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

New Value Propositions with Connected Devices: Leveraging Complex Data, Scaling AI, and Managing Challenges

Jenn Gustetic will talk about how NASA selects ideas and collaborates with the ecosystem to develop new technologies for NASA’s portfolio. She will explain how the organization encourages collaboration, co-invests to develop ideas from lab to market, and acts as the hub-and-spoke of the ecosystem. Jenn will also discuss NASA’s journey to break silos and work horizontally across programs.

• Gathering and evaluating ideas internally and externally with diverse players – engaging communities, being the hub-and-spoke of the ecosystem, and encouraging collaboration through co-investments
• Identify the best ideas, funding ideas from maturation to hand-off with fluctuating budgets, and managing IP and tech transfer
• Balancing investments in projects that address NASA’s needs with higher risk ideas that may not have an obvious application
• Transitioning ideas to the next phase – training people and teams and ensuring ownership
• Developing a 3.0 innovation capacity strategy – disrupting silos, enabling the ecosystem to work seamlessly together, and taking people and leaders along

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

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

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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

How to Become Entrepreneurial – The Six Mindsets that Break the Rules

In his latest book, Break the Rules!, John Mullins draws on 20 years of field research to build a compelling argument that successful entrepreneurs exhibit one or more of six mindsets that allow them to challenge assumptions, overcome obstacles, mitigate risk and, sometimes, change the world. Surprisingly, however, 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.

John’s keynote will bring to life the six counter-conventional mindsets that enable iconic entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Elon Musk and others to take advantage of the opportunities that present themselves. Innovators of every kind and stripe owe it to themselves to understand, master, and embrace these winning mindsets.

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.

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

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

Five Big Learnings on Digital Transformation – Why Companies Struggle and How to Set Up for Success

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
  

New Value Propositions with Connected Devices: Leveraging Complex Data, Scaling AI, and Managing Challenges

Thomas Salditt will explain how BSH creates new value with connected devices and develops an ecosystem of services. He will discuss the company’s approach to creating value with AI and complex data. Thomas will also detail how the company organizes for digital innovation and AI, and he will share lessons learned.

• Creating new connected value propositions and business models – and leveraging data from connected devices to generate insights, guide R&D, and develop an ecosystem of services
• Transforming the existing organization and mind-set to embrace digital innovation – setting up a centralized digital unit for platform development as well as a future-oriented unit and accelerators focused on exploration and venturing
• Leveraging AI and complex data – overcoming initial difficulties and moving from lighthouse projects to scaling
• Dealing with the chicken and egg problem: needing the data to prove the value of the solution, and the solution to get the data
• Lessons learned on how to make digital innovation work and maintain momentum with AI

Leveraging Data to Create a 360° Customer View – Becoming More Data-Driven, Focusing on Consumer Journeys & Engagement, and Driving Direct-to-Consumer Sales

Thomas Salditt will talk about BSH’s journey towards leveraging data for a 360° customer view. He will share insights on what it takes to become data driven as well as what worked and what didn’t. Thomas will also share the company’s approach to creating and visualizing consumer journeys, moving towards a multichannel approach, and lessons learned in rolling out and scaling.

– Leveraging data to create 360° customer views and visualizing consumer journeys:

• Visualizing consumer journeys with data management – moving from single touchpoint to consumer engagement journey management and direct selling
• Bringing the tech system together and enabling marketing people
• Insights from implementing customer engagement journeys in several countries – accelerating and scaling after initial slow roll-out
• The approach to working with data visualization – and how it enables value creation, showcasing benefits of data

– Lessons learned in multichannel sales: Moving towards more direct-to-consumer sales, accelerated by covid

– Becoming more data-driven – what works and what doesn’t

• The need to have a clear understanding of what is to be achieved with tangible KPIs
• The importance of having someone to mediate between the business and data scientists to ensure that use cases create value and traction

Design, Innovate, Transform: Embedding Design and Customer Experience into Digital Programs to Change 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

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

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.

Managing Global Customers – How to Set Up for Success and Mind the Caveats

George Yip will talk about key success factors to successfully leverage global account management. Based on his research findings, he will discuss how companies can determine whether to use global account management, how to identify the right customers, and what approach to take.

• How to leverage global account management – from determining fit to customer needs to ensuring competitive advantage
• The scorecard for selecting global accounts – introducing three possible approaches and how to identify and implement the right one
• How to work with customers and move from bowtie to diamond relationship

From Bold Experimentation and Rapid Iteration to Leadership: How the Chinese Ecosystem Validates and Adapts Innovation Practices

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.

Digital Transformation: Accelerating Digital Product Velocity and Impact Through a 4-pillar Framework

Creating a Business Builder: Identifying the Best Entrepreneurs, Engaging Them, and Making Them Grow Faster & Stronger

Building Value-Adding Tech Partnerships & Business Models to Solve Big Problems – Exploring Three Collaboration Vectors

Hansjörg Reick will lead a lab on how companies can partner around technology to create value for all sides. He will briefly introduce P&G’s partnership approach including how the company partners up for commercializing internal technology, which models exist for that, and how profit is split. Hansjörg will proceed to explain three vectors and their sub-elements that will be the focus of a world café style group discussion.
Lab participants will discuss the following vectors within dedicated discussion groups:

• Vector 1: What kind of technology do you consider for external value creation efforts – and how does this align with overall business strategy and goals
• Vector 2: What are the formats and models for such partnerships – including licensing, JVs etc.
• Vector 3: How to define value and the right profit split – exploring multiple value dimensions
• Harvesting discussion results
  

Building Value-Adding Tech Partnerships & Business Models to Solve Big Problems – Exploring Three Collaboration Vectors

Hansjörg Reick will lead a lab on how companies can partner around technology to create value for all sides. He will briefly introduce P&G’s partnership approach including how the company partners up for commercializing internal technology, which models exist for that, and how profit is split. Hansjörg will proceed to explain three vectors and their sub-elements that will be the focus of a world café style group discussion.
Lab participants will discuss the following vectors within dedicated discussion groups:

• Vector 1: What kind of technology do you consider for external value creation efforts – and how does this align with overall business strategy and goals
• Vector 2: What are the formats and models for such partnerships – including licensing, JVs etc.
• Vector 3: How to define value and the right profit split – exploring multiple value dimensions
• Harvesting discussion results
  

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.

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

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

Building a Portfolio of Sustainable Solutions – Driving Cross-Functional Collaboration and Implementing the Governance Model

Lessons Learned in Incubating and Validating New Ventures

Uwe Kirschner will talk about Bosch’ experiences with new business creation and leveraging design thinking, lean, and agile. He will share lessons learned and discuss evaluation criteria for successful scaling. Uwe will also detail typical problems encountered even after initial successful validation, and how to transition new ventures into business units.

• Experiences from developing new businesses at Bosch using design thinking, lean and agile in over 200 projects
  • Typical problems in new business creation even after initial successful validation
  • Organizational ambidexterity – integrating new ventures into the business unit
    Creating the Bosch innovation framework starting from strategic framing until incubation with different maturity grades and specific gate criteria
  • Developing an agile business model innovation approach – combining elements of design thinking, lean, and agile, and weaving these into a new setup for an agile and iterative process
  • Leveraging the different benefits of each method and focusing on failing fast and cheap – learning ahead of investments
  • Criteria for new venture evaluation to ensure successful scaling
  • Encapsulating experiences from new business creation in a digital tool that is continuously updated and used for guiding and validating new ventures
• Lessons learned – the benefits of leveraging different methods, the need to determine maturity and validation level already achieved, and using a portfolio view for new ventures to compare them against each other to define appropriate portfolio actions

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.

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

Success Factors of a Creative Climate: Dimensions of Innovation Culture & Examples of Good Practices

The “Innovation Roundtable” is one result of a question we are all facing everyday: “how to deal with all the global changes?”.
The continuous run for the new – whether it is to compete on the market, to win customers or to develop new products – this is what brings us to Copenhagen.
The lab aims to identify the right organizational conditions for training the muscle for this run: The creativity muscle.

Creativity is a core competency to answer the global changes. So, in the lab we are learning which dimensions of creativity can be fostered by an organization.
Participants assess their working environment and exchange about the best factors of creativity within the group discussion.

At the end, every participant should own an individual set of examples and ideas how to influence and build a true environment for creativity within their organizations.

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Leveraging Digital Business Modelling

Jannis is working within the Volkswagen’s Ideation Hub that functions as an internal creative agency. He will lead a lab on digital business modelling with a Digital Canvas. He will briefly introduce the Hub’s approach to leveraging digital business modelling with the Digital Canvas followed by a try-out and exploration of the framework in discussion groups. The lab participants will learn and discuss the following:

• Try out the digital canvas framework with learning by doing
• Get to know specific methods used within the framework
• Harvest the results from the method try-out and discussion