Tom Kelley | TEDxTokyo 2012
Brainstorms are Tom Kelley’s stock-in-trade, and when he says creativity is the secret to economic growth, people listen. After all, Tom helped take global design and innovation consultancy IDEO from a crew of twenty designers to over five hundred. He’s also the author of The Art of Innovation and The Ten Faces of Innovation both named among the top ten best books on innovation by Business Week’s SmallBiz magazine̶ and was a “Group of 33” contributor to Seth Godin’s The Big Moo. Tom has been a corporate renaissance man, at various times handling IDEO’s business development, marketing, human resources, legal, and operations. Little surprise, then, that the dean of UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business named him the school’s first-ever Executive Fellow. Tom joined the 2009 launch of the University of Tokyo’s innovative new “i.school” program, and is now an Executive Fellow there as well. He’s also an advisor to California start-up Ekso Bionics, led by TEDster Eythor Bender, which makes a “smart exoskeleton” that puts paraplegics back on their feet.