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Jean-Philippe Deschamps graduated with a degree in marketing and business management from École des Hautes Etudes Commerciales (HEC) in Paris; from the European Institute of Business Administration, INSEAD in Fontainebleau, and from the Harvard Business School. He began his career as a commercial attaché in the New York City office of the French Embassy in the United States. Prior to joining IMD, Professor Deschamps was based in Brussels as a corporate vice-president with Arthur D. Little, and chairman of the firm’s technology and innovation management practice, which he created in 1981. Before that, he was Arthur D. Little’s first European practice leader for strategy and organization. He has thirty years of international management consulting experience throughout Europe, North America, Asia and the Middle-East. Deschamps is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, and co-author of Product Juggernauts: How Companies Mobilize to Generate Streams of Market Winners, which has been translated into six languages and long featured in the best-selling list of the Harvard Business School Press. His new book, Innovation Leaders: How Senior Executives Promote, Steer and Sustain Innovation was published by Wiley/Jossey-Bass in April 2008. He was recognized by The Economist as one of Europe’s influential innovation management thinkers and has given conferences and lectures throughout the world, including twice at the World Economic Forum in Davos.

On the show, Jean-Philippe Deschamps detailed his idea of “innovation governance.” Innovation management, he said, is quite tactical, project and process focused, and for a firm to truly be successful and innovative, it ought to have a broader guidance up to and including the C-suite and Board of Directors. These people need to set the firm on a grand path towards being innovative, to govern resource allocation, firm-wide values, human resources and more.

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Nancy Tennant is the Chief Innovation Officer and Vice President for Margin Realization for Whirlpool Corporation, reporting to the Chairman and CEO. In addition to leading Whirlpool’s innovation arm, she is one of the world’s leading thinkers and practitioners (theoretic practitioner) in transforming businesses and non-profit environments to achieve innovation from everyone and everywhere. Bloomburg Businessweek named Dr. Tennant one of the 25 Innovation Champions (IN25) in the world. She has been an adjunct faculty member of both the University of Notre Dame Mendoza College of Business and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business since 2003. In 2013 she co-founded the Certification Program for Innovation Mentors (CIMp) at the University of Notre Dame. Dr. Tennant is the author of numerous articles and the co-author of two best-selling books on innovation: Unleashing Innovation: How Whirlpool Transformed an Industry (Tennant Snyder & Duarte; Jossey-Bass, Wiley, 2008), and Strategic Innovation: Embedding Innovation as a Core Competency in Your Organization (Tennant Snyder & Duarte; Jossey-Bass, 2003). She is presently working on a new book about innovation to simplify how to get started in innovation, with a publication goal of 2015. She is the co-author of the best selling Mastering Virtual Teams (Duarte & Snyder; Jossey-Bass, 2006, 3rd edition), ranked by Amazon as one of the 50 best selling team books of all time. She is a frequent public speaker on the topic of innovation and organization change to “C” level audiences around the world including United Arab Emirates, China, Brazil, Peru, India, Italy and the UK. Dr. Tennant holds a doctorate in organizational behavior from The George Washington University. She is the President of the Board for the First Tee of Benton Harbor, a non-profit organization that offers character development and life skills to youth-at-risk through golf.

On Innovation Navigation, Tennant spoke about her time at Whirlpool, and how she helped transform the industrial stalwart into one of the most innovative firms in the world today. It is a story of a remarkable corporate turnaround and an immense success. Among other specifics, she dove into problems of the management of innovation – how a whole firm has to be retooled to become an innovative powerhouse. The right people must be found and trained, and the “invisible systems” like financing have to be shaped to allow experimentation and innovation, and the firm must eventually define for itself what innovation actually is and consists of, so that innovation can become a solvable business problem.

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Carla Diana is a hybrid designer keenly focused on realizing new visions for smart objects and the Internet of Things. In addition to her industry experience at some of the world’s top design firms such as Smart Design and frog design, Carla maintains strategic alliances with a number of academic research groups. She is a member of the Georgia Tech Socially Intelligent Machines Lab, and a faculty member at SVA and in the University of Pennsylvania’s Integrated Product Design Program where she developed the first course on Smart Objects. She is Advisor for the group Tomorrow-Lab, a young design firm that creates electro-mechanical solutions for smart devices and continues work as a Fellow at Smart Design, where she oversees the Smart Interaction Lab. Her recent article, “Talking, Walking Objects”, appeared on the cover of the New York Times Sunday Review in January 2013, and is a good representation of her view of our robotic future. She has just completed a children’s book for Maker Media about the future of 3D printing and design entitled LEO the Maker Prince.

http://carladiana.com/blog/

On the show, Carla Diana discussed her role in a new product design course at UPenn, focusing upon the design of new products for play and learning for small children. She also offered significant insight into how designers think about gender and design together. When a designer identifies a small demographic that is underserved, the designer ought to think about how to serve that specific group, and oftentimes, serving that group results in a product that is applicable to a broader population and is successful. She calls this approach “universal design.”

David A. Owens is professor of the practice of management at Vanderbilt’s Graduate School of Management where he also directs the Executive Development Institute. Specializing in innovation and new product development, he is known as a dynamic speaker and is the recipient of numerous teaching awards. He provides consulting services for a wide range of clients around the world, and his work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, London Guardian and San Jose Mercury News, as well as on NPR’s Marketplace. Owens has consulted for NASA, The Smithsonian, Nissan LEAF, Gibson Music, American Conservatory Theater, Alcatel, Tetra Pak, Tennessee Valley Authority, Cisco, LEGO, The Henry Ford Museum and many other organizations. He has done product design work for well-known firms including Daimler Benz, Apple Computer, Dell Computer, Coleman Camping, Corning World Kitchen, Steelcase and IDEO Product Development. He has also served as CEO of Griffin Technology, a global company that specializes in iPod, iPhone, and iPad accessories. Owens earned his Ph.D. in management science and engineering through a joint fellowship program between Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and its School of Engineering. He holds an M.S. in engineering product design and is a registered professional electrical engineer (P.E). In his current work, Owens focuses on concrete strategies for creating positive change in all types of organizations. Dave was born in Germany and is fluent in German. He currently lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife and two daughters.

Professor Owens spoke at length about how companies and co-workers really do so much to stop innovation. Oftentimes, a firm ought not ask “how can we have more innovative people?” but rather “how are preventing innovation from happening right now?” He related a personal anecdote of a group of employees telling him that their manager came to brainstorming sessions and said all the ideas were bad right there, and the manager later agreed, saying that he feared if those ideas (many of which were indeed bad!) left the room, they’d be made into expensive projects. Owens discussed at length how innovation is often stopped by a failure in process – especially when ideas are being nixed at the brainstorming level. It’s important for a firm to develop and continually improve its strategy for brainstorming creative ideas, and then carrying them forward through constant evaluation, such that only smart bets are actually taken by the firm, but creativity isn’t stifled at the source. One interesting point Professor Owens made was on how Steve Jobs was so great at cultivating innovation – he removed roadblocks. When managers would ask for resources from one another, if the would-be-giver hesitated to give up resources, the would-be-taker needed only mention that Jobs wanted to see the project done, and the other manager would give up resources immediately, fearing to incur Jobs’ wrath for holding back innovation.

Andrew Hargadon received his B.S. and M.S. from Stanford University, in the mechanical engineering department’s product design program. He received his Ph.D. from the Management Science and Engineering department of Stanford’s School of Engineering, at which time he was named a Boeing Fellow and Sloan Foundation Future Professor of Manufacturing. Prior to his work in academia, he worked in product design at Apple Computer and taught product design at Stanford University. Today, Hargadon is the Charles J. Soderquist Chair in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Technology Management at the Graduate School of Management at University of California, Davis and a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. He is founder of the Center for Entrepreneurship and the Energy Efficiency Center at UC Davis, and has written extensively in numerous journals and is the author of How Breakthroughs Happen: The Surprising Truth about how Companies Innovate.

On the show, Professor Hargadon discussed in detail how his research into famed innovators Henry Ford and Thomas Edison informs not only the work of global consultancy IDEO, but also the innovative work of the most successful entrepreneurs. He spoke on how the greatest and most revolutionary breakthroughs are often, very surprisingly, the result of finding what has worked in other fields and other times, and creatively recombining them and retooling them to a new problem for a unique solution. It is not a flash of genius, but the process of immersion in history and many different cultures that builds the toolkit for the successful innovator to draw upon when confronted with ostensibly intractable problems.

Born in Bangladesh, Faisal Hoque emigrated to the United States after beginning his entrepreneurially career at age 14. He has since been CEO, Chairman of the Board, advisor to the boards and management of Fortune 500 companies, and has worked closely with such brands as GE, MasterCard, American Express, Northrop Grumman, PepsiCo, IBM, Home Depot, Netscape, Infosys, French Social Security Services, Gartner, Cambridge Technology Partners, JP Morgan Chase, CSC, and more. Hoque has written seven books on management, of which his most recent is Everything Connects – How to Transform and Lead in the Age of Creativity, Innovation, and Sustainability. Hoque has also contributed to the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, BusinessInsider, Huffington Post, BusinessWeek, Mergers & Acquisitions, Forbes, Leadership Excellence, and other fine publications.

During Innovation Navigation, Hoque discussed the notion of innovation as a Matryoshka doll, with a variety of theories and approaches from the innermost personal psychological approach, to broader and broader influences and thoughts. In addition, he spoke the different clusters of innovative people surrounding any effort at innovation. He brought to the show the very interesting idea that successful entrepreneurship and innovation relies enormously on clusters of people who aren’t and never will be direct employees of the innovator. For successful innovation, the manager must work to incentivize and captivate those individuals who do not work for him or her, but are necessary for success, and therein lies one of the most difficult challenges of the innovator.

Warren Berger is a graduate of Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communications, and the author of both A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas and Glimmer: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World, both of which drew critical praise. Berger also writes for Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, and has previously written extensively for Wired. He has appeared on NBC’s The Today Show, ABC World News, CNN, and NPR’s All Things Considered. He is an adjunct professor at the University of Colorado, and has lectured at the University of Virginia, University of Oregon, University of Texas, New York’s School of Visual Arts, and Virginia Commonwealth University. He is an expert on design thinking and innovation.

As a guest on Innovation Navigation, Berger spoke in depth about the manner and power of correctly questioning. As children, we question everything around us, but we start to question less and less as we grow older. Successful innovation necessarily involves asking not just ‘why’ but also ‘what-if’ and then finally, ‘how?’. This is not simply a matter for individual entrepreneurs, however. Berger spoke about how successful companies are and will continue to be those that cultivate an environment of questioning, in which employees feel comfortables asking management why things are as they are, but also feel comfortable doing so even when they do not have an answer to their own question. On a more personal note, he discussed how individuals ask themselves questions to help understand themselves, their motivations, and their plans for the future.

Rachel Botsman is a global thought leader on the power of collaboration through technology to transform the way we live, work and consume. She has inspired a new economy with her influential book What’s Mine is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing The Way We Live. TIME Magazine recently called Collaborative Consumption one of the ’10 Ideas That Will Change The World’. Rachel is the founder of Collaborative Lab, the leading source of expertise for companies and governments that want to embrace the collaborative economy to revolutionize business and society. Rachel was recently named a 2013 Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum, which recognises individuals for their commitment to improving the state of the world. In 2014, she was named by Fast Company as one of the ‘Most Creative People in Business,’ Rachel has presented at high profile events including The Clinton Global Initiative, TED, HP, Google, and No.10 Downing Street and was named by Monocle as one of the top 20 speakers in the world to have at your conference. Her thought leadership and writings have appeared in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, CNN, New York Times, The Guardian, Fast Company and other publications. Rachel has a monthly future tech trends column in the Australian Financial Review and is a contributing editor to WIRED UK. Rachel was a founding partner in the Collaborative Fund, an early stage investor in disruptive ventures, and a former director at President Clinton’s Foundation. She received her BFA (Honors) from the University of Oxford, and undertook her postgraduate studies at Harvard University. Her work has taken her to every continent, except Antarctica.

On Tuesday, Rachel Botsman discussed Collaborative Economy with Rahul Kapoor. Botsman explained that the Collaborative Economy identifies unused life assets and puts them into marketplaces for collaborative or shared use for greater efficiency or shared access. According to Botsman, this idea has been around for 40 years, and has been evolving over time.

Simon has 25 years global experience building rapid growth, technology-based businesses including 7 years at Symbian, the phone OS maker, where he was a member of the Leadership Team and VP Global Marketing. He was founder of Myriad Solutions Ltd was formerly an Industrial Fellow at the London based Royal Society. He holds a BA and Ph.D in Engineering from Cambridge University in the UK and was named a Global Technology Pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2013.

On Tuesday’s show, Simon Bransfield-Garth discussed Azuri Technology. Azuri is pioneering bringing solar power to rural areas. 20% of the worlds population still do not have access to main electricity. Azuri finds ways to bring power to these people. Since mobile technology is universal, they combine this technology with solar energy, to reach these off-the grid populations. They avoid the upfront costs associated with solar, by having users pay as they use it, they way they pay for mobile.

Dr. Silver is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Cambrian Innovation Inc., a water and bio-energy technology provider headquartered in Boston, MA. Founded at MIT in 2006, Cambrian Innovation develops advanced environmental solutions for corporate, government, and agricultural clients. Cambrian has been supported by NASA, EPA, DOD, NSF, and USDA, won the Clean Tech Open in 2009, and was selected as a top 50 global emerging water company by the Artemis Project in 2012. Matt has published over 15 academic publications and in 2011 testified before the United States Senate on the government’s role in early stage innovation. Prior to founding Cambrian Innovation, he co-founded Intelligent Action Inc., an MIT spin-out using patented algorithms developed during his masters work. Matt worked previously in the aerospace sector with primary focus on technology strategy and systems architecture. He was a Research Scientist at the MIT Space Systems Lab and System Engineer at the Canadian Space Agency, during which he participated in two field expeditions to the High Canadian Arctic to operate and test exploration systems in extreme environments. He was a finalist candidate for the NASA Astronaut Corp (final 48 out of 6,300+ applicants). Matt received a Doctorate in Engineering Systems and two Master’s degrees in Astronautical Engineering and Technology and Policy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has a Bachelors Degree, cum laude and with honors, from Williams College. Matt was previously a national ski patroller and also enjoys surfing, snowboarding, sailing, golf, and guitar.

On Innovation Navigation, Dr. Silver discussed revolutionising water treatment in the US. Cambrian Innovation offers the world’s first bio-electrically enhanced waste-water system. They primarily work in food and beverage , primarily doing biotech to eliminate the organics in waste-water, reducing water risk while also cutting operating costs.