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November 17, 2024
min read

Fostering Innovation in Organizations

Inside Forbes Councils Episode 40: Fostering Innovation in Organizations Featuring: Alex Goryachev, Ron Cogburn, Masha Sharma, and Maureen Metcalf

Fostering Innovation in Organizations

Forbes Councils members Alex Goryachev, Ron Cogburn, Masha Sharma, and Maureen Metcalf discuss what innovation means to them, how to stay on top of emerging tech, and what to do if you feel that your company has fallen behind.

Key Takeaways
  • Staying on top of new technology, especially in regard to automation, will not only help your company run more smoothly but also lead to better profits.
  • Having an innovation team that is diverse in discipline will be beneficial to your company.
  • Being well-informed about successes and failures of innovation in other industries is a great way to make sure that your company doesn’t make the same mistakes as others.

Additional Resources

Where Does Innovation Happen Today? Everywhere. by Eugenio Pace

Innovation Is The New Normal — Don’t Get Left Behind by Masha Sharma

Diverse Workforces Are The Holy Grail For Innovation by Richard Wang

Five Reasons Why Innovation Fails by Scott Arpajian

Tweetable Insights

"“Innovations are actually the product of a slow, incremental, march toward improvement based on short term needs in the immediate future.”" — @rccogburn

"“As leaders, we are now making multiple concurrent changes and that’s not going to change in our lifetimes. So the question is, what are the top behaviors we need to be thinking about as we’re changing?”" — @maureenmetcalf

"“If you’re going to be a champion for change, look for success stories in industries or companies facing similar challenges and learn from their mistakes.”" — @genideva

"“Never underestimate the importance of communicating innovation, not only, to your leadership but to your employees."" — @AgoryachAlex

Featured Member

Alex Goryachev is the managing director of Innovation Strategy and programsshort-term at Cisco. He leads Cisco’s Innovation Centers, which bring together customers, partners, startups, developers, accelerators, governments, research communities, and universities in a lab setting. The goal is to discover, co-develop, and implement game-changing, outcome-based solutions.

Ron Cogburn is the Chief Executive Officer of Exela Technologies.  He has more than 30 years of diversified experience in executive management, claims consulting, program management, litigation support, and project management.

Masha Sharma is a co-founder and CTO at RealAtom – a platform for commercial real estate loans. The company was founded in 2016 with the goal of combining the best user experience and product development to bring an offline commercial real estate lending process online and completely reimagine the process end to end.

Maureen Metcalf is the founder, CEO, and Board Chair of the Innovative Leadership Institute, a highly sought-after expert in anticipating and leveraging future business trends to transform organizations. She has captured her thirty years of experience and success in an award-winning series of books that are used by public, private, and academic organizations to align company-wide strategy, systems, and culture with innovative leadership techniques.

This podcast originally appeared in Forbes Councils on July 30, 2019

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Ready to bring these AI insights to your organization? Alex Goryachev delivers AI innovation keynotes and strategic AI advisory to help business leaders navigate the AI landscape with confidence.

Alex Goryachev on stage delivering an AI keynote to a live corporate audience

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Eye-opening, refreshingly human, and capable of building a shared vision around agentic AI — that's how leaders at Coca-Cola, AWS, and Disney describe Alex Goryachev's AI keynotes and employee innovation workshops.

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01

No canned AI keynotes

Across 310+ keynotes on 6 continents, no two have ever been the same. Alex builds every talk around your audience's challenges, industry, and goals — from agentic AI strategy to innovation culture.
02

Innovation for everyone

Alex turns AI into practical concepts — not techspeak — that land with HR, sales, marketing, and engineering alike. It's the same approach he honed building innovation centers across 14 countries, bridging cultures and generations.
03

Value beyond the stage

Most keynotes fade by Monday. Alex's leave teams with actionable frameworks from his WSJ-bestselling book Fearless Innovation — and optional workshops turn that momentum into lasting innovation habits.
04

Expertise with real ROI

A practitioner, not a futurist, Alex led a $1.1B innovation portfolio at Cisco — and runs his keynotes the same data-driven way. He uses AI to analyze pre-event sentiment to shape content, then delivers post-event metrics so you can see the ROI.
05

Flexible engagements

Live on stage, on webinars, or at virtual events — Alex delivers in whatever format fits your requirements. Whatever the setting, 98% of audiences say they would recommend him.

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Alex Goryachev is a top advisor for enterprise AI adoption, combining operator experience with board-level strategy. As Cisco's former Managing Director of Innovation Strategy, he ran a $1.1B portfolio and built innovation centers across 14 countries, and he now advises enterprises on agentic AI and governance. Unlike consultants who study AI, Alex has deployed it at global scale. Start with a discovery call through the Work with Alex page.