Strategy & Innovation Masterclass with Prof. Howard Yu, IMD

We are delighted to announce that we are hosting Howard Yu, the LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation from the prestigious IMD Business School in Switzerland, for a masterclass on 4 May 2018.

This is a synopsis of Prof Yu’s session, based on his upcoming book titled “LEAP: How Businesses Thrive In A World Where Everything Can Be Copied.”

Outlasting competition is difficult. Doing so for decades is nearly impossible. Yet some pioneering companies have prevailed and even prospered throughout the centuries. How did they do it? And what can we learn from them as we now all compete in an arena where everything can be copied?

All the competitive advantages we have today mean nothing when latecomers can copy any product or service and produce it more cheaply. Even expert intuition and market intelligence have been overtaken by machine algorithms. Companies can no longer just be very good at what they do, they need to leap to new knowledge disciplines. The best leap repeatedly. And it’s the combination of two skills—mastery of the old and the new—that empowers them with the most formidable advantage over copycats. To discover how some companies not only survive but thrive for centuries, this session will take participants on a journey through the industrial history of the past 250 years, extracting timeless lessons and rigorously applying them to today’s environment.  Prof Yu will examine areas where managers should look to generate momentum—leveraging technological shifts outside while harnessing existing know-how—in order to leap forward.

Revealing how rules are constantly rewritten throughout history as well as reimagining them for the future, the session speaks to start-up entrepreneurs to family own businesses to those running multinational corporations.

Given Prof Yu’s experiences, he will also touch on how companies can win in Asia/China.

Howard Yu is the LEGO Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD, as well as the Director of IMD's signature program, the three-week Advanced Management Program (AMP). In 2015, Professor Yu was selected by Poets & Quants as one of the “World's Best 40 Under 40 Business School Professors.” He was shortlisted for the 2017 Thinkers50 Innovation Award, and then in 2018, appeared on the Thinkers50 Radar list of 30 management thinkers “most likely to shape the future of how organizations are managed and led.” He has published in academic journals, including the Business History Review, and his articles have also appeared in popular media outlets, including the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Forbes, MIT Sloan Management Review, and the Financial Times. He has been interviewed and quoted in Bloomberg News, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, and Reuters. Prof Yu received his doctoral degree in management from Harvard Business School. Prior to his doctorate, he worked in the banking industry in Hong Kong.

In the second part of the morning, Prof Yu will be part of a panel discussion with a number of senior business leaders who will help contextualise Prof Yu’s insights in the New Zealand context.

All guests will receive a complimentary copy of Howard’s upcoming book “LEAP: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything can be Copied?”