Keynote & Workshop Topics:
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Innovation
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Getting Greedy When Others Are Fearful: Linking Innovation, Sustainability, and Profits
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Dark times are when the best players make the biggest gains. Everyone else is lying low, resources are hard to come by, and consumers are an endangered species. Richard Worzel, one of today's leading futurists, sees real opportunities in today's situation, and this presentation offers retailers insights on:
- Why today's 'new' marketing tools such as Facebook and Twitter are only the beginning of personal marketing on a mass basis;
- Why getting into your customer's head is now more necessary and more possible than ever before;
- Why sustainability today's environmental issue will not disappear the way scarcity of resources the issue of the 70s did following the previous oil price break in 1980-81, and therefore why working on sustainability now, even in hard times, is critical to future survival and success; and finally
- Why innovation is not popular, and why you need to create a new culture of innovation, starting from the bottom.
In addressing these issues, especially the issues of sustainability and innovation, Richard will provide two sets of tools. The first, called the Opportunity Matrix, offers a means of producing a steady stream of new ideas for incremental innovation. The second, the handbook on Risk Management and Scenario Planning that Richard developed for his consulting clients, is a take-away toolbox that can help you put yourself in your customers' future mindspace in order to be there, waiting, when she arrives.
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Innovate or Evaporate! How to Innovate Your Way Out of Tomorrows Tough Times
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The world has changed from two years ago - or even six months ago. We are experiencing events and circumstances for which we have no precedents and no guides, and this means that the old, tried and true methods for keeping sales up and operations safe are no longer as effective. Instead, think about ways to re-invent your organization to take advantage of today's novel situation. This presentation by Richard Worzel, a strategic planner, and one of today's leading futurists, outlines how to do this by:
Assessing the differences from what we had before compared with the way things are now. What's different, and what do you need to do about it?
Identify the stumbling blocks that make it hard for your organization to change and innovate. Innovation is neither easy nor comfortable, but in today's environment, it's the difference between survival and disaster.
Use proven techniques to come up with novel ways of doing business, and test them out for their effectiveness.
Overcome the inertia of past successes with new possibilities, and assessing their potential before committing to a course of action.
Richard will help you put your organization on the road to change geared to today's problems, and help you bring your group safely into the next decade.
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Managing Innovation
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No less a figure than Peter Drucker has said that the only real asset an organization has today is the collective brains of its people. The implications of this are severe: the successful leadership and management of innovation is now the most important strategic weapon any company can wield in the marketplace.
Leading innovation is the ultimate challenge for CEOs for by definition, no road map is possible. Drawing on the in-depth research from his best-selling book, Who Owns Tomorrow?, strategic planner and professional futurist Richard Worzel assesses this challenge in a hard-headed, yet surprising and entertaining keynote presentation that covers the key elements required for innovation leadership, including:
- The battle for talent - recruiting, training, and retaining key people;
- The dangers of the technology gap - jumping across too early is expensive, falling behind is fatal;
- Micro-managing is hazardous to your wealth, yet hands-off management can lead to loss of accountability;
- Flexibility as a tactical weapon, arising from the exploitation of technology, training, and effective delegation; and
- Awareness of the major factors shaping the competitive marketplace of tomorrow, including the coming demographic upheavals, changes in society's values, and the rising threats of weakening governments.
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Creating an Innovation Organization: The Deliberate Act of Devising New Business (Workshop)
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Innovation has become a corporate religion, in part because there is so much happening in so many areas that organizations must now innovate to survive. Yet our own natural biases often defeat innovation before it begins, resulting in organizations where people know how to look good, but don't actually innovate. In this workshop, futurist and strategic planner Richard Worzel identifies the forces that oppose innovation, provides strategies to create an environment that encourages it, and then offers specific techniques that will allow you to arrive at new ideas, new directions, and practical new products and services. These techniques will allow you to focus on the future needs and wants of your clients and their clients, to broaden your thinking beyond the confines of your present thinking, and to develop the outlines of a game plan to bring your ideas into commercial reality. This workshop will provide you with take-aways you can use immediately in your business, as well as a tool kit of techniques that you can use over and over again. Innovation is a skill that can be learned - and this workshop teaches it explicitly.
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Accountable Innovation: Creating an Innovative Organization that Maintains Accountability
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Any organization that wants to entrench innovation as an important part of its culture accepts that innovators sometimes fail. But if you allow your people to try things and occasionally fail, how do you maintain accountability? What, in short, constitutes 'responsible failure' and how does it differ from any other kind of failure? In this keynote presentation, futurist and strategic planner Richard Worzel talks about the keys to innovation, and how they can be successfully balanced against the needs for individual accountability and responsibility. This creative tension actually produces higher levels of innovation, rather than stifling creativity.
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Innovation Thinking (Workshop)
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Innovation has become the Holy Grail of business today, and with good reason. Changes are happening so fast, and the consequences of being left behind are so extreme, that companies believe - correctly - that innovation is the only way to thrive and survive. Yet most people believe that creativity is only open to the artistic. Like art, everyone is creative to a greater or lesser extent, but few ever learn how to exercise their creativity, and fewer practice it on a regular basis, so that they get flabby results when they do try.
There are specific techniques, just as there are in art, that can help those who are not practiced in innovating, and can help the already creative individual become even more innovative. In this workshop, futurist and strategic planner Richard Worzel will walk you through the techniques of innovating, and show you how you can create new ideas, new products, and new results. These techniques will include immediately practical techniques, such as those focused on product innovation, and developing an opportunity matrix to identify new needs and ideas. You will leave this workshop not only with new ideas you can use immediately in your business, but with a toolbox of techniques that you can use over and over again.
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