This year’s C-Suite Challenge painted a clear picture of how corporations’ most senior executives see the future, and what priorities and interventions are required to succeed in it. We have been looking at the insights through an Innovation & Productivity lens to help Innovation leaders best influence the priorities and efforts ahead.

"Save the web: technology should serve humanity, not undermine its core values and institutions" is just one of John Metselaar's takeaways from this year's Lisbon Web Summit. As more than half the world's population becomes digitally connected, industry, governments, citizens and academia need to work together to keep the "digital peace."

Despite not understanding how Silicon Valley works, hundreds of corporations have started Silicon Valley innovation labs because they know that digitization is rapidly changing everything, and their corporate cultures are too siloed, insular, slow to accept, slow to use, and slow to commercialize the innovation they desperately need to survive.

Alex Goryachev, Cisco System’s Director, Innovation Strategy and Programs, shares the most common mistakes he has seen at companies working to build a culture of innovation. The key concept tying together Goryachev’s observations: the need to focus on the people innovating, not the “innovations” themselves. Goryachev will be speaking at The Conference Board Innovation Master Class this December in Palo Alto.

At the upcoming Innovation Master Class, taking place in Palo Alto December 6-7, 2018, Maureen Rinkunas, Innovation Systems Designer, Specialty Products Division at DowDuPont will be speaking on Thinking Like a Startup – Lessons from Accelerating 100+ Companies. She will be sharing insights gained from having coached over a hundred companies at a startup accelerator, and from bringing that startup thinking to DowDupont.

There are many and varied definitions of the word innovation. The word often conjures up visions of scientists in white lab coats holding clipboards, but the most successful innovations that drive business results are often small and incremental cultural innovations rather than dramatic large-scale R&D endeavors.

China has recognized the need to put its giant economy on a path toward developing an innovation culture, an initiative that could position it to challenge the U.S. as a global leader of innovation. But despite a massive investment in research and development, the nation faces some significant barriers to reaching its goal.

Managing culture, embracing metrics and pursuing evolving technologies are among the top priorities talent leaders should focus on in the New Year.