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Jeff DeGraff    

Author; Corporate Leadership, Strategy & Innovation Professor at University of Michigan

Jeff DeGraff is the Professor of Management and Organizations at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. He teaches MBA, EMBA, BBA, and Executive Education courses on leading creativity, innovation, and change. DeGraff’s research and writing focuses on innovation strategy, change and innovation competency development, creativity and innovation practices and methods, create communities and innovation networks, and leadership development.

He is an author and co-author of the books Innovation You, Creativity at Work: Developing the Right Practices to Make Innovation Happen, Leading Innovation: How to Jumpstart Your Company’s Growth Engine and Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations. His book, Making Stone Soup, was a finalist for several book awards. In his newest book Innovation Code: The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict, he argues that diversity of thought is essential to innovation. He urges everyone to practice constructive dialogue and work in diverse teams to find hybrid solutions and develop unique approaches to solve difficult problems.

DeGraff’s mission is “the democratization of innovation.” He brings innovation to everyone, every day and everywhere through his books, his public television program (Innovation You), columns (Inc.) and radio program (The Next Idea).

His articles and thought leadership on contemporary business matters have been covered by Business Week, US News and World Report and the Wall Street Journal, to name a few.

His client list reads like a ‘who’s who’ within the world of innovators, including, among many others, General Electric, Coca-Cola, American College of Surgeons, and Google. In working with these prominent firms, he has developed a broad array of widely used change and innovation methodologies and tools. DeGraff was a member of the executive team at Domino’s Pizza when it was one of the fastest growing businesses in the world in the 1980’s. DeGraff’s creative and direct take on making innovation happen have made him a world-renowned thought leader and have prompted his clients and colleagues to dub him as “The Dean of Innovation.”

DeGraff is a Managing Partner of Innovatrium, an innovation center and consulting practice that specializes in teaching companies how to grow and become more innovative. He serves as an advisor to think tanks and governments. DeGraff has worked all over the world, with significant experience in Europe and Asia, and in most industry and market segments.

Speech Topics

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.

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.

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.

News

Jeff DeGraff: The Graduation Speech I Didn't Give
So you have big dreams. So does everyone else on this planet. Just watch your favorite reality television program and witness what enthusiasm without ...
Embracing Failure and Working at the Edges | Jeff DeGraff
Embracing failure, working at the edges -- these are strategies that would not work in other aspects of organizational culture. But in innovation, they are crucial.

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