Gavin Heaton

Gavin Heaton's Biography

Gavin Heaton advises boards and leadership on innovation strategy, marketing, data-driven product development and corporate venturing. He leads labs and accelerator programs, coaches startups and is a sought after public speaker. Gavin is also the Chair of Vibewire, a youth-led social enterprise based in Sydney, Australia.

 

Gavin helps people to drive innovation mindset, process and behaviour change so they can shift the dial on their programs, empower their teams, excite their customers and feel confident about their future.

 

Gavin works with Boards, leadership and management to manage risk and innovation, drive outcomes and deliver value to stakeholders. As part of his commitment to social change, he volunteers his time and expertise to organisations such as Lifeline Australia, Good2Give and Vibewire.

 

Gavin has worked at the intersection of marketing and technology for over 20 years for companies and clients including SAP, IBM, McDonald's and PwC, has co-authored five books and is a regular speaker on marketing, technology, startups and innovation.

 

He has been a mentor at Telstra's Muru-D accelerator, FinTech incubator, Stone & Chalk, and serves as president of youth organisation, Vibewire where he helps grow social, business and tech startups.

 

Gavin works with government and enterprise clients to align board-level strategy, leadership decision-making and organisational capability to drive new product and service development, create or reach new markets and to do so at speed.

 

He believes that innovation can generate commercial, professional and social value - and that the power of creativity and innovation to transform lives is in all our hands.

 

Gavin specialises in:

Enterprise startups: Creating new businesses not just new business ideas
Digital transformation: Putting the programs in place to drive change across your organisation
Marketing strategy: Management consulting for the internet age
Business incubation: Run your new project like a startup with our incubation program

Speaking Topics Include

Ideas are easy - Create better products and services with data driven innovation

We tend to think that the best innovation start with an idea. Almost the opposite is true. They start with a "problem". In this presentation Gavin steps through the four dimensions of a "problem worth solving" and shares case studies on how companies like Qantas and Johnson & Johnson have used data to drive product and service innovation.

 

Don't fail fast - reverse the startup mantra to create corporate ventures that scale

The startup mantra is to "Fail Fast". But in the corporate world, if you fail, you're likely to be fired. That means some of the best corporate ideas never see the light of day. In this presentation Gavin shows you how to rethink corporate innovation - reversing the startup focus on product-market fit, and choosing market-product fit to rapidly build brands, scale product and deliver competitive advantage.