Larry Keeley
Presenter at Ford Innovation Symposium, Sept. 28. 2006
Larry
Keeley, president of Doblin Inc., is an innovation strategist who
often wonders why people bother to listen to innovation "experts"
at all. After all, since innovation fails about 96% of the time, it
seems self-evident that the field has advanced to about the same
state as medicine when leeches, liniments and mystery potions were
the sophisticated treatments of the day.
On occasions when Keeley can get someone to listen, he is inclined to reveal pieces of the emerging science of innovation that is at the heart of Doblin's practice. By being obsessive about identifying the root causes of innovation failure and injecting better methods, it is now possible to systematically boost innovation 'hit rates' to between 35% and 70%. That still isn't perfect but it is an improvement of 10-15 times over the pathetic results people try to convince themselves is "normal."
Keeley is a co-founder of Doblin and was lucky enough to have Jay Doblin as a mentor for a decade. He is the current president of Doblin, and a frequent lecturer and teacher about frontiers of innovation and strategy. Keeley has worked with a wide variety of pioneering enterprises since 1979, among them firms like Aetna, Apple, Citigroup, ExxonMobil, Hallmark, McDonald's, Motorola, Pfizer, Steelcase, Texas Instruments, and Zurich Financial Services.
Keeley is a board member for the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology, where he is also an adjunct professor teaching graduate design strategy classes. He is a lecturer in innovation at Kellogg and University of Chicago and at many executive education programs. He is also a board member for WBEZ-FM in Chicago, where he has been instrumental in charting strategies that have made it the nation's most innovative public radio station. Keeley is author of The Taming of the New, a guide to the new disciplines of innovation to be published soon by Harvard Business School Press.
"Innovation," Keeley says, "can be the submarine that you sneak into the safe harbor of an unwary competitor, or it can be the clever entreaty you use to begin a fantastic lifelong relationship with your customer."
Fast facts:
- Secretly wants to be a research biologist
- Loves literature, jazz music, and tacky pop-culture stuff
- Teaches famously grueling courses on innovation at the Institute of Design
Keeley will give the Ford Innovation Symposium presentation, "How Detroit and the Auto Industry Can Innovate Themselves to Prosperous Futures," part of University of Detroit Mercy's Founders Week. The presentation is scheduled for Thursday, Sept. 28, at 5:30 p.m. in the Ford Life Sciences Building, McNichols Campus.