What good is a competitive landscape if it’s already 4 weeks old? Why wait weeks to identify assets for licensing if you can do it in minutes? It’s a fast-paced world with knowledge as a weapon and if your information process provide syou insights that are old by the time you get it, or worse obsolete by the time you start acting on it they are as good as painting a target on your back. This is the problem faced by every innovative organization today.

Winners of 2020 demand information instantly. That’s exactly what Dolcera’s AI suite PCS helps them achieve. We will be talking about how the AI is empowering the users in research to answer the right questions faster than ever before. Learn how companies are leaving behind the 20th century target-painting and preparing for 2020 war-paint.

Can throwing the doors of a technology institute wide open – to provide industry with access to expertise and equipment – facilitate innovation and change in traditional industry?  Can purposefully connecting different industry services within that same institution lead to the solutions that will drive industry competitiveness?

We’ll take a deep dive into how brand behavior mapping helped a billion dollar whiskey company develop a strategy to recapture the bourbon millennial. In this interactive session, we will guide you through how we uncovered why millennials choose their whiskey brands. You’ll see how we used different research techniques to:

• Conduct Ethnographic Interviews: Understand ‘why’ consumers behave the way they do
• Map Customer Journeys: Capture the customers’ evolutionary journey
• Segment Customers: Distil observational research findings to create unique customer categories
• Map Brand Behaviors Show how brand perception and association influence purchases

You will learn non-traditional ways we’ve developed to conduct research and translate insights from customer journey maps into growth opportunities. Plus, you may learn a thing or two about bourbon, whiskey, and scotch.

How AI & machine learning are affecting our world and how innovation engines are the key to preventing a jobless future. Please join David Lee, whose popular TED talk on “Why jobs of the future won’t feel like work” for a presentation and discussion about trends and capabilities shaping the working world of the near future.

This session will explore Westinghouse Electric Company’s unique approach to radical innovation. It will focus on the value of documenting, empowering, and adjusting a core innovation process for ideation, project management, and reporting. Participants will learn about the challenges of allowing engineering and R&D teams enough freedom to creatively approach radical innovation, while also maintaining commercial rigor and feasibility. They will also learn how to balance between incremental and radical innovation, as well as the processes Westinghouse uses to report innovation metrics.

The country is undergoing a rapid generational change in our workforce. Baby boomers are starting to retire, and 35% of the labor force in America is currently made up of Millennials. That number is set to rise significantly, and this generation has a very different learning style from previous ones. VR Training is rapidly becoming one of the most powerful new ways to learn. Come to this session to discover why VR Training is so effective and to hear highlights from Foundry 45’s case studies of real world VR Training projects.

Le and LeCun will close the day with an interactive conversation about what the future will hold for A.I. and innovation.

As access to the internet grows globally, the number of information sources are growing exponentially.  In addition, innovations driven by technology platforms such as IoT, AI, MEMS, etc. are bringing new competitors into spaces that were never considered before.  This period of expansion in both information sources and technologies presents a tremendous opportunity and challenge for global corporations.  Information needs to be tracked on a regular and consistent basis from various (and previously ignored) sources to identify new opportunities, innovations and threats. SciTech Patent Art will share its learnings from the establishment of one such well-thought through Competitive Technology Intelligence (CTI) program for a global corporation.  The presenter will discuss how scope was established, what approach was used, and what key elements ensured the success of the program.  Use of tools such as Artificial Intelligence and web-scraping, which played a critical role in sustenance of the program, will be reviewed in the context of establishing a cost-effective global CTI program.

(NSF-curated breakout) Startups use technology alliances to access critical aspects of commercialization such as manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and customer support. The startup decreases risk by alignment with an established firm. While alliances are powerful tools, they are not easy to plan or negotiate. Managers must deal with the complexities of allocating rights to jointly developed intellectual assets, protecting proprietary know-how and trade secrets, linking decision-making structures, and utilizing financial models that allow both firms to share the risks, as well as the rewards, of collaboration. This presentation will discuss two key practices that have emerged from the presenter’s work on over 300 technology-based alliances—approaching the potential partner and structuring the deal.

(NSF-curated breakout) For startups, developing your first go-to-market strategy and finding and winning your first customers is often a big challenge. But even more challenging are the changes that you will encounter as you grow that will call for a different game plan. In this session, Grant will share his experience growing his business as it moved from a startup to a company. The session will cover common business development decision points that confront entrepreneurs. The goal is to help you better anticipate and assess the changing needs and opportunities of your business, and the business development, sales, and marketing strategies you will need to adapt to these changing dynamics.

(NSF-curated breakout) … And the top things investors should never say to you. Navigating investment capital is never easy for early-stage startups. In this session, learn the basic lessons of raising capital to ensure smoother sailing through these challenging waters. While every investor and company are different, there are some common do’s and don’ts that all founders should know. Get honest answers to the fundraising questions you might be afraid to ask from an active seed round venture capitalist.

This panel will bring together leaders from corporate, startup, and university sectors to discuss best practices for working with one another. Learn how to better position your company for most effective collaborations.

(NSF-curated breakout) The skills required to develop a prototype for any product, whether it be hardware, software, biomedical device, or complex tool, are usually much different than the skills needed to make a robust, dependable, low-cost, production version of that prototype.  The panel will explore some of the pitfalls to avoid and some of the new skills that your company will need to attain to produce your technology at scale.

(NSF-curated breakout) As you grow your company, you may be attracted to opportunities with large corporations that want to partner, license, purchase, or jointly develop products. Such relationships can be game changers, but not always in the way that you hoped. This panel will explore asymmetrical relationships to help you understand how to avoid being crushed by your large corporate “partner.” We’ll look at types of agreements, the techniques for successful negotiation and relationship building, common mistakes, and how to avoid them. Panelists are both large company executives and entrepreneurs who have many years of deal experience.

“Jill Watson” was initially developed to respond to student questions posted to class forums, though the possibilities extend far beyond the classroom. Ashok Goel, creator of Jill Watson, will discuss how we can used A.I. to scale personalized learning, and how this will impact the future of innovation, both in the academic and industry sectors.

Innovation at Corning Inc. in the context of the history of industrial R&D in the United States, with emphasis on the impact of company leadership, innovation approach, innovation investment and company culture. We will talk about how it has worked and what we see as our future

Design for service is critical to Rolls-Royce’s Advanced Services Transformation Roadmap. Harrison, the company’s chief of life cycle engineering, will outline how Rolls-Royce is integrating a unique customer service concept within its engineering and design process— an approach that has yielded unanticipated disruptions in engine availability fall and customer satisfaction rise.

This tour will explore the state-of-the-art facility built in collaboration with IBM, which uses cutting edge technology and innovation architecture. Participants will also visit the Data/IBM center and have a chance for a Q&A with a member of their executive innovation team.

Tour the first-of-its-kind, remotely accessible swarm robotics lab. The Robotarium houses more than 100 rolling and flying swarm robots that are accessible to anyone. Trial Microsoft’s HoloLens, the first self-contained holographic computer.

Visit three labs (Biolocomotion, Complex Rheology, and Biomechanics) and learn about their unique projects and corporate partners.

Prof. Dan Goldman 

CRAB Lab: Complex Rheology And Biomechanics

Our research addresses problems in nonequilibrium systems that involve interaction of physical and biological matter with complex materials (like granular media) that can flow when stressed. For example, how do organisms like lizards, crabs, and cockroaches generate appropriate musculoskeletal dynamics to scurry rapidly over substrates like sand, bark, leaves, and grass. The study of novel biological and physical interactions with complex media can also lead to the discovery of principles that govern the physics of the media. We integrate laboratory and field studies of organism biomechanics with systematic laboratory studies of physics of the substrates, create models of the substrates, and create mathematical and physical (robot) models of the organisms.

Dr. David Hu 

Hu Laboratory for Biolocomotion

Particle capture by bees, moths, and moles Animals excel in the capture and manipulation of airborne particles. Bees can remove 10,000 pollen grains from their bodies in under a minute. Moths can smell their mates from over a kilometer away, sensing odors in concentrations of parts per billion. The star nosed-mole exhales and inhales bubbles at high speed, capturing underwater odors without getting its nose wet. We present experiments and theory rationalizing how each of these animals perform these feats. Particular attention is paid to the specific geometry of the animal’s sensor and its interaction with incoming flows. We also discuss the development of GROMIT, a device that inhales air at the sniffing frequencies of animals and was awarded third place in a cheese-sniffing machine olfaction competition in Montreal in May of 2017.

Dr. Vladimir Tsukruk 

The SEMA Lab: Surface Engineering and Assembly

Surface Engineering and Assembly (SEMA) Lab focuses on wet-chemistry fabrication of organic, polymeric, and biopolymeric materials at surface and interfaces with inorganic world and full-scale characterization of nanostructures and properties of synthetic and biological materials and nanocomposites with a battery of microscopic and spectroscopic methods such as scanning probe microscopy and related surface-sensitive techniques.

Visit the labs of some of Smart City ATL’s corporate partners, including Southern Company and Panasonic, then take part in a panel discussion.

Experience a unique environment that encourages technological creativity. Following a tour of the innovation lab, the group will participate in an interactive work session on design thinking in innovation.

Deep learning has caused revolutions in computer perception and natural language understanding, enabling new applications such as autonomous driving, radiology screening, real-time language translation, and dialog systems. But almost all these successes largely use supervised learning, which requires human-annotated data. For game playing, many systems use reinforcement learning, which requires too many trials to be practical in the real world.  In contrast, animals and humans seem to learn vast amounts of knowledge about how the world works through mere observation and occasional actions. Good predictive world models are an essential component of intelligent behavior: With them, one can predict outcomes and plan courses of actions. One could argue that good predictive models are the basis of “common sense”, allowing us to fill in missing information: predict the future from the past and present, the past from the present, or the state of the world from noisy percepts.  LeCun reviews some principles and methods for predictive learning, and gives examples of applications in virtual assistants and creative tools.

Innovation leaders are faced with an unprecedented rate of change in the world today. Observable technology and consumer trends present increasingly frequent opportunities for growth and threats of disruption. For innovation leaders to compete in this dynamic business landscape, they must understand how to incorporate insights from technology and consumer trends into corporate innovation strategy. In this session, RTI’s Innovation Advisors will present a method and framework for using technology and consumer trends to inform innovation strategy.

Corporate research collaboration with major academic centers has called for rethinking the balance between academic and corporate roles in these relationships. Discover how a leading research university has strategically approached collaboration with large companies and has served as a catalyst to supercharge a regional innovation ecosystem. Lessons learned include the changes the university had to make to become more “industry friendly.”Through this case study and interactive, facilitated discussion, participants come away with the skills to define, manage, and lead a successful industry-university strategic collaboration focused on innovation best practices.

Around the world industries are investing in ways to brace themselves for increased volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity – popular termed the VUCA world. Most industries are impacted by these changes, including the toy industry. To meet the increasing pace of change in the marketplace, LEGO Group has set forth to improve response to change through transforming into an Agile way of working. One of the large Agile transformation journeys in LEGO Group was kicked off in the beginning of 2018 in two large technology departments with the code name #goingagile. Dr. Sommer explains the background and reasoning behind LEGO’s Agile transformation including how to orchestrate a large change journey without top-down directions. A big rock in becoming Agile is the change in leadership – moving from command and control style to becoming a team of teams. Early learnings and experienced challenges are presented, and advice will be given to participants on how to avoid falling into the trap of ‘using Agile’ instead of ‘being Agile’.

The session will cover all aspects of the GoFly Prize from its inception to today (with 2,000 Innovators participating from 85 countries). It will take a deep dive into our programming and mentor platform, our partners and the innovation ecosystem we have created, as well as the convergence of breakthrough technologies that make this the first moment in human history when we have the ability to make people fly.

Learn the top 10 takeaways from the commercialization trenches – how the BridgeCommunity program (a consortium of corporations and a select group of startups) — enables commercial partnerships between corporations and startups. Participants learn new methods for addressing roadblocks and are encouraged to share experiences (good and bad) in engagement with technology startups.

Chantrelle Nielsen tells the story of how her startup pioneered a new market for a dataset that had never been use before – signals produced as a byproduct of knowledge worker activity. She’ll talk about how the startup was acquired by Microsoft, and how they handled culture integration and product category innovation at a 40-year-old company. Learn how this unique dataset can measure culture and innovation in organizations and explore how it’s been used to make changes at Fortune 500 companies.

Clayton Christianson’s research indicates that 76% of all corporate innovation projects are either scuttled or rescinded, never making it out the door.Joe contends that the single biggest reason we start in the wrong direction is because we aren’t sure of the problem we are solving and haven’t been trained in how to find the best problem to solve. We often start focused on the tool rather than the job-to-be-done. Breathing has divergent and convergent components. When we inhale we diverge by taking everything in, not caring whether we need it or not. In contrast, exhaling is a divergent process. We throw out what we don’t need, keeping only what sustains life. Such is the innovation process. This hands-on training session teaches participants the difference between convergent and divergent thinking, when to use each and the skills to perform divergent thinking.

Participants learn how to leverage crowdsourcing of innovation challenges to engage employees, and unleash creativity and potential value latent in your business. Explore the use of technology and executive leadership to make the challenge a successful process.

Through the years, enduring business models have relied on Barriers to Entry (usually through large infrastructure investments) and Customer Intimacy. Wild offers some new tools and methods to help leaders and change agents think and act on the opportunity to reinvent their company’s role in the marketplace. Examples from B2C and B2B are presented. What can we learn from disruptors?   Participants walk away with a different perspective on how to frame the opportunity and re-imagination of business models

The world we’re about to step into will be unlike anything that has been seen before. This speed of change, as much as the specific changes it brings, will transform the ways we work, live and think.  It is impossible to predict exactly what is coming but what we do know is that social systems, political norms, and popular expectations are going to be disrupted in a dramatic way. The nature of work, the way we interact with each other, the principles on which we organise our societies … all these will be questioned in the very near future. The advances that are on the near horizon offer us ways of integrating humans and machines.  The hybrids that result will combine the analytical processing powers of computers with the creativity that is uniquely human, becoming something much more than the sum of their parts.   Such capabilities might sound like science-fiction but they are fast approaching.  The fundamental technologies are already in place and it is only a matter of time before machine learning, portable processing power, and brainwear tech are developed and integrated enough to make this reality possible.  Once that happens, the question of automation takes on an entirely different light.  Automation and AI appear not as competitors to humans, but as part of an extended, augmented human organism.

Conceptually, Technology Readiness Levels (TRLs) provide a linear map of technology evolution, which recent work reveals to be in many ways a nonlinear process. TRLs also tend to be applied and interpreted inconsistently within organizations, despite the availability of detailed guidance. For these reasons TRL estimates and forecasts are highly subjective. A computationally-assisted model of a TRL-like classification for estimation and tracking could enable a Research and Development (R&D) portfolio manager to estimate more accurately the relative level of development for technologies in that portfolio. SRI is creating a data-driven tool that can inform R&D portfolio managers’ evaluation of the risk and potential impact of the technologies in their portfolios, which, in turn, will allow them to make more informed decisions on how to allocate their limited resources. This tool will identify indicators of technology transition between technology development levels and, using those indicators, provide explanations for prior technology development cycles.

The Institute for Advanced Composite Manufacturing Innovation is a DOE-sponsored consortium focused on accelerating the commercialization of carbon fiber composites. In 2017, Ashland, Michelman, Zoltek, Michigan State, University of Dayton Research Institute (UDRI) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory came together to collaborate on an IACMI project. Participants learn from the very effective approaches used in bringing together partners from industry, academia and federal labs.

The correct and appropriate application of lean principles to the innovation creation process can revolutionize the process how engineers take an idea and turn it into a profitable new process. Participants learn:

• The lean principles to speed up the product development process by 70% from a lean champion
• A process to manage both the creative front end of the development process
• The principles to increase efficiency by a factor of 3

Participants come away with a roadmap for implementing such a process in any organization.

Join us to examine a few cross- industry examples of AI technologies being applied in ‘traditional’ (non-web) enterprises. In particular, applications of deep learning and deep reinforcement learning, with the latter’s effectiveness at ‘playing games’ coming in handy once we begin viewing much of routine operations as games themselves. While in many cases, operations traditionally involving humans expertise can be increasingly automated using AI technologies, we also see equally as many scenarios where knowledge workers’ effectiveness can be significantly amplified via appropriate contextually intelligent assistants. Dr. Shroff also illustrates examples of the use of crowdsourcing to train machines, which combined with active learning can keep machines and humans working together in a synergistic loop.

A key element to the Organizational leg of IRI’s new Vision and Strategy is TRACK:  Training Resources to Advance Competencies and Knowledge.  TRACK is the way to take years of learning from IRI RoR research coupled with the research of subject matter experts and make it accessible to those who want to improve their Innovation Leadership skills.  Come learn about TRACK and how our new tool, a Self-Directed Learning Engine (SDLE), can guide assessment of Innovation Leadership Skills for you and your team as well as point you toward specific learning resources to fill those skill gaps.

As futurist Gary Hamel so aptly says, ”We are the first generation in history that needs to cope with an exponentially accelerated pace of change.” While agreeing with Gary is easy, doing something about it is much harder. To date, very few organizations have adjusted their leadership mindset or have adopted different management approaches to be successful in this new environment. The future requires expanding an organization’s willingness to learn, capacity to team and ability to create a range of alternative futures. This hands-on workshop session offers participants an introduction to a core set of visual tools and describe how they apply to business model creation. Participants then design for the future and develop new models that address key performance imperatives: improved product development timelines and operational excellence.

We can view innovation like a blindfolded bow hunter, with an endless supply of ideas in his quiver that he hurls in random directions hoping to strike game. Or, we could determine which arrow represents the most ideal arrow for that specific type of game, and send a single arrow flying for a direct hit. Through real-world examples, Michael McCathren illustrates the dangers of beginning the innovation process with ideation. Participants take a walk through an idea using the Chick-fil-A innovation process. Learn how to identify and evaluate NPOs (Need to be met, Problem to be solved, Opportunities to be seized), and how to package a problem to move it into ideation as effectively as possible. McCathren maintains that if companies were to invest more and be more disciplined in the problem finding phase of innovation, the result would be fewer yet more focused ideas which would yield more successful innovations.

Participants learn about the tools and techniques fast growing companies are using to launch new digital products in under 90 days. Come away with a better understanding of which techniques work at each stage of the new product development life cycle. Session focus includes: creating concept pitch decks, moving from concept to prototype, validiating concept prototypes, moving from prototype to MVP, and launching minimum viable products. Come prepared to discuss challenges you have encountered when launching new products.

Georgia Tech Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) has had a long standing relationship with The Boeing Company. Bringing academia and industry together to form a collaborative innovation space has allowed Georgia Tech to work on cutting edge projects and enabled Boeing to capture new ideas in design, new market spaces, and lean processes without major disruption to near term goals. A key driver in the success of the relationship is the process by which Georgia Tech enables protection of proprietary information while delivering on the university’s share of the partnership. Through a research facility established at the university, Georgia Tech is able to bring in work from Boeing, despite their many constraints, and work to develop proprietary solutions where Boeing can choose to own the IP. Join us for a moderated discussion to hear about the key enablers of the Georgia Tech/Boeing relationship allowing to efficiently produce leading edge solutions.

Failure Is the Only Option: The Importance of Failure When Innovating in Today’s Global Marketplace
 
Walk with tech industry visionary Edward Jung through his decades-long experience working in innovation across startups, multinationals, governments, and SME’s. Edward attributes his success to his capacity to fail and will be sharing stories on why failure is key to everyone and every business. His latest company, Xinova, an outsourced innovation firm, is built on this belief – to share risks and manage failure on behalf of its customers.

Breaking Boundaries is about innovation – acting and even thinking differently. Creativity is foundational to innovation. The challenge is that much of the literature and training on creativity provides little practical guidance on what to actually do to be more creative. It takes more than brainstorming tips and thought exercises to spark creative output. In this session, Matt provides his 6-Step Creativity Development Method to build creativity skills and use them in a way that will produce innovative results. His basic creativity training session is now augmented with tools to foster an environment of creativity in organizations. Participants take part in several engaging exercises to practice the creativity development steps and gain an understanding that can immediately bring new-found creative power to their personal and professional lives.

According to futurists, Blockchain will be more disruptive than the internet. Join this session to learn the current state status of Blockchain and apply qualitative forecasting techniques, called Impact Trees, to forecast Blockchain to the future. We’ll form future-state vignettes and have a collaborative conversation on possible Blockchain implications especially in the financial, educational, and IP environments.

This project postulates that at a strategic level, R&D practitioners would benefit from better resources for identifying failing projects and for making the decision on whether or not to terminate or redirect a project.  Once the decision is taken, techniques for capturing and communicating the learnings from that project will add value to other projects.   In order to develop the resources described above, this research effort has been divided into four key themes, building off of one another: 1) Defining “failure”; 2) identifying methods for objectively determining whether a project is failing a priori to the occurrence; 3) making the decision to either pivot, terminate, or pause; and 4) creating a learning organization by capturing and disseminating learnings. This session will include an update on the working group’s progress to date and a facilitated discussion on the topic.

In Phase 1 of this ROR on Monetizing Long Term R&D, the team did new research on best practices for long term R&D and developed a maturity model that will allow organizations to both benchmark and develop continuous improvement plans.  Two areas were found to be significant pain points for organizations:  valuation of projects that extend beyond the normal business planning cycle, and cross-functional communication of Long Term R&D across an enterprise.  The focus of this Phase 2 work is qualitative work with organizations identified in Phase 1 that have approaches and practices in place in these two focus areas.  In addition, based on the findings from new, targeted, and focused interviews, the team will work to extend and refine these existing practices and propose approaches for feedback and discussion. This session will include an update on the working group’s progress to date and a facilitated discussion of the topics above.

Horizon scanning to identify important rising technologies and trends is a critical need for organizations. Companies must understand what will disrupt their product portfolios to develop new products and to remain competitive. Human expert analysis and the Delphi approach are established approaches but are time consuming and inherent with bias. Many new data analysis tools are coming on the market. Using them appropriately, however, require a deep understanding of datasets and how their inherent biases may undermine methods and alter results. Humans are still needed to infer very rich, complex dynamics from very limited datasets. “Disruption” is highly dependent on the organization, their industry, and stakeholder needs. Gain a baseline understanding of horizon scanning and methods through a combination of discussion and case study worksheets. Learn the best approaches for your own organizations.

Companies are rushing to adopt machine learning to improve business results. But human interpretation is required to ensure the machine learning algorithms are gathering and interpreting unstructured data, such as social media, appropriately. Foresight is a human process that can inform the training of machine learning algorithms by improving the feature engineering of the unstructured data and ensuring that unique insights about the external environment are not discounted or weighted appropriately. Walk through the design process of creating machine learning algorithms for monitoring the external environment, and the required human process of foresight needed to ensure robust algorithms without less bias in results interpretation.

Workshop facilitators use a proven game (Snakes and Ladders) in an engaging and informative session that illustrates the common barriers and challenges companies face in moving to services-led business models. The game captures the predictable phases that companies must transverse along their journey and also the pitfalls (snakes) and enablers (ladders) that are common. Participants play the game together and discuss how a situation has happened or might happen in his or her organization. The anecdotes are captured, reflected upon, and shared.

We’ve all seen it: a group inside a large, established enterprise embarks on a journey to “innovate.” But is everyone aligned on what is meant by “innovation?” Why is it necessary for the company to “innovate?”

Leadership, believing they have issued a clarion call for new action, wait for impact while struggling to understand how this new team will contribute to the bottom line.

How do innovation teams get leadership buy-in to their way of working? How can they expand their influence? The solution involves acting like startup entrepreneurs. They must tap into what motivates leadership, what their strategic priorities are; what keeps them up at night.

Brant Cooper discusses useful tools, tips and strategies for innovators looking to engage leadership and demonstrates the short and long-term value of a new way of working.

Through the SPRING program, RTI and IRI are providing members with research on trends impacting innovation leaders today. Translating information about emerging trends into insights that are relevant for your business requires more than a cursory understanding of a particular trend. In this interactive session, RTI’s Innovation Advisors will immerse you in both the technical and non-technical aspects of the 2018 trend, Smart Horizons: Preparing for the Future of Intelligent Systems, and help you generate insights about what this trend means for you and your company.

A key element to the Organizational leg of IRI’s new Vision and Strategy is TRACK:  Training Resources to Advance Competencies and Knowledge.  TRACK is the way to take years of learning from IRI RoR research coupled with the research of subject matter experts and make it accessible to those who want to improve their Innovation Leadership skills.  Come learn about TRACK and how our new tool, a Self-Directed Learning Engine (SDLE), can guide assessment of Innovation Leadership Skills for you and your team as well as point you toward specific learning resources to fill those skill gaps.

Companies need a consistent and systematic way to identify signals of emerging trends that will affect the future of their business. It enables organizations to engage proactively in shaping the future, to obtain timely and relevant information to make opportunistic decisions, and to develop strategic action plans based on identified priority issues and challenges. Thinking about the future is hard. Humans have cognitive “anchoring” in the past. We assume the future will be like the present. We must confront our personal bias, our confirmation bias. RTI invested in training a small cohort of staff in foresight practices and used a series of internal workshops to uncover key moments of historical change for research organizations. Learn more about RTI’s work in mapping the drivers of change that led to empowering staff to be a flexible, nimble, resilient organization (from top to bottom) that works as one team. Prepare for emerging challenges and opportunities by creating a vision of the future of your industry. Foster a collaborative community driven by action, urgency, and focus—starting today.

Participants hear first-hand how the Centers for Disease Control implemented the National Science Foundation’s Innovation Corps (NSF I-Corps) curriculum. The CDC I-Catalyst training program, founded on the NSF I-Corps program, facilitates the translation of ideas into solutions by providing CDC staff training in customer discovery and entrepreneurship. The training addresses the tenets of the I- Corps curriculum, such as Customer Discovery, Stakeholder/Ecosystem Mapping, Mission Model Canvas, Prototyping, Story Telling, and others relevant topics. The goal of this training is for CDC staff to gain exposure and comfort with entrepreneurship methods and immediately begin applying them where appropriate. Since the CDC I-Catalyst program began, 28 project teams and 94 CDC staff have completed the training. This session presents outcomes, insights and lessons gained on this approach to growing and sustaining an innovation ecosystem in a federal agency.

There is an inevitable gap in culture, processes, speed, and motivation between startups and corporations, so setting the right foundations for a partnership is critical to its success. By leveraging innovation communities in the form of university partnerships, startup accelerators, venture capital, and corporate partnerships, our team drives proof-of-concept (PoC) projects with BASF businesses to demonstrate the potential of emerging technologies. This session will highlight best practices and case studies from BASF’s newly established Digital Innovation Team in Silicon Valley as it is designed to accelerate and maximize opportunities with startups.

The current administration has re-affirmed that American science/technology leadership is critical and has prioritized fostering strong partnerships between national laboratories and industry. Argonne National Laboratory, a multi-program DOE laboratory, has made changes to facilitate efficient research collaboration with industry to maximize outcomes from firms’ open innovation strategies. Dr. Sunderrajan discusses these changes and presents ideas on how to maximize outcomes from open innovation strategies that firms may be able to use when collaborating with national laboratories.

Is your firm trying to figure out what you should be doing in the realm of advances in digital?  From Manufacturing, to IoT to Product design to path to market – everything is changing.  The answers to where companies should and should not invest differ from firm to firm.  The R+D capabilities needed to win will also be specific to your firm.  The challenges however, are not.  Learn to unravel what your firm should do by taking a counterintuitive approach.  Do NOT start with digital.  This workshop will teach participants to solve the problem of relevancy by determining how to map the change onto your business; the challenge of density by creating digestible amounts of information about what is going on; and prepare for impact by designing scary and fairy tales for each element of change. Participants are then able to explore the interactions across the elements of change and discover the digital technologies that will be most relevant and critical to the firm’s future. Learn how to turn these insights into a practical roadmap for building the innovation portfolio and R+D capabilities.

The IRI has sponsored a multiphase study on the management practices associated with Breakthrough innovation that has occurred over three phases and twenty years. This workshop will focus on the learnings of the third phase, Institutionalizing Innovation through People. Participants will be introduced to a framework for designing innovation roles, and the logic behind it. They’ll assess their companies’ Innovation Maturity, with a special emphasis on Talent Management at the Senior, Platform, and Project levels. They’ll learn about specific Innovation roles, and the selection criteria needed to fill them.  They’ll assess themselves personally to find their closest fit to these roles. Development and retention mechanisms will also be addressed.

The workshop is led by Joanne Hyland, Co-Founder and President of the rInnovation Group, and former Vice President, New Venture Development, at Nortel Networks and Gina O’Connor, Professor of Marketing and Innovation Management and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, the Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The workshop is led by Joanne Hyland, Co-Founder and President of the rInnovation Group, and former Vice President, New Venture Development, at Nortel Networks and Gina O’Connor, Professor of Marketing and Innovation Management and Associate Dean for Academic Affairs, the Lally School of Management, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

Workshop participants focus on the following topics: 1) Why innovation is important in all industries, services and processes; 2) the lean principles that take an idea to a successful product; 3) examples and case studies of successful implementations, and 4) how to engage the people in the transformation. This session will include hands-on exercises to explain concepts, such as quick learning cycles, minimum viable products, and how to fail fast and often. The workshop is led by Norbert Majerus, Lean Champion and author of Lean-Driven Innovation: Powering Product Development at The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company.