You once wrote that everyone does innovation, and usually it goes fine – it’s only when we talk about innovation that things go wrong. Why is that?
“Innovating is just human behaviour. We’re constantly trying to improve things, come up with new ideas, test them out, and if it doesn’t work – try again. It’s iterative. But when someone from above tells us to ‘go innovate’, we suddenly freeze. We don’t know what to do.”
Why not?
“Because it’s often too vague – they tell us to ‘think outside the box’, so we go on a team retreat and come up with new ideas. That part isn’t so hard. The real challenge is what comes next: turning those offbeat ideas into a new reality. That’s where the innovation really happens.”
Why is that so difficult?
“Because innovating often goes against the grain – against what we think we know. And the thing is, we don’t even realise we’re making assumptions, because they’ve just become accepted as facts over time. But real innovation means questioning those assumptions.”
You’re going to talk about ‘delta sciences’ in your farewell lecture. How do they help with innovation?
“In one of my courses, which ran for 10 weeks, I’d do five weeks of theory, then five weeks of practical assignments. In those theory weeks, we’d touch on 50 different concepts – from organisational behaviour to entrepreneurial thinking – drawn from all sorts of disciplines: psychology, sociology, business, economics, tech. That’s when I realised there’s no single foundation for understanding innovating as a social, interactive process. I draw on the humanities, sciences, and social sciences. That combined knowledge – which I call delta sciences – helps me teach. It’s about how we design the frameworks through which we shape the future together. And that, in itself, is innovating.”
So for you, innovation is a social, interactive process?
“Yes – but many managers don’t see it that way. Instead of talking to the people actually doing the work, they grab a book or hire a consultant and try to implement a top-down solution. That happens all the time, everywhere, even here at TU Delft when it comes to social safety. The question is how do we design a way of working together that creates a socially safe university? I’d say not through consultants because unsafe situations often arise during the innovation process itself. Someone suggests something that clashes with what another person believes – maybe someone who’s been in the field for 20 years. If you shut that person up, they’ll think, ‘Not doing that again.’ But maybe 10 years later, they turn out to have been absolutely right. And that’s exactly what innovative organisations need: a safe space for people to speak up, so you get the lift effect.”
What is the lift effect?
“Think about people in a lift – they don’t talk to each other. But if the lift gets stuck between floors, suddenly they have a shared problem, and then everyone’s ideas, doubts, and intentions start to matter. They start talking. And right now, society is basically that lift – stuck between two floors. We need to move forward together. And that means getting out of your silo. Let go of disciplinary pride for a moment and start jointly thinking about how we fix things like the childcare benefits scandal, the nitrogen crisis, or the Groningen earthquake mess.”
So how do we innovate our way out of those problems?
“We can’t predict the future, but we can move towards it. We can take steps forward, and keep checking ourselves – are we still on the right track? Filling the North Sea with wind turbines and covering every field with solar panels is not going to cut it either. We need to realise that the relationship between society, politics, and public agencies is broken. It needs redesigning. Right now, agencies are being given incredibly detailed mandates, subject to lots of laws and rules, and they’re like: we literally can’t do it like this. I’d love to help think through how we can fix those relationships.”
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