A recognized authority on fostering innovation, Wujec enjoys extraordinary access to the design studios, innovation centers and executive suites of The Fortune 500. As a Fellow in one of the world's largest and most creative software companies, Autodesk, he introduces approaches and tools that help organizations drive business success through the creation of new products, services and processes. What distinguish Wujec's expertise are his diverse range of approaches and the broad range of organizations he works with. Engaging with the largest automotive and consumer product manufacturers as well as the most colorful and fast-moving visual effects and games companies makes Wujec a rare speaker: a seasoned practitioner of innovation who is also entertaining and informative.

Wujec shares his vast experiences to help audiences understand the fundamental principles of innovation and apply them to their own businesses. He brings together real-world, down-in-the-trenches stories of innovation successes (and failures) with the sharp, poignant and sometimes funny lessons of what works and what doesn't. In doing so, he paints a comprehensive picture of why fostering innovation is vital to business health, what problems innovation can solve, and most importantly, how to do it, whether in a small team or a large organization.

Tom Wujec is a Fellow and Principal Consultant at Autodesk, the Oscar winning industry leader in 3D computer animation technology. He has brought several award-winning products to market and is co-author of Return on Imagination: Realizing the Power of Ideas, published by the Financial Times, and author of Five Star Mind and Pumping Ions, which have been translated into over a dozen languages.

Why should we invest in innovation? What is really driving the growing need to innovate? And how can we innovate more effectively and efficiently? Wujec asks and answers these questions through stories, case studies, striking images and practical lessons. Based on his experiences working with the Fortune 500, Wujec opens a door that few people have a chance to walk through—the real-world art and science of creating new ideas and bringing them to reality.

In Return on Innovation, Wujec reveals the underlying factors that have forced us into an economy and society driven by innovation. He shares photographs and adventures from his global travels, demonstrates remarkable emerging technologies and delights audiences with displays of the sheer genius of the famous and unknown innovators—examples of simple insight to complex inventions.

What audiences find most valuable are Wujec's insights into integrated innovation. He carefully walks audiences through the act of identifying the right business problems using visual framing. Wujec presents approaches that encourage exploration, clarification, customer engagement, prototyping, and innovation testing. Finally, he illustrates simple ways to measure the return of innovation success.

By the end of Wujec's presentation, audiences have collected five universal and practical principles they can apply to their own businesses. The brilliance of these principles lies in their simplicity: how they bring together the world of imagination and its sense of unlimited possibility with the world of pressing and tangible business needs.

Return on Innovation can be customized to an audience's specific business challenges and key success factors. Audiences will be energized with a new understanding of how to leverage their imaginations for greater personal satisfaction and business success. Work will never be the same again.

There is a behind-the-scenes business revolution happening around the world. Creative leaders in the shrewdest companies are using a constellation of new tools to make work visible. Visualization, the art and science of thinking and communicating with images, is rapidly becoming the principal tool to foster innovation and business success.

BizViz: Using Images to Think, Innovate, and Drive Business is a groundbreaking presentation that reveals how to read, use, and create business imagery. BizViz is not a guide to making perfect PowerPoint presentations. Rather, it's a deep, engaging, and organization-changing introduction to the ideas, practice, and benefits of making work visible. For businesses, BizViz offers a holy grail: a way to working better, faster, more creatively, and, perhaps most important, differently.

Why is visualization emerging as the next big idea in business? The short answer is that the growing speed, complexity, and pressure of work have taxed our skills to the limit. We need new approaches and tools to be effective. If we are going to compete, lead, and work smarter in the information economy, we need easy-to-use approaches and tools that help us clarify what's important, focus on how to get there, and ignore the rest. We need the power of visual clarity.

In one of the most interesting and compelling presentations you'll ever see, Tom Wujec shows how visual thinking can be used to clarify, communicate, and innovate. Wujec will demonstrate a wide range of business diagrams, including how three images helped Unilever reduce time to market from eight months to two weeks, how BMW uses one photograph to connect divisional silos, and how National Semiconductor created one diagram that helped its 25,000 employees pull themselves out of bankruptcy.

Wujec will show audiences how simple images can be used for almost any part of business thinking and communication, with examples from strategic planning, understanding customer needs, human resources, product development and legal and financial communication.

Because we work in a knowledge economy, the act of making work visible and understandable is a powerful tool for leadership. It allows leaders to "see" the operations of the company in one clear snapshot, and more importantly, it offers entire teams a shared visualization, with roles and ambiguities, strengths and weaknesses, successes and problems all seen together in a mutual understanding. This approach can provide dramatic gains in productivity, cost reductions, and corporate confidence. It also facilitates change by providing an ever-evolving representation of the current state of company projects and initiatives - from the highest-level strategy to small group projects.

In this unique multi-part presentation, Wujec opens and sets the stage for your conference. He also attends sessions throughout, maps the experience and wraps it all up in an invaluable closing session.

During your conference Wujec records each speaker's key ideas into a collection of sketches and idea illustrations that colorfully depict the central topics, areas of concern, and innovation practices. He also leads a series of fun interactive activities in which the audience arranges these images (as well as their own) into insightful and useful idea maps in order to find out which ideas are the most practical in the short- and long-term, which ones created the most dramatic insight, and where in your business these ideas can be applied most effectively.

At the close of the conference Wujec presents his sketches to recall the full range of topics presented and to reflect on any trends and patterns that have emerged—providing a unique opportunity for the audience to synthesize the conference topics into their own personal representations of what works, what's worth trying and how your business can be elevated and expanded well into the future. The end result is a remarkable view of what your business sees as its priorities. As a bonus, Wujec will make the concept sketches and idea maps available on-line immediately after the close of your conference.

Wujec's presentations can either be presented as, or combined with, a workshop. In this format participants not only learn about the tools they need to leverage the imagination in their work, they are also given an opportunity to put these into practice, identifying key problems and challenges and the ways in which the imagination can be brought to bear on these. Under Wujec's expert guidance, participants produce concrete, actionable ideas on how to improve their products, process, or customer relationships. At the conclusion of the event, Wujec gathers the results together and integrates them into digital format, providing everyone with a lasting record of their ideas, which can be shared, discussed, and refined in the weeks and months ahead.