Live Talks Los Angeles invites you to:
a morning Business Forum with:

Michael Raynor, Director, Deloitte Consulting LLP,
business strategist and bestselling author

in conversation with 
Karen Kerr, Senior Director of New Ventures and Alliances at the Stevens Institute for Innovation at USC

THE INNOVATOR’S MANIFESTO:
Deliberate Disruption for Transformational Growth

Thursday, January 26, 2012

7:45am  Continental Breakfast
8:15-9:15am  Forum

The City Club on Bunker Hill
333 S. Grand Avenue, 54th Floor
Los Angeles, CA 90071

Tickets: $20, $40 includes Michael Raynor's book

Michael Raynor is a leading business strategist and coauthor with Clayton Christensen of the bestseller The Innovator’s Solution and is author of the critically acclaimed management book The Strategy Paradox. He is a director at Deloitte Consulting LLP and consults to clients in virtually every industry all over the globe.

We’ve come to accept that innovation is a game of luck with no way to predict success. But what if you could instead raise innovation from an art to a science? What if you could improve the frequency with which you predict winning innovations by 5 percent or more?

That’s what strategist Michael Raynor argues is possible in THE INNOVATOR’S MANIFESTO: Deliberate Disruption for Transformational Growth, a controversial and practical polemic that flies in the face of the traditional methods of innovation practice. His rigorously researched and proven predictive method has major implications for companies, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, investors and M&A strategists.

Case studies from the past are too inaccurate to predict future outcomes. Equally unreliable and more expensive is the popular “fail fast to learn” approach to innovation. Instead what we need are proven rules like in physics that determine future success. Raynor reveals that these rules are available to us from Disruption, the landmark theory introduced by Clayton Christensen. Disruption happens when new businesses topple old ones with an upward march from a foothold in a smaller less attractive market. Surprisingly, Disruption is the only theory of innovation that has evidence to support the claim that it can improve the odds of predicting success.

To prove his point, Raynor compares and contrasts what innovation models worked and why—the majority of which are from Fortune 100 companies. He explores: Which companies today are developing new business opportunities with the explicit intent of realizing Disruptive growth? How his method could have predicted well-known Disruptions of the past? Why Disruption is impossible for some industries? Why an enabling new technology or process is necessary to Disruptive innovation?

In his most recent book, The Innovator’s Manifesto, Raynor not only unravels the mystery of what innovation will succeed but also imparts the invaluable knowledge of when it will take off and for how long. And perhaps more importantly, how to apply Disruption deliberately to increase the odds of innovation success instead of leaving it to chance.

Karen Kerr is the Senior Director of New Ventures and Alliances at the  Stevens Institute for Innovation at the University of Southern California.  She is responsible for accelerating the formation of startup companies out of university research.  Before joining USC Stevens in 2011, Karen was Director of Business Development, Targeted Acquisitions for Intellectual Ventures (IV) Invention Investment Fund (IIF).  Previously she served as the US Head of Business Development for IV’s Invention Development Fund (IDF).  In that role, she forged numerous strategic relationships with university, government, and industry partners that expanded the IDF portfolio and diversified its acquisition channels.  Karen has over 15 years of experience as a venture investor in seed and early stage technology based companies.  She founded Agile Equities, a venture development company and previously served as a Managing Director at ARCH Venture Partners and an associate at both Patricof & Co Ventures and ARCH Development Corporation.