FEI Innovation Summit: Day 2Tuesday, 6 October 2026 - US/Mountain

In this workshop, we'll discuss ways to shift our mindset, build resilience and practice the skill of seeing opportunity even during set-backs. Specific skill building around... Being present - Attention training - Mindset shift / growth mindset - Reframing - Ways to deal with anxiety - Cognitive perspective taking - Reorientation towards optimism - Power of Gratitude -Systems / putting it all together

Breakthrough innovation requires challenging assumptions and taking smart risks. In this panel, leaders discuss how they design experiments, test bold ideas, and manage innovation portfolios without putting the business at unnecessary risk. Learn how companies push beyond the status quo while maintaining strategic discipline.

I frame this through a Transform → Augment → Automate model, showing how organizations can adopt AI to drive speed, clarity, and tangible business impact rather than experimentation without outcomes.

Most AI discussions focus on efficiency, but our internal innovation team discovered a hidden cost: AI-generated "noise" can inadvertently dampen human empathy, innovation culture, and project ownership. After benchmarking three distinct sprint models—Full Human, Free AI, and Paid AI Platforms—we realized that simply "adding AI" wasn't enough.This case study reveals how we redesigned our workflow into the "Tempo Sprint"—a joint human-bot partnership designed to protect the "soul" of the innovator while leveraging the speed of automation. We’ll share the specific data from our experiments, including how we reduced required sprint resources by 5 people and saved 8 hours per cycle while actually increasing the team’s emotional investment in the final output.

Innovation leaders must constantly decide which signals to follow and which to ignore. In this panel, executives share how they combine foresight, customer insight, and market intelligence to identify the opportunities worth pursuing. Learn how organizations make smarter bets on the future.

Breakthrough innovations often struggle in early consumer testing—not because they lack value, but because testing captures current acceptance, not future behavior. This session explores when leaders need to challenge “correct” data to make smarter bets on emerging needs and shifting behaviors. You’ll examine how to balance evidence with intuition, recognize signals of future adoption, and build the confidence to back ideas that data alone may undervalue.