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Jeff DeGraff

Corporate Leadership & Strategy Professor at University of Michigan, Innovation Speaker & Author of "Innovation Code: The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict"

Corporate Leadership & Strategy Professor at University of Michigan, Innovation Speaker & Author of "Innovation Code: The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict"

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Ann Arbor, MI, USA
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Jeff DeGraff Biography

Jeff DeGraff is the Professor of Management and Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He teaches MBA, EMBA, BBA, and Executive Education courses on leading creativity, innovation, and change. DeGraff’s research and writing focuses on innovation strategy, change and innovation competency development, creativity and innovation practices and methods, create communities and innovation networks, and leadership development.

DeGraff is an author and co-author of the books Innovation You, Creativity at Work: Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen, Leading Innovation: How to Jumpstart Your Company’s Growth Engine and Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations. His book, Making Stone Soup, was a finalist for several book awards. In his newest book "Innovation Code: The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict," he argues that diversity of thought is essential to innovation. He urges everyone to practice constructive dialogue and work in diverse teams to find hybrid solutions and develop unique approaches to solve difficult problems.

DeGraff’s mission is “the democratization of innovation.” He brings innovation to everyone, every day and everywhere through his books, his public television program (Innovation You), columns (Inc.) and radio program (The Next Idea). His articles and thought leadership on contemporary business matters have been covered by Business Week, US News and World Report and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few.

His client list reads like a ‘who’s who’ within the world of innovators, including, among many others, General Electric, Coca-Cola, American College of Surgeons, and Google. In working with these prominent firms, he has developed a broad array of widely used change and innovation methodologies and tools. DeGraff was a member of the executive team at Domino’s Pizza when it was one of the fastest growing businesses in the world in the 1980’s. DeGraff’s creative and direct take on making innovation happen have made him a world-renowned thought leader and have prompted his clients and colleagues to dub him as “The Dean of Innovation.”

DeGraff is a Managing Partner of Innovatrium, an innovation center and consulting practice that specializes in teaching companies how to grow and become more innovative. He serves as an advisor to think tanks and governments. DeGraff has worked all over the world, with significant experience in Europe and Asia, and in most industry and market segments.

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Speaker profile last updated by AAE Talent Team on 10/04/2024.

Jeff DeGraff Speaking Topics

  • Leading Innovation: How to Jumpstart Your Organization's Growth Engine

    “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.

  • Business Design in the New Tech Centric World

    You’ve heard all the buzz and blather about the new world of work: Millennials, digital everything, AI and AR, 3D printing, blockchain, and hundreds of other vague descriptions of emerging technology and trends that could mean just about anything. Innovation happens. Sure, the speed and magnitude increase with every new year, or maybe even each new day. But, the dynamics of how innovation really works, or doesn’t, have remained relatively constant…until now. The biggest innovation these days is how we work to make innovation happen.

    Modern corporations have a fundamental dilemma. They use standardized techniques and technologies to synchronize all aspects of their operation so that they produce predictable results at scale. They are vertically aligned. Think McDonalds. Conversely, a new type of company has emerged with the digital age that achieves rapid growth by deviating from these standards. The networked upstart. These organizations are horizontally connected to a federation of other participants. Think biotech startup.

    Corporations have become captives to their business models. Competition didn’t stop Sears from becoming Amazon, Microsoft from Google, or GM from Tesla. What stopped them was their own inability to quickly transit from their dominant culture and competencies, and the innovation leadership practices that maintain them. They tried to create the next big solution with the old rules and tools.

    This lively and challenging session will contrast the old world of work with the new, and how to integrate the two. We will explore how changes in the workforce, fluid organizational structures, network dynamics, ubiquitous connectivity, and the economics of fast growth are changing what leaders must do to succeed. We will focus on how to synchronize an increasingly complex and diverse enterprise to make innovation happen.

  • The Power of Diversity and Teams

    “One size never fits all, so throw out your checklist.” Jeff DeGraff

    Innovation is a form of positive deviance. It’s the opposite of standard operating procedures. Most processes are designed to align your organization. Especially, your hiring and staffing practices. That’s great if you want efficiency and quality, but if you want innovation you have to introduce the variety necessary to produce valuable growth. Why? Because innovation is generated through the creative power of constructive conflict. When people have diverse views, skills, and experiences, they take different approaches to creating value. These points of departure, when properly and respectfully engaged, challenge the status quo by producing new and hybrid ideas that lead to breakthrough products and services.

    Diversity is more than just your ethnic heritage or cultural background. It’s also your mindset and worldview. It includes the skills you bring to work. Getting these diverse abilities to interact successfully is the key to creating high performing teams. This session will introduce a new way of thinking about diversity: how to identify the strategic situation, appropriate culture and competencies, and specific leadership practices necessary to produce growth. It will provide sound evidence that diversity pays.

    This energetic and compelling session will demonstrate how to make diversity work where you work.

  • Connecting the Dots of Innovation: Making Collaborative Innovation Work Where You Work

    “Innovation seldom fails in a function or region. It fails in the handoffs between them.” Jeff DeGraff

    Innovation used to be confined to the realm of the tech center. Then the global economy emerged and there were dozens of these innovation centers to coordinate across a wide array of boundaries and barriers. Now the world is flat and innovation happens across a diverse ecosystem of loosely affiliated entities with a wide array of strategies, cultures, and competencies. Vertical approaches to innovation such as tech centers, stage-gate systems, and product portfolios are now expected to operate in sync with horizontal federations like idea markets, creativity clusters, and collaborative open innovation networks.

    There is far too much complexity in the modern organization to develop another layer of processes to try to make innovation happen. The key to successfully leading innovation is to develop a new mindset and shared language to connect the dots. This way marketing knows what manufacturing is doing without all of the extensive data inputs and outputs. The same goes for Dallas and Shanghai. Innovation is situationally specific. The way you design an aircraft engine and the way you develop a fine dining restaurant have very little in common. You need to know be able to identify what are the appropriate practices for each situation.

    This dynamic and compelling session will show how to sync up your innovation strategies and practices to achieve your goals and create value.

  • Doing the Creative Work the Company Can’t

    “The most creative work your people do is in the coffee shop across the street.” Jeff DeGraff

    Are your people doing their most creative work at work?

    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 with 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. More cheerleading or another tool for the toolbox will only get you so far.

    So how is an organization supposed to make innovation happen?

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

    This lively and compelling session focuses on the creative development of the person: how they feel, how they think and how they act. It encourages individuals to design and follow their own creative path. When people are revitalized, they tend to put their creativity to work where they work.

  • Innovation You: Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved

    “The greatest innovation you create is yourself.” Jeff DeGraff

    One day it hits you: the game has changed. You no longer feel like you are growing. The job has become tedious or unrewarding. Fear and greed are no longer pushing you forward. The spark is gone.

    What if you were a product or a service? How you make yourself better or new? You would innovate you. But how?

    You would do an inventory of what gives you energy and what takes it. You would assess your real strengths and weaknesses. You would tell your story in new ways. You would find the edges of what is possible. You would make intelligent decisions and rebalance the portfolio of your life. You would develop some simple guiding principles to move forward. You would run some small experiments to see what really works and what doesn’t. You would innovation you.

    In this lively and inspirational session, the best practices from the most innovative organizations in the world will be explored. Their strategies and tactics will be explained, and more importantly, how they can be applied to your own life. It will provide 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. It will demonstrate how to make yourself new and improved, and how to help others do the same.

Jeff DeGraff Videos

  • Jeff DeGraff LEDx 3.0
    Professor of Management and Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan Dr. DeGraff’s mission is “the...
  • Jeff DeGraff Unleashing AirWarfare2018
    Jeff DeGraff: "The Dean of Innovation," Michigan Business Professor, Author, and Keynote Speaker.
  • Cultivating Innovation to Stand Out: Jeff DeGraff
    Office Hours with Jeff DeGraff is a video series where the Dean of Innovation interviews thought leaders on the broad subject of innovation. These...

Jeff DeGraff Books

  • The Innovation Code: The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict
    The Innovation Code: The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict
  • Innovation You: Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved
    Innovation You: Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved
  • Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations (New Horizons in Management)
    Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations (New Horizons in Management)
  • Leading Innovation: How to Jump Start Your Organization's Growth Engine
    Leading Innovation: How to Jump Start Your Organization's Growth Engine
  • Creativity at Work
    Creativity at Work

Speaker Lists Featuring Jeff DeGraff

FAQs on booking Jeff DeGraff

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  • What topics does Jeff DeGraff speak about?

    Jeff DeGraff is a keynote speaker and industry expert whose speaking topics include Authors, Business, Business Leadership, Corporate Strategy, Creativity, Economy, Education, Finance, Innovation, Inspirational, Leadership, Literary, Motivational, Strategic Leadership, Virtual.
  • Where does Jeff DeGraff travel from?

    Jeff DeGraff generally travels from Ann Arbor, MI, USA, but can be booked for private corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. For more details, please contact an AAE Booking agent.
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    AAE Speakers Bureau has successfully booked keynote speakers like Jeff DeGraff for clients worldwide since 2002. As a full-service speaker booking agency, we have access to virtually any speaker or celebrity in the world. Our agents are happy and able to submit an offer to the speaker or celebrity of your choice, letting you benefit from our reputation and long-standing relationships in the industry. Please click the Check Availability button above and complete the form on this page including the details of your event, or call our office at 1.800.698.2536, and one of our agents will assist you to book Jeff DeGraff for your next private or corporate function.
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Jeff DeGraff is a keynote speaker and industry expert who speaks on a wide range of topics such as Leading Innovation: How to Jumpstart Your Organization's Growth Engine, Business Design in the New Tech Centric World, The Power of Diversity and Teams, Connecting the Dots of Innovation: Making Collaborative Innovation Work Where You Work, Doing the Creative Work the Company Can’t and Innovation You: Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved. The estimated speaking fee range to book Jeff DeGraff for your event is $30,000 - $50,000. Jeff DeGraff generally travels from Ann Arbor, MI, USA and can be booked for (private) corporate events, personal appearances, keynote speeches, or other performances. Similar motivational celebrity speakers are Richard Florida, Peter Diamandis, Daniel Burrus, Maddy Dychtwald and Jim Carroll. Contact All American Speakers for ratings, reviews, videos and information on scheduling Jeff DeGraff for an upcoming live or virtual event.

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