About The Keynote
What a Ridiculous Bird Can Teach Us About Innovation
Most innovation talks ask people to think differently and then show them a slide about Kodak. This one hands them a duck and a deadline. Within ten minutes the room is designing, arguing, combining ideas and taking creative risks they'd never take on their own work, which is exactly the point.
The Concept
A Safe Place To Be Brave
The British Duck Board has declared the duck unfit for the modern age. It is a fiction, and everybody knows it. That shared permission to be playful removes the fear that quietly kills most real innovation sessions: looking stupid in front of colleagues.
Because nobody owns the duck, nobody defends it. Ideas get built on instead of blocked. Then the frame is turned around and the room applies exactly the same behaviours to the things they do own, products, services, processes, culture.
The result is a keynote that gets the biggest laughs of the conference and the longest conversations afterwards.
Fig. 2 · Subject under review
The Arc
How The Session Runs
The Ridiculous Brief
The audience is handed a national innovation challenge nobody asked for, and immediately starts solving it.
The Crowd Gets Loud
Ideas are captured live, combined and stress-tested. Hierarchy quietly disappears from the room.
The AI Collaborator
We put the crowd's thinking through AI ideation and compare what humans and machines each contribute.
The Reveal
The duck stops being a joke. The room sees exactly how their own organisation stopped evolving, and what to do next.
The Practicalities
Format & Logistics
Duration
45, 60 or 75 minutes. The 60-minute version is the sweet spot: full challenge, full crowdsourcing, full reveal.
Audience Size
From 30 people in a boardroom to 2,000 in a plenary. The interaction model scales without losing energy.
Live and In Person
Delivered live in the room with you, wherever your event is, with live idea capture.
Customisation
The duck brief is retuned to your sector, your strategy and your change agenda, so the lessons land where you need them.