Stephen Wunker

What makes a leader innovative? How do they enable their organizations to innovate? The path to these successes can be straightforward and surefire. Through a disciplined approach, strengthen your own and your organization’s innovation muscles.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Panera’s Ron Shaich, and Levi’s Chip Bergh are some of the 50 top innovators who shared their insights with Wunker, and he brings you their wisdom in a step-by-step approach to making giant leaps in innovation performance.

It starts with the individual – how can you become more consistently innovative? Then it extends to the organization – how can you create the right aspirations, mechanisms, and culture to make innovation happen over-and-over again?

The secrets of these innovators show the concrete moves you can make to create a short-term impact and a long-term change.

Successful innovation doesn’t begin with a brainstorming session–it starts with the customer. So, in an age of unlimited data, why do well over half of new products fail to meet expectations? The truth is that we need to stop asking customers what they want . . . and start examining what they need.

Jobs to be Done is a way to understand what really drives customers. It uncovers what leads people or companies to purchase products and services, rather than looking at traditional industry definitions. Consumers don’t buy ice cream, for example, but a way to accomplish celebration, bonding, and indulgence.

The concept is so simple (and can remake how companies approach their markets) — and yet many have lacked a way to put it into practice. Wunker’s speech guides you through the innovation process, revealing how to: – Engage with customers in ways that uncover their real motivations. – Translate market insights into specific product features and commercial strategies. – Get your organization speaking with a common language around what customers want and which needs you’ll focus on.

Cut costs – it’s a common corporate refrain. But if you constantly slash spending, what happens to innovation? How can you stay competitive and satisfy customers?

Taking a Costovation approach solves the dilemma of how to spend less and innovate more. Through product and business model innovation, let go of assumptions, take a fresh look at the market, and relentlessly focus on what customers really want. Innovation and cost control don’t need to be opposites; done right, they can work together and delight customers too.

Consider Planet Fitness – it grew to 10 million members by concentrating on casual exercisers. Those customers don’t care about frills and sophisticated offerings. They want easy, low-cost access to good equipment. Although it’s very inexpensive to run, Planet Fitness ranks #1 in gym satisfaction.

Explore cost innovation strategies that work for big and small companies alike. From open innovation and cost-sharing to simplifying products and finding inexpensive ways to bring customers flocking, your audience will learn how rivals are building low-cost businesses that customers love.

How do you build a winning growth strategy when you don’t know exactly what lies ahead?

If Covid-19 taught us anything, it’s that organizations need to be better prepared for future uncertainty. Disruptions like these are only going to increase in frequency and intensity – so what can we do to prepare ourselves? And, with AI starting to upend whole industries, how can we position to seize the upside?

Wunker’s talk uncovers principles of success and failure. Learn from tales taken from Facebook and Tesla, as well as cautionary stories from Atari and Blackberry, to see how to win in new markets and how to keep those triumphs coming. ?

Learn how to define where markets are heading, how to define new ones, and what moves you can make today to create real competitive advantages in an uncertain future.