Jeff DeGraff

“The amount of innovation a company produces is inversely related to the number of PowerPoint slides or elaborate process diagrams it makes about innovation.”- The DeGraff Hypothesis

Productivity is no longer enough. Leaders are finding that the drive for growth is pushing strategic innovation initiatives down into operating units where the management and staff have few of the tools and little preparation to really make it happen. Leading organizations are pursuing innovative strategies and processes only to find that they lack the culture, competencies, and leadership practices required to execute and sustain innovation. The theme of this session is simple: Sustainable innovation is produced by developing leaders who can systematically add innovation to existing business practices.

This highly engaging and interactive session is organized around the Innovation Genome, a simple framework that allows leaders at all levels and locations to understand how their leadership directly affects the creation of specific types of culture and competencies in their organizations, and how these abilities make innovation happen across the enterprise with everyone, everyday, everywhere. This session will presents a simple approach for leaders to recognize, develop, and launch creative ideas into winning solutions that create value.

One day it hits you: the game has changed. The market stinks, you are tired of the same old fear and greed, and what once gave you a spark isn’t enough anymore. What always worked for you before, professionally or personally, no longer gets results. Now there’s only one way forward: innovate. Make it new. Make you new. But how?

In this presentation, Innovation You, also the title of Jeff DeGraff’s book and PBS program, will explore how the strategies and tactics used to grow top businesses like Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, and GE can be translated and applied to your own life. It will give some pointers on how to aim for high quality targets, enlist deep and diverse domain expertise, take multiple shots on goal and learn from experience and experiments. This presentation will explain how to make yourself new and improved and how to help others do the same. So bring your challenges, an open mind and your desire to grow.

An innovation only exists for a very brief moment before it goes sour like milk. Breakthroughs don’t conform to authoritative leadership practices because they advance at unpredictable speeds and magnitudes. Since it is disruptive, radical innovation is often relegated to an orphaned tech center, marginalized development function or outsourced completely where it becomes someone else’s problem. But in a down market, where growth is hard to come by, innovation isn’t your best friend; it’s your only friend. Now the same leaders who managed to keep innovation segregated from standard operations find themselves chasing a fast moving global market where disruptive innovation is likely to be an integrated solution created by a federation that spans companies, geographies and disciplines. As a result, conventional organizational strategies, structures and processes are being replaced by boundless affiliations where connecting the dots of diverse cultures and competencies has become the essential function of leadership. But what happens when your best people aren’t your people at all? What happens when everyone, everywhere, everyday innovates? Throw away your checklist. One size never really fit all anyway. It’s time to connect the dots – to innovate how we innovate. This presentation will show you how to sync your strategies, practices and competencies to achieve your collaborative innovation goals.

While the motion picture industry was developing ever more sophisticated innovation methods, a small group of relatively inexperienced exiles from the big studios met a local café and created a plan to produce a series of ingenious movies. They called their start-up Pixar.

Take a close look at your favorite company or organization. You will find lots of diversity, intelligence and generative energy – in the coffee shop right across the street. While focusing on complex development processes, micromanaging new product portfolios or tormenting designers a dizzying array of metrics, your most creative people walk out of your door every day unnoticed, uninspired and untapped.

In the new world of work, where breakthrough products, services and solutions can happen anywhere, anytime with anyone, the processes that you create to accelerate innovation in your company inevitably drives it out. So how is a company supposed to make innovation happen?

By encouraging and developing people to do the creative work the company can’t.

This presentation focuses on the personal creative development of the individual: how they feel, how they think and how they act. Jeff DeGraff, the Dean of Innovation, uses stories and practical advice gained from working with hundreds of the world’s top organizations to energize and inspire the audience to start their own personal and professional renaissance. When people are revitalized, they tend to put their creativity to work where they work.