Diana Kander

Diana Kander is a New York Times bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, and one of the most dynamic voices on innovation, curiosity, and building products and services that customers actually want. Her book All In Startup has become a go-to resource for entrepreneurs and corporate innovation teams, and her consulting work has helped organizations across industries rethink how they approach innovation.

The Curiosity-Driven Approach to Innovation

Kander is a serial entrepreneur who came to the United States as a refugee and built her career on challenging assumptions and asking the questions that most organizations avoid. Her approach to innovation centers on curiosity, the willingness to test assumptions rather than trust them, and the discipline to build what customers actually need rather than what companies think they should want. She has been a faculty member at multiple universities and her research focuses on why established brands lose relevance and how organizational decline can be prevented.

Helping Organizations Stay Curious and Relevant

Kander’s presentations are high-energy, interactive, and designed to make audiences rethink their approach to innovation and customer engagement. Her keynotes deliver powerful insights on building cultures of curiosity that drive innovation, avoiding the assumptions that kill new products and ideas, what causes established brands to lose relevance, and the entrepreneurial mindset that keeps organizations ahead of disruption.

Why Curiosity is the Ultimate Competitive Advantage

This keynote explains exactly why most companies reaching the peak of their potential lose their curiosity and crash into irrelevance. From how we develop blind spots about our business, to the pitfalls of feeling like an expert, this thought-provoking, engaging program reveals the smokescreens obscuring imminent threats to long-term viability. It walks you through specific ways to boost innovation, uncover customer needs, solve problems, create new value for customers, and increase employee engagement. Most importantly, Diana demonstrates why curiosity is your greatest asset to drive constant innovation and help your company thrive and compete on more than price alone — ultimately, future-proofing your business.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• How you can institutionalize curiosity, ask better questions to stay competitive and relevant to your customers and drive growth
• How you can dramatically reduce the risk of new ideas and create a more innovative culture that leads to results
• How to determine pitfalls within your organization and avoid falling into the “expert trap”

Increasing the Speed of Innovation

The pace of change in today’s economy requires innovative, value-adding ideas to come from all parts of your organization – whether they are internal improvements or new sources of revenue. The way managers were traditionally trained stifles innovation and forces out-of-the-box thinkers out of the company. This interactive presentation outlines the must-have skill sets to effectively lead your employees. Diana will provide the framework for how your organization – and the people within it – can flourish in this hyper-competitive world.

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• Learn new skill sets required of the innovative leader
• Avoid common pitfalls of innovative leadership
• Create an internal culture of innovation so that every employee is a resource to the effort

How to Compete on Value Instead of Price 

This presentation teaches a methodology used by both entrepreneurs and established organizations to continuously create new value for their customers. You will learn the key questions you must ask in order to uncover value-creating opportunities, as well as precisely how to ask them to effectively yield useful insights. Questions like: are you competing on price or value with your customers? If your focus is on value (which it should be), are you missing some key blind spots in your product or service? Are you measuring true data about the health of your project or just relying on vanity metrics that are concealing what’s really going on?

ROI & Key Outcomes:

• Change the way you solicit feedback from customers to make it more actionable
• Learn the key customer questions that will uncover value-creating opportunities.
• Learn detailed examples to improve curiosity, creativity and leadership skills