one of the few. This month, on 30 September, he is hosting TEDxInnovation Drive, which brings that same spirit to Connecticut for the first time. And he has done far more than book a venue and print a programme. He has authored a vision for what innovation really is and who it belongs to, assembled a team from scratch, curated a room, won the backing of world-class sponsors for something that did not yet exist, and brought in a coach to help a lineup of accomplished, world-renowned speakers give the talk of their lives.

One stubborn question: what does it actually take to make innovation work? In this special milestone edition, host Simon Hill steps out from behind the interviewer's chair to look back at the conversations, characters and ideas that have shaped the Total Innovation Podcast so far.

From Aidan McCullen and the polyvalent players of Toulouse Rugby Club, to Steve Rader running 850 challenges for NASA with a team of just twelve, to Gina Lucarelli's 90 UN accelerator labs built on "directed improvisation" — Simon revisits the moments that stuck. Along the way he draws out the threads that connect rugby pitches to lunar missions and Faroese entrepreneurs to financial services boardrooms: innovate where you differentiate, know your planted foot, reward the right kind of mistakes, and never assume the best answer lives where you expect to find it.

It's also a chance to reflect on Expected Value, Simon's book on closing innovation's measurement gap, and the central thesis behind the whole series — that innovation rarely fails because of bad ideas. It fails because of bad systems. Part retrospective, part manifesto, this is a reflection on making the invisible visible, and a marker on the road to the next fifty.