The Innovation Age
Leading the companies that will build our future
By Jamie Heywood
“Outstanding.”
Colin Mayer, Emeritus Professor of Management Studies, Said Business School, Oxford University.
“Thought-provoking, lucid and surprising”
Andrew Palmer, Executive Editor & Bartelby columnist at The Economist
“A must-read”
Michael Muthukrishna, Professor of Economic Psychology, LSE & NYU
“Wise and timely”
Jean Marc Huet, Chair of Lonza & Heineken Holdings & ex-CFO of Unilever
RRP £44.99
FREE
Why has our out-dated understanding of the company caused a 50 year decline in innovation and how can we reverse it?
How will AI change companies, and how must companies change to benefit from AI?
Why does our prosperity require us to stop regulating what companies do and start regulating what they are?
How can leaders ensure that their companies solve more problems than they create?
About the author
Jamie Heywood has three decades’ experience leading companies at the intersection of innovation, growth, and regulation.
He ran Uber’s Northern European businesses through the crisis that followed Travis Kalanick’s exit, led Amazon’s UK electronics divisions through a period of extreme growth, and, while he successfully launched Virgin Mobile in India, he was also forced to close down their business in China when the regulatory environment shifted. Jamie has seen firsthand how companies adapt—or fail to—in a changing world.
Today, he serves on the board of Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and as a Senior Advisor to Principia, an ethics consultancy.
He holds an MA in Philosophy and Psychology from Oxford University and an MBA from INSEAD.
About the book
Why have our out-dated companies caused a 50 year decline in innovation and how can we reverse it?
Why does our prosperity require us to stop regulating what companies do and start regulating what they are?
How can leaders ensure that their companies solve more problems than they create?
How will AI change companies, and how must companies change for AI?
After fifty years of slowing productivity, declining trust, and rising inequality, leaders know something is broken—but few agree on what to fix. In The Innovation Age, Jamie Heywood offers a radical yet pragmatic answer: the modern company is mis-designed for the world it now inhabits.
From his courtroom battles at Uber to lessons drawn from cities, communities, and even the human brain, Heywood shows why hierarchies suppress innovation, why shareholder primacy distorts purpose, and why the most creative systems are modular, diverse, and collaborative.
Clear-eyed, original and deeply practical, this open access book is a manifesto for corporate change. It shows what each of us—employees, citizens, and policy makers—must do to build the companies of the future. For leaders, it explains how to organise for innovation rather than efficiency, how to balance autonomy with alignment, and how to turn companies back into what they were always meant to be—society’s most powerful problem-solving institutions.
“In defining what we suppose a public corporation to be, we implicitly express our view of the nature and purpose of our social life. Since we disagree on that, our law of corporate entities is bound itself to be contentious and controversial. It will be worked out, not deduced. In this process, efficiency concerns, ideology, and interest group politics will commingle with history… to produce an answer that will hold for the here and now, only to be torn by some future stress and to be reformulated once more.”
W. Allen, Chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery (1992)