The future is about how we innovate now, both to solve our current challenges and to meet those known and unknown trends that will be our future opportunity (or the killer blow to some businesses).

In the context of the current economic crisis and pressing social challenges, organisational capacity to innovate and improve productivity is becoming an imperative. Results from blackswan surveys indicate that innovation is considered one of the few proactive strategies an organisation can take to regenerate growth and fight a recession. Innovative working is expected to be reinforced in the current economic climate to meet the demands of an increasingly competitive marketplace.

It never ceases to amaze me that we are still talking about gender equality, gender quotas or glass ceilings in leadership. Women and men contribute in different ways to the creation of scientific and technological knowledge. When it comes to women in science and technology, a statistic often discussed is the low number of women entering science, technology, engineering, mathematics in education and occupation. What can we do to close these gender gaps? While women are not entering science and technology fields at the same rate as men, the disproportionate under-representation of women in innovation and leadership suggests that we are missing a huge resource to affect the changes we need. The culture necessary to foster innovation, the life blood of our future world, is an open and trusting environment, motivation for change, openness to ideas and original problem solving. For innovation to flourish it must be supported at all levels with leaders being responsible for encouraging and reinforcing innovative working. There needs to be more modelling behaviours that encourage innovation. Research literature shows that traits specifically related to the ability to lead for innovation include intellect, planning ability, problem solving skills, and emotional intelligence. I would argue that the increasing demand for innovation is a huge disruptive trend to the idea that we can allow gender blindness to continue and that, rather than women looking for parity with men, this is a real opportunity for them to go beyond the current broken leadership model and be the change we want to see.