The Human Side of Innovation: Building and Scaling a Design Thinking and Innovation Culture

Mauro Porcini will talk about how to design and create an organizational culture that enables a human-centric approach to innovation. He draws on his experience from PepsiCo and 3M to share how to overcome resistance to change, bridge silos, and connect communities with a common language, approach, and focus.

• How to build a new culture with new ways of working and new capabilities in order to change the innovation playbook, make it holistic, and place the focus on people
• What’s the right mindset of the innovator in this new global and tech-driven society? How to find them? How to inspire, mentor and grow them?
• Five stages of changing culture: denial, inner rejection, occasional leap of faith, quest of confidence, and holistic awareness
  • How to address the hidden rejection and identify people who genuinely support the culture change – ensuring people demonstrate commitment to the effort
  • Connecting co-conspirators to low hanging fruits to get the critical mass of proof points needed to scale change
  • From startup mode to integration and scaling – creating 15 design centers in every region of the world and integrating design with R&D and marketing

CoCreate – A Design Thinking Approach

Abstract TBA

Embedding Digital Transformation within the Organization and Taking People Along on the Journey

Abstract TBA

Bringing Corporate Innovations to Market

Corporate innovations often have a rocky road, particularly those with a strong technology focus. Having previously worked at Daimler and Volkswagen, and currently Chief Innovation Officer at People Flow company KONE, Amy Chen will share her insights and experiences on how to drive customer-focused innovation and organize for it in a global operating environment.
You will hear about the following topics:

• How to create an open space and the mindset for innovation? – Define what innovation means for your company
• How to move beyond experimentation? – Start from customers, combine business with technology, and other tricks
• How to set up for success, or not? – Create the right organization and funding model, and ways of working for your purposes

Pushing the Boundaries with AI, ML and Robotics within R&D – Making AI a Part of the Invention Process and Increasing Safety

Maurits van Tol will talk about how Johnson Matthey is working to bring about a vision of AI and ML, designing their own experiments and learning from them. He will share the approach taken to delivering on the vision, and he will share insights from the journey so far.

• The approach taken towards the vision of robot-populated labs aimed at enabling safety, speed, and innovation
•  Enabling AI and ML to learn from experiments and design their own – starting with the more difficult solid-state chemistry and shifting to shift to gas and liquids
•  Learnings on the ongoing journey of leveraging AI and robotics within R&D

Building an Internal Culture of Innovation and a Capability for External Collaboration with Startups and Ecosystems

Abstract tba

Driving and Growing Brands with Purpose – How to Make it Work and Avoid the Pitfalls

Rik Strubel is a marketing leader with over 15 years of experience in growing brands with purpose. He started with Unilever’s Dove to later lead the Axe brand globally, preceding his current role at Henkel. Rik will share his experience and learnings on growing brands with purpose:

• The brave marketing framework – bold, relevant, authentic, and value adding enabled by data and technology
• Pitfalls in growing brands with purpose illustrated with examples – from picking an irrelevant focus to lacking credibility to choosing the wrong thing
• Key learnings on how to drive brands with purpose

Driving Digital Transformation – Leaders as Enablers of Change

Rik Strubel will talk about the role of leadership in driving digital transformation. He will discuss common pitfalls in driving the transformation and how to overcome them. Rik will share learnings on:

• What often goes wrong in digital transformation – from lack of understanding what is needed to using too many and irrelevant KPIs
• What to do instead – understanding what good and bad look like and identifying what has fundamental impact on the business
• How to build a core leadership team and culture to enable coping with immense pressure and level of change – from clear vision and game plan through clear roles and walking the talk

The Power of Focused Collaboration: How One Startup Has Built a New Model for Innovation to Bring Self-Driving Cars to Market

Jody Kelman runs Lyft’s business unit that will deploy self-driving technology. She will talk about how the organization collaborates with incumbents at speed. Jody will also discuss how the organization revamped its approach to innovate in a world of fundamental uncertainty.

• Partnering with auto manufacturers with different ways of doing development and innovating – co-developing things together with partners, who benefit from Lyft’s startup culture
• Building tiger teams and organizing them around hyper-specific goals with very short time horizons for execution – empowering teams for quick change
• Developing an innovation practice and a resilient business model in a world of fundamental unknowns – building a practice based on overlap between current customer pain-points and technology development to move forward
• Creating specific milestones and translating uncertainty into a series of definable decisions
• The importance of storytelling in innovation

How Amazon’s Leadership Principles Create Fertile Ground for Innovation

In his presentation, Paul Misener will share context for Amazon’s Leadership Principles and ways in which organizations of any kind can apply these methods to cultivate a culture that continually innovates for its customers.

At Amazon, innovation doesn’t take place during a moment in time—like a hackathon or an incubator—it takes place as part of everyday work. From the Kindle and Amazon Go, to Alexa and Prime, Amazonians work to create products and services that help make life easier for customers. As an Amazon leader for more than two decades, Paul has lived and breathed Amazon’s culture of innovation and its relentless commitment to four guiding principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. In his tenure, he has witnessed incredible invention, growth, speed, and creativity, while also seeing firsthand how the company took calculated risks and failed.

Seeding Innovative Ideas and Partnering with the Ecosystem – Encouraging Collaboration, Engaging Communities and Transitioning Ideas to the Next Phase

Abstract TBA

Towards Sustainable Materials: Collaborating with Partners and Building a Framework and Scenarios to Close the Loop

Carla Seidel will talk about how BASF drives sustainability for materials for the circular economy. She will share the approach taken, from creating the framework to building scenarios to translating these into action. Carla will also discuss how the organization is working internally and with partners to deliver on targets.

• Developing a framework to define the scope – basing the framework on both, the technical and bio loop, for consumptive and non-consumptive materials
• Building four scenarios, looking at sustainability and digitalization: 1. safety first, 2. compliance 4.0, 3. staying the course, and 4. digital wild west
• Translating scenarios into strategy, and developing targets and a new research program with partners along the value chain
• Setting up a recycling incubator as a vehicle
• Lessons learned including ensuring management support, collaborating in a fast-moving field, and leveraging digitalization in materials research

Driving Digital Transformation – Embedding Customer Experience in Digital Initiatives and Taking Pragmatic Steps to Changing the Culture

Monica Dalla Riva will talk about Deutsche Telekom’s approach to driving culture change and embedding customer experience in digital transformation. She will discuss the steps taken to empower people and make them eager to join the transformation.

• Why customer experience matters for innovation and digital transformation – driving the transformation and the cultural shift to empower people and work across silos
• Taking small and pragmatic steps to transforming the culture:
  •  Reading the unwritten rules, habits, and ways of thinking in the organization
  •  Identifying change makers and enabling them to change the company
  •  Sustaining change efforts through ongoing communication – and empowering and engaging the organization
• Lessons learned including training and investing in people, driving a growth mindset, fostering open and flat leadership, and why a culture of failure doesn’t work for digital transformation

The Journey Towards Zero Impact Operations – Leveraging Agile Values and Principles, Organizing and Driving Employee Engagement

Anita Friis Sommer is Head of Sustainable Operations at LEGO Group. Dr. Sommer will talk about the new department’s approach to reducing carbon footprint, waste generation, and water consumption. Insights will be shared on:

• The approach taken to make Operations more sustainable – Leveraging agile mindset and principles, creating a lightweight portfolio process to frame sustainability activities in Operations – enables collaboration, fast learning loops and adaptive ways of working
• The role of new technologies in becoming zero impact; green energy, machine learning, automation and more…
• Organizing for sustainability – ensuring central guidance and framing while enabling local factory teams to implement, learn and scale
• The role of sustainability KPIs – process versus value-based measures and how to guide sustainable behaviors
• Driving employee awareness and engagement through campaigns; several ways to contribute and make the change
• Lessons learned on an ongoing journey including how to lead in a complex environment.

How We Manage Product Development to Meet Sustainability Transformation Demands

Tetra Pak is leading a sustainability transformation within the packaging industry. This requires us to simultaneously develop and sometimes transform all parts of the value chain. In this presentation will discuss how our products are evolving and what is takes to achieve this. Key lessons learned will be presented.

Session title tba

The details of this session will be made available soon

Digital Transformation: Aligning with Strategy, Ensuring Focus, Leveraging Data & AI, and Working with Partners

Shahab Salemy led a portfolio of programs across Nike driving the digital transformation of the organization. He will detail Nike’s digital transformation journey, how the organization has evolved its approach and how it organizes for it, embeds digital into the business, builds digital capabilities and rapidly accelerates the transformation. Shahab will explain the lessons learned in the journey, as well as how the organization leverages AI and data, and how it collaborates with startups.

• Organizing for digital transformation – evolving from a series of loosely managed initiatives to a highly centralized office to integrating digital
• Key lessons learned from aligning not only with top management but with those executing through the importance of embedding the work in the business to limiting the number of projects
• The organization’s triple double strategy and the reasons for aligning digital transformation with it in lieu of having two strategies
• Building key capabilities from how the product is made to how it is sold
• Rapidly accelerating the transformation, simplifying the strategy and changing decision-making process to respond to Covid-19
• Leveraging data and AI to make better decisions, move faster and simplify
• Collaborating and partnering with startups to build capabilities
  

Driving a Culture of Digital Collaboration

Having spent ten years driving the transformation of digital culture at Rolls-Royce, Manisha is COO at R2 Factory, leading its digital culture team. She will discuss a framework to engage all parts of the organisation in transformation, create the right environment to foster collaboration and embed digital mindset. Manisha will share insights on:

• Enabling everyone to play a part in digital innovation from spotting the problem areas to sharing pain points to influencing and opening doors
  • Building a safe environment and supporting people to come together to work on hard things – enabling people to understand shared pain-points and challenges, try things out, fail, and pivot
  • Creating a framework and going beyond teaching skills to establishing communities and the environment to foster digital – creating a global framework that speaks to the needs of local teams and departments
• Lessons learned including what worked and what didn’t and the practices that led to leaps in innovation

Five Key Digital Transformation Themes – Assessing and Impacting Digital Transformation at Your Organization

Sam Dickinson will lead a lab on digital transformation. He will start the lab off with a brief introduction to the five key themes for digital transformation. This will be followed by group discussion.
Lab participants will learn about and work on the following:

• Understanding the five key elements of digital transformation
• Assessing digital transformation at own organizations by completing an online organizational transformation survey
• Working in groups to compare and discuss the autogenerated report on five key digital transformation themes
• Harvesting the learnings

Why People Matter More Than Ever in the Digital Age

Sam Dickinson is the Head of Digital Transformation at Google Digital Academy, wherein he works on some of Google’s most exciting projects. He will talk about how Google puts people in focus across the organization including hiring, building effective teams, and fostering a culture of innovation.

• Tech-led vs. people-led transformation – why people are your superpower for transformation effort
• How Google has unlocked a people-led approach by focusing on 5 key areas: Customer Centricity; Technology, Data & Automation; Culture of Innovation; People Operations; Vision and Leadership

The Why Behind Lean & Agile: Insights from Psychology and Human Behavior Research

Innovation programs and organizations applying Lean and Agile principles and methods create faster and better innovation value and drive higher motivation and ownership of individuals and teams. Psychology and human behavior research underlines the foundational principles and provides valuable insights for a successful transformation of teams and entire organizations.

Transforming for Compelling Customer Experience: Leveraging Consumer Insights to Effectuate Customer-Centric Culture

Lawrence Gould will talk about the journey of propagating consumer insights within the firm and discuss the role they play in the organizational thrust to deliver compelling customer experience. He will briefly explain which methods are used in the effort as well as share how the journey has triggered cultural change.

• The journey from a fledgling consumer insights unit to playing a strategic role in support of a corporate-wide customer experience initiative
• Leveraging consumer insights to move from specs and hardware focus to customer experience centricity
  • Addressing the challenges of culture, silos, corporate tradition, and language
  • Getting internal buy-in to consumer insights by starting with quantitative data/evidence
  • Engaging strategy and innovation people to bring them on the journey step-by-step and to effectuate change
  • Building different types of customer experiences – and the role of consumer insights in defining and organizing around consumer experiences
  • How customer insights contribute to cultural change – and how customer experience plays a part in the firm’s new internal ways of working
• Learnings from the journey of cumulative growth of customer centricity within the organization
• Brief introduction to the consumer insights methods deployed

Cracking the Code of Open Innovation – Tried-And-True Startup Engagement Models and Key Success Factors

Noga Tal spearheads Microsoft’s relationships with startups and other partners such as accelerators, incubators, and innovation hubs among others. She will talk about how the organization approaches startup collaboration to create real value for startups and drive corporate innovation. Noga will share learnings on:

• How Microsoft evolved its startup collaboration approach and ways of working to adapt to changes in the ecosystem
• Building streamlined partnerships that stand out and ensure win-win and long-term relationships with startups – democratizing the collaboration approach and leveraging tried-and-true engagement models
• Driving innovation agenda and creating real value for startups
• Key factors for successful collaboration including how to set up for scale

Thinking Visually and Building Stories – Leveraging Rich Narratives in Innovation

Michael McKay will lead a lab on how to use rich narratives in innovation. He will start the lab off by explaining the reasons for using narratives, and will introduce a template for participants to use in crafting their own storylines. Michael will also share different variations of narratives to serve as inspiration.
The lab participants will learn and work on the following:

• Understand the role narratives can play in innovation – and learn how to use narratives and build a storyline in their own work
• Craft a storyline around a theme using provided visual props or their own sketches
• Create a short film to document the storyline
• Harvest learnings, share, and view other participants’ work during video screening of films

Leveraging Digital Business Modelling with the Digital Canvas

Abstract tba.

Creating Visions and Stories for a People and Planet Positive Future

This interactive session will combine an individual exercise and group discussions on envisioning products in and related aspects in different future world’s contexts.

Design Thinking Crash Course – Launching Design Thinking In Your Organization & Effectively Training Mindsets

Camilla Damgaard-Soerensen will lead a design thinking crash course where participants will experience and learn the method as well as get a taste for the most important design thinking mindsets for their organization. Camilla will also discuss how to get started with design thinking in your organization tomorrow.

Become Counter-Conventional: How the Six Break-The-Rules Mindsets of Entrepreneurs Can Help You Change Your Company and Change the World

Every business these days wants its people to be more “entrepreneurial,” it seems. Rarely, however, do their leaders know exactly what they mean. Do they want more out-of-the-box thinking? Probably. More innovation? For sure. Do they want more risk? Not so much!
This Lab, based on John’s forthcoming book, Counter-Conventional, will bring to life the six break-the-rules mindsets of entrepreneurs that can help anyone to challenge assumptions, off-load risk, and overcome obstacles that stand in their way to take advantage of opportunities that present themselves. Surprisingly, perhaps, these mindsets run counter to the conventional wisdom that’s typically found in large and well-established companies. They fly in the face of what’s taught in business schools about strategy, core competencies, target marketing, financing and more.
Working in small breakout groups, Lab participants will:

• Apply one or more of these mindsets to an innovation challenge they currently face
• Develop a one-page action plan for putting one or more of their new mindsets to work to resolve that challenge.

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

Accelerating Competitive Advantages with AI: From Experimental to Advanced Use of Artificial Intelligence

Against a backdrop of fluctuating growth forecasts, ongoing political and economic uncertainty and ever more rapid digital transformation programmes, Dr. Chris Brauer reveals AI-led digital transformation increasingly holds the key to gaining and retaining a competitive edge – for individual organisations and within and across industry sectors and markets. This heightened performance includes forging ahead on vital areas like productivity and business outcomes as well as on more culturally-led (but no less important) aspects such as fostering an ethos of active participation and continuous learning among employees, and establishing clear usage principles to ensure the technology’s benefits are experienced in their entirety, without bias and promoting inclusively. Dr. Chris Brauer will start off the lab sharing the results of his data-driven benchmarking study of best practices for scaling AI investments and securing competitive edge in over 4,000 organisations followed by group discussions and the opportunity for participants to rapidly benchmark themselves in the key dimensions of AI-driven competitive advantages and explore the differences and success factors in different strategic approaches and experiences of AI.

The Rise of Innovation in China and Implications for Non-Chinese Companies

While China has long had a reputation for imitation, Chinese companies are now starting to innovate. Well known Chinese innovators include Alibaba, Haier, Huawei and Tencent, but there are also thousands of smaller Chinese innovators, as yet unknown to the world.

This Lab will begin with a presentation on:

• Characteristics of China’s environment that foster innovation, both on the supply and the demand side.
• The specific nature of Chinese companies’ approach to innovation and the factors driving their foreign expansion.
• An insiders’ view of China’s under-the-radar, globally competitive innovators
• How non-Chinese companies can participate in the Chinese national innovation system, not only for China but also for the world.

The Discussion portion of the Lab will focus on (1) identifying the threats to your company from Chinese innovation, and (2) how your company can innovate in China for both China and the world.

Data as an Asset: Three Zones of Value – and How to Move Between Them

Amit Joshi will talk about the value of data and will explain the three different zones organizations can be in regarding the relationship between data-generated value and incurred costs. After introducing the three zones, Amit will explain the pitfalls of the initial and the mature zone. He will also detail the drivers and liabilities of different zones, as well as how organizations can move between them to remain at the sweet spot where the value gained is higher than the cost.

The value of data across three zones:

• Zone one: the costs of setting up infrastructure, compliance, etc. outweigh value gained
• Zone two: the sweet spot – value created exceeds the cost incurred
• Zone three: The cost of outdated and no longer unique data exceeds value added
• Drivers and liabilities for different zones – and how to move from one zone to another

Ethical Boundaries in Leveraging Machine Learning for Marketing – Making Tradeoffs and Minding the Slippery Slope of Data Use

Machine learning can help marketers make forecasts and assess innovation adoption. Amit Joshi will lead a lab on the ethics of data gathering and use – and resulting tradeoffs. He will start the lab off with a short introduction to the slippery slope in crossing the ethical boundaries to making predictions more accurate, followed by a hands-on group simulation exercise and discussion. The lab participants will learn and discuss the following:

• How data can lead to a slippery slope, crossing ethical lines, albeit not legal ones
• Making a projection on earnings, in the form of a simulation exercise, and determine the accuracy of data needed at each stage
• Discuss the issues and ethical boundaries from the exercise, and resulting tradeoffs

Gaining the Competitive Edge in a Disruptive World: How to Craft & Lead a Radical Business Transformation?

It is a critical time for most incumbent organizations: their existing business models are failing, and they struggle to adapt to the fast-paced technological change. Corporations need to fight back as they have a big unfair advantage with their deep domain expertise, large customer base, strong brands and vast intellectual property.

This lab offers inspiration and a proven blueprint to upgrade business models and get it fit for the digital economy. It kicks-off with a 20 min foundational presentation and is followed by break-outs with groups of 6-8 participants. The format is based on Carsten Linz’s best-selling book ‘Radical Business Model Transformation: Gaining the Competitive Edge in a Disruptive World’, which is considered a standard reference in business model and transformation literature. Join the movement to innovate for the future instead of digitizing the past!

Lab participants will:

• Get to know a highly effective strategic framework and learn through numerous case studies the patterns of successful business model and digital transformations and what separates the winners from the losers.
• Work in groups on own innovation-led transformation challenges and develop a (first) transformation path for one of the participants real-world cases with the help of the Business Transformation Board.
• Explore how project, team and organization leaders need to rethink leadership to pioneer the fourth industrial revolution. Learn how to apply the next-practice capabilities of NewLeadership and get your firm’s executive team on board.