Frans Johansson

Keynote speaker Frans Johansson is the best-selling author of The Medici Effect: Breakthrough Insights at the Intersection of Ideas, Concepts and Cultures, which was translated into 18 languages and named one of the top ten business books by Amazon.com. Raised in Sweden by his African American/Cherokee mother and Swedish father, he speaks to audiences worldwide, from the boardrooms of America’s largest corporations to villages in developing countries. He has founded a software startup, a healthcare firm, a hedge fund, and the strategy consulting firm The Medici Group. His second book,  The Click Moment was released in 2012.

In his books and in his presentations, speaker Frans Johansson clearly shows how the best ideas and innovation come from collaboration between people with diverse experiences, skills, expertise, perspectives, backgrounds, and cultures. Simply stated, he is known for making the business case for diversity. Beyond lip service, he packs his programs with plenty of examples and gives people what they need to know and what they need to do to break down silos, unleash an explosion of ideas, and inspire passion and action. He makes it clear that anyone can innovate, regardless of rank or role.

Now with The Click Moment, Johansson zeroes in on a core concept from The Medici Effect: randomness. In that book, he showed how some of the best ideas come out of seemingly random combinations. In The Click Moment, he examines what makes a random combination or occurrence a “click moment”—that is, a rare opportunity that can redefine one’s strategy or course.

Frans Johansson earned his BS in environmental science at Brown University and his MBA at Harvard Business School. He has written articles on healthcare, information technology, and the science of sport fishing and has been featured on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, ABC’s Early Morning Show, and CNBC’s The Business of Innovation series along with Jack Welch and Muhammad Yunus.

The Click Moment: Seizing Opportunity in an Unpredictable World

Success, we’re told, is the outcome of careful planning, analysis, and strategy. But the truth is, success is far more random than we’d like to believe. In fact, in today’s complex, volatile, and random world, the five-year business plan is obsolete and going through the motions can no longer guarantee strong performance. If planning is out the window, what do you have? According to Frans Johansson, look for “click moments”—rare opportunities, often serendipitous, to change course. He will discuss how to spot click moments and increase their occurrence in our lives, how to place lots of high-potential bets, and how to harness the complex forces that lead to a winning strategy.

The Medici Effect: Groundbreaking Innovation at the Intersection of Disciplines & Cultures

What do goat milk, spiders, and fishing lines have in common? Fiber optics and concrete? Ant hills and architecture? Most of us would assume nothing. But out of each of these seemingly random combinations have come radical innovations that have created whole new fields. In this talk, Frans Johansson takes us on a fascinating journey to The Intersection—a place where ideas from different fields and cultures meet and collide, ultimately igniting an explosion of extraordinary new innovations. Through the Medici principles of innovation, see how companies become global leaders, how products and services yield huge margins, and how the most unlikely people have outdone the experts in their own fields.

Diversity Drives Innovation

The world is changing fast. People today are more global than ever and move often between many cultures and countries. Companies, cities, and nations must compete on a global basis. In this new order of rising economies and beleaguered first-world nations, diversity is more important than ever for innovation. Frans Johansson explains how today’s most innovative companies form culturally diverse talent pools and teams as a specific strategy to innovate. These companies have become #1 brand leaders and R&D centers—and very profitable ones. In this program, Frans Johansson clearly and persuasively shows what happens when companies make diversity their most powerful innovation tool.

Intersectional Thinking & the New Innovative Leader

The only constant is change and our interconnectedness means the world has become far more unpredictable. How do leaders navigate in this climate? Frans Johansson believes it takes a new kind of thinking, passion, courage, and collaboration to thrive and compete successfully in today’s business world. He coined “Intersectional Thinking,” which calls for leaders to create, actively seek, and see intersections around them. Leaders who become Intersectional Thinkers can spark organization-wide culture change using their existing resources, perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds. In this talk, the audience will gain a fresh look at innovation and what it means to be an adaptive leader. More importantly, they will discover how they can develop their own creative abilities to inspire change and innovative growth.