Ben Edmonds
Most companies say they want innovation. Few are structured for it. Engineering, marketing and operations all compete to define how problems get solved. The resulting culture either rewards inventive thinking or quietly punishes it.
Ben Edmonds is a multi-patented inventor and former Dyson Principal Designer who teaches organisations how to build the conditions for sustained innovation.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Ben Edmonds
- Patent record. He is named inventor on commercial patents inside Dyson’s New Product Innovation team and earlier at Xyratex, including the global stowage system on the Dyson DC49 vacuum cleaner. He speaks about innovation from the perspective of an engineer who has shipped commercial products.
- Inside view of an engineering-first culture. More than a decade at Dyson taught him what structural conditions allow teams to produce original products consistently. He can name the specific choices that distinguish companies that innovate from companies that talk about it.
- Tactile method, not slideware. His sessions involve teams building real prototypes from cardboard. Senior leaders walk out having designed something with their own hands.
- Translates equally to executives and children. Edmonds runs an international Inventor Club for young people alongside corporate work. The discipline of teaching twelve-year-olds removes abstraction from how he explains innovation to senior leaders.
Biography highlights
- Twelve years at Dyson, leaving as Principal Designer in the New Product Innovation department.
- Named inventor on multiple patents assigned to Dyson Technology Limited and earlier to Xyratex (since acquired by Seagate), including the global stowage system on the Dyson DC49.
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Aided Product Design from the University of Portsmouth.
- Founder of InnovationBen and the international Inventor Club, an innovation programme running with young people across multiple countries.
- Speaking clients include Airbus, the UK Ministry of Defence, Dyson, and the UK Sheet Plant Association.
- Founder of CRINNAC, a prototyping and product development workshop for hardware founders.
Biography
At Dyson, engineering ran the show and marketing followed. Engineers solved the problem first, then marketing built the story to sell it. That ordering is the structural difference between companies that ship original products and companies that talk about wanting to.
Edmonds spent more than a decade inside that culture, working in Dyson’s New Product Innovation department and rising to Principal Designer. He is the named inventor on commercial patents covering parts of the Dyson product range, including the stowage system for the DC49 vacuum cleaner. Before Dyson he led design at Xyratex, where his team built the storage hardware that held data for IBM, Dell and NetApp.
His teaching draws a direct line between two settings most innovation speakers keep separate: the corporate boardroom and the school workshop. He runs an international Inventor Club for children alongside corporate engagements with Airbus, the Ministry of Defence and the Dyson alumni network. The same five-step discipline applies in both: observe a problem, generate options, build a prototype, test it, communicate what you found.
The work he does with senior teams uses cardboard prototyping. It looks playful, and audiences laugh through it. The point is serious. Within an hour, a finance team or head office leadership group has designed and built something that did not exist when they walked in.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation culture and structural design
- Practical creativity in the workplace
- Product design and rapid prototyping
- Building inventive teams
- Engineering thinking applied to commercial problems
- Creative confidence and problem-solving
- The structural conditions for sustained innovation
Ideal for
- Heads of R&D, innovation directors, and chief product officers responsible for new product pipelines
- Executive teams in engineering-led businesses asking how to scale creative output without losing rigour
- Heads of culture and people functions tasked with building innovation capability across non-technical teams
- Off-sites and leadership retreats where the goal is for teams to leave having built something together
Audience outcomes
- A working prototype their own team built during the session
- A diagnosis of which structural conditions in their business help or hinder new ideas
- Tools they can apply the next day to spot problems worth solving
- Methods for treating creative problem-solving as a learnable team discipline