The Curious Advantage

The Curious Advantage is an exploration of the behaviour of curiosity and its central role in the digital age, taking the widest possible exploration of all things curious—historical, contemporary, neuro-scientific, anthropological, behavioural and business.

Curiosity has profound implications for organisations, leaders and individuals inhabiting the digital reality. The Curious Advantage provides pragmatic tools and case studies and makes the case for how curiosity is the greatest driver of value in the new digital age. Curiosity is at the heart of the skills required to successfully navigate our digital lives when all futures are uncertain.

The Curious Advantage introduces the 7C’s of Curiosity model—a useful tool for anyone wanting to lead a curious organisation or who wants to challenge themselves to be actively curious.

In this wonderfully pragmatic book, Paul Ashcroft, Simon Brown and Garrick Jones provide the roadmap for curiously navigating and unlocking the opportunities of the new digital reality.

About the Authors

Co-founder and partner at Ludic Group, co-author of the book ALIVE: Digital Humans and Their Organizations, keynote speaker and facilitator. With a background in mathematics and strategic consulting, Paul is an expert in applying principles of innovation, design thinking and digital tools to accelerate large-scale, sustainable change on a global scale. During his 20-year career, Paul has been working with the world's leading organisations to design strategy, align leaders and implement, engage and motivate people. As an investor, Paul is successfully establishing and growing innovative and technology-based businesses that deliver global solutions. Paul has worked with many of the Fortune 500 and works extensively with SMEs. The ground-breaking methods he uses to collaborate, design and deliver solutions enable organisations to transform and make the successful shift to digital. Ludic Group is revolutionising global consulting by delivering services digitally and redefining how transformation is successfully delivered in the hyper-networked reality of today's organisations. Paul lives in London with his wife Zsanett and their two children Ben and Leanne.

Chief Learning Officer at Novartis. Simon leads learning at Novartis, a focused medicines company, and one of the leading companies in the world. He is a commercially-minded learning leader with experience across a range of the world's top organisations. In 2000, Simon co-founded Brightwave, one of the UK's leading eLearning companies, which was eventually acquired by Capita Plc. Simon spent seven years working for Accenture, advising companies including BT, BP, Microsoft, Canon, Barclays and HSBC. In 2010, Simon moved to Lloyds Banking Group where he led the award-winning bank-wide learning transformation. In 2013 Simon moved to Novartis global HQ in Switzerland, where he led various global learning teams. These including being responsible for enhancing effectiveness of learning for the global pharma salesforce, creating the cross-divisional Global Development University, running the Novartis-wide Learning Centre of Expertise and Corporate Universities, and also defining the strategy for how Novartis would develop digital capability across the company. After leading the development of a new, award-winning learning strategy, he became Novartis's first-ever Chief Learning Officer in February 2019. Since then Novartis has gained several global awards for learning including the award for Learning Strategy Innovation. Simon shares his experiences, speaking at conferences around the world and with an active digital presence on the Linkedin platform. Simon lives in Switzerland with his wife Rachel, son Oliver, daughter Lucinda, their cat Paddy and a coop of chickens. He can be found most weekends struggling up a Swiss mountain road on his bike.