Matthew E. May believes he has the best job in the world: part creativity coach, part innovation catalyst. Matt works with creative teams all over the world, helping them track down elegant solutions to complex problems. On matters of innovation and design strategy he is a close advisor to senior management of companies such as Amgen, Toyota, ADP, Intuit, and Edmunds.com.

He is the author of four critically acclaimed, award-winning, books on business innovation and a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review blogs, Fast Company Design, OPEN Forum Idea Hub, and University of Toronto’s The Rotman Magazine. His articles have appeared in frog design’s Design Mind, Thinkers50.com, MIT/Sloan Management Review, Strategy+Business, Quartz, and USAToday.

Matt’s work has been featured or mentioned in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, USA Today, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, Forbes, INC magazine, Fast Company, Wharton Leadership Digest, CIO Insight, American Enterprise Institute, The Miami Herald, and The Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on numerous radio shows, television, and online shows, including MSNBC, NPR, and ESPN.

Matt received his training in design thinking from the Stanford d school, holds an MBA in Marketing and Organization Design from The Wharton School, as well as a BA in Social and Behavioral Sciences from Johns Hopkins University, but he considers winning the The New Yorker cartoon caption contest as one of his proudest and most creative achievements.

Matt encouraged Innovation Navigation listeners to start focusing on one of the most important but most forgotten parts of the creative process – subtraction, or what to ignore and leave out. He pointed to examples of the power of simplification like Sudoku, the rules to which can be explained in a single sentence, and Apple’s ecosystem – for all its parts, developed to enable consumers to buy just one song instead of an entire album. He recommends that people and organizations trying to simplify ask those who receive their work – managers, supply chain partners, and so on – what they can stop doing or adding, and thinks we’ll be surprised by what we can start leaving out.