Keynotes & Speaking

The Innovator's DNA keynotes are powerful, inspiring sessions delivered by iDNA executive team members in a highly interactive approach. Each keynote is delivered with the rigor that comes from 20 years of academic research on the topics of innovation and research, while also providing the practical insight that comes from applying this work at hundreds of organizations.

Featured Speakers

Curtis Lefrandt

CEO & Co-Founder

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Jeff Dyer

Senior Partner & Co-Founder

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Nathan Furr

Senior Partner & Co-Founder

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Speaking Topics

Innovation Capital: How to Compete – and Win – Like the World's Most Innovative Leaders

Great leaders of innovation know that creativity is not enough. They succeed not only on the basis of their ideas, but because they have the vision, reputation, and networks to win the backing needed to commercialize them. It turns out that this quality--called "innovation capital"--is measurably more important for innovation than just being creative. In this session, we share practical tools for building a personal reputation for innovation, garnering attention for ideas and projects, and how to provide visionary leadership for an organization or team.

Developing Disruptive Strategies in the Age of Uncertainty

In today's ever-changing and increasingly fast-paced world, innovation is essential for every organization. We teach how to navigate areas of uncertainty—including how management and teams can thrive through implementing a sustainable process of innovation that creates competitive advantage.

The Innovator's Method: How to Innovate Like a Start-up

Based on our research inside corporations and successful start-ups, we've developed the innovator's method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining, and bringing ideas to market. The innovator's method focuses on the "how" of innovation—how to test, how to validate, and how to commercialize ideas with the lean, design, and agile techniques successful start-ups use. Based on the book The Innovator's Method, we'll show you how to apply the method within your organization to accelerate innovation discovery, testing, and growth.

Unlocking Your Creative Potential: The Five Discovery Skills of Disruptive Innovators

By studying Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and other disruptive industry leaders, our research has shown that innovation can be taught. Based on the principles outlined in our best-selling book, The Innovator's DNA, this session helps the audience master the five discovery skills that distinguish innovative leaders from ordinary managers.

Developing a Customer-Centric Perspective

Customers are the lifeblood of any organization–and yet we often find ourselves removed from their perspective. This topic is all about immersing in your customer's world to gain a first-hand understanding of their needs, pain points, and objectives. Participants will learn and apply powerful tools like customer personas, journeylines, customer interviewing, and ethnography.

Using Experiments & Prototypes to Reduce Risk & Uncertainty

In large organizations, we tend to do our best to remove risk and uncertainty. In a world where disruption is all around us, we instead need a set of tools to manage and thrive in uncertainty. This topic focuses on the tools of the scientific method to identify critical assumptions and unknowns embedded within potential solutions, the design of rapid experiments to test these assumptions, and quick learning through iterative prototypes.

Speaking Highlights

Innovator's Method Training

Teaching the importance of identifying assumptions as part of experimenting and prototyping at a 2-day all-company training at Canopy Tax. This training helped cross-functional teams learned the power of customer immersion, experimenting, and prototyping to better understand their customers at a crucial pivot point for the company.

Leadership Keynote & Training

A summary of The Innovator's Method presented as part of leadership training at Cisco in San Jose, CA.

Customer Immersion Tools

Accruent, a software-based industrial resource management company in Texas, invited Curtis in to lead a company-wide conference to teach employees to gain deeper customer empathy. Through this training, employees learned how to develop a customer-centric perspective to take back to their day-to-day work life.

“Our sessions with Innovator’s DNA, have enabled us to activate the ‘Art of the possible’ mindset in our teams, unlocking our resources creative capacity. We now step forward with curiosity into the unknown, testing & experimenting and acting on our ideas. It has changed our relationship with risk at all levels and driven a culture of innovation and challenging the status quo.”

Dave Wilson | Cisco, Country Director

Build a Culture & Capability of Innovation

We help individuals and organizations develop a capacity for creativity and innovation. Let us help you discover your innovation capability and take your ideas, employees, and teams to the next level.