On Monday, May 9th Professor Hal Gregerson, Affiliate Professor of Leadership at INSEAD, will offer a Research Seminar at the Graduate School of Business at University of Cape Town entitled The Innovator's DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators.
Date: Monday 9 May
Time: 13:00 - 14:00 (Sandwiches will be served.)
Venue: Boardroom 1
Graduate School of Business, Portswood Rd, Green Point
For catering and seating purposes, please RSVP to Tamlyn at 021 406 1441 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
Abstract: Innovation. It’s the lifeblood of our global economy and a strategic priority for virtually every CEO around the world. In fact, a recent IBM poll of fifteen hundred CEOs identified creativity as the number-one ―leadership competency‖ of the future. With the demands for innovation on the rise in the public, private, and social sectors, managers, employees, and volunteers often wonder ―how can I personally innovate better?‖ To create actionable answers to this simple but critical question this workshop focuses on understanding and practicing the everyday behaviours of innovative entrepreneurs.
Based on in-depth case studies of the world’s most innovative—and often most valuable companies and organizations, interviews with their entrepreneur founders or current CEOs, and a survey of over 4500 executives and 500 entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs, this session presents a core set of ―discovery skills‖ (or The Innovator’s DNA) that distinguishes ―innovative entrepreneurs and executives‖ from non-innovators. Collectively, these skills—thinking differently by Associating (or connecting the unconnected) and acting differently by Questioning, Observing, Idea Networking, and Experimenting, constitute the Innovator’s DNA, or the code for generating innovative—and often world changing—ideas. We will also dig deeper into how the Innovator’s DNA skills can benefit teams, organizations, and society as they weave a code for innovation deep into their cultures. Finally, we will explore how these skills can not only lead to greater success in professional but also personal lives.
Please click to read The DNA of the World’s Most Innovative Companies and Entrepreneur Behaviors, Opportunity Recognition, and the Origins of Innovative Ventures
Speaker: Hal Gregersen Hal Gregersen is a Professor of Leadership at INSEAD where he pursues his vocation of executive teaching, coaching, consulting, and research by exploring how leaders in business, government, and society discover provocative new ideas, develop the human and organizational capacity to realize those ideas, and ultimately deliver positive, powerful results. Before joining INSEAD, he taught at the London Business School, Tuck School–Dartmouth College, Helsinki School of Economics, Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy–Tufts University, Brigham Young University, Thunderbird, and Turku School of Economics as a Fulbright Fellow. In 1983 he completed his masters in organizational change from Brigham Young University and in 1989 a Ph.D. in business administration from the University of California, Irvine.
Putting his research on leading innovation and change to practice, Gregersen regularly delivers ideas with impact as he consults with senior teams, conducts executive seminars, and delivers keynote speeches on these issues with companies like ADIA (Abu Dhabi’s sovereign wealth fund), Adidas, Aramex, Cemex, Christie’s, Coca-Cola, Daimler, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, KPMG, LG, Lilly, Marriott, Nokia, Philips, PwC, Randstad, Sanofi Aventis, Tong Yang, Twinings, World Economic Forum, & Yahoo! He also works extensively with governments, not-for-profit and NGO organizations, such as Teach for America and Room 13, to generate greater innovation and change capabilities in the rising generation of leaders, particularly women leaders.
