Keynotes and track talks by 30 corporate speakers from different industries and leading academic experts
Presentations are short and mostly take place in tracks. This enables attendees to stay focused on their key interests and challenges. Each day includes more time for interaction than presentation in order to ensure high levels of energy and exchange.
Director Product Mgmt, Microsoft Research & AI, CoFounder Cortana
Microsoft
Ed is a principal product manager for Microsoft Research where he leads teams developing new products. He started out as a scientist, trained as a researcher, and ultimately fell in love with applying those skills to creating new products and businesses. Ed joined MSR from the Cortana team where he co-founded the product, lead product planning, and lead some targeted AI innovation and ecosystem projects. Prior to Microsoft, Ed lead insight strategy teams for Yahoo!, helping build new products and better businesses across search, browse, rich media, and ecommerce. And even before that, Ed lead market research, user research, business intelligence, and management consulting teams focused on applying research to make the organization smarter and better. Ed holds a Ph.D. and a deep love of coffee.
Our market landscape is changing, our customer’s expectations evolving, and new partners or competitors are springing up faster than ever. Internal innovation isn’t antithetical to global businesses, it is a core necessity. So, what is it really like to be an intrapreneur and what can we learn from other intrapreneurs to help us deliver in this new world? Ed Doran will share real world examples and lessons of moving from new discovery to new products and businesses to help you on this journey.
Global Chief People Officer, AWS Professional Services
Amazon Web Services
Since 2019, Eric Tachibana has been the global Chief People Officer for the Professional Services organization at Amazon Web Services. In this role, Eric helps large enterprise customers across Asia with the organizational transformations necessary to deliver maximum benefits from the Cloud Operating Model and supports AWS teams with hiring, training, and culture at scale. From 2014 – 2018, Eric was the Professional Services lead for APAC, Japan, and China.
Previous to his role at Amazon, Eric was the Asia Pacific COO for UBS, across the Investment Banking, Wealth Management, and Asset Management Chief Technology Office where he was responsible for Innovation Management, Enterprise Architecture & Strategy, and Enterprise Social Networks. Before UBS, Eric was with Bank of America Merrill Lynch where he served as APAC Technology and Operations COO and was responsible for Innovation Management, Business Management, Risk & Compliance, and Employee Engagement.
Prior to his years in banking, Eric was an entrepreneur, focusing on the financial services space for over 14 years - creating, building, and eventually exiting, successful small and mid-sized companies in Silicon Valley, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, and the U.K. Today Tachibana continues his entrepreneurial endeavors as a regional angel investor, strategic adviser, and mentor for young, developing entrepreneurs, serving as founding non-executive advisor for 7 companies ranging from IT, to F&B, to retail/fashion and as Program Advisor for the DBS Bank HotSpot Accelerator.
Eric is also an author of 8 books on technology development and innovation management and continues to earn regional industry recognition as an adjunct Professor at the National University of Singapore and Thammasat University business schools.
Eric Tachibana will lead a lab on culture transformation. He will start the lab off with an introduction to Amazon’s culture and a deep dive into the organization’s approach to culture change. This will be followed by group discussion.
Lab participants will learn the following:
Eric Tachibana will talk about how Amazon’s culture supports innovation. He will discuss how key manifestations of culture fuse together to create a strong culture of innovation. Eric will share insights on:
Senior Vice President, Corporate Research & Development
P&G
Lee Ellen Drechsler’s career at Procter & Gamble has included technical leadership roles across Beauty Care, Baby Care and Corporate R&D, with responsibilities from upstream Disruptive Innovation to downstream Product Supply. Lee Ellen leads Corporate Transformative Platform Technology (TPT), Global Packaging, Process and Open Innovation Disciplines, and Glad JV organizations with a mission to continue building P&G’s long-held reputation as a world leader of growth driven by innovation. She is accelerating the way P&G delivers game-changing and sustainable products, packages, and services, leveraging early in-market learning as well as collaborations with strong academic and business partners.
Lee Ellen Dreschler will talk about how P&G’s breakthrough innovation unit identifies and develops ideas and technologies to create new S-curves. She will explain how the unit has evolved to become multifunctional, and how its set-up and positioning allow it to work with and develop platform technologies. Lee Ellen will tell the story of the unit’s journey in developing new products from starting small through working with customers and pivoting, as well how it collaborates with startups.
Chief Technology Officer
Siemens Healthineers
Peter Schardt has been Chief Technology Officer of Siemens Healthineers since October 01, 2018.
The doctor of physics joined Siemens in 1995 as a project manager for X-ray tubes. There he developed high-performance tubes for computed tomography before taking over the management of the entire predevelopment for X-ray tubes in 2002. In 2009, Peter assumed business responsibility for the Mechatronics Competence Center in Kemnath. This is one of the largest integrated development and manufacturing sites of Siemens Healthineers worldwide.
In 2011, he moved to the Laboratory Diagnostics business unit as program manager for the Atellica Solution product family. In this role, he played a key role in the final development and market launch of the new system, which is a trend-setter in laboratory diagnostics. On January 1,2018, Peter took over worldwide management of the X-ray Technology product division.
Change within companies is often not as easy and fast as we desire. Judit Richwien, Peter Schardt, and Marc Schlichtner will present initiatives taken at Siemens Healthineers to accelerate cultural and organizational change in support of digital transformation and customer centricity. They will talk about their three individual perspectives through the lens of the Transformers Club (T-Club), a bottom up grass root initiative.
Transformers club – a bottom-up grassroots initiative: addressing the challenge of digital transformation:
Senior Lecturer
MIT Sloan School of Management
David Robertson is a Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Formerly, as a Professor of Practice at the Wharton School, Robertson taught Innovation and Product Development in the undergraduate, MBA, and executive education programs. From 2002 through 2010, Robertson was the LEGO Professor of Innovation and Technology Management at Switzerland’s Institute for Management Development (IMD), which received the #1 worldwide ranking by The Financial Times for its executive education programs. At IMD, he was Program Director for IMD’s largest program, the Program for Executive Development, and co-Director of the Making Business Sense of IT program, a joint program between IMD and MIT Sloan.
Understanding the cultures of the communities you’re serving is critical for effective innovation. David Robertson will talk about how organizations can learn from Cherokee culture to develop empathy dor their customers. He will share insights on:
David Robertson will lead a lab on different ways to use empathy for innovation. He will briefly introduce the platinum rule of innovation and illustrate how the Cherokee’s 12 languages of empathy can serve to provide some new ways to empathize with customers. This will be followed by a card game within the groups. Lab participants will learn and work on the following:
Chief Commercial Officer for Group Technology
BP
Dr Steve Cook completed a D.Phil. in Bio-organic chemistry at Jesus College, Oxford before joining BP in 1998. He managed various R&D projects in support of BP’s Acetyls and Olefins businesses (mainly in the areas of hetero- and homogeneous catalysis) before moving into a strategy role in BP’s Downstream business. This strategy work led to the creation of BP’s strategic accounts organisation, initially focused on deepening strategic relationships with global automotive companies.
Steve then moved into BP’s Renewables business in 2002, managing collaborative demonstration projects in the area of hydrogen refuelling for fuel cell vehicles which included the construction and operation of the UK’s first hydrogen refuelling station in London. During 2005 Steve was part of the launch team for BP’s Alternative Energy Business and following launch led various commercial business development activity in the gas to power business, originating major projects in the UK and Russia.
In 2009 Steve moved to the Group Technology organisation in BP, leading long term strategy development and change management.
From 2012 Steve led the Technology commercialisation team which was established to maximise the value of BP’s technology through the application of appropriate commercial models to technology programmes. Steve was VP Technology Commercialisation and part of BP’s Upstream Technology leadership team.
Steve is currently Chief Commercial Officer for Group Technology with a remit that includes long term technology strategy, emerging and disruptive technology, technology intelligence and technology commercialisation and business building through BP’s new scale up capability: Launchpad. All in service of creating the energy system of the future.
Energy is fundamental to human progress and the challenge is to provide this to more people while also helping the world move to a net zero carbon future. BP has a 100 year incumbency in hydrocarbon energy. In February we announced a new ambition to move the company and help the world get to net zero carbon by mid-century or sooner. This will require BP to develop new global businesses outside of oil and gas. This talk will share some of the successes and failures in BP’s use of venturing and business building in its new Launchpad subsidiary as we have begun to build an ‘ambidextrous’ organisation, able to grow its existing businesses while at the same time entrepreneurially building disruptive new businesses for the future.
Group Chief Design Officer, Design Center Founder
Thales
Didier Boulet is the THALES Design Center Director, an organization he co-founded in 2013. Its mission is to leverage Design-driven Innovation or Design Thinking throughout THALES. The Design Center Network is currently present in 9 locations across the world. Didier is also leading the digital transformation plan related to User Experience Design (UX). Since joining Thales Didier has held a number of high-level positions in Business, Innovation and Design. He is also serving on a number of Innovation & Governance Boards including THALES Learning Hub, Design Center Network, Digital Marketing & THALES Belgium Board. Didier is an innovation activist and “serial intrapreneur”, having founded and co-created multiple innovation platforms and initiatives. He is a Belgian national and a graduate of the Haute Ecole de Bruxelles.
Thales has been on a Design Thinking journey for more than 10 years, implementing in the process a strong design (thinking) center network (15+ DCs opened across the world). More recently, Thales Digital Transformation has opened a new design workstream focusing on User Experience Design creating a unique context for the creation of a design organization/capabilities.
In this talk, Didier will present synthetic elements of this journey and the more recent convergence towards Thales Design which brings together design thinking, UX/UI, product/service design & industrial design. Didier will present some of the lessons learned and key pivots along the way.
Cordell Hardy will talk about how 3M is strengthening its culture with clarity of purpose. He will discuss how the organization incorporates purpose from product portfolio to sustainability. Cordell will share insights on:
SVP Digital Customer Solutions / ABB Turbocharging
ABB
Cristian Corotto is the global Head of Digital Customer Solutions at Turbo Systems Switzerland Ltd. where he leads an international cross-functional team in developing and implementing innovative business models, platforms and digital solutions.
Formerly VP Online Customer Experience at Nobel Biocare and Head of Buyer Relationship Marketing Europe for eBay Inc. he has extensive experience in digital innovation, strategic marketing, business development, change management and process optimization and has consistently driven the translation of data into value for both business and end customers.
He holds a Master’s degrees in both Marketing Management (Università degli Studi di Torino, Italy) and in Management Engineering (Università degli Studi di Genova, Italy) and gained his experiences at Pirelli, Fiat Group Automobiles (now Stellantis), Case New Holland and Iveco. In addition, Cristian also completed the Stanford Graduate School of Business executive program.
Cristian Corotto has taken the digital approach and mindset from his work at eBay first to a dental implant company then to ABB. He will discuss the ABB’s four-years long digital transformation journey and share learnings on:
Executive Vice President Finance Customer Services
Siemens Healthineers
Judit has more than 20 years’ experience in innovating, re-thinking and implementing finance of the future. She worked in multiple roles, countries and industries cross Siemens (like Digital Industry and Healthcare). Her often unconventional approaches created new ways of enabling tangible profit improvements and sustainable growth. Trying to do the same at less cost was never enough for her – as certified agile leader empowerment and agility are her enablers for successful innovations and digitalization.
She is an energetic and self-motivated team player and lifts traditional line management models to the next level of inspiring leadership. Therefore she loves to build, motivate and deeply engage in cross-functional and international teams fostering collaboration and thriving to improve things end-to-end. Being a powerful digital guardian, she combines the use of data to drive value based on unconventional ideas and new business models. As Customer Service CFO, Healthineers biggest horizontal, and as sponsor of the T-Club, she is a role model in level less thinking, enabling a culture of trust and an environment that nurtures our endeavor to the next big things in Healthcare.
Change within companies is often not as easy and fast as we desire. Judit Richwien, Peter Schardt, and Marc Schlichtner will present initiatives taken at Siemens Healthineers to accelerate cultural and organizational change in support of digital transformation and customer centricity. They will talk about their three individual perspectives through the lens of the Transformers Club (T-Club), a bottom up grass root initiative.
Transformers club – a bottom-up grassroots initiative: addressing the challenge of digital transformation:
VP, Head of Venture Building and Strategy, Stationary Solid Oxide Fuel Cells
Bosch
Sebastian Budischin has been VP for venture building and business model design as well as strategy development, market intelligence and product management for stationary fuel cells at Bosch since 2021.
Before that, he was Director in the Corporate Department for Business Model Innovation at Robert Bosch GmbH from June 2016 until end of 2020. He was responsible for the Accelerator Programs, the Business Model Academy Asia-Pacific as well as consulting activities for Industry 4.0. Before joining the department for Business Model Innovation, he was the head of marketing, business strategy and communication for Asia-Pacific for the electrical drive business.
In previous positions, he was working in the fields of marketing and strategy development in the automotive and power tool business. He studied international business in Stuttgart, GER and Michigan, USA.
Sebastian Budischin will talk about Bosch’s approach to growing an internal scale-up within a corporate environment. He will discuss the approach taken to maintaining the right degree of flexibility and independence for the venture as well as the strategy for collaborating with partners to accelerate growth. He will share challenges and best practices on:
Director, R&D External Innovation Technology Scout
PepsiCo
Kelly Van Dyke is a Director within the External innovation team for PepsiCo’s Global R&D organization. Kelly has 20 years of experience in the Food Industry, earning her BSc from Purdue University. She currently has accountability for identifying & driving technologies that will disrupt the Wellness & Health CPG category through strategic partnerships and business opportunities. Prior to this role, she led multiple highly successful Product Development teams delivering new innovations to multiple Global markets at PepsiCo and Kraft Foods, previously.
Kelly Van Dyke will talk about how PepsiCo collaborates with startups. She will introduce the organization’s tripartite collaboration strategy and will delve deeper into partnerships within R&D workstreams. Kelly will share insights on:
Managing Director, New Business
BASF
Since January 1, 2016 Volker Hammes is Managing Director of BASF New Business GmbH, Ludwigshafen/Germany. He is particularly responsible for Business Build-up of innovative material solutions e.g. for E-Power Management, Functional Feed Additives, and 3D-Printing (Additive Manufacturing). Additionally, he is Chairman of BASF 3D Printing Solutions GmbH, Heidelberg/Germany.
Currently, Volker Hammes serves on the Boards of Essentium Inc, Pflugerville/TX, USA, Evolve Additive Solutions, Minnetonka/MN, USA, and the NASDAQ listed company Materialise NV, Leuven/Belgium.
Born on July 21, 1963 in Essen, he is married with two children. Volker Hammes holds a Master of Science degree with first-class honors in Mechanical Engineering/Plastics Technology from RWTH Aachen University.
In this fireside chat, Volker Hammes and Axel Rosenø, CEO of Innovation Roundtable, discuss new business creation at BASF. They discuss how BASF is organized for new business creation and delve into lessons learned on building new businesses, managing challenges, and scaling. They further discuss why organizations should not go it alone and how to co-innovate with startups.
VP Head of Open Innovation
Signify
Study of chemistry in Germany, followed by a postdoc at Caltech. In 1995, joined Philips Research to work on LED materials. In 2004, transferred to Philips Lighting to continue with LED system development. In 2006, joined newly founded LED business group as CTO to develop LED lamps and systems for the emerging LED Lighting market. In 2011, continued to work on LED platforms with a build-up of a new supply base in Asia. Since 2013, working in Open Innovation to focus on the emerging digital Lighting market with Lighting being one of the most interesting verticals in IoT.
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Thomas Canova will talk about how Solvay develops and incubates new platform-based businesses. He will discuss how the organization identifies new opportunities, manages uncertainty, and collaborates with startups to develop and incubate new businesses. Thomas will share learnings on:
Sr Director Sustainability, Program Lead Circular Economy
Philips
As lead of the Philips Circular Economy program, Harald aims to drive innovation and business value creation via the transition to a circular economy. As such, he focuses on closing loops, product and business model design, further embedding sustainability and circular thinking into the core processes and culture of the company – with active engagement of employees. Prior to Philips, Harald worked as Director of the DNA Investigation Department at the Dutch Forensic Institute, and as transformation management consultant at McKinsey & Company.
Philips is a global leader in Health Technology, aiming to make the world healthier and more sustainable through innovation. Via its “Healthy People, Sustainable Planet” program, Philips is driving a broad agenda of societal and ecological development goals, with a strong focus on UN Sustainable Development Goals SDG3 (increasing the world’s health and well-being) and SDG12 (responsible consumption and production). In moving towards a Circular Economy, Philips’ aim is, by 2020, to reach 15% of its total revenue from circular propositions and to take back and repurpose all the large medical systems that its customers are prepared to return to it. Harald’s work on the Circular Economy program is focused on realizing the corporate ambitions, unlocking business value and innovation potential, with active involvement and engagement of Philips’ employees. In this talk Harald will describe the journey, including successes and challenges along the way.
Director of Customer Innovation
Porsche Digital
Florian has spent over 15 years in the mobility industry, starting by building up a Competence Center at Fraunhofer IAO for Mobility and Smart City Design with more than 120 employees. During this time, he was the Director and established a joint lab with MIT called Ambient Mobility. The focus was on exploring how converging trends such as electrification and sharing could be used to re-design the mobility solutions in our cities.
For the last 7 years, Florian has been at Porsche AG – and as Manager, helped create the VW Garage Mobility Lab with a first investment in the area of mobility and parking. Currently, he is the Director for Customer Innovation/Digital Business and is working with various start-ups related to mobility services, cycling and Web3. Florian studied Business Engineering at the University of Karlsruhe.
Porsche Digital was founded with the goal of helping Porsche digitalize the core and open up new business opportunities. Florian Rothfuss has been leading innovation projects for new business areas since the unit’s inception. He will discuss how Porsche Digital builds new digital businesses and interacts with the mothership. Key learnings on building digital businesses:
Global Business Manager Circular
Ingka Group (IKEA)
Pia Huusfelt leads the Circular Innovation and Transformation at INGKA Group, which includes designing future circular business models.
The work for Ingka Group (IKEA) is focused on human-centred design and innovation, exploring and testing ideas iteratively to quickly learn and adjust practices. Leading in the unknown, requires agile methodology including sprints, self-managing teams and high adaptability.
In some of her previous work, Pia has had leading positions as CEO for a Danish furniture retail chain, Director in Coop (Hypermarket), European Director in Specsavers (People & Culture), and CEO for Profil Optik (Optician chain) before joining Ingka Group. In all roles, Pia has focused on leading teams, sales, re-branding and positioning, acquisitions, and turnarounds. Pia has held several board and advisory board positions in start-ups.
Pia Huusfelt will talk about how IKEA innovates for circularity. She will share how the organization identifies innovation opportunities and builds circular business models around them while working in an agile way. Pia will share learnings on:
Global Sustainability Insight and Foresight Leader
IKEA
Trying to enjoy the journey, not the end. Being a student of my three small teachers in life. Last decade with Ingka Group (IKEA) working with sustainability and innovation, strategy.
This interactive session will combine an individual exercise and group discussions on envisioning products in and related aspects in different future world’s contexts.
Manager Special Projects
Ericsson
Hendrik Esser works as manager special projects at Ericsson. He is continuously exploring and driving new ways to create better results and greater organizations. He has more than 20 years of leadership experience in product development ranging from project- and project office management and technology management to being the COO of a large product development organization. On that journey he has led small (20 people) to very large (>7000 people), globally distributed organizations. Starting with the agile transformation of one of Ericsson’s Software development units in 2008, Hendrik has become one of the drivers of Ericsson’s enterprise transition. Today he works as in-house consultant driving the business agility transformation of one of Ericsson’s business areas with over 15000 people. With his passion to drive transformations, creating organizations that enable companies coping with the complexity of todays business world, Hendrik is also an internationally active change driver and ambassador. He participates in several cross-industry exchange groups, collaborates with research projects, voluntarily works as program director for the Agile Alliance’s Supporting Agile Adoption initiative and is a frequent speaker at international Agile-, Project management- and HR conferences as well as company events.
As part of its shift away from manufacturing consumer electronics to developing software solutions around its core strength in network infrastructure, Ericsson embarked in 2008 on a transformation effort that prioritized agile to help reorient the entire organization. Through his experiences at Ericsson, Hendrik Esser draws on the essential aspects of the organizational transformation to discuss how to leverage business agility for growth innovation.
Ericsson embarked in 2008 on a transformation effort that prioritized agile to help reorient the entire organization. Through his experiences at Ericsson, Hendrik Esser will talk about how to drive mindset change to create an adaptive organization and present some of the key lessons learned:
Head of Design Thinking and UX Design
Ørsted
With a broad background in design leadership, product innovation, user centred design thinking and launch of innovative global products and services, Michael now focuses on building human centered innovation cultures in large size organisations. His hands-on leadership approach has brought him to companies like Amazon, PayPal, eBay, Nokia and Lego as well as several startups. He currently leads the UX and design thinking practice at Ørsted, a leading renewable energy company.
At Ørsted, Michael oversees the creation of the Design Thinking strategy while maturing the UX design function for the company. This includes operational, strategic and cultural ways to embed design and design thinking in a program at global scale in conjunction with the agile transformation into SAFe (Scaled Agile Frameworks).
Michael lectures and teaches at several design schools and MBA programmes in design thinking and design strategy. He has recently been appointed adjunct professor of Design at the Royal Academy of Architecture and Design in Copenhagen (KADK). Furthermore he actively pursues communities and partnerships that rethink design in concert with the fields of Psychology, Business development and Marketing in an effort to create new frameworks for change.
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:
Karolina Bjurehed will talk about how Volvo Cars’ startup collaboration program evolved from early struggles to a success. She will also discuss the organization’s venture capital approach. Karolina will share insights on the following:
Making corporate-startup collaboration work:
Venture capital approach – supporting R&D with securing innovations through collaborating prior to investing
Agile Coach - Digitalization of R&D
BASF
Cordelia Krooß is an Agile Coach at BASF. She is responsible for Agile Transformation in Digitalization of R&D. A biologist by education, she sets up agile experiments and enables teams and executives to apply agile principles in an R&D context.
Cordelia is an acknowledged expert on Digital Transformation, with a strong background in coaching, organizational development, change management, learning and communications. In her 28 years with BASF, she has built a track record of sustainable successes. She was part of the team behind connect.BASF, one of the first Online Business Networks established in the German industry. When leading the Change Management workstream for BASF’s introduction of Office365, Cordelia established a consulting team for “New Ways of Working” that still operates today. Prior to this, she worked in various communication roles in Germany and Hong Kong.
The Lab will explore the frictions between the theory behind agile and the real world of R&D. Participants will discuss challenges in adopting agile in R&D, examine different aspects of the resulting frictions, and harvest insights and learnings.
Gaurav will talk about Schneider Electric’s approach to leveraging circular opportunities. He will explain how the organization brings together upstream and downstream initiatives and targets with the aim of creating circularity-ready products and enabling circular loops and circular business models. Gaurav will illustrate the approach with examples and will share how the organization drives circularity and what lessons were learned on the journey.
Principal Key Expert and Founder of T-Club
Siemens Healthineers
Marc Schlichtner has 21 years’ experience in innovations, portfolio management, project- & regional management and sales. As Portfolio Manager in he is driving the global digital health service portfolio and platform and ecosystem related ativities for Siemens Healthineers.
He is founder of the Transformation Club (T-Club). The T-Club is a Siemens Healthineers grass-root initiative, focusing on the cross-company transformation. In recent years, he has implemented many trendsetting future topics. All had a strong transformational character and ran in various businesses across Siemens. During his career he gathered multiyear experience in digital services, servitization, design thinking, digital business model design, customer centric innovation, digital transformation, loT and platform-based ecosystems, cross industries. He was part of incubation of internal lean startups. This 360-degree view provides him with all levers for a successful digital transformation.
As recognized thought leader in his domain he is member of Research Advisory Board of FIR at RWTH Aachen University, Advisory Board (DiHECO) Kaunas University of Technology & University of California Berkeley and the Advisory Board “MBA Leadership Digital Business Transformation” at the Quadriga University of Applied Sciences.
Change within companies is often not as easy and fast as we desire. Judit Richwien, Peter Schardt, and Marc Schlichtner will present initiatives taken at Siemens Healthineers to accelerate cultural and organizational change in support of digital transformation and customer centricity. They will talk about their three individual perspectives through the lens of the Transformers Club (T-Club), a bottom up grass root initiative.
Transformers club – a bottom-up grassroots initiative: addressing the challenge of digital transformation:
Professor, Innovation & Digital Transformation
Ivey Business School
Robert D. Austin is a Professor of Information Systems and Innovation at Ivey Business School, and an affiliated faculty member at Harvard Medical School. Prior to his current appointments, he was Professor of Management of Innovation and Digital Transformation at Copenhagen Business School, and before that, a professor of Technology and Operations Management at Harvard Business School. He is author or co-author of eight books, most recently The Adventures of an IT Leader (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016) and has published in many academic and practitioner journals, e.g. Harvard Business Review. He has held managerial positions at Ford and Novell, and served as CEO of the largest executive education provider in northern Europe. His research focuses on innovation, digital transformation, managing creative companies, and talent and performance management.
As recently as five years ago, GE was held up as an example of how companies should do digital transformation. They were not waiting to be forced to change, people said, they were “disrupting themselves.” They invested heavily, creating an entirely new GE Digital division, aspiring to become a “top ten software company.” People believed them, partly because of GE’s longstanding reputation as one of the world’s best managed companies. But in 2018, it became apparent that this ambitious transformation had veered off course. The company fell into an extended and deep crisis. In November 2021, the company announced that it would split up, which the Wall Street Journal described as “the end of the GE we knew” and a page turning in business history.
In this interactive lab, we will discuss what they were trying to do and how they tried to do it, in an effort to figure out what went wrong. Our end objective will be to extract lessons relevant to all companies about how to succeed in established firms with digital transformation — what the GE story can tell us about mistakes to avoid and how we should proceed.
Visting Fellow
Cranfield University
Ken Webster is a leading figure in the development of the theory and practice of a circular economy in its 21st century guise. He was, until recently Head of Innovation for the Ellen MacArthur Foundation* and helped establish the intellectual basis of their approach from its inception in 2010 through to 2018. He is currently a senior lecturer at the University of Exeter Business School’s Centre for Circular Economy where he is leading on the establishment of an International Society for Circular Economy in tandem with a number of leading academics across the globe. He is guest researcher at Linköping University in Sweden.
His book The Circular Economy: A Wealth of Flows (2nd Edition 2017) relates the connections between systems thinking, economic and business opportunity and the transition to a circular economy. He makes regular contributions to conferences, workshops and seminars around the world. His current interests include total product liability, open vs closed circular economy loops and the relationship between large and small scales in the creation of effective economic systems. He is a supervisory Board member of the Dutch Madaster Foundation, a materials passport initiative in the built environment.
*The Ellen MacArthur Foundation’s aim is to accelerate the transition from a linear ‘take-make-dispose’ economy to a circular economy
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Senior Industrial Fellow
Aston Business School
Ian Machan’s expertise, developed throughout his 40 years working with manufacturing businesses, are in supply chain, strategy and continuous improvement. Executive roles, both permanent and interim in the healthcare sector, followed an engineering and production career in traditional manufacturing and fast moving food consumer goods.
An experienced university industrial fellow, for the Advanced Services Group, Ian now leads their advisory services, including organisational development workshops, executive education and commissioned projects. He has worked extensively with several multi-billion dollar businesses in their transformation journey towards a servitized value offering.
Presentation: Based on the research and practical experience of The Advanced Services Group at Aston Business School, Ian Machan will present frameworks and tools to help manufacturing companies develop their own advanced services:
Exercise: Snakes and ladders service transformation game is an interactive group exercise that shares previous experiences in moving into advanced services. Using a snakes and ladder game format, the players are challenged to explore how the typical experiences of others would impact on their own company and their own potential to move into advanced services. It offers a tool to engage with others back in the home organization and jointly anticipate risks.
Professor of Innovation and REF Director
University of Bath
Ammon Salter is a Professor of Innovation and REF Director at the School of Management, University of Bath. He received his doctorate from SPRU at the University of Sussex in 1999, where he also worked as a researcher from 1998-2002. From 2003-2013, he was a faculty member at Imperial College London, acting as the co-Director of the Innovation Studies Centre. From 2009-2013, he was the Research Director of the UK Innovation Research Centre, which was collaboration between Imperial College London and the University of Cambridge. His research has been published widely, in journals such as Strategic Management Journal, Organization Science, Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Research Policy, Industrial and Corporate Change and California Management Review. His current research focuses on open and distributed models of innovation, social networks and innovation, and university-industry collaboration and typically involves engagement with policy and practice through collaborative projects with industrial and governmental partners.
Ammon Salter will lead a Lab on managing technologists. He will start off the Lab with a brief introduction to the main tensions in motivating and developing R&D staff as well as the trade-offs in resolving them. This will be followed by group discussions.
The Lab participants will learn and discuss the following: