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Futurists and innovators can teach each other lessons to help their ideas succeed. Innovators and futurists ought to have a symbiotic relationship. Often, they do not. The futurist aims to help us understand how trends and events will shape the future, so that we can chart our business and policy courses to bring us to a future that most appeals to us. The innovator, on the other hand, aims to realize a possible future by getting ideas (i.e., possibilities for the future) adopted as practice in our communities. Many would-be innovators ask in frustration, Why do my own good ideas often go by the wayside and other people's bad ideas get adopted? Why do I invest enormous time and resources to systematically generate new ideas, only to see much of my effort go to waste? Leaders in all fields fret and fume over these questions. They want to improve their innovation success rates. Increasing success and reducing wasted effort on the path to innovation are very important goals. Many people believe innovation is the key to economic development, technological progress, competitiveness, and business survival. Policies that enhance a nation's ability to be innovative are constantly in public discussion and are hot topics among politicians and business leaders. Futurists collaborating with innovators can contribute to these goals. I have been investigating these questions for many years and have learned many things that I wish I knew when I was younger. Based on these investigations, my colleague, Robert Dunham, and I wrote a book, The Innovator's Way (MIT Press, 2010, innovators-way.com). I will share here some excerpts from the book as a guide for innovators-and futurists-who are trying to get their ideas adopted.

A winning knowledge management program increases staff productivity, product and service quality, and deliverable consistency by capitalizing on intellectual and knowledge-based assets. Many organizations leap into a knowledge management solution (e.g. document management, data mining, blogging, and community forums) without first considering the purpose or objectives they wish to fulfill or how the organization will adopt and follow best practices for managing its knowledge assets long term.

The London Knowledge Lab is a unique collaboration between two of the UK's most prominent centres of research - the Institute of Education and Birkbeck. The Lab brings together computer and social scientists from a very broad range of fields, including: education, sociology, culture and media, semiotics, computational intelligence, information management, personalisation, semantic web ubiquitous technologies. This means that issues can be tackled from many different perspectives, and this is reflected in our mission, to Understand the place of digital technologies and media in our cultural, social and educational relationships with knowledge - finding, acquiring, creating, and sharing it; Design, build and evaluate systems, processes and interfaces that enhance these relationships; and Examine critically the assumptions about knowledge and learning that underlie the increasingly wide range of applications of digital technologies.