Who We Are

Lanny Vincent has been consulting for clients’ innovating systems for over 33 years. Lanny serves clients primarily as a facilitator, coach and experienced analyst of innovating systems hosted by companies of diverse types around the world.

He provides innovation management advice and counsel to general managers, CTOs, R&D directors, innovation sponsors, “midwives” and mavericks. For three decades Lanny has primarily focused on the peculiar innovation challenges of companies with established revenue streams. His industry experience includes consumer packaged goods and appliances, automotive, forest products, computers, peripherals, consumer electronics, and trade associations and government sponsored pre-commercial collaborations.

Prior to establishing Vincent & Associates, Ltd. 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 founded the Innovation Practitioners Network and the Mavericks Roundtable. He wrote "Innovation Midwives: Sustaining Innovation Streams in Established Companies" Research-Technology Management (January 2005). In 2011, Lanny published Prisoners of Hope: How Engineers and Others Get Lift for Innovating (Westbow Press), which caused one reader to call him a "prophet of innovation."

“Lanny contributed immensely to our efforts in holding the innovation workshops, encouraging the participants to come out with inventive ideas and generating subsequent invention disclosures. Many of the invention disclosures generated from our company now come from these innovation workshops.”

—Patent Attorney, Chartered Semiconductor

Associates

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