Gijs van Wulfen

Ten Guidelines on Your Path Becoming an Amazing Design Thinking Innovator

Becoming an amazing innovator is a long journey. You face endless challenges, especially when you want to change a ‘big old elephant’, your challenge gets exponentially more difficult. In essence it’s very simple. Organisations consists of people. So, when you have innovative people, you have an innovative organisation. That’s why Gijs’s ten guidelines focus on people, like you.

Now, you can point to others in your organisation claiming they are not willing to change. But when you point at them, take a look at your hand. Three of your five fingers point to yourself, reminding you that the change starts with you. Your take-away from Gijs’ keynote are ten practical guidelines helping you to become an amazing innovator, leading others to let the old elephant dance again.

The ten guidelines and key take-aways for the audience are:

• Be courageous.
• Align to strategy.
• Get buy-in.
• Pick the right team.
• Discover.
• Be customer-centered.
• Experiment.
• Pivot.
• Be resilient.
• Trust the process.

How to Create a Design Thinking Culture for Innovation

This famous lecture of Gijs takes an original approach to show how you can innovate to create a design thinking culture for innovation in the expedition way! Gijs draws parallels between mankind’s greatest explorations in history and modern-day innovation. He talks on “How Columbus discovered America; how Hillary reached the summit of Everest; and how Neil Armstrong got to be the first man on the Moon”.

Their remarkable stories of exploration and how they overcame unexpected setbacks will inspire you to innovate with a new mindset in a structured way according to the FORTH innovation methodology. FORTH is a proven customer-oriented and inspiring innovation expedition to create new business cases for innovative products, services and business models. It creates a design thinking culture for innovation in ‘old firms’. The scientifically proven method is used worldwide and described in his innovation bestseller “The Innovation Expedition”, published in English, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, Chinese, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish and Japanese.

There are five take-aways for the audience on how to create a design thinking culture for innovation:

• Never innovate alone.
• Do it the expedition way.
• Solve a relevant customer friction.
• Use the voice-of-the-customer.
• Bring back business.

How to Find Your Way Through the Innovation Maze

In practice so many people experiencing innovation as a maze. You get lost or stuck on your journey due to obstacles as ‘no internal support’, ‘a lack of resources,’ ‘no time’ or ‘no inspiration’. Meaning that statistically eighty percent of all innovation projects never reach the market. In this keynote, Gijs shows four clear routes from different natural innovation starting points and guides you through how to overcome the obstacles to successfully deliver new business cases for products, services and business models.

Your four innovation routes:

• The idea route: You are starting with a new idea.
• The technology route: You have discovered a new technology.
• The customer issue route: You have identified an unsolved customer problem.
• The business challenge route: Your business needs to innovate.

Gijs shares eight valuable lessons learned to successfully navigate the innovation routes. You get practical answers on vital questions like: How do I know there’s a need for it? How do I know it is technologically do-able? How do I know I can realize a profit?

Breaking Innovation Barriers

Innovators often find themselves facing countless barriers when attempting to revolutionise markets and organisations. The resounding words you hear time and time again are a discouraging ‘NO’, and a thousand ‘WHYs’ from your superiors, partners and investors. Our biggest challenge is to get management buy-in to prioritise innovation and, once we’re on your way, to keep their commitment during the development of our new innovative initiatives.

In this keynote Gijs presents fifteen proven strategies that will enable you to turn those resounding ‘NO’s’ into resounding ‘YES’s’. By mastering these fifteen strategies, you will pave your path to becoming an immensely impactful innovator. It is time´to shatter the barriers that stand in your way. This keynote guides the audience on their design thinking innovation journey.

The way to win management buy-in for innovation, and the key take-aways for the audience are:

• Understand your Management’s Agenda
• Cultivate Innovation Ambassadors
• We-nnovate across Silos
• Assemble a Top Team
• Experiment
• Be Authentic
• Seize the Innovation Sweet Spot
• Align Innovation to Strategy
• Showcase Innovation Successes
• Find Innovation Partners
• Be Customer-centred
• Apply Proven Methodologies
• Proof Customer Commitment
• Draft an Innovation Business Case
• Pitch your Innovation Story