Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden: "Innovation-ish" and why most innovation doesn’t have to be a moonshot

Tessa Forshaw and Rich Braden: "Innovation-ish" and why most innovation doesn’t have to be a moonshot

April 16, 2026 · 46 min · Season 12 · Episode 170

About this episode

Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw discuss their book 'Innovation-ish' and the misconceptions surrounding innovation.

We’re all familiar with the tropes around innovation and how it starts. You just need a garage in Silicon Valley, a few geniuses and visionaries, maybe some good snacks. Our guests today help us debunk that myth. Rich Braden and Tessa Forshaw wrote a book called Innovation-ish, and that little “-ish” is doing a lot of work. Rich Braden is a design strategist who’s taught innovation at Stanford and advised companies around the world. Tessa Forshaw is a cognitive scientist whose lab studies the psychology of creativity — why we lose it, and how we get it back. In this conversation, we talk about why most innovation doesn’t have to be a moonshot — and why chasing moonshots might actually be holding your team back. We dig into the neuroscience of what Tessa calls “innovation hesitation,” the tiny amygdala response that makes us reach for certainty instead of possibility. Bios Tessa Forshaw As a co-founder of the Next Level Lab at Harvard University, Tessa specializes in using cognitive science to develop creative and innovative potential in the workforce. She draws upon her academic research as a cognitive scientist and extensive background as a former designer at IDEO CoLAb and…

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