Professional Qualifications of Vincent and Associates, Ltd.

Lanny Vincent facilitates market discovery, opportunity foresight and strategic invention for companies with significant investments in R&D. He also provides innovation management advice and counsel to general managers, innovation sponsors, "midwives" and mavericks and serves as a catalyst for innovation practitioner networks. Lanny has been an innovation management practitioner for over 30 years, focusing on the particular innovation challenges of companies with established revenue streams. His industry experience includes consumer packaged goods and appliances, automotive, forest products, computers, peripherals and consumer electronics, and trade associations and cross-industry government sponsored collaborations.

Prior to establishing Vincent & Associates in 1990, Lanny was a Partner and General Manager of Synectics, Inc., a creative problem-solving firm born out of Arthur D. Little's Invention Design Group. From 1981 to 1986 he was with Kimberly-Clark Corporation's Innovation Management Group facilitating strategy, product, materials and process innovations and managing the Trends Project.

Lanny's formal training includes systems analysis, total quality principles of manufacturing, creative problem solving, systems theory of family therapy, and social forecasting methods. He holds a Masters degree (M. Div.) from Yale University and a B.A. from Davidson College. Lanny collaborated with Bill Wilson and Dick Cheverton on The Maverick Way: Profiting From the Power of the Corporate Misfit (2000) and is the founder of the Innovation Practitioners' Network (formerly the Mavericks Roundtable and the Mavericks Network), a network of veteran practitioners pioneering the art of innovation management.

Links to Published Articles and Presentations

Associates:
Our associates are subcontracted for client engagements based on the expertise and skill set required for the assignment.

Stuart Brown, M.D. is the founder of the Institute for Play, where he speaks, consults and educates organizations, corporations, universities, and public policy makers about the importance of play in our lives and the unexpected, serious consequences that occur when play is neglected. His background in psychiatry, evolution of species, and animal play, as well as his clinical research into the causes and prevention of violence, have shown him that authentic play is a state of being which can be accessed and used by everyone, and that play is as important to humans as vitamins or sleep.

When his four children had grown, Stuart left his medical practice in 1988, traveled for a year, and realized that he wanted to study play using a multidisciplinary approach. From his clinical research, he knew that the prevailing notion that play is trivial was simply wrong. With a little help from Jane Goodall, he got National Geographic to let him study animals at play for two years. Stuart says human beings have been "designed by nature to play" — that we retain juvenile physical and behavioral characteristics long into adulthood, and that play is important in every stage of life. There is, he says, "a tremendous hunger in the culture for true play. Work is not the opposite of play, depression is." A Chicago native who graduated from Wheaton College and earned his M.D. at Houston's Baylor College of Medicine, Stuart is now president of the Institute for Play, a non-profit corporation based in Carmel Valley, California.

John Philipp is the president of the Enhanced Thinking Institute, a software design and development start-up. With 30 years of creative and strategic planning work, John has been serving clients in financial services, packaged goods, high technology, banking and entertainment industries. John was a senior partner at Synectics, Inc., and considered by many a "dean" of various principles and practices developed there. John has worked on complex strategic planning problems in a variety of industries. He has also assisted clients in exploiting opportunities in new product innovation, cultural change and organizational development in most of the Fortune 500 companies. John earned his B.A. at Harvard University and was an MBA degree candidate at NYU.

Jane Gannon has 15 years of experience in innovation management as a meeting facilitator, focus group moderator and trainer of work teams in creative problem-solving skills. Prior to starting her own practice in 1994, she was a consultant at Synectics, Inc., where she worked with a range of clients in publishing, banking, food services and consumer package goods, and where she helped develop the field of "technography" or computer-enhanced meetings. Jane also worked in public relations and for several newspapers as a graphic artist and reporter. Jane received her B.A. in Politics and Government from Ohio Wesleyan University and a Certificate in Publishing from University of California at Berkeley. She recently earned a teaching credential at Sonoma State University.