Mitch Ditkoff is the co-founder and President of Idea Champions, a highly acclaimed management consulting and training company, headquartered in Woodstock, NY. He specializes in helping forward thinking organizations go beyond business as usual, originate breakthrough products and services, and establish dynamic, sustainable cultures of innovation.

Educated at Lafayette College and Brown University, Mitch has worked with a wide variety of Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies who have realized the need to do something different in order to succeed in today's rapidly changing marketplace. These clients include: GE, Merck, Allianz, AT&T, Lucent Technologies, NBC Universal, Goodyear, A&E Television Networks, General Mills, MTV Networks, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and a host of others.

Mitch has been an adjunct faculty member for several esteemed leadership development programs, including GE's Crotonville Management Development Center, Duke Corporate Education, Fuqua School of Business, University of New Mexico's Anderson School of Management, and Bell Atlantic's Marketing Institute.

At the heart of his work lies the fundamental belief that a company's most important capital asset is the collective brain power, creativity and commitment of its work force and that this asset can be significantly leveraged when people are provided with the appropriate setting, systems, tools and techniques to think (and act) out of the box.

Prior to his work with Idea Champions, Mitch was a principal in Ki Learning Systems and a Senior Consultant with the Inner Game Corporation - both organizational development firms dedicated to catalyzing superior performance in the workplace.

In addition to his consulting work, Mitch is also an accomplished keynote speaker and large group workshop facilitator. During the past 18 months, he has delivered a wide variety of keynote and workshops to a wide variety of forward thinking organizations, including the National Institutes of Health, Merck, Mitre, Chubb Insurance, Intertek, EXL, Dover Corporation, AtlantiCare, Reckitt Benckiser, Graceworks, Inpex, National Multiple Sclerosis Society, and IdaVation.

In 2010, he was voted as the #1 innovation blogger in the world. His widely read blog, The Heart of Innovation, is a daily destination for a global audience of movers and shakers. Additionally, Mitch is the author of the award-winning book, Awake at the Wheel: Getting Your Great Idea Rolling (in an uphill world) and the innovation-sparking card deck and online app, Free the Genie. Mitch was also acknowledged as one of the "40 Hottest Business Speakers on the Association Circuit" in Association Meetings magazine.

Mitch lives in Woodstock, New York, with his wife, Evelyne, and their two teenage children, Jesse and Mimi.

Mitch Ditkoff: Program Outlines

Creating a Culture of Innovation
When, Where, Who, Why and How
All business leaders want the same thing—and that is an organizational culture that is agile, adaptive, and conducive to sustainable innovation.

Easier said than done, however.

When you think of how difficult it is for just one person to lose five pounds or stop smoking, imagine how difficult it is to engage an entire workforce in the effort to innovate.

But just because it's difficult, doesn't mean it's impossible. You've got to start somewhere. And Creating a Culture of Innovation is the best way to start—a highly engaging wake up call that demystifies innovation, sparks creative thinking, and provides an easy-to-adapt model that each participant can immediately apply on the job.

Face it. The days of depending on R&D to ensure your organization is innovating are over. The times have changed. Now, everyone needs to get into the act.

Includes:

• Best innovation practices of leading organizations
• A robust business case for why innovation matters
• Hundreds of actionable culture of innovation ideas, sorted into eight categories
• Three culture-building tools and techniques
• A free, one-month license of Free the Genie

The Seed of Innovation
How to Foster Extraordinary Possibility in Others
Let's cut to the chase: Innovation doesn't begin with processes. It begins with people—inspired, committed, and collaborative people.

When people are in the right mindset, your company has thousands of daily, spontaneously occurring opportunities for innovation to take root. All too often, however, these opportunities are missed.

Why? Because they are usually invisible to people. Like the rarely seen white arrow in the FedEx logo, people have a hard time seeing what's right in front of them—the opportunity to identify, spark, and co-develop promising new ideas.

The Seed of Innovation teaches people how to create the conditions that radically increase the odds of bold, new ideas being identified, nurtured, and developed on the fly.

It does so not by requiring people to add another initiative to their already maxed out schedule, but by leveraging the countless interactions they are already having on the job—in hallways, elevators, parking lots, lunchrooms, bathrooms, conference rooms, and cubicles.

Includes:

• The art of listening
• Best innovation practices from leading organizations
• Teaching and practice of LCS (idea feedback tool)
• Seven ways to maximize the seed of innovation moment
• Free annual license of Free the Genie (online brainstorming tool)

Blue Sky Thinking
When Incremental Improvements are Not Enough
Some organizations are afraid of disruptive innovation. It spooks them. And understandably so.

Disruptive innovation can be extremely challenging—replete with the unknown, the unknowable, and seemingly endless meetings no one has the time to attend.

Innovation, in these organizations, takes place on the incremental side of the equation—tweaks, cost cutting, and process improvements.

That's all well and good.

But there are other organizations who know their future depends on a purposeful effort to challenge the status quo and generate breakthrough ideas—ideas for new products, new services, and new ways of doing business.

If this describes your organization, then Blue Sky Thinking is for you.

This highly energizing, interactive, two-hour keynote not only gets the creative juices flowing, but provides senior leadership with an extraordinary variety of newly generated business-growth ideas they can evaluate, post-session.

Includes:

• Pre-session "innovation opportunities" poll
• Teaching and practice of the Blue Sky Thinking technique
• Small group brainstorming
• 16-page Blue Sky Thinking guidebook
• Sorting of newly generated ideas into TBD categories

Assumption Busting 101
The Art & Science of Going Beyond the Status Quo
Of all the obstacles to innovation, the most destructive is the tendency individuals and organizations have to be ruled by limiting assumptions.

Better known as "blind spots" or "lines in the sand," limiting assumptions prevent people from trying anything new. Stopped before they've even had a chance to start, people bound by limiting assumptions bail out at the status quo.

Ask them to explore new possibilities and they will give you countless reasons why nothing new can happen. They have "proof," based on past experience. Probe a bit, however, and you'll discover their inability to consider the new, isn't because they don't want to innovate, but because their limiting assumptions prevent them from seeing opportunities to innovate.

Assumption Busting 101 is a way to turn this phenomenon around, helping even the most curmudgeonly "no can do" person to open their mind to new possibilities. The takeaway from this keynote is not just the generation of great ideas, but a palpable change in mindset. From "no" to "possible." From "can't do" to "will do," From the "cup's half empty" to "who said we have to drink out of that ridiculously small cup, anyway?"

Includes:

• Pre-session, online limiting assumptions poll
• Review and discussion of famous innovation-averse assumptions
• Action learning (hands on experiential challenge and debrief)
• Small group brainstorming
• 16-page Lead Into Gold assumption busting guidebook

Awake at the Wheel
What You Can Learn About Innovation from a Neanderthal
These days you've probably had your fill of stories about Google, Apple, Southwest Airlines, and Dell—the so-called golden boys of innovation. Stories about them are everywhere. Time, Newsweek, Fortune, Inc, Fast Company, Forbes, and every blogger looking for a few more fans are waxing poetic about the wisdom of these innovation-savvy organizations.

I'd like to put a stop to this madness.

Not because the stories are untrue. And not because the stories are uninspiring. But because the stories don't always translate to your business, your industry, and your workforce.

It's time for a new story that everyone can relate to—and that new story is the story told by Mitch Ditkoff in Awake at the Wheel, his award winning business parable about the invention of the wheel by the world's first innovator, Og the Neanderthal.

What Og had to go through to get his idea out of his head and into the world is the same journey we all have to go through—the journey from idea to execution.

Includes:

• A copy of Awake at the Wheel for each participant
• Best innovation practices from the Stone Age to the Information Age
• Teaching and practice of three creative thinking techniques
• Launching of your company's "Best New Idea" campaign
• Free annual license of Free the Genie (an online brainstorming tool)

Free the Genie
Innovation Town Meetings
In today's financially challenged marketplace, most organizations can no longer afford to throw money at problems or hire more "head count." Those days are over.

What's needed now is a far more intelligent, collective response—a way to access the existing brainpower and imagination of your workforce. You've got the horses. You've got the horsepower. What you don't have is a simple, cost-effective way to unleash it.

That's what Free the Genie is all about—a highly interactive large group ideation event that makes it profoundly easy for participants to generate, develop, and collaborate on compelling new ideas to grow the business. Incremental ideas. Disruptive ideas. And everything in between.

What's unique about a Free the Genie session is that the newly unleashed creativity of your workforce doesn't end when the meeting is over. Our service includes an annual license Free the Genie, our online brainstorming tool—a simple way to provide everyone with the means to continue developing their new ideas, post-session.

Includes:

• Pre-session, online Qualities of an Innovator poll
• Tutorial on the art and science of creative thinking
• Best innovation practices from leading organizations
• Teaching and practice of LCS (idea feedback tool)
• Free annual license of Free the Genie

Catalyzing the Creative Mind
There's a lot of talk these days about the need to raise the bar for innovation and creativity. Understandably so. These are challenging times we find ourselves in. The game is changing, big time. Talk, however, is cheap. What your workforce needs is more than talk. What your workforce needs is a way to activate, accelerate, and apply their innate creativity on the job. So they can intelligently respond to changing times. So they can solve old problems in new ways. So they can generate new ideas—both incremental and breakthrough—that grow the business.

Your workforce doesn't need to be taught how to be creative. (They already are.) What they need is a simple way to catalyze their creativity. Enter Catalyzing the Creative Mind—Mitch Ditkoff's engaging interactive keynote that dramatically increases the odds of each member of workforce becoming proactive innovators on the job. Not next month. Not next week. Not tomorrow. Now.

Includes:

• Pre-session 20 Qualities of an Innovator poll
• Compelling business case for why creative thinking is important
• Creative thinking jump start in eight key domains:
• Balancing left brain analysis with right brain thinking
• How to recognize and go beyond limiting assumptions
• The art of framing powerful questions
• Seeing opportunities with fresh eyes
• Blue Sky Thinking (how to unleash the imagination)
• Synthesizing innovation: How to spark new product and service ideas
• How to nurture the "seed of innovation" moment
• Diffusing nay saying and idea killing behavior
• A sampling of best practices and inspiration from creative luminaries
• Free one month license of Free the Genie (online brainstorming tool)