The Partnering Group is excited to announce that Greg Ames has joined the group as Partner in the Innovation and Strategy space.  Greg brings over 35 years of applied experience in innovation, NBD and NPD.  Early in his career, He worked in the trenches on P&G launches for brands including Swiffer, Pampers, Crest, new chemical technologies (Rx, materials), and new ventures (Iams, Duracell, Norwich).  In B2B space Greg led innovation strategy and NPD at Worthington (alternative fuels, cryogenics) and Koch Industries (building products).  Greg’s experience in innovation is comprehensive. He’s served in both executive and mastery roles in enterprise strategy, discovery, product research, design, brand for multi-billion dollar brands and businesses.  He’s also built full-scope, multidisciplinary innovation capabilities from scratch and understands the cultural and socialization challenges of institutionalizing innovation capabilities from the basic to most advanced practices.

From this experience, Greg has developed a passion for making the innovation journey simpler and more productive, and he strives to “make ‘it’ all more practical and accessible.”

“Innovation is fundamentally about increasing value, on purpose.  Competitive advantage comes from doing it bigger, faster and more productively than anyone else.  Great innovation capability resolves some fundamental paradoxes – to name a few:

• Finding big opportunities – while accelerating failures
• Rigor – without “boiling the ocean”
• Discipline – without bureaucracy
• Competitive competencies – without proliferating functions and processes

The Innovation space is crowded and confusing.  TPG is in a great position to serve clients through our depth of practice and synergies in Strategy, Innovation and Organizational Effectiveness by experienced Partners who have “done the work”.  This combination is unique and very important, and will help us serve customers across the journey of choosing where to play/how to win, identifying target-rich opportunities and installing productive capabilities that efficiently deliver business results for our clients – and that’s the measure of our value.”

Over his career, Greg has been drawn to the “fuzzy front end” and is particularly passionate about helping clients with disciplines to discover, define and demonstrate high potential business opportunities with more certainty, speed, and lower investment.  He’s a lifelong tinkerer of innovation best practices in consumer understanding, translating insights to product, fast-cycle prototyping/testing (strategy-to-product) and inspired/collaborative facilitated idea generation (e.g., Design Thinking, Consumer co-Creation).

For the past 2 years, Greg has been an independent consultant specializing in innovation strategy and enterprise capability development serving clients such as Fifth Third Bank, Emerson, FedEx, Scotts MiracleGro, The Ohio State University, IGS Energy, Dow/DuPont, and Miller Welding.  He’s a passionate and experienced teacher.  Greg serves as an Adjunct Professor of Innovation Methods at the Illinois Institute of Technology College Institute of Design and is a Visiting Innovator at The Ohio State Office of Research and College of Engineering where he helps coach the administration, faculty, and students on strategy and innovation.

We gladly welcome Greg to The Partnering Group. His comprehensive applied experience in innovation will help our clients increase the productivity of their innovation efforts.