Total Innovation Podcast

In this episode, Ola Vasvik discusses the future of intellectual property, the impact of AI on patenting, and how deep tech companies can navigate the complex world of innovation and protection. Discover how Lightbringer is revolutionizing IP management and why every company should have a clear IP strategy.

Over the past 63 years, HACT has helped to shape social housing in the UK. Shelter, home adaptations, care and repair, floating support, BME housing, rural housing, Housing Plus, floating support – all have originated out of our work. More recently, we’ve created the sector’s social value framework, brokered new partnerships with the NHS, supported the best in community investment, created data standards and promoted digital innovation. And now we are piloting the first ever carbon credit for retrofitting housing. And the next big thing?Well that’s up to you. Together we can harness the passion, expertise and creativity of those who work in housing. We can meet the challenges of climate change, support our communities through the cost of living crisis, and create the communities and places where we can all thrive.

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.