Thomas is a Head of Corporate Innovation Management at Continental Automotive. He directly manages the innovation process and innovation is perceived a critical to Continental’s future success. Attending Innovation Excellence Masterclass helped Thomas remove any ambiguity about what innovation is and how it should be implemented by seeing how to adopt innovation as a systematic framework.

My Challenges: Our main challenge lies in the internationalisation of innovation management. I got recommended the Innovation Excellence Masterclass by a colleague, the agenda sounded interesting so I attended.

How Gemba Helped: Major learning for me has been to treat innovation like everyone did quality 10 years ago, approaching it with the same level of commitment. I used to perceive innovation as something to do with experiments. I really benefited from seeing that innovation can be implemented as a systematic framework, just like quality. Masterclass leader Rowan Gibson brought a lot of practical examples into the learning which helped me grasp the idea of what innovation should look like within my company. I also liked that everyone was from a different industry as I got to learn different perspectives and how others approach innovation on an international scale. I travel a lot, and being able to form a meaningful network during the Masterclass was a big plus.