Tom Wujec

Every industry is becoming computable. As digital technologies automate more of what we do every day, the nature of our work—and our livelihood—will undergo a radical transformation.

This keynote explains, provokes, and inspires. It clearly explains how three classes of technology—tools that capture, compute, and create—are propelling the evolution of companies. It provokes by shining a light on the fast-approaching future, illustrating how the idea of value is unfolding in unexpected ways. And it inspires, showing how individuals, leaders, teams, and organizations can take advantage of emerging digital tools to not just automate, but to augment their work, unleashing superpowers that scale impact and deepen fulfillment.

Tom also shares first-hand stories of how manufacturing, construction, pharma, healthcare, education, and financial organizations are reimagining work as they disrupt their industries.

The future of work has never been more relevant. As technology continues to accelerate, we all need to understand how to can take advantage of digital tools, rather than be replaced by them.

This immersive, high-energy, and visually rich workshop helps you map the future of your work by charting how digital tools change the nature of value and where your specific industry and skills fall into this largely uncharted new terrain. This workshop turns what can be complex and overwhelming about new tech into simple, clear, and manageable action.

Through collaborative brainstorming and value/technology mapping, you can survey the technologies that matter now, clarify their impact on your business, and discover how to dramatically augment—not automate—the talents that matter to you.

Technology is moving at an extraordinary rate. But at the leading edge of innovation, designers are working in concert with it, as partners, to augment our intelligence and capabilities. As technology becomes cheaper, more powerful, and more widely available, we’re now witness to a democratizing force that’s letting us tackle the most challenging design problems on the planet.

We owe much of this momentum to a new disruptive creation process called RIP, MOD, FAB. In this mind-expanding talk, Tom Wujec describes how we are now ‘ripping’ the world to get an ever-more accurate digital picture, ‘modifying’ these models with advanced simulation tools, and ‘fabricating’ the net result in physical reality—a totally new way to imagine, communicate, manufacture, and sell physical products, from cars to shoes, movies to skyscrapers. Think of it as a digital ‘read, understand, and write’ approach to design. And when it touches an industry, Tom says, that industry is never the same. Thus it has untold repercussions for every sector: manufacturing, real estate, media, transportation, retail, education, finance, entertainment, healthcare—the list goes on.

This unprecedented development will produce entirely new business models. It will demand new skills and team capabilities. It’s downright scary. But there’s incredible potential for those who can wield it properly, who can understand and frame the changes. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be a designer, a producer, and a consumer, and Tom serves as an invaluable guide to this burgeoning world.

In this talk, chief disruptor Tom Wujec will illustrate the dramatic transformation Autodesk has made to the cloud—from delivering software products to providing comprehensive team-based service solutions. Being “Born in the Cloud” means much more than just off-loading applications to remote servers. Cloud computation creates fundamentally new value propositions, business models, and infrastructure solutions. It equips customers with new ways to do their work. With fascinating examples, Tom shows how manufacturing, construction, pharmaceutical, finance, media, entertainment, and other industries are being upended in surprising and powerful ways by cloud computing—and what that means for sales.

Innovation speaker Tom Wujec’s “Marshmallow Challenge” is a design experiment that reveals surprising lessons about teamwork, collaboration, and project management. Presented at TED, Tom’s experiment sounds simple enough: teams try to build the tallest freestanding structure they can out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, 1 yard of tape, 1 yard of string and a marshmallow. What makes it difficult, though, is the need for teams to organize, prototype and finally build the structure in a short time frame. The results are astounding: children tend to outperform MBA students, due to their ability to redesign on the fly rather than plan a rigid structure and execute, even if the structure is doomed for failure. In this interactive keynote and workshop, Tom brings his audiences through the Marshmallow Challenge from start to finish, helping groups of all types discover the value of teamwork and the power of visualization.

Why is innovation so important to growth? And how can we innovate more effectively and efficiently? In this customizable talk, Tom answers these questions through striking images and practical lessons learned from his award-winning work with Fortune 100 companies. Tom’s talk is a rare chance to see innovation at work—to see how great companies come up with new ideas and bring them to market. Tom shares proven approaches that encourage exploration, customer engagement, prototyping, and innovation testing. And importantly, he illustrates simple ways to measure the return of innovation success. he leaves audiences with principles that any company can use immediately: principles whose brilliance lies in their powerful simplicity.