Bettina von Stamm

Director & Catalyst, Innovation Leadership Forum Ltd

I am hugely passionate about understanding and enabling innovation, particularly in large organisations. For this purpose I have set up my own company, the Innovation Leadership Forum (ILF) (www.innovationleadershipforum.org). Part of the ILF is a Networking Group to exchange and further knowledge around innovation; the 17 members include BASF, Cancer Research UK, Cargill, Marks & Spencer, Mars, Ordnance Survey, Smith & Nephew and Unilever. I particulerly enjoy the role of a ‘catalyst’ in large organisations to speed-up the creation of innovative organisations (e.g. DSM, Hibernian, Mars & the Financial Ombudsman Services), and keeping a hand in academic research on my favourite topic (curently zorking with John Bessant of Tanaka Business School, Imperial College on discontinuous innovation. I also very much enjoy teaching innovation and design management at a number of leading universities in the UK, Germany and France, and sharing my passion for innovation at conferences, workshops and other events. My firstdegree is in architecture and town planning which I followed, after some years of working in that field with an MBA as well as a PhD from London Business School. The final feather in my cap is writing. There are a number of articles out there, and two books: "The Innovation Wave", Wiley; 2002, an introduction to my thinking around innovation - probably a little out of date, and "Managing Innovation Design & Creativity" a textbook that is structured around 12 case studies; The second edition has just been published earlier this year and I am particularly pleased that this book has actually been translated into simplified Chinese! The kind of topics i addres in workshops & seminars include, ▪ Creating a culture of innovation, ▪ Understanding differences between an organisation that is good at innovation and the innovative organisation ▪ Innovating versus operating ▪ Leadership behaviours for innovation ▪ Search strategies for discontinuous innovation ▪ Innovation – what HR has got to do with it ▪ Using design and design thinking to drive innovation ▪ Totem Building - building bridges across mindsets