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In large or complex organizations, starting or ramping up innovation can be a real challenge. For concrete ideas on how to create momentum for innovation projects, watch this IM Channel One Ask the Experts Panel Discussion. We invited two experts from KILN’s cauldron to discuss aspects of innovation program momentum, from leveraging the creative talent of your people, through to winning management’s buy-in.

Chief Solver Gregg Fraley moderates this second discussion in KILN’s Change Culture by Doing series. The first webinar broke the mould and set new attendance records. Joining Gregg are Dr Orin Davis of Claremont Graduate University, USA and Fiona McAnena, formerly VP Innovation at Pepsico UK & Ireland and Global Brand Director, Bupa.

The session focuses on a set of problems facing innovation champions within complex firms who face analysis paralysis.

  • “How can I help my people become better, more creative innovators?
  • “How can we earn and keep the attention of senior management?”
  • “When management is so often saying no, how do we get them to yes?”

About the moderator and the panelists

Gregg Fraley is a serial entrepreneur and international expert in creative problem solving providing consultancy to Fortune 500 corporations. A keynote speaker on company innovation and commercial creativity, Gregg’s business novel Jack’s Notebook features on reading lists from University of California Berkeley’s MBA to Judge Business School and City University in the UK. Always a pioneer, his Emmy-award winning team at Warner Cable’s QUBE earned a cable ACE Award for innovation. As board member for the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) in the USA from 2003-2007 when he moved to Britain, Gregg has trained scores of professionals in Creative Problem Solving (CPS) using the Osborn-Parnes model. He continues this work through KILN, a firm he co-founded in 2010 to create IdeaKeg, a unique subscription service for company teams to generate breakthrough thinking. KILN also provides innovation culture assessments, ideation services, meeting facilitation and qualitative research to clients in North America and Europe.

Dr Orin Davis is a scientist-consultant who earned the first doctorate in positive psychology under Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at Claremont Graduate University. Conducting research on creativity, flow, mentoring, and hypnosis, Dr Davis is sought out as a consultant to help companies maximize the performance of their employees. He advises companies on recruitment, mentoring programs, diversity, culture, teamwork and productivity. As a speaker and business thinker, Dr Davis has lectured at both business schools and work groups alike. He also blogs for the Front End of Innovation and Positive Psychology News Daily, writing about employee-management relations, developing a culture that fosters innovation, and personal/professional development. He is the author of several white papers and working papers, including “Why the Workplace Needs Positive Psychology” and Intern Bridge’s “Mentoring Interns and Entry-Level Employees.” Dr Davis is currently the principal investigator at the Quality of Life Laboratory.

Fiona McAnena is a classically trained marketer with twenty-five years’ experience in brand building and innovation. She started her career in Unilever, learning marketing in consumer packaged goods, and later worked as a consultant to clients in financial services, telecoms and other sectors. Her most recent corporate roles were: two and a half years as Vice President of Innovation at Pepsico UK, a role created to help PepsiCo become as good at long term discontinuous innovation as it already was at incremental improvement and close-in new product development; followed by three years as Global Brand Director at Bupa, the UK-based international healthcare company with revenues of £8bn, where she used a brand-led vision to accelerate innovation across Bupa’s businesses. Earlier this year she set up a consulting business, Clearhound, to help service companies grow through taking a customer-centered approach to their purpose, and applying this to proposition development and innovation. Fiona is a graduate of Cambridge University and a Fellow of the Marketing Society of Great Britain.

Replying to questions behind the scenes…

Kate Hammer PhD is a commercial storyteller. She catalyses innovation in companies of all sizes, stokes people’s courage to attempt what is unfamiliar, and crafts stories that change what people choose. In 2012, culture anthropologist Grant McCracken dubbed Kate an honorary Chief Culture Officer. She is a Fellow of the RSA in London.

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Indy Neogy is an expert in culture, both anthropological and organizational. He earned an MBA from Leeds after studying rocket science at MIT. His book When Culture Matters: A 55-Minute Guide to Better Cross Cultural Communication has just been published. Like Kate, Indy also has been named honorary Chief Culture Officer, and is an RSA Fellow.

About KILN

KILN specializes in helping companies change their innovation activities. With panelists from leading multinational firms – each with a mature innovation culture – KILN hosts a conversation to:

  • Uncover behaviors, activities and practices fostering innovation in complex firms
  • Share examples where cultural difference has impaired innovation and strategies for overcoming cultural difference in innovation work
  • Inspire practitioners to change and adapt their day-to-day activities

KILN’s platform incorporates models and frameworks for:

  • cognitive style and diversity (Gardner, Kirton)
  • complexity and changing by doing (Snowden)
  • conversational style and diversity (Kline, Cain)
  • corporate culture (Schein)
  • cultural anthropology (McCracken and others)
  • cultural difference (Hofstede)
  • innovation (Christiensen, Rogers)
  • organizational creativity (Rhodes)
  • problem-solving processes (Osborn-Parnes)
  • semiotics (various)

For more information about KLIN, please visit kilnco.com