Speakers Corner Proudly Presents Innovation Speakers
As innovation impacts on business worldwide, Speakers Corner - a leading speaker bureau - presents an all-encompassing list of esteemed and knowledgeable orators available as after dinner speakers, keynote speakers and conference facilitators.
- (1888PressRelease) June 23, 2011 - In a world where innovation is the central point upon which companies can seize new growth opportunities, create new markets and even transform industries, corporate events are the central stage for on which to grandstand innovation. Speakers Corner holds a catalogue of personalities who can imbue a passion and knowledge for the subject, including Zunaira Munir, Nick Jankel, Jane Young, Noreena Hertz and Steven Attenborough.
Innovation is not just about coming up with ideas. When companies catch the innovation bug, their tendency is to launch fun initiatives like online suggestion boxes, creative competitions, etc, but ideas are just the front end of innovation. Without the back end of innovation - the capacity to effectively screen ideas, align them with strategy, allocate resources to them and manage them successfully toward commercialization - all of those light bulbs and eureka moments will never become real.
Zunaira Munir Founder and Managing Director of Strategize Blue, has given Speakers Corner an insight into her philosophy:
"Many companies struggle to survive, to keep up and especially to grow. Companies have been engaged in head to head competition for so long the only way they know how to survive is to gain more market share, and serve their customers better than their competitors. But, as new competitors enter the market, profit margins shrink. If a company wants to really thrive, the business needs to innovate, to challenge the way their industry operates and do something totally different."
"Companies need to look at their business from an entirely new and fresh perspective. Instead of striving to beat the competition, you can make the competition irrelevant to your success. They can create new markets, maximize opportunity and minimize risk through a systematic approach."
What a company actually does with ideas has serious implications for its future. How many of these ideas have been turned into experiments; how many are receiving more funding and attention; how many ventures are heading for commercialization; and how much money are those ventures expected to generate?
Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, originally pitched his personal computer idea to Hewlett-Packard, his employer at the time. But HP had no organizational mechanism for connecting an engineer and his 'crazy invention' with the political and financial infrastructures of the company. There was simply nowhere for his idea to go; no way to get a small amount of experimental capital and some time to test its potential; no mentors to help him push his idea forward; no management processes to support his work as an innovator. So instead Wozniak quit, and together with Steve Jobs, he went off to commercialize his idea from his garage. The rest is history.
Top innovation experts at Speakers Corner are the best sources of ideas for how to build a corporate innovation system - which most will attest starts with building leadership commitment to innovation across the organization.
When Whirlpool's former CEO Dave Whitwam set out to define his company's global innovation strategy in 1999, he chose to call it "Innovation from Everyone and Everywhere." This was a huge aspiration, considering Whirlpool's 68,000 employees in 170 countries, but Whirlpool rose to the challenge, and today the company has become a best-practice model for the embedment of innovation as an enterprise capability.
The key objective of Whirlpool's innovation strategy was to help every single employee to think outside the traditional "white box" of home appliances, and imagine exciting, customer-relevant solutions. The outcome has been a stream of breakthrough ideas for products and businesses that have come from all over the Whirlpool organization - ideas that have delivered value to consumers in ways never before seen either at the company or in the industry. As a result, Whirlpool has seen a steep upturn in its annual revenues from innovative new products.
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