Robert B Tucker
Most large organisations have an innovation function. Few have an innovation discipline. Pilots multiply, vanguard projects get presented at the offsite, and the operating business looks the same a year later. The hard question for the leadership team is no longer whether to innovate; it is what to industrialise, what to retire, and where the next source of growth actually comes from.
Robert B Tucker is a futurist and innovation advisor who helps senior teams turn innovation from an aspiration into a managed discipline that produces measurable growth.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Robert B Tucker
- He has spent four decades inside the innovation practice of large companies, with named research underpinning each book: 50+ innovator interviews behind Winning the Innovation Game, 23 vanguard companies behind Driving Growth Through Innovation.
- His Forbes column and his international bestseller Managing the Future give him an unusually wide read on what is actually shifting in markets, technology and customer behaviour, not what is trending in the innovation press.
- He brings named frameworks the room can use afterwards: the seven I-Skills, the D.I.T.O. method, the seven navigational mindsets. Each maps to a specific leadership decision.
- His client work spans Nokia, IBM, American Express, Nestle and the economic development ministries of Singapore, Dubai and Morocco, so he speaks to commercial and public-sector audiences with equal grounding.
- He treats innovation as a portfolio and capability question, not a creativity exhortation, which is what senior leaders need when the board is asking why pilots are not producing returns.
Biography highlights
- President of The Innovation Resource, Santa Barbara; consultant and keynote speaker since 1986.
- Former adjunct professor, UCLA.
- Author of Managing the Future: 10 Driving Forces of Change (international bestseller, translated into 13 languages, endorsed by Andy Grove of Intel), Driving Growth Through Innovation, Innovation Is Everybody’s Business (John Wiley), Winning the Innovation Game, and Build a Better Future: 7 Mindsets for Navigating the Age of Acceleration.
- Forbes contributor on innovation trends; published in Strategy & Leadership, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Journal of Business Strategy, Harvard Management Update.
- Recipient of the BrandLaureate Brand Personality Award from the Asia Pacific Brands Foundation for contributions to innovation.
- Featured on PBS, Bloomberg and CNBC’s The Business of Innovation series.
Biography
Innovation as a corporate function is now mature; innovation as a corporate discipline often is not. Robert B Tucker has spent forty years documenting the difference. His first book, Winning the Innovation Game, was built on interviews with more than fifty leading innovators in 1986, before innovation had a department or a budget line. The argument then, and now, is that companies which produce repeatable growth treat innovation as an operating practice, not a posture.
That argument runs through his later work. Driving Growth Through Innovation studied 23 vanguard companies and isolated the practices that separated them from peers who talked the same language but produced different results. Innovation Is Everybody’s Business, published by John Wiley, sets out the seven I-Skills he sees as the practical competence behind those practices. Managing the Future, an international bestseller endorsed by Intel’s Andy Grove and translated into thirteen languages, broadened the lens to the macro forces leadership teams have to read.
His most recent book, Build a Better Future, addresses what he calls the Age of Acceleration: a period in which climatological, geopolitical, technological and social shifts compound faster than most planning cycles can absorb. The book introduces the D.I.T.O. framework and seven navigational mindsets aimed at senior leaders deciding where to place capital, talent and attention.
Tucker is president of The Innovation Resource in Santa Barbara, a former UCLA adjunct professor, and a Forbes contributor on innovation trends. His client work, from IBM, Nokia, American Express and Nestle to the economic development ministries of Singapore, Dubai and Morocco, gives him a working brief on what innovation discipline looks like when the operating reality is complex and the upside is contested.
Key speaking topics
- Innovation as a managed discipline
- Strategic foresight and the Age of Acceleration
- Driving growth through innovation portfolios
- Innovation skills for individual contributors and leaders
- The seven navigational mindsets for senior leaders
- Future trends and market disruption
- Building a culture that produces innovation outcomes
Ideal for
- CEOs, CSOs and corporate strategy teams wrestling with where the next growth wave actually comes from
- Heads of innovation, R&D and transformation responsible for converting pilots into operating advantage
- Boards and senior leadership teams setting long-range direction under accelerating change
- Public-sector and economic development leaders shaping national or regional innovation agendas
Audience outcomes
- A clearer view of which innovation practices separate vanguard companies from peers that talk the same language
- A named framework, the seven I-Skills, that maps innovation behaviour to individual and team capability
- The D.I.T.O. method and the seven navigational mindsets as a working reference for senior decisions under acceleration
- A read on the macro forces that change the assumptions underneath strategy, capital allocation and talent
- A more honest internal conversation about which innovation activity is producing returns and which is theatre
Talks
A keynote built around the seven navigational mindsets and the D.I.T.O. framework from Build a Better Future.
Key takeaways:
- A working definition of the Age of Acceleration and the MegaForces reshaping markets
- The seven mindsets senior leaders need to operate inside that environment
- The D.I.T.O. method as a practical sequence for decisions under accelerating change
A session based on the research behind 23 vanguard companies and what separates them from peers.
Key takeaways:
- The operating practices that distinguish vanguard innovators from talkers
- How to build a portfolio view of innovation rather than a project view
- Where leadership attention has to land to convert pilots into growth
A talk built on the seven I-Skills set out in the Wiley book of the same name.
Key takeaways:
- The seven Innovation Skills and how they appear at every level of an organisation
- Why innovation capability is now a career competence, not a departmental one
- Practical ways to make innovation behaviour visible, measurable and rewarded