Embedding Purpose Across the Organization, Driving Engagement, and Ensuring Efficiency of HR Practices

SAP’s Pledge to Flex • Taking a Holistic Approach to the Future of Work

Christian Schmeichel will talk about how SAP is tackling the future of work with its ‘pledge to flex’ strategy. He will discuss why flexibility is the key to the future of work as well as how HR needs to adapt to drive change successfully.

• Future of work as the future of workforce and future of people and workplace practices
• Pledge to flex strategy, rationale, and approach – from connecting people & technology and leveraging data and analytics to culture development and skills building
• Evolution of the HR function to shape the Future of Work
  • The need to run HR like a business with a strong focus on strategy, clear portfolio management, and impact metrics
  • HR as change driver – making change stick through a good transformation plan, communication, and capability building

Driving Transformation Internally – Working Top Down, Bottom Up and Making Middle Managers the Backbone of Change: Lessons Learned

Siemens Energy is transforming a legacy culture to enable the major portfolio shift toward decarbonization and building the energy transition. Nandani Lynton will share the approach to multi-layered people and business transformation. She will share learnings and challenges on:

• Taking an internal approach to drive the transformation – and the rationale for change
  • Taking learnings from previous internally driven change initiatives that focused on bottom up change, and distilling what works and what doesn’t to leverage these insights for the transformation
  • Working with the board to establish the targets – supporting leaders to internalize and role model the change, and ensure consistency above all
  • Focusing on middle management to drive the transformation – building their skills, activating their own motivation, and getting them to become internal drivers and consultants for transformation
  • Working with different stakeholders and ensuring alignment on goals in a new company with long history and moonshot goals – partnering with innovation, strategy, and business verticals to accelerate the process
  • Measuring culture KPIs including behaviour – and making strides in driving D&I and senior leadership development to foster the culture
• Lessons learned including managing challenges, using the hierarchy where needed as we become less hierarchical, and the advantages and disadvantages of an internal approach

Driving Transformative Leadership Through Skills Enablement – Empowering People and Fostering Organizational Agility

Enhancing Talent and Employee Experience – Leveraging New Technologies and Building Talent-Centric Solutions

Michaela Schütt will talk about Siemens’ approach to boosting talent experience. She will discuss how the organization created and implemented a new program to support employees’ career development. Michaela will also share learnings on how the organization leverages AI and new tech to deliver on talent-centricity, including on:

• Leveraging AI and new technologies to improve and enhance employee experience: the approach to piloting and exploring new initiatives – what works and what doesn’t
• The change journey of building the Own Career concept to support employees – understanding employee needs and feeding the insights into the program
• Creating an ecosystem of easy-to-use tools and approaches that people can use on demand to chart their career paths and identify strengths – from self-reflection tools to job shadowing
• Lessons learned including the need to place the talent at center, move beyond hype and ensure new technologies solves an employee need, and more
• Learning and development

Building a High Potential Pool for Executive Hiring – Approaches and Criteria

Roopesh Panchasra will lead a lab on executive hiring. He will start off the lab off by briefly introducing a framework to guide the group discussion that follows. Lab participants will discuss and learn about the following:

• What criteria organizations use to identify internal talent with high potential for executive positions
• How do organizations establish their criteria, measure the program’s impact, and nurture and adapt it – and how do they continue to build the talent pool and reassess its members
  

Leadership Acquisition – Moving Beyond Role-Based Experiences and Traditional Hiring Approaches

Roopesh Panchasra will talk about Uber’s talent acquisition approach. He will share how the strategy has enabled the organization to expand its talent pool, retain talent, and make better, systematic, and data-based assessments. Roopesh will share insights on:

• Moving beyond the traditional executive recruiting approach – reexamining the need for role-based experience since company experience and leadership skills can cross domains
• Fine-tuning the ability to assess talent, and increasing the hiring pool, by casting a wider net that includes more than top tech companies
• Focusing leadership hiring on competences, drives, and personality traits required for success in a role
• Shifting towards data-based and unbiased tools to make better leadership assessments, and to overcome challenges with the traditional approach

The Journey of Creating a Differentiating Global Employee Experience at ING

At ING we believe that engaged employees contribute to higher customer satisfaction and more innovative and profitable organisations. In order to improve the engagement of our people, we want to make sure that everything that an employee sees, hears, thinks and feels when interacting with our organisation is personal, smart and easy. Think of it as Customer Experience (CX), but then internally. Sander will share his journey of building a global Employee Experience strategy for ING, introducing the concepts of “data driven improvement” and ”human centric design” to the Global HR Function.

Leadership’s Role in Navigating the Innovator’s Dilemma and Driving Transformation

Vinod Philip will talk about the role of leadership in driving and encouraging corporate innovation. He will share how leadership can stifle but also encourage innovation and transformation.

• How the organization reflects the Boardroom – why leaders need to be innovative to enable innovation throughout the organization
• Taking the right perspective on innovation – innovation as essential before being risky
• Moving beyond the either-or of the innovation dilemma – how innovation can be the thread that connects the existing and the new business
• Demystifying leadership and transformation – transformation as organic and normal process that starts with leaders
• How leaders can manage the unpredictability of transformation by being in charge but not in control

Partnering With Startups, Universities and Large Companies – And Improving Innovation Culture – To Drive Enel’s Innovability Agenda

Ernesto Ciorra will speak about how Enel leverages open innovation for its sustainability and circularity agenda.
Enel has combined Innovation and Sustainability in a model called “Innovability®”, based on the fundamental concept that in order to be sustainable it is necessary to constantly innovate and, at the same time, every innovation pursued must be sustainable.
To innovate, Enel has adopted an “open” approach that leverages an ecosystem of customers, employees, suppliers, startups, companies, international organizations, universities and NGOs. To engage the various players, Enel has created some tools, such as “”openinnovability.com””, a crowdsourcing platform to collect solutions and a network of Innovation Hubs, to get in touch with startups and other stakeholders present in the most important innovation ecosystems of the world. The Group has collected over 25000 proposals and activated over 1200 projects of which about half have been successfully advanced and over 300 have met the requirements to be implemented on a large scale.

How HR Can Drive Innovation and Transformation

Susan Lyon will talk about the role of HR in innovation and transformation. She will kick-start her presentation with lessons learned from her previous role as a business manager and how she translates that experience to her HR role to grow the business faster and further. Susan will detail how HR can support business needs and manage talent so that innovation can happen anywhere in the organization. She will explain four different actions HR can take to accomplish this illustrated with four cases.

How HR can drive innovation and transformation:

• Resolving challenges and having the courage and insight to identify business obstacles and address them – E track case and accountability matrix
• How HR can foster a culture for innovation by being the expert, caretaker, and the disruptor; driving a growth mindset and ensuring a culture-process fit and a culture that develops in support of business needs – Fabric Care ecosystem case
• Strategic talent planning by ensuring complementary skills, collaboration, diversity of thought, disruptors within teams, and balancing changes in leadership – Global Fabric Care Leadership team and platform leadership

Innovating within HR to inspire and liberate teams – taking a third way approach to talent scouting

Driving a Culture of Innovation – Lessons Learned on Empowering Innovators and Overcoming Innovation Roadblocks

Jayshree Seth will talk about how to foster and preserve a culture of innovation in the face of adversity. She will draw on her experience to discuss how innovators can get unstuck on their innovation journey and the role of leadership in uplifting people. Jayshree will share insights on:

• The ERRORS framework – from overt Expectations and trifecta of Resources through Risk taking and Opportunities to Rewards and Socialization
• How to address the challenges in preserving the culture and course correctly – approach and strategies
• Overcoming the barriers on the innovation journey – leveraging the power of little factors to make headway
• 5 things leaders need to do uplift the people and empower innovators
• The Human in the human capital – reengaging people through Working your Way

Leveraging Learning and Development for Digital Transformation –Building a Future-fit Workforce

In times when jobs are changing, even if you’re not changing jobs, the skills needed to succeed will continue to evolve. In this sense, skills are a new currency of the labor market. It’s about retaining, re- and upskilling of talents, it’s about the people. Learning becomes more important than ever. Because business transformation always is people transformation. And Siemens has an answer to it.

The Futures of China – Leveraging Scenarios to Inform Corporate Innovation, Marketing and HR Strategies and Long-Term Plans

Björn Theis will lead a lab on leveraging scenarios to inform strategic involvement in China. He will briefly introduce the large-scope scenario study Evonik has conducted and share the main strategic findings. This will be followed by a group workshop.
The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Understand the scenarios and the most important strategic insights for each of the scenarios
• Work in groups on a selected research question focused on innovation, marketing, or HR
• Use the future wheel approach to identify the consequences of the main development with respect to the group’s research question
• Work as a group to determine how to respond to the challenges and opportunities the results of the future wheel present
• Harvest the workshop’s results

Enabling Cross-Cultural Collaboration and a Culture of Agility – Fostering Psychological Safety and Bringing Silos Together for Digital Transformation

Jan Burchhardt and Johannes Hinsch will talk about how Porsche breaks silos to drive cross collaboration for digital transformation. They will discuss how the organization drives a culture of agility, psychological safety, and experimentation. Jan and Johannes will also share how the company leverages and integrates digital within the organization.

• Building connections between siloed departments – enabling collaboration and shifting ways of workings towards end-to-end processes and value streams
• Leveraging a set of approaches to drive collaboration – from communication to cultural initiatives
• Integrating digital within the structures of the company and vehicle development with the digital family as the epicenter of collaboration
• Reorganizing the company for digital – and rolling out the new model
• Building the virtual organization – bringing business and IT hand-in-hand to create the most exciting products for customers
• Setting up the right team for the right value stream with the right skills – and using agile and SAFe
• Driving experimentation and delivering at high speed – creating the right environment to enable people to deliver at their best
• Leveraging scenarios to set objectives – and integrating agile with digital transformation

Enabling Cross-Cultural Collaboration and a Culture of Agility – Fostering Psychological Safety and Bringing Silos Together for Digital Transformation

Jan Burchhardt and Johannes Hinsch will talk about how Porsche breaks silos to drive cross collaboration for digital transformation. They will discuss how the organization drives a culture of agility, psychological safety, and experimentation. Jan and Johannes will also share how the company leverages and integrates digital within the organization.

• Building connections between siloed departments – enabling collaboration and shifting ways of workings towards end-to-end processes and value streams
• Leveraging a set of approaches to drive collaboration – from communication to cultural initiatives
• Integrating digital within the structures of the company and vehicle development with the digital family as the epicenter of collaboration
• Reorganizing the company for digital – and rolling out the new model
• Building the virtual organization – bringing business and IT hand-in-hand to create the most exciting products for customers
• Setting up the right team for the right value stream with the right skills – and using agile and SAFe
• Driving experimentation and delivering at high speed – creating the right environment to enable people to deliver at their best
• Leveraging scenarios to set objectives – and integrating agile with digital transformation

Creating Safe Spaces and Fostering Brave, Focused, and Curious Behaviors

Maeve O’Sullivan will moderate a group discussion on how to leverage Campfires to create safe spaces and foster brave, focused, and curious behaviors to drive an innovation culture. She will introduce the tools for the subsequent group discussion session. The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Explore how to translate the Leadership Playground principles within own contexts
• Understand how to create safe spaces and involve people in safe conversations to drive a culture of innovation
• Learn and apply the tools to engage people in safe conversations and brave, curious, and focused behaviors
• Harvest the discussion results

More tba

More to be announced

Driving Digital Transformation – Organizing, Changing Mindsets and Leveraging Human-Centric Technologies

Anneli Gunnarsson leads digital strategy at IKEA. She will discuss how the company leverages digital for customer-centric innovation. Anneli will also discuss how the company is transforming into a digital organization. She will share insights on:

• Bringing innovation to life through digital in retail – using digital to become more customer-centric in an originally analogue company
• Rearchitecting the company from both the mindset and the tech perspectives – the approach, key elements, and learnings
• Putting human-centric technologies at the center and leveraging data to deliver on value-driven solutions
  

Transforming a Company from Being Linear to Circular: Paradigm Shift and Mindset Change

Abstract TBA

Orchestrating Digital Transformation, Driving AI, and Enabling Data-Driven Decisions

Guido Merighi Buitoni will discuss Danone’s different digital business models and will explain the company’s organization and culture for digital transformation. He will further delve into the use of AI and ML and the role of data-driven decision-making.

Driving Change for Sustainability – Engaging the Organization and Building True Partnerships

Anna Celsing, Head of Sustainability for the Alfa Laval Group, will elaborate on the company’s journey. She will dig into how innovation and key technologies can support the sustainability transformation and share examples how Alfa Laval leverages data and collaborates externally to drive the transition forward.
Innovation – using the core of the company identity to accelerate the transformation of society together with partners. In the very beginning (1883), Alfa Laval introduced an innovative, efficient milk separator that revolutionized the industry. The company remains a frontrunner, driving the transformation towards a more sustainable living in the areas of energy supply, alternative proteins, water treatment and re-use, sustainable shipping etc.
Partnerships – Collaborating and co-creating within the ecosystem – transparency as a key factor to building true partnerships and achieving success. Giving examples of the work.
People – Engaging people throughout the company and at all levels – with sustainability at the core of the company purpose, clarifying roles and responsibilities and the follow up on targets.
Data – Tackling the big challenge of securing data quality to drive the change. To prove to “walk the talk”, an important competitive factor – and to encourage continuous engagement internally.

Partnering With Startups, Universities and Large Companies – And Improving Innovation Culture – To Drive Enel’s Innovability Agenda

Ernesto Ciorra will speak about how Enel leverages open innovation for its sustainability and circularity agenda.
Enel has combined Innovation and Sustainability in a model called “Innovability®”, based on the fundamental concept that in order to be sustainable it is necessary to constantly innovate and, at the same time, every innovation pursued must be sustainable.
To innovate, Enel has adopted an “open” approach that leverages an ecosystem of customers, employees, suppliers, startups, companies, international organizations, universities and NGOs. To engage the various players, Enel has created some tools, such as “”openinnovability.com””, a crowdsourcing platform to collect solutions and a network of Innovation Hubs, to get in touch with startups and other stakeholders present in the most important innovation ecosystems of the world. The Group has collected over 25000 proposals and activated over 1200 projects of which about half have been successfully advanced and over 300 have met the requirements to be implemented on a large scale.

Building a High-Growth Business in a Large Corporation: Experiences and Key Success Factors

Bosch’s new hydrogen business is growing fast. Marcus Spickermann will talk about the journey of building the SOFC venture. He will discuss the organization’s approach to drive the new business in a groundbreaking area. He will share challenges and learnings on:

• Running a high growth business in a large firm – and managing challenges including technological development and evolution of hydrogen, and organizational challenges including the contrast between the speed of the new business and that of the mothership
• The journey of setting the project up for success and what matters in this – from starting with an advanced technical project without a market to linking it to potential customers and distilling a marketing and sales strategy
• The approach to bring the product to market – and finding new markets and new business models
• Key success factors and the approach to address them – insulating the venture from corporate process to the right degree, budgeting, finding a real home for the venture within the organization, and more

Exploring Connected Solutions and Digital Services – Working with Businesses and Managing Barriers

Åsa Mohalland and Tommy Hansson Strand will share Volvo Group’s approach to creating digital services & ventures. They will detail what sets the Innovation Lab’s approach apart in exploring and driving transformation towards new growth. Åsa and Tommy will also discuss the barriers in creating digital services and share learnings on:

• Innovation Lab setup and way of working – making strategic but also realistic bets: driving agile and bringing in new people to mature faster and build a mix of capabilities
  
• Leveraging open innovation and venture clienting model and collaborating with startups to accelerate value creation
• Venture building through inhouse capabilities in multidisciplinary venture teams
• Interplay between explore and exploit through close collaboration within the Volvo Group and frameworks to support the collaboration
  – Involving the businesses early to get the buy-in and to quickly decide whether to scrap or pursue an opportunity
  – Working with businesses to understand their plans, opportunities, and barriers – managing the challenge in orchestrating the conversation and helping the business to lift barriers
• Lessons learned including starting small, getting business owners involved, and more
  

Future Frontiers: Generative AI as a Service

Abstract tba

5 Things You Need to Do Now to Augment Your Human Workforce with Automation

Augmented businesses perform better than their counterparts on multiple levels – including business, finance and employee engagement. By freeing people from the repetitive and mundane tasks, but also by enabling human-machine collaboration, augmented businesses further enhance innovation and creativity. This lab offers a framework for organizations to augment their workforce through optimizing work for people and machines, and encouraging collaboration between people and machines. Dr. Chris Brauer will start off the lab with a foundational presentation followed by group discussions, based on his making-work-human framework. Lab participants will:

• Get to know the five main challenges in augmenting work, and learn how organizations can tackle these to develop augmented services, data, and culture
• Work in groups to assess a real job description filtering the role’s tasks using the making-work-human framework in order to redefine the job for the purpose of increasing creativity and innovation via human-machine collaboration

Building a Disruptive Innovation Capability – Enabling Ambidexterity, Fostering Culture Change, and Collaborating with Startups

Grzegorz Ombach will talk about Airbus’ approach to building disruptive R&T capabilities. He will discuss how the organization is creating innovation vehicles to apply internal and external technologies to new and existing businesses. Grzegorz will also share how the company balances autonomy and integration, fosters the culture and mindsets for disruptive innovation, and collaborates with startups.

• Setting up the disruptive innovation organization – and leveraging multiple vehicles such as Blue Sky teams working beyond the current portfolio and Zonal accelerators for technology and new business
  • Moving from proving technology readiness to exploring and accelerating its application or new business models – an example
• The balancing game of separation from, and integration with, the mothership; balancing new and existing in resource allocation; and building an ambidextrous organization
  • Empowering and aligning regional innovation centers across the world
  • Translating technology to vertical farming with carbon capture feed – an example
• Building a venture client unit and creating an interface that provides the right kind of support to external startups
• Fostering a culture for disruptive innovation – how the UpNext team brings together external and internal people to foster the right culture and mindsets

Creating Value with Data & AI at Scale and Ensuring ROI

Abstract tba

Creating a New Business Based on Data – Incubating the Venture, Pivoting, and Overcoming Challenges

Philippe Armand will talk about Michelin’s approach to transitioning from products to services. He will share the journey of building a new digital business for a novel market. Philippe will discuss how the team pivoted and will share insights and challenges on:

• Leveraging data for the Mobility data program – incubating the venture and shielding it from the company
• Pivoting to new territory and changing customers – managing the lag effect and working to understand a very different customer for a very different business
• Lessons learned in building new digital businesses and operating in a new market
• Having the skills and the humility to learn from scratch anew
• Starting with what you have but acknowledging that you may need reinforcements
• Having the relevant solution ready at the right time
• Pros and cons of being a late mover vs a first mover educating the market

A Practical Approach towards Digital Transformation – Organizing Teams, Building Capabilities, Leveraging AI, and Collaborating with Digital Startups

Dr. Qi Wang will talk about a practical and value-driven approach to PepsiCo’s digital transformation journey across it’s global R&D organization, a Billion dollar food and beverage company aiming to drive a positive impact on the planet and people. Qi will share insights on:

• Leveraging the core strength of its business models while adopting fit-for-purpose technologies to achieve both scale and speed
• A hybrid organization and operating model with strong leadership commitment, cultivating a community of diverse talent with digital expertise
• Start with the business problems to solve and build interoperable capabilities for predictive analytics, AI and human intelligence
• Follow a roadmap to think big and move towards the future with a series of value driven investments, avoiding the pitfalls with thinking big where the grand vision makes it hard to land
• Collaborating with external partners including digital startups.
  

Fostering a Culture of Experimentation and Customer-Centric Innovation

Matt Rich leads digital innovation across customer-facing businesses at BP. He will talk about how BP drives customer-centric innovation by enabling people to experiment, fail fast, and leverage empathy:

• Helping to build innovation culture and leadership culture to drive innovation
• Enabling legacy teams to embrace experimentation and become comfortable with failure – and supporting people to work in agile ways and leverage new tools and technologies
• Driving idea generation throughout the organization – and leveraging design thinking and lean startup to develop solutions on decarbonization with speed and tackle difficulties early on
• Driving innovation with a clear purpose (decarbonization)

Circular Business Models and Value Assessment – and Overcoming Linear Lock-Ins

The Futures of China – Leveraging Scenarios to Inform Corporate Innovation, Marketing and HR Strategies and Long-Term Plans

Björn Theis will lead a lab on leveraging scenarios to inform strategic involvement in China. He will briefly introduce the large-scope scenario study Evonik has conducted and share the main strategic findings. This will be followed by a group workshop.
The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Understand the scenarios and the most important strategic insights for each of the scenarios
• Work in groups on a selected research question focused on innovation, marketing, or HR
• Use the future wheel approach to identify the consequences of the main development with respect to the group’s research question
• Work as a group to determine how to respond to the challenges and opportunities the results of the future wheel present
• Harvest the workshop’s results