Scott Kirsner
Scott Kirsner is the CEO and Co-Founder of Innovation Leader. He also has written a weekly column for the Boston Globe since 2000, and before that helped the Globe launch its digital publishing division with Scott Cohen and Frank Hertz, his co-founders at Innovation Leader.
Scott has also been a contributing writer for Wired Magazine, Fast Company, Variety, The New York Times, BusinessWeek, and other publications. He is the author of several books on innovation and technology, including “Inventing the Movies,” which explores the challenge of bringing new ideas to a century-old, change-resistant industry: Hollywood.
Scott has presented leadership strategies to corporate leaders, technologists and entrepreneurs at Harvard Business School, the MIT R&D Conference, South by Southwest, the Consumer Electronics Show, HubSpot Inbound, Tijuana Inovadora, the Connected Health Symposium, and the NAB Futures Summit. Scott has also appeared on NBC's Today Show, NPR's Science Friday, the Discovery Channel, and WBUR's Radio Boston.
VideoWhat Matters in Innovation — Feb. 12, 2021
In this installment: the launch of a disruptive new innovation consulting firm; Clubhouse starts attracting more than just Silicon Valley cool kids; and traditional automakers playing catchup on electric vehicles.
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7 of the Best Tools for Bringing Serendipity Back
One thing is painfully absent from the work-from-anywhere era: serendipity. We’ve been testing out tools that support serendipity this year. These are seven of the best.
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The 10 Best Things That Explain Amazon’s Culture of Innovation
What makes Amazon’s culture unique? Here’s a list of 10 articles and books if you want to better understand what makes Amazon tick.
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What Makes Amazon’s Approach to Innovation Unique
Lots of leaders talk like Jeff Bezos. But few organizations know how to create a culture with the right enablers to behave like Amazon. Here’s some background to get you started…
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The 9 People You’ll Meet as a Corporate Innovator
Here’s our guide to the nine people corporate innovators interact with most — and how you can get them on board with your agenda. Any resemblance to real people in your organization is completely coincidental.
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Elon Musk: Forget Breakthough Innovation — Just Make the Product Better
Elon Musk shared his thoughts on innovation at a Wall Street Journal CEO Council conference. ”Spend less time in meeting rooms, less time on PowerPoint presentations, less time on spreadsheets,” he said. Here are the three big takeaways from his session.
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How Do You Transform a Company as Big as UPS? Scott Price Explains
Scott Price share how UPS — and other large organizations — should be approaching strategic planning amidst the coronavirus pandemic.
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How One CEO Gets Innovation Initiatives Over the Finish Line
Jason Field, CEO and President of W. L. Gore & Associates, shares how he encourages a culture of innovation and gets all levels of employees involved.
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Why Did AI as a Capability Just Get More Important?
What I’ve observed is that the much-talked-about but often delayed and deferred digital transformation of the typical company has been massively accelerated because of the COVID-19 pandemic. And that transformation work is an antecedent to artificial intelligence being deployed and scaled.
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Why COVID-19 Is Accelerating the Adoption of 5G Technology
Christian Guirnalda, Director of 5G Labs and Innovation Centers, explains how Verizon is finding new use cases for their emerging 5G technology during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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These are the Finalists for Innovation Leader’s 2020 Impact Awards
Our 2020 awards will be presented online this October, as part of the year’s biggest gathering of corporate innovators, Impact 2020. Here’s a look at which organizations made it to the finalists stage…
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Johnson & Johnson Exec on COVID-19 and Inequality
Michal Preminger explains how the innovation teams at Johnson & Johnson are working to find solutions for both COVID-19 and racism…
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Mercedes Lays Off Staff at Innovation Centers, Seeks Outside Partners
Daimler AG, the German company that makes Mercedes-Benz vehicles and Daimler trucks, has laid off more than 100 staffers at its Lab1886 innovation centers around the world…
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The Rise of ‘Conferencing Competence’ and the Decline of Fancy Footwear
Thornton May contends that many leaders — and many organizations — are moving too slowly in responding to the dramatic changes that 2020 has brought. More insights inside…
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Scenario Planning in 2020: What You Should (and Shouldn’t) Be Doing
The business and societal impacts of the coronavirus pandemic will be “more like World War I or the Great Depression,” says Matthew Ranen, a scenario-planning consultant.
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Stop Trying to ‘Bounce Back’ to Normal
Rather than trying to restore all of the activities from February 2020 in the US, we should be thinking about how to “bounce forward” toward something new.
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The Three Crises Caused by COVID-19 — and How to Respond
Futurist Steve Brown sees the current pandemic as three overlapping crises — each requiring a different response. See how innovation plays into the solution…
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Moving Museums and Universities into the Digital Realm
At our Innovation Strategy for Nonprofits event, Arthur Daemmrich of the Smithsonian Institution and Panos Panay of Berklee College of Music discussed how their teams have been pivoting to offer educational experiences online.
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Ex-DreamWorks Animation CTO: How the C-Suite Can Foster Innovation
”In my experience, the most powerful motivator to encourage innovation was peer recognition,” says Ed Leonard, Co-Founder of Bred Ventures and former CTO at DreamWorks Animation. Leonard shares more on what senior leaders do at companies like DreamWorks Animation and Disney to shape a culture of innovation…
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At NASA, Introducing a New Openness to Innovation
In a safety-obsessed culture, how do you suggest new ways to innovate? Omar Hatamleh, the first Chief Innovation Officer for the engineering group at NASA’s Johnson Space Center, shares.
