Gijs van Wulfen

Book Gijs van Wulfen for your event

Why do promising ideas get stuck? Why does management say no? And why do organisations generate plenty of ideas but struggle to turn them into results?

These questions are at the heart of Gijs van Wulfen’s work. His message challenges one of the most common assumptions about innovation: success is not simply about generating more or better ideas.

Real innovation depends on what happens next. Organisations need to overcome internal barriers, align decision-makers, create commitment and establish a process that can move new concepts towards implementation.

When you book Gijs van Wulfen for your event, audiences discover how to make innovation more effective in practice. Through compelling stories, visual thinking and proven methods, he shows leaders and teams how to create the conditions in which promising ideas can become meaningful results.

Breaking innovation barriers

Innovation rarely fails because organisations lack ideas. More often, promising concepts lose momentum because of internal resistance, competing priorities, slow decision-making or a lack of alignment.

Gijs helps audiences recognise and address these obstacles through five interconnected themes:

• Innovation Effectiveness: Moving beyond innovation activity to create measurable impact.
• Breaking Innovation Barriers: Identifying and overcoming the obstacles that stop promising ideas from progressing.
• Innovation Discipline: Bringing focus and direction to a process that naturally involves uncertainty.
• Innovation Ownership: Engaging people so they support and take responsibility for new solutions.
• Structured Innovation with FORTH: Creating a clear journey that connects teams and decision-makers from exploration to implementation.

By making these challenges recognisable, Gijs gives audiences a practical way to examine where innovation becomes stuck and what they can do differently.

From innovation to WE-nnovation

At the centre of Gijs van Wulfen’s philosophy is a simple idea: innovation is not the achievement of a lone genius.

He calls this WE-nnovation.

Successful innovation happens when the right people create, learn and commit together. Instead of developing ideas in isolation and seeking support afterwards, Gijs encourages organisations to involve key stakeholders throughout the journey.

This creates more than collaboration. It develops the trust, commitment and shared responsibility needed to give new solutions a genuine chance of succeeding.

Through WE-nnovation, Gijs challenges audiences to see innovation as a collective capability rather than an individual creative act.

Structure innovation with FORTH

Gijs is the founder of the FORTH Innovation Methodology, a structured approach used by organisations around the world.

FORTH addresses one of innovation’s central challenges: balancing the freedom to explore new possibilities with the discipline required to maintain momentum. It brings multidisciplinary teams and decision-makers into a shared process, creating clarity around how innovation progresses.

For Gijs, structure is not the enemy of creativity. The right structure gives creativity direction. It helps organisations navigate uncertainty, make decisions and prevent valuable concepts from becoming disconnected initiatives that never progress.

FORTH provides organisations with a practical framework for making innovation systematic without losing the curiosity and experimentation that new ideas require.

Innovation & AI

Artificial intelligence is dramatically increasing the speed at which organisations can explore possibilities, generate concepts and develop solutions. But faster innovation does not automatically mean more effective innovation.

As Gijs puts it, AI can give organisations speed, but it cannot give them trust or ownership.

The human side of innovation therefore becomes even more important. Leaders must consider not only what technology makes possible, but how people participate in change, make decisions and commit to new solutions.

Gijs brings this perspective into the AI conversation, helping organisations balance technological acceleration with the human capabilities required to translate possibility into progress.

A practical innovation keynote

Gijs van Wulfen is the author of several books on innovation, including Breaking Innovation Barriers, The Innovation Expedition and The Innovation Maze. His innovation methods, maps and tools are used by professionals and organisations worldwide.

On stage, Gijs is energetic, visual and highly practical. Rather than presenting innovation as abstract theory, he takes audiences inside the realities of creating something new: resistance, uncertainty, difficult decisions and the challenge of maintaining momentum.

His keynotes combine inspiration with practical application, giving audiences frameworks and tools they can use in their own organisations. Whether speaking about innovation effectiveness, organisational barriers, FORTH, WE-nnovation or AI, Gijs helps people rethink how innovation happens and what is required to make it work.