Many grand challenges confront humanity today – improving living standards and lifting billions out of poverty without destroying our planet, reducing societal polarisation and intolerance, and enabling human flourishing, to name but a few. The United Nations has attempted to provide a comprehensive view of the challenges that face us over the next several decades by identifying 17 strategic development goals (SDGs) to guide the efforts of individuals, corporations, NGOs, and governments. But given the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) nature of our reality today, efforts that rely on existing solutions will not get us to where we want to go. The path forward requires bold innovation. But the novelty and often unforeseen consequences of innovation can potentially make bad situations worse or create new problems. Therefore, we need to advance a very specific kind of innovation – at SPJIMR, we call this “wise innovation”.
What is wise innovation? It is a conscious attempt at every level (individual, corporate, NGO, and government) to design solutions that have broad economic, societal, and environmental benefits. These benefits are conceptualised as contributing to the so-called triple bottom line (also called 3P). Designing such 3P solutions requires individual innovators and organisations to mindfully apply specific wisdom mindsets and practices in the innovation process.
What then should the role of a management institute be in advancing wise innovation?
At SPJIMR, we aim to advance wise innovation at scale by shaping the innovation practices of the following stakeholders – the thousands of participants in our full-time and modular programmes, the hundreds of corporate and NGO partners who rely on us for talent acquisition and ongoing development programmes, and a select number of high leverage entrepreneurial communities or ecosystems that we support through our centres of practice.
The participants in our programmes master contemporary innovation practices such as design thinking, the lean startup method, and agile management. But more importantly, they dig deeper into the foundational enablers of innovation such as critical thinking and systems thinking. Participants develop a wisdom mindset of intellectual humility, reflection, contextualisation, compassion, and responsible action; we enable these with our curriculum and through carefully curated immersive experiences that develop societal sensitivity. Participants continuously put their knowledge into practice, designing novel solutions in various contemporary contexts of product management, entrepreneurship, resilient supply chain design, customer journey management, and social sector interventions. Our participants then go on to advance wise innovation in their organisations, communities, and ecosystems.
Whether you are an individual innovator or an organisation innovating for 3P outcomes, consider working with SPJIMR on your wise innovation journey.