13.Gijs van Wulfen: Breaking innovation barriers

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.