David Gram

David Gram has worked with radical innovation and lean start-up methods in small businesses and large global corporations for the last 15 years – e.g. as Head of Innovation at Scandinavian Airlines, as Senior Innovation Director in LEGO’s Future Lab, and recently as Venture Partner in LEGO Ventures.

Using design thinking and agile development, David has been developing and leading innovation units and projects from early incubation to full maturity. He has recently been instrumental in building and launching LEGO Ventures, the new strategic venture arm at the LEGO Brand Group. David is co-founder of Diplomatic Rebels; a company dedicated to empower companies and intrapreneurs around the world to become stronger innovators.

David is passionate about transforming large organizations into lean innovators. Believing that companies not only have an opportunity to better leverage their resources, assets and expertise in creating value, but also a responsibility to lead the global change in a way that has a long term positive impact on human beings and the planet.

Through his experience, David Gram has obtained several unique insights and developed approaches to how businesses can stay afloat in an ever-faster changing world and transform the organization into a change-leading innovator. David Gram believes that anybody can become an innovator in their own organization or as he calls it a Diplomatic Rebel.

As an experienced international key-note speaker and executive advisor, David is using his passion for breakthrough innovation to inspire and infuse this new mindset and toolbox in organizations around the world.

Radical innovation through Intrapreneurship

Intrapreneurship is the act of behaving like an entrepreneur while working within a large organization. This approach enables larger companies to breakout of old habits and ways of working to meet future challenges and disruptions in an agile, nimble and fast manner, minimizing risk and maximizing learning.

The Foundation for Effective Innovation

Understand why having a clear purpose and understanding of the company’s core capabilities is essential for driving effective innovation and how setting limits to what you do will increase your chances of success dramatically.

From Corporate Giant to Agile Ecosystem – Leveraging Corporate Venturing

Growing big is no longer a clear strength for companies as they risk becoming slow and unable to adopt. It seems that with size comes a growing fear of failing which paralyzes experimentation. Understand how to transform the growing organization into a nimble and adaptive ecosystem of capabilities, assets and talent.

Customer Insights and User-Participation

Understand how customer insights and user-participation can change not only a company’s approach to product development, but the entire business model and value creation process.

Diplomatic Rebels – Disrupting large organizations from within

How to challenge status quo with disruptive and provocative new ideas and projects – without losing the support and respect from colleagues and management. Understand the 5 habits of highly impactful intrapreneurs and become a Diplomatic Rebel.

Leading millennials as Intrapreneurs

Attracting, retaining and leading the millennial & GenZ entrepreneurs demands a new approach to leadership and new ways of working. Understand how to embrace the skills and mindset of the new generations to drive disruptive innovation.

Keywords

The topics can be mixed as needed and will in various degrees cover the following methods and tools:

• Design thinking
• Customer empathy
• Ecosystem building
• Agile product development
• Digital transformation
• Learning-based experimentation
• New business creation
• Scouting and direction design – identifying Opportunity Spaces
• Moving from incubation to execution