The Big Idea: Exploring Innovation as a Culture

Getting ready to present the Big Idea of Exploring Innovation as a Culture. Have been refining the core concept and trying to trim all excess distractions. Inspired by the work that I did with Gil Agnew and Arjan Kamphuis this past week, I used Open Source as inspiration and rationale for the presentation.

I tried to address all the problems and conditioning that we face here in The Netherlands. That's why I thought we needed a powerful Big Idea that would unify everything and really seduce people into a transformation.

We live in a country weighted down by a huge social contract where people feel entitled to their subsidized behavior. Combine this with a transactional based economy and we're ready for an innovation revolution.

Our task becomes: How to replace the syndrome of “entitlement” with the behavior of “performance with a conscience”. We have a real chance to transform ourselves through socio-economic behavior, capturing the need to address the basic health, educaiton and welfare of our society with an innovative and sustainable economy. This means changes from protectionism strategies to open source strategies - and embracing the benefits of diversity, instead of fearing it.

The Strategic Opportunity: Develop a new vision on investment, giving investment a new purpose and a new role for creating value - more than just transactional value - and replacing the existing entitlement practice of subsidizing. If we can convincingly encourage people to engage in new practices that network ideas, people and practices across all diverse areas, we have a path forward to a new economy that has a social conscience.