Steve Faktor
Most large companies treat innovation as theatre. They host hackathons, set up labs, announce partnerships, and run accelerators, ending up with a pipeline of pilots that never reach the P&L. The real problem is converting a corporation’s existing assets into products the market will actually pay for.
Steve Faktor helps large organisations turn innovation budget into commercial outcomes, using the 4C’s of Innovation™ framework he built running American Express’s $50M Chairman’s Innovation Fund.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Steve Faktor
- He works from a proprietary, named methodology, the 4C’s of Innovation™, developed inside Fortune 100 innovation programmes at American Express, Citi and MasterCard, not adapted from case studies of others’ work.
- His operating record is concrete. As head of the $50M Chairman’s Innovation Fund at American Express, he launched commercial products including Zync, LoyaltyEdge, and the Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée.
- His 9 Corporate Personality Types™, the viral Forbes piece picked up by NPR, gives audiences a working tool for diagnosing why innovation initiatives die inside specific corporate cultures.
- He carries a 750,000-strong LinkedIn following from his status as one of the platform’s original 160 Influencers, alongside figures like Richard Branson. Buyers hiring him get a futurist whose calls are public and dated.
- The voice in Econovation, sharp and satirical, is the same voice on stage. Senior leaders get an honest read on innovation work without the consultant gloss.
Biography highlights
- Founder and CEO of IdeaFaktory, the innovation incubator behind multiple $100M+ businesses for Fortune 100 brands, built on its proprietary 4C’s of Innovation™ process.
- Former Vice President of Growth and Innovation and Head of the $50M Chairman’s Innovation Fund at American Express, where he launched Zync, LoyaltyEdge and the Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée.
- Former SVP of Innovation and Growth Ventures at Citigroup; senior strategy and innovation executive at MasterCard; former management consultant at Arthur Andersen.
- Author of Econovation: The Red, White, and Blue Pill for Arousing Innovation (Wiley, 2011).
- Forbes and Harvard Business Review contributor; one of LinkedIn’s original 160 Influencers, with a 750,000-strong executive following.
- Host of The Trendaddy show; media credits include The Wall Street Journal, NPR, Bloomberg Radio and MSNBC. Graduate of NYU Stern School of Business.
Biography
At American Express, the Chairman’s Innovation Fund came with a $50M budget and a brief to launch new businesses inside the company. Steve Faktor ran it. Out of that role came Zync, LoyaltyEdge and a Private Sales joint venture with Vente Privée. The same period produced the methodology he has since codified as the 4C’s of Innovation™: context, creativity, capabilities and culture.
That methodology is the operating logic he now applies through IdeaFaktory, the innovation firm he founded after leaving AmEx. IdeaFaktory has helped Fortune 100 clients launch multiple $100M+ businesses by partnering with vetted startups and rebuilding their internal innovation programmes from the culture out. The ‘culture out’ part matters. His viral Forbes piece on the 9 Corporate Personality Types, picked up by NPR, came from watching innovation initiatives die at the hands of identifiable, predictable internal characters.
Faktor’s second strand of work is futurist. Econovation (Wiley, 2011) argued that consumerism was ending and producerism was emerging, with economic value shifting to those who make rather than those who consume. As one of LinkedIn’s original 160 Influencers, with a 750,000-strong executive following and Forbes and Harvard Business Review columns, he has built more than a decade of dated, public predictions clients can audit.
In a boardroom, both strands earn their seat. Senior teams get a working framework rooted in real product P&Ls, the AmEx ones with his name on them, not someone else’s case studies. They also get a voice that has been right enough, often enough, in public, that buyers can audit the work before they commission it.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation strategy and methodology
- Corporate-startup partnerships and commercialisation
- Growth strategy in financial services and consumer goods
- Futurism and trend forecasting
- Innovation culture and corporate change
- Business model innovation
- Digital commerce, payments and loyalty
Ideal for
- Chief Innovation Officers and Heads of Strategy in Fortune 500 firms whose innovation programmes have plateaued at pilot stage.
- Growth and commercial leadership teams in financial services, payments and consumer goods evaluating where to commit capital next.
- Boards and executive committees commissioning a candid, externally validated read on internal innovation capability.
- Founders and corporate venture teams looking for an operator’s view of how large enterprises actually make buying decisions.
Audience outcomes
- A specific diagnostic for why their innovation programmes are stalling, anchored to the 4C’s of Innovation™.
- A working vocabulary for the cultural archetypes that block or enable change inside large organisations, drawn from the 9 Corporate Personality Types.
- A view of which trends in technology, economics and consumer behaviour are most likely to disrupt their P&L over the next five to ten years.
- A short list of the highest-leverage moves a senior team can make to convert innovation budget into commercial product launches.
Talks
A working session on the four elements most critical to sustained innovation: context, creativity, culture and capabilities, with examples of how American Express and other Fortune 100 firms apply them.
Key takeaways:
- A definition of innovation that breaks the common myths and clichés inside large organisations.
- A diagnostic of how the four C’s interact, and which one is failing in a given company.
- A view of how to align innovation initiatives with the company’s existing DNA so they have a chance of surviving.