Cecilia Thirlway

Every Digital Transformation and innovation needs a water carrier. That is to say, the successful Digital Transformations and Innovation teams need someone who is prepared to fetch and carry, who is tirelessly energetic, who operates with the end in mind, who is prepared to do the unbeautiful stuff, who believes that a strong melody carried by a powerful rhythm is worth a thousand grace notes, and whose overall performance, season after season, sends out the message of devotion to a cause.

It seems widely accepted that innovation today is a collaborative endeavor, with universities playing a significant part. For instance, a study published last year showed that approximately 80% of published papers had contributed to at least one patent. What’s more, most of these connections were outside of their core domain, so patents would be registered in a completely different domain to the research article, underlining the power of basic research in driving recombinative innovation.

But not everyone is cut out to be an entrepreneur. It would be foolish to think that you can turn all of your employees into entrepreneurs. Most people are not resilient enough for that path, and it’s not that you would want everyone to suddenly be an entrepreneur anyway. That said, the future will require competencies for everyone that are more akin to an entrepreneur than a typical employee.