Category Archives: Innovation

Innovation or Not – Chemical-Free Farming with Autonomous Robots

Greenfield Robotics and the Human-Centered Reboot of Agriculture

LAST UPDATED: October 20, 2025 at 9:35PM
Innovation or Not - Chemical-Free Farming with Autonomous Robots

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

The operating system of modern agriculture is failing. We’ve optimized for yield at the cost of health—human health, soil health, and planetary health. The relentless pursuit of chemical solutions has led to an inevitable biological counter-strike: herbicide-resistant superweeds and a spiraling input cost crisis. We’ve hit the wall of chemical dependency, and the system is demanding a reboot.

This is where the story of Greenfield Robotics — a quiet, powerful disruption born out of a personal tragedy and a regenerative ethos—begins to rewrite the agricultural playbook. Founded by third-generation farmer Clint Brauer, their mission isn’t just to sell a better tool; it’s to eliminate chemicals from our food supply entirely. This is the essence of true, human-centered innovation: identifying a catastrophic systemic failure and providing an elegantly simple, autonomous solution.

The Geometry of Disruption: From Spray to Scalpel

For decades, weed control has been a brute-force exercise. Farmers apply massive spray rigs, blanketing fields with chemicals to kill the unwanted. This approach is inefficient, environmentally harmful, and, critically, losing the biological war.

Greenfield Robotics flips this model from a chemical mass application to a mechanical, autonomous precision action. Their fleet of small, AI-powered robots—the “Weedbots” or BOTONY fleet—are less like tractors and more like sophisticated surgical instruments. They are autonomous, modular, and relentless.

Imagine a swarm of yellow, battery-powered devices, roughly two feet wide, moving through vast crop rows 18 hours a day, day or night. This isn’t mere automation; it’s coordinated, intelligent fleet management. Using proprietary AI-powered machine vision, the bots navigate with centimeter accuracy, identifying the crop from the weed. Their primary weapon is not a toxic spray, but a spinning blade that mechanically scalps the ground, severing the weed right at the root, ensuring chemical-free eradication.

This seemingly simple mechanical action represents a quantum leap in agricultural efficiency. By replacing chemical inputs with a service-based autonomous fleet, Greenfield solves three concurrent crises:

Biological Resistance: Superweeds cannot develop resistance to being physically cut down.
Environmental Impact: Zero herbicide use means zero chemical runoff, protecting water systems and beneficial insects.
Operational Efficiency: The fleet runs continuously and autonomously (up to 1.6 meters per second), drastically increasing the speed of action during critical growth windows and reducing the reliance on increasingly scarce farm labor.

The initial success is staggering. Working across broadacre crops like soybeans, cotton, and sweet corn, farmers are reporting higher yields and lower costs comparable to, or even better than, traditional chemical methods. The economic pitch is the first step, but the deeper change is the regenerative opportunity it unlocks.

The Human-Centered Harvest: Regenerative Agriculture at Scale

As an innovation leader, I look for technologies that don’t just optimize a process, but fundamentally elevate the human condition around that process. Greenfield Robotics is a powerful example of this.

The human-centered core of this innovation is twofold: the farmer and the consumer.

For the farmer, this technology is an act of empowerment. It removes the existential dread of mounting input costs and the stress of battling resistant weeds with diminishing returns. More poignantly, it addresses the long-term health concerns associated with chemical exposure—a mission deeply personal to Brauer, whose father’s Parkinson’s diagnosis fueled the company’s genesis. This is a profound shift: A technology designed to protect the very people who feed the world.

Furthermore, the modular chassis of the Weedbot is the foundation for an entirely new Agri-Ecosystem Platform. The robot is not limited to cutting weeds. It can be equipped to:

Plant cover crops in-season.
Apply targeted nutrients, like sea kelp, with surgical precision.
Act as a mobile sensor platform, collecting data on crop nutrient deficiencies to guide farmer decision-making.

This capability transforms the farmer’s role from a chemical applicator to a regenerative data strategist. The focus shifts from fighting nature to working with it, utilizing practices that build soil health—reduced tillage, increased biodiversity, and water retention. The human element moves up the value chain, focused on strategic field management powered by real-time autonomous data, while the robot handles the tireless, repeatable, physical labor.

For the consumer, the benefit is clear: chemical-free food at scale. The investment from supply chain giants like Chipotle, through their Cultivate Next venture fund, is a validation of this consumer-driven imperative. They understand that meeting the demand for cleaner, healthier food requires a fundamental, scalable change in production methods. Greenfield provides the industrialized backbone for regenerative, herbicide-free farming—moving this practice from niche to normalized.

Beyond the Bot: A Mindset for Tomorrow’s Food System

The challenge for Greenfield Robotics, and any truly disruptive innovator, is not the technology itself, but the organizational and cultural change required for mass adoption. We are talking about replacing a half-century-old paradigm of chemical dependency with an autonomous, mechanical model. This requires more than just selling a machine; it requires cultivating a Mindset Shift in the farming community.

The company’s initial “Robotics as a Service” model was a brilliant, human-centered strategy for adoption. By deploying, operating, and maintaining the fleets themselves for a per-acre fee, they lowered the financial and technical risk for farmers. This reduced-friction introduction proves that the best innovation is often wrapped in the most accessible business model. As the technology matures, transitioning toward a purchase/lease model shows the market confidence and maturity necessary for exponential growth.

Greenfield Robotics is more than a promising startup; it is a signal. It tells us that the future of food is autonomous, chemical-free, and profoundly human-centered. The next chapter of agriculture will be written not with larger, more powerful tractors and sprayers, but with smaller, smarter, and more numerous robots that quietly tend the soil, remove the toxins, and enable the regenerative practices necessary for a sustainable, profitable future.

This autonomous awakening is our chance to heal the rift between technology and nature, and in doing so, secure a healthier, cleaner food supply for the next generation. The future of farming is not just about growing food; it’s about growing change.

Disclaimer: This article speculates on the potential future applications of cutting-edge scientific research. While based on current scientific understanding, the practical realization of these concepts may vary in timeline and feasibility and are subject to ongoing research and development.

Image credit: Greenfield Robotics

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The Nuclear Fusion Accelerator

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How AI is Commercializing Limitless Power

The Nuclear Fusion Accelerator - How AI is Commercializing Limitless Power

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

For decades, nuclear fusion — the process that powers the sun and promises clean, virtually limitless energy from basic elements like hydrogen — has been the “holy grail” of power generation. The famous joke has always been that fusion is “30 years away.” However, as a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I can tell you that we are no longer waiting for a scientific miracle; we are waiting for an engineering and commercial breakthrough. And the key catalyst accelerating us across the finish line isn’t a new coil design or a stronger laser. It is Artificial Intelligence.

The journey to commercial fusion involves taming plasma — a superheated, unstable state of matter hotter than the sun’s core — for sustained periods. This process is characterized by extraordinary complexity, high costs, and a constant, data-intensive search for optimal control parameters. AI is fundamentally changing the innovation equation by replacing the slow, iterative process of trial-and-error experimentation with rapid, predictive optimization. Fusion experiments generate petabytes of diagnostic data; AI serves as the missing cognitive layer, enabling physicists and engineers to solve problems in days that once took months or even years of physical testing. AI isn’t just a tool; it is the accelerator that is finally making fusion a question of when, not if, and critically, at a commercially viable price point.

AI’s Core Impact: From Simulation to Scalability

AI accelerates commercialization by directly addressing fusion’s three biggest engineering hurdles, all of which directly affect capital expenditure and time-to-market:

1. Real-Time Plasma Control & Digital Twins: Fusion plasma is highly turbulent and prone to disruptive instabilities. Reinforcement Learning (RL) models and Digital Twins — virtual, real-time replicas of the reactor — learn optimal control strategies. This allows fusion machines to maintain plasma confinement and temperature far more stably, which is essential for continuous, reliable power production.
2. Accelerating Materials Discovery: The extreme environment within a fusion reactor destroys conventional materials. AI, particularly Machine Learning (ML), is used to screen vast material databases and even design novel, radiation-resistant alloys faster than traditional metallurgy, shrinking the time-to-discovery from years to weeks. This cuts R&D costs and delays significantly.
3. Design and Manufacturing Optimization: Designing the physical components is immensely complex. AI uses surrogate models — fast-running, ML-trained replicas of expensive high-fidelity physics codes — to quickly test thousands of design iterations. Furthermore, AI is being used to optimize manufacturing processes like the winding of complex high-temperature superconducting magnets, ensuring precision and reducing production costs.

“AI is the quantum leap in speed, turning the decades-long process of fusion R&D into a multi-year sprint towards commercial viability.” — Dr. Michl Binderbauer, the CEO of TAE Technologies

Case Study 1: The Predict-First Approach to Plasma Turbulence

The Challenge:

A major barrier to net-positive energy is plasma turbulence, the chaotic, swirling structures inside the reactor that cause heat to leak out, dramatically reducing efficiency. Traditionally, understanding this turbulence required running extremely time-intensive, high-fidelity computer codes for weeks on supercomputers to simulate one set of conditions.

The AI Solution:

Researchers at institutions like MIT and others have successfully utilized machine learning to build surrogate models. These models are trained on the output of the complex, weeks-long simulations. Once trained, the surrogate can predict the performance and turbulence levels of a given plasma configuration in milliseconds. This “predict-first” approach allows engineers to explore thousands of potential operating scenarios and refine the reactor’s control parameters efficiently, a process that would have been physically impossible just a few years ago.

The Commercial Impact:

This application of AI dramatically reduces the design cycle time. By rapidly optimizing plasma behavior through simulation, engineers can confirm promising configurations before they ever build a new physical machine, translating directly into lower capital costs, reduced reliance on expensive physical prototypes, and a faster path to commercial-scale deployment.

Case Study 2: Real-Time Stabilization in Commercial Reactor Prototypes

The Challenge:

Modern magnetic confinement fusion devices require precise, continuous adjustment of complex magnetic fields to hold the volatile plasma in place. Slight shifts can lead to a plasma disruption — a sudden, catastrophic event that can damage reactor walls and halt operations. Traditional feedback loops are often too slow and rely on simple, linear control rules.

The AI Solution:

Private companies and large public projects (like ITER) are deploying Reinforcement Learning controllers. These AI systems are given a reward function (e.g., maintaining maximum plasma temperature and density) and train themselves across millions of virtual experiments to operate the magnetic ‘knobs’ (actuators) in the most optimal, non-intuitive way. The result is an AI controller that can detect an instability milliseconds before a human or conventional system can, and execute complex corrective maneuvers in real-time to mitigate or avoid disruptions entirely.

The Commercial Impact:

This shift from reactive to proactive control is critical for commercial viability. A commercial fusion plant needs to operate continuously and reliably to make its levelized cost of electricity competitive. By using AI to prevent costly equipment damage and extend plasma burn duration, the technology becomes more reliable, safer, and ultimately more financially attractive as a baseload power source.

The New Fusion Landscape: Companies to Watch

The private sector, recognizing the accelerating potential of AI, is now dominating the race, backed by billions in private capital. Companies like Commonwealth Fusion Systems (CFS), a spin-out from MIT, are leveraging AI-optimized high-temperature superconducting magnets to shrink the tokamak design to a commercially viable size. Helion Energy, which famously signed the first power purchase agreement with Microsoft, uses machine learning to control their pulsed Magneto-Inertial Fusion systems with unprecedented precision to achieve high plasma temperatures. TAE Technologies applies advanced computing to its field-reversed configuration approach, optimizing its non-radioactive fuel cycle. Other startups like Zap Energy and Tokamak Energy are also deeply integrating AI into their core control and design strategies. The partnership between these agile startups and large compute providers (like AWS and Google) highlights that fusion is now an information problem as much as a physics one.

The Human-Centered Future of Energy

AI is not just optimizing the physics; it is optimizing the human innovation cycle. By automating the data-heavy, iterative work, AI frees up the world’s best physicists and engineers to focus on the truly novel, high-risk breakthroughs that only human intuition can provide. When fusion is commercialized — a time frame that has shrunk from decades to perhaps the next five to ten years — it will not just be a clean energy source; it will be a human-centered energy source. It promises energy independence, grid resiliency, and the ability to meet the soaring demands of a globally connected, AI-driven digital economy without contributing to climate change. The fusion story is rapidly becoming the ultimate story of human innovation, powered by intelligence, both artificial and natural.

Image credit: Google Gemini

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The Ongoing Innovation War Between Hackers and Cybersecurity Firms

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Last Updated: October 15, 2025 at 8:36PM PDT

The Ongoing Innovation War Between Hackers and Cybersecurity Firms

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the world of change and innovation, we often celebrate disruptive breakthroughs — the new product, the elegant service, the streamlined process. But there is a parallel, constant, and far more existential conflict that drives more immediate innovation than any market force: the Innovation War between cyber defenders and adversaries. This conflict isn’t just a cat-and-mouse game; it is a Vicious Cycle of Creative Destruction where every defensive breakthrough creates a target for a new offensive tactic, and every successful hack mandates a fundamental reinvention of the defense at firms like F5 and CrowdStrike. As a human-centered change leader, I find this battleground crucial because its friction dictates the speed of digital progress and, more importantly, the erosion or restoration of citizen and customer trust.

We’ve moved past the era of simple financial hacks. Today’s sophisticated adversaries — nation-states, organized crime syndicates, and activist groups — target the supply chain of trust itself. Their strategies are now turbocharged by Generative AI, allowing for the automated creation of zero-day exploits and hyper-realistic phishing campaigns, fundamentally accelerating the attack lifecycle. This forces cybersecurity firms to innovate in response, focusing on achieving Active Cyber Resilience — the ability to not only withstand attacks but to learn, adapt, and operate continuously even while under fire. The human cost of failure — loss of privacy, psychological distress from disruption, and decreased public faith in institutions — is the real metric of this war.

The Three Phases of Cyber Innovation

The defensive innovation cycle, driven by adversary pressure, can be broken down into three phases:

1. The Breach as Discovery (The Hack): An adversary finds a zero-day vulnerability or exploits a systemic weakness. The hack itself is the ultimate proof-of-concept, revealing a blind spot that internal R&D teams failed to predict. This painful discovery is the genesis of new innovation.
2. The Race to Resilience (The Fix): Cybersecurity firms immediately dedicate immense resources — often leveraging AI and automation for rapid detection and response — to patch the vulnerability, not just technically, but systematically. This results in the rapid development of new threat intelligence, monitoring tools, and architectural changes.
3. The Shift in Paradigm (The Reinvention): Over time, repeated attacks exploiting similar vectors force a foundational change in design philosophy. The innovation becomes less about the patch and more about a new, more secure default state. We transition from building walls to implementing Zero Trust principles, treating every user and connection as potentially hostile.

“In cybersecurity, your adversaries are your involuntary R&D partners. They expose your weakness, forcing you to innovate beyond your comfort zone and into your next generation of defense.” — Frank Hersey

Case Study 1: F5 Networks and the Supply Chain of Trust

The Attack:

F5 Networks, whose BIG-IP products are central to application delivery and security for governments and major corporations globally, was breached by a suspected nation-state actor. The attackers reportedly stole proprietary BIG-IP source code and details on undisclosed security vulnerabilities that F5 was internally tracking.

The Innovation Mandate:

This was an attack on the supply chain of security itself. The theft provides adversaries with a blueprint for crafting highly tailored, future exploits that target F5’s massive client base. The innovation challenge for F5 and the entire industry shifts from simply patching products to fundamentally rethinking their Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). This demands a massive leap in threat intelligence integration, secure coding practices, and isolating development environments from corporate networks to prevent future compromise of the IP that protects the world.

The Broader Impact:

The F5 breach compels every organization to adopt an unprecedented level of vendor risk management. It drives innovation in how infrastructure is secured, shifting the paradigm from trusting the vendor’s product to verifying the vendor’s integrity and securing the entire delivery pipeline.

Case Study 2: Airport Public Address (PA) System Hacks

The Attack:

Hackers gained unauthorized access to the Public Address (PA) systems and Flight Information Display Screens (FIDS) at various airports (e.g., in Canada and the US). They used these systems to broadcast political and disruptive messages, causing passenger confusion, flight delays, and the immediate deployment of emergency protocols.

The Innovation Mandate:

These attacks were not financially motivated, but aimed at disruption and psychological impact — exploiting the human fear factor. The vulnerability often lay in a seemingly innocuous area: a cloud-based, third-party software provider for the PA system. The innovation mandate here is a change in architectural design philosophy. Security teams must discard the concept of “low-value” systems. They must implement micro-segmentation to isolate all operational technology (OT) and critical public-facing systems from the corporate network. Furthermore, it forces an innovation in physical-digital security convergence, requiring security protocols to manage and authenticate the content being pushed to public-facing devices, treating text-to-speech APIs with the same scrutiny as a financial transaction. The priority shifts to minimizing public and maximizing continuity.

The Broader Impact:

The PA system hack highlights the critical need for digital humility
. Every connected device, from the smart thermostat to the public announcement system, is an attack vector. The innovation is moving security from the data center floor to the terminal wall, reinforcing that the human-centered goal is continuity and maintaining public trust.

Conclusion: The Innovation Imperative

The war between hackers and cybersecurity firms is relentless, but it is ultimately a net positive for innovation, albeit a brutally expensive and high-stakes one. Each successful attack provides the industry with a blueprint for a more resilient, better-designed future.

For organizational leaders, the imperative is clear: stop viewing cybersecurity as a cost center and start treating it as the foundational innovation platform. Your investment in security dictates your speed and trust in the market. Adopt the mindset of Continuous Improvement and Adaptation. Leaders must mandate a Zero Trust roadmap and treat security talent as mission-critical R&D personnel. The speed and quality of your future products will depend not just on your R&D teams, but on how quickly your security teams can learn from the enemy’s last move. In the digital economy, cyber resilience is the ultimate competitive differentiator.

Image credit: Unsplash

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Making Decisions in Uncertainty

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This 25-Year-Old Tool Actually Works

Making Decisions in Uncertainty

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

Just as we got used to VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous) futurists now claim “the world is BANI now.” BANI (brittle, anxious, nonlinear, incomprehensible) is much worse than VUCA and reflects “the fractured, unpredictable state of the modern world.”

Not to get too Gen X on the futurists who coined and are spreading this term but…shut up.

Is the world fractured and unpredictable? Yes.

Does it feel brittle? Are we more anxious than ever? Are things changing at exponential speed, requiring nonlinear responses? Does the world feel incomprehensible? Yes, to all.

Naming a problem is the first step in solving it. The second step is falling in love with the problem so that we become laser focused on solving it. BANI does the first but fails at the second. It wallows in the problem without proposing a path forward. And as the sign says, “Ain’t nobody got time for this.”

(Re)Introducing the Cynefin Framework

The Cynefin framework recognizes that leadership and problem-solving must be contextual to be effective. Using the Welsh word for “habitat,” the framework is a tool to understand and name the context of a situation and identify the approaches best suited for managing or solving the situation.

It’s grounded in the idea that every context – situation, challenge, problem, opportunity – exists somewhere on a spectrum between Ordered and Unordered. At the Ordered end of the spectrum, cause and affect are obvious and immediate and the path forward is based on objective, immutable facts. Unordered contexts, however, have no obvious or immediate relationship between cause and effect and moving forward requires people to recognize patterns as they emerge.

Both VUCA and BANI point out the obvious – we’re spending more time on the Unordered end of the spectrum than ever. Unlike the acronyms, Cynefin helps leaders decide and act.

Five Contexts, Five Ways Forward

The Cynefin framework identifies five contexts, each with its own best practices for making decisions and progress.

On the Ordered end of the spectrum:

Simple contexts are characterized by stability and obvious and undisputed right answers. Here, patterns repeat, and events are consistent. This is where leaders rely on best practices to inform decisions and delegation, and direct communication to move their teams forward.
Complicated contexts have many possible right answers and the relationship between cause and effect isn’t known but can be discovered. Here, leaders need to rely on diverse expertise and be particularly attuned to conflicting advice and novel ideas to avoid making decisions based on outdated experience.

On the Unordered end of the spectrum:

Complex contexts are filled with unknown unknowns, many competing ideas, and unpredictable cause and effects. The most effective leadership approach in this context is one that is deeply uncomfortable for most leaders but familiar to innovators – letting patterns emerge. Using small-scale experiments and high levels of collaboration, diversity, and dissent, leaders can accelerate pattern-recognition and place smart bets.
Chaos are contexts fraught with tension. There are no right answers or clear cause and effect. There are too many decisions to make and not enough time. Here, leaders often freeze or make big bold decisions. Neither is wise. Instead, leaders need to think like emergency responders and rapidly response to re-establish order where possible to bring the situation into a Complex state, rather than trying to solve everything at once.

The final context is Disorder. Here leaders argue, multiple perspectives fight for dominance, and the organization is divided into fractions. Resolution requires breaking the context down into smaller parts that fit one of the four previous contexts and addressing them accordingly.

The Only Way Out is Through

Our VUCA/BANI world isn’t going to get any simpler or easier. And fighting it, freezing, or fleeing isn’t going to solve anything. Organizations need leaders with the courage to move forward and the wisdom and flexibility to do so in a way that is contextually appropriate. Cynefin is their map.

Image credit: Pexels

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How Incumbents Can React to Disruption

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How Incumbents Can React to Disruption

GUEST POST from Geoffrey A. Moore

Think back a couple of years and imagine …

You are Jim Farley at Ford, with Tesla banging at the door. You are Bob Iger at Disney with Netflix pounding on the gates. You are Pat Gelsinger at Intel with Nvidia invading your turf. You are virtually every CEO in retail with Amazon Prime wreaking havoc on your customer base. So, what are you supposed to do now?

The answer I give in Zone to Win is that you have to activate the Transformation Zone. This is true, but it is a bit like saying, you have to climb a mountain. It begs the question, How?

There are five key questions executives facing potential disruption must ask:

1. When?

If you go too soon, your investors will lose patience with you and desert the ship. If you go too late, your customers will realize you’re never really going to get there, so they too, reluctantly, will depart. Basically, everybody gets that a transformation takes more than one year, and no one will give you three, so by default, when the window of opportunity to catch the next wave looks like it will close within the next two years, that’s when you want to pull the ripcord.

2. What does transformation really mean?

It means you are going to break your established financial performance covenants with your investors and drastically reduce your normal investment in your established product lines in order to throw your full weight behind launching yourself into the emerging fray. The biggest mistake executives can make at this point is to play down the severity of these actions. Believe me, they are going to show, if not this quarter, then soon, and when they do, if you have not prepared the way, your entire ecosystem of investors, partners, customers, and employees are going to feel betrayed.

3. What can you say to mitigate the consequences?

Simply put, tell the truth. The category is being disrupted. If we are to serve our customers, we need to transition our business to the new technology. This is our number one priority, we have clear milestones to measure our progress, and we plan to share this information in our earnings calls. In the meantime, we continue to support our core business and to work with our customers and partners to address their current needs as well as their future roadmaps.

4. What is the immediate goal?

The immediate goal is to neutralize the threat by getting “good enough, fast enough.” It is not to leapfrog the disruptor. It is not to break any new ground. Rather, it is simply to get included in the category as a fast follower, and by so doing to secure the continuing support of the customer base and partner ecosystem. The good news here is that customers and partners do not want to switch vendors if they can avoid it. If you show you are making decent progress against your stated milestones, most will give you the benefit of the doubt. Once you have gotten your next-generation offerings to a credible state, you can assess your opportunities to differentiate long-term—but not before.

5. In what ways do we act differently?

This is laid out in detail in the chapter on the Transformation Zone in Zone to Win. The main thing is that supporting the transformation effort is the number one priority for everyone in the enterprise every day until you have reached and passed the tipping point. Anyone who is resisting or retarding the effort needs to be counseled to change or asked to leave. That said, most people will still spend most of their time doing what they were doing before. It is just that if anyone on the transformation initiative asks anyone else for help, the person asked should do everything they can to provide that help ASAP. Executive staff meetings make the transformation initiative the number one item on the agenda for the duration of the initiative, the goal being at each session to assess current progress, remove any roadblocks, and do whatever possible to further accelerate the effort.

Conclusion

The net of all of the above is transformation is a bit like major surgery. There is a known playbook, and if you follow it, there is every reason to expect a successful outcome. But woe to anyone who gets distracted along the way or who gives up in discouragement halfway through. There is no halfway house with transformations—you’re either a caterpillar or a butterfly, there’s nothing salvageable in between.

That’s what I think. What do you think?

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How Compensation Reveals Culture

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Five Questions with Kate Dixon

How Compensation Reveals Culture

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

It’s time for your company’s All-Hands meeting. Your CEO stands on stage and announces ambitious innovation goals, talking passionately about the importance of long-term thinking and breakthrough results. Everyone nods enthusiastically, applauds politely, and returns to their desks to focus on hitting this quarter’s numbers. After all, that’s what their bonuses depend on.

Kate Dixon, compensation expert and founder of Dixon Consulting, has watched this contradiction play out across Fortune 500 companies, B Corps, and startups. Her insight cuts to the heart of why so many innovation initiatives fail: we’re asking people to think long-term while paying them to deliver short-term.

In our conversation, Kate revealed why most companies are inadvertently sabotaging their own innovation efforts through their compensation structures—and what the smartest organizations are doing differently.

Robyn Bolton: Kate, when I first heard you say, “compensation is the expression of a company’s culture,” it blew my mind. What do you mean by that?

Kate Dixon: If you want to understand what an organization values, look at how they pay their people: Who gets paid more? Who gets paid less? Who gets bigger bonuses? Who moves up in the organization and who doesn’t? Who gets long-term incentives?

The answers to these questions, and a million others, express the culture of the organization. How we reward people’s performance, either directly or indirectly, establishes and reinforces cultural norms. Compensation is usually the biggest, if not the biggest, expenses that a company has so they’re very thoughtful and deliberate about how it is used. Which is why it tells you what the company actually does value.

RB: What’s the biggest mistake companies make when trying to incentivize innovation?

KD: Let’s start by what companies are good at when it comes to compensations and incentives. They’re really good about base pay, because that’s the biggest part of pay for most people in an organization. Then they spend the next amount of time and effort trying to figure out the annual bonus structure. After that comes other benefits, like long term incentives, assuming they don’t fall by the wayside.

As you know, innovation can take a long time to payout, so long-term incentives are key to encouraging that kind of investment. Stock options and restricted shares are probably the most common long-term incentives but cash bonuses, phantom stock, and ESOP shares in employee-owned companies are also considered long term incentives.

Large companies are pretty good using some equity as an incentive, but they tie it t long term revenue goals, not innovation. As you often remind us, “innovation is a means to the end, which is growth,” so tying incentives to growth isn’t bad but I believe that we can do better. Tying incentives to the growth goals and how they’re achieved will go a long way towards driving innovation.

RB: I’ve worked in and with big companies and I’ve noticed that while they say, “innovation is everyone’s job,” the people who get long-term incentives are typically senior execs. What gives?

Long-term incentives are definitely underutilized, below the executive level, and maybe below the director level. Assuming that most companies’ innovation efforts aren’t moonshots that take decades to realize, it makes a ton of sense to use long-term incentives throughout the organization and its ecosystem. However, when this idea is proposed, people often pushback because “it’s too complex” for folks lower in the organization, “they wouldn’t understand.” or “they won’t appreciate it”. That stance is both arrogant and untrue. I’ve consistently seen that when you explain long-term incentives to people, they do get it, it does motivate them, and the company does see results.

RB: Are there any examples of organizations that are getting this right?

We’re seeing a lot more innovative and interesting risk-taking behaviors in companies that are not primarily focused on profit.

Our B Corp clients are doing some crazy, cool stuff. We have an employee-owned company that is a consulting firm, but they had an idea for a software product. They launched it and now it’s becoming a bigger and bigger part of their business.

Family-owned or public companies that have a single giganto shareholder are also hotbeds of long-term thinking and, therefore, innovation. They don’t have that same quarter to quarter pressure that drives a relentless focus on what’s happening right now and allows people to focus on the future.

What’s the most important thing leaders need to understand about compensation and innovation?

If you’re serious about innovation, you should be incentivizing people all over the organization. If you want innovation to be a more regular piece of the culture so you get better results, you’ve got to look at long term incentives. Yes, you should reward people for revenue and short-term goals. But you also need to consider what else is a precursor to our innovation. What else is makes the conditions for innovating better for people, and reward that, too.

Kate’s insight reveals the fundamental contradiction at the heart of most companies’ innovation struggles: you can’t build long-term value with short-term thinking, especially when your compensation system rewards only the latter.

What does your company’s approach to compensation say about its culture and values?

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The Future of Military Innovation is Analog, Digital, and Human-Centered

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The Hybrid Advantage

The Future of Military Innovation is Analog, Digital, and Human-Centered

GUEST POST from Art Inteligencia

In the high-stakes world of defense and security, the innovation conversation is often hijacked by the pursuit of the most complex, esoteric, and expensive technology — hypersonic weapons, next-generation stealth fighters, and pure AI command structures. But as a human-centered change and innovation thought leader, I argue that this obsession with technological complexity is a critical strategic mistake. The future of military innovation isn’t a matter of choosing between analog or digital; it’s about mastering Hybrid Resilience — the symbiotic deployment of low-cost, human-centric, and commercially available technologies that create disproportionate impact. The best solutions are often not the most advanced, but the ones that are simplest to deploy, easiest to maintain, and most effective at leveraging the human element at the edge of the conflict.

The true measure of innovation effectiveness is not its unit cost, but its cost-per-impact ratio. When simplicity meets massive scale, the result is a disruptive force that can overwhelm even the most sophisticated, closed-loop military industrial complexes. This shift is already defining modern conflict, forcing traditional defense giants to rethink how they invest and innovate.

The New Equation: Low-Cost Digital and The Power of Speed

The most devastating innovations often come with the smallest price tags, leveraging the widespread accessibility of digital tools and talent. The goal is to maximize chaos and damage while minimizing investment.

Operation Spiderweb: Asymmetric Genius Deep Behind Enemy Lines

The coordinated drone attacks known as “Operation Spiderweb” perfectly illustrate the principle of low-cost, high-impact hybrid warfare. This was not a cyberattack, but an ingenious physical and digital operation in which Ukrainian Security Services (SBU) successfully smuggled over 100 small, commercially available FPV (First-Person View) drones into Russia, hidden inside wooden structures on trucks. The drones were then launched deep inside Russian territory, far beyond the reach of conventional long-range weapons, striking strategic bomber aircraft at five different airbases, including one in Eastern Siberia — a distance of over 4,000 km from Ukraine. With a relatively small financial investment in commercial drone technology and a logistics chain that leveraged analog disguise and stealth, Ukraine inflicted an estimated sizable financial damage — potentially billions of dollars — on critical, irreplaceable Russian military assets. This was a triumph of human-centered strategic planning over centralized, predictable defense.

This principle of scale and rapid deployability is also seen in the physical domain. The threat posed by drone swarms that China can fit in a single shipping container is precisely that they are cheap, numerous, and rapidly deployable. This innovation isn’t about the individual drone’s complexity, but the simplicity of its collective deployment. The containerized system makes the deployment highly mobile and scalable, transforming a single cargo vessel or truck into an instant, overwhelming air force.

The Return of Analog: Simplicity for Survivability

While the digital world provides scale, the analog world provides resilience. True innovation anticipates technological failure, deliberately integrating low-tech, human-proof solutions for survivability.

Take, for example, the concept of drones connected with physical connection (optical fiber cables). In an era of intense electronic warfare and GPS denial, a drone linked by a physical fiber-optic cable is uncorruptible by jamming. The drone’s data link, command, and control remain secure, offering an unassailable digital tether in a highly contested electromagnetic environment. This is an elegant, human-centered solution that embraces an “old” technology (the cable) to solve a cutting-edge digital problem (signal jamming). Similarly, in drone defense, the most effective tool for neutralizing small, hostile drones is often not a multi-million-dollar missile system, but a net gun. These net guns in drone defense are a low-tech, high-effectiveness solution that causes zero collateral damage, is easily trainable, and is vastly cheaper than the target itself. They are the ultimate embodiment of human ingenuity solving a technical problem with strategic simplicity.

The Chevy ISV: Commercial Off-the-Shelf Agility

The Chevy ISV (Infantry Squad Vehicle) is a prime example of human-centered innovation prioritizing Commercial Off-the-Shelf (COTS) solutions. Instead of spending decades and billions designing a bespoke vehicle, the U.S. military adapted a proven, commercially available chassis (the Chevy Colorado ZR2) to meet the requirements for rapid, light infantry mobility. This approach is superior because COTS is faster to acquire, cheaper to maintain (parts are globally accessible), and inherently easier for a soldier to operate and troubleshoot. The ISV prioritizes the soldier’s speed, autonomy, and operational simplicity over hyper-specialized military complexity. It’s innovation through rapid procurement and smart adaptation.

The Human-Augmented Future: Decentralized Command

The most cutting-edge military innovation is the marriage of AI and decentralized human judgment. The future warfighter isn’t a passive recipient of intelligence; they are an AI-augmented decision-maker. For instance, programs inspired by DARPA’s vision for adaptive, decentralized command structures use AI to process the vast amounts of sensor data (the digital part) but distribute the processed intelligence to small, autonomous human teams (the analog part) who make rapid, contextual decisions without needing approval from a centralized HQ. This human-in-the-loop architecture values the ethical judgment, local context, and adaptability that only a human can provide, allowing for innovation and mission execution at the tactical edge.

The Innovation Ecosystem: Disruptors on the Front Line

The speed of defense innovation is now being set by agile, often venture-backed startups, not just traditional primes. Companies like Anduril are aggressively driving hardware/software integration and autonomous systems with a focus on COTS and rapid deployment. Palantir continues to innovate on the data side, making complex intelligence accessible and actionable for human commanders. In the specialized drone space, companies are constantly emerging with highly specialized, affordable solutions that utilize commercial components and open-source principles to achieve specialized military effects. These disruptors are forcing the entire defense industry to adopt a “fail-fast” mentality, shortening development cycles from decades to months by prioritizing iterative, human-centered feedback and scalable digital infrastructure.

Conclusion: The Strategy of Strategic Simplicity

The future of military innovation belongs to those who embrace strategic simplicity. It is an innovation landscape where a low-cost digital intrusion can be more damaging than a high-cost missile, where resilience is built with fiber-optic cable, and where the most effective vehicle is a clever adaptation of a commercial pickup truck. Leaders must shift their focus from what money can buy to what human ingenuity can create. By prioritizing Hybrid Resilience — the thoughtful integration of analog durability, digital scale, and, most importantly, human-centered design — we ensure that tomorrow’s forces are not only technologically advanced but also adaptable, sustainable, and capable of facing any challenge with ingenuity and strategic simplicity.

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2025

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Top 10 Human-Centered Change & Innovation Articles of September 2025 Drum roll please…

At the beginning of each month, we will profile the ten articles from the previous month that generated the most traffic to Human-Centered Change & Innovation. Did your favorite make the cut?

But enough delay, here are September’s ten most popular innovation posts:

McKinsey is Wrong That 80% Companies Fail to Generate AI ROI — by Robyn Bolton
Back to Basics for Leaders and Managers — by Robyn Bolton
Growth is Not the Answer — by Mike Shipulski
The Most Challenging Obstacles to Achieving Artificial General Intelligence — by Art Inteligencia
Charlie Kirk and Innovation — by Art Inteligencia
You Just Got Starbucked — by Braden Kelley
Metaphysics Philosophy — by Geoffrey Moore
Invention Through Co-Creation — by Janet Sernack
Sometimes Ancient Wisdom Needs to be Left Behind — by Greg Satell
The Crisis Innovation Trap — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia

BONUS – Here are five more strong articles published in August that continue to resonate with people:

This AI Creativity Trap is Gutting Your Growth — by Robyn Bolton
How Neuromorphic Computing Will Unlock Human-Centered Innovation — by Art Inteligencia
Why Context Engineering is the Next Frontier in AI — by Braden Kelley and Art Inteligencia
The Nordic Way of Leadership in Business — by Stefan Lindegaard
Three Strategies for Overcoming Change Resistance — by Greg Satell

If you’re not familiar with Human-Centered Change & Innovation, we publish 4-7 new articles every week built around innovation and transformation insights from our roster of contributing authors and ad hoc submissions from community members. Get the articles right in your Facebook, Twitter or Linkedin feeds too!

Have something to contribute?

Human-Centered Change & Innovation is open to contributions from any and all innovation and transformation professionals out there (practitioners, professors, researchers, consultants, authors, etc.) who have valuable human-centered change and innovation insights to share with everyone for the greater good. If you’d like to contribute, please contact me.

P.S. Here are our Top 40 Innovation Bloggers lists from the last four years:

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An Industrial Call-To-Arms for the Environment

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An Industrial Call-To-Arms for the Environment

GUEST POST from Mike Shipulski

What is your obligation to improve the health of our planet?

For the CEO – Look around. Look at Europe. Look at China’s plans. Look at the startups. I know you want to achieve your growth objectives, but if you don’t take seriously the race toward cleaner products and services, you’ll go out of business. You can see this as a problem or an opportunity. Bury your head or put on your track shoes and run! It’s your choice.

Look at the oceans. Look at the landfills. Look at the rise in global temperatures. Just look. This isn’t about ROI, this is about survival. Growth objectives aside, no one will buy things when they are struggling to survive in an uncertain future. Your same old dirty products won’t cut it anymore. So, what are you going to do?

For an example of a path forward, look to the companies in the oil business. Their recipe is clear. They’ve got to use their large but ever-diminishing profits to buy themselves into technologies and industries that will ultimately eat their core business. Though the timing is uncertain, it’s certain that improvements in cleaner technologies will demand they make the change.

Whatever you do, don’t wait. You don’t have much time. Cleaner technologies are getting better every day. It’s time to start.

For Marketing – Look at the upstarts. Look at the powerful companies in adjacent markets who will soon be your direct competitors. Look at your stodgy, unprofitable competitors who are now sufficiently desperate to try anything. Their next marketing push will be built on the bedrock of an improved planet. They’ll be almost as good as you in the traditional areas of productivity and quality and they’ll blow your doors off with their meaner and greener products. Customers will choose green over brown. And they’ll look for real improvements that make the planet smile. The time for green-washing is past. That trick is out of gas.

You need to help customers with new jobs to be done. They care about their environment. They care about their carbon footprint. They care about clean water. And they care about recycling and reuse. It’s real. They care. Now it’s up to you to help them make progress in these areas. It will be a tough road to convince your company that things need to change, but that’s why you’re in Marketing.

You’re already behind. It’s time to start. And it’s up to you to lead the charge.

For Manufacturing – Look at your Value Stream Maps (VSMs). Assign a carbon footprint to each link in the chain. And do the same with water consumption. Assess each process step for carbon and water and rank them worst to best. For the worst, run carbon kaizens and improve the carbon footprint. And run water kaizens for the thirstiest processes.

And look again at your VSMs, and look more broadly. Look back into the supply chain, rank for carbon and water and improve the ones that need the treatment. And teach your suppliers how to do it. And look forward into your distribution channels and improve or eliminate the worst actors. And then propose to Marketing that you teach your customers how to use VSMs to clean up their act. And challenge Engineering to change the design to eliminate the remaining bad actors.

You’ve made good progress with your value streams. Now it’s time to help others make the progress that must be made. As subject matter experts, it’s your time to shine. And, please, start now.

For Engineering – Look at your products. Look at how they’re used. Look at how they’re delivered. Look at how they’re made. Look at how they’re recycled. Sure, your products provide good functionality, but throughout their life cycle they also create carbon dioxide and consume water. And you’re the only ones that can design out the environmental impact.

Learn how to do a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). Learn which elements of the product create the largest problems. For all the parts that make up the product, sort them worst to best to prioritize the design work. It’s time for radical part count reduction. Try to design out half the parts. It’s possible. And the payoff is staggering. What’s the carbon footprint of a part that was designed out of the product?

Or, to make a more radical improvement, consider an Innovation Burst Event (IBE) to make a fundamental change in the way your products/services impact the environment. With this approach, your innovation work, by definition, will make the planet smile.

It’s time to be open-minded. Ask Manufacturing for the worst processes (including supply chain and distribution) and try to design them out. Design out the part, or change the material, or change the design to enable a friendlier process. Manufacturing can only improve a bad process, but you can design them out altogether. There’s power in that, but with power comes responsibility.

And it’s time for you to take responsibility.

For Everyone in Industry – Regardless of your company, your country or your political affiliation, we can all agree that all our lives get better as the health of our planet improves. And everyone can agree that cleaner air is better. And everyone can agree it’s the same for our water – cleaner is better. And that’s a whole lot of agreement.

As industry leaders, I challenge you to build on that common ground. As industry leaders, I challenge you to improve our planet one product at a time and one process at a time. And as industry leaders, I challenge you to help each other. There’s no competitive disadvantage when you help a company outside your industry. And there’s no shame in learning from companies outside your industry. And it’s good for the planet and profits. There’s nothing in the away. It’s time to start.

As an industry leader, if you want to make a difference in the health of our planet, drop a comment.

Image credit: Pixabay

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Three Steps from Stuck to Success

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Managing Uncertainty

Three Steps from Stuck to Success

GUEST POST from Robyn Bolton

When a project is stuck and your team is trying to manage uncertainty, what do you hear most often:

“We’re so afraid of making the wrong decision that we don’t make any decisions.”
“We don’t have time to explore a bunch of stuff. We need to make decisions and go.”
“The problem is so multi-faceted, and everything affects everything else that we don’t know where to start.”

I’ve heard all three this week, each spoken by teams leads who cared deeply about their projects and teams.

Differentiating between risk and uncertainty and accepting that uncertainty would never go away, just change focus helped relieve their overwhelm and self-doubt.

But without a way to resolve the fear, time-pressure, and complexity, the project would stay stuck with little change of progressing to success.

Turn Uncertainty Into an Asset

It’s a truism in the field of innovation that you must fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Falling in love with the problem ensures that you remain focused on creating value and agnostic about the solution.

While this sounds great and logically makes sense, most struggle to do it. As a result, it takes incredible strength and leadership to wrestle with the problem long enough to find a solution.

Uncertainty requires the same strength and leadership because the only way out of it is through it. And, research shows, the process of getting through it, turns it into an asset.

Three Steps to Turn Uncertainty Into an Asset

Research in the music and pharmaceutical industries reveals that teams that embraced uncertainty engaged in three specific practices:

Embrace It: Start by acknowledging the uncertainty and that things will change, go wrong, and maybe even fail. Then stay open to surprise and unpredictability, delving into the unknown “by being playful, explorative, and purposefully engaging in ventures with indeterminate outcome.”
Fix It: Especially when dealing with Unknowable Uncertainty, which occurs when more info supports several different meanings rather than pointing to one conclusion, teams that succeed make provisional decisions to “fix” an uncertain dimension so they can move forward while also documenting the rationale for the fix, setting a date to revisit it, and criteria for changing it.
Ignore It: It’s impossible to embrace every uncertainty at once and unwise to fix too many uncertainties at the same time. As a result, some uncertainties, you just need to ignore. Successful teams adopt “strategic ignorance” “not primarily for purposes of avoiding responsibility [but to] allow postponing decisions until better ideas emerge during the collaborative process.

This practice is iterative, often leading to new knowledge, re-examined fixes, and fresh uncertainties. It sounds overwhelming but the teams that are explicit and intentional about what they’re embracing, fixing, and ignoring are not only more likely to be successful, but they also tend to move faster.

Put It Into Practice

Let’s return to NatureComp, a pharmaceutical company developing natural treatments for heart disease.

Throughout the drug development process, they oscillated between addressing What, Who, How, and Where Uncertainties. They did that by changing whether they embraced, fixed, or ignored each type of uncertainty at a given point:

As you can see, they embraced only one type of uncertainty to ensure focus and rapid progress. To avoid the fear of making mistakes, they fixed uncertainties throughout the process and returned to them as more information came available, either changing or reaffirming the fix. Ignoring uncertainties helped relieve feelings of being overwhelmed because the team had a plan and timeframe for when they would shift from ignoring to embracing or fixing.

Uncertainty is Dynamic – You Need to Be Dynamic, Too

You’ll never eliminate uncertainty. It’s too dynamic to every fully resolve. But by dynamically embracing, fixing, and ignore it in all its dimensions, you can accelerate your path to success.

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