Alex Conjour, Head of Port & Cargo Operations, Wallenius Wilhelmsen.
Fielding Kidd, Strategy Director at R/GA and former Director of Business Partnerships, Comcast Strategic Development.
Jenny Tran, Director of Global Brand Strategy and Design for Innovation, Pepsico.
Rachel Podbury, Senior Manager, NYU Langone Health.
Rebecca Cameron, VP of Strategic Planning, NASDAQ and Head of NASDAQ Next.
Amit Bhatia, Head of Manulife/John Hancock Innovation Labs.
Kerry Feldmann, Divisional VP – Global Merchandising, Tiffany & Co.
Charles Trevail, CEO of Interbrand and Cal Austin, Director of Innovation, Pfizer.
Scott Kirsner of InnoLead talks with Charles Trevail of Interbrand.
Raphael Guillet, Disruption Technologist at Accor S.A.
David Duncan, Senior Partner at Innosight.
The conversation kicked off after breakfast with a round of introductions.
In December, we brought together innovation and R&D leaders from large organizations in New York. The gathering was hosted at Tiffany & Co.’s corporate offices.
Our roundtables are off-the-record to encourage a group of peers to openly discuss issues they’re grappling with — in this case, related to designing and executing long-term innovation strategies. David Duncan, Senior Partner at Innosight and co-author of the book “Competing Against Luck,” facilitated the conversation with InnoLead CEO Scott Kirsner.
Part of the conversation explored the language that companies use around innovation: creating a “climate” that supports experimentation, rather than trying to change the overarching company “culture”; the merits of talking about “growth” as an objective rather than “innovation”; “killing” a project versus “stopping and saving” (the saving refers to money that doesn’t get wasted); and “ships versus trains.” Trains are parts of the organization that focus on operational excellence, and need to run on rails. Ships are groups that are more free to discover and explore.
If you’re a corporate innovation, strategy, or R&D leader and you’d like to join an upcoming roundtable, you can request an invite here.
