Hal Gregersen

Hal Gregersen is committed to creating insight with impact. As a Professor of Leadership at INSEAD and a Senior Fellow at Innosight (a consulting firm based in Watertown, MA), he pursues a lifelong vocation of learning how leaders in business, government, and society discover provocative new ideas, develop the human and organizational capacity to realize those ideas, and ultimately deliver positive, powerful results. Putting insight into practice, Gregersen regularly delivers inspirational keynote speeches, motivational executive seminars, and transformational coaching experiences. He has worked with a diverse set of companies to help them master the challenges of innovation and change (for example, Adidas, Aramex, Cemex, Christie’s, Coca-Cola, Daimler, IBM, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, LG, Lilly, Marriott, Nokia, Philips, PwC, Randstad, Sanofi-Aventis, Twinings, and the World Economic Forum).

Gregersen’s newest book, “The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators” (2011) uncovers the code for the successful innovator in business—and beyond. Unlike other books that help organizations simply maximize execution, “The Innovator’s DNA” demonstrates how execution alone can become a dead-end destination unless you cultivate enough competent innovators within your company to make crucial new discoveries. Co-authored with Jeff Dyer at Wharton/BYU and Clayton Christensen at Harvard Business School (best-selling author of “The Innovator’s Dilemma”), “The Innovator’s DNA” comes from an eight-year study on the origins of disruptive innovations and how executives, entrepreneurs, and employees build highly innovative companies. Gregersen and co-authors identified the 50 most innovative companies in the world (in collaboration with HOLT at Credit Suisse) and interviewed their founder entrepreneurs and current CEOs. They also surveyed over 5000 high performing entrepreneurs, managers, and inventors to see how the Innovator’s DNA skills led to the creation of hundreds of successful new products, services, processes, and businesses. His presentations are packed with examples of high-profile innovators (as well as low-profile ones) that illustrate not only how they got great ideas, but how they transformed them into economic powerhouses as well. The book builds on the ideas found in Gregersen’s HBR article of the same name which received the 2009 McKinsey runner-up award for the best article in Harvard Business Review.

Gregersen has co-authored numerous other books, including “It Starts With One: Changing Individuals Changes Organizations” (2008) and “Global Explorers: The Next Generation of Leaders” (1999). He has published over 70 articles, book chapters, and cases on innovation and change in leading business journals such as Harvard Business Review and Strategic Entrepreneurship Journal. His research has been highlighted globally on CNN and in magazines such as Across the Board, Business Week, Chief Executive, Fast Company, Forbes, Fortune, Psychology Today, and The Wall Street Journal. Before joining INSEAD in 2006, Gregersen taught at the London Business School, Tuck School–Dartmouth College, Helsinki School of Economics, Brigham Young University, and Turku School of Economics as a Fulbright Fellow. Gregersen also works extensively with governments, educational, not-for-profit and NGO organizations around the world, such as Teach for America and Room 13, to generate greater innovation and change capabilities in the rising generation of leaders. He is actively exploring how the Innovator’s DNA skills also fuel social entrepreneurial success around the world and often includes a variety of powerful, moving examples of how social innovators create and sustain change in his presentations and workshops. Hal and his wife live in France and Abu Dhabi where he pursues his lifelong avocation, photography, and she her lifelong love, painting, as part of a global community of social entrepreneurs dedicated to creating positive social impact through the arts.