Building a Sustained Culture of Innovation | Bob Eckert

Building a Sustained Culture of Innovation

Bob Eckert
CEO, New & Improved

Bob Eckert is CEO at New & Improved. He focuses on helping organizations harness and develop the innovative brain power of their people to deliver new and improved results.

A constant learner, Bob has been involved in the business of helping people reach their highest potential in one way or another for the last thirty years. After diverting from an early planned career in medicine, he speaks and trains from a perspective enriched by a background which includes: management experience in both manufacturing and retail, creation/direction of an internationally renowned health promotion program, teaching in both youth and adult criminal justice systems, work as the senior instructor in adaptive “Outward Bound” programming for incarcerated juvenile delinquents, founding and directing a county–wide drug abuse treatment and prevention system and as a national trainer in the area of neuropharmacology and addiction. Bob has been doing his work on a global scale for the last 30 years. He is a facilitator for Facilitators Without Borders and an adviser to its Board of Directors.

Bob uses his training and coaching skills to make change efforts stick. Fast Company calls him an “Innovation thought leader” and he has been quoted in publications such as Forbes and Inc.com. He has written extensively about innovation leadership. The author of numerous articles and books, his two most popular are Demystifying Innovation Culture Efforts (co-authored with Natalie Jenkins) and More Lightning, Less Thunder: How to Energize Innovation Teams (co-authored with Jonathan Vehar).

Organizations that have benefited from his organizational and leadership development work include: General Electric, Intel, Johnson & Johnson, Mercedes-Benz, TE Connectivity, Kimberly Clark, and many others.

A Scoutmaster and avid outdoorsman who’s as comfortable driving a tractor as he is driving meetings in corporate boardrooms, Bob lives with his wife on their active tree farm in the northern Adirondack Mountains of New York State.

New & Improved helps leading companies create growth through innovation. We help individuals think creatively and work productively together. We work with you to create Innovation Teams that work towards creative solutions that yield results. How do we do that? By creating programs and organizational interventions that provide new skills, methods, techniques and approaches to the work your people do and the challenges they face.

Sometimes our work looks like a training program. Sometimes it’s structured as a keynote speech. At times it looks like a facilitated group problem solving session. Frequently it involves team-building. Usually it’s some combination of things that fit together in a package of sophisticated organizational development initiatives. The bottom line is that we customize programs to help people work together to create great things: new and improved solutions, systems, processes, places, and people.