AGENDA

WORKSHOP 1: Selecting the Best Metrics for Your PD & Innovation Team’s Success

WORKSHOP 2: Accelerating the Pace of Product Innovation Through Customer Co-Creation

How do you gauge if you are doing meaningful work and doing it effectively? If both you and your projects are effecting change? How do you act differently when looking at specific vs. portfolio metrics for success? Join this interactive workshop to experience what it’s like to develop project-specific measures of success and get ideas on how to standardize portfolio metrics along with your goals in order to measure the effectiveness of your innovation team.

Key Take-Aways:

• Framework for categorizing metrics and outcomes with project-specific outcomes
• Fresh perspectives on utilizing metrics in the management of innovation portfolios
• Techniques for steering the development process with metrics

Before we begin to accelerate the pace of product innovation, we need to first understand our users and customers. In this interactive workshop we will explore the role of the customer’s experience and the importance of the customer journey as it connects to product innovation.

Key Take-Aways:

• Framework for customer journey mapping
• Tools for identifying and defining the customer’s needs and wants through Lean Canvas
• Action items to manage your budget and product launch schedule

An essential meeting for Headliners, Moderator presenters, Fab Facilitators, and confirmed thought leaders to preview the event, highlight your roles, and network with fellow peers.

This end-user/practitioner networking activity is your opportunity to identify – right out of the gate – those peers who share challenges similar to your own. It’s a great way to find participants who have thought leadership you can benefit from and to facilitate later dialogues throughout the event.

Investing scarce resources in high gain ‐ high risk projects to explore disruptive technologies requires a good stomach, credibility and trust in the innovation team, clear governance and good planning. Dirk will share some of the lessons learned and tools Bayer uses to create a successful foundation in innovation and mitigate risk.

Key Take-Aways:

• Framework to select the right innovation projects
• Fresh perspective on internal and external partner strategy
• Critical factors to organizational setup of innovation teams

Leveraging Machine Intelligence to deliver bespoke software to IoT devices/Robots

This case study will examine how Shark Robotics, maker of intelligent advance navigation robotic vacuum cleaners, leverages AI to drive greater consumer satisfaction through data harvesting and analytics.

Key Take-Aways:

• Proven ways to inexpensively harvest data from IoT devices and Robots
• Best practices to leverage machine to see the patterns and anomalies vs humans
• Lessons learned in Shark Robotics’ journey to deliver bespoke software versions for different users based on their home environment

Unlike startups, corporate innovation teams are saddled with policies and processes that throttle back their agility and speed. How can innovation leaders create an environment where guidelines encourage customer intimacy and accelerate innovation agility? This interactive session explores the role of innovation executives in releasing the entrepreneurial energy of product teams.

Key Take-Aways:

• Examples of how to move your team to a startup mentality
• Fresh perspective on how a startup mindset can make the transition to scale up to generate growth
• Best practices to get the C-suite and other stakeholders on board

Driving success in the current economy requires an understanding of market trends and how customers are evolving. Companies that adopt a culture of customer-centric innovation see greater adoption, customer engagement, and ultimately increased revenue.

Key Take-Aways:

• Fresh perspectives on the fundamental difference between the customer and the buyer, including why customer-focused teams are critical to strong engagement and revenue success
• Examples of the balance between customer needs and business outcomes
• Framework for ways to process customer feedback at scale
• Best practices for identifying and implementing customer expectations and ways to integrate them into your current business strategy

You want to produce a product with striking features and user-pleasing technology. In addition, you also want to bring it to market on time and on budget. Striking a balance between effective inclusion of new, ‘shiny objects’ such as AI, IoT or VR while maintaining a reasonable product development schedule requires careful thought, research and planning. Join us to learn proven techniques for making product development decisions that are at once exciting and prudent.

Key Take-Aways:

• Techniques to include/exclude technologies for your Gen 1 product and later planned iterations
• Framework for choosing optimal development methodology: Agile vs Waterfall vs Hybrid processes
• Best practices for effective client collaboration/co-creation in the development process

Play the “wheel” to find out which of the industry’s products and services will help you solve your challenges. It is a series of rapid fire, one-on-one meetings with leading sponsors – both intense and fulfilling.

Apple. Pepsi. Nike. Procter & Gamble. SAP.
Over the last 15 years, each one has outperformed competitors thanks to exceptional design because for leading firms innovation is not just a mixture of engineering, products, and marketing. It is customer-centric, user-experience-focused, and most importantly, design-driven.

In this interactive session, participants will work together to determine what aspects of design thinking are most important to product strategy, how to test it, determining design function and are most important to create an entire product strategy.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on how the customer drives design & strategy
• Framework to marry design and engineering innovation
• Examples of how to reconcile wide acceptability and narrow customer focus

Practitioners and solution providers host a menu of luncheon discussions on pertinent industry issues. Dine and dish with industry experts. The list of discussion topics will be available on-site.

Hosted by: SmartOrg

Turn how you spot disruption into how you predict and lead disruption. Powerful new tools and services enable product teams to turn disruptors into opportunities and value. What are these new technologies? Do they really work? How do you start using them tomorrow?

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on how to identify the trends in disruption monitoring like advances in collective intelligence, social market research, and channel identification
• Examples of the latest approaches, technologies, and services for your tool chest and how to always be the person in the room one step ahead
• Framework to set yourself or your product teams apart by with powerful social and web 2.0 tools that monitor, recommend, and even predict potential disruption

You’ve got a great innovative idea, maybe, resting on some assumptions or hypotheses. Are you really ready to pull the trigger? In this interactive session, we will work on and compare notes on developing hypotheses, classifying them to understand the most critical, and prioritize the testing of them. Making sure what you and your teams work on delivers the greatest impact to move your opportunity forward. Bring an example innovation situation of your own and develop some insights to power up your projects.

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices for a simple checklist for making sure you have all the right types of hypotheses
• Framework for assessing and classifying your hypotheses, and opportunity to classify your own
• Tools for prioritizing experimentation and determining when you can make an investment grade proposal

Since data is the new natural resource all companies need to manage, all smart organizations are looking for cutting edge solutions. Innovative organizations that lead in transforming this resource into insights drive true insights. Join us to discover powerful data science capabilities that can lead to uncovering real value in your data, and move your organization from using hindsight to foresight.

Key Take-Aways:

• Key advanced methodologies that lead to unlocking insights from your data
• Examples of value that will come from data based decisions
• Best practices for starting a data science backed innovation framework

Judy has delivered market leading products in business productivity tools, global recruiting systems, compensation management, card-linked consumer promotional offers, and consumer websites. Throughout this journey her focus has been on optimizing product roadmaps for ROI, achieving company growth by delighting customers. So, how do you know which products, features, and services will drive ROI, who will buy what, what opportunities to pursue?

Amilkar oversees the vision, strategy and execution of all Mobile and B2B Products, serving B2C, B2B and B2G customers. His work allows him to have expertise across all products to determine whether IoT can be integrated into current models or if a product must be created from scratch.

We all face big challenges. It can be very difficult to innovate while reporting quarterly growth to investors. This session will focus on tools to identify and set big hairy audacious goals (BHAG) for the company. We will explore Nike’s strategy on what it took to break the 2 hour marathon.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on identifying BHAG’s that are measurable and meaningful to your business
• Framework to align your team towards a single same goal, so that every little decision adds up to a larger vision
• Best practices for rapidly prototyping while using data and science to drive tangible results

This session will look at Golden State Foods (GSF) journey as an early adopter of these technologies, what is driving ROI and value, and how GSF’s innovation commitment to “Think Big, Start Small, Go Fast” has helped better position GSF. Bob will also share insights from his role as Chair of the IBM Food Trust Advisory Council around how other global food and beverage companies are innovating with these technologies.

Key Take-Aways:

• Best practices on learning to be agile with pilots as the unexpected pops up
• Blueprint to uncovering business value when changing seems too hard
• Examples of dealing with an overwhelming volume of IoT data
• Insight on Thinking Big while keeping an eye on bitesize chunks of risk

The pace of technological change makes it impossible for one company to have expertise in all areas required to bring new innovations to market. It’s surprising how many companies lack a partnership strategy necessary to develop successful external partnerships. Learn the key steps in building, evaluating, and developing the right partnerships for your organization.

Key Take-Aways:

• Ecosystem Mapping: guide to identify and map critical ecosystem players
• Partnership Evaluation: models to evaluate potential partnership structures and key partners
• Partnership Courtship: techniques to align on principles & death threats during early partnership engagement
• Partnership Execution: tactics to effectively align teams and execute across organizations

The session will cover the challenges of developing globally sourced new products from napkin sketch to launch.

Key Take-Aways:

• Tools to improve brainstorming and problem solving
• Framework for concept generation and industrialization phases
• Techniques to improve effective communication with international multicultural teams

Lace up your sneakers and get your endorphins flowing with a little exercise. It’s the perfect start to a great day of content

This session provides insight for large corporations to understand open innovation frameworks created from peers’ efforts and how to develop a technology scouting initiative for your company – either from within your workforce or external.

Key Take-Aways:

• Case studies and proven ways of internal disruptive innovation programs and curricula from peer industrial organizations
• Tools and curricula from the above case studies which can be pivoted to fit your specific innovation needs
• Blueprints for setting up both external facing and ‘intrapreneurial’ innovation programs among your workforce

Share your smarts! Choose between five themed brainstorming sessions and crowd source solutions to the most vexing challenges facing product developers and innovators today. These are twenty minute rapid fire sessions with three rotations. First come, first serve, so choose wisely! Each brainstorm group will build upon the other to build a list of readily operationalized ideas to these common challenges.

The Fix on Operational Efficiency

Hosted By: Nias Puthenveettil, Senior Director, Technology & Innovation, Cerner Corporation
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The Fix on Managing Innovation & Product Development in a Global Organization

Hosted By: Amilkar Torres, Senior Director for Product Enablers Development, Cable & Wireless Communications
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The Fix on Meeting the Needs of the Connected Consumer

Hosted By: John Bartucci, Vice President, Connected Products, The Master Lock Company
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The Fix on Strategic Planning for the Human Experience

Hosted By: Justin Hendrix, Vice President, Senior Manager, Innovation, Fifth Third Bank
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In the last 20+ years, women have had more opportunities to innovate products and solutions across industries that are changing the world. Have you wondered how to excel in today’s environment of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics based careers? Allyson will walk through my own journey as a woman in technology, in addition to a framework for supervisors to diversify their teams. Hear successful case studies on women innovating and transforming our everyday lives.

Key Take-Aways:

• Identify your path and ways to ensure your own success
• Blueprint for setting up the right processes, mentors, and resources to achieve across multiple industries
• Framework for thinking forward, networking, and expanding your career; even when you aren’t trying

“New” is simultaneously the most necessary and risky descriptor for product companies. Tomorrow’s growth leaders must introduce new products that open new sources of revenue while navigating unknowns in technology, customer needs, and business constraints.

In this interactive session, participants collaborate in small-group exercises that guide the application of the paradigms to their own innovation challenges.

Key Take-Aways:

• Framework for product opportunity evaluation that has evolved from decades of supporting product development leaders
• Examples from across industries that will illustrate the utility of the framework
• Fresh perspective to discover how you can reduce risk and increase success in your own organization

Innovation is a risky business. Disruptive innovation is even riskier…but also has the highest ROI. Join us to learn about best practices for developing a plan that not only ensures market success but also keeps competitors years away.

Key Take-Aways:

• • Critical factors to learn what testing is most revealing to long-term product success
  • Audience segmentation leads to greatest market success
  • Best practices when using USPTO data effectively

A panel of five leading voices provides insightful perspectives for today’s workers, especially as concerns over career longevity, job hopping, worker skills shortages, and technological threats rise. Hear practical advice to guide yourself and your team to stay in demand and evolve with the world around you.

Key Take-Aways:

• The state of reskilling and upskilling: blueprint for keeping you and your workforce relevant
• Fresh perspective on the new trend of outskilling: performing today’s work while preparing for tomorrow’s
• Insight on on-ramping: the keys to remaining marketable when you have to leave and return to the workforce

Participants at the New Product Innovation & Development Executive MindXchange come away with a wealth of key learnings and it can be a challenge to take it all in. During this interactive session, executives in product development, innovation and engineering will highlight the most important themes, key take-aways and lessons learned they can be readily operationalized once you are back in the office.

Florida Space Institute Immersive Tour – The Florida Space Institute, housed at the University of Central Florida, was created by the Florida State Legislature in 1996. The tour will provide an in-depth look at the space-centered, aeronautics research currently being performed at FSI in support of NASA initiatives including extended interplanetary travel, colonization, and extraterrestrial soil mechanics.

Following the tour of FSI, there will be a brief immersive tour of the physics laboratory to demonstrate the inter-departmental research being performed to accelerate space research.

Tour three will provide an in-depth look at the UCF Engineering’s Maker where researchers and students are able to gather, brainstorm, and create innovation prototypes using simple to complex machinery.

Key Take-Aways:

• Insight on how FSI’s planetary research and experimental hardware innovations, combined with cross-disciplinary research, are accelerating NASA and national objectives to expand space exploration.
• An in depth overview of the partnership between UCF and NASA towards revolutionizing space exploration, travel, and colonization
• Through the Maker Spaces, UCF provides extensive support, materials, and equipment to help researchers and students create new innovations that can have a significant impact on science and commercial spaces
• An overview of UCF’s big data and cyber security efforts