What does a typical day in the life of an innovation leader look like?
Innovation happens every day, whether big or small. My typical day is packed with conversations, connections, creativity and acceleration. Every day I have a goal of advancing just one initiative to drive growth and impact. Whether it is helping our CEO, employees or a partner, my day is anchored in driving progress and impact.
What are a couple of examples of innovation projects that you have nurtured to completion?
A few examples of big innovations that we have executed over the past few years include:
Our pandemic recovery efforts, “Planwell Meetwell®” helped us recover and grow by bringing meeting and events back to our industries through safe and healthy events. We launched wellbeing, virtual events and new products and services anchored in hybrid and metaverse, such as our “First-Person Experience”, and health and safety measures. This helped us reach an increase in year-over-year growth compared to pre-pandemic numbers.
Sustainability acceleration and strategy is helping our organization define net zero goals, create a strategy for reduction and meet our client requirements for reporting and verification. This established a new sustainability practice for us and aligned our products and services to help our clients reduce their footprints. We appointed a General Manager, Environmental Strategy and also launched a Carbon Footprint Measurement (CFMT) tool for events. This has increased revenue and new client acquisitions, but most importantly, we are helping our planet.
The last example is the acceleration and launch of our internal and external AI strategy for the business. This included launching policies, tools and engagement of AI for employees and specific AI use cases and applications across our business. We are also launching client-facing AI tools that support our products and services. This is contributing to reduced labor, productivity and efficiencies and new revenue opportunities tied to client acquisition, new product applications and leadership in the markets we serve.
Maritz’s innovation practice is focused on people and growth. We focus on advancing ideas, big and small, connected to an accelerated process and methodology. Those ideas feed a pipeline of key initiatives and projects, supporting our people, partners and new product development.
What inspires you or helps you be more creative?
Our people and their ideas allow me to create connections and activate ways to drive growth for our business. My ability to be interconnected across the organization allows me to foster value creation by expanding the value of products and services across markets, initiating interest and cross-market value for new initiatives, especially in technology and new product development, and leveraging partnerships and new trends to create new demand.
How can the events industry be more innovative?
Being open to change, fostering more conversations, sharing ideas and best practices and leveraging relationships and connections to advance ideas more quickly. More collaboration can help us grow and advance at great speed.
Anything else you’d like to add?
I would share that my role is a gift. I approach every day with a new lens and always lead with support and encouragement to help people have a place to be innovative, entrepreneurial and have a safe place to be creative to advance their ideas. Maritz supports the craft of innovation by allowing me to lead with flexibility, space and trust so we can explore the unknown. Our greatest asset is our people and their ideas. Innovation gives us the opportunity to transform our people, our services and the clients and industries we support.
