From The Front End of Innovation - USA 2008
From The Front End of Innovation, USA 2008 was held in Boston, May 19-22.
Janine Benyus & Gunter Pauli: Inspiration for Innovation: Learning from Nature
Dean Kamen: FIRST Robots
A.G. Lafley: The Art and Science of Game-Changing Innovation
Deborah Ancona: X-Teams: How to Build Teams that Lead, Innovate and Execute
Ray Kurzweil: The Acceleration of Technology in the 21st Century
Michael Giersch: Organizing for Success in High-Growth Emerging Opportunities
Mark F. Buckley: Sustainability at Staples/Values that Move Us
Dean Kamen: DEKA Research & FIRST Robots
Kamen introduced his presentation with the following disclaimer: “I don’t know what innovation is. It requires a lot of things including luck and the ability to fail regularly.” He proceeded to outline the following rude realities and offered some serious suggestions about the world of innovation.
Janine Benyus and Gunter Pauli
The goal of the presentation was to speak about innovation in the context of competitive strategies. Their point and counterpoint format, Benyus focused on the biomimicry and the examples of nature while Pauli defined how that conve
A.G.Lafley, Chairman, CEO, Proctor & Gamble
When he took the position of CEO of P&G, A.G. Lafley understood purpose and values of company. His experience and instincts put the customer at the center of the innovation strategy. The company believed innovation was the core issue. The challenges to be overcome were:
Deborah Ancona, Professor, MIT Leadership Center
XTeams are an external route to agility and innovation. In his book, The World is Flat, Tom Friedman described an economy where information flows seamlessly all directions. The result is hypercompetition. I
Ray Kurzweil, Inventor, Author
Our thinking process is linear, not exponential. That makes it difficult for most people to understand the billion-fold increases in technology in the past 25 years. Today, a Blackberry has comparable computing power of a computer that would have filled a room 25 years ago. That incredible rate of innovation is not limited to computing technology, but is also occurring in biotech.
Michael Giersch, VP Strategic Planning, IBM Corporate Strategy
The issue Mr. Giersch proposed to the crowd was how to capitalize on emerging business opportunities within a large firm. His findings, he hoped, can serve as a model for other organizations. Having been with IBM for 35 years, he claimed to be intimately connected with the organization that created and solved the problems.
Mark F. Buckley,V.P. Environmental Affairs, Staples
Sustainability is not something that has come to Staples as a marketing cover, but the result of values that were at the company’s core from the beginning and surfaced as they saw an opportunity to blend market sensitivity with good business strategy and decisions.

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