THOUGHT LEADER: Maria Thompson, Global Innovation Framework Director, ITW

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Maria Thompson, Global Innovation Framework at Illinois Tool Works is joining the list of speakers at the Business Transformation & Operational Excellence World Summit (BTOES17). Maria will be heading up the Innovation track with her talk, 'An Innovation Framework for Accelerating Organic Growth'.

Tell us about your roles & responsibilities within your organization.

Innovation Governance, Innovation capability improvement, workshop facilitation for Customer-Back Interviewing, Value Proposition, Go To Market Strategy

What are the critical challenges your presentation will address?

Using an Innovation Framework for successful NPD:

1. Customer problem identification,

2. Value Proposition derivation,

3. Moving from inside-out to outside-in customer-driven ideation,

4. Successful New Product Launch,

5. Risk Assessment

After your presentation, what are you hoping the attendees will take away with them?

New tools and techniques to successfully manage and launch new products and services

What have been the biggest developments in Operational Excellence in the last 12 months, within your organization?

Identifying most-promising opportunities through identification of high-value customer problems; continuously validating customer's value proposition throughout project lifecycle; value-driven Go To Market Strategy

How do you see Operational Excellence developing over the next 5-10 years within your organization?

Disciplined Innovation Management practices that are used to support both incremental, adjacent and new product and service introduction

What 3 key learnings would you like to takeaway from this conference?

1. Methods for Identifying and testing innovation or growth opportunities;

2. Pricing strategies for new products;

3. Metrics for disciplined project and creativity management

Maria Thompson is a senior technology operations leader with international experience in innovation, change management, and organizational capability improvement. She facilitates teams to creatively solve problems to generate strategic patent portfolios and new product and service designs. She has introduced new processes, technology, and culture change to organizations, resulting in creativity, quality and productivity improvements. She’s an accomplished innovator and patent-holder skilled at fostering alliances with senior management, strategy, legal, research, marketing, engineering & services personnel. She’s successfully improved the innovation capability of organizations ranging from five to 5000 staff across AT&T Bell Laboratories, Motorola and now Illinois Tool Works, Inc. (ITW). You can learn more about Maria's role at the summit here.