DECEMBER 2025
The Human Innovation Institute has entered a new launch phase. Over the past year we have been building the core architecture of the discipline of human innovation and the growth engines that will all us to deploy it.
As we move into this next stage of development, the through-line of our work has become increasingly clear: we are building the discipline of Human Innovation at a moment when individuals and institutions need new ways to understand, navigate, and shape The Great Transition.
This update outlines the major elements coming into focus including:
The Institute Themes that anchor our research
The Sponsorship Program that supports long-term institutional capacity
The flagship Partnership Program that applies the discipline in the world
The foundational publication that will define the field of Human Innovation
Together, these developments reflect the growing focus of the Institute and our commitment to helping leaders, partners, and innovators build the necessary capabilities, models, tools, and systems.
Institute Themes
As the Human Innovation Institute continues to expand its research and build the discipline of Human Innovation, we’ve been refining the core themes that guide our work. These themes shape what we study, the provocations we explore, and the applied research our sponsors engage with. Together, they form the intellectual backbone of the Institute that includes a structured way to understand The Great Transition and the emerging opportunities it creates for individuals, organizations, and society.
These themes extend well beyond research categories although they do begin there. Eventually, they become the foundation for our labs, partnerships, content, and capability development. They help us identify emerging pressure zones across The Great Transition and inform how to design the next generation of tools and methods, and work with our partners to prototype the models that will define the next era.
As we move into 2026, these themes will guide the questions we explore and the collaborations we form.
Sponsorship Programs
The Human Innovation Institute is advancing its sponsorship architecture and inviting a select group of aligned partners to help build the next phase of the Institute. Sponsorships fund the core infrastructure that enables the Institute to operate at its highest level. Our launch phase focuses investment into media and communications capacity, technology systems, operations, and the research engine that powers labs, content, and fellowships.
Sponsors engage through the Institute Themes most relevant to their work reflecting a major pressure zone of The Great Transition and offering strategic opportunities to explore emerging challenges, shape new models, and position themselves at the leading edge of change. Across all tiers, sponsors contribute to a shared mission while gaining domain-specific opportunities to advance their strategies, explore new ideas, and participate in developing the models that will create new opportunities.
Flagship Partnership Program
The Partnership Program has become the flagship offering of the Human Innovation Institute and is the primary way sponsors and high-agency innovators engage directly with the discipline of Human Innovation, applying it to the pressure zones shaping their world. Partnerships sit at the center of our 'research-to-practice loop' and provide a structured path for exploration, experimentation, and capability development inside specific thematic areas.
Each partnership is designed as a yearlong program that helps sponsors explore questions traditional consulting and advisory models cannot address. Participants work within a chosen Institute domain, engage with guided research and provocations, and co-create new perspectives, prototypes, or operating models tailored to the partner’s strategic needs. Our partnerships focus on adapting to technological acceleration, reimagining the future of work, strengthening human capability during transition, and developing leaders capable of navigating volatility.
Over the past year, we have refined the partnership architecture, strengthened the research backbone behind each domain, and built the operational systems required to scale. The flagship program now includes customized research pathways, co-designed labs, and integration processes that help partners translate the work into their organizations, expressing our mission to help individuals and institutions advance their missions during this time of profound change.
Foundational Publication Update: Human Innovation, A Map for the Great Transition
We are continuing to develop what will become the Institute’s foundational publication, Human Innovation, A Map for the Great Transition. It is the first comprehensive articulation of the discipline of Human Innovation and a defining guide for how individuals and institutions can navigate and shape this emerging era.
This publication presents The Great Transition as a period marked by both degradation and reimagining. It describes the breakdown of legacy systems and the loss of coherence across work, education, leadership, culture, and community. It also maps the corresponding rise of reinvention, reconfiguration, and rebuilding. The Great Transition is a moment of creative opportunity, and this publication provides a way to understand it and a method to act within it.
Human Innovation is introduced as a scalable discipline that can be practiced by individuals, teams, organizations, and society. The methodology offers a structured way to orient, reimagine, experiment, and evolve in environments defined by uncertainty and acceleration. It helps people develop the capabilities needed to meet this moment with clarity, agency, and action.
The publication also presents the full architecture of the Institute. It explains how our research engine identifies signals and patterns, how provocations shape the questions we explore, how labs function as applied practice fields, how community supports capability development, and how our flagship Partnership Program offers a comprehensive path for transformation. Together these elements form a cohesive ecosystem and demonstrate what it means for Human Innovation to operate as a modern think tank and a platform for intentional evolution.
