Former Disney executive Duncan Wardle is to give the Opening Address at ISE 2020. Wardle is to talk about how innovation can become part of the day-to-day and how we can put it into action. It will take place in the RAI's Amsterdam Forum at 18:00 on 10 February, the day before ISE 2020 begins.
Drawing on his experience of over 25 years at Disney, where he became Head of Innovation and Creativity, Wardle today works with leading brands to help them tap into the innate creative potential of their workforces.
He is a firm believer that imagination, intuition, creativity and curiosity are traits we are all born with, but we are discouraged from using them as we grow up. Additionally, “the more expertise and the more experience we get, the more reasons we know why the new idea won’t work, so we immediately shut it down rather than considering how we might get it done.”
“There’s a real gap in the market,” he explains. “All the CEOs are saying, ‘We need to disrupt, we must innovate’, and their employees are saying, ‘That’s great – can you show me how?’ – and no-one’s doing the ‘how’. I’ve taken a design thinking toolkit that’s the best of what I’ve learned from working with companies like Apple, Disney, Pixar and IDEO, and essentially simplified it to make innovation easy, creativity tangible and the process fun.”
Wardle believes that the next decade will bring changes at an incredible rate – with artificial intelligence driving much of the change. However, he believes AI is something to be embraced, not feared: “What will happen is, we will take all the human traits that we have – empathy, intuition and so on – tech will bring what it brings and it will be embedded into us. We will become superhuman.”