The space shuttle Atlantis was built at NASA and took its maiden voyage in 1985. It took its final flight, the last flight of any space shuttle, in July 2011 and returned safely home to Earth.
Forging Innovative Business Leaders
Our team lays down the hammer every day to forge innovation capability for business leaders, cultivating the kind of creative leadership that can build a better business world.
We work as a small family of companies. Innovation Bound focuses on the business side. Knowinnovation focuses on innovation in the scientific community, and Inclusive Innovation focuses on innovation in the developing world.
It is our pride, joy, and promise to unlock your creative potential. You'll be amazed at what you can do!
Meet our Extended Family »
For each Learning Director who explores our high ROI learning programs we donate $100 to Coral Restoration Foundation™
Watch Our Video »Take your innovation game up a notch
Our services focus on building up your organization's innovation capabilities. We work with learning and development professionals on their top talent and high potential leadership development programs. We've engaged with organizational leaders from the C-suite all the way to the front lines, and our participants have gone on to create massive progress in their organizations.
Generating multiple 10x and 100x ROI opportunities
Innovation Tournaments are dynamic, fast-paced, highly relevant, immersive experiences for top talent groups that teach innovation by doing innovation. They were created at Innovation Bound and have elements of gamification, Design Thinking, entrepreneurship, and several modern innovation methodologies.
Learn More »Can you keep calm under extreme pressure?
Finding The Wild Within is an adventurous learning experience built by our cofounder Costa Michailidis, wildlife physiology professor Amanda Wilson Carter, and world record freediving champion Martin Stepanek to show executives the wild within
each of them and how to use it to lead their organizations through the toughest challenges.
Discover your hidden innovation potential
Storymining is a learning-rich ethnographic activity created by Ismet Mamnoon at Innovation Bound and has its basis in two modern innovation methodologies, Appreciative Inquiry & Design Thinking, as well as the ancient craft of storytelling.
Learn More »Learn creative problem solving in an immersive, collaborative game
Escape The Meeting is an immersive simulation for teams designed by Erica Swiatek, and Ismet Mamnoon at Innovation Bound to teach creative problem solving skills. It is based on the Creative Problem Solving model, embraces elements of gamification, and integrates elegantly with multiple assessments such as Myers-Briggs and Foursight.
Learn More »The five foundational habits of great innovators
Innovation 101 was created by Costa Michailidis to teach the core habits of great innovators to a broad range of people in business and beyond. The course covers the five foundational innovation habits, when to use them, and how to practice them in our daily lives to achieve mastery.
Learn More »Resources, insights, podcasts, videos, articles, and more...
Our innovation facilitators share their battle tested learning concepts, latest training ideas, and deepest insights on creativity and innovation to help you better understand and support the innovators at your enterprise.
Browse Our Best Content »Innovation is difficult... That's where we come in.
The Innovation Bound team is made up of facilitators, consultants, coaches, and master trainers with an expertise in creativity and innovation. We work in English, Spanish, and other languages when needed. Our team members are based in New York, Cambridge, Barcelona, and several other cities around the globe.
We've worked with Design Thinking approaches, Agile, and a variety of other popular methodologies and models. We've also helped clients build innovation processes and training programs all their own from the ground up.
Costa is passionate about making a positive impact and spends his time working with scientists and business leaders on some of today's greatest challenges.
Costa's full bio
Once a native of Corporate America, Erica has taken the innovation journey and returned ready to arm her patrons with the skills and tools to innovate.
Erica's full bio
Ismet has worked with a unique set of people including the New York Governor's Office, the National Institute of Education Sciences in China and young people around the world.
Ismet's full bio
Maggie Dugan is a riveting creativity and innovation facilitator. She heads up Inclusive Innovation giving breakthrough ideas a way to flourish in the developing world.
Maggie's full bio
Originally trained in improv, Russ eases his students into the difficult work of innovation, teaching them in bite-sized, super-engaging, interactive activities.
Russ's full bio
A four time entrepreneur and cofounder at Innovation Bound, Stavros consults with global enterprises, academic institutions, government agencies, and NGO's on their innovation initiatives.
Stavros's full bio
Tim is an allstar creativity and innovation trainer and a sought after keynote speaker. His humorous, narrative style serves to captivate audiences.
Tim's full bio
Toby Scott is an influential design thinker, an innovation strategist and a gifted facilitator and educator.
Toby's full bio
Andrew James Ferris is a Digtal Storyteller and Expedition Photographer with a residence at Innovation Bound.
Andrew's full bio
Sofia-Jeanne Caring is an Organizational Psychologist with a residence at Innovation Bound.
Sofia-Jeanne's full bio
Complex challenges exist across various sectors, economies, and countries, and we've been there to help accelerate innovation efforts. Here are some examples of our past projects with Fortune 500 enterprises and beyond.
You'll notice we keep our enterprise examples anonymous. This is a reflection of our respect for confidentiality and protecting competitive advantage. We have an extensive list of references available for interested clients.
Innovation dies...with middle managers. It doesn't matter that 'innovation' is in the mission statement or that you hire the most creative people if your directors and managers don't know how to support and integrate change.
We built a training program, but not a classroom, projector, lecture, snooze reel. We gave our participants real innovation challenges. They built real solutions that they implemented in their departments. One group built a sponsor-backed internet service bus for disaster response scenarios, building brand, profit, and social impact all at once. One participant had the idea of assembling the reportings of the whole training cohort of directors into a single dashboard, which not only got greenlit, but streamlined. They were using it before the next quarterly meeting.
Our program ultimately produced a 2,000% return on investment, while giving directors the skills and attitudes needed to foster innovation in their departments. The program added a new cohort each year, enlisting the previous cohort to mentored the new one, and cultivating a culture of innovation over the years.
A fully immersive learning experience in a gorgeous city is both reward and challenge for our top talent group. Identified as high potentials, these young managers will some day lead their organization.
This learning experience was cocreated by Innovation Bound, and three other extraordinary training firms. The first two days were dedicated to strategy and research. This was followed by a three-day business case building challenge, and topped off with a collaborative design session.
Participants formed teams and raced through review panels and working sessions. They generated breakthrough ideas, composed financial models, and pitched their ideas to their directors. They received critical feedback, struggled and shined through leadership and teamwork interventions, and learned more about how to innovate in their organization in six days than they thought possible.
In the end, teams were granted seed funding to move their innovation projects forward, and even before the program had ended, two teams held meetings with prestigious potential clients.
This project was an adventure and a success; a true microcosm of what it takes to innovate.
Learn about Innovation TournamentsThe information technology revolution has disrupted one industry after the next (music, publishing, politics, and more), and it has arrived at money and finance. What happens next?! Nobody knows, and it's going to be fascinating and fun to see how this all unfolds.
Innovation Bound was hired by an exciting and dynamic startup in the Bitcoin space to host their executive leadership team retreat in Miami. We designed and facilitated a series of activities to help them develop their 5-year roadmap, as well as assess and mitigate current and future risks.
Leadership development programs at Fortune 500's can be massive. Our client hired us to design the innovation component of their leadership development program. We crafted innovation training for each level of leadership from top to bottom.
Training top talent is ultimately an act of stewardship. The future CEO of the company is in the room, and she has the potential to do incredible things. The learning architecture we built took into account the career evolution of these high potentials, and the intricacies of innovation at our client's organization.
With the COO's blessing, and a CorpU award for our collaboration, the training program has been thriving for five years and counting.
Our client had been observing problems with teamwork for some time. Teams had gotten stuck at various stages in the problem solving process, people in teams became negative with teammates at times, and teams even broke down.
We created a unique teamwork simulation that asked participants to 'Escape the Meeting' (an adaptation of the popular Escape Room trend) to reveal the critical sticking points. Because the simulation we created was playful, participants dropped their guard and showed their natural problem solving style, which, as it happens, would clash with their teammates style at predictable points.
As with all learning, participants were invited to reflect on their experience and the transformations in perspective began to materialize. This allowed for real and lasting change in teamwork skills and behavior.
Learn about Escape The MeetingIt's 2015 and financial services organizations are beginning to see their own reflection in the glass of the bullet train of disruption headed there way. It's a harsh metaphor, but it might not even come close to emphasizing just how much can change for the financial services industry.
A group of forward-thinking managers and their VP set out to learn what creativity and innovation skills can do to help them heed those changes, or become leaders in disruptive change. As part of their effort, they hired us to run a half-day in-person training on CPS (Creative Problem Solving) skills, and six weekly webinars to follow.
A Knowinnovation Project
How do you find something when you don't know what it looks like or what it's made of? This is part of the mystery of searching for life beyond the Earth, and an essential step in answering one of the oldest questions in history: Are we alone in the universe?
We worked with a group of NASA scientists to think beyond the current boundaries and current approaches to biosignatures.
Learn about Astrobiology at NASAAn innovation team in the US segment of a Fortune 500 company had crafted an innovation system, and having tuned it to work efficiently in the US, took it to their international hubs. As you may have predicted, the system broke down.
Several of our trainers have lived and worked in multiple countries, and have done original research on the psychology of human creativity. We worked with our client to scaffold their innovation system to account for, and often benefit from, cultural differences in approaches to creative problem solving.
Our client hired the top academic experts in innovation to train their executives. After a rigorous and dense review of the literature, a sleepy C suite returned to their usual day-to-day activities unaffected.
Innovation is not complex. People are naturally creative, and organizations are begging their people to innovate, but when employees are told, "Go Innovate!" they don't know what that means or how to act on it.
We worked with our client to create their own language of innovation, which was rolled out to all levels of leadership. Over the three years of our engagement there was a tangible and dynamic change in the organization's culture. In our experience we have never seen a culture of innovation so strong develop so quickly. We are very proud of our client.
A Knowinnovation Project
The city of Nicosia has a rich and turbulent history. It was the copper mining center of the ancient world, and became a fortified Venetian stronghold in the middle ages. Today it faces the challenges of being car centric with underdeveloped mass transit and having its citizens divided along a UN buffer zone.
Our workshop brought together a diverse group of government officials, municipality staff, academics, architects, and engineers to explore the challenges of the transportation system and to compose a series of policy and urban development recommendations.
Learn about Nicosia TransportIn 2009 the H1N1 virus was breaking out, and our client had 400+ locations worldwide they needed to prepare against the coming pandemic.
They needed to be able to understand a vast and rapidly changing set of variables. Decisions had to be made quickly with no room for error, because human life could be in danger.
We lead a team of disease experts, doctors, risk managers, and software engineers to develop a real time responsive pandemic planning system that could be retooled for a different disease, or a different enterprise.
Often times innovators are called upon not just to build new things, but to protect against crisis and disaster.
An Inclusive Innovation Project
How does investment drive impact in economic development? In this project our team designed and facilitated a dynamic all-hands meeting, followed by a hackathon, to help the innovation group inside of a development bank answer this question. The meeting included people from all levels of the organization, and was facilitated in English and Spanish. Participants identified core challenges, delved into their core competencies and took a good hard look at their culture. They crafted strategy, began to make major shifts in their culture and demonstrated beautifully the key characteristics of a high-functioning team.
Storytelling is one of the oldest art forms, and in this project we used it to improve the sales performance of a large tech firm's North America regional team. We utilized immersive webcasts, easy-to-use templates, and a little bit of friendly competition to turn the sales team into expert storytellers and improve the effectiveness of their engagement with clients.
A Knowinnovation Project
EarthCube is a collaboration between the National Science Foundation and Earth, atmosphere, ocean, computer, information, and social scientists, educators, data managers, and more. EarthCube aims to transform the conduct of research through the development of community-guided cyberinfrastructure to integrate information and data across the geosciences. We designed and facilitated three conferences for the EarthCube community of scientists in it's early phases.
Learn about EarthCubeAn Inclusive Innovation Project
Feed the Future Partnering for Innovation is a USAID-funded program that spurs private sector investment in disseminating new technologies in developing countries to help smallholder farmers build profitable, sustainable businesses. We designed and facilitated a workshop to help accelerate innovative efforts within the program.
Contact us to learn about more of our past projects, or follow our company on LinkedIn for new updates.
Can you keep calm under tremendous pressure?
What if I told you that freediving can make you a better innovator?
Both freedivers and innovators need to distinguish between necessary risk and real danger. Both freedivers and innovators harness and cultivate their natural abilities to achieve remarkable goals. Both freedivers and innovators must brave the unknown...
Learn More »What people are saying about us
I feel like you guys really knocked it out of the park. You were able to build instant credibility with the business stakeholders.
It was inspiring to work with a group of extremely capable and bright people who knew what they were doing and did it with dedication to doing the best job possible. You followed through on that promise, and that made our job so much easier!
I’ve always steered away from the innovation topic—I never really thought I was creative enough to contribute new, solid ideas...This workshop changed my perspective!
