Who are you learning with to get more innovative? And what are you bringing together to spark business-saving change in the era of transformation?

If you still think innovation looks like a new chip and a middle-aged CEO in a leather jacket, you won’t want to hear about what it really is… because it’s about the untidy practices of creativity. But in my first commission for Pier Journal out this week, I meet someone who embodies what the future of effective ideation and business development really looks like. And I managed to not use the word ideation once.

The Woodstock of AI.?

Do you need a little swig of water to discretely flush the back of your throat there?

It’s the description of this week’s Nvidia GPU Tech Conference in San Jose, California, from many reports. It’s the sort of biz-journo corporate shorthand that should make you gag just a bit if you still have a finger-hold on reality but that if you were writing yourself you would absolutely reach for in desperation for any creative colour at all in your copy. Because this is a conference launching a new chip.

A chip that might turbo-charge the processing possibilities of AIs. Let all the bells in every parish ring.?

The B200 or Blackwell is the company’s first multi-die GPU, rumoured to be made up of >checks notes< TWO HUNDRED AND EIGHT BILLION TRANSISTORS and I can only imagine how awkward Google and Microsoft and Amazon and the other mega corps feel after forking out multiple billions each on its predecessor last year. That one, the H100 or Hopper is in the guts of the biggest game-changing AI engines we already think we know and have been surrendering our illustration careers to. This new one is supposed to be maybe two and a half times faster.

Is this what you think innovation is? More of the same, only smaller and faster and even more AI-ier?

It seems to be making the techbros very excitable and so the markets around Nvidia and anyone seen to be mates with them this week. I don’t know if CEO Jensen Huang wears a leather biker jacket just anywhere.

But if innovation is meant to be something with at least hair-thin last threads of connection to a Tomorrow’s World progressive future for all of us then maybe sixty billion quid to roll-out clean energy transmission sounds more like it.

The National Grid’s Electricity System Operator this week announced a ￡58bn investment to supposedly fast-track its net zero capabilities, even if regulations of scrutiny and planning are going to make the “fast-track” bit sound less switched on than the old fashioned press release wants it to sound. That this very body is also going to be brought back into public ownership to create a Future System Operator sounds very actually futury and in the public interest on top of that.

But, y’know. What can you and I learn from that? If what we want to do is get on the front foot about change and transformation in what we’re doing?

You might not like where I’m taking this. Because a clear answer to that will have you put down your phone and close your laptop for a bit.

..No, not until you’ve finished reading this. Finish reading this THEN… oh, you’ll see what I mean.

Get it together and mix it up.

Should we compare lanyards for how many events we’ve each been to with the word ‘innovation’ in the description? And can you describe some innovation you’ve actually seen?

I can, after years with VentureFest South, but what we see even there is the ready-for-Dragon’s Den pitch concepts and start-up testimonies of inspired individuals and their teams. If what you want to do is encourage more of this sort of thing generally, what does that look like?

There is an obvious way to look at it that doesn’t seem to quite get said in business events. Because innovation is just a more industrial-sounding way to say creativity. But lordy, don’t open that can of worms, no one reporting to line managers will know how to report what that freaking means.

Yet a key working practice of creativity will definitely help you innovate – juxtaposition. Rubbing things together. It makes energy. Can start fires. And if you don’t like friction, simply sitting very different things next to each other can spark whole new trains of thought.

This week, my first article for the wonderful Pier Journal comes out as issue #07 is launched tomorrow. A high quality, scene-fanning monthly, distributed to the coffee houses and start ups of my home towns across Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole, it showcases creatives and entrepreneurs doing new things in our communities, taking a few joyful risks.?

And this month, inspiring founder and art director Sammy Murphy sent me along to meet Penelope Norman at the AUB Innovation Studio .

Penny runs the MA in Fashion Technology at the arts university, and you can find out what we chatted about in the article itself. But she’s been seconded to help run a facility that exists to bring all sorts of disparate things together.

She thinks like an artist. Following a calling into the richly conceptual world of fashion showed her the world – and, in time, the state of it. And just how her industry was contributing to the state of it. This has fired a sense of sustainable innovation in her that is feeding into new generations of fashion graduates who are already beginning to change worlds.

The point to note here is the principle I’m levering so much of my own work with – thinking like an artist, to change the world.?

Penny’s creative confidence has her leaping into spaces and technologies and partnerships to try new ideas and see what happens. Her context now only balloons that principle and its possibilities – because the innovation studio she gets to play with sits in an art college.

AUB is the very place I started my own creative journey thirty five years ago. Art college is where you go to question things, try things, muck about safely, find your voice, turn hesitant marks into confident ones and resist the little boxes of business as usual. At least where modern university chancellors still hold invested space for you to. There you learn that creativity is just a bunch of practices. Processes. It might create magic to change the stories we think we’re in, but it’s actually just a bunch of behaviours led by a curious attitude.

Now imagine sometimes putting industry professionals and businesses right next to the students to learn alongside them – in, I will stress further, AN ART COLLEGE. It changes the dynamic in the air of those classrooms, it leads to happy accidents of relationship. It puts together very different world experiences and resources just in the human imaginations being let loose together on the kit and the problems to solve.?

And now imagine this being led by a fashion designer – someone who lives in the space where the most fantastical creations meet the hardest realities of resources, waste and logistics.

I used to think fashion was the one area of the arts that didn’t matter much. Just one of the ways I was a bit knobby at twenty. It seemed to me back then that it served itself only. I’ve moved slowly over the years to understand how much its playful absurdities can enliven our lives, how clothes stand us up in our visions and hopes of who we want to be and how the industry itself has the potential as the one of the least quick to change and most extravagant with bad planetary impacts to lead manufacturing and cultural transformation, even if it is waking up late.

That sounds like innovation inspired to happen in my brain at the mere thought of it, even before I’ve been left alone in the digital loom room.

Leaders can learn vital things from spending time with someone like Penny. The creative practices she’s spent a lifetime inhabiting and building, to bring to bear on industry-level problems. The practical experience of how to crack open new ideas and get at their reality-changing juices.

If you want your business to really transform its fortunes, it’s time you started juxtaposing all your usual experience with that of creatives.?

But be careful what you wish for, they will likely change what you think innovation even is. What it is asking you to do, and who it is wanting you to learn with.

Discover the AUB Innovation Studio right here >

Discover Pier Journal at pierjournal.co.uk >