John Loudon McAdam was born in Ayr, Scotland in 1796. It was around 1820, some 24 years later, that he pioneered the use of single sized aggregate layers of small stones, with a coating of binder to act as a cementing agent to form a surface much like the roads we take for granted today.

The need behind this solution was the ever-increasing
transportation of goods and people, as required by an industrial revolution which, through necessity, challenged the capacity of canals and the stability of the so-called ‘roads’ which had been made available up to that point in time.

When I went to school, Galileo was reported to have challenged the Church through the use of science to demonstrate the Earth was round. I took it from those teachings that he was the first to discover this. I ended up with a belief based on what I had assumed I had been taught. In later years, Copernicus was another name that cropped up, and with the advent of Google and t'internet, it didn't take too much digging to find a much richer history behind the evolution of our modern beliefs; which subsequently changed my own belief about the subject.

“INNOVATION!”
Is yet another, in a long line of buzzwords which go hand in hand with engagement, ownership, culture change and other
business critical capabilities which prove extremely ‘Hard’ to get right, even though they fall on the ‘soft’ skills side of the fence…. Ironic huh?

So, what exactly is ‘Innovation’?