DUNCAN WARDLE

Creativity Speaker, Former Head of Innovation at Disney


  • Led the team that helped Imagineering, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar and Disney Parks to innovate
  • As founder of iD8 & innov8 he now brings his extensive Disney experience as an Innovation Speaker delivering keynotes, workshops and ideation forums
  • Unique approach to Design Thinking, helping people capture unlikely connections, leading to fresh thinking and disruptive ideas
  • Multiple Ted X speaker and contributor to Fast Company, Forbes & the Harvard Business Review
  • Teaches innovation Master Classes at Yale, University of North Carolina and University of Florida

As Head of Innovation and Creativity at Disney, Duncan led the team that helped Imagineering, Lucasfilm, Marvel, Pixar and Disney Parks to innovate, creating magical new storylines and experiences for consumers around the globe. As founder of iD8 & innov8 he now brings his extensive Disney experience as an Innovation Speaker delivering keynotes, workshops and ideation forums, around the globe helping companies embed a culture of innovation into everyone’s DNA.

He now brings his extensive Disney experience to audiences around the world using a unique approach to Design Thinking, helping people capture unlikely connections, leading to fresh thinking and disruptive ideas.

Delivering a series of keynotes, workshops and ideation forums, his unique Innovation toolkit helps companies embed a culture of innovation into everyone’s DNA.

Duncan is a multiple Ted X speaker and contributor to Fast Company, Forbes & the Harvard Business Review. He teaches innovation Master Classes at Yale, University of North Carolina and University of Florida. In 2008 he received the American Citizen of Choice Award at the White House. He holds an Hons. MBA and Hons. Doctorate from Edinburgh University. He also holds the Duke of Edinburgh Award presented by Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth

Duncan Wardle tailors each presentation to the needs of his audience and is not limited to the topics we have listed below. These are topics that have proven valuable to customers in the past and are meant only to suggest the speaker's range and interests:

  • Creativity
  • Innovation
  • Design Thinking
  • Customer Experience

Keynotes

With 25+ years spent in leadership roles at Disney, Duncan’s talks are anything but ordinary. As an Innovation Speaker he shares real world stories and lessons learned from the innovation battlefield. Duncan leaves audiences inspired, motivated, and ready to innovate for their own organizations.

Workshops

By sharing the tools and techniques needed to generate more frequent, consistent “a-ha!” moments for your business, Duncan’s hands-on innovation workshops turn teams into innovation powerhouses, driving immediate, measurable impact for organizations across the globe.

Ideation Sessions

Forever change brainstorming: Let Duncan guide your team through a structured Ideation Session and make the sparks fly. Learn the format that’s been proven to elicit the most meaningful new ideas from every level of your company, and change the way your team innovates.

Business as Unusual - Lessons from a Virtual Keynote Speaker

Now more than ever we all need to innovate.

Everyone talks about Innovation. Take Risks! Be Brave! But few actually know HOW to innovate. So what if there was a set of tools that made innovation accessible to all by making the process easy, tangible and fun.

Built on 25 years with Disney, most recently as Head of Innovation and Creativity, helping Pixar, Lucas Films, Marvel and Disney Parks create incredible new products and services, the innovation toolkit I have created is designed to take the theory out of innovation and put it into practice, by creating a tangible tool kit that everyone can use on challenges big and small.

Think Different

In his over 25-year career at the world’s most innovative organization – The Walt Disney Company – keynote speaker Duncan Wardle learned many important things about building a profitable business and winning creative culture. The most important? If you want to be different, you have to think different.

As one of the most impactful creativity speakers, Duncan leans on his experiences as the Head of Innovation & Creativity at Disney to take audiences on a journey. Throughout Think Different, they’ll be given a unique set of Innovation Tools and Techniques – the same ones Duncan used with teams inside the Disney organization. These include the breakthrough “What If” creative thinking tool, made famous by Walt Disney himself, who used it to pivot his company from simply an animation house to an entertainment and theme park pioneer.

After this immersive crash course from the acclaimed creativity keynote speaker, your organization’s ability to mine for creativity and innovation will be drastically improved. In the end, your audience will leave with an actionable set of steps they can take to immediately start reshaping your company’s culture, creating a space where innovation thrives, and teams are encouraged and rewarded when they think different.

Embedding Innovation Into Everyone's Data

Innovation is not something that happens by chance. It’s the result of building an environment in which it can thrive.

Duncan Wardle knows a thing or two about fostering an environment of innovation. During his time as the Head of Innovation for a company known for redefining pretty much every industry they touch – The Walt Disney Company – Duncan’s decades of success weren’t merely a matter of luck or chance. No, his results were a direct reflection of his ability to create an innovative culture, and ensure that everyone on his teams were put in a position to let their inner creativity run wild.

In his Embedding Innovation Into Everyone’s DNA keynote, Duncan will share the exact steps and strategies used to create such an environment. Your team will learn how to create safe spaces for taking creative risks, ensure everyone on your team is empowered and thinking like an entrepreneur, and transition from the ideation stage into action. He’ll also share a creative problem-solving tool called “What Else,” which will prime your organization to discover innovative ideas each and every time you set out to tackle a challenge.

In the end, your team will walk away from this keynote with a fresh outlook on their day to day tasks, and be ready to approach them with new levels of creative thinking, allowing innovation to flourish.

Customer Experience Magic

The best brands in the world don’t thrive simply because of their great product or service. They thrive because of an unrelenting passion and focus on customer experience.

Throughout Customer Experience Magic, creativity keynote speaker Duncan Wardle will show your audience what can happen when your organization transitions from a product-centric focus to a customer-centric one, and the steps you’ll need to take to get there. He’ll share a famous real-world example from his time as the Head of Innovation and Creativity at The Walt Disney Company, where they found themselves facing challenges brought on not by their direct competitors, but by retail behemoth Amazon, whose lightning-fast fulfillment and delivery systems drastically changed how long consumers were willing to wait to be served.

As Duncan walks your audience through this example, he’ll share the exact steps they took to turn this problem into a massive opportunity, and how they used it to reshape the way Disney serves its theme park guests, creating a whole new echelon in customer experience. A new level of experience that’s frequently deemed to be “magic” by their guests.

By the end of this interactive presentation, your audience will have developed a whole new understanding of customer experience, and will be able to reframe all the challenges facing your organization, finding those unique opportunities to create some customer experience magic.

  • Travels from: Florida, USA

  • Fee Range: USD 20.000 to USD 30.000