Innov8rs Connect on Governance, Portfolio Mgt & Program Mgt (28-30 September 2021)

This presentation will share the story of how Katherine Radeka developed the Rapid Learning Cycles framework for innovation programs. Her journey started when a team tried to use Scrum in an Advanced R&D group at a large company. The team’s struggles and successes led to three breakthroughs in how a team needs to apply Agile principles for physical products. She’ll share how this team incorporated these breakthroughs to accelerate Advanced Research and how she systematized the process into a repeatable framework for driving innovation from idea to launch.

Katherine Radeka is a professional keynote speaker, author and the founder and executive director of the Rapid Learning Cycles Institute, which supports a growing global community of Rapid Learning Cycles Certified® Professionals who are actively using the framework to get their best ideas to market faster. She has worked with companies on every continent except Antarctica, and in industries from aerospace to medical devices and pharmaceuticals to consumer electronics and alternative energy. In 2015, Katherine published the first edition of The Shortest Distance Between You and Your New Product. Her first book, The Mastery of Innovation, was published in 2012 and won the Shingo Research Award. Her most recent book, High Velocity Innovation was published in Fall 2019 by Career Press. Katherine has climbed seven of the tallest peaks in the Cascade Mountains and spent ten days alone on the Pacific Crest Trail until an encounter with a bear convinced her that she needed a change in strategic direction.

Establishing and maintaining innovation pipelines inside large organizations is a huge challenge. Meeting that challenge requires new ways of working at the team level focused on experimentation and iteration, and at the leadership level focused on evidence-based decision-making, metered funding and portfolio management. Our experience over the last decade has seen the growth board emerge as a key venue where these new ways of working converge. This session will unpack the role of the growth board in driving and managing an innovation strategy. We’ll use examples from multiple large corporations and government organizations to illustrate the key ingredients to establishing an effective growth board – its membership, its approach to decision making and the key metrics for evaluating success.

Jonathan is focused on transforming businesses through changing culture, embracing innovation, strategic disruption, and building sustainable, responsive organizations that are capable of thriving in the digital environment. Jonathan is Senior Faculty at Lean Startup Co. He has worked as a consultant, trainer and workshop facilitator with global corporations, early-stage startups, government agencies and nonprofits with clients including Mastercard, Cargill, Fortive, Whirlpool, Simply Business, US Dept of Defense, US Air Force, UK Ministry of Defense, the Metropolitan Police, Pearson, and many more. Jonathan has an LLB from The University of Leeds, UK and is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Does your organizarion measure innovation and its outcomes? Is there any sort of governance over your high impact projects that are also higher risk? Does the governance you have in place empower innovation or stifle it? In this session, we will cover the topic of how organizations can measure, control and budget innovation without creating a stifling beaurocracy and while still enabling the unpredictable nature of innovation and entrepreneurship.

Since 2011, Ahi Gvirtsman has accumulated a rich experience in forming, building and running innovation programs for various types of organizations both as the manager of such programs and as a mentor to innovation managers of diverse types of organizations (corporations, municipalities, military). He personally designed, built and managed the innovation program of HP’s software division covering 20,000 employees worldwide. In his book “The PEAK innovation principles”, released in 2017, Ahi offers a common framework based on his experience that can be implemented by any type of organization in any industry as a way of turning itself into being innovation proficient. He is a 25+ year veteran of the software industry with roles ranging from large corporations to small startups and has an MSc in computer science from the Technion and an MBA from Tel-Aviv University. Currently, Ahi is the co-founder of Spyre, a company which guarantees at least a doubling of any organization’s innovation outcomes.

Lack of transparency around the entire innovation process from strategy through to delivery can often make it feel as though ideas disappear into a black hole once they have left the ideation/evaluation stage. Innovators need to be able to engage with the rest of the pipeline to ensure that their ideas aren’t being lost but instead are being morphed into a robust reality that bring benefit to the business. In this session, Ivan will discuss a well-integrated approach to end-to-end business transformation, combining the culture of innovation and project management teams to help prioritize the entire portfolio and empower leaders to confidently invest time, people and funds into projects that will provide value. During this session, expect to gain insights on: – How a single entity responsible for end-to-end business transformation creates widespread involvement in the innovation process. – How improved portfolio prioritization enhances your project delivery performance. – How to drive value from your innovation portfolio, with benefits centrally managed, monitored and understood during and after project execution.

Ivan has over 25 years of consulting experience in both Innovation and PPM and has been an adviser to Microsoft since 2003. Ivan is the global leader of our business and is a major respected expert in innovation delivery, project management excellence and business case justification. He helps edison365 clients drive innovation into their core business processes and helps them make ideas work for their organization.

Enterprise Innovation Management is often thought of different and distinct from Project/Program/Product Portfolio Management leading to questions of EIM versus PPM. In this interactive session we will explore how PPM – whether your portfolios are Products, Programs or Projects – needs to be an integral part of your overall Enterprise Innovation Management framework and toolset. We will bring “Jobs To Be Done” type of thinking to the discussion to explore the linkages and what “Jobs” we are trying to accomplish to meet corporate goals.

Mike Bauer currently serves as Sopheon’s Chief Product Officer responsible for Sopheon’s product vision and roadmap overseeing product management, user experience and product marketing. Mike brings over thirty years of experience in building and leading cross-functional teams and organizations to successfully bring new companies and products to market. His experience includes working in a range of industries that include: data communications, enterprise software, connected products/IoT, sensor analytics, marketing automation, IT, Big Data, and embedded systems.

Noel Sobelman will present finding from his benchmark study on leading innovation portfolio management practices. Learn about the capabilities that separate top performing companies from the rest: – How leading companies govern portfolios to ensure strategy alignment – How leading companies optimize resource loading for priority projects to maximize R&D productivity – How leading companies conduct portfolio reviews using customer evidence to drive fact-based decisions – Leadership’s role managing the tension between the core business and exploratory new ventures – The use of enterprise software tools to enable real time portfolio analysis and decision making If you attend this session live uyou will be eligible to receive one of 10 copies of Michael Tushman and Charles O’Reilly book, Lead and Disrupt, updated with new examples and their latest analysis.

Noel Sobelman works with corporate leaders to accelerate core business vitality while simultaneously building new-growth businesses. For the past 25 years, he has worked in the areas of growth strategy, innovation capability building, portfolio management, organization design, ecosystem development, and digital enablement. He is widely recognized for bringing a practical and applicable approach to companies looking to ignite change. Noel’s background includes senior-level corporate roles, new venture creation, and executive advisory. He serves clients in multiple sectors, including life sciences, software, consumer electronics, telecommunications, automotive, consumer packaged goods, financial services, and renewable energy.

Artem created Cisco Services Innovation Office delivery model which is now serving as an example for other Cisco departments. Join Artem as he discusses Cisco’s current journey of establishing an ‘assembly line for innovation delivery’, creating one seamless and holistic process for converting successful ideas into realized value. In the session, expect to gain insights on: – How Cisco has moved from a disconnected innovation pipeline to a unified process, with complete visibility from the idea stage to business case creation and into a project for delivery. – How business cases that were previously difficult to standardize are now easy to manage and customize to each teams’ ways of working. – How Cisco is accelerating adoption from senior stakeholders by utilizing analytics. – The benefits of gamification and connecting the innovation process to your recognition program. – Why Cisco chose edison365 to support their end-to-end innovation and delivery process.

Artem manages Cisco Services Innovation Office and Intellectual Digitization program in the EMEAR Region and has over 20 years of experience in data services management, strategic development, and delivery engineering. On a daily basis you’ll find Artem supervising multinational SW development teams and project manager, ensuring project teams are equipped with resources and are delivering within the agreed time and budget. Ivan has over 25 years of consulting experience in both Innovation and PPM and has been an adviser to Microsoft since 2003. Ivan is the global leader of our business and is a major respected expert in innovation delivery, project management excellence and business case justification. He helps edison365 clients drive innovation into their core business processes and helps them make ideas work for their organization.

How can companies govern, be in control of and create more out of their innovation portfolio? Misha will share principles and lessons learned in years of portfolio management, also an investor. We will discuss some challenges around how to create a high-performing venture board, which taps into the ‘ideal’ collective mindset and mechanics of venture boards. We’ll also discuss what and when to innovate internally versus externally, as well as dynamics around committed capital versus budget in the scaling up phase.

Misha de Sterke is a creative entrepreneur and venture builder for Fortune 100 companies. Two times awarded author and senior partner at Innoleaps. Misha’s focus lies on helping clients protect, grow or transform their business. Combining a strategic perspective with a pragmatic and effective style of implementation where Strategy = Execution. Alceo Rapagna is Senior Partner at Innoleaps and CEO at Startupbootcamp Italy. Alceo was formerly Chief Digital Officer OTB Group (1.5B€ fashion group with brands such as Diesel, Marni, Maison Margiela), Chief Digital Officer RCS Mediagroup (1.2B€ publisher with titles as Corriere della Sera, Gazzetta dello Sport, El Mundo, Marca) and Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company (European lead Marketing & Sales and Consumer Practices).

Rita Gunther McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought-after speaker, and a longtime professor at Columbia Business School. She is widely recognized as a premier expert on leading innovation and growth during times of uncertainty. Rita has received the #1 achievement award for strategy from the prestigious Thinkers50 and has been consistently named one of the world’s Top 10 management thinkers in its bi-annual ranking. As a consultant to CEOs, her work has had a lasting impact on the strategy and growth programs of Fortune 500 companies worldwide. Rita is the author of the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013). Her new book is Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). She has written three other books, including Discovery Driven Growth, cited by Clayton Christensen as creating one of the most important management ideas ever developed. She is a highly sought-after speaker at exclusive corporate events around the globe, such as the Global Peter Drucker Forum. She received her Ph.D. from the Wharton School (University of Pennsylvania) and has degrees with honors from Barnard College and the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs. Ron is a globally experienced organizational transformation specialist sought out by boards to help them navigate some of the toughest operating environments within the consumer products, technology, and retail sectors. His leadership has rapidly transformed underperforming businesses and operating groups as well as non-profits to create measurable results in extraordinarily short timeframes. He has held C-level roles as CEO of Barnes & Noble, Sears Canada, and Brookstone, as well as senior leadership positions at Sony, Toys R Us, Sears Holdings and Best Buy. Ron has MBAs from Columbia Business School and London Business School. He is the co-founder, along with his wife, of the Ferguson Noonan Foundation, a 501(c)3 charity focused on educating underprivileged children.

CFOs and other senior finance and accounting executives within large corporations are often the last and most important hurdle many corporate innovators face when trying to secure funding for their new venture. In this Trending Topic, Mike Joslin (Director, High Alpha Innovation) talks through the Jobs-to-be-done of CFOs, how to craft business/investment cases that translate “innovation speak” into CFO language, and novel approaches to funding innovation that increase the odds of success.

Mike is a Director at High Alpha Innovation. Prior to High Alpha Innovation, Mike established and ran Marriott’s corporate venture capital program, supported portfolio companies at a $13B venture capital fund of funds and later stage investor, spun out tech-enabled startups at a startup studio, and consulted large corporations on growth strategy, innovation capabilities, and new venture development. Mike holds an MBA from Harvard Business School and began his career at Best Buy Co in marketing and new product development.