Show Notes
Innovation is lonely work. Sam West built a museum of failure to make visible what organisations hide — and found it gives people permission. Working in innovation is lonely. You're usually pushing against the culture, not with it. You're the person asking "why not?" in rooms full of people paid to say "because." You try things that don't work, often in public, and the organisation's instinct is to move on quickly and quietly rather than ask what happened and why. In startup land there are spaces for this. F**k Up Nights — actual events where founders get on stage and tell the audience what went wrong — have become a real phenomenon precisely because there was nowhere else to say it. The relief in the room when someone is honest about failure is palpable. You can feel people exhale. Corporate innovation doesn't have that. It has words about failure — "we celebrate learning," "there are no bad ideas," "fail fast" — but not much else. The language of failure tolerance is everywhere. The actual practice of it is rare. And the people doing the hard work of trying new things inside large organisations often feel like they're doing it alone, without cover, in an environment that will quietly hold it against them if it doesn't work out. Samuel West, Founder and Curator, The Museum of Failure; Organisational Psychologist; PhD in Organisational Psychology, Lund University, has spent a decade studying exactly that gap. He built a museum full of things that failed — from global corporations to billion-dollar bets — precisely to make visible what organisations prefer to make invisible. The effect it has on people is not what you might expect. It doesn't make them cynical. It gives them permission. When you see that Apple, Google, and Procter & Gamble get things catastrophically wrong, something shifts. The fear shrinks a little. The risk feels more possible. He has also, as it happens, lived through a very public personal failure of his own — declared bankrupt over the museum itself. Which gives him a credential that no PhD can provide. This conversation is for anyone who has ever sat in a post-mortem and felt like nobody was really saying what happened. For anyone who has ever killed a project and felt they had to pretend it never existed. For the person who is doing innovation work right now and wondering why it feels so unrewarding even when they believe in it.
More from Total Innovation Podcast
Over the past 63 years, HACT has helped to shape social housing in the UK.
Michael Carter is the founding principal of Carter Morse & Goodrich. He has been on the financial side of business from many perspectives: as a business founder, commercial lender, investment banker, board director, and business advisor. As a seasoned investment banker, he has advised over 100 M&A and financing transactions. But that's not the real story.... Because there are a handful of stages in the world that carry a kind of gravity. You know the one I mean. Three letters that have come to stand for the best ideas humanity has to offer, delivered in a way that stays with you long after the lights come up. Very few people ever get to stand on a stage like that. Fewer still get to build one. He is one of the few. This month, on 30 September, he is hosting TEDxInnovation Drive, which brings that same spirit to Connecticut for the first time. And he has done far more than book a venue and print a programme. He has authored a vision for what innovation really is and who it belongs to, assembled a team from scratch, curated a room, won the backing of world-class sponsors for something that did not yet exist, and brought in a coach to help a lineup of accomplished, world-renowned speakers give the talk of their lives.
Lukas Waeschle is co-founder and CEO of Node 42, an AI-native startup that comes out of stealth on this episode. His path here was anything but linear. He dropped out of mechanical engineering, switched to political science, then spent years in industry across sales, sales management and product management, carrying what he describes as a long-running inferiority complex about lacking a business or engineering degree. That shifted when a corporate venture project inside a large medtech company pulled him into business innovation, where he finally found his footing. Three realisations shape what he's building now. Every company chasing adjacent growth runs into the same structural walls. Everyone reinvents the wheel, even though decades of evidence-based frameworks are readily available. And those frameworks are nearly impossible to apply in practice, let alone scale. Node 42 builds them into software, jobs-to-be-done above all, using knowledge graphs to give mid-sized companies a digital twin of their market. He set up in Ravensburg, near Lake Constance, on purpose: close to the German Mittelstand hidden champions he's serving, far from the noise. At 42, with a family and a quarter of a million in pre-seed raised, he's an unapologetic Clayton Christensen believer and proof that experience can be an asset rather than a delay.
In this season finale, Simon Hill looks back at more than 20 years of Innocentive and the enduring power of solving problems by going wide, not just deep. From breakthrough ideas generated by unexpected human solvers to Wazoku’s emerging synthetic crowd, the episode explores the next big leap in innovation: hybrid collective intelligence. What happens when human experience, judgment and creativity are combined with the speed, scale and breadth of machine intelligence? It is not humans versus AI. It is about orchestrating both to explore more possibilities, solve harder problems and move from discovery to impact faster. This episode brings Season 4 to a close. We are taking a short summer break, but the Total Innovation Podcast will return with Season 5 later this year, featuring a new line-up of conversations and guests.
Deepa Krishnamurthy began her working life as a cost accountant on the floor of a tractor plant in India, surrounded by production schedules and inventory. From there, her path ran through finance, real estate, investing, Harvard — and, decades later, somehow all the way back to the factory floor. She likes to say it feels less like a new direction and more like a great many separate paths finally converging. Today she's the co-founder and CEO of Nterprisers, and she's here because she thinks we're telling ourselves the wrong story about American manufacturing. There are hundreds of thousands of manufacturers scattered across the country — small, mostly family-owned, almost all privately held. They make the parts beneath the parts: precision-machined components, specialty fabrication, the tooling and subassemblies that quietly hold up the whole economy. And here's the strange thing — most of them are nearly impossible to find. The tidy story goes: the factories closed, the work went overseas, the industry declined. Deepa will tell you that story is mostly wrong. Manufacturing didn't disappear — it became invisible. The companies are still there. The skills are still there. The knowledge built up over decades is still there. What thinned out was the connective tissue — the dense local networks that once let manufacturers, suppliers, engineers, lenders, and investors find one another. Her core belief is simple, and I think rather profound: we cannot strengthen what we cannot see. Visibility comes before connection. Connection comes before integration. And integration comes before growth. Before highways, there were maps. Before marketplaces, there were the humble systems that let people find each other in the first place.