Most executives and their lieutenants, influencers are out of their comfort zone with regards to innovation and how to shape the future for three key reasons:

# Too busy
# Just don’t know...
# ...and don’t know how to get started

Stefan Lindegaard will lead and facilitate a discussion on what we can do to upgrade our executives on innovation.

Strategic Innovation is an organizational capability the fuels growth and renewal of mature organizations. It operates in a context of high uncertainty and ambiguity, and therefore requires different managerial and executional approaches than those that drive the core business.

Companies initiate strategic innovation on a sporadic basis but fail to sustain it and evolve their expertise.

Research is converging around the basic principles associated with successful development of this important organizational expertise. Professor Gina O’Connor will share the results of a 25 year research program, and introduce a set of 8 tenets that enable organizations to develop and sustain a sustainable capability for strategic innovation.

Gina Colarelli O’Connor is Professor of Innovation Management and Fischer Family Chaired Professor at Babson College. She conducts research and teaches on the topic of Corporate Innovation.

Gina has published numerous scholarly papers and co-authored three books for organizational leaders on managing breakthrough innovation in large mature companies. Five of her papers have received best paper of the year awards. The second book, Grabbing Lightning was named one of the top books of the year by Strategy + Business Magazine in 2009 and the third, Beyond the Champion: Institutionalizing Innovation through People, was nominated for the Academy of Management’s Best Book of the Year in 2019. In 2018 Gina was honored to be named a Crawford Fellow by the Product Development & Management Association.

Andre Marquis and Stefan Dierks will discuss how MHP’s adoption of Hypershift’s Platform for Innovation Performance Management (IPM) has allowed MHP to navigate through covid-induced market change with agility and direct their sales efforts towards new market opportunities.

You will learn how IPM differs from other approaches to innovation and harnesses the power of an all-digital, metrics-driven program at scale, spanning ideation to commercialization, to allow for a dynamic and operational connection between strategy, innovation, and sales.

Andre Marquis is the CEO of Hypershift Systems, a software company focused on Innovation Performance Management that helps companies realize the benefits of running innovation at scale as a data-driven, strategic function.

Andre was formerly the Executive Director of the Lester Center for Entrepreneurship at U.C. Berkeley, founder of the Innovation Acceleration Group, and a serial entrepreneur with a track record of startups with initial public offerings and acquisitions. Prior to U.C. Berkeley, Andre co-founded the Chorus Group at Eli Lilly, where he pioneered agile business processes for successful drug development programs running >10x cheaper and 3x faster than the industry average. Andre is now bringing this wealth of expertise to Hypershift’s corporate customers.

Stefan Dierks is Partner and Head of Service Unit Digital Services at MHP, a Porsche Company. In this role, Stefan is responsible for new venture creation, co-investments, incubation of new business models, and delivery of digital services.

In times of unprecedented change and extreme uncertainty, organizations must take action, but traditional responses will be less effective. As an innovation leader, you may be concerned about what the crisis and subsequent downturn means for your business. While understood, entrepreneurial leaders must remember that downturns can be a great time to grow. Anyone can grow a company when markets are booming, cash is free flowing, and everything is going up. When the froth clears, only those with true strategic insight prevail.

• Survive: Stabilize your business not just with the basics but through utilising repurposing and partnering, building employee engagement, communicating clearly, and accelerating learning velocity
• Reset: Revisit your existing strategic plan and reset this to take into account the new normal, including updating your critical beliefs which form your choices, setting a direction, building on your competitive advantage, and updating your strategic priorities
• Thrive: Dramatically grow and prosper on the other inside including identifying and taking advantage of strategic insights through disciplined flexibility

The next few months will be tough, but as entrepreneurs we need to embrace the upcoming opportunities and grow through and on the other side of the downturn.

Dr. Rebecca Homkes is a high-growth strategy specialist who serves as a Lecturer at the London Business School (LBS), a Director at the Strategic Management Centre (SMC) in London, and previous Fellow at the London School of Economics’ Centre for Economic Performance (CEP). With her boutique consultancy, she works with CEOs and executive teams of the top global companies and fast-growing enterprises on developing and executing strategies for growth as well as established enterprises in digital strategy, navigating successful innovation journeys, and establishing innovation capabilities.

Rebecca is the director of the global Active Learning Programme (ALP) for the Young President’s Organization (YPO) and works with high-growth and scaling entrepreneurial companies across industries and countries. She is also a senior strategic advisor for GSV Labs (Global Silicon Valley), working to democratize entrepreneurship through corporate and young company consultancy, ecosystem building and online collaborative platforms; a partner with GrowthX, a Silicon Valley investment ecosystem and innovation consultancy; and is the faculty lead of two large European Fintech scaling and growth focused accelerators. A global keynote speaker, she is also a member of several advisory boards, directed the joint McKinsey & Co and LSE Centre for Economic Performance Global Management Project since 2007 and has written for publications such as the Harvard Business Review, Businessweek, Fortune, and Forbes.

Most large corporate enterprises treat strategy, R&D, and innovation as separate and distinct functions – worthy of specialized teams, segmented funding, reporting structures and operational charters. This is starting to change. Many large enterprises are reimagining their system for creative transformation in a more holistic and integrated way.

The early signs of this change are becoming visible as large enterprises are evolving to create a system in which strategy, R&D and innovation all work together in harmony to drive the creative transformation outcomes of a company.

Steve Schwartz is one of the founding partners of The Inovo Group, a strategic innovation consulting firm. Steve is an engineer by training but an entrepreneur by nature. He has spent 30 years in various technology and commercialization roles and is passionate about how large organizations pursue transformational growth in a systematic way.

Steve holds a BSE in computer engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; an MS in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and an MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University.

Tim Kidd has worked in various innovation roles inside DSM for the past 17 years, spanning the whole innovation journey from value creation through to value capture. Recently, Tim moved to DSM’s Innovation Center that drives long-term innovation outside the scope of the mainstream business through a Global Business Incubator and Emerging Business Areas. In his current role as Innovation Excellence Manager, Tim works with fellow innovators across DSM business groups to apply the right mindset, toolset and connect to the right skillset for impactful, purpose led, sustainable innovations.

Line Lyst is currently Global Head of New Ventures & Commercial Partnerships at GN. As an executive and front-runner in digital transformation, she enables large enterprises to innovate at speed and scale in order to own the future rather than being disrupted by it.

Bernd Zimmerman is since 2018 Global Head of Organization Development and Innovation at Siemens Healthineers AG with global responsibility for organizational development, leadership model, DI&E, employee retention and innovation culture.

Heather Wishart-Smith is the Senior Vice President, Technology & Innovation for Jacobs. An integrator of digital disruption and innovation, Heather is a registered Professional Engineer and certified Project Management Professional with proven experience managing large design programs and developing, managing, and turning around troubled offices in the architectural/engineering professional services market.

"Inventions wrapped in art" are more than just words inside Oakley's Foothill Ranch HQ, it's the idea that defines the brand. During his tenure as a Senior Director of Product Strategy at Oakley, Luiz Diaz led multiple product innovation initiatives ranging from incorporating electronics into sunglasses to developing new products for Oakley's sport performance categories and more recently leading all Oakley's product innovations in response to the COVID crisis.

From starting her career back in 2003 in the Contact Center, Fatema Pirone is now leading Innovation for CIBC enterprise-wide. In this role she is aiming to drive education and awareness about emerging trends and tech, test and learn new ideas and championing complex initiatives throughout the bank; her leadership continues to evoke thoughtful conversations and impactful execution, creating purposeful client experiences.

Panel hosted by Dr. Simone Ahuja, the founder of Blood Orange, an innovation and strategy consultancy headquartered in Minneapolis, USA. She is co-author of the international bestseller, Jugaad Innovation, and intrapreneurship playbook Disrupt-It-Yourself (HarperCollins Leadership, 2019). She recently released micro-learning course, Innovating Out of Crisis in partnership with LinkedIn Learning.

Many corporates adopt leadership competency assessment frameworks and most of these have innovation as one of its core elements. Most organizations find that the innovation competency is low in their organization. Of course, it is a no brainer that almost all the leaders in these organizations want it to improve.

Also, most leaders want innovation to be institutionalised across their organization. However, not all succeed. There are many frameworks and models published but understanding and adapting them in each context itself is a challenge. Since leaders who want to institutionalise innovation but are unable to achieve it despite having a lot of knowledge and expertise at their disposal, I call this a ‘mirage’.

In this session, Shreyas will share share his learnings on how leaders can deal with the mirage.

Shreyas Bakshi is the Vice President – Innovation for Mahindra and Mahindra Limited since 2016.

Before then, he has 7.5 years of experience facilitating corporates to leverage innovation to drive projects, train people and architect the organizational journey to institutionalise innovation.

Prior to then, he has over 20 years of experience of leading ventures based on ahead of its time technologies and managing innovations done by others. This experience in across industrial domains in private & public sectors of India & UK.

Jason Wild is the Global Leader of the Ignite team, a strategic innovation lab where Salesforce collaborates with its customers to help them to reinvent their role in the marketplace.

In this session, Jason will share learnings from nearly 20 years of leading innovation and transformation work around the world, focusing on the mindsets and disciplines required to achieve true transformation in a post-COVID world.

Jason Wild is Senior Vice President of Strategic Innovation at Salesforce, leading a global team of Igniters who engage leading companies around the world to transform themselves to be more customer-centric. Ignite is sponsored by the Chairman and CEO and is the strategic innovation lab where Salesforce collaborates to reinvent clients’ role in the marketplace.

Jason is currently co-authoring a book with Dr. Linda Hill of the Harvard Business School slated for publication in 2021. The book will feature new research and insights related to the next generation of leadership and the power of good.

It takes a lot of effort to push any new innovation out to commercialization; the initiative has to be worth the effort.

Discover proven techniques used to quantify and score early innovations to weed out the duds and push forward the most impactful programs.

Lorrie enjoyed a 21 year career at Nike, with her last role in 2017 as the VP of Nike’s Material Science and Innovation. Her passion for design, innovation and sustainability has made her a recognized global leader in bringing innovation to all facets of Nike’s products as well as shaping the future of the apparel and footwear industry.