The wheel
In the innovation process, chance is not a disturbance to be organised away — it is a constitutive condition. Whoever denies it plans past reality. Whoever relies on it is not doing management.
Deliberate irritation in innovation management
Innovation is not roulette.But nothing new comes without disruption.
Innovation processes are built as straight lines — stage gates, roadmaps, portfolios, quarterly targets. That order is necessary to get things finished, and it is blind to everything it has not already assumed. The new emerges where the line breaks. Innovation-Roulette works on the question of whether an organisation leaves that break to chance — or places it deliberately.
The house edge
Le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés. Pasteur’s sentence is not a consolation but a working instruction. Nothing can be adjusted at the wheel; everything can be adjusted at the player. Preparation is the only variable an organisation actually owns.
The irritation
Chance cannot be steered; irritation can. It can be dosed, addressed and repeated. “Deliberate” means: placed, not suffered. That is precisely the difference between a random generator and a method.
Part of a larger whole
Innovation-Roulette does not stand alone. Pictures of Tomorrow produces structured futures: consistent scenarios, systematically developed. Questions of Tomorrow starts from a single question and delivers a fast scenario snapshot. Innovation-Roulette is the complement to both — not the order, but the controlled break in the order.
This site is a prelude. The position stands; the tool is taking shape. Its foundation is the doctoral dissertation Innovationen zwischen Planung und Zufall — Bausteine einer Theorie der bewussten Irritation (LMU Munich, 2012). If you want to think along, write.