Most Companies Fail at Innovation.
This Book Explains Why—and What to Do About It.
A practitioner's blueprint for autonomous, AI-powered innovation—featuring diagnostic frameworks, a phased transformation roadmap, and ready-to-implement tools and agentic AI patterns.
Not theory. Actionable advice, architectures and organizational designs.
Springer | January 2026 | 340 pages | 11 chapters | Pre-order on Amazon
Every company claims to be innovative. Few actually are.
Annual reports celebrate "innovation culture." Leadership decks promise "breakthrough thinking." Yet when you look at the pipeline, it's empty. Ideas stall in committees. Pilots never scale. The innovation team becomes a cost centre waiting to be cut.
The problem isn't a lack of ideas. It's the absence of a system.
Innovation Mode 2.0 is the practitioner's blueprint for building that system – one where artificial intelligence doesn't replace human creativity but amplifies it at every stage: from sensing market shifts and discovering opportunities to validating concepts with real-world evidence and shipping MVPs that actually achieve product-market fit.
This isn't theory. It's a pragmatic framework built on two decades of leading innovation across multinational corporations in various industries and markets, and four technology startups – distilled into 70+ actionable recommendations across six transformation phases.
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What You'll Learn
How AI transforms every stage of innovation – from autonomous opportunity discovery agents that scan markets 24/7 to AI-powered prototyping that compresses months into days.
Why most corporate innovation fails – and the specific structural, cultural, and leadership blind spots that kill promising initiatives before they reach the market.
How to assess your organisation's innovation readiness – using the Innovation Maturity Index framework to identify gaps and prioritise investments.
How to build innovation "dream teams" – the roles, skills, and dynamics that separate high-performing innovation units from innovation theatre.
How to validate opportunities with real-world evidence – moving beyond opinion-based decisions to structured business experimentation.
How to measure what matters – innovation metrics that drive accountability without crushing creativity.
A complete transformation roadmap – six progressive phases that take your organisation from ad-hoc innovation efforts to AI-powered autonomous mode.
The Six Phases: From Zero to Innovation Mode
The book's Innovation Masterplan guides organisations through a structured transformation:
Phase 1: Power-Up – Establish foundational capabilities and assemble your core innovation team.
Phase 2: Spark – Ignite creative momentum through AI-enhanced brainstorming, design sprints, and hackathons.
Phase 3: Connect – Link essential capabilities into an integrated innovation system with a centralised Innovation Portal.
Phase 4: Empower – Open business experimentation methodologies across the organisation.
Phase 5: Scale-Up – Drive innovation at enterprise pace with parallel opportunity pipelines and portfolio management.
Phase 6: Embed – Transition to AI-powered autonomous mode where innovation becomes self-sustaining and continuously adaptive.
Each phase includes specific activities, capability milestones, and cultural interventions – not abstract principles, but concrete steps you can begin implementing immediately.
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The AI Advantage
AI isn't coming for innovation. It's already here.
Companies that figure out how to integrate AI into their innovation function will discover opportunities faster, validate them cheaper, and ship products before competitors finish their strategy decks.
Companies that don't will find themselves disrupted by those that did.
Innovation Mode 2.0 shows you exactly how to be in the first group.
Inside the Book
11 chapters from defining innovation to building an AI-powered autonomous innovation function.
1. Innovation (Re)Defined. Clear definitions that cut through the buzzwords – distinguishing innovation from novelty, invention, and opportunity.
2. The Innovative Organisation. What separates genuinely innovative companies from pretenders – and the Innovation Maturity Index to assess where you stand.
3. Chapter 3. People & Culture. Building innovation dream teams, the Chief Innovation Officer role, and fixing cultural blockers that kill ideas.
4. Innovation Capabilities – Powered by AI. The complete AI-powered capability stack: market intelligence, opportunity discovery, validation, realization, and portfolio management.
5. Innovation Workshops and AI. How AI transforms brainstorming, design sprints, and hackathons – plus the Innovation Calendar for sustained momentum.
6. Opportunity Discovery. Using AI to systematically identify high-potential concepts, including autonomous discovery agents and the AI Sandbox for security.
7. Opportunity Validation. Business experimentation methodologies, prototype strategies, and building makerspaces for physical innovation.
8. Opportunity Realisation. From validated concepts to MVPs – parallel development, rapid iteration, and the path to product-market fit.
9. Measuring Innovation. Comprehensive performance frameworks at both corporate and individual levels, plus the Innovation Insights system.
10. The Innovation Masterplan. The complete 70+ recommendation transformation programme across six phases.
11. Final Remarks. The future of innovation roles in an AI-powered world – from hands-on execution to strategic oversight.
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From the First Edition
"A must-read and must-use by innovation leaders."
"A must-have for any forward-thinking organization."
The first edition helped hundreds of organisations build sustainable innovation capabilities. The second edition - fully rewritten - takes those foundations and rebuilds them for an AI-powered world.
The first edition of the Innovation Mode as described by leaders across industries:
“The Innovation Mode is a must-read for innovation managers, top-level corporate executives, and entrepreneurs!”
— A. Tzoumas, CTO, SciFY.org
“A tribute to innovation and its transformative power, an inspiring journey through innovation's known and unknown aspects.”
— Alex Papageorgiou, Analytics Expert, ex-Googler
“In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, the ‘Innovation Mode’ is an important read for any organization.”
— Brook Perry, Director of Marketing at ‘nuffsaid
“A practical guide for how to tap your organization's creative energy, and transform it into an innovation-driven pace-setter.”
— Bart Manning, Head of Sales & Business Development, Unity
“An inspiring and must-read book for every organization that doesn’t wish to sit on the sidelines while someone else steals their share of the market.”
— Sue McGill, SVP of ATB Ventures
“A must-read to any innovation leader in their efforts to reflect and refine existing innovation activities or to set them up completely new.”
— Erik Schumb, Founder & CXO of Agile Sprints
“The Innovation Mode is a must-read book. Corporate leaders will get inspired and learn how to design and execute great innovation programs.”
— D. Livas, Managing Partner, Agile Actors
“The Innovation Mode is a must-read and must-use to convert the team and organization to a never-ending innovation mode.”
— A. Stergioulis, Director, Intrasoft International
About the Author
George Krasadakis is a technologist, product architect, and innovation advisor with 25+ years of international experience across startups, consulting, and global technology companies.
Most people writing about AI and innovation have done neither. George Krasadakis has done both – architecting, building, and patenting pioneering data-driven systems since before "machine learning" and AI were buzzwords.
Twenty-plus patents. Eighty delivered projects. Four startups. And beyond the technology: George has designed the innovation labs, product discovery teams, and venture units where these systems come to life inside multinational corporations. This isn't theory.
His foundation is scientific: an MSc in Computational Statistics, with deep expertise in scientific programming, data modeling, and software architecture. This technical grounding matters more now than ever – today's large language models and generative AI systems are, at their core, sophisticated statistical machines. George spotted the opportunity early – applying advanced statistical modeling to rich data, embedding it in software components, and creating systems that make intelligent decisions at scale. He was building AI before the industry had a name for it.
That early work became Datamine Decision Support Systems, his first startup, which pioneered smart, adaptive, data-driven decision-making – serving 20+ multinationals across telecom, banking, and retail. His patent portfolio – AI negotiation agents, voice-driven ideation systems, natural language processing architectures – reads like a 2024 AI startup pitch deck, except he patented these systems a decade ago. The work has since been cited over 500 times by inventors and global technology giants building on his foundations.
Currently, George is the architect of Ainna.ai – the world's first AI Innovation Agent. Ainna embodies the principles of Innovation Mode 2.0: an autonomous system that discovers opportunities, validates concepts, and generates execution-ready documentation. It's proof that AI-powered innovation isn't theoretical – it's already here.
George also serves as a corporate advisor on innovation architecture, product development, and AI adoption – helping multinational organisations build the capabilities, teams, and systems described in this book. It's where theory meets implementation: the same frameworks he writes about are the ones he deploys with clients.
The first edition of The Innovation Mode (Springer, 2020) established a new standard for practitioner-focused innovation frameworks and has been adopted by innovation teams worldwide. George is also the creator of the 60 Leaders series on Innovation and AI, with 100+ published articles on technology and innovation methodology.
"While most companies claim to be innovative, only a minority systematically create value through novel products. The rest scratch the surface – focused on appearing innovative rather than actually building anything." — George KrasadakisTrack Record
25 years across startups and enterprise
20+ patents as sole inventor in AI/ML
80+ technology projects delivered
4 startups founded
Companies
Microsoft · Accenture · GSK · Datamine + a series of technology startups
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