One of the challenges of managing innovation is figuring out what your industry is going to look like in a few years’ time. The big difficulty here is that you are juggling data from three domains, and all of them are changing rapidly: the external environment that shapes your industry, innovations within your industry, and innovations within your organisation. These act together to create non-linear feedback loops which make the change process nearly impossible to predict or manage. How do we manage this? The act of innovation consists of combining ideas in new ways, and then executing the this new combination effectively (If you’re nerdy, I’ve got a fairly technical model of how this works in the paper I wrote with Jason Potts & Mark Dodgson for this year’s DRUID Conference). One of the ways that we deal with the complexity we face is by innovatively connecting ideas.