Co-Author - Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life
Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg is the co-author of Innovation as Usual: How to Help Your People Bring Great Ideas to Life, a Harvard Business Review Press book on the art of driving innovation in regular organizations. As Partner at the advisory firm The Innovation Architects, he has worked with managers in nearly all parts of the globe, including China, India, Russia, Singapore, Britain, France, the United States and his native country, Denmark. He is a frequent corporate speaker and has delivered keynotes at events such as Time Warner’s Senior Leadership Series, HP’s European Executive Partner Summit, Johnson & Johnson’s HCS Fall Leadership Meeting, and The Economist’s Talent Management Conference. Mr. Wedell-Wedellsborg holds an MA in Media Science from the University of Copenhagen and an MBA from IESE Business School. His research has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Sunday Times, The Telegraph, BBC Radio, Bloomberg Businessweek and the Financial Times. He has founded two startups: the Danish non-profit knowledge sharing platform Akademisk Opgavebank and 13 MBAs, a private professional network for Harvard, Stanford, Columbia and ten other top-ranked business schools. He currently serves as an advisor to two startup incubators, namely the BBC WorldWide Labs in London and the venture development firm Prehype. Prior to his business career, Mr. Wedell-Wedellsborg served for four years as an officer and infantry platoon commander with the Danish Royal Guards.
Wedell-Wedellsborg discussed the process of coming up with and moving new ideas up in the corporate ladder. He advocated “stealth storming,” am alternative to flamboyant brainstorming sessions that result in lots of ideas that go nowhere, which ought to be done by professionals at navigating corporate politics to bring a few great ideas to life. Also, he talked about how many ideas will come up in a firm, and the reality is that many will be bad ideas, so there is vital importance to having a systematic process that can handle these ideas and not only kill the bad ones, but select and encourage the good ideas that are generated alongside.
