Fernando Trias de Bes
Most companies say they want innovation. What they build instead is a pipeline that produces smaller variants of products they already sell, aimed at smaller slices of markets they already serve. The harder question, how to generate genuinely new categories and organise a company so ideas survive contact with operations, rarely gets a serious method behind it.
Fernando Trias de Bes is a Spanish economist and ESADE professor who helps organisations build repeatable methods for generating and commercialising new ideas, drawing on two books co-written with Philip Kotler.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Fernando Trias de Bes
- He is the only Spanish author to have co-written books with Philip Kotler, and the frameworks in Lateral Marketing and Winning at Innovation give leadership teams a shared vocabulary for where their ideas actually come from.
- Winning at Innovation, with its A-to-F Model, won the CMI Innovation and Entrepreneurship category at the 2013 Management Book of the Year Awards, a credential that speaks directly to boards asking how innovation should be structured inside the firm.
- He runs Salvetti and Llombart, a Barcelona-based consumer research and innovation consultancy whose client list has included PepsiCo, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Nestle and McKinsey, which means the classroom work is tested against paying clients.
- He bridges two registers most economists do not reach, serious academic marketing theory and popular business writing, and audiences that have read La buena suerte or El libro negro del emprendedor often arrive already familiar with his thinking.
- He presents in English and Spanish and has been delivering executive-level keynotes since 2003, with hundreds of international engagements behind him.
Biography highlights
- Associate Professor of Marketing Management at ESADE Business School since 1994.
- Co-author with Philip Kotler of Lateral Marketing (Wiley, 2003) and Winning at Innovation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
- CMI Management Book of the Year 2013, Innovation and Entrepreneurship category, for Winning at Innovation.
- Founder and President of Salvetti and Llombart, a consumer insight and innovation consultancy working with PepsiCo, Sony, HP, Nestle and McKinsey.
- Regular columnist for La Vanguardia, ARA and El Pais Semanal; author of more than twenty books of essay and fiction translated into more than thirty languages.
- Winner of the Premio Espasa de Ensayo (2015), Premio De Hoy de Ensayo (2009) and Shinpukai Prize (Japan, 2005).
Biography
Most innovation in large companies is lateral in name only. Teams segment further, tweak an existing product, and call it new. Fernando Trias de Bes spent two decades arguing, in books co-written with Philip Kotler, that this is the core reason corporate pipelines stall, and building methods that address it directly.
Lateral Marketing, published by Wiley in 2003, set out a structured way to generate product concepts that do not come from narrower segmentation but from a different logical operation on the category itself. Winning at Innovation, published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2011, took the argument further with the A-to-F Model, a step-by-step description of the roles and stages an organisation needs to convert ideas into launches. The Chartered Management Institute named it Innovation and Entrepreneurship Book of the Year at its 2013 awards.
Trias de Bes has taught marketing and innovation at ESADE Business School since 1994 and runs Salvetti and Llombart, the Barcelona consumer research and innovation consultancy he co-founded in 1996. Clients have included PepsiCo, Sony, Hewlett-Packard, McKinsey and Nestle, which gives the academic frameworks a field of consumer goods and services to answer to.
Beyond the business books he writes columns for La Vanguardia, ARA and El Pais Semanal, and has published essays and novels translated into more than thirty languages, including La buena suerte, co-written with Alex Rovira, and El libro negro del emprendedor. The Premio Espasa de Ensayo in 2015 sits alongside earlier recognition in Japan and Spain. That range, economist, consultant, columnist, novelist, is the unusual shape of the author, and it is what audiences tend to remember from the keynote.
Key speaking topics
- Business model innovation
- Lateral marketing and creativity in commercial strategy
- The A-to-F Model for organising innovation
- Entrepreneurship and the economics of new ventures
- Economic trends and consumer behaviour
- Corporate reinvention and disruptive thinking
Ideal for
- CMOs, CSOs and heads of innovation confronting commoditised categories and stalled pipelines.
- Executive committees running corporate strategy offsites on growth and reinvention.
- Business schools and management development programmes covering innovation, marketing and entrepreneurship.
Audience outcomes
- A shared vocabulary for lateral versus vertical innovation that a leadership team can use the next day.
- The A-to-F structure for assigning innovation roles and stages inside an organisation.
- Concrete examples, drawn from consumer goods and services, of where breakthrough ideas actually come from.
- A sharper read on why most corporate innovation produces line extensions rather than category moves.