Having worked as a longtime design consultant, Ingo started asking himself over the years: why is innovation so hard? This thought came up when yet another “innovation“ was invested in, prototyped, presented, and abandoned. What a waste!
As this was not the first time it happened, Ingo decided he wanted to understand it, which led him to pursue a Ph.D. in innovation management. Starting at the Hasso Plattner Institute, he moved on to join an Innovation Management Program at the Chalmers University of Technology. This gave him first-hand experience studying, educating, and working with some of the world’s leading innovators in the US and Germany incl. IBM, P&G, Intuit, SAP. Doing so, he realized that innovation was never the problem. The problem was, and still is, that innovators and leaders have learned to better understand “the people who use these services”, but forgot to “understand the people who create them”. It seems like we forgot that innovation is not only about processes and services but about supporting the people who create them to change. This led Ingo to dive deeper into the study and practice of human behavior change. Combining his knowledge about human change with his experience in innovation Ingo consults innovation leaders who seek to not only talk about innovation but make it happen.
Aside from his consulting work, Ingo teaches in executive and MBA programs at leading business schools, including IE Business School (Madrid, Spain), Rotman School of Management (University of Toronto). In 2020 Ingo founded an educational institution – the School of Becoming – to empower executives to go from paycheck to purpose, teaching them how to apply the fundamentals of innovation and behavior science in their own lives.