Jeff Degraff
Top Innovation & Creativity Speaker, University of Michigan Business Professor, Bestselling Author
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Jeff Degraff
Biography
Dubbed the “Dean of Innovation,” Jeff DeGraff not only wrote the book(s) on innovation, but is renowned for jumpstarting creativity and empowering innovation culture, strategies, competencies, community, and ecosystems for over half the Fortune 500. A former executive at Domino’s Pizza, where he grew the business from $50M to $2B acquisition, Dr. DeGraff is both a professor at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, and founder of the Innovatrium, an innovation center and consulting practice serving business and public sector clients around the globe. Always on the cutting edge of unleashing innovation in a rapidly changing world, his impassioned mission is to democratize innovation and cultivate creative mindsets, bringing transformative approaches to everyone, everywhere.
Jeff’s client roster reads like a “Who’s Who” of innovative brands: Apple, Hulu, Google, Coca-Cola, Mercedes-Benz and more. He has clocked over two million frequent flyer miles as an advisor to governments from Poland to Singapore and is a key advisor on the largest innovation ecosystem in the world, the U.S. Air Force and Space Force. Dr. DeGraff is also the co-creator of Competing Values Framework (CVF), the gold standard in assessing innovation and growth, used by Wall Street and top-tier management consultants alike. Rapid X, a key acquisition process developed at Innovatrium with the USAF key acquisition talents, was deployed by “Operation Warp Speed” to bring COVID vaccines to the public in eight months vs. the usual eight years. He is also widely known as a mentor or influencer to many, including leaders ranging from Adam Grant to prominent CEOs.
Dr. DeGraff’s extensive experience, expertise and research have fueled several acclaimed books, numerous articles, his own TV show and speaking engagements spanning the breadth of the Fortune 1000. His PBS program, Innovation You, his book by the same title, and his segment on Michigan Radio called “The Next Idea” encourage and empower individuals to innovate in their everyday life. His book, Innovation Code: The Creative Power of Constructive Conflict, identifies four contrasting types of innovators and how to build and manage a team that represents the full spectrum of innovative thinking. In his latest book, The Creative Mindset: Mastering the Six Skills That Empower Innovation, Jeff and his co-author share how-to advice, tools, and techniques as two master innovators who have taught and worked with over half of all Fortune 500 companies. Jeff’s articles have been published in Inc. and on LinkedIn, and his opinions appear in Business Week, US News and World Report, and the Wall Street Journal, just to name a few.
Before being recruited to the University of Michigan, Dr. DeGraff was Vice President of Communications and New Ventures at Domino’s Pizza when it was one of the fastest growing businesses in the world. Under his innovative leadership, Domino’s went from a $50M valuation to a $2B acquisition by Bain Capital.
He holds a PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Jeff Degraff
Featured Video
Current: The Dean of Innovation
Time 03:05
Jeff Degraff
Featured Keynote Programs
Leading Innovation
How to Jumpstart Your Organization's Growth Engine
"The amount of innovation a company produces is inversely related to the number of PowerPoint slides or elaborate process diagrams it makes about innovation." The DeGraff Hypothesis
Productivity is no longer enough. Leaders are finding that the drive for growth is pushing strategic innovation initiatives down into operating units where the management and staff have few of the tools and little preparation to really make it happen. Leading organizations are pursuing innovative strategies and processes only to find that they lack the culture, competencies, and leadership practices required to execute and sustain innovation. The theme of this session is simple: Sustainable innovation is produced by developing leaders who can systematically add innovation to existing business practices.
This highly engaging and interactive session is organized around the Innovation Genome, a simple framework that allows leaders at all levels and locations to understand how their leadership directly affects the creation of specific types of culture and competencies in their organizations, and how these abilities make innovation happen across the enterprise with everyone, everyday, everywhere. This session will presents a simple approach for leaders to recognize, develop, and launch creative ideas into winning solutions that create value.
Innovation You
Four Steps to Becoming New and Improved
One day it hits you: the game has changed. The market stinks, you are tired of the same old fear and greed, and what once gave you a spark isn't enough anymore. What always worked for you before, professionally or personally, no longer gets results. Now there's only one way forward: innovate. Make it new. Make you new. But how?
In this presentation, Innovation You, also the title of Jeff DeGraff's book and PBS program, will explore how the strategies and tactics used to grow top businesses like Apple, Coca-Cola, Pfizer, and GE can be translated and applied to your own life. It will give some pointers on how to aim for high quality targets, enlist deep and diverse domain expertise, take multiple shots on goal and learn from experience and experiments. This presentation will explain how to make yourself new and improved and how to help others do the same. So bring your challenges, an open mind and your desire to grow.
Connecting the Dots of Innovation
Making Collaborative Innovation Work Where You Work
An innovation only exists for a very brief moment before it goes sour like milk. Breakthroughs don't conform to authoritative leadership practices because they advance at unpredictable speeds and magnitudes. Since it is disruptive, radical innovation is often relegated to an orphaned tech center, marginalized development function or outsourced completely where it becomes someone else's problem. But in a down market, where growth is hard to come by, innovation isn't your best friend; it's your only friend. Now the same leaders who managed to keep innovation segregated from standard operations find themselves chasing a fast moving global market where disruptive innovation is likely to be an integrated solution created by a federation that spans companies, geographies and disciplines. As a result, conventional organizational strategies, structures and processes are being replaced by boundless affiliations where connecting the dots of diverse cultures and competencies has become the essential function of leadership. But what happens when your best people aren't your people at all? What happens when everyone, everywhere, everyday innovates? Throw away your checklist. One size never really fit all anyway. It's time to connect the dots – to innovate how we innovate. This presentation will show you how to sync your strategies, practices and competencies to achieve your collaborative innovation goals.