Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg

Creative Cultures course – New York edition

March 4, 2009 · Leave a Comment

ny-for-cc-course-announcement

On May 4-8, we will be running our Creative Cultures course in New York, focused on the role of the Innovation Architect in managing innovation and creativity at work.

As part of the course, the participants will also take part in the World Innovation Forum. Program details here. You can also read the press release, copied in below.

——— PRESS RELEASE ———

NEW YORK, NEW YORK–(Marketwire – March 3, 2009) -

Amid today’s global turbulence, fueling creativity and innovation has become essential for survival and long-term sustainability. To help CEOs and executives make radical improvements in these areas, IESE Business School has launched a special program, which is set to take place May 4-8 in New York City.

“Creative Cultures: Making Innovation Work” is designed to show business leaders how to establish innovation as part of their corporate culture, so that processes, systems and attitudes work together to achieve a long-term competitive edge.

The program covers:

- The role of the Innovation Architect

- Open source vs. crowd-sourced innovation

- Creative principles in practice

- Shaping the ecosystems of innovation

- Making it happen in the next 100 days

“A culture of innovation is driven by the individual,” says IESE Professor Paddy Miller, who leads the program. “Yet it’s instilled in the organization by small teams working together on a daily basis.”

Other members of the faculty team are:

- Antonio Davila (Doctor of Business Administration, Harvard University), author of Making Innovation Work: How to Manage It, Measure It and Profit from It

- Erich Joachimsthaler, (Ph.D. in Business Administration, University of Kansas), founder and CEO of Vivaldi Partners

- Thomas Wedell-Wedellsborg (MBA, IESE Business School), Managing partner at 13 MBAs and specialist in innovation and creative methodologies.

Prof. Miller and Wedell-Wedellsborg maintain a blog, where they examine innovation and creativity in companies (www.miller-wedell.com).

Participants to the Creative Cultures program will work in small teams to analyze business scenarios focused on innovation issues, followed by group discussions facilitated by faculty leaders. They will develop individual action plans and strategies to take back to their companies. In addition, they will have the invaluable opportunity to hear from innovation luminaries at the World Innovation Forum. Because innovation is most effectively carried out in small groups within firms, participants are encouraged to attend the program with other members of their management teams.

IESE Business School is one of the world’s leading business schools. With campuses in Europe and a newly-created center in New York, IESE provides high-caliber executive education programs for business leaders and companies around the world.

For more information on the program, visit “Creative Cultures: Making Innovation Work.”

To view a video associated with this press release, please visit the following link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aEkT_TnsZcY

To view the photo associated with this press release, please visit the following link: http://www.marketwire.com/library/20090226-CreativeCultures800.jpg

 

 

For more information, please contact

IESE International Executive Education
Barcelona, Spain
+34-93-253-4200
Email: sfp@iese.edu
Website: www.iese.edu

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Creative cultures
Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

Doing Good Doing Well

February 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment

dgdw-logo

This Friday I will be moderating a panel discussion on Smart Tech at the annual Doing Good Doing Well conference in Barcelona.

The panel is on the role of innovation and technology in CO2 emissions, and will feature some pretty interesting speakers: Molly Webb from The Climate Group, Emmanuel Lagarrique, Senior VP of Scheider Electric, and Andy Eggleston of Eggleston Partners. Details below.

“Smart Technology: Can IT reduce CO2 emissions?”
This panel, based on the Smart 2020 report written by The Climate Group, will focus on the potential of IT in cutting CO2 emissions across industries: energy, transport, buildings, etc. This transformation will be driven by climate change but will also reduce costs and create competitive advantage. The panel will put into light a new field of innovation, which generates tremendous job and entrepreneurial opportunities.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized

Green innovation in Copenhagen

November 28, 2008 · Leave a Comment

co2penhagen-logo

co2penhagen-2

In September 2009, my native city of Copenhagen hosts the world’s first CO2-neutral festival, CO2PENHAGEN. The festival showcases a mix of art and science events, all geared at promoting green awareness and displaying innovative environmental technologies. It also happens to be founded and organised by two of my friends, Katrine Vejby and Nina Louise Jensen, in what I think is a pretty impressive display of green entrepreneurship. Read more on this link:

http://www.co2penhagen.com/?page_id=77

(Disclaimer: I’m one of their advisors).

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Creative cultures
Tagged: , ,

Innovation trend: crowdsourcing

November 7, 2008 · Leave a Comment

Just posted a short piece on the subject of crowdsourcing on our Creative Cultures blog, including a link to a good video introduction to the phenomenon.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Creative cultures
Tagged: ,

The Gatekeeper’s Dilemma: how do you recognise a good idea?

October 15, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I recently posted a piece on an important but often overlooked question that innovators face: how do you recognise a good idea? Preview below – the rest of the entry is posted on our Creative Cultures blog.

On the day after New Year’s Eve, 1962, the nervous young band members and their manager entered the Decca Records studio to do an audition for a record contract. The manager had great confidence in the band’s potential, but he had trouble convincing the record labels to offer them a contract. In fact, the labels wouldn’t even give them an audition. He had only managed to get that day’s audition with Decca because he had privately contacted the record label and, without the band’s knowledge, offered to pay the cost of the audition out of his own pocket.

The tape that the band recorded that day, containing 15 songs, was sent to one of the record label’s producers, Dick Rowe. Rowe, an experienced professional with more than 20 years in the business, was known as a great talent spotter, and spent most of his time searching for new bands. After he had listened to the recording, Rowe contacted the manager, bringing bad news. Rowe was sorry; he did not think the band had commercial potential, and Decca would under no circumstances offer them a recording contract. He then made the statement that would become his public epitaph: “Guitar groups are on the way out, Mr. Epstein.”

If Brian Epstein hadn’t entered his life on that day in January, Dick Rowe would still be known to the world as a great and talented record producer. But after a fateful day, based on one rapid judgment call, all that was forgotten. After that day, Dick Rowe would forevermore be known as only one thing: the man who said no to The Beatles.
[Continued]

Read the rest of the entry on our Creative Cultures blog.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Uncategorized
Tagged: , , , ,

New post: The Practicality Gap

October 15, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I just wrote a short piece on one of the biggest challenges of innovation, The Practicality Gap, posted on our Creative Cultures blog:

The Practicality Gap is one of the most intransigent problems of innovation. By its very nature, innovation requires people to change their behavior, and this is exceedingly difficult to do. Worse, when the behavior we need to change is a well-established daily habit, it is nearly impossible. This is the Practicality Gap: if a new behavior cannot be effortlessly integrated into your working life, chances are that it won’t get done unless somebody literally forces you to do it. [...]

Read the rest of the posting.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Creative cultures
Tagged: , ,

New blog: Creative Cultures

September 19, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I have just launched a new blog on innovation and business creativity, called Creative Cultures.

The blog is written in collaboration with Paddy Miller, Professor at IESE Business School, and Research Associate Azra Brankovic. It is a window into our current research undertaking, and features a mix of longer postings and short notices about interesting new papers and articles in the area of innovation.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Creative cultures
Tagged: ,

Spam innovation

September 5, 2008 · Leave a Comment

I just posted a stray thought on innovation in the spam business on my (otherwise generously neglected) Fragments of Knowledge blog:

It seems that Total Quality Management has come to the spam business.

Used to be, you could tell spam emails by the weird names, non-English phrasing and requests that you’d have to be quite caffeine-deprived to respond to. That, however, may be changing. [...]

Rest of the posting here: New developments in the spam war.

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Fragments of knowledge

Creative Cultures: Making Innovation Work

July 10, 2008 · 1 Comment

I’m happy to announce that I’ll be teaching parts of a forthcoming Executive Education program on the subject of innovation, hosted at IESE Business School in Barcelona on November 18-21, 2008. 

The course, entitled Creative Cultures: Making Innovation Work, is not a basic primer course, but assumes that the participants have already been through the traditional innovation workshops and are familar with the fundamentals. The program adresses the question of what comes after that: how do you actually make it happen? Gathering innovation professionals from different companies, the program goes beyond brainstorming and explores the practicalities of how you can manage to build a creative culture in a company that has a hundred OTHER things to take care of as well. This requires far more than creative thinking skills; it requires a deep understanding of strategy, motivation and systems thinking as well.

Besides Paddy Miller, the program features a pretty interesting lineup of speakers, including Tony Davila, author of the bestselling Making Innovation Work (and an excellent lecturer), Anne Skare Nielsen, founder of FutureNavigator, and Erich Joachimsthaler, author of the bestselling Hidden In Plain Sight (Harvard Business Press).

As of today, about a third of the places in the program are already taken. If you want to know more, you can download the Creative Cultures folder with all the details (PDF file, 1MB) or contact Program Director Mark Wuijten on MWuijten@iese.edu.

→ 1 CommentCategories: Creative cultures
Tagged: , , ,

New books: on cities, personality, and happiness

March 27, 2008 · Leave a Comment

city.jpg   personality.jpg   happiness-hypo.jpg      

A few recommendations from my book blog, most notably of Richard Florida’s fascinating Who’s Your City. Also a new book on the science of personality that completely vindicates your parents, and one on happiness research that takes on Buddha, Socrates et al. 

→ Leave a CommentCategories: Books