Tom Wujec

Tom Wujec

• A global authority on innovation, disruptive technology, and the art of visual thinking
• Technology pioneer, entrepreneur, writer, and facilitator
• Academy Award recipient for his Maya software
• Founder of the Wujec group that helps industries create and deliver breakthrough strategies

A technology pioneer, entrepreneur, writer, and facilitator, Tom Wujec is considered by many to be a global authority on innovation, disruptive technology, and the art of visual thinking. His career spanning more than 25 years has seen him create digital tools to help organise and engineer better cars, stronger buildings, and better sustainable consumer products. An example of his prowess includes his Academy Award-winning software Maya and Sketchbook pro. His role as an Autodesk Fellow and Singularity University Professor has seen him consistently work at the leading edge of growing technologies.

As the founder of The Wujec Group, Tom Wujec has created a boutique consultancy aimed at helping organisations create a positive impact on both business and society at large. The group, which creates custom workshops, consults with leading Fortune 200 companies from a variety of industries. In so doing, it helps to create and deliver breakthrough strategies. The group also assists in the training and equipping of organisations in the art of problem-solving and design thinking.

The successful author of various books on technology, design, business, and creative thinking, Tom Wujec has seen some of his works translated into sixteen languages. He has appeared before TEDx audiences six times and delivered over 400 keynotes and workshops to audiences spanning the globe.

Tom Wujec – Speaker

As a keynote speaker, Tom Wujec focuses on topics in the fields of innovation, disruptive technology, and visual thinking. He lives in Canada and presents in English.

Speaking Topics

• Unleash Your Superpowers: How to Manage the Emerging Technologies Transforming Your Industry, Organization, and Jobs: 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.
• The Future of Making: Revolutionizing How We Imagine, Create, & Distribute Products – Business Disruption, Exponential Technology: 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 are now witness to a democratizing force that is letting us tackle the most challenging design problems on the planet.
• On Teamwork: Kindergarteners Outperforming MBAs: Explaining the Famous Marshmallow Challenge – Business Disruption, Creative Collaboration: Tom Wujec’s Marshmallow Challenge is a design experiment that reveals deep lessons about teamwork, collaboration, and project management. It sounds simple – 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 is the need for teams to organize, prototype, and 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 it, even if the structure is doomed for failure. In this interactive keynote and workshop, Wujec 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.
• Born in the Cloud: How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business – Business Disruption, Exponential Technology: 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, Wujec 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.
• Imagination Pays: Getting a Return on Imagination – Business Disruption, Creative Collaboration: Why is innovation so important to growth? And how can we innovate more effectively and efficiently? In this customizable talk, Wujec answers these questions through striking images and practical lessons learned from his award-winning work with Fortune 100 companies. Wujec’s talk is a rare chance to see innovation at work—to see how the great companies come up with new ideas and bring them to market. Wujec 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.