Dr Gaia Grant
Most large organisations say innovation is a priority and still cannot move ideas past the pilot stage. The friction sits inside the operating culture: the same systems built to protect quarterly performance quietly punish the experimentation needed for the next decade of growth. Leaders are asked to run both at once, with little practical guidance on how the trade-off is actually managed.
Dr Gaia Grant helps senior leaders build the cultures, decisions and leadership habits that turn innovation from a stated priority into a repeatable operating capability.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Dr Gaia Grant
- A working University of Sydney Business School researcher whose doctoral thesis on sustainable innovation drew on 70+ global leader interviews and 4,000+ survey responses, so the frameworks she presents are tested data, not opinion.
- Two Wiley-published books, “The Innovation Race” and “Who Killed Creativity?”, that give buyers a defined intellectual position they can preview before booking.
- Proprietary diagnostics, the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning tool, that let an executive team locate where their own innovation culture is breaking down rather than receive a generic talk.
- Two decades of advisory work with Google, JP Morgan, Visa, Salesforce, Boeing, Deloitte Digital and KPMG, which means the examples in the room land at the level senior teams operate at.
- A specific argument on ambidextrous leadership, the discipline of running today’s business and tomorrow’s at the same time, which is the actual problem most innovation programmes fail on.
Biography highlights
- Researcher and lecturer in innovation, University of Sydney Business School, Discipline of Strategy, Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
- Co-author of “The Innovation Race” (Wiley, 2016) and the international bestseller “Who Killed Creativity?” (Wiley).
- Executive Director of Tirian, an international consultancy with client work across more than 30 countries.
- Creator of the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning (PoP) tool, used inside corporate innovation and leadership programmes.
- Featured in Harvard Business Review, BBC, ABC TV, Reuters, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal.
- Speaker and facilitator for Salesforce, Gartner Symposium, the World Presidents Organization, Google, JP Morgan, Boeing, KPMG and Deloitte Digital.
Biography
Innovation budgets keep rising while breakthrough output keeps falling. The gap is not a creativity problem; it is a culture and leadership problem, and that is the territory Dr Gaia Grant has spent her career mapping.
Her doctoral research at the University of Sydney Business School, drawing on more than 70 interviews with global innovation leaders and over 4,000 survey responses, set out to identify what actually makes innovation sustainable inside large organisations. The work produced a set of diagnostics, the Innovative Change Leader Profile (iCLi) and the Polar Positioning tool, that locate where a leadership team is collapsing into one mode (efficiency, control, short-term certainty) at the expense of the other (exploration, risk, long-horizon bets).
That argument runs through her two Wiley books. “Who Killed Creativity?”, co-authored with Andrew Grant, became an international bestseller by treating the loss of creative capacity as an organisational and cultural diagnosis rather than a personal failing. “The Innovation Race” extends the analysis to whole companies and economies, framing the central problem as ambidextrous leadership: the practical discipline of running the existing business and the next one at the same time.
As Executive Director of Tirian, she works with Google, JP Morgan, Visa, Salesforce, Boeing, Deloitte Digital and KPMG, which gives her the rarer asset in this field: live evidence of where the published frameworks hold up under operating pressure and where they have to be retuned. Her commentary and research have appeared in Harvard Business Review, BBC, Reuters, Fast Company and the Wall Street Journal.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation leadership and culture
- Ambidextrous leadership and the explore/exploit tension
- Sustainable innovation and purpose-driven growth
- Creative thinking inside large organisations
- Change leadership and cultural transformation
- Responsible decision-making about new technologies, including AI
- Future-proofing leadership for digital transformation
Ideal for
- CEOs, CSOs and innovation leads commissioning enterprise innovation programmes that need to move past pilot stage.
- CHROs and chief learning officers building leadership development around adaptive and ambidextrous capability.
- Boards and executive teams confronting the trade-off between core-business performance and long-horizon investment.
- Transformation and culture leads inside professional services, financial services and technology firms.
Audience outcomes
- A clear diagnosis of where their own organisation’s innovation culture is breaking down, framed against the iCLi and Polar Positioning models.
- A working vocabulary for the explore/exploit trade-off that leadership teams can apply to specific portfolio decisions.
- Evidence-based examples from Google, JP Morgan, Salesforce, Boeing and similar firms on what works and what fails.
- A defensible position on responsible adoption of new technologies, including AI, inside an existing operating culture.
- Confidence to challenge the assumption that “more creativity training” will fix what is fundamentally a leadership and structural problem.
Talks
A talk on how senior leaders make defensible choices between aggressive AI adoption and responsible restraint inside existing operating models.
Key takeaways:
- Where the real divide sits between organisations gaining ground from AI and those losing it.
- How ambidextrous leadership applies specifically to the AI adoption question.
- A practical decision lens for responsible innovation under uncertainty.
A keynote translating the book-length argument of “The Innovation Race” into a working agenda for senior teams.
Key takeaways:
- The cultural conditions that move innovation from one-off pilots to portfolio practice.
- The specific leadership behaviours that protect explore activity inside an exploit-dominant business.
- How to use the Polar Positioning tool to locate the team’s current default.
A keynote built from the bestselling book, treating the loss of organisational creativity as a leadership and culture diagnosis.
Key takeaways:
- The structural and behavioural pressures that erode creative capacity in large firms.
- Why “creativity training” rarely fixes the underlying problem.
- What leaders can change in the operating environment to recover it.
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 |