The Innovation Age

“Thought-provoking, lucid and surprising.”
— Andrew Palmer , Executive Editor & Bartleby columnist at The Economist

“The most insightful book on business strategy since Gary Hamel and CK Prahalad’s Competing for the Future .”
— Jules Goddard , Professor of Marketing and Fellow at London Business School, UK

“A must-read for anyone who enjoys looking at the world through a fresh lens.”
— Michael Muthukrishna , Professor of Economic Psychology at LSE & NYU, and author of A Theory of Everyone

“Wise and timely.”
— Jean Marc Huet , Chair of Lonza & Heineken Holding, Ex-CFO of Unilever

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 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.

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.