Morten Toft
Most innovation programmes stall in the gap between idea generation and operational adoption. Stakeholders are consulted late, ownership stays with a small central team, and the resulting initiatives lose energy before they touch the customer. The harder question is how to design an innovation process that the people responsible for executing it actually feel they built.
Morten Toft is a Danish innovation facilitator, author and coach who helps industrial and retail organisations turn co-creation into measurable commercial output, drawing on three decades of work with companies including Grundfos and Danfoss.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Morten Toft
- Two decades of repeat innovation facilitation work for Grundfos, Danfoss and other large Danish manufacturers, which is unusual longevity for a process consultant.
- Author of Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), Jyllands-Postens Forlag, a text used as a teaching reference on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes, giving his methodology a documented, teachable form.
- Operating background as sales and marketing director at Photo Experten across 146 stores, so the co-creation work is grounded in line-management experience, not pure consultancy.
- Initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne and the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre, which gives him a track record of building functioning organisations from a standing start, not only advising existing ones.
- Sessions are designed for engagement and recall, with humour and physical staging used deliberately to lock in concepts that pure presentation tends to lose.
Biography highlights
- Author of Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), Jyllands-Postens Forlag, 2007, with Ole Vestergaard Poulsen, used as a teaching text on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes.
- Author of To Be Perfectly Honest (Aschehoug, 2001) on authentic leadership, and Changemakers (2020, with Rachel Rouncefield).
- Co-developer with Rachel Rouncefield (De Montfort University) of the Changemakers youth empowerment programme, building on the Butterfly Project in Peterborough.
- Long-running innovation facilitator for Grundfos and Danfoss.
- Initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne (Danish Hospital Clowns), founded after working with Patch Adams at the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia.
- Co-initiator of the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre in Middelfart.
- Former sales and marketing director at Photo Experten across 146 Danish stores; earlier consultant at GREY.
Biography
Innovation in large industrial businesses tends to fail in a specific way. Ideas accumulate in the central team. Adoption stalls at the operating units. The work that reaches customers is a thin version of what was originally proposed. Morten Toft has spent over twenty years working inside that gap, mainly with Danish manufacturing groups including Grundfos and Danfoss, designing co-creation processes that bring stakeholders into the work early enough to own it.
His methodology is documented in Innovationsrecepten (The Innovation Recipe), co-authored with Ole Vestergaard Poulsen and published by Politikens Forlag. The book is used as required reading on Danish innovation and entrepreneurship programmes, which gives his approach a teachable structure rather than the personality dependence common to facilitator-consultants.
The work draws on a line operating background. Before consultancy, Toft was sales and marketing director at Photo Experten, with responsibility across 146 retail stores in Denmark. That experience, alongside earlier work at GREY, shapes a facilitation style oriented to commercial outcomes and to the practical question of who actually executes the change. He is also the initiator of Danske Hospitalsklovne, founded after a period with Patch Adams at the Gesundheit Institute in West Virginia, and a co-initiator of the MAD House Denmark Innovation Centre.
Alongside the innovation work, Toft has written on authentic leadership and personal development, including a forthcoming memoir, Journey Out to Find Home (Danish edition August 2026, English edition planned). He also runs Changemakers, a youth empowerment programme co-developed with Rachel Rouncefield of De Montfort University and grounded in the Butterfly Project in Peterborough, which involved several thousand young people over eight years. The connecting argument across his output is straightforward: organisations get more from their people, and societies more from their young people, when those involved feel they built the answer themselves.
Key speaking topics
- Co-creation and stakeholder-led innovation
- Innovation process design in industrial organisations
- Authentic leadership
- Personal development and purpose at work
- Building healthy organisational cultures
- Youth empowerment and the changemaker concept
Ideal for
- Innovation, R&D and product directors in industrial and manufacturing businesses
- HR and learning leaders running leadership development programmes
- C-suite and senior teams setting direction for cultural change
- Founders and entrepreneurial leaders running participation-led organisations
Audience outcomes
- A working model for designing innovation processes that build adoption alongside ideas.
- Specific tools for involving operating-unit stakeholders before, not after, decisions are made.
- A clearer view of the link between authentic leadership behaviour and commercial culture.
- Practical examples drawn from long-running work with Grundfos, Danfoss and Danish retail.
Talks
A working session on co-creation methodology and how it changes the development of unique selling propositions and future strategy.
Key takeaways:
- A structured approach to involving stakeholders in commercial decisions
- The shift from internally generated USPs to customer-built ones
- Practical tools for translating co-created insight into a forward strategy
A talk on authentic leadership grounded in the argument that personal character cannot be switched on at the office.
Key takeaways:
- The cost to organisations of leaders who behave differently in private and at work
- How values translate into observable leadership behaviour
- Why credibility is built through small, repeated decisions
A personal development session on purpose, meaning and the relationship between individual direction and organisational contribution.
Key takeaways:
- A framework for clarifying personal direction at work
- The link between purpose and sustained performance
- Practical reflection tools for senior leaders under sustained pressure
A talk applying ideas from neuroplasticity and self-fulfilling prophecy to organisational strategy and culture.
Key takeaways:
- How collective focus inside an organisation shapes what gets executed
- Methods for redirecting attention toward strategic priorities
- The cultural implications of what leaders consistently notice and reward
A dialogue session on loneliness and belonging, designed for youth audiences and for workplace contexts focused on wellbeing and culture. Drawn from the Crazy Lonely book co-authored with Rachel Rouncefield, the session is built around facilitated dialogue with the audience.
Key takeaways:
- The specific pressures shaping how young people experience loneliness and belonging
- How small individual actions translate into community-level change
- A facilitation method built on dialogue rather than presentation