Genius 2020: Innovation Impact in Times of Transformational Change: Making Innovation Leadership Count

Just a few years ago, innovation success could be just reliably pushing out incremental innovation to your company’s product portfolio. Those days are gone. The current innovation climate is both uniquely challenging and uniquely exciting. We now face an abrupt discontinuity, a perfect storm, of sustainability, the circular economy, digitization and customization all at once. We are literally in the midst of a once-in-a-lifetime transition from one innovation curve to the next. The last time something similar happened was in the 1940s and 1950s, when society adopted oil and mass marketing. This year COVID-19 has made society much more receptive to change, causing an acceleration of this transformation. For innovation leaders, this poses a devilish dilemma: how long to exploit the old, how much time to explore the new, before we get overtaken. It is the place where innovation can be extraordinarily impactful – or negligent – for your organization. This presentation discusses how innovation leaders need to nurture and actively steer “the right brain-side” of their innovation capabilities, engaging in step-change projects and getting involved with partners. It provides practical examples how to do that: making specific changes to the tools and processes for doing innovation and leading it to perform outside your own and your organization’s comfort zone.