Howard Yu
Every competitive advantage a company holds will eventually be copied. The strategic question is not whether to transform, but whether to do so while still ahead. Most leadership teams wait for the crisis – by then, the gap is too wide to close.
Howard Yu, LEGO Professor at IMD and author of LEAP, helps organisations identify when current competitive advantages are eroding and which new knowledge disciplines they must master to sustain long-term growth.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Howard Yu
- The Future Readiness Indicator – a quantitative, publicly available benchmark developed by Yu’s Center at IMD – gives boards an industry-specific measure of strategic preparedness, replacing intuition with verifiable data and enabling direct comparison with the leading companies in their sector.
- His LEAP thesis makes a specific and testable claim: competitive longevity depends not on refining the current knowledge base but on deliberately crossing into adjacent disciplines before copycats commoditise what already exists. This is a named argument with an empirical track record, not a generic innovation position.
- His case material spans century-old incumbents (P&G, Novartis) and recent disruptors (BYD, WeChat) across industries – giving leadership teams cross-sector evidence for what strategic transformation actually looks like, rather than analogies drawn from a single sector.
- His doctoral research at Harvard Business School was supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower – grounding his frameworks in a rigorous empirical tradition and a direct intellectual lineage from the two most cited strategy thinkers of their generation.
- He co-directs IMD’s Future-Ready Enterprise programme, run jointly with MIT, and has designed and delivered strategic transformation work for organisations including ABB, Novo Nordisk, Heineken, Bosch, and Maersk – his content is tested in demanding executive contexts, not developed for stage consumption alone.
Biography highlights
- LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation, IMD Business School, Switzerland
- Director, IMD Center for Future Readiness – established with funding from the LEGO Brand Group
- Creator of the Future Readiness Indicator, a publicly available composite index benchmarking seven industries on long-term strategic preparedness
- Author of LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can Be Copied (2018) – Axiom Business Book Award winner; named to Inc.’s Best Strategy Books of 2018
- Thinkers50 Strategy Award, 2023; included in the Thinkers50 global management thinkers ranking
- DBA, Harvard Business School, supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower
- Regular contributor to Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Forbes; frequent commentator on Bloomberg, BBC, and CNBC
- Named among the world’s top 40 business professors under 40 by Poets&Quants
Biography
Yu holds the LEGO Chair in Management and Innovation at IMD Business School and directs the Center for Future Readiness. His research addresses a recurring failure that most strategy teams prefer not to name: the slow commoditisation of the capabilities that once guaranteed advantage, and the organisational inertia that makes it so hard to act before the damage is visible.
His book LEAP, winner of the Axiom Business Book Award and named by Inc. as one of the best strategy books of 2018, argues that competitive longevity requires deliberate moves across knowledge disciplines. Companies must leap from the domain that built today’s advantage to the one that will define tomorrow’s, before competitors close the gap. The case material runs from P&G’s sequential moves through manufacturing, consumer psychology, and biotechnology to pharmaceutical firms navigating organic chemistry, microbiology, and genomics over more than a century.
That historical argument has a quantitative counterpart. The Future Readiness Indicator, developed by Yu’s Center, is a composite index benchmarking seven industries using publicly available data on R&D investment, revenue generation, and innovation behaviour. At IMD, he co-directs the Future-Ready Enterprise programme, run jointly with MIT, working directly with leadership teams from ABB, Novo Nordisk, Heineken, Bosch, and Maersk.
His doctoral work at Harvard Business School was supervised by Clayton Christensen and Joseph Bower. In 2023, he received the Thinkers50 Strategy Award. He writes regularly for Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Forbes, and appears frequently on Bloomberg, the BBC, and CNBC.
Key speaking topics
- Competitive advantage in commoditising markets
- Strategic leaps and knowledge discipline transitions
- Future readiness measurement and benchmarking
- Business model resilience and transformation
- Innovation strategy in incumbent organisations
- Long-term value creation under disruption
Ideal for
- Board and C-suite teams confronting decisions about strategic transformation or competitive commoditisation
- Chief Strategy Officers and heads of corporate development
- Senior leadership teams at large incumbents in sectors facing digital or technological disruption
- Executive education cohorts focused on long-term strategy and innovation capability
Audience outcomes
- A specific vocabulary for diagnosing where competitive advantage is in the process of commoditisation, before the position has fully eroded
- Practical application of the LEAP framework to identify which knowledge discipline transitions are most relevant to their industry and timeline
- Understanding of how the Future Readiness Indicator works and what the leading companies in their sector are doing differently on the dimensions it measures
- A shift from generic innovation language to a structured argument about which strategic bets are worth making and when
- Clarity on the distinction between strategic planning and forward-looking capability-building – and the leadership behaviours that drive the difference
Talks
Equips senior teams with an industry-specific framework for measuring and building the strategic capabilities required to sustain growth through structural change.
Key takeaways:
- How to use the Future Readiness Indicator to benchmark organisational preparedness against industry leaders in your sector
- Why engaging with emerging technologies early and scaling new capabilities fast separates companies that lead through disruption from those that respond to it
- How to distinguish genuine future readiness from strategic planning – and which leadership behaviours drive the difference
Shows how established organisations can build a sustainable culture of innovation through three capabilities: creative abrasion, creative agility, and creative resolution.
Key takeaways:
- Why innovation stalls in organisations that prioritise consensus over productive cognitive conflict
- How to create the structural conditions for diverse teams to generate, test, and develop ideas at scale
- The leadership behaviours that sustain an experimental culture without sacrificing operational performance
Drawing on the LEAP framework, this talk addresses how established companies can cross into new knowledge disciplines proactively – before their current advantages are commoditised by faster-moving competitors.
Key takeaways:
- How the five principles from LEAP apply to contemporary industries navigating digital and technological disruption
- Why the deliberate abandonment of profitable positions – self-cannibalisation – is often a prerequisite for sustained competitive advantage
- How to identify the knowledge discipline that represents the most viable next leap for your organisation