Monetizing the Elephant: Creative Ways to Generate Revenues.  How do you find creative new ways to generate revenues from your startup or even a long established business? Based on activities created for one of my business school courses, this lecture introduces key concepts that will help any entrepreneur to discover new monetization strategies and business models, drawing inspiration from other fields and even from literature. It also discusses why sometimes the best strategy is non monetization.

Borrow Screenwriter Techniques to Make Presentations Compelling. Many of the techniques used by TV and movie screenwriters can be repurposed to make any speech, lecture or presentation much more compelling and memorable. How you begin, how you end, how you link parts together and how you build in an underlying story arc that draws people into your ideas are all things that we can master simply by borrowing from the techniques borrowed from the toolbox of the professional scriptwriter. In this workshop Andrew Hennigan explains how we can learn these techniques, using examples from well-known movies and TV series.

Fantastic Ideas and Where to Find Them. One thing that makes good speakers and writers stand out from others is that they seem to have an unlimited store of interesting new stories, examples, cases and ideas that you have probably never heard of before. Where do they find these ideas? And, more importantly, how can anyone come up with exciting new content like this. In this talk I explain how professional speakers and writers discover and capture ideas for later use, presenting systematic methods that anyone can apply in their everyday work.

Lean & Agile Speaking. Many people have already learned how to make a competent presentation, but their next challenge is to learn how to do that with the minimum time and effort. This requires new skills related to the process of creating, learning and sometimes adapting in real time a new presentation. Being able to speak convincingly with short lead times gives participants an advantage over their peers. This lecture introduces the concept and already provides some essential tools for participants.

How to Communicate Disruptive Innovation. Sometimes obviously useful innovations are rejected by the market, managers and sometimes the developers themselves for reasons that appear on the surface to be irrational – like when Xerox invented the modern personal computer in 1973 but chose not to market it. In this lecture participants learn that there are good reasons why these products were rejected and how by studying these reasons we can avoid repeating the same mistakes with our own innovations. 

Biology's Unexpected Role in Innovation. Why do some innovations fail while others succeed? Innovation has played a key role in the success of our species, allowing us to exploit an unusually broad range of habitats and resources. Most people accept these innovations willingly, yet at times useful new ideas like self-tuning guitars and wheeled luggage are rejected by the market for reasons that are rooted in evolutionary biology. Why does this happen? And, more importantly, how can innovators avoid apparently irrational resistance to their ideas and gain traction more easily?

Here Be Dragons: How Culture Impacts Us More Than We Think. Most people are aware that other people see the world in a different way, but they rarely dig beneath the surface differences. But recent discoversies reveal that culture's impact is much deeper than anyone imagines. In this lecture we cover the origin and evolution of intercultural thinking, providing a clearer understanding of the challenges and the benefits of cultural diversity.

Essential Career Skills for Academics. To succeed in any career, you need to be able to influence other people effectively. This influence does not come from innate charisma but is the result of applying three essential skills: how to build an influence network, how to speak effectively an how to write persuasively. Participants learn how to build a toolkit that will allow them to perform efficiently in all three areas. This lecture provides a compact overview or the key skills every academic should have to be successful and gives practical tips that they can use immediately.

The Surprising Science Behind Professional Networking. To many people “networking” is either something optional or a necessary evil, but archeological evidence suggests that networks of interconnected communities were critical in making our species a success. Today our brains are effectively wired for networking and taking advantage of this feature makes us more productive and less stressed. This lecture brings the concept of networking to academics in a way that makes it both more interesting and more relevnt.

Ethical Influencing Skills. Convincing other people to adopt your ideas is more complex than it appears. It requires a combination of effective communication, credibility, a network of influence, strategy and a plan. To do this without using any manipulative techniques appears to be more complex, but is more effective in the long term. This lecture introduces essential influencing skills using exclusively ethical techniques, providing insights that will guide attendees as they address their own influencing goals.

I am always working on new ideas for lectures so if you don't see what you are looking for, give me a call to discuss.