Andrew Grant

SPEAKER CORE TOPICS: ON INNOVATION

The Innovation Race: Who wins, who loses and who gets eliminated?  Why innovation doesn’t always work.

When it comes to the ‘innovation race’, are you more of a traveler or a tourist? Or are you simply an armchair observer? Most of us marvel at the pace of innovation, but few understand how to engage with the topic. Yet your approach to innovation may be critical for future survival. Although we are all keen to hear current market leaders share their predictions, hoping to pick up the latest trends in innovation and stay ahead of the curve, we are not always shown how to practically prepare for the innovation race. Perhaps it’s time to identify just how innovation ready you and your organisation are, and what you might need to do about it. This session considers what it really means to compete in the innovation race, and what the implications are for those who win, lose and are eliminated. Unique global and historical research from a broad range of cultures and contexts provides a sobering understanding of what it will take to stay in the innovation race for the long run. Practical tools for becoming an effective ‘ambidextrous’ innovation leader, able to both draw from and build on the past but also see into the future, are then introduced. This is a ‘futurist keynote’ with a difference, providing real strategies that will allow the much talked about ‘Forth Industrial Revolution’ to be a growth opportunity, rather than a dangerously disruptive and potentially eliminating threat.   (Presented at the APEC CEO Summit Danang)

The Paradox of Leading Sustainable Innovation: The Monk and the Mobile

Companies like Google may appear to be leading in the ‘innovation race’, but do they have all the solutions and can they be simply copied? Our research has revealed that most companies today only have half the story right, and that a new perspective and model is needed to overcome the challenges. This presentation identifies core sustainable innovation strategies for surviving and thriving in ‘the innovation race’. It reveals that by simply changing perspective, new ideas can be better supported through to implementation. Discover how to lead and manage innovation through successfully navigating the 4 key innovation paradoxes. Practical strategies and the ‘polar positioning’ tool are introduced to show how to navigate these paradoxical tensions successfully. The fast-paced global adventure reveals how different cultures and companies around the world have effectively managed the key Exploration / Preservation innovation paradox, along with the 4 contributing sub-paradoxes.

 The Collaboration Deception:  Leading Collaborative Innovation 

The Collaboration Deception  social experiment:  Building  collaboration in a competitive corporate context.  This is a unique keynote that includes a powerful game-theory style interactive session. In this session the participants become involved in a social experiment and discover firsthand what happens when trust is removed from the equation. Leaders and teams can benefit from this program through learning how to build long lasting trust with fellow team members, vendors, partners and associates. They will understand what to look for in a healthy teams and business relationship, and how to collaborate to avoid those that are in it for themselves.

Innovation key takeaways: 

• How to create a culture to support innovation
• Learn the core sustainable innovation strategies for surviving and thriving in ‘the innovation race’
• How to lead and manage innovation through successfully navigating the 4 key innovation paradoxes

SPEAKER CORE TOPICS: ON CREATIVITY

Who Killed Creativity?… And how can we get it back?

Identifying the potential blocks and essential strategies for developing creative thinking

We need to be creative to be innovative. But the relentless push to innovate faster may be undermining the whole creative process. In our rush for end results, we could ironically be killing the very thing that will lead us to innovation: creativity. Recent research has revealed that creative thinking will be the most important leadership attribute in the next 10 years. Yet it has been identified that even though IQ has been on the rise, creative thinking (CQ) has been rapidly declining since the 1990s. CQ has also been found to drop over an individual’s lifespan. We are now at a point where all the design thinking strategies and innovation labs in the world won’t help a team if there are significant psychological or environmental and cultural blocks to the creative probes. This session takes the participants on a journey from the classroom to the boardroom to understand the impact of the current creativity crisis. The session covers the implications for the workplace and reveals how it is possible to develop a creative and innovative culture.

Key takeaways include:

• Understand from a neuroscience perspective the psychological blocks to creativity and how they manifest in the workplace
• Identify the importance of developing creative thinking in order to innovate better
• Know the key creativity factors that need to be developed to support innovation

 The magic of creative thinking –  and how to really think outside the box.

Uses magic illusions as an illustration for how the creative thinking process can be blocked psychologically, segueing to challenging people about their mindset and mental models.

How to use CQ as a competitive advantage in the workplace:

This fun interactive session assesses individuals and the team, and then maps the CQ (7) skills needed to use the Creative Thinking Strategies to their full potential. The session then goes onto to show how CQ has direct business applications, through connecting case studies to the CQ Torrance testing and design thinking models.

 Creativity thinking key takeaways:

• How to identify the potential blocks and essential strategies for developing creative thinking
• Identify the importance of developing creative thinking in order to innovate better
• Know the key creativity factors that need to be developed to support innovation