Jennifer Kenny shares knowledge, experience, and frameworks to help innovation leaders not only survive but thrive by changing the way people think and act.
Focusing on today’s biggest levers of innovation – technology, gender balance, and ecosystem management – Kenny’s thought-provoking book chapters, articles, keynote speeches, presentations and blog help individuals and companies gain perspective on how to innovate, lead, and succeed in complex technical environments.
Book a KeynoteIn Chapter 3, Jennifer Kenny describes the challenges to developing policy on the fly, getting things wrong, making mistakes, creating waste and leaving people behind as we innovate and respond to the challenges presented by the worldwide pandemic.
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In a moment when “innovation” and “disruption” are decidedly buzzwords, counter-cultural approaches are only natural. If we look beyond some of the dominant old-school attitudes in corporate culture, actively engaging empathy and sensitivity inside the workplace can offer new, dynamic leadership approaches.
If your culture is toxic you’ll likely spot some key warning signs that indicate you have internal problems to solve. According to a panel of Forbes Coaches Council members, here are some big red flags that signal your culture is doing more harm than good—and how to approach solving them.
Read More ArticlesNext time you find yourself being uncomfortable with being uncomfortable remind yourself of the toddler learning to walk or the scientist doing an experiment for the 1,000th time. The key is wonder: the self-talk that says: “I’m not sure what is going on here, but there may be new opportunities for me, and I like that.” Wonder coupled with ambition says, “I believe that there are opportunities for me in this situation and I am committed to working hard to make them happen.” This leads to the fastest learning.
If you’re committed to mastery, excellence, or continuous learning, then a deep understanding of the concept of Human Blindness will help you in your quest. This isn’t about the physical inability to use one’s eyes to perceive and decode light, but instead our struggle to understand and embrace the massive complexity that is our world. It’s the mental model that gets in our way when we want to learn from others.
As emerging technology moves from extensions of our physical selves to amplifiers of our creative, thinking, deciding, and learning selves, comes ever increasing complexity and the need for a new paradigm of innovation: Human Innovation.
Read more Blog PostsInnovate Better Together
In this address, master of innovation practices Jennifer Kenny, builds on Design Thinking, System Thinking and Universal Pragmatics to share innovation frameworks that have repeatedly resulted in the elimination of silos and the creation of game changing innovation ecosystems.
Acknowledging the issues that inhibit innovation, including translating strategy into executable programs, cascading frustration, and the inability to get new products to market – Kenny inspires attendees to turn typical technology innovation problems into a new sense of control, ownership, and the amplification of the innovative capabilities of all team members. The result is energized teams who evolve from waiting to be told what to do to being agents of their own future.
Women Catalyzing Innovation
As our technology becomes more complex and interconnected, so to too does our need to fundamentally rethink our understanding of innovation leadership. In this presentation, Jennifer provides a framework for understanding why gender-diverse teams are better at complex innovation and how that can be leveraged.
An inspiring and exciting speaker, Jennifer Kenny may be booked for meetings, conventions and offsites. The following are examples of some of her most popular presentations.
The Building Blocks of an Innovation Mindset
For teams wishing to coalesce around advanced innovation
In this talk Jennifer Kenny introduces the concept of innovation as the adoption of “new practices in community.” She demonstrates how co-ordination, co-invention and knowledge creation increase innovation capacity. Attendees will learn how to facilitate tech transfer and the process of moving knowledge from tacit to explicit to practice and why it’s not enough to just understand technology to innovate, and what it means to build innovation practices as a team.
The Innovators Path to Mastery: How not to be a blind squirrel
For individuals and teams wishing to increase their innovation capacity
We practice technical capabilities, but do you consider innovation an ongoing practice area? In this talk Jennifer will introduce the idea of innovation as a deliberate practice and show teams how not to leave innovation success up to change and ‘blind squirrel’ luck. Jennifer introduces the concept of deliberate practice as popularized recently by Angela Duckworth in the book ‘Grit’ and show how that applies to practicing innovation
Leading Innovation
For leaders and teams seeking innovation in complex organizational environments.
By applying systems and design thinking, leaders and teams can turn organization complexity to their advantage – but they’ll need to learn how to frame their organizations as Complex, Adaptive Systems. Jennifer Kenny demonstrates how to harness complexity to increase the innovation drive of teams, moving them from feeling overwhelmed to Autonomy, Mastery and Purpose.
How to make your strategy executable. Moving beyond wishful thinking
For leaders and teams seeking to realize strategic goals
Creating a good strategy requires intelligence, but building an Executable Strategy requires intelligence, humility and commitment. In this session, Jennifer Kenny reveals why bridging the gap between strategy formulation and day-to-day implementation is a struggle for 61% of leaders, and why only 44% of leaders believe their companies are good at implementation.
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