Anyone, or any organization, can improve upon their abilities to become serial innovators. Innovators are both problem-identifiers and problem-solvers. Innovators create new, impactful solutions to clearly identified root-cause problems. Creative problem-solving is not enough. To generate impact those solutions must also be adopted. No adoption, no impact. No impact, no innovation.

Innovating is a learnable, not an innate, skill. Innovating takes the right people, in the right environment utilizing the right methodology. The focus of this book is the description of a learnable, repeatable, non-linear, iterative, knowledge-based methodology for generating innovations. It is the oft-missing guide necessary to becoming a serial innovator. A guide that integrates creation and adoption. A guide that includes root-cause problem identification and solution formulation. A guide that can be adopted by individuals, groups, or large organizations.

The design-thinking based Innovation Pyramid methodology is laid out in the first half of this book. Its implementation utilizes the creativity-based DOC (Diverge Organize Converge) Process described in the second half of this book. The appendices, in turn, describe specific techniques that apply to the DOC Process.

Advances in production systems and technology, particularly around automation and robotics, have been accompanied in recent years by a resurgence of debate about the future of work. Many contemporary accounts inhabit a utopian space where radical change is desired and envisioned. They point to profound, possibly revolutionary change in the nature of work – perhaps the end of work. They place work at the centre of social life as presently known, and in so doing tend to offer up a critique of capitalist society in toto. During the twentieth century, Western economies grappled with the issue of automation, at the same time finding themselves oscillating between consumer-fuelled expansion and economic crisis. This produced an intellectual engagement with automation and post-work which has much in common with that of today’s ‘postindustrial utopians’. Even stretching back into antiquity, utopian thinkers imagined a world without toil, and so the notion of ‘post-work’, or the ‘end of work’ exists in the context of a long and distinctive intellectual heritage. This chapter presents an analysis of this intellectual heritage and seeks to illustrate continuity and disjuncture in the dynamics of what could be termed ‘post-work imaginaries’.

Digital technologies have made it possible for people to work from literally anywhere in the world, as long as they have the right devices and Wi-Fi (Torten et al., 2016). At the same time, the number of self-employed workers is growing rapidly. This group usually does not have an office in a firm they can go to every day, to work. Digital technologies open up an array of possibilities. Working is possible anywhere and anytime. Self-employed workers can choose to work from home, a rented hot desk in a co working space, in coffee-shops, hotel lobbies, and even on the beach in a sunny resort on a beautiful island. In this chapter, the focus lies on self-employed workers who work in hotel lobbies that were not primarily designed as co-working spaces.

The Innovation Pyramid, like any tool, comes down to how well we learn to use it to improve our collective judgement. Reviewing innovation projects allows us to better understand the linkages between the specific-level decisions and the overall project outcome. This deeper discernment requires a critical analysis of the entire innovation system – every decision taken between the initial situation and overall desired outcome must be reviewed. Fortunately, the structure of The Innovation Pyramid is equally useful in guiding the identification of the well-rationalized choice made during the design and execution of the innovation that inadvertently caused us to veer away from our overall, macro-level, desired impact of the original situation. This chapter lays out a structure to systematically review the project elements that could be associated with the variance between the actual and forecasted impact of the innovation. The guidance that The Pyramid provides for a project's post-execution review must often be augmented with additional research. Firms should consider this additional research an investment in their emerging core competency of serial innovation.

The chapter considers how research that puts the workers' perspective at the forefront can be placed within a critical dialogue with the researcher. While there have been accounts of resistance taking place across Europe in delivery platforms, these have tended to take a broader analytical lens, rather than focusing on the specific practices being experimented with. In this chapter, the author presents a reflection on the experiences of joint writing with workers in the gig economy. This involves analysing attempts to use methods of co-research inspired by the workers-inquiry method, building on previous accounts. The chapter is intended as a corrective to much of the abstract academic research on the 'gig economy'. As such it is both an empirical and methodological intervention – presenting an account of this work from the perspective of a worker themselves, while also arguing that it is from this perspective that the work can be not only critically analysed but also transformed.

The aim of this chapter is to examine the neglected area of platform work and inequalities. Drawing on Acker’s theoretical frame of inequality regimes, this study investigates whether platform work reproduces and/or augments inequalities. Extant research on platforms has focused predominantly on lesser-skilled work based on repetitive transactions; in contrast, we explore experiences of higher-skilled work, specifically the provision of legal services. A qualitative approach was adopted based on participants using the People Per Hour (PPH) platform, which offers high-skilled professional services targeted at the small-business market. The study is situated in the context of structural disadvantages in the legal profession. Our findings show that persistent inequalities within the offline legal profession are not simply mirrored, but amplified in platform work, contesting any optimistic claims that platform work has the potential to act as a leveller.

An overview of the creativity-based DOC (Diverge Organize Converge) Process is described in this chapter. The DOC Process is an important sub-process necessary to reduce the design stages of The Innovation Pyramid to practice. It will be applied multiple times, in a variety of different ways, during the innovation design stages. The DOC Process can also be applied to a multitude of other non-innovative challenges. The DOC Process has three distinct components: divergent thinking, organizing and convergent thinking. It is the combination of all three that makes the method powerful. While most are familiar with divergent thinking, particularly brainstorming new solution ideas, the DOC Process is as useful for identifying root-cause problems as it is for ideating new solutions. The Diverge step expands from the original solution idea or problem situation. The second step of the process is the often ignored Organize step. Once the Organize step is completed, the process moves onto the Converge step. Converge narrows the organized concepts down to the “best.” Criteria for choosing “the best” problem or solution must be conscious and public. Unless agreed-upon criteria is defined for choosing “the best,” each of us will apply our own measures, ensuring a chaotic outcome.

In this essay, we contend that new ways of working imply a crisis both of communities and politics in our societies. We introduce the concept of 'co-politicisation' to make sense of the potential highly transformative political power of managerial agency in society. In the context of ongoing work transformations, managerial agency increasingly seems to become a political agency, through its potential to transform society and the sense of togetherness. However, in the meantime, politics has entered into crisis. Each of us has the possibility to express their own, individual voice, but without building, in turn, any meaningful or resonant collective and community. We argue that a temporal approach is needed to understand such a crisis of community and of the politics. To that end, we introduce Paul Ricoeur (1985)’s thought on a ‘crisis of the present’ that we apply to new ways of working. We conclude by suggesting that new ways of working may be missing practices likely to produce the extra-temporality that managerial agency needs to perform. Without this extra-temporality, the managerial agency of new ways of working just keeps weakening our sense of togetherness.

Craftsmanship, making and do-it-ocracy are prominent elements of the so-called new world of work. In this chapter, we describe the ‘experience of making’ in two makerspaces, one located in France and the other in the United States. In particular, we focus on three concepts – silence, atmosphere and togetherness – in order to flesh out, or make visible, the specificities of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) and Do-It-Together (DIT) processes in makerspaces. We mobilise Merleau-Ponty’s work and an aesthetic perspective on time and place to delve into the experience of making. This leads us to propose the concept of New Collaborative Experiences (NCE), which we define as new modes of feeling and expressing the self and the world in a context that requires a collective production and coordination, as a way of illuminating our two ethnographic accounts.

Divergent thinking is the first of three essential steps in completing the non-linear DOC Process. Like all DOC Process steps, divergent thinking applies to both the problem and solution spaces. It simply requires different techniques when seeking to identify a root-cause problem versus attempting to come up with a new impactful problem-solving approach.

Identifying root cause issues begins with broadening our purview to ensure we are not overlooking the disease by focusing too closely on its symptoms. Divergence occurs as we zoom in from this broad purview; identifying factors or causes of the identified zoomed-out General Problem, then factors of the identified factors, then causes of the sub-factors, and so on, until the root-cause level is reached.

Divergent thinking for solutions occurs on several perspective levels: feature, function and system. In addition to ideating new and improved features of existing solutions, substitute solutions should be considered. Potential substitutes perform the same function as current solutions, but do so in a very different way. New technology is often the enabler of substitute products. System level thinking diverges solution ideas by strengthening or streamlining system connections or linkages at the broadest purview.