Amer Iqbal Keynote Speaker

• 5 Ways to Innovate

The problem with innovation and how corporates are dealing with it.

Throw a rock and you’re likely to hit an innovation lab. Chances are your company has a team of people walking around in jeans and sneakers, a room filled with VR headsets and IoT tech, or a mysterious incubator for disruptive ideas somewhere in the business.

Every organization is investing in innovation, but the ugly truth is that very few know where they should be placing their bets. From our experience with hundreds of companies across many geographies, we have observed five typical ways that corporates approach innovation – the problem is choosing which one is right for you.

The 5 Ways to Innovate is a simple framework that helps organizations learn from the world’s best innovators in order to build for the business of tomorrow.

• Building a Winning Innovation Team

How to build organisations that change the game

Steve Jobs was the ultimate purist – but whether it was members of Jony Ive’s design team or members of the board, would Apple have been as successful without the pragmatists who balanced him? On the other hand, pragmatism and consensus alone rarely changes the game; as the saying goes, if you search every park in every city in the world, you’ll find no statues of committees.

So when it comes to designing organizations, what is the right balance of purism vs. pragmatism?

Like an elastic band, only when we have two equally opposing forces do we stretch the possibilities. Only when we create tension in the right balance do we generate energy that can be harnessed into corporate innovation. Digital disruptors have created disproportionate impact across numerous industries by finding this balance. What can large corporates learn from the startup world and how can leaders organize their teams for success in a digital economy?

• Unlocking the Power of Partnerships

Unlocking the power of partnerships to ride the wave of change

ESG, Web3, NFT, ChatGPT. It’s official, the business world has entered the era of acronym poetry. It’s an era defined by constant change, which begs the question: how can leadership teams get on the front foot and stay ahead of the curve?

One of the most underrated approaches in building the business of tomorrow is unlocking the power of the partnerships ecosystem. After all, why spend years building a suite of capabilities that will soon be outdated when you can borrow those same capabilities from expert partners who are there to support you today?

In this interactive session Amer Iqbal will share stories from his work as an innovation coach to Fortune 500 companies, his time leading transformation efforts at Meta, and his lifelong obsession with NBA basketball. Along the way he will uncover some practical strategies that leaders can implement to make sense of exponential change and how to remain proactive while everyone else plays catch up.

• From “Better Websites” to True CX

How to actually put the customer at the heart of your business

What does Customer Experience mean to you? In a corporate world grappling to come to terms with jargon and concepts from the alien field of design, the term CX has come to cover everything from focus groups to website design.

The reality is most organizations are currently investing in some form of customer centricity initiative, and the level of investment has been constantly increasing over the past five years. However, very few leaders are willing to rate their organization as having achieved a sufficient level of customer centricity.

In order to turn the tide of increasing wasted investment and executive burnout, we explore some practical structural and operational changes that can be made in most organizations to drastically improve the effectiveness of their CX investments and truly put the customer at the heart of their business.