Design & Innovation Roundtable

Bringing together a community for directors and VP-level leaders of design-led innovation across corporate America

The Design & Innovation Roundtable is a free, invite-only group of leaders who share a passion for design-led innovation, and carry the experiences, victories, and struggles earned from the unique challenges of bringing change to established organizations.

You’re a leader in an established organization. You’re leading a team focused on innovation, design, or digital, or maybe all three. You’ve spent years as a practitioner, a change agent, and a mentor. You’re leading up and sideways, executing critical work while teaching, evangelizing, and sometimes defending a new way of working.

It’s easy to find advice and stories from innovators in start-ups and new high-growth companies, who just accept design-led innovation, customer-centricity, and digital-first as normal. But it’s hard to find others who understand the particular challenges of teaching an established organization a new way of thinking.

You don’t have to do it alone.

About the Roundtable

The Design & Innovation Roundtable was founded in 2019 by Jon Berbaum, President at Highland. It was a modest coming together of a handful of design and innovation leaders as a peer group. Since then, the group has expanded to 55+ members across two groups. Some of the reasons members join our roundtable are to:

Share Best Practices

Our monthly peer-led gatherings are built around sharing and learning with other leaders. We’ll discuss how to improve design processes & innovation, as well as broader topics of becoming better leaders and human beings.
Explore Interests

Through virtual monthly gatherings and a private Slack group, you’ll have the flexibility to explore areas of interest, from research, to design, operations, budgeting, organizational design, team management, and anything else you bring to the table.
Foster Connections

Make valuable connections to other leaders and organizations that can give you support, outside perspective and problem solving, and links to talented people and partners to assist your team.
Expand Horizons

Expose yourself to emergent practice areas, industry domains, and new human-centered design methods to orchestrate more effective outcomes and impact at your organization. Recent topics include systems innovation, foresight/futurism, launching new ventures, etc.