Jeff DeGraff
Most large organisations talk about innovation and reward predictability. Leaders end up sponsoring two operating systems that pull in opposite directions, and one quietly wins. The real problem is not generating ideas, it is building a company that can hold competing priorities (efficiency and experimentation, control and creativity) without collapsing one into the other.
Jeff DeGraff is the University of Michigan professor and Innovatrium founder who helps senior teams turn the contradictions inside their business into a working method for innovation and growth.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Jeff DeGraff
- He brings a tested intellectual frame, the Competing Values Framework, that gives executives a shared language for the trade-offs they already feel but cannot resolve.
- His Innovatrium has built innovation programmes inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, NASA and Microsoft, so the methods are stress-tested in real operating conditions.
- The work crosses sectors that rarely share a stage: commercial, military (US Air Force, NATO, Singapore Armed Forces), academic and mission-driven, which sharpens his diagnosis of what is structural and what is industry-specific.
- He treats innovation as a system of competing roles (Artist, Engineer, Athlete, Sage), so leaders leave with a way to staff and sequence change, not a motivational pep talk.
- The Ross School base and the Certified Professional Innovator programme give buyers a credible academic anchor when they need to sell the engagement internally.
Biography highlights
- Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations, University of Michigan Ross School of Business, since 1990.
- Co-creator of the Competing Values Framework, with Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh.
- Founder of the Innovatrium Institute for Innovation, working with Fortune 500 firms, NASA and allied military commands.
- Author of The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), The Creative Mindset, The Innovation Code, Leading Innovation and Competing Values Leadership.
- Host of the PBS programme Innovation You and contributor to Michigan Public’s The Next Idea.
- Former Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza during the period the company scaled from a regional chain to a global brand.
Biography
Innovation inside large organisations rarely fails for lack of ideas. It fails because the same organisation rewards efficiency, control and reliability while asking a small group to break those very rules. That tension is the subject Jeff DeGraff has spent his career mapping, first as a co-creator of the Competing Values Framework alongside Robert Quinn, Kim Cameron and John Rohrbaugh, and then as the architect of a more applied body of work on innovation as a system.
The academic anchor is the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he has been Clinical Professor of Management and Organizations since 1990. The applied side is the Innovatrium, the institute he founded to put the theory into contact with operating reality. Through Innovatrium and direct consulting, his methods have been used inside more than half the Fortune 500, including Google, Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, Microsoft and NASA, and inside the US Air Force, NATO and the Singapore Armed Forces.
His three most recent books, The Innovation Code (2017), The Creative Mindset (2020) and The Art of Change (Berrett-Koehler, 2025), form a single argument. Innovation is not a personality trait, it is a discipline of holding competing values long enough to produce something new. The Innovation Code translates that into roles and team design. The Creative Mindset breaks creative work into six trainable skills. The Art of Change reframes paradox itself as the engine of transformation.
The career arc explains the bias toward application. He earned his PhD at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1985 and went directly into industry as Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza, where the nickname “Dean of Innovation” stuck. The work since has kept the same shape: a serious framework, tested against organisations that cannot afford abstractions.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation strategy and operating models
- Competing Values Framework in practice
- Creative leadership and team design
- Organisational change and transformation
- Culture and capability for sustained innovation
- Cross-sector innovation: commercial, public, military
- Paradox and decision-making under competing priorities
Ideal for
- CEOs and executive teams under pressure to deliver core performance and a credible innovation agenda at the same time
- Chief Innovation Officers, CSOs and heads of strategy designing or rebuilding innovation operating models
- CHROs and learning leaders building creative capability across senior cohorts
- Public-sector, defence and mission-driven leadership groups that need a private-sector grade innovation method
Audience outcomes
- A shared language for the competing demands inside the business and a way to talk about them without picking sides
- A working model for staffing innovation teams across distinct creative roles rather than relying on a few “creative” individuals
- A practical sequence for turning paradoxes (efficiency versus experimentation, control versus autonomy) into design decisions
- Confidence that innovation can be built as a repeatable system, not a personality-driven exception
- Examples drawn from companies, NASA and military commands that translate cleanly back to the audience’s own context
Talks
A talk on why most innovation programmes fade and what makes a small number endure across leadership transitions.
Key takeaways:
- The structural reasons innovation initiatives lose energy after the launch year
- How to design culture, capability and community so innovation outlasts its sponsor
- A diagnostic for senior teams to test whether their current programme is built to last
A cross-sector talk drawing on work with armed forces, cultural institutions and small business to show how mission-led organisations innovate under hard constraints.
Key takeaways:
- What commercial leaders can take from mission-driven environments where failure is not an option
- How constraint, not abundance, tends to produce the most durable innovation
- A framework for translating mission clarity into operating decisions