Leadership: Culture for innovation success - webinar

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Professor David Falzani MBE
Professor Adam Clare

This webinar has now taken place, please register to receieve a recording. 

 

Corporations from large to small pursue various forms of innovation; whilst engineering and science focused innovation is increasingly seen as being critical to the future of the UK’s knowledge economy.

However, technological innovation success is transient, and companies have to decide whether to develop technology in house, buy it in, or collaborate with partners, and then find a suitable commercialisation route in order to achieve success.

A key issue of delivering success is therefore how the innovation is organised, and how the key stakeholders are rewarded and motivated. Culture has a key role to play in this and different corporate cultures offer very different levels of freedom to innovate, although the reasons for this are sometimes not understood as well as they should be.

The speakers will reflect on their own experiences and use the latest management theory in order to explain that, in fact, often the culture and types of personalities critical to innovation are suppressed due to the need to agree to corporate norms which have been established for purposes not aligned with the needs of successful innovation.

Similarly, a key aspect of organising innovation is in the importance of organising a pipeline of innovation, with key decisions made along that process, as well as recognising the different types of commercial risk.

It’s also important to review failure. Innovation failure can be broadly broken down into technical failure and commercial failure. Arguably, studying commercial failure is more useful than studying success, since failure often offers insights into the ‘mechanics’ of what actually drives success, whilst success can be a simple case of good luck – after all, there is no substitute for being ‘in the right place at the right time’, which is fine as long as it is recognised for what it is.

The webinar reviews current best practices for success, leveraging what has been learnt from the models of success, failure modes, and the importance of developing processes such as rapid ‘touch and learn’ cycles with customers. 

Who is the webinar for?

This webinar is suitable for senior leaders, managers and workforce development professionals looking to develop a culture of innovation within their teams and organisations. Although the content is focussed on innovation within medium/large engineering, science and technology organisations the theories, models and ideas can be adapted and applied across industries

About our speakers

Professor David Falzani

David is a business consultant, entrepreneur and professor, with extensive executive and strategic business development experience in various industries.He began his career at IBM and then, after attending the prestigious Wharton School, worked in consulting with a variety of clients including BAE Systems, Marks & Spencer and 3i, including M&A transactions totaling over GBP11bn. He then participated as a founder, director or angel investor in over 16 entrepreneurial companies in 4 countries, helping raise over GBP30m in venture capital. David has also advised CEOs on the challenges of pursuing and delivering growth, and has an in-depth understanding of the techniques that enable this.

David was made a Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (MBE) in the 2017 Queen's Birthday Honours list for services to enterprise and engineering. He was appointed Royal Academy of Engineering Visiting Professor in 2011, then Honorary Professor in 2013 and Professor of Practice in 2019 and has published over 80 articles and blogs. He has been a trainer for innovation and growth programmes such as Growth100 at Nottingham University, the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Business programme at Oxford University Said Business School and The Royal Academy of Engineering's Enterprise Hub/Lea ders in Innovation Fellowship programmes - supporting over 850 companies.

David has a voluntary role as President and trustee of registered charity Sainsbury Management Fellowship, whose patron is Lord Sainsbury of Turville, which has given GBP8m in bursaries for study at one of the top 14 business schools in the world. Those recipients have gone on to found new companies worth over GBP4.6bn, create 18,000 new jobs, and helped develop some of the UK's largest corporations.

Professor Adam Clare

Professor Adam Clare joined the University of Nottingham as a Lecturer in 2010 and since then has undertaken Fellowships at the University of Tokyo, Rolls-Royce and the High Value Catapults (AMRC/MTC). Adam leads a team of 20 researchers and PhD students who are addressing a range of research challenges. To date they have produced over 100 peer reviewed technical papers, numerous patents and regularly work at international conferences.

Alongside his research, Adam is the Director of and Scientific Advisor to Texture Jet Ltd (a University spin out company), the Vice President of the Association of Industrial Laser Users and an Associate Member of the International Academy for Production Engineering (CIRP). He also holds Editorial roles with the Journal of Materials Processing Technology (subject editor), Precision Engineering (associate editor), Manufacturing Letters (Editorial board) and International Journal of Machine Tools and Manufacture (reviewing committee).

Adam’s research focuses on the use of non-traditional manufacturing methods to arrive at net shape while inducing favorable material properties and generating new surfaces on engineering components. He is particularly interested in developing new manufacturing methods and materials for use in the high value manufacturing sectors including aerospace and biomedical engineering.

Registration

To recieve a recording of the webinar please register via our online form.