Wazoku Blog

Every year, TIME magazine recognizes the 100 best inventions of the year, a tribute to humanity’s ability to innovate and adapt to problems facing society. In 2022, it chose to double the size of the list and celebrate 200 inventions that highlight the boom in innovation as a result of our rapidly changing world.

For 35 years, IdeasUK has brought innovation and idea management specialists together to reinvigorate and share their knowledge, each collaborating across corporate boundaries to gain new insights. Lisa Jackaman was part of the Wazoku team that attended IdeasUK’s 35^th International Conference in November 2022. In this blog, she reflects on the experience.

The term collective intelligence covers technology enabled processes in which large groups of individuals gather, share, or generate knowledge, data, and skills – as such it is a field that holds massive potential for the private and public sectors. However, collective intelligence is still an emerging field, and a large knowledge gap persists in academia as well as across the private and public sector.

Last year, ten of the world’s biggest airlines came together to launch the Aviation Climate Taskforce (ACT). Recognizing that the industry currently contributes nearly a billion metric tons of CO₂ annually, the group was set up to accelerate breakthroughs in innovation that will bring this figure down. The industry has set a target for net zero by 2050, but the growing electrification of carbon sources puts these plans under threat.

Earlier this month, Innov8rs hosted its first event ever in the United States. A team from Wazoku was in attendance at the summit, where presentations, networking, and conversations on innovation ran across two packed days. Here, Molly Cariker, one of Wazoku's representatives at the event, shares her thoughts on the team's time in Austin.

In a November 6^th 2022 article, the European Business Review explained how open innovation and crowdsourcing can be seen as a cure-all until the ideas become too unfamiliar, a mindset that can see many innovations being dropped before their success. In this blog, we relate how Oguz A. Acar suggests breaking down the biases that promote this kind of thinking.

Having enjoyed a great time at the Spring Innovation Roundtable event this year, Wazoku will return to Copenhagen next week as part of the Fall Innovation Roundtable. Our representatives will host workshops, co-present with customers, and network with attendees, showing how we can change the world, one idea at a time.

The teams at Front End of Innovation (FEI) and All Things Innovation (AI) conducted an in-depth survey to take the pulse of the innovation community, sponsored by EY and supported by MassChallenge. The report, available here, covered what businesses are experiencing and planning for their spends and trends, cultures, opportunities, and talent for 2022.

Seven years ago in Paris, 196 world leaders from different countries and of different political ideologies came together to sign a historic agreement. They all pledged to pursue efforts that would limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C above 1850s levels. This agreement was signed against the backdrop of warnings that if global temperatures were to get any higher than this, a staggering 3.5 billion people could be exposed to life-threatening heat and humidity.

What do nine Challenges, run by nine different global organizations, in topics as varying as sustainability, pharmaceuticals, and beauty have in common?

In terms of real-life events, they don’t come any bigger than the mega GiTex Global Innovation showcase I recently attended in Dubai. Having been starved of the opportunity to connect with people face-to-face for the past couple of years, this was certainly a case of ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire.’ As the below graphic illustrates, this event was huge, and while Dubai loves any opportunity to dub something the “world’s largest”, I could well believe it to be true in the case of this year’s GiTex.

The return of in-person events brings with it brilliant opportunities to reconnect with legacy contacts while also making new connections at the same time. With Innov8rs embarking on a first State-side event in Austin next week, we’re thrilled to announce that representatives from Wazoku will be there to chat, present, and network with some of the leading lights in global innovation.