When Jeanne Liedtka, Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, spoke to audiences at this year’s Better by Design CEO Summit, she posed the question, “How do we create in our employees, an entire organisation full of minds that are prepared to see and act on opportunity?”

When Jeanne Liedtka, Professor at the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business, spoke to audiences at this year’s Better by Design CEO Summit, she posed the question, “How do we create in our employees, an entire organisation full of minds that are prepared to see and act on opportunity?”

Innovation and growth, she said, only happen when leadership steps up to the challenge of creating a culture and an environment that encourages employees to have minds prepared to see and act on innovation opportunities.

In this presentation, Jeanne shares:

• Why the innovation opportunities are already out there.
• Why ‘business as usual’, with its accepted but unexamined ways of thinking and acting, can create invisible barriers that make innovation difficult.
• How can you surface and defeat these obstacles to develop a culture of success, open to new ways of doing things?
• How can managers be taught the processes and toolkits of designers, to make better decisions in times of instability when accepted wisdom is holding them back?
• Specific stories from a variety of organisations that have successfully adopted design thinking as a different way to solve problems

Presentation at New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE)’s sixth Better by Design CEO Summit in October 2013.