Andrew Grant & Dr Gaia Grant
Most organisations face a contradiction they have not solved. Boards now demand faster innovation and faster AI adoption than the structures, talent and risk appetite below them were ever built to handle. Without the language to name that tension, leadership teams produce noise, burnout and bold-sounding decisions that quietly damage the business.
Andrew Grant and Dr Gaia Grant are innovation researchers and co-presenters who help leadership teams accelerate innovation without breaking the rest of the business.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Andrew and Gaia Grant
- The co-presenting format is its own offer. The audience hears two voices working a leadership problem in real time, with the academic and the facilitator perspectives playing off each other.
- The frameworks come out of Gaia Grant’s PhD research in the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. The Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) is an academically validated diagnostic, which matters when the work has to defend itself in front of a board or audit committee.
- They treat the explore-preserve tension as the actual problem. Most innovation speakers present innovation as a simple acceleration story, which leaves leaders without a useful answer for the part of the business that has to stay reliable.
- The thirty-year working partnership is itself the case study for the leadership content. Andrew and Gaia have built a co-authored body of research while running a global consultancy together, and that lived material reads in the room as something that cannot be performed.
Biography highlights
- Co-authors of The Innovation Race: How to Change a Culture to Change the Game (John Wiley & Sons, 2016) and the international bestseller Who Killed Creativity?…And How Do We Get it Back? (Wiley, 2012)
- Dr Gaia Grant: PhD researcher and lecturer in the Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School
- Andrew Grant: founder and director of Tirian International Consultancy and a TEDx speaker, with three decades of executive facilitation across more than thirty countries
- Developers of the academically validated Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) and the Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) framework, used with executive teams from Fortune 500 firms and government innovation programmes
- Keynote work at YPO Global Leadership Conference, APEC CEO Summit, the PwC US National Conference, Gartner ITxpo, TEDx and the Salesforce ANZ Roadshow
- Clients include Google, Nestlé, Boeing, Disney, Salesforce, Four Seasons Hotels & Resorts, Citibank, Visa, Goldman Sachs, UBS and the UAE Prime Minister’s Office
Biography
The hardest part of innovation is not coming up with new ideas. It is running the rest of the business while you do it. That tension is the central argument of two books co-authored by Andrew and Gaia Grant: The Innovation Race and Who Killed Creativity?. It is also the problem most organisations get wrong when they accelerate AI adoption.
The research backbone is Dr Gaia Grant’s doctoral work in Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Sydney Business School. Her PhD examined what lets some organisations innovate sustainably while others stall. Two tools came out of it: the academically validated Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP), both now used by executive teams worldwide.
Andrew Grant founded Tirian International Consultancy and is the working other half of the research in the room. Gaia anchors the academic case; Andrew runs the live facilitation, with simulations, audience experiments and the kind of pacing that keeps a three-thousand-person Salesforce roadshow following the argument. The partnership is thirty years old, which is why the co-presented sessions read as a working dialogue, not a stitched-together keynote.
The work has been used by Google, Nestlé, Boeing, Salesforce, Four Seasons and the UAE Prime Minister’s Office, often delivered with partner institutions including Duke Corporate Education. What gets repeated is the clearest signal of fit: roadshows that return, leadership programmes that scale, teams running iCLi diagnostics by the next planning cycle.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation leadership and culture
- The explore-preserve paradox in AI adoption
- Sustainable innovation in complex organisations
- Creative intelligence and critical thinking
- Ambidextrous leadership
- Innovation diagnostics and culture transformation
Ideal for
- C-suite teams running concurrent AI adoption and core-business protection mandates
- Heads of innovation, transformation and strategy in large, complex organisations
- Boards and CEOs designing a programme of cultural change with a long delivery arc
- Executive education and leadership programmes that need academically defensible content
Audience outcomes
- A working vocabulary for the explore-preserve tension that surfaces in every AI and innovation programme
- An honest read on where the organisation sits on innovation readiness, supported by the Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi)
- A workable distinction between creative thinking and innovation execution, and where each is breaking down inside the audience’s own teams
- Visibility into which leadership archetypes in the room pull toward exploration and which pull toward preservation
- Decisions that hold up in a board paper because the framework behind them is academically validated
Talks
Examines what executive teams need to hold true on AI adoption, including the contradictions between speed of deployment and the stability the rest of the organisation depends on.
Key takeaways:
- Where AI adoption is producing a fault line between explorer-mindset and preserver-mindset leaders inside the same C-suite
- How the Innovation Climate Indicator (iCLi) and Dynamic Polar Positioning (DPoP) tools surface the tensions a leadership team has to manage during digital transformation
- A working position on the speed-versus-strategy question that a leadership team can defend to a board
Focuses on the human capabilities most exposed by AI acceleration: original idea generation, judgement under ambiguity, and the discipline to know when to defer to a model and when not to.
Key takeaways:
- Where the Creative Quotient (CQ) and Torrance Test of Creative Thinking (TTCT) place the audience on creative thinking capability, against published benchmarks
- A working principle for when to lean on AI in a creative process and when human judgement has to lead
- The named cognitive biases that consistently degrade innovation decisions, each with a direct corrective
Examines why some organisations sustain innovation while others stall, drawing on thirty years of research from Andrew and Gaia Grant’s book The Innovation Race.
Key takeaways:
- A working model of the cultural and leadership conditions that correlate with sustained innovation
- Honest case material on companies that won and lost the innovation race, including warnings from the ones that did everything visible right
- A short list of leadership decisions that change the trajectory of an innovation programme, beginning in the next planning cycle
Videos
Testimonials
Books
Fees
| EUR | GBP | USD | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Home Country | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Asia Pacific | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Europe | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Middle East & Africa | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| South America | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| United Kingdom | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| US East Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| US West Coast | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |
| Virtual | €12000 to €40000 | £10,001 - £35,000 | $15000 - $50000 |