Connecting dots combines this week ten most read articles into a single story.

As political, economic and social experts further emphasize the emergency of defining new solutions and models combining pragmatic expertise and a wider variety of knowledges, the global threats and constraints rising from technology and environment require to develop intelligent frameworks to drive innovation with more sense. People-centricity emerges in businesses to sharpen approaches to market for which new generations and technologies need to find the secured freedom to express their creativity. To let personal stories take control of developments, diversity should be envisaged as a mind opener and key organizational driver so it can deliver its human-centric creativity potential to support a smarter innovation.

Society driving change

Experts and analysts demonstrate a political need for change by linking economic threats to stagnant approaches to public policies which would benefit from bringing further operational expertise in order to maximize their pragmatism.

Nouriel Roubini from Project Syndicate has our opening thought: “So the global economy is flying on a single engine, the pilots must navigate menacing storm clouds, and fights are breaking out among the passengers. If only there were emergency crews on the ground.” Any volunteer? Actually, many. Joel Elkaim from Deloitte argues that we should “retrieve public policies evaluation from the closed administrative orthodoxy under which we are currently reviewing them, in order to include elected leaders, operational experts and universities”.

Read more: Europe in the mirror, Emerging markets from local to global, WAI November 2014

Society also expresses needs for further privacy protection for all, demanding an intelligent legal framework to sustain freedom on the Internet. This secured creativity could enable more solutions to arise so as to develop new solutions to protect the environment, as the political global community gathers up in Paris COP21 to commit on solutions that secure a sustainable future for all.

By explaining the opportunities and dangers identified in the legal and environment frameworks of innovation, experts and analysts define requirements that need to be taken into account for new developments:

1. Privacy protection should be a right for all and not restricted to happy fews
2. There are solutions to intelligently define rights and ownership in the online world
3. Protecting citizens should not lead to threatening their freedom
4. Countries commitments to protect the environment should be followed up by pragmatic propositions
5. Public-private partnerships could contribute to a wider impact
6. Sustainability is identified as a profitable business area

Read more: The luxury of freedom and green lights of hope, WAI November 2015

Individuals understand the centrality of their play, and are eager to take ownership to change the world. To better share critical information and knowledge leading to new sustainable ideas, our sense of responsibility comes out as our individual and common strength to direct discussions towards good purposes.

The Internet has thrown us in an virtual environment of virtual freedom, opinion variety and sometimes conflicts. Information and data that can be used either for good or bad purposes. It leaves us with the responsibility of judgement, which is a great, if not the most important one. How do we, as one global community interacting on one global platform, draw the line between good and bad, that is sharing freely and protection our freedom of privacy?

Read more: Privacy, sharing 2.0 and synergies that save more than money, October 2014

Consequently, social requirements are now identified as inseparable from economic developments. Experts vividly outline the centrality of society to develop new ideas and policies, exhorting professionals to better include human needs and objectives into projects such as new approaches to manage cities.

William Sand from Strategy and Business provides an essential thought on cities: “But no matter the indicators we’ve tracked or the elements we’ve added to the mix, one thing has remained absolutely clear since the study’s inaugural year: No single overriding strength can assure lasting growth, or shelter a city from reversals, if social and economic conditions are out of sync. “

Read more: The disrupted society and the last mile, November 2014

People-centric businesses

Business experts jointly outline the need to focus developments around sense and human needs, shifting away from complex processes and organizations. This new mindset is supported by a need to further think projects, potentially using collaborative tools to enhance creativity and keep it closer to social needs.

Outlining the critical social, technological and economic changes affecting innovation ecosystem, business experts and professional communities bring up necessary mindsets and tools for organizations to build the technical and human skills they need to generate more value. Because business complexity is increasing with the multiplicity of challenges and solutions fostered by hyper-connected customers, business experts and professional communities demand that organization invest and spend more time on building sense rather than complex processes.

Read more: Business experts seeking intelligent innovation, November 2015

New generations joining organizations enable to hope for a change towards human centric innovation, provided that they find the necessary tools and flexibility to freely develop their creativity in shaping smart solutions for global issues.

While connectedness and sense of engagement is highlighted by business experts, society explains how we intend to develop new learning methodologies to empower younger generations. As a whole, the arrival of a technology savvy and information rich generation on labor and consumption markets seems to be an opportunity to develop new models, new approaches and new hopes to challenge world problems.

Read more: Millennials, the game changing generation, August 2015

At the same time, advanced technology developments demand that critical questions and risk assessment for human impact are driven thoroughly, not only to better drive next choices but also to refine the exact opportunities companies should target.

Developments are occurring at all levels of AI value-chains, showing an on-going investment and research phase alongside already advanced initiatives and trials. This way, benefits are clearly outlined under productivity terms while risks keep being registered as human-threatening. Technological advances allow experts to foresee new market opportunities, including those which do not exist yet and may add further unidentified risks to humanity. In such a polarized conversation, AI appears as a fascinating science about to disrupt our daily lives in the near future without the certainty it will improve them in the long term but with the evidence that many will try to make money out of it.

Read more: The human questions behind AI business models, September 2015

Diversity as a creativity fertilizer

In order to impact choices and discussions, experts stress the need to let personalities become the core engine of technological developments. This way, personal and human stories are placed at the heart of innovation projects and deployments.

But haven’t we said that startups were personal stories? What if ecosystems could work with their own personalities as well? As Jason Fell writes for Entrepreneur, “Today, Berlin’s 3.5 million residents are creating a bright, new history for their city — and business is often at the heart of it. “Because Berlin was cut off during the decades of the Cold War, it is a capital again, but not with the usual infrastructure around it,” explains Nicole Simon, a startup mentor and head of publisher sales and blogger relations at Berlin-based blogfoster.com. “The city itself is a startup.”

Read more: Startup, people and ecosystems, success and reality, WAI August 2015

Innovation experts highly value strategies where people take a central role. People-centricity enables to lower barriers to innovation, defining new concepts and cultures that consider social impact as a driving strength.

Urging us to consider a constructive future, innovation analysts and experts seek to tackle complex issues by multiplying ideas and models which put human at the heart of their strategies. In order to remove barriers to innovation, organizations should align their objectives to apply new concepts beyond technologies and drive their culture towards a growing social future.

Read more: Daily Pick: 12 ideas to challenge innovation, WAI November 2015

As a way to let personalities take control of technological stories, diversity represents our best human creative engine and should not only be encouraged in companies and businesses, but also driven so as to let individual and team diversity express its full potential for a creative and human centric innovation.

Companies and organizations tend to focus on diversity as an indicator of gender and ethnic integration, rolling-out a marketing and communication speech to prove they comply with a justified customer requirement to encourage diversity. Although critical to participate in shaping a diverse  workforce, this transformation should be followed-up by enabling diversity to generate the creativity innovation depends on to answer human centric needs.

Read more: Diversity as a success story, November 2015

In order to help innovation leaders and practitioners achieve these objectives, weareinnovation.org has published “Diversity as a success story“, a first report as part of its “Beautiful Diversity” initiative, aiming at enabling individuals to become diversity champions. Based on analyses and articles shared and developed in our global think l@b, this report highlights key thoughts and messages initially shared by business experts, innovation experts and leaders who see diversity as a key component of a sustainable and smart innovation. “Diversity as a success story” enables innovation practitioners, leaders and learners to understand the critical value of inner and outer diversity as a way to learn, share, develop and celebrate differences, jointly shaping a virtuous circle where our common visions of tomorrow improve continuously.