Jeff DeGraff

Jeff DeGraff is a world-renowned innovation thought leader, business professor, and bestselling author known as “The Dean of Innovation.” His creative and direct approach to making innovation actionable has earned him a reputation as the go-to advisor for Fortune 500 companies seeking to grow, change, and move forward. Jeff co-created the Competing Values Framework and has advised organizations including American Airlines, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, General Electric, Prudential, and Pfizer.

Making Innovation Real
Jeff’s career reads like an innovation playbook – marked by failures followed by great successes, all driven by the mantra he adopted from Walt Disney: “Keep moving forward.” His work focuses on helping organizations move beyond PowerPoint slides and elaborate process diagrams to develop the culture, competencies, and leadership practices required to execute and sustain real innovation. He is the author of Innovation You and host of a companion PBS program that explores how strategies used by top companies like Apple and GE can be translated and applied to everyday life.

Connecting the Dots of Innovation
Jeff’s keynotes challenge conventional thinking about how innovation happens in organizations. He addresses the reality that today’s global market requires boundless affiliations where connecting diverse cultures and competencies has become the essential function of leadership. His presentations on collaborative innovation, leading growth, and building innovation cultures equip audiences with practical frameworks for making innovation work where they work.

Jeff brings a competitive edge and creative energy that prompts organizations to throw away their checklists and embrace the messy, unpredictable process of genuine breakthrough innovation.

Leading Innovation: How to Jumpstart Your Organization’s Growth Engine

“The amount of innovation a company produces is inversely related to the number of PowerPoint slides or elaborate process diagrams it makes about innovation.” The DeGraff Hypothesis

Productivity is no longer enough. Leaders are finding that the drive for growth is pushing strategic innovation initiatives down into operating units where the management and staff have few of the tools and little preparation to really make it happen. Leading organizations are pursuing innovative strategies and processes only to find that they lack the culture, competencies, and leadership practices required to execute and sustain innovation. The theme of this session is simple: Sustainable innovation is produced by developing leaders who can systematically add innovation to existing business practices.

This highly engaging and interactive session is organized around the Innovation Genome, a simple framework that allows leaders at all levels and locations to understand how their leadership directly affects the creation of specific types of culture and competencies in their organizations, and how these abilities make innovation happen across the enterprise with everyone, everyday, everywhere. This session will presents a simple approach for leaders to recognize, develop, and launch creative ideas into winning solutions that create value.

Innovation You: Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved

One day it hits you: the game has changed. The market stinks, you are tired of the same old fear and greed, and what once gave you a spark isn’t enough anymore. What always worked for you before, professionally or personally, no longer gets results. Now there’s only one way forward: innovate. Make it new. Make you new. But how?

In this presentation, Innovation You, also the title of Jeff DeGraff’s book and PBS program, will explore how the strategies and tactics used to grow top businesses like Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, and GE can be translated and applied to your own life. It will give some pointers on how to aim for high quality targets, enlist deep and diverse domain expertise, take multiple shots on goal and learn from experience and experiments. This presentation will explain how to make yourself new and improved and how to help others do the same. So bring your challenges, an open mind and your desire to grow.

Connecting the Dots of Innovation: Making Collaborative Innovation Work Where You Work

An innovation only exists for a very brief moment before it goes sour like milk. Breakthroughs don’t conform to authoritative leadership practices because they advance at unpredictable speeds and magnitudes. Since it is disruptive, radical innovation is often relegated to an orphaned tech center, marginalized development function or outsourced completely where it becomes someone else’s problem. But in a down market, where growth is hard to come by, innovation isn’t your best friend; it’s your only friend. Now the same leaders who managed to keep innovation segregated from standard operations find themselves chasing a fast moving global market where disruptive innovation is likely to be an integrated solution created by a federation that spans companies, geographies and disciplines. As a result, conventional organizational strategies, structures and processes are being replaced by boundless affiliations where connecting the dots of diverse cultures and competencies has become the essential function of leadership. But what happens when your best people aren’t your people at all? What happens when everyone, everywhere, everyday innovates? Throw away your checklist. One size never really fit all anyway. It’s time to connect the dots – to innovate how we innovate. This presentation will show you how to sync your strategies, practices and competencies to achieve your collaborative innovation goals.