Longer and with Additional Points Bio:

Dr. Alan Gregerman is the founder, President, and Chief Innovation Officer of VENTURE WORKS Inc., a strategy and innovation consulting firm based in Washington, D.C., that helps many of the world’s leading companies and organizations build winning strategies and create successful new products, services, ventures, customer experiences, and new ways of doing business. His customers are a wide range of Fortune 500 corporations, growing firms, entrepreneurial start-ups, nonprofit organizations, and public sector agencies, including Marriott and Ritz-Carlton Hotels, Discovery Communications, Google, Kaiser Permanente, Mercedes-Benz, Verizon, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, Children’s National Medical Center, the National Civil Rights Museum, and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Alan is an internationally-respected expert on business strategy, innovation, and unlocking the talent in people at all levels of organizations. As a consultant he has helped more than 300 teams and businesses to create important innovations with a 90% success rate. He is also an award-winning teacher, best-selling and award-winning author, and renowned keynote speaker who has been called “one of the most original thinkers in business today” and “the Robin Williams of business consulting.” His first book, Lessons from the Sandbox, provided a powerful formula for business and personal success based on the magic of childhood. His second book, Surrounded by Geniuses, showed companies and organizations how to unlock more compelling value by finding powerful insight in their own people and the world around them. His latest book, The Necessity of Strangers, is all about the power of connecting with and learning from people who are very different than us as the key to greater innovation, collaboration, and success. Before starting VENTURE WORKS, Alan was Director of Entrepreneurial Services for a national management consulting firm, Special Assistant for Program Operations at the U.S. Department of Commerce, and the first Visiting Scholar in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the Library of Congress. He has also worked as a mapmaker, subway mechanic, hotel housekeeper, and is currently an Adjunct Professor of Innovation at the Robert Smith School of Business at the University of Maryland.

Alan earned his B.A. in geography, summa cum laude, from Northwestern University, and his M.A. in economic geography and Ph.D. in urban and technological planning with highest honors, from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In his free time he is active in a wide range of volunteer activities focused on education and creating opportunities for everyone in our communities to reach their full potential. He and his wife Lisa, an educator and labor and delivery nurse, have three children, Sara, Carly, and Noah, and two very goofy rescued Flat Coated Retrievers named Vincent and Leo.