Intro

We are having a Stanford self-improvement sort of weekend. Yesterday, KEEN ON featured a conversation with two Stanford profs on how to acquire a venture capital mindset. Today, Jeremy Utley, the director of education at Stanford’s Institute of Design, teaches us how to facilitate our own epiphanies. In his new co-authored book, IdeaFlow: The Only Business Metric that Matters, Utley - who boasts of having been “facilitating epiphanies for over 20 years” - promises to teach us how to radically innovate in the style of disruptive masters like Bezos or Jobs. Trust an evangelical Stanford prof to be in the business of transforming commercial innovation into religion. Not everyone, I suspect, will be quite as keen as Jeremy Utley in becoming personal assembly lines of their own creativity.

Jeremy Utley is the Co-Founder of Stanford's Masters of Creativity at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford. He was formerly the Director of Executive Education at the Stanford d.school, where his blend of on-your-feet thinking and penetrating insight have earned him a reputation as a go-to advisor for CEO’s and start-up founders alike. The co-author of the book ideaflow (2022), and co-host of the popular Paint & Pipette Podcast, continues to work on invention, discovery and entrepreneurship and demystifies the counter-intuitive techniques that drive productive creativity.  Known for his work in Lean Start-Up and Design Thinking methodologies, Jeremy shows their ability to drive product development and consumer engagement at a fraction of typical product development costs.  Jeremy is also a General Partner at Freespin Capital, a venture firm that helps legacy companies launch hyper-growth start-ups. He holds a BBA with Honors in Finance from The University of Texas at Austin (2005) and an MBA from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business (2009). Jeremy's book Ideaflow: The Only Business Metric That Matters unpacks why and how innovation is not an event, a workshop, a sprint, or a hackathon; it’s a result of mastering ideaflow, a practice that elevates everything else you do. Check out the Ideaflow website at www.ideaflow.design.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting KEEN ON, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy show. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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