Episode 28: Innovating Emergent Futures with Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca

Product Quest Podcast

Our guests today are Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca from Emergent Futures Lab (emergentfutureslab.com), a strategic innovation consulting firm focused on radical innovation.

Iain and Jason founded the Emergent Futures Lab in 2018 as a platform for the rethinking of creativity, invention, and change. They have developed a number of new tools including the Innovation Design Approach, which we will be talking about today.

Iain Kerr is a designer working at the intersection of creativity, ecology, and emergent systems.

He is a Co-Director of the MIX Lab at Montclair State University within the Feliciano Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation He is a co-founder of SPURSE, an award winning creative design consultancy that focuses on social, ecological and ethical transformation. He regularly works as a consultant, lecturer and workshop leader on creativity, innovation, and design and has done so for institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Columbia University, Parsons, Yale, and others. He formally studied philosophy and architecture, but his deep immersion in the wilderness around Vancouver where he grew up spawned many interests that have since expanded to cover a wide range of fields including ecology, complexity science and evolutionary theory and as you will see these are major influences on his work.

Jason Frasca is a native New Yorker and an entrepreneurial business executive, marketing, and sales professional who has worked with Fortune 500 and nationally recognized clients in many diverse sectors of the economy. He cut his teeth at Boardroom Reports, a business newsletter to executives, where he learned Direct Response Marketing from several legends in the field

With Iain he is also a Co-Director of the MIX Lab at Montclair State University where he teaches innovation, entrepreneurship, sustainability, marketing and provides mentoring to startups. His research revolves around disruptive innovation models and frameworks for entrepreneurship and he uses 3D Printing as a mechanism to demonstrate and teach these methods and approaches.

You can find out more about Iain and Jason here:

emergentfutureslab.com

Referenced on the show:

Books by Deleuze

Books by Stephen J Gould

Books by Elisabet Vrba

The Wright Brothers, David McCullough

The Box, Marc Levinson

The Art of Noticing, Rob Walker