Innovation is created by people, not by processes or tools. Here is how we define innovation, why mindset matters most in the age of AI, and the seven practices it is made of.
Novelty is relative: it is enough for a solution to be new to your company, city or customers. Value is broader than money. And innovation lives everywhere: in products, services, business models, finance and processes.
| Creative thinking | Innovative thinking | |
|---|---|---|
| Key question | How do I come up with a new idea? | How does an idea become value for people? |
| Focus | Idea-generation techniques | Mindsets and skills for the whole journey: from noticing to bringing people along |
| Place | One of the practices | Seven practices, creativity being just one of them |
| How it develops | Often a one-off training | Regular immersion in new ideas, cases and questions |
The more AI can do, the less our skills set us apart — and the more it matters how we think.
Oksana Hoshva · DOT_DOT Innovation
A person with GPT-4 generates about 800 ideas an hour, without it about 20. Training only idea generation means training the skill that loses value fastest.
Girotra et al., Wharton, 2023 · working paper
With AI-generated ideas, individual writers’ stories get better but more similar to one another. What sets you apart is what you add yourself.
Doshi & Hauser, Science Advances, 2024
AI helps train skills. But curiosity, courage and caring cannot be delegated: AI is never curious and nothing matters to it.
AI is useful when it asks questions rather than hands out ready answers. We learn this in practice, with a personal AI companion.
It all starts when someone notices a small detail that others walk past every day. For something to come of it, you need to understand who it really matters to. Then connect things that have so far existed separately, and imagine where it could grow. Then comes the hardest part: acting, making mistakes, persisting when nothing is clear. And finding people to co-create with, because an innovator alone will not get far.
Each practice has a role the innovator tries on; mindsets, meaning how a person sees the world; and skills, what they do to turn it into action.
How do you see what others walk past every day?
Who is this really important to, and why?
How are ideas born at the intersection of unrelated things?
Where could an idea grow, and what could the future look like?
How do you test ideas in reality quickly?
How do you keep going when nothing is clear and things go wrong?
How do you create something new together with others?
How these practices become a habit of the team, the organisation and the ecosystem, not of a single person.
Before the session, participants take a self-assessment: 28 statements, 7–10 minutes. The result is a personal profile across the seven practices with two lines: mindsets and skills.
Tell me about your team, how many people will take part and what you want to achieve. No commitment. I will suggest a format, an agenda and a date.
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