On-Demand Chief Innovation Officer
Unique innovation advisory services by the author of ‘The Innovation Mode.’
My innovation story
I’ve seen innovation through various roles, across markets and industries, for more than 20 years.
From Start-ups like Datamine Decision Support Systems, to corporations like Microsoft and Accenture, I had the opportunity to invent, build innovative products, drive innovation, architect innovation programs, and lead cross-functional ‘dream teams.’
Reflecting on my experience across 20+ multinationals, technology startups, and big tech companies, I would argue that the single most important success factor of corporate innovation is a vivid environment characterized by ‘diversity of thought’ and a special ‘discovery mode’.
In such an environment there is both a plurality of ideas - coming from all directions and across the hierarchy - and the readiness to exploit them - the ability to consider novel ideas as drivers of business success. The former requires inspired, capable people who believe in the organizational purpose and engage ‘naturally’ with innovation activities. The latter requires the right innovation capabilities along with a special leadership style that supports a continual ‘opportunity discovery’ function.
Such a business setup inspires creative minds across the hierarchy of the organization – it brings together scientists, domain experts, technologists, and business leaders as a single force, a cross-disciplinary team that works and innovates ‘naturally’ towards big, meaningful organizational objectives.
- George Krasadakis
“While most of companies out there claim to be innovative, it is only a minority of them that are able to systematically create value through their novel products, services, or business models.”
“Often companies only scratch the surface of innovation – they focus on appearing innovative; others try hard to foster innovation but with no success ”
Projects
80+ data-driven technology projects for corporate customers - Big Tech, Consulting, Telcos, Banking, and online Retailers.
Back in 2000, I designed and delivered various advanced analytical business systems that leveraged advanced analytic and statistical components - including a traffic modeling system for mobile telecom operators, a custom OLAP - Online Analytical Processing - engine for dynamic reporting, and advanced analytics, and a novel Credit Scoring system able to make automatic, optimal decisions – handling the routing of customer applications based on statistical modeling and a flexible business rules engine.
Among the most sophisticated systems, I designed and engineered an advanced competition analysis system, powered by an adaptive similarity-based product matcher. The system allowed the growth of a rich, near-real-time, pricing data store that empowered the extraction of pricing patterns, trends, and insights leading to market intelligence that was further used in dynamic pricing scenarios.
Entrepreneurship
I have founded four technology startups - including ‘Datamine decision support systems’ - and run various product experiments.
Back in 2004, even before the genesis of the term ‘data science’, Datamine was offering ‘data-driven systems, embedding statistical models, data mining and machine learning techniques enabling effective decision making and automated, sophisticated CRM logic for customer management.’
The company delivered various novel implementations using data mining - including churn prediction & management, tariff optimization, social network analysis (SNA), data warehousing, business intelligence (BI), and analytical CRM systems.
Datamine empowered more than 20 multinational corporations across various sectors – it helped them adopt intelligent data-driven customer management strategies.
One of my most ambitious startup initiatives was ‘plantobuy’ platform - an innovative social commerce service, that enabled retailers to ‘talk’ to consumers based on their anonymous buying plans.
Among other startup experiments, I have defined and built ‘ideachain’ - an online service enabling a network of innovators to share their ideas and publish them on blockchain - thus obtaining an undisputable timestamp as a proof of publishing and a basis for open collaboration.
Career Summary
I wrote my first piece of software about 25+ years ago. It was a C program implementing an autoregressive time series analysis model. I was instantly fascinated by the power of combining the two - software and statistical science - and the potential of building ‘smart’ digital products.
Since then, I have been applying my passion for software, data and innovation in solving big problems for startups, consulting and Big-Tech companies, across markets and industries.
Throughout the last two decades, I have designed, architected, managed and, in many cases, implemented AI-powered digital products and delivered 80+ innovative, data-intensive projects, including Data Warehousing, Data Mining, and Predictive systems.
I am an entrepreneur at heart - I have founded 4 technology startups and led their product development and technology functions.
I have worked for/with 20 multinational corporations (including Microsoft, Accenture, GSK, ATB Ventures, Wind Telecommunications) in 4 countries and I have designed/ optimized 4 global innovation centers/ labs for technology organizations.
Innovation Perspectives
I’ve experienced innovation through various roles, and across markets and industries.
This enabled me to obtain a holistic view of innovation through the lens of the inventor, the startup founder, the intrapreneur, and the corporate leader.
As an innovator, I have been actively designing, architecting, and developing innovative technology solutions to challenging business problems.
As an innovation leader, I have been empowering corporate leadership teams to transform their companies into agile, fast, and effective organizations. I have architected and built sophisticated innovation frameworks, gamification programs, innovation labs, and ideation systems, including an innovative blockchain-based open innovation platform that enables ideators to serialize their ideas on a public blockchain, obtain a timestamp, and form a global network of collaborators.
Books & Articles
I am passionate about technology, innovation and product development and an advocate of knowledge sharing and ‘open’ culture.
In this spirit, I have been sharing my perspectives and knowledge on these topics on various publications - I ‘ve published 100+ articles on medium.com, freecodecamp, hackernoon, naftermporiki, netweek, irishtechnews, startupgrind, the startup, startups.co, theinnovator, innovationleader.com, and others.
I am the author of the Innovation Mode (Springer, 2020) – the book that empowers business leaders to drive cultural, technological, and organizational changes toward a mode of innovation. The ‘Innovation Mode’ focuses on the role of the latest technologies (e.g., Artificial Intelligence to discover, handle and manage ideas), methodologies (including Agile Engineering and Rapid Prototyping), and combinations of these (like hackathons or gamification). At the same time, it highlights the importance of culture and provides suggestions on how to build it.
In the spirit of sharing and open collaboration, I have conceived and produced the ‘60 Leaders’ series – an initiative that brings together diverse views from global thought leaders on a series of topics - starting with the 60 Leaders on Innovation and 60 Leaders on Artificial Intelligence. These books are created and distributed on principles of open collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Patents
I am the sole inventor of more than 15 patents and co-inventor of at least 10 more - most of them assigned to Microsoft and Accenture.
Most of the patents describe novel data-driven, AI-powered solutions – including: ‘Artificial intelligence negotiation agents’ – an AI-powered framework empowering buyer agents to negotiate with seller agents • ‘Implicitly adaptive eye-tracking user interface’ - a device enabling a user to navigate between content using gaze tracking • ‘Voice-driven ideation session management‘ - a system that captures, handles and categorizes ideas from a live meeting in real-time • ‘Unknown Word Predictor and Content-Integrated Translator’ – a system that predicts the unknown words in the context of the reader and annotates them inline • ‘Techniques to Facilitate a Live Audience Experience on a Computing Device’ – methods that convert live audience reactions to engagement indicators based on concurrency patterns • ‘Closed-Loop Natural Language Query Pre-Processor and Response Synthesizer’ – a system that is able to answer business questions on top of data stores and Business Intelligence environments • ‘Organization, Retrieval, Annotation and Presentation of Media Data Files Using Signals Captured from a Viewing Environment’ – a smart-home system that offers personalized experiences to users, by reacting to signals captured through a series of sensors.
Find out more on Google Patents and also on Google Scholar