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Luke Williams    

Innovation Leader, NYU Professor, Best-Selling Author & Keynote Speaker on Disruption

Luke Williams is a globally recognized authority on disruptive innovation and a distinguished academic. He serves as a Professor of Marketing at NYU Stern School of Business and is the Founder and Executive Director of the W.R. Berkley Innovation Labs. Williams has lectured in 21 countries, including prominent engagements at the United Nations General Assembly and the World Innovation Forum.

Williams has an impressive record of creating innovative products, holding over 30 U.S. patents and having designed more than 100 products across diverse industries such as transportation, finance, healthcare, and consumer electronics. His role extends beyond academia into practical applications of innovation, as evidenced by his position as a Fellow at Frog Design, a leading product strategy and design firm.

His insights on innovation and leadership are frequently featured in major media outlets including Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Fast Company, The Wall Street Journal, and The Economist. Williams is also the author of the international bestseller "Disrupt: Think the Unthinkable to Spark Transformation in Your Business," which emphasizes the power and necessity of disruptive thinking in achieving business transformation. His professional contributions and thought leadership make him a pivotal figure in the fields of innovation, strategy, and design.

Speech Topics

Disruptive Technologies: How to Prepare for What’s Coming Next

As much as we might desire it, the future we face will not be predictable. We are living in a fast-changing and uncertain time and we are entering this new global order with a way of seeing and thinking better suited for a world now several centuries behind us. A world that could be explained in simpler terms, when you could expect and carefully plan for gradual shifts in the status quo. But the scale of the challenges we face and the accelerating speed of innovation in Artificial Intelligence (AI), the Internet of Things (IoT), and Biotechnology demands a new way of opening minds to unconventional strategies. Winning organizations in the next decade will need to incorporate a steady stream of disruptive technologies to stay ahead of the game—technologies that will force them to rethink the habits that have made them successful in the past, and challenge the conventional wisdom that has defined the competitive dynamics of their industry.

Disruptive Leadership: Thriving in an Era of Constant Change

What does it take to be a disruptive leader? Do you need to be a brilliant agitator like Steve Jobs? A driven workaholic with a passion to change the world like Tesla’s Elon Musk? Sure, CEOs like that get a lot of press, but there’s more to success than being loud and charismatic. Truly disruptive leaders are like Master Chefs on a cooking show, always looking for ways to take existing ingredients— the same ones everyone else has access to—and combine them in unique ways. Those new recipes are a type of investment capital: the more you have, the better. Of course, not all of them will succeed. But disruptive thinking and leadership is less about the success of any one idea and more about putting your business in a position where you have more new ideas to spend than your competition does. Most importantly, being a disruptive leader is about creating a culture where everyone values new recipes. Because if you want to build a disruptive organization, you first have to build more disruptive leaders.

Disruptive Thinking: How to Spark Transformation in Your Business

Successful companies operating in mature industries that embrace incremental change find themselves on a path that gets narrower and narrower. Eventually, they reach the end of the path, and by then, their customers have forsaken them for a new offering that nobody saw coming. In cases where companies do take disruptive risks, it’s often because they’re backed into a corner and there’s no other choice. But companies that try to differentiate themselves by focusing on incremental innovation instead of game-changing, disruptive innovation will differentiate themselves right out of business. They simply cannot afford to wait until they get backed into a corner. Companies need to be consistently making bold moves, even at the very peak of their success. It is an essential skill for anyone in business, from a small start-up to a global corporation, with the desire to transform organizational processes and behaviors, and ask, “Why hadn’t we ever thought about our business and industry this way before?”

News

Internationally Recognized Innovation Expert to Keynote ISPA EXPO ...
... Sleep Products Association (ISPA) hosts Luke Williams, professor of marketing and executive director of the Berkley Center for Innovation & Entrepreneurship ...

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