"Innovation can be the submarine that you sneak into the safe harbor of an unwary competitor, or it can be the clever entreaty you use to begin a fantastic lifelong relationship with your customer." -- Larry Keeley, Co-Founder, Doblin, Inc.
Convergence 2004 speaker, Larry Keeley, is an innovation strategist who often wonders why people bother to listen to innovation "experts" at all. After all, since innovation fails about 96% of the time, it seems self-evident that the field has advanced to about the same state as medicine when leeches, liniments and mystery potions were the sophisticated treatments of the day. On occasions when Larry can get someone to listen, he is inclined to reveal pieces of the emerging science of innovation that is at the heart of Doblin's practice. By being obsessive about identifying the root causes of innovation failure and injecting better methods, it is now possible to systematically boost innovation 'hit rates' to between 35% and 70%. That still isn't perfect but it is an improvement of 10-15 times over the pathetic results people try to convince themselves is "normal."
How does Larry help people achieve higher rates of success in this field which will always be part science and part art? By doing extensive, in-depth research and synthesizing those findings into process models that can be used to guide innovation in any organization. Larry will be presenting his latest research and insights at Convergence 2004. He also has a new book being released by HBS Press early next year. Title: "Taming the New: The Emerging Discipline of Innovation." You can say you heard it first at Convergence 2004!
You can get an overview of some of his thinking by looking at the Ten Types of Innovation model .
On top of all of that, you can play music if you go to Doblin's website For all you musicians, send us the score for any tunes you can pick out and we'll all play along with Doblin.
We'd love to have you join us at Convergence This is the 10th annual conference of innovation practitioners and it's an incredible opportunity to exchange ideas with folks from organizations around the world.
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