Christian Wehner
Most large organisations have more knowledge than they can use and less curiosity than they need. Process discipline, accumulated expertise and AI tooling do not by themselves produce the next product, the next category, or the next reason for a customer to choose. Leaders are being asked to defend creative capacity inside companies that have spent two decades engineering it out.
Christian Wehner is a Senior Director of Innovation Strategy at SAP and a SPIEGEL bestselling author who helps organisations rebuild the creative habits, curiosity and risk tolerance that drive innovation in the age of AI.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Christian Wehner
- He runs innovation strategy inside SAP Brand & Creative, so the perspective is from a serving operator at a Fortune 100 software company, not a former practitioner.
- His SPIEGEL bestselling book Alles, was du im Leben wissen musst, hast du schon im Kindergarten gelernt gives audiences a citable thesis on where adult organisational thinking has narrowed, and what to do about it.
- His “Kidult” framework reframes creativity as a recoverable adult capability, not a personality trait, which lands with executives who have written off creativity training.
- He is a LinkedIn TopVoice for Creativity and Innovation, with a public body of work that audiences can extend after the keynote.
- He works fluently in English and German, which matters for DACH-region leadership programmes and EU-headquartered corporate audiences.
Biography highlights
- Senior Director, Innovation Strategy, SAP Brand & Creative.
- SPIEGEL bestselling author, Alles, was du im Leben wissen musst, hast du schon im Kindergarten gelernt (Conte Verlag).
- TEDx speaker on the “Kidult” mindset.
- LinkedIn TopVoice for Creativity and Innovation.
- Guest lecturer, Brand Academy, EBS University Oestrich-Winkel.
- Ambassador, School of Future Skills.
Biography
Most large companies are not short of intelligence. They are short of the willingness to ask naive questions inside rooms full of expertise. That gap is the one Christian Wehner has spent his career closing, first in radio and start-up environments, now as Senior Director of Innovation Strategy at SAP Brand & Creative.
His thesis is direct. The skills that make organisations creative, curiosity, comfort with not-knowing, and the ability to be wrong out loud, are the skills most adults stop practising once they enter corporate life. His SPIEGEL bestselling book Alles, was du im Leben wissen musst, hast du schon im Kindergarten gelernt sets out the argument in book form. His TEDx talk gives it a name, the “Kidult” mindset.
In keynote settings, he turns this into an executive question rather than a self-help one. What does an organisation lose when its senior people optimise for being right? Where in the operating model does AI-era automation make childlike thinking more valuable, not less? Audiences leave with a defensible reason to protect curiosity inside performance cultures, and language to do it with their own teams.
The credentials read as a portfolio of platforms rather than titles: a serving SAP innovation role, a guest lectureship at EBS University’s Brand Academy, an ambassadorship with the School of Future Skills, and a steady editorial presence on LinkedIn that has earned him TopVoice status in both Creativity and Innovation. The combination is unusual: an operator inside one of Europe’s largest software companies who writes and speaks publicly about how big companies stop being creative.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation culture and creative recovery in established organisations
- The “Kidult” mindset: curiosity as an executive capability
- Future skills in the age of AI
- Leadership and intuition under algorithmic decision-making
- Brand and creative strategy inside large enterprises
- Collaboration and the transparency revolution
Ideal for
- Chief innovation, strategy and brand officers responsible for the next product cycle
- Executive leadership teams confronting AI-driven workforce redesign
- Corporate transformation, learning and culture lead inside DACH and EU-headquartered organisations
- Sales, marketing and customer experience leadership programmes looking for a creative-strategy keynote rather than a tools session
Audience outcomes
- A working argument for why creative capability is a board-level concern in the AI era
- A language and framework (“Kidult”) for protecting curiosity inside performance-driven cultures
- A clearer view of which adult corporate habits suppress innovation and which can be retrained
- Concrete prompts for leaders to use with their own teams the next working day
- A bilingual perspective from inside a Fortune 100 European software company, useful for cross-border programmes
Talks
A keynote on collaboration as the operating principle that replaces zero-sum competition once transparency becomes the default.
Key takeaways:
- Why “be a factor, not an actor” is a usable rule for senior leaders, not a slogan
- How emotional and social intelligence become competitive variables once information asymmetry collapses
- What sustainable collaboration looks like in practice across teams, partners and customers
A keynote arguing that curiosity, wonder and naive questioning are the executive skills least automatable by AI, and the ones most actively trained out of adult professionals.
Key takeaways:
- A defensible case for why creative recovery belongs on the executive agenda, not the L&D agenda
- The specific adult habits that suppress innovation inside large organisations
- How leaders can model, license and protect “Kidult” behaviour in their own teams