The ranking of innovation keynote speakers

1. Erica Dhawan

Erica Dhawan holds degrees from Harvard University, MIT, and the Wharton School, and went back to teach collaboration and leadership as a research fellow. Her advisory work is with Fortune 500 executives, and she wrote Get Big Things Done, which set out her Connectional Intelligence™ framework, and Digital Body Language, which reached the Wall Street Journal bestseller list.

For a keynote on innovation, Erica Dhawan is the definitive choice. Her subject is how organizations create new value together across distance, function and generation, and she has spent a career turning it into two books, a framework used inside Fortune 500 companies, and a speaking practice that reaches audiences across industries and countries. Global Gurus lists her in its top 20 management experts, and Thinkers50 has named her to its ranking of the top 50 management thinkers.

Best fit: leadership summits, strategy offsites, and company-wide conferences

2. Lisa Bodell

Lisa Bodell is the founder and chief executive of FutureThink, a research and training firm that works with corporate innovation teams, and she built and sold an earlier strategy firm before starting it. Her books Kill the Company and Why Simple Wins both deal with the organizational habits that crowd out new work, and she has taught innovation at Fordham University and American University.

Her sessions concentrate on subtraction, the rules, meetings and approval steps a company can remove to free the time new ideas need. The material suits operating groups that have run innovation programs for a year or more without much to show for them, because the diagnosis it offers is about capacity. Audiences leave with a method for auditing their own calendars and processes.

Best fit: transformation program kickoffs, operations leadership meetings, and corporate innovation summits

3. Duncan Wardle

Duncan Wardle spent more than two decades at The Walt Disney Company, finishing as its head of innovation and creativity, where he worked across the studios, parks and consumer products businesses. He now runs his own practice and wrote The Imagination Emporium, a set of creative tools drawn directly from that work.

He teaches a repeatable creative method, built around tools that teams who do not consider themselves creative can run without him in the room. The approach fits brand, marketing and product groups that want something they can use the following week. Sessions are usually interactive and need room layout agreed in advance. Organizers tend to book him when a previous innovation session was well received but changed nothing afterward, which is a common enough pattern in the category.

Best fit: brand and marketing conferences, product team offsites, and creative leadership events

4. Jeremy Gutsche

Jeremy Gutsche is the chief executive of Trend Hunter, one of the larger trend research platforms, which tracks consumer and commercial patterns across sectors. He wrote Better and Faster and Create the Future, and he worked as an innovation consultant and in corporate strategy before founding the firm.

His keynotes work from that pattern research, showing where opportunity is forming and which habits keep established companies from seeing it in time. The content suits strategy and commercial audiences who want an outside read on their own market. He usually tailors the trend set to whichever industry has booked him, which keeps the cases close to the audience. Organizers who want a data-led outside view generally find the fit works, and the research behind it is refreshed continuously.

Best fit: annual strategy meetings, industry association conferences, and commercial leadership summits

5. Frans Johansson

Frans Johansson is the author of The Medici Effect and The Click Moment, and the founder of the Medici Group, an innovation firm working with large organizations. His argument, developed across both books, is that breakthroughs concentrate at the points where different fields and backgrounds meet.

He speaks on intersectional thinking and on building teams whose differences become a source of new ideas. The material suits cross-functional groups and organizations trying to understand how diverse teams actually produce. His examples run across science, business, sport and the arts, which tends to work well for a mixed room where no single industry dominates the audience. He is a useful choice when a company has committed to a diverse workforce and now needs an argument for what to do with it.

Best fit: cross-functional leadership meetings, diversity and innovation summits, and executive retreats

6. Natalie Nixon

Natalie Nixon is a creativity strategist and the founder of Figure 8 Thinking, an advisory practice working with executive teams. She holds a doctorate in design management, taught for years at Philadelphia University, and wrote The Creativity Leap, on the relationship between wonder and rigor in business.

She treats creativity as a discipline that can be developed and taught, and she works with design, human resources and executive groups on building it into how the company operates day to day. The material suits organizations that want creativity understood as a capability they can hire for and measure. Her framing draws on anthropology as much as on business research. Audiences get a vocabulary for the subject, which matters in organizations where creativity is treated as the property of one department.

Best fit: design and innovation conferences, human resources leadership events, and executive development programs

7. Kaihan Krippendorff

Kaihan Krippendorff is the founder of Outthinker, a strategy network for corporate executives, and he worked as a consultant at McKinsey and Company before starting it. He wrote Driving Innovation from Within and Outthink the Competition, and he has taught strategy at Florida International University.

His focus is internal innovation, the work of employees who build new businesses inside established companies. The content suits corporate strategy teams and anyone running a growth agenda from inside a large organization where the constraint is permission. He draws on case research across sectors, much of it from companies that are not usually held up as innovators. The register is practical, and it tends to land with managers who have been told to innovate without being given room to do it.

Best fit: corporate strategy meetings, growth and transformation summits, and executive education sessions

8. Soren Kaplan

Soren Kaplan is an affiliate professor at the USC Marshall School of Business and the founder of Praxie, a software and consulting firm. He wrote Leapfrogging and The Invisible Advantage, the second of which is on innovation culture, and he led internal innovation work at Hewlett-Packard earlier in his career.

He speaks on disruptive thinking and on the cultural conditions that let an organization act on an idea once it has one. The material suits innovation and research groups working on why good ideas stall internally. His examples come from his own corporate work, which gives the sessions a practitioner register. He is a reasonable choice for a group that is tired of being told to take more risk and wants to know what has to change structurally first.

Best fit: innovation team offsites, research and development conferences, and culture change programs

9. Linda Hill

Linda Hill is the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, where she chairs the leadership initiative. She co-wrote Collective Genius and Being the Boss, and her field research has followed innovation leaders inside companies across several continents over many years.

Her work is on how leaders build organizations capable of innovating repeatedly, and on what that asks of the people leading them. The content suits senior executive audiences thinking about structure, culture and leadership. Because it rests on long-running field studies, it tends to hold up with audiences who are skeptical of the category. The sessions work best with audiences who already own decisions about organizational design, since the material asks what a company would have to change, and answers at that level.

Best fit: senior leadership forums, board education sessions, and executive conferences

10. Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel holds a visiting post at London Business School, and he co-founded the Management Lab. He wrote Competing for the Future with C. K. Prahalad, then The Future of Management and Humanocracy, and he has worked on questions of management design for four decades.

He speaks on management models and on the bureaucratic drag that slows large organizations down, arguing for structures that let more people contribute to direction. The content suits boards and enterprise leadership working on how the company itself is designed. The argument is deliberately uncomfortable for incumbents, which is usually the reason he is booked. Audiences used to incremental change programs tend to find the scope larger than expected, and the material is better suited to a group with the authority to act on it than to a general conference crowd.

Best fit: board meetings, enterprise leadership summits, and management conferences