Our facilitator
The Innovation Network is run and facilitated by Siobhan Soraghan BSc MBA, founder and Director of Active Insight Consulting Limited.
She is a staunch believer in the value of bringing smart people with common interests together, especially in a fast-changing environment. More heads create a richer mental map of reality, reducing decision-making risk. The greater cognitive diversity results in challenges to assumptions and in fresh perspectives that lead to more creative approaches to challenges.
Over her 30yr career she’s seen that there’s no substitute for experiencing rich dialogue with diverse respected peers, and the random flow of ideas and thoughts that emerge as conversations unfold. Trust builds, minds are expanded, problems are solved and new ideas are generated.
All this is fuel for innovation – getting us out of our thinking ruts and seeing things from different perspectives.
Serendipity often occurs at the events, and it’s not entirely by accident. As a leadership development professional, Siobhan knows the value of providing conditions conducive to learning, creativity, and relationship-building. So, the format is designed to maximise the value to participants:
- Topics may be generated by participants themselves
- Dialogue takes place in small groups to make it easy for all voices to be heard
- Plentiful nuggets of wisdom are surfaced to apply back in the workplace
Siobhan is no stranger to new product development or to science and technology. Her career began in oilfield chemicals development and she has a patent to her name. This developed her capacity for scientific enquiry which she brought to her interests in leadership, organisational culture, and change when she undertook an MBA at a top business school (Cranfield).
About Siobhan
Siobhan is a deeply experienced leadership coach and facilitator of over 30 years, and acts as a trusted confidant of CEOs, Directors and senior executives in the private sector, central Government, and the military. Siobhan works with senior leaders across a wide range of sectors, often where rich intellectual capital is embedded in products and services, e.g. science and technology, pharmaceuticals, professional services, creative arts and public service.
Her clients have included the CFO of a major energy firm, CTO of a major manufacturer, the CEO of an infrastructure firm, the DG of a central Government Department, a Permanent Secretary, a Naval Commander, and a C of E Bishop.
She also designs and facilitates bespoke engagement activities for surfacing opportunities for change and innovation. For example, bringing wider groups of staff together with management teams to formulate their organisation’s strategy, bringing representatives together from across departments to highlight opportunities for increasing value, or effecting change.
Many CEOs have found her an invaluable support in developing their Exec Team’s cohesion and their decision-making capability. In addition to her analytical skills, she brings an unusual mix of creativity and sensitivity to her work. A natural systems thinker, she is deeply insightful about her clients’ inner challenges as well as their external circumstances, paying great attention to their leadership roots, natural preferences, organisational context, and stage of life.
Her passion is to support the flourishing of leaders and innovation in their organisation, accelerating healthy evolution.
About The Innovation Network Community
Companies in the community are high-tech firms across the UK and beyond, covering a wide range of industries in engineering, chemicals, biotech, pharma and digital.
Many are technical innovators of global repute in their own field. All are deeply curious about advances the leadership of innovation in their own and in other sectors.
Individual participants from these firms include leaders of transformation, technology development and customer facing teams.
It is a very unique peer community – everyone is willing to learn from one another and generously share their experience.
Membership is by invitation only as we are careful to ensure the “fit” with the profile of members and alignment with the Network ethos.
What we’re about
We believe that innovation is facilitated by
- connecting with those who are cognitively diverse to us
- understanding challenges intelligently using systems thinking
- bringing EQ (emotional intelligence) to IQ (cognitive intelligence) – because most obstacles to innovation tend to be more about people than things!
In a world of flatter organisations and hybrid working, it can be difficult to find the time and the opportunities to have such unplanned, yet potentially fruitful interactions.
So we commit to creating such valuable interaction opportunities in each of our activities.
The Network exists to help optimise the investment in innovation by fostering dialogue
- between diverse sectors and discipline boundaries within high tech
- across silo boundaries within organisations
- using principles of systems thinking
- in safe spaces that allow all voices to be heard
Underpinning this is our knowledge of the power of quality conversation between cognitively diverse and trusted peers to help see opportunities to innovate in plain sight.
Who participates
The Activity Streams
The Matches and Circles are highly confidential safe spaces where manufacturers can talk openly about their real challenges, so these activities are not open to vendors or to organisations that don’t align with our values of collaboration and shared learning.
The Innovators’ Assembly
Because this event explores more universal systemic issues at play in the wider environment, this event welcomes participants from right across the manufacturing ecosystem. Patent attorney firms, specialist technical services, legal services firms, research institutes, academia, Government support departments are welcome.
Expect the following mix at the Assembly:
