54: Unleashing Employee Innovation at WTW

At WTW (NASDAQ: WTW), they provide data-driven, insight-led solutions in people, risk, and capital. By leveraging their colleagues' global view and local expertise in serving 140 countries and markets, they help their clients sharpen their strategy, enhance organizational resilience, motivate their workforce, and maximize performance. But what does innovation look like inside a $9 billion company? Karen O’Leonard, Head of Innovation at Willis Towers Watson, joins me in a conversation about the innovative strategies that have helped her company grow. She also shares how seeing disproportionate ratios of men to women in the tech industry fueled her passion to get more women involved in innovation and build a culture where everyone can shine. We also discuss what happens when innovation fails. For example, it might be the best idea possible at the wrong time, or there are simply no available resources. Karen shares her mantra of falling in love with the problem, not the solution. Unfortunately, we have all seen teams fall in love with their solution, and they will go down swinging with it, even in the face of all evidence to the contrary from their customers. Food for thought indeed.

Om Podcasten

Did you ever wonder how an innovation got to its finish line? How innovators saw the future, made a product, and created change – in our world and in their companies? I did. Innovation Storytellers invites changemakers to describe how they created their innovation and just as important – THE STORIES – that made us fall in love with them. Come learn how great innovations need great stories to make them move around the world and how to become a better storyteller in the process. I’m Susan Lindner, the Innovation Storyteller. But I wasn’t always. I’ve been a wannabe revolutionary, an epidemiologist at the CDC and an AIDS educator in the brothels of Thailand helping to turn former sex workers into entrepreneurs. Trained as an anthropologist and the Founder of Emerging Media, I’ve spent the last twenty years working with innovators from 60+ countries. Ranging from cutting edge startups to Fortune 100 companies like GE, Corning, Citi, Olayan, and nine foreign governments, helping their leaders to tell their stories and teaching them how to become incredible advocates for their innovations. Great innovation stories make change possible. They let us step into a future we can’t see yet. I started this podcast to shine a light on our generation of great innovators, to learn how they brought their innovation to life and the stories they told to bring them to the world.