Helping Companies
Survive & Thrive
Bruce Vojak works with leaders at all levels in maturing and mature companies and industries.
Drawing on decades of experience in industry, research, advising, and board service, he helps organizations clarify priorities, strengthen their innovation capabilities, and better enable the people who generate promising opportunities and turn them into meaningful results.
Innovation researcher • Advisor and board member • Co-author of two Stanford University Press books
When a Company
Needs to Renew
Established companies often possess many of the ingredients required for innovation: strong customer relationships, deep technical knowledge, capable people, and a history of solving difficult problems. Even so, creating the next source of meaningful value can become increasingly difficult.
Growth may slow. Important initiatives may lose momentum. Owners, directors, executives, and technical leaders may disagree about where to focus, how much risk to accept, or what success should look like. Processes intended to provide discipline may become cumbersome. The individuals best equipped to recognize and pursue important opportunities may be overlooked, constrained, or inadequately supported.
Bruce helps leadership teams understand what is preventing progress and develop an approach suited to the company’s business, people, and objectives.
Stalled growth and renewal
Leadership misalignment
Innovation initiatives that lose momentum
Exceptional innovators who
are not fully enabled
A Distinctive Position
For decades, companies have largely approached innovation as they would any other complex business process. Structure, close supervision, and well-defined practices can help produce incremental innovation. They are less effective when the objective is to create the kind of Breakthrough Innovation capable of producing significant strategic and financial results.
In many organizations, the drive to make innovation routine has gone too far. Processes and structures intended to improve consistency can instead limit the judgment, flexibility, persistence, and creativity required to address unfamiliar opportunities and difficult problems.
Bruce’s work reframes the issue by resurfacing a people view of innovation in addition to the more conventional organizational structure and process views. This perspective focuses on the exceptional individuals who repeatedly create and deliver important innovations within established companies.
Bruce refers to these individuals as Serial Innovators. They are typically unknown outside their organizations, yet they can contribute substantially and disproportionately to customer value, competitive advantage, and financial performance.
The practical question is therefore broader than “What innovation process or organizational structure should we use?” It is also, “How do we identify, develop, support, manage, and retain the people capable of producing Breakthrough Innovations?”
What Engagement Can Look Like
Bruce helps clients establish and sustain a successful innovation capability. Depending on the company’s needs, he may become involved at one point in the journey or remain engaged across several stages.
01.
Discover the Potential
Understand what Breakthrough Innovation could mean for the business, assess current capabilities, and identify the barriers limiting progress.
02.
Plan and Prepare
Clarify priorities, align leaders, develop the necessary capabilities, and establish a practical path forward.
03.
Transform
Implement the practices, capabilities, systems, and organizational conditions required to produce meaningful results.
04.
Sustain
Strengthen the capabilities, leadership practices, systems, and culture required to continue benefiting from innovation.
Enabling Your Company To Succeed
Bruce does not engage as an outside technical specialist seeking to replace the expertise already present within the company.
His role is to bring a deep understanding of how innovation occurs, why it stalls, and what leaders can do to enable their own executives, managers, and innovators to succeed.
When an engagement would benefit from additional expertise, Bruce can draw selectively on a network of experienced colleagues with complementary technical and organizational backgrounds.
Primary Ways Bruce Contributes
Consulting and Advisory Support
Bruce works with leaders, ranging from technologists, innovators, managers, executives, and owners, who are confronting questions involving innovation, renewal, functional expertise, leadership alignment, and organizational effectiveness.
Keynote Presentations
Bruce speaks to companies, industry associations, economic development groups, and leadership audiences on innovation, renewal, and the people who make both possible.
Board Service
Bruce contributes technical, commercial, organizational, research, and governance perspectives, as well as strategic and financial expertise, to companies whose long-term value depends on innovation and thoughtful strategic renewal.
Authored Books
Practical guidance for leaders of small- and medium-sized mature enterprises seeking renewal without the resources or specialized functions available to major corporations.
No-Excuses Innovation
Research-grounded guidance concerning the exceptional individuals who repeatedly create and deliver Breakthrough Innovation inside established companies.
Serial Innovators
Client Perspectives
Consider what a stronger innovation capability could make possible
Whether your company is confronting stalled growth, an initiative that has lost momentum, a need for stronger leadership alignment, a board-level question involving renewal, or is simply seeking to sustain innovation excellence, a focused conversation is a useful place to begin.