There are lots of design schools, as Ritesh Gupta says, but how many are out there using fonts by people of colour, in a design school of colour, to recalibrate the world of design and colour in their own their eyes and image?
There’s retail, there’s unboxing, there’s circular fashion and mystery shopping, but thanks to Joe Wilkinson, Mario Maher and his new platform offer, Heat, there’s now circular retail that involves unboxing and mystery fashion brands and cult products.
There are also crypto-clubs, DAO squads, and those in the know and the not-know when it comes to NFTs, but thanks to Deana Burke, another of our Futures 100 Innovators, there’s now a new Boys Club that’s shaking up the tech sector by building a feminist Web3 scene to bring more women and non-binary people into a space currently dominated by men.
In each case, our innovators aren’t just changing the consumer lifestyle marketplace with new products (that old-school definition of innovation), they’re challenging and disrupting it by flagging up the roles that gender, race, equity and inclusion play in shaping an innovation or defining its trajectory.
This is hugely important when considering the role innovation plays in your organisation. For many of us, innovation is still too narrowly defined as a new method, idea or shift from the now that catapults us into the next – and one that is always about technology (another mobile app, anybody?) and building a better, shinier, more efficient tomorrow.
But as entrepreneur, author and disruptor Margaret Heffernan tells it: ‘For good ideas and true innovation you need human interaction, conflict, argument and debate.’
And this, of course, has been part of the underlying criteria used by the LS:N Global team when selecting our Futures 100 Innovators to include innovators, disruptors, entrepreneurs and co-collaborators that embody challenge, conflict, argument and debate as a core part of their innovation DNA and journey.
