We all face moments of profound uncertainty—whether launching new ventures, transforming organizations, or reinventing careers. While we can’t eliminate uncertainty, we can learn to navigate it with purpose and confidence.

Through captivating stories from the frontlines, this keynote reveals a powerful approach to turning uncertainty from an obstacle into an opportunity for growth.

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The strategic role of innovation to deliver business growth and speed to market is harder – and more important – than ever.

• Are innovation opportunities tightly aligned with business strategies based on valuable problems to solve?
• How to incorporate sustainability requirements into the strategic innovation choices?

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Welcome to Arizona State University and W.P. Carey School of Business, a hub of innovation where ideas ignite, and boundaries are redefined.

In this keynote, Hitendra will share with you how ASU’s unique ecosystem is fostering groundbreaking partnerships between academia and industry in one of the fastest growing entrepreneurial ecosystems in the world.

Picture this: You’re sitting in Caterpillar’s headquarters, surrounded by images of the iconic yellow machines that have built the world’s infrastructure for generations. Your team has just developed a revolutionary concept that could disrupt the construction industry. But there’s a catch – testing it in the market under the Caterpillar name could risk the brand’s hard-earned reputation if things go wrong. What Caterpillar developed next was nothing short of brilliant – a systematic approach to market testing that protected their brand while allowing for rapid experimentation.

In this session, you’ll learn how established brands like Caterpillar manage the tension between innovation and safeguarding their reputation. Key insights include practical ways to overcome a legacy brand’s innovation challenge:
– The Shadow Brand Solution
– Digital Innovation Labs Framework
– Implementation Strategies
– Risk Management Benefits

The rise in new challenges (like sustainability and climate, amongst others) that are impacting enterprise the world over, require a change in the way we innovate, particularly when it comes to collaborations.

This new way of working requires the coordination of a multitude of players, with different short-term objectives, but shared long term goals, each contributing their unique capabilities.

Unilever faces a multitude of these challenges, and as one of the largest Consumer Goods companies in the world we are looking to constantly evolve our partnership models in order to innovate at a faster and more impactful pace.

This evolution has given rise to the ‘Ecosystem Innovation Model’.

In this session, Kyle will provide an overview of ExxonMobil’s Open Innovation program from inception through the current focus on scaling.

Participants will be given practical advice on how to create and/or manage a successful open innovation program, including:
– Definition of four key stages all open innovation programs go through
– Detailed implementation plans for each stage with suggested key performance metrics
– Practical advice on how to overcome the most common objections and how to be successful
– Current plans for how to scale the program to meet growing demand

Open Innovation has been interpreted many ways. By focusing on its core and original meaning and applying it in an strategic end-to-end way within R&D, organizations will have better ROI on product and process development.

Open Innovation is complementary and enabler to core and non-core innovation development and provides better acceleration opportunities within R&D, regardless of commercialization success.

Innovation at TD Bank goes beyond being a buzzword—it’s a foundational ethos that drives meaningful change.

This session will explore TD’s inclusive, culture-first strategy, which empowers employees to contribute to innovation at every level.

This approach demonstrates how addressing real customer challenges has democratized innovation, breaking down silos and fostering a collaborative environment.

CVC professionals face the challenge of balancing financial returns with strategic impact.

In this session, Geetha Dholakia, Portfolio Program Director at TDK Ventures, explores how CVCs can maximize value by fostering effective collaborations between parent corporations and startups.

Key insights include aligning startup opportunities with corporate objectives, driving mutual value through structured collaboration, and evolving partnerships to support growth and innovation.

By leveraging diverse engagement models and ensuring alignment from due diligence to post-investment, this session provides actionable strategies for CVCs to enhance their role as innovation enablers.

How can leaders unlock their teams’ and organizations’ potential to address high-level systemic problems like global health equity, the climate crisis, food security, or biodiversity loss?

Peter will share a framework to align people, culture, systems, and self-leadership to foster innovation, impact, and profitable growth.

Walk away inspired and equipped to create lasting change.

Innovation often favors the new – but should it? How should brands balance new launches with nurturing previous ones?

Drawing on insights from Haleon, this session will question the “”new or nothing”” mindset and explore why last year’s launch could be your next sustainable success.

Are you ready to unlock your organization’s full innovation potential? This interactive workshop provides a practical framework for understanding and advancing your innovation maturity.

Participants will engage in a self-assessment process based on a comprehensive Innovation Maturity Model, resulting in a personalized maturity profile and actionable steps for growth.

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Many companies celebrate innovation, but few have mastered the art of turning ideas into reality. What if hackathons and innovation programs could be more than symbolic?

Ed Essey, creator of Microsoft’s Garage Growth Framework, reveals the secrets behind transforming short-term experiments into long-term success.

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In this interactive session Rachel Gordon, Founder of Triple Agent will sit down with Rainer Struck, Global VP of Innovation Transformation at Mars, to discuss his personal and professional innovation journey.

Rainer will reflect on his transition from leading some of the world’s most loved candy brands in marketing to leading the transformation of the way in which Mars innovates.

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Join innovation and AI thought leader Mohan Nair for a groundbreaking keynote that explores the balance between leveraging artificial intelligence and maintaining your unique human cognitive capabilities.

Drawing from decades of research and experience, Mohan Nair reveals how AI-obsession can lead to cognitive decay while offering practical strategies to reclaim your inner innovator.

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Explore the delicate interplay between innovation and bureaucracy in this dynamic 60-minute roundtable, inspired by the book “Innovation Against the Bureaucratic Octopus”.

This session brings together thought leaders to unpack how bureaucracy, often seen as a barrier, can be navigated or even leveraged to foster innovation.

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Transparency and Collaboration are key success factors to break silos, leverage past experience, and share best practices across your organization.

But it won’t be enough to earn trust from your Management. You need to deliver performance, like any other Function.

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Innovators are famously reluctant to predict whether or not an idea will have impact. But CEO and CFO demand realistic projections of financial returns, lives saved, or positive environmental impact.

If we can’t give a prediction, we can’t get funding.

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Enterprises fail to successfully innovate because they fail to robustly test assumptions.

In this interactive workshop, get hands-on with A.I tools that can be used to make you faster and more effective at identifying assumptions and exhaustively testing them to give you confidence to invest further.

Then, hear from senior executives from leading organizations on how even validated assumptions can’t save teams from a culture that isn’t ready for innovation to succeed.

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Issuing a call for innovative new product ideas can open the floodgates from eager employees who want to take initiative and exercise their creativity. Unfortunately, most of these ideas are not pursued.

Many are too small to make a difference, others are too far-fetched to be relevant, and others, while interesting, simply cannot be supported given limited resources.

These well-meaning initiatives result in cynicism and a dampened innovation culture, rather than the opposite.

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Incubation is hard. How do you turn an actionable yet uncertain idea into a big opportunity a skeptical CFO will fund? Failure rates are high and personal reputations are often on the line.

Join this interactive, chocolate-fueled workshop to try out a new approach for navigating this difficult journey.

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Unlock your organization’s full innovation potential with our interactive Innovation Diagnostic session. Discover how top brands like Comcast, Winnebago, and Dick’s Sporting Goods have supercharged their innovation programs.

Through hands-on exercises, you’ll:

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Discover how to overcome barriers to innovation, or resistance to change, by using the Innovation Storytelling method to create organizational alignment in this three-part innovation workshop series.

Participants will learn how to tell better stories that engage and align key stakeholders, get audiences on board with their vision, and deliver maximum impact.

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