When working as a business designer and trying to help companies innovate for the future, the main challenge I find, is often not one of designing the new future business area or product, but rather one of creating strong ownership and cross organizational storytelling about this future, that allows management to implement. I frequently have the pleasure of teaching MBAs in innovation – and the opportunity of testing first hand how storytelling can enhance operational will to implementation. One of my key entry points to this storytelling is the idea of mega trends: How future business design and innovation must be based on long term trends, rather than short business cycles.
And when it comes to mega trends, one of the strongest with huge business impacts on all – but also one of the hardest to really understand businesswise – is the fall out with nature: The global environmental crisis.
So whenever I come across new ways of telling the sustainbility story and the opportunities for innovation rising from the environmental mega trend, I bring it on board. And recently I have been reading up on older economic theories on long term trends, including the old Russian economist Kondratieff’s wave theory. This theory is hugely debated, but as another of my favorite models, Maslow’s hierachy of needs, Kondratieff’s wave model has an intuitive storytelling quality that far outpaces it’s lack of consensus and evidential proof in the world of economics.
Australian outfit “The Natural Edge Project” has caught on to this, and uses Kondratieff to tell the story about a 6th innovation wave: The green wave, that some how strikes the managers and CEOs that I work with as intuitive:
Lars Lundbye is a futurist and innovation evangelist with over 20 years of experience working with international companies and municipalities on sustainable strategy and radical innovation within cleantech, architecture, infrastructure and urban development. Lately Lars has been focused on global water issues as Executive Strategist for Grundfos and development of water sensitive and sustainable villages, on new sustainable architecture and for 3XN, and urban planning, and on radical redesign of public services in municipalities for Lejre Kommune among other major clients.
Lars is renowned for his ability to energise and motivate change and organisations, and his out-of-the-box thinking, that has inspired global businesses as well as numerous social services and innovative startups. With solid academic research behind him, miles and miles of walking the talk in live businesses, and decades of active practice in creative arts and mental development, Lars excels in crossing borders between deep research, hard business, the arts, and mental training; bringing unseen synergies and unique insights to clients’ projects.
Lars has founded and chaired several successful companies, and sits on several boards. Both a practitioner and an academic researcher on innovation, Lars is Lead Faculty on innovation at CBS-Executive (Copenhagen Business School), and is a popular keynote speaker on sustainable innovation, co-creation and integral leadership. He holds an executive MBA from SIMI, a cand. phil. in Literature, and as a former dean of the Danish School of Television and co-founder of the Workz agency with the film company Zentropa, Lars has extensive experience working with storytelling and communicating purpose driven business strategies.
Lars lives to create and enable revolutionary projects that empower people to be creative and innovative in creating a more sustainable, equitable and beautiful world. He is a passionate evangelist for holistic and integral thinking, and is a founding partner of Transition World in collaboration with The Club of Budapest and HeartMind Academy, training global top executives in new sustainable paradigms of development and leadership.
