Alf Rehn
Most organisations say innovation is a priority. Most also have little to show for the resources they have poured into it. The problem is rarely a shortage of ideas. It is that the innovation industry itself – the workshops, the frameworks, the consultants – has trained leaders to perform innovation rather than practise it. Distinguishing between the two is harder than it sounds, and the cost of getting it wrong is institutional.
Alf Rehn is a Professor of Innovation at the University of Southern Denmark and a Thinkers50-recognised management thinker who helps organisations separate genuine creative capacity from the innovation rhetoric that has come to replace it.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Alf Rehn
- His central argument runs against the grain of the innovation industry: that most of what organisations call innovation is performance, not practice – and that rebuilding the real thing requires dismantling the very frameworks many have paid consultants to install.
- Innovation for the Fatigued (Kogan Page) provides a named, publishable framework – “deep innovation” – that gives leadership teams a vocabulary to diagnose and address innovation theatre without discarding ambition.
- His current research at SDU’s Center for Organizational Datafication and its Ethics in Society gives him a credible, peer-reviewed lens on how AI and algorithmic systems are reshaping management and innovation decisions – a perspective grounded in data, not trend commentary.
- Having held chairs at three universities across Finland, Denmark and Sweden, and served on the board of a billion-dollar corporation, he operates across the researcher-practitioner boundary in a way that is rare in the innovation speaking space.
- His Thinkers50 Guru Radar inclusion (2016) and coverage in the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and Harvard Business Review give buyers a named, verifiable body of external endorsement to anchor the engagement.
Biography highlights
- Professor of Innovation, Design and Management, University of Southern Denmark
- Head of the Center for Organizational Datafication and its Ethics in Society, SDU – researching AI’s effects on management, innovation and algorithmic ethics
- Previously held the Chair of Management and Organisation at Åbo Akademi University, Finland; and a professorship in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
- Named to Thinkers50 Guru Radar (2016) – listed among “the 30 management thinkers most likely to shape the future of management”
- Author of Innovation for the Fatigued (Kogan Page) and Dangerous Ideas – the latter translated into eight languages
- Featured in the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and Harvard Business Review; over 1,000 keynotes delivered across five continents
Biography
Alf Rehn has spent much of his academic career making the same uncomfortable argument: that organisations are not suffering from a lack of innovation, but from an excess of innovation theatre. His book Innovation for the Fatigued, published by Kogan Page, names this problem directly – and his concept of “deep innovation” offers a framework for distinguishing creative cultures that produce real output from those that have learned to imitate one.
That critique has weight because of where it comes from. Rehn holds a chair in Innovation, Design and Management at the University of Southern Denmark, where he also leads the Center for Organizational Datafication and its Ethics in Society – a research unit examining how AI and algorithmic technologies are changing the way executives, engineers and managers make decisions. He has previously held professorships at Åbo Akademi University in Finland and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, combining research across critical management studies, creativity and organisational theory.
His earlier book Dangerous Ideas – translated into eight languages – argues that the ideas organisations most need are precisely the ones they are instinctively disposed to dismiss. Together, the two books form a coherent intellectual position: that genuine innovation requires not better processes but the courage to engage with what is uncomfortable, inconvenient and structurally difficult.
Named to the Thinkers50 Guru Radar in 2016 and covered by the Financial Times, The Sunday Times and Harvard Business Review, Rehn engages boards and executive teams on the strategic gap between innovation ambition and innovation reality – and on how emerging technologies, including AI, are creating new versions of the same problem.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation strategy and organisational creativity
- Innovation fatigue and deep innovation
- Creative cultures and their destruction
- Dangerous and unconventional ideas in business
- AI, datafication and ethics in management
- Leadership paradox and contradictory demands on leaders
- Scenario planning and taboo futures
- Contrarian and critical thinking in strategy
Ideal for
- Chief Innovation Officers and strategy leads seeking to audit and rebuild innovation culture
- Executive leadership teams who have invested in innovation programmes with limited return
- Boards and C-suite audiences examining how AI is reshaping organisational decision-making
- CHROs and transformation leads working on the cultural conditions for sustained creativity
Audience outcomes
- A clearer diagnostic for distinguishing genuine creative capacity from performative innovation activity
- Practical language and frameworks from Innovation for the Fatigued to challenge and rebuild internal innovation practice
- A more rigorous approach to unconventional and uncomfortable ideas, informed by the argument of Dangerous Ideas
- Familiarity with how AI and algorithmic systems are reshaping management decisions, grounded in current academic research
- A more honest account of what leadership under contradictory demands actually requires – and how to navigate it without resolving it
Talks
Examines the contradictory demands placed on modern leaders and argues that authenticity, presence and reflection are how great leaders handle – rather than resolve – irreconcilable pressures.
Key takeaways:
- The core tensions of leadership (decisive yet empathetic, future-focused yet present) cannot be engineered away – they must be navigated consciously
- Leadership emerges in specific moments that require recognition and deliberate action
- Reflection on one’s own leadership path is not a soft skill but a strategic discipline
A practical examination of why organisations that claim to value creativity systematically undermine it – and what the cultures that genuinely sustain it do differently.
Key takeaways:
- The conditions that distinguish cultures of consistent creative output from those that only produce the appearance of it
- Why supporting ideas from across the organisation, not just designated innovators, strengthens long-term adaptability
- How misaligned incentives and misplaced focus erode creative capacity quietly and at scale
Challenges conventional futures and scenario thinking by arguing that strategic resilience requires organisations to confront the possibilities they are most reluctant to examine.
Key takeaways:
- Most trend and foresight work is too comfortable to be strategically useful
- Engaging with “taboo futures” – the disruptive scenarios organisations avoid modelling – reveals hidden structural vulnerabilities
- Unthinkable scenarios, properly examined, are among the most powerful tools available to strategic decision-makers
Analyses what distinguishes genuinely contrarian thinkers from conventional creativity and draws strategic lessons for organisations that want to move beyond established assumptions.
Key takeaways:
- The specific characteristics that separate contrarian thinking from standard divergent creativity
- Lessons from rule-breakers across cultures, industries and contexts
- How challenging core assumptions at the organisational level opens up strategic space that conventional ideation cannot reach
A critical examination of innovation as both a corporate necessity and an overused buzzword, and what it takes to restore its substance.
Key takeaways:
- How innovation rhetoric has displaced innovation practice in many organisations, and what the difference looks like operationally
- The organisational costs of innovation fatigue – stress, disengagement, and strategic drift
- A practical model for rebuilding real innovation ambition without repeating the patterns that produced fatigue
Argues that the primary challenge of innovation is not the generation of ideas but the organisational alignment required to act on them – and introduces a structural framework for addressing this.
Key takeaways:
- Why innovation bottlenecks are most often problems of alignment and structure, not inspiration
- How existing organisational capabilities can be reconfigured rather than replaced
- The concept of innovation architectures as a practical design tool for sustained creative output
Makes the case that genuine creativity is rarer than organisations assume, and that the conditions required to produce it involve difficulty, critique and the deliberate cultivation of radical thinking.
Key takeaways:
- Why the conditions required for breakthrough ideas are structurally different from those that produce incremental improvement
- The role of challenge, dissent and difficult perspectives in generating extreme creativity
- What organisations that produce genuinely radical ideas do differently from those that produce merely good ones
Videos
Testimonials
Alf Rehn's Articles
Books
Fees
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