For credit-bearing courses in entrepreneurship, innovation and competitive strategy: the book and the Innovation Toolkit for the whole cohort, a desk copy and teaching materials for faculty, and Ainna for course workshops.
The Author’s Edition eBook and the Innovation Toolkit, for the whole cohort, through a course-specific download code. Individual students can also request access directly. Nothing is required from the department to set this up.
The Product Toolkit is free for coursework too.
Request a course pack →Where a course includes a product or innovation workshop, Ainna can be made available to the cohort on terms set for the classroom, sized to the class and timeboxed to a one or two week window.
Ask about a workshop →As AI absorbs execution, entrepreneurship becomes one of the defining skillsets of the AI era. Deciding what to build is the judgement that must not be delegated to a machine, and a university is where this can be practised.
With Ainna, innovators work with AI agents to frame the problem, generate and challenge product and venture concepts, score them and bring in domain experts to assess them, then enrich the venture concept through market sizing, competitive landscape, persona analysis and go-to-market. Concepts are held to an evidence standard rather than simply agreed with, and the verdict stays with the human team.
In a classroom the effect is pedagogical: each cycle trains sharper framing, surfaces hidden assumptions and rewards evidence over conviction.
Students take innovator and domain-expert roles, and pitch to a panel.
Teams work on a shared brief, run on the hackathon lifecycle the book sets out.
Course design, facilitation and grading remain with the instructor.
First published by Springer in 2020 and revised throughout for the Author’s Edition (2026), Innovation Mode is a 434-page practitioner manual, in 11 chapters, on designing and running innovative companies in the AI era. It starts from diagnosis, why innovation programmes fail, and builds the innovation function from there, closing with a model for autonomous, AI-driven opportunity discovery.
Innovation workshops and the impact of AI; then discovery, validation and realisation: framing problems and ideas, scoring, experimentation, prototypes and MVP definition.
The innovative organisation and why corporate innovation fails; innovation performance measurement; and the Innovation Masterplan.
| Chapters | Theme | In brief |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Innovation redefined; the innovative organisation | The vocabulary and the diagnosis: why corporate innovation fails across six named deficits, and the Innovation Maturity Index. |
| 3–4 | People, culture and AI-powered capabilities | The human system, then the capability system: who leads innovation, the blockers of innovation culture, and the capability layer. |
| 5 | Innovation workshops and the impact of AI | The operational playbook for brainstorming, design sprints and the full hackathon lifecycle, and what AI does to the people in the room. |
| 6–8 | Discovery, validation, realisation | Framing problems and ideas, the Idea Assessment Model, autonomous discovery, business experimentation, prototypes and MVP definition. |
| 9 | Innovation performance measurement | Measuring innovation as a performance function rather than an activity log. |
| 10–11 | The Innovation Masterplan | The theory made actionable: programme setup, which capabilities to build first, and six sequenced phases. |
The book is written for real innovation environments, and several of its core frameworks now run in production: the discovery and validation pipeline and the opportunity scoring behind it are implemented inside Ainna. The Innovation Maturity Index scores an organisation, the Idea Assessment Model scores an idea, the Masterplan sequences the work.
“An excellent overview and reference point about people, culture, and capabilities as the key pillars of innovation and practical ways to discover, validate, and realize opportunities on the road to innovation.”
Universities are adopting the book for graduate and undergraduate courses in entrepreneurship, innovation and competitive strategy. The Toolkit has been in use by innovation teams worldwide since 2021, and Ainna is used by product managers and innovators working on real products.
The full licence is in the terms of use, under Academic use.
Our vision is bigger than software for companies: we envision a world where anyone (a global enterprise, a ten-person team, a single person with one idea) can materialise the right ideas into real opportunities, with an AI-native system co-innovating and doing the strategic heavy lifting beside them. In this world, innovation and entrepreneurship stop being privileges of budget, title or timing and become capabilities anyone can practise.
The stakes are societal. As AI absorbs execution, one thing stays deeply human: deciding what to build. The coming wave of technological displacement can only be answered with entrepreneurship, in all its forms. We believe our products grow exactly that capability and mindset, in individuals and across whole societies.
For organisations, the destination has a name: the Innovation Mode, where companies innovate organically, all the time, and innovation is no longer a function but an embedded capability in the OS of the company: how the company runs. For individuals, the same system is a path from hunch to a framed, assessed, defensible case: the entrepreneurial muscle, trained on real ideas.
We are committed to improving how people and organisations innovate: globally, from Dublin.
If the programme works for your course, three things help us, and none is required:
You can also email info@theinnovationmode.com
or connect with us on LinkedIn.
Name, email and a short description are required.
AI strategy, the innovation function and corporate hackathon programmes, from a first call to ongoing advisory.
Send an advisory request MediaInterview and podcast requests, keynotes and panels, expert commentary, and review copies of Innovation Mode.
Send a media request AcademiaCourse adoption of the book, guest lectures, student projects, and free access to the Innovation Toolkit for students and educators.
Make an academic enquiry OtherPartnerships, licensing, the toolkit, an order or a question.
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