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.

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 organizations have a fundamental dilemma. They need to operate efficiently to get the most value out of their people and processes. They do this by using predictable techniques and technologies to standardize all aspects of their operation. Think McDonalds. But organizations also need to grow. They achieve this by deviating from these standards. That’s right, innovation is a form of positive deviance. Think biotech startups. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the conflict between the need to maintain the operation and the desire to grow it is actually good. This tension between the old world of work and the new one produces the creative power necessary to make breakthrough ideas scalable. But, it can’t be managed in the conventional way.

Throw out your checklist. You know one size never fits all. What is required are leaders who recognize the strategic situation, and understand how to develop the appropriate culture and competencies, and utilize the new best practices required to make innovation work where you work.

In this presentation, we 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 innovation leaders must do to create growth. We will focus on how to synchronize an increasingly complex and diverse enterprise to make innovation happen.

Professor DeGraff, the Dean of Innovation, will draw on thirty years of experience as advisor to the top leaders, scientists, and artists at most prestigious organizations in the world to lead you through this energizing and inspiring session. This interactive presentation includes dozens of examples, and a wide array of “how-to” tools and techniques. This presentation is for leaders who are looking to find better ways to innovate in this new world of work.

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.

Creativizing is a neologism, a made up word, to mean adding creativity to ordinary practices every day, everywhere. You’ve heard go big or go home. Well, Professor Jeff DeGraff, the Dean of Innovation, a top thought leader on the subject, suggests something radically different. Successful innovators actually have a wide array of creative practices that they use in small ways to see what really works and what doesn’t in a given situation. They are creativizers who make the ordinary extraordinary.

Borrowing from everyone from Aristotle to Zappa, Jeff DeGraff, the Dean of Innovation, will examine the five levels and types of creativity, from the easiest to the most difficult to master, and some of the creative methodologies associated with each: Mimetic (To imitate), Bisociative (To connect), Analogical (To transfer), Narratological (To integrate) and Intuitive (To transcend). Using real stories, wit and creativity itself he will introduce you to practices for designing, developing, and implementing creativity in real work situations. As importantly, Professor DeGraff will demonstrate these tools and illustrate when and where they are most effective. This session is highly interactive, energizing and inspiring. This session is for anyone who wants to put creativity to work where they work.

You are successful. You continue to develop yourself intellectually, physically and spiritually. You use many of the latest efficiency tools and technology to fit more and more into your life. But lately you have started to feel overwhelmed and it’s blocking your path to personal growth. You’ve tried mindfulness techniques, and while they bring temporary relief, they really don’t address the day to day problem of too much and too fast. You know that life is about making purposeful decisions. That means stopping some things in order to start others. But the challenge now is how to make adjustments without completely overhauling the life that you have built with your family, friends and colleagues. It’s time to rebalance the portfolio of your life.

There is so much more to personal transformation than just yourself. This workshop will give you the tools and techniques to accurately assess your real abilities and aspirations, as well as those of the groups you affiliate with and the situations in which you work. Within the context of real life, where we have responsibilities to others as well as ourselves, you will be guided through a series of exercises to rebalance your portfolio life and develop the necessary capabilities and relationships to make it happen.

Professor DeGraff, the Dean of Innovation, will draw on thirty years of experience as advisor to the top leaders, scientists and artists at most prestigious organizations in the world to lead you through this highly interactive, energizing and inspiring session. This workshop is for anyone who wants to find new ways to grow as a person in the face of ever increasing demands.