Jeff Dyer Keynote Speaker

Professor of Strategy at the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University
Lead author of the bestselling book The Innovator’s DNA
Top-ranked innovation scholar and strategy expert

Jeff Dyer's Biography

Jeff Dyer is the lead author of the bestselling book The Innovator’s DNA (with Clayton Christensen and Hal Gregersen), which identifies the five skills the world’s best innovators use to generate creative ideas. His follow-up book, The Innovator’s Method (with Nathan Furr), examines how leading innovators use systematic processes to test and validate ideas before launching them in the marketplace.

Dr. Dyer (Ph.D., UCLA, 1993) is a Professor of Strategy at the Marriott School of Business at Brigham Young University, where he serves as Chair of the Department of Organizational Leadership and Strategy. Prior to joining BYU, he was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, where he continues to hold an adjunct appointment and teaches in Executive MBA and executive education programs. His professional experience also includes five years as a consultant and manager at the global management consultancy Bain & Company.

Dr. Dyer’s research and consulting focus on innovation, change, alliances, and effective collaboration within and across organizations. He is the only strategy scholar in the world to have published five times in both Strategic Management Journal—the leading academic journal in strategy—and Harvard Business Review, the top practitioner journal. His research impact has been widely recognized: Essential Science Indicators ranked him as the 17th most-cited scientist (1996–2006) across the combined fields of management, finance, marketing, operations, and economics, and the fourth most-cited management scholar overall.

His work has earned numerous honors, including awards from the Academy of Management, Institute for Management Science, Strategic Management Society, and McKinsey & Company. His Oxford University Press book, Collaborative Advantage, received the Shingo Prize Research Award.

Dr. Dyer regularly consults with and delivers training programs for organizations on innovation, change, and strategy. His clients have included Adobe, AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, Gilead Sciences, Johnson & Johnson, and Sony. He is also the co-founder of The Innovator’s DNA Consultancy, which provides innovation training and consulting services to companies worldwide.

Innovation Capital: How to Compete – and Win – Like the World’s Most Innovative Leaders

What distinguishes individuals who emerge as effective leaders of innovation? It’s not just being creative or the quality of their ideas. Nikola Tesla was arguably a more brilliant inventor than Thomas Edison; but Edison realized tremendous commercial success while Tesla died penniless. Edison not only developed world-changing ideas, but he also acquired resources in a competitive market to execute and commercialize them. Jeff Dyer says that success hinges on building “innovation capital” through effective leadership.

This entails building your “human capital” skills of forward thinking, proactive problem solving and persuasion. To put your ideas into action, you also need “innovative social capital” – a network of influencers, financial benefactors and organization leaders who can help build and promote your brand, product or service. Finally, you need “innovative reputation capital” – the credibility and notoriety that motivates organizational leaders and investors to trust you with their money, and consumers to eagerly await your next idea. Without the network and reputation, your vision will remain an unfulfilled wish.

Based on his book Innovation Capital: How to Compete – and Win – Like the World’s Most Innovative Leaders (HBR Press, June 2019), Dyer and his co-authors, through in-depth interviews, unlocks the secrets of how the world’s most successful and well-known CEOs – including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Tesla’s Elon Musk and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff – journeyed from their initial idea stage to being touchstones for innovation and dynamism.

For entrepreneurs and creative managers, Dyer’s accumulation of wisdom from these towering figures is an invaluable resource in learning how to forge your own innovation capital, and walk in their footsteps.

Developing Disruptive Strategies in the Age of Uncertainty

In today’s complex, dynamic and uncertain world, game-changing innovation is critical – both for growing a business and protecting current markets. But leading disruptive innovation requires new mindsets and behaviors, for leaders and their organizations.

Professor Jeff Dyer navigates the different routes to disruptive innovation, exploring the success factors of various companies and individuals – from pushing boundaries, generating insights, and conducting small, fast, inexpensive experiments.

His insights about how to lead your team into the unknown will help you and your business thrive amidst uncertainty through sustained, repeatable innovation that creates competitive advantage.

The Innovator’s DNA — Mastering the Skills of Disruptive Innovators

For most of us, innovation isn’t a natural mindset, but it can be learned. Drawing from his award-winning research with the late Clayton Christensen, professor Jeff Dyer describes how anyone can become a more creative problem solver and effective leader of innovation.

Successful innovators exhibit common behavioral habits; he identifies the five discovery skills – associating, questioning, observing, networking and experimenting – proven to distinguish innovative entrepreneurs and executives from execution-focused, results-driven managers.

But innovation isn’t a one-person job, he stresses, it’s a team game. Professor Dyer details the behavior changes necessary to build innovation capacity into the very fabric of your organization.

The Innovator’s Method: Bringing the Lean Start-up into Your Organization

Innovation has become synonymous with small, agile and social – but that doesn’t mean bigger, more established companies can’t innovate successfully, says professor Jeff Dyer. It’s about being lean and maniacally focused on fast and frugal experimentation. Taking a page from start-up culture, he offers a new perspective derived from the world of the lean and agile start-up.

Based on his most recent best-selling book, Professor Dyer details the innovator’s method, an end-to-end process for creating, refining and bringing ideas to market. He shows when and how to apply the tools and strategies of the method, and how to adapt them to your business to jump-start – and sustain – innovation.