Innovation Management Symposium

Innovation Management Symposium

Achieving Growth through Innovation: Ignoring What the Customer Says?

Professor Keith Goffin

Stockholm School of Economics and Cranfield School of Management

Achieving growth through innovation: how? Many companies that want to become more innovative focus strongly on creativity. This is because they assume that innovation and new product development is all about ideas and brainstorming. In this symposium, Professor Goffin will first explain how this leads organisations to fall into the ‘ideas trap’ thinking that challenging their employees to generate ideas will lead to breakthrough innovation.

Secondly, he will explain how other companies get trapped by what is called the voice of the customer asking customers to articulate their ideas. Based on his own research and concepts from the field of creativity, Professor Goffin will then explain how companies can avoid these two traps by generating deep customer insights and identifying so-called hidden needs, needs that customers have not even recognized themselves. The session will include case studies and videos from Professor Goffin’s work with companies, and many examples of how identifying hidden needs can lead to competitive advantage. There will also be adequate time for questions and discussions.

Agenda

6.00pm Registration and Refreshments

6.15pm Event Commences

7.30pm Event Concludes

Location

Room 5-034, 5th Floor

(take lift or stairs via Bishop Street Entrance)

DIT College of Business, Aungier Street, Dublin 2

About our Speaker

Professor Keith Goffin is a researcher and consultant in the field of strategy and innovation management. He is Emeritus Professor of Innovation and New Product Development at Cranfield School of Management and adjunct professor at Mannheim Business School and Stockholm School of Economics. Before joining academia, he worked for fourteen years in the medical electronics industry, in management roles in new product development and marketing. His teaching has won several awards and he currently teaches on MBA programmes in Italy, Germany, Sweden and South Korea. His research, which has been widely published, covers innovation strategy and how to generate customer insights. In addition, he is extremely active in industry consulting and supports B2B and B2C companies with breakthrough innovation. This includes companies such as Agilent Technologies, Coillte, Mölnlycke Health Care, Reckitt-Benkiser, Sanofi, and Sony. His latest book is Innovation Management: Effective Strategy and Implementation (Palgrave, 2017) and his latest research paper is: “Telling Tales: Stories, Metaphors and Tacit Knowledge at the Fuzzy Front-End of NPD.”