Printable Biography of Rowan Gibson

---

KEYNOTE SPEECHES:

THE INNOVATION WAR ROOM
Strategies for Winning in Tough Economic Times

“What can we do to survive – and, more important, to win – in the turbulent times ahead?”

“How do we get the sales curve moving upward in a market where customers are no longer buying?”

“How do we motivate our people to imagine radical new solutions when we’re simultaneously reducing headcount?”

“How do we continue to meet our growth targets if we don’t even know how to make it through the next quarter?”

With a global recession banging on the door, markets rapidly shrinking, and corporate budgets being slashed on every front, these are the urgent questions that executives everywhere are asking.

Rowan Gibson, global business strategist and bestselling author, provides compelling and practical answers in his new series of keynote speeches and 2-day strategy meetings. Focusing specifically on today’s burning economic issues, Rowan shows you how to radically rethink your product and service offer, your cost structures, internal processes, supply chains, distribution channels, and business models for these challenging times. With his cutting-edge “Innovation War Room”, he explains how you can discover innovative ways to save money and create new value – both for your customers and your own organization.

Rowan argues that an unstable competitive environment always opens up a lot of space for new ideas, new strategies, and newcomers. He teaches you how to turn crisis into opportunity and steal a march on your competitors by innovating for the short term as well as the long term. His bottom-line message is that by innovating your way through this economic crisis, your company can actually come out of it better and stronger than it was before!

Based on his groundbreaking new book, “Innovation to the Core” (Harvard Business School Press), Rowan has designed a practical set of innovation strategy tools to help your company deal decisively and creatively with the challenges that currently face you.

Using his cutting-edge methodology – the “Four Lenses of Innovation” – Rowan will teach you how to spot new opportunities for radically adjusting your business model to the new market conditions.

The four lenses are:

1. Challenging deeply-held orthodoxies inside your company and your industry

2. Harnessing trends and discontinuities that could substantially change the rules of the game

3. Leveraging competencies and strategic assets in unconventional ways to create new value

4. Identifying unsolved customer problems, market inefficiencies, unmet needs and wants

In his keynote speeches, Rowan demonstrates how to use the “Four Lenses of Innovation” to rapidly and radically rethink your products, services, processes, strategies and business models in a down economy. In his hands-on, two-day strategy meetings, Rowan will work with you to generate a slew of new strategy options and growth opportunities for your company using the “Four Lenses of Innovation”.

Rowan Gibson is a very popular keynote speaker. His mix of insight, inspiration and information has impressed a wide range of audiences all over the world. The media have called him “a guru among the gurus”.

WINNING IN THE INNOVATION ECONOMY

Your audience will learn:
• how to understand innovation at the level of the entire business system
• how to create an enterprise-wide culture that is committed to innovation
• how to invent breakthrough strategies for sustaining profitable growth
• how to build a management infrastructure that supports innovation
• how to make innovation a systemic capability at the organization’s core

Today’s “Innovation Economy” is driven by hyper-acceleration, hyper-competition and the rapid commoditization of products, services and capabilities. In this difficult environment, the only option for creating new wealth, building new markets and driving future business is innovation. Of course, most organizations understand that, but they still can’t make innovation happen. Why?

The truth is that companies might espouse innovation but their culture and their management systems usually inhibit it – and they may not even be aware of it! The only way to close the rhetoric-reality gap is by turning innovation into a deep, systemic capability that reaches right to the core of the organization. Yet how can this be achieved?

In this revolutionary keynote speech, Rowan Gibson focuses on how to build an enterprise-wide innovation system that actually works. A system based on new values, new skills, new processes, new metrics, new IT solutions and new management structures. A system that puts the focus on continuous innovation - not just at the product and service level, but at the level of the entire business model. A system that will enable the company to invent new breakthrough strategies for sustaining profitable growth and then turn those strategies into market success stories.

Winning in the Innovation Economy is based on a forthcoming book on corporate innovation (to be published by Harvard Business School Press) which Rowan is currently co-writing. It’s a speech that will give your audience practical advice and inspiring insights on how to make innovation really happen. A speech that reveals how to unleash the imagination, entrepreneurial spirit and “network power” of the organization in order to seize new growth opportunities, create new markets and even transform industries. A speech that shows how to recalibrate the whole organizational system around the paradigm of innovation.

A must-hear presentation for leaders at all levels of an organization.

RETHINKING THE FUTURE

Discontinuous change and disruptive technology can destroy the foundations of your organization’s success. Yet they also make it possible for you to invent new growth strategies, transform your industry and create fundamentally new markets. So how can you make sure that you harness the forces of discontinuous change to shape your own future, before the future shapes you? How can you continually reinvent your business?

RETHINKING STRATEGY 

Strategy has traditionally been an analytical, data-driven exercise. But the science of strategy no longer works in a fast-moving and fuzzy world. Today, your organization needs to be driven by a big, distinctive idea - a breakthrough core strategy that works on ‘emotional logic’. So how can you create and implement a coherent strategy in which your brand, your customer experience and your employee experience become inseparable? And how often should you rethink it?

RETHINING HUMAN CAPITAL 

If every company can now outsource, offshore or computerize huge chunks of its non-core activities (75% to 90% of what we do), then the only strategic difference between one company and the next will be the stuff that’s left at the core – the value-added ‘intellectual capital’ of the company’s hot talent. So how can you unleash the imagination, entrepreneurial spirit and ‘network power’ of your people? How can you build your strategy around human capital - the only competitive weapon you have left?

RETHINKING THE BRAND 

The age of ‘brand image’ is over. This is the age of ‘brand reality’. In the highly networked and completely transparent world of the 21st century, companies can no longer hope to hide behind a marketing façade. They must ‘live the brand’ both internally and externally, creating a culture that walks the talk. So how can you ensure that your brand becomes ‘special’ by making a deep emotional connection with your customers and employees? How can you turn the brand into a ‘lovemark’?

RETHINKING THE OFFICE

Office design is not a cosmetic issue. We’re finding out that the workplace has a powerful impact on your corporate culture and performance. That gives it a crucial place on the leadership agenda. So how can you use office design as a strategic tool – a catalyst – to bring about cultural change? How can you make sure your workplace communicates your brand values, attracts the best talent, fosters innovation and collaboration, and speeds up the flow of work, ideas and decision-making?

RETHINKING LEADERSHIP

As business moves to a new level of complexity, leadership becomes more crucial than ever. The challenge for today’s senior executives is to master a new and radically different set of competencies. These include the ability to routinely and radically rethink the business, a focus on wealth creation not operational efficiency and the talent to build an inspiring, innovation-based culture that is designed from the customer backwards. How do you develop these competencies?