What is Innovation?

Innovation is change that takes hold :: Dr. Merrick Furst

Episode Summary

🎙️ This week’s guest is Dr. Merrick Furst, Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation at Georgia Tech and co-author of “The Heart of Innovation.” Dr. Furst unpacks the essence of successful innovation as a change that takes hold and describes how principles from behavioral economics can be useful in this space. He also highlights a critical barrier to innovation: how to solve the puzzle of indifference. Have you worked on a project, product, or program that ultimately ran into the end user or customer’s indifference?

Episode Notes

More about our guest:

Merrick Furst, Ph.D., is a Distinguished Professor and the Director of the Center for Deliberate Innovation (CDI) at Georgia Tech. In 2011, he founded Flashpoint, a first-of-its-kind deliberate innovation studio, to develop formative leaders and exceptional technology startups. Flashpoint was the thirty-sixth startup accelerator worldwide, very early in the development of business accelerators. Both at Flashpoint and at CDI, Furst works with hundreds of founders and innovators and is developing the discipline of Deliberate Innovation.

To date, Furst has personally started eight start-ups. Furst has been teaching entrepreneurship in an innovative form since 2006. He was a professor and the President of the International Computer Science Institute at UC Berkeley, and previously, was a professor and Associate Dean in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Cornell University. Furst is known for seminal research in algorithms, complexity theory, and AI. He co-invented probabilistic circuit analysis and planning graphs, which are considered among the most influential breakthroughs in the field of AI planning.

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