Emergent Innovation: sustainable innovation as learning from the future as it emerges. On uncertainty and creating opportunities by exploring potentials and adjacent possibles

Most approaches in innovation are extrapolating past experiences into the future or they use "wild" out-of-the-box-thinking methods for generating new knowledge or perspectives. However, how can we create something radically new and at the same time something that has been “waited for”, although nobody has explicitly known or seen it; i.e., something that—despite its perhaps radical newness—appears just in the right time at the right place (“kairos”) and organically fits in the existing environment (be it a market, an organization, a culture, or society). The challenge is to create something that is both radically new and fits into existing patterns of perception and thought. It is a kind of "innovation from within", an innovation that—despite its novelty— respects what is already there and makes use of its potentials for creating something new in a sustainable and thriving manner. We refer to this alternative approach to innovation as Emergent Innovation. Both its theoretical foundations and a concrete well-proven innovation process will be introduced.