The Sweeney Agency

About Rowan Gibson - Business Strategist and Innovation Expert:

Rowan Gibson is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading experts on business innovation. The media have labeled him Mr. Innovation, the Innovation Grandmaster, the W. Edwards Deming of innovation and a guru among the gurus. Rowan Gibson is one of the world’s most in-demand public speaker on innovation in business, leadership and marketing. In just the last three years alone, he has delivered his keynote speeches, innovation masterclasses and public seminars in nearly 50 countries around the world. He has addressed a long list of major organizations, including Accenture, ADP, Ahold, Bayer, Carlson-Wagonlit, Heineken, Henkel, IBM, Mars, Microsoft, Motorola, NCR, NOKIA, Philips, Roche, Siemens, Steelcase, and Volkswagen.

He is the internationally bestselling author of two major books on strategy and enterprise innovation – Rethinking The Future (1996) and Innovation to the Core (2008) – which have been published to date in over 20 languages. His latest book, Innovation to the Core (Harvard Business School Press), explains – for the first time – how to build and sustain a deep, company-wide innovation capability that drives continual growth and strategic renewal.

Over the last two decades, Gibson’s international clients have included some of the world’s largest and most successful organizations. He teaches them how to seize new growth opportunities, create new markets and even transform entire industries by recalibrating their whole organizational system around the paradigm of innovation.

Rowan Gibson is also a prolific writer. He has authored dozens of business articles, columns and blogs which have been read all around the globe. He has been interviewed frequently on television and radio, as well as in the international press. His media appearances include Forbes, BusinessWeek, Harvard Business Review, CNN and BBC World Service. He has also appeared in several business documentaries.

Rowan was born and educated in London, where he began his career as an advertising executive in the early 1980s and moved on to become an international creative director with Euro RSCG, one of the world’s largest advertising agency networks. After a successful career in the advertising, branding and marketing business, he became a strategy and innovation consultant to Fortune 500 companies all over the world, with a focus on how to make innovation a deep, sustainable capability across a large enterprise.

What Rowan Gibson Talks About:

Winning in the Innovation Economy
Today’s Innovation Economy is driven by hyper-acceleration, hyper-competition and the rapid commoditization of products, services and capabilities. In this difficult environment, the only option for creating new wealth, building new markets and driving future business is innovation. Of course, most organizations understand that, but they still can’t make innovation happen. Why? In this revolutionary keynote speech, Rowan Gibson focuses on how to build an enterprise-wide innovation system that actually works. A system based on new values, new skills, new processes, new metrics, new IT solutions and new management structures. A system that puts the focus on continuous innovation – not just at the product and service level, but at the level of the entire business model. A system that will enable the company to invent new breakthrough strategies for sustaining profitable growth and then turn those strategies into market success stories.

Rethinking innovation
Everyone preaches innovation. So why the rhetoric-reality gap? It’s because innovation has to be more than a vague aspiration. It has to a deep, systemic capability in your organization, one that requires completely new management systems – new values, new processes, new tools, new training, and new IT networks. But how exactly do you build a corporate innovation system? How do you recalibrate your corporate culture so that innovation becomes embedded in your DNA?

Rethinking the future
Discontinuous change and disruptive technology can destroy the foundations of your organization’s success. Yet they also make it possible for you to invent new growth strategies, transform your industry and create fundamentally new markets. So how can you make sure that you harness the forces of discontinuous change to shape your own future, before the future shapes you? How can you continually reinvent your business?

Rethinking strategy
Strategy has traditionally been an analytical, data-driven exercise. But the science of strategy no longer works in a fast-moving and fuzzy world. Today, your organization needs to be driven by a big, distinctive idea – a breakthrough core strategy that works on ‘emotional logic’. So how can you create and implement a coherent strategy in which your brand, your customer experience and your employee experience become inseparable? And how often should you rethink it?

Rethinking human capital
If every company can now outsource, offshore or computerize huge chunks of its non-core activities (75% to 90% of what we do), then the only strategic difference between one company and the next will be the stuff that’s left at the core – the value-added ‘intellectual capital’ of the company’s hot talent. So how can you unleash the imagination, entrepreneurial spirit and ‘network power’ of your people? How can you build your strategy around human capital - the only competitive weapon you have left?

Rethinking leadership
As business moves to a new level of complexity, leadership becomes more crucial than ever. The challenge for today’s senior executives is to master a new and radically different set of competencies. These include the ability to routinely and radically rethink the business, a focus on wealth creation not operational efficiency and the talent to build an inspiring, innovation-based culture that is designed from the customer backwards. How do you develop these competencies?