Dave Stewart
Most organisations know creativity matters. Few have built the conditions that make it work reliably. Innovation initiatives generate ideas. They rarely generate the structural environment in which those ideas can become commercial output. The tension is between the discipline required to run an efficient organisation and the openness required to produce anything genuinely new.
When organisations cannot turn creative thinking into commercial results, Dave Stewart, co-founder of Eurythmics, Rock & Roll Hall of Famer, and author of The Business Playground (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), shows them how to build the conditions that make it possible.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Dave Stewart
- Stewart’s credibility is operational, not academic. He has built multiple businesses across music, media, film, and technology – from Weapons of Mass Entertainment to The Hospital Club to RARE Entity – and can demonstrate from firsthand experience what the structural conditions for creative output actually look like at scale. No case study is borrowed.
- His book, The Business Playground (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), co-written with branding expert Mark Simmons and published in eight languages, provides a replicable methodology for applied creative thinking in business contexts. It draws on scientific research, structured exercises, and interviews with figures including Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – with a foreword by Richard Branson.
- He has worked inside major corporations as a practitioner, not an outside voice: serving as Nokia’s “change agent” and as US creative director at The Law Firm. Clients including Nokia, Visa International, and Credit Suisse have drawn a direct line between exposure to his thinking and changes in how they approached innovation.
- His current venture, RARE Entity (launched January 2026), is a venture builder that shifts IP ownership and commercial control back to the creators who generate it. He is speaking to one of the most urgent tensions in business today – who owns creative output and who benefits from it – from the position of someone actively building companies to solve it.
- The credential combination is genuinely unusual: a Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and Grammy Award winner who has also built media ventures, co-authored a business book for a major publisher, scored West End and Broadway musicals, and spent four decades proving that the artist’s approach to making things is also the most commercially effective approach.
Biography highlights
- Co-founder of Eurythmics with Annie Lennox; over 100 million album sales across a four-decade career
- Rock & Roll Hall of Fame inductee (2022); Songwriters Hall of Fame inductee (2020); UK Music Hall of Fame inductee (2005)
- Grammy Award winner; Golden Globe Award winner; four Ivor Novello Awards (Best Songwriter); four BRIT Awards (Best Producer), including a Lifetime Achievement Award
- Author of The Business Playground: Where Creativity and Commerce Collide (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), co-written with Mark Simmons, foreword by Richard Branson, published in eight languages
- Founder and chairman, Weapons of Mass Entertainment; co-founder, The Hospital Club, London, with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen
- Served as Nokia’s “change agent” and US creative director at The Law Firm; executive producer, NBC series Songland (2019)
- Co-founder, RARE Entity (2026) – a venture builder dedicated to returning IP ownership and commercial control to creators
Biography
For most organisations, creativity is somewhere between a priority and a problem. It is cited in strategy documents and killed in planning meetings. The organisations that get it right tend to have someone who understands it not as a mindset but as a structural challenge. Dave Stewart has spent 40 years being that person.
As co-founder of Eurythmics with Annie Lennox, Stewart helped build one of the most commercially successful creative partnerships in music history – over 100 million album sales, a Grammy Award, a Golden Globe, and induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2022. The creative process that produced those results was not accidental. It was the product of specific conditions, specific constraints, and a specific willingness to go into the unknown. Stewart has spent the decades since making that process legible for organisations that want to replicate it.
His book, The Business Playground (Financial Times/Pearson, 2010), co-written with branding expert Mark Simmons, is the clearest articulation of his argument. Organisations that treat creativity as a personality trait will always struggle; those that build the right environment will consistently outperform. Published in eight languages, with a foreword by Richard Branson and interviews featuring Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, it remains a practical reference as much as a business book.
His corporate work has included serving as Nokia’s “change agent” and as US creative director at The Law Firm. His most recent venture, RARE Entity (launched January 2026), is a venture builder that shifts IP ownership and commercial control back to the creators who generate it – the same argument he has been making for 40 years, now applied to one of the most contested challenges in the modern creator economy.
Key speaking topics
- Creativity as a commercial capability
- Applied creative thinking in business
- Innovation culture and organisational conditions
- Entrepreneurship and venture building
- The creator economy and IP ownership
- Branding and cultural influence
- Technology, media disruption, and the future of creative industries
Ideal for
- Chief Innovation Officers and innovation leadership teams seeking to move beyond idea generation into repeatable creative output
- CMOs and marketing leadership working on brand distinctiveness, creative culture, and commercial differentiation
- Leadership teams at media, entertainment, and technology organisations navigating disruption to existing business models
- Entrepreneurship and growth strategy conferences; founder, scale-up, and creative industries audiences
Audience outcomes
- A clearer understanding of why creativity fails as a corporate programme – and what structural conditions actually produce it
- Practical frameworks and exercises drawn from The Business Playground for running better creative processes, from problem framing to idea development
- A model for thinking about the relationship between creative ambition and commercial discipline – from someone who has built businesses where that relationship was the point
- A sharper view of the creator economy: who controls IP, what AI and platform concentration are doing to that landscape, and what organisations need to do now
- The ability to distinguish between organisations that talk about innovation and those that have built the conditions for it
Talks
A keynote drawn from Stewart’s book of the same name, showing organisations how to build the internal conditions that turn creative thinking into commercial output – rather than treating creativity as an individual trait that some people have and others do not.
Key takeaways:
- Why organisations systematically suppress the creative capability they claim to want, and the specific structural changes that reverse it
- A practical methodology for applied creative thinking: from asking better questions to building the right environment for collaboration, divergent thinking, and idea development
- How the principles that produced commercially successful creative work across music, media, and technology translate directly into organisational practice