Inspiring Innovation Speaker

If I had no budget limitations, who would I invite to speak about innovation for my colleagues? Recently I was asked to provide a list of inspiring speakers about innovation. The focus of the talk should be in the area of creativity, innovation and invention. This is the list I came up with. If you have other's you would recommend, please leave a comment!

My list, again, in no specific order:

  1. Scott Berkun, author of 'The Myth of Innovation'. Nice book about what innovation is and what it's not.
  2. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of 'Flow: The psychology of optimal experience'.
  3. John Seely Brown, ex Xerox PARC director, talks, publishes and thinks about new forms of learning and education and the role of technology. Wrote an interesting report for McKinsey called ‘The next frontiers of innovation’ with the next person on this list
  4. John Hagel, thinker/author about mega trends (shifts) in the world and its meaning for enterprises.
  5. Clay Christensen, author of the well-known books about innovation: The Innovators Prescription, the Innovator's Dilemma and the Innovator's Solution.
  6. Dev Patnaik, author of book about innovation culture ('Wired to Care') and recently wrote a great article titled: ‘Innovation starts with empathy’.
  7. David Murray, recently wrote a book about building ideas on other ideas. It's titled ‘Borrowing Brilliance’.
  8. Henry William Chesbrough, the Open Innovation guru.
  9. Edward de Bono, author of several inspiring books about creativity, invention and innovation.
  10. Rene Jansen, inspiring speaker on the edge of organization, innovation and technology.
  11. Someone at IBM to tell about their (Innovation) Jam Sessions.
  12. Someone at Innocentive or Proctor & Gamble to tell about Innocentive and crowdsourcing innovation.
  13. Dave Snowden, special thinker and practioners on the edge of innovation and knowledge management.
  14. Thomas Davenport, recently published an interesting article about 'reverse engineering Google's innovation machine'.
  15. Tim Brown, director of IDEO about 'design thinking'.
  16. Darell Rigby, Kara Gruver and James Allen, authors of a June HBR article 'Innovation in Turbulent Times'. Interesting how they show companies that successfully and structurally innovate have paired leadership: analytic left-brainer thinkers and an imaginative right-brain partner.
Tags van Technorati: ,,

Popular posts

Keep the Intranet Small

Image
This tweet by Jonathan Phillips ( @digitaljonathan ) triggered to finalize this post, that's been burning in my draft box. I've always been intrigued by how unsuccessful many intranets are. And there are all kinds of good reasons for intranet failure. One of the things that is hardly ever mentioned is: Shouldn't the intranet be smaller? Usually intranets are huge. Lots and lots of pages with lots and lots of content. With complex navigation. The intranet  evaluation surveys almost always show employees only use the news page and people finder. But still we build and maintain nice big intranets. Not only stats point to smaller intranets. There are others reasons as well. I came up with a few. If you have more, just leave a comment. Here's my list: -            user requirements: users don't require large intranet -            search/navigation: searching and navigating a small intranet is easier than in a large intranet -            mobile: the content of the
Read more

Enterprise 2.0 Research

Image
There's not too much fundamental research on Enterprise 2.0. Deloitte recently published interesting research done on enterprise 2.0 implementations and their return-on-investment. In the EU research has also done as well. Study is being done for the European Commission and it was carried out by Tech4i2, IDC and Headshift. What was the goal of the study? Goals of the study To provide a clear definition of Enterprise 2.0 is, describe the market and the positioning of EU industry, also in comparison with US and Asia; To analyze the take-up of Enterprise 2.0, the organizational requirements, and the role on the transition to a knowledge based low-carbon economy; To collect evidence on its macro-economic impact, as a market opportunity for the European Software industry and as a productivity tool for European business; To identify and analyse both the direct and contextual challenges, including the need for Next Generation Access and the legal barriers; To analyse an
Read more

Innovation in Turbulent Times

Image
I love reading articles about innovation. And every now and then you read one that is very interesting. "Innovation in Turbulent Times" by Rigby, Gruver, Allen (in HBR, June 2009) is one of them. This article takes fashion companies as an example for continuous, year-by-year innovation. And how successful fashion companies are usually led by two people: a left-brainer and a right-brainer. "If you don't have highly creative people in positions of real authority, you won't get innovation. Most companies in other industries ignore this lesson." They extend this to show that successful non-fashion companies have the same kind of leadership. And this kind of leadership is usually also characterized by a long-term relationship. I think this concept can also be extended to teams and projects as well. More often than not, people are good at one or the other: thinking up great concepts or ideas, or, making them. In teams and projects we can learn from this as
Read more