Amer Iqbal

Throw a rock and you’re likely to hit an innovation lab. Chances are your company has a team of people walking around in jeans and sneakers, a room filled with VR headsets and IoT tech, or a mysterious incubator for disruptive ideas somewhere in the business.

Every organisation is investing in innovation, but the ugly truth is that very few know where they should be placing their bets. From our experience with hundreds of companies across many geographies, we have observed five typical ways that corporates approach innovation – the problem is choosing which one is right for you.

The 5 Ways to Innovate is a simple framework that helps organizations learn from the world’s best innovators in order to build for the business of tomorrow.

What do Balinese coffee, Japanese martial arts, and Covid-19 have in common?

Let’s face it: a global pandemic is a strange environment for business as usual. According to Satya Nadella, we saw 2 years of digital transformation in 2 months. Something strange is brewing. Unprecedented times certainly call for unprecedented measures, but is there some common wisdom available to help the business world wake up and smell the coffee?

One of the most common ways that corporates innovate is through internal upskilling programs, but many of these efforts fall short: armies of newly agile certified employees flock back to their desk only to discover everything around them stayed the same. This session reveals some of the secrets that global tech companies have used to drive innovation behaviour, providing a simple framework for internal change that has been successfully adopted by incumbents in traditional industries.

Steve Jobs was the ultimate purist – but whether it was members of Jony Ive’s design team or members of the board, would Apple have been as successful without the pragmatists who balanced him? On the other hand, pragmatism and consensus alone rarely changes the game; as the saying goes, if you search every park in every city in the world, you’ll find no statues of committees.

So when it comes to designing organisations, what is the right balance of purism vs. pragmatism?

Like an elastic band, only when we have two equally opposing forces do we stretch the possibilities. Only when we create tension in the right balance do we generate energy that can be harnessed into corporate innovation. Digital disruptors have created disproportionate impact across numerous industries by finding this balance. What can large corporates learn from the startup world and how can leaders organise their teams for success in a digital economy?

What does Customer Experience mean to you? In a corporate world grappling to come to terms with jargon and concepts from the alien field of design, the term CX has come to cover everything from focus groups to website design.

The reality is most organisations are currently investing in some form of customer centricity initiative, and the level of investment has been constantly increasing over the past five years. However, very few leaders are willing to rate their organisation as having achieved a sufficient level of customer centricity.

In order to turn the tide of increasing wasted investment and executive burnout, we explore some practical structural and operational changes that can be made in most organisations to drastically improve the effectiveness of their CX investments and truly put the customer at the heart of their business.

I know, I know… you’ve been hearing about VR since the 80’s. But this year will definitely be the year Digital Reality explodes and becomes a must-have for every business – right?

When we get past the conversation about when AR/VR will hit critical mass, a strangely uncomfortable question arises: is your business actually ready for the revolution? What’s your strategy and how will you demonstrate ROI?

The Digital Reality Maturity Model is a framework that corporates can use to assess where they are on the readiness scale and inform pragmatic decisions to get started, scale over time, and make the virtual a reality.

“If it’s so innovative, show me an example where our competitors have done it before”

The field of innovation is rich with stories of how the core business is often disconnected from the role that innovation plays in the organisation. No one is more familiar with this than those who work in the innovation teams, labs, incubators and accelerators across the corporate landscape.

One of the key challenges any innovation team faces is maintaining the speed and autonomy required to truly achieve new things. The risk averse traditional business case process of endless information gathering, data point development and stakeholder navigation is often the very thing that stifles innovation efforts and ironically ensures failure.

This topic provides guiding principles and operational frameworks to business leaders charged with managing innovation efforts, as well as practical advice for practitioners working hands-on within innovation teams.

According to an executive coach for companies like Apple, Adobe and eBay, more than two thirds of C-Level meetings are actually failures. Yet, most people walk out believing they’ve done a good job. Rather than just “don’t fail”, how can you elevate that senior presentation from just good to actually being great?

Executive communication is one of the most valuable tools an individual can build in their career, and yet there is little practical training available to build the awareness needed to make an impact when it counts.

If you want to be remembered, be different. Don’t waste your time and theirs by playing it safe – you’re here because you’re an expert and you’re passionate about your idea – so go and talk about it! Using these tools, it’s actually possible to elevate from mere presentation to a true conversation.