Marketing’s Post-Pandemic Role in B2B Innovation:  New Methodologies and Refilling the Top of the Funnel

October 12-13, 2022

The whole innovation process had a major disruption during the pandemic. The top of the funnel in particular as we didn’t meet with each other or customers for over 2 years.

How do we catch up and refill the top of the funnel?  Join us at our upcoming ISBM Member’s Meeting to learn more!

Our next ISBM Member’s Conference will be Oct 12-13, 2022 in Chicago at the mHub Innovation Center (965 W. Chicago Ave), hosted by Marmon Holdings.

We highly encourage your in-person attendance, but we will also broadcast virtually.

We have secured a limited number of hotel rooms for participants at the Crowne Plaza Chicago West Loop (25 South Halsted Street).  The nightly rate there will be $265/night plus tax if you book using the ISBM Registration Link before October 3, 2022.  We will also be arranging group transportation to/from the Crowne Plaza Hotel to mHub for October 12 & 13.

Agenda:

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

• Arrival in Chicago, IL
•  ISBM will sponsor a small reception on Tuesday evening from 5:30 – 7:30PM CST at:
  • Haymarket Pub & Brewery
    737 W. Randolph Street

Day 1 – Wednesday, October 12, 2022

8:30AM CST

• Welcome to Chicago / mHub & Opening Remarks – Lynn Yanyo, ISBM

9:00AM – 10:00AM CST

• B2B VOC Skills that Boost New Product Development Success – Dan Adams, AIM Institute
  • Join Dan Adams, founder of The AIM Institute, as he presents their landmark research on 12 B2B VOC skills. This is the first-of-its-kind research linking VOC skills to new product success, and it is very compelling. Learn which VOC skills you should improve. Participants will receive a free copy of the research report, B2B VOC skills: Research linking 12 VOC skills to new product success.
  • Key take-aways:
    • See the research linking VOC skills to understanding customer needs & new-product success.
    • Learn which VOC skills separate the winners from losers… and why they matter.
    • Explore 10 ways to virtually eliminate commercial risk in the front end of innovation.
    • Understand 10 Ways to better engage & impress B2B customers during interviews.

10:00AM  CST

• Networking Break 

10:15AM – 10:30AM CST

• Welcome from our Host – Marmon Holdings – Beth Sulentic, Marmon Holdings
  • Hear from our host, Marmon Holdings and learn a little bit more about what they do.

10:30AM – 11:30AM CST

• Concrete Examples of How B2B Companies are Successfully Digitally Transforming Innovative Services & Capabilities – Jim Weigand, and Joe Foresman, Insight Group
  • In this session, INSIGHT will present the findings of their study plus review actionable recommendations that can help accelerate their transformation to a “digitized” B2B services business model that will include innovative approaches utilizing the new emerging tools and capabilities enabled by “Anything-as-a-Service”  (XaaS), BD/A, AI, Blockchain, IoT, digital media, Hybrid Cloud, etc.

11:30AM CST 

• Lunch 

12:30PM – 1:30PM CST 

• Capitalizing on the New Tradeshow Environment Post Pandemic – Srinath Gopalakrishna, University of Missouri & ISBM Distinguished Research Fellow
  • While the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a dramatic downturn in face-to-face exhibitions in the short-term, industry reports express cautious optimism in their outlook for the future. In this presentation, Srinath describes the new landscape for business trade shows in the post-pandemic era where digital technology now occupies a prominent role, provide an overview of how the different stakeholders are modifying and adapting their event strategy to achieve multiple goals in the new environment and highlight opportunities found in his academic research in this uncharted territory that can potentially unlock novel insights to promote academic thought-leadership in addition to offering significant practitioner value.

1:30PM CST

• Networking Break

2:00PM – 3:00PM CST

• Innovation at the Top of the Funnel  – Christopher Miller, Innovation Focus
  • Aggressive logistics management has failed us. Most tech we can imagine is on the open and technology glutted market. Many customers have locked their doors to us. Our teams would prefer to work virtually and our stockholders and critical stakeholders would rather sit on a pile of cash than invest. Love it or hate it, our job as innovation managers is, as it always has been, “to facilitate the conversation.” Perhaps VOC has become, “Voice of the community”. The good news; the fundamentals are just as applicable today with some very significant market vertical dependent difference.
  • This will be a case study rich presentation from the perspective of teams that invented new processes because they had no choice. Firm in the belief that there is a crisis in the future of every NPD process, the speaker will draw on stories from his 40 plus years in NPD to provide 6 discovery strategies that every NPD pro can hide in their top desk drawer.

3:00PM CST

• Networking Break

3:30PM – 4:30PM CST

• Pulling It Together, Integrating B2B Marketing Into Stage Gate – Colin Palombo, State Gate International
  • Join Colin Palombo, Managing Partner of Stage-Gate® International, and Dan Adams, founder of The AIM Institute, as they show you how to breathe new life into your Stage-Gate process. Learn how to drive out commercial risk in the front-end of NPD… so your development can focus on technical risk. Participants will receive a free copy of their e-book, 9 Actions to Supercharge your Stage-Gate Growth Machine.
  • Key takeaways:
    • Learn how to separate your teams’ Opportunity Quality from Execution Quality… and why.
    • Understand the role of Agile, and practical ways to accelerate your product development.
    • Supplement your Vitality index with new metrics to boost your innovation success.
    • Learn which new skills your people must learn to drive more new product success.

4:30PM CST

• Induction of New ISBM Practice Fellows

5:00PM – 6:00PM CST

• Reception
• Sign-up for “Dine-Around”

6:00PM CST

• “Dine-Around” Chicago – sign-up for various dining locations around Chicago with ISBM Members and Speakers (self-pay)

Day 2 – Thursday, October 13, 2022

8:30AM CST

• Welcome  – Lynn Yanyo, ISBM

8:45AM – 9:45AM CST

• Data-Driven Ideation for the Front-End of Innovation – Jonathan Fegely, Aperture.ai
  • The pace of technology and market change continues to accelerate, and the forces of digitization, automation, and AI are disrupting virtually every industry. And yet, our approach to innovation, i.e., creating uses for technology – new connections between solutions and market needs – has scarcely evolved. When faced with a dizzying array of complex and fast-moving markets, trends, customers, applications, and technologies, under-resourced market, product, and technology developers face a nearly impossible task of finding real, actionable opportunities for growth.
  • In this session, Aperture.ai President Jonathan Fegely will introduce a data-driven process for identifying growth and innovation opportunities, faster and more reliably than ever. Through multiple case examples, Jonathan will show how Aperture has helped companies rapidly make sense of broad market spaces and systematically identify specific and actionable growth opportunities, where their unique technologies could solve real customer problems. We’ll also discuss how this AI-powered approach can be combined with creative processes inspired by design thinking and agile software development to unlock even more strategic value.

9:45AM – 10:30AM CST

• Tour mHub Innovation Center

10:30AM – 11:30AM CST

• Actionable AI for B2B Competitive Advantage, Growth, Profitability and Customer Satisfaction – Suj Chandrasekhar, Strategic Insights
  • This presentation and open forum discussion aims to show how AI and Machine Learning (henceforth referred to as AIML) can be used by Marketing and Sales teams to gain competitive advantage, increase market share, boost profitability, and enhance customer satisfaction.
  • This presentation we will share some cases in point on how Multimodal AI platforms can unify the development and deployment process across teams, while lowering costs and improving performance.
  • The AI Hub concept takes advanced shared services to a whole new level of leverage for large scale adoption and deployment of insights from models.  For example, when it comes to analyzing customer preferences, behaviors, and preferences, the AI Hub can create and validate a variety of segmentation models, test dozens vs the classical approach of 3-4 and select the best fit model for the data all in record time and on an ongoing basis. Further, pricing and demand forecasting can be enabled on live simulators that would pull data directly from ERP systems.  These insights in turn directly translate to timelier and more impactful actions and responses to market forces.

11:30PM CST

• Wrap Up & Close, Lynn Yanyo & Rand Mendez, ISBM

12:00PM CST

• Depart

The ISBM Marketing Excellence Roundtable (MEX) – will follow right after the Members Meeting on Thursday, October 13th from Noon – 4:00PM.  Registration is also complimentary for ISBM Members, but registration is separate.  Please click here for Marketing Excellence Roundtable Registration.

We will feature:  B2B Mastery TRACK(TM) Series; Business Acumen Series; Demand Forecasting, LinkedIn for B2B; Career and Talent Development, and more.