4 minute video 9 minute video

Mitch Ditkoff, co-founder and President of Idea Champions, is a highly engaging keynote speaker – known for his unique ability to spark innovation, collaboration, creativity, and commitment. Each of his presentations is custom-designed with one thing in mind – to help his audiences translate his innovation-sparking principles into real-time behavior change on the job. "Innovation is an inside job," he explains. "Organizations don't innovate, people do." Author of Awake at the Wheel, Free the Genie, Banking on Innovation, and the forthcoming Wisdom at Work, Mitch is available to talk with you – at your earliest convenience – to explore your keynote/conference needs. Contact us Keynotes include: Awake at the Wheel The Power of Two Free the Genie! Assume Nothing!

Awake at the Wheel

The future of your business – indeed, the future of any business – is intimately tied to its ability to innovate: the relentless effort to originate and implement bold new ways of creating extraordinary results. Or, as some pundits put it, "commercializing creativity".

But how does innovation really happen? What ignites it? What drives it? And more importantly, what can you do to increase the chances of it becoming a day-to-day reality on the job – no matter what your title?

Awake at the Wheel is a groundbreaking, interactive keynote for anyone wanting to significantly increase their odds of generating, developing, and implementing the kind of ideas that lead to real innovation.

Presented by Mitch Ditkoff, President of Idea Champions and author of Awake at the Wheel: Getting Your Great Ideas Rolling (in an uphill world), the keynote is a generative greenhouse for possibility... an incubation chamber for creativity...

What will participants take away from an Awake at the Wheel keynote?

• Key insights into what it takes to be a breakthrough innovator
• A clear model on what's required to establish a culture of innovation
• Useful principles and best practices to apply on the job
• Three tools and techniques to think outside the box
• The origination and development of at least one, powerful new idea
• A painless way to give timely feedback to fellow innovators
• The confidence and commitment to manifest their most inspired ideas
• A copy of the book, which includes 35 engaging tools to jump start innovation.

Schedule a keynote and get 100 free books!

The Power of Two
Innovation Coaching for the 21st Century

In today's downsized, delayered, re-engineered corporation, the role of the manager is radically changing. Command and control are rapidly giving way to self-managed teams. Middle men (or middle women) are just about as valued these days as middle age, which is just one of the reasons why middle managers are fast becoming — like the spotted owl — an endangered species. Clearly, managers need to re-invent themselves if they expect to survive in today's marketplace. They need to learn new skills, new tools and new approaches.

What kind of skills, tools and approaches? The kind that will leverage them and their companies to the fullest. And that, in today's knowledge-based economy, has less to do with mergers and acquisitions than it does with the human mind itself — the problem solving, solution finding, idea generating, product inventing, process improving capacity of people to meet and exceed their pressing business challenges.

Simply put, managers must become coaches if they expect to make the cut. But not just any kind of coach. Innovation coaches. People capable of helping others get out of the box, stay out of the box, and achieve extraordinary results. The days of hired hands are over. Now, it's hired minds — or shall we say highered minds. And it's the manager of the future's role to find new and better ways of helping those minds turn their top of the line ideas into bottom line realities.

Enter The Power of Two — a wake up call for managers who know they need to do something different, but don't know what. Or how. This exciting, interactive keynote provides not only inspiration, but practical tools and techniques to help managers translate theory into action — new behaviors they can apply on the job to help their direct reports become powerful agents of change.

Free the Genie!
55 Ways to Get Out of the Box

During the past decade, billions of dollars have been spent on re-engineering efforts by well-meaning corporations intent on dramatically improving bottom-line performance and gaining the edge they need to succeed in today's radically changing marketplace. And yet, curiously, industry watchers are increasingly reporting that the results of most re-engineering interventions have been seriously disappointing.

Why? One clue lies in the word itself. Look at it for a moment. Do you see what the root of the word is? "Engine" (the machine that converts energy into motion). Now, take a look at the word "engine." Do you see it's root? "Gine" — a word that comes from the Latin "ingenum" — the same root from which the words "genius," "ingenuity," and "genie" originate. Simply put, at the core of re-engineering is the engine... and at the core of the engine is the genie... or genius — a long neglected resource in most organizations.

How evident is genius in your company? How healthy? How capable is your workforce of originating breakthrough solutions to your company's pressing business challenges? What if you could free this genie? What if you could release the individual and collective brainpower of your organization? Imagine the new products and services that might be invented... processes improved. Customers delighted. Costs reduced. Morale boosted...

Idea Champions' Free the Genie keynote presentation is a powerful way to catalyze a renaissance of innovation in your organization. Beyond theory, we get audiences addressing real-time business challenges via the use of our Free the Genie deck of creativity cards.

Assume Nothing!
Overcoming the #1 Obstacle to Innovation

There are many reasons why an individual or company does not innovate. But the biggest of them all is the propensity every one of us has to be ruled by limiting assumptions — those false beliefs and other half-baked conclusions that have absolutely nothing to do with reality.

During the past 18 years, Idea Champions has worked closely with thousands of clients to help them identify and go beyond their limiting assumptions. Why? Because their very survival depends on it. Because somewhere, one of their competitors is inventing a new product, service or process that is not ruled by the same assumption. It's what FedEx was able to do by putting together a nationwide package delivery system. It's what Japanese carmakers did to Detroit. And it's how the inventors of the ATM machine revolutionized retail banking when they realized that customers did not need to go through a teller to make a transaction.

Assume Nothing! is an engaging keynote address that enables every member of your audience to identify his or her biggest limiting assumption and use it as a catalyst to brainstorm new ways of going beyond the status quo. Time allowing, a full group profile can be created, providing senior management with insights into the most common limiting assumptions impacting the organization. Below are just a few examples of the kind of assumptions we are helping our clients identify and transform:

• "I don't have enough time to offer my clients superior service."
• "Why bother to innovate? We're already doing well enough."
• "I don't have the power to make a difference in the organization."
• "Cross-functional teams will never be effective in this company."
• "Training is a waste of time."
• "It's impossible to get funding for this kind of project."
• "If I pitch a new idea, I'll just have more work to do."
• "It's not my job."
• "Our annual conferences will always be tedious and unproductive."

Contact us