Welcome and An Overview of DuPont Innovations



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The Role of AI in Ideation

Ideation is the start of the innovation process and is fundamental to business growth and success. We review the AI literature in three fields of: identification of new opportunities, idea generation, and idea screening. We identify five major findings of how AI can revolutionize ideation. First, whereas in the past researchers highlighted the importance of industry characteristics and market stability, the authors now emphasize the importance of firm culture in driving radical innovation. AI will be an important mediator in this relationship. Second, across all stages of innovation, AI will improve the efficiency, speed, and cost of ideation. Third, AI increases the average creativity of ideas, but the effect on the generation of top ideas compared to those of humans differs between studies, likely due to prompting techniques. Fourth, AI assists very well in idea screening but does not do a good job yet in idea selection. Fifth and most importantly, we are in the early stages of AI, which will greatly improve in the future. So, we expect, AI has the potential to radically transform ideation subject to a firm’s culture of innovation. While considerable progress has occurred in using AI to analyze text and image, such research on video and audio data is currently scarce but rapidly developing and highly promising.

Gerard J. Tellis (PhD Michigan) is Neely Chaired Professor of American Enterprise, Director of the Institute for Outlier Research in Marketing, Director of the Center for Global Innovation, at the USC Marshall School of Business. Dr. Tellis is an expert in innovation, advertising, social media,new product growth, and global market entry. He has published 7 books and over 200 papers (http://www.gtellis.net) that have won over 30,000 citations in Google Scholar. His publications have won over 25 awards. He is Past-President ISMS and was an Associate Editor of Marketing Science and Journal of Marketing Research.

Areas of Expertise: Advertising, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Creativity, Crowdfunding, Crowdsourcing, Innovation, Machine Learning, New Product Launches, Social Media, Viral Ads.



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The Future Belongs to Those Who See It Coming

Michael Koenka is a recognised leader in AI-driven innovation, technology scouting, and strategic foresight. He is the founder of Lightbeam Insight, the world’s first frontier innovation agency helping established B2B industrial enterprises identify and capitalize on emerging market opportunities. Michael is also CEO of GetSparked, Europe’s premier AI community, comprising over 600 leading experts, founders, investors, and executives advancing industrial applications of artificial intelligence.

Michael’s clients include global enterprises such as NVIDIA, SHV Global, and HP, who leverage his market intelligence for strategic technology scouting and informed innovation investment decisions. His proprietary, AI-driven methodology analyzes over 2 million patents and research papers to identify emerging high-value technology applications 18–36 months ahead of traditional market indicators. This unique approach translates complex technical insights into actionable strategies, bridging the gap between technical capabilities and commercial implementation.

Throughout his career, Michael has facilitated strategic technology partnerships totaling over $11.6 billion, collaborating with prominent founders, top-tier accelerators, and leading venture organizations including TechStars, Rockstart, Antler, and Y Combinator. At the ISBM Member Meeting hosted at DuPont’s historic Experimental Station, Michael will share insights on how AI-driven foresight can reshape early-stage innovation and strategic decision-making within industrial markets.

Michael holds a Master’s degree in Public Affairs, Management, International and Development Affairs from Carleton University. He is recognized by Accenture for his contributions to innovation strategy and serves as an Accredited Professor at the Center for Post Graduate Education in the Netherlands.

Attendees are encouraged to reach out before, during, or after the event to explore specific ways AI-driven foresight can enhance innovation efforts within their organizations.

In a time of constant change, industrial companies must expect and adapt to new tech trends. What if you could know with 90% certainty which early-stage tech will lead the future? You’d have an edge before your smartest competitors even know what’s happening. At Lightbeam, we discovered a unique approach that changes the way industrial companies navigate this uncertainty.

This talk will show how leading materials and industrial B2B firms use AI foresight. Learn how we can now discover virgin markets worth billions, even in times of major change. You’ll learn how AI forecasts can identify emerging tech clusters your competitors missed.
Here’s what I’ll showcase:

• How we analyse millions of patents and papers to find hidden technology patterns.
• Our signal identification system that predicts which technologies will outperform in fast-changing markets.
• Results from industrial companies that gained years of competitive advantage through predictive intelligence.
• Fascinating biomimicry connections we have uncovered between natural phenomena and breakthrough industrial applications.

Using an anonymised example, I’ll share how we spotted a $1.4B opportunity that 9 out of 10 competitors missed. This helped our client lock in a 20-year advantage in a highly competitive industry.

Most organisations find it hard to keep up with the rapid evolution of technology. Smart companies leverage experts to surface key insights. This almost always leads to better results than those that try to build in-house.



Listen Smarter, Build Better. How AI-Powered VOC is Changing Innovation as We Know It

Join Kristyn Corrigan of Applied Marketing Science (AMS) to explore the future of VOC—and how your team can move from insights to execution with speed, clarity, and confidence.

Today’s R&D and innovation teams face growing pressure to uncover unmet customer needs faster, with greater accuracy, and at lower cost. Yet traditional Voice of the Customer (VOC) research can be time-consuming, resource-heavy, and susceptible to human bias.

What if AI could change that?

In this session, we’ll explore how a next-generation large language model (LLM)—fine-tuned specifically for customer insights—can instantly extract deep, solution-agnostic needs from text-based sources like feedback, reviews, interviews, and more. You’ll learn how this approach is reshaping the front end of innovation for forward-thinking B2B and consumer companies alike.

What You’ll Learn:

• Turn Raw Customer Input into Strategic Insight
  See how this advanced LLM identifies rich, hidden needs—not just sentiment or keywords—to reveal opportunities for true differentiation.
• Accelerate Innovation with AI-Augmented Decision-Making
  Discover how combining AI with expert interpretation leads to faster, more confident decisions and customer-aligned product development.
• See It in Action: Real-World Results
  Explore case studies across sectors—from B2B products and services to consumer goods—showing how this AI-powered VOC method is already delivering measurable impact.

Featured Case Studies:

• B2B Product: Composite Siding
• B2B Service: Professional Association
• Consumer Product: A Chicken-Based Food Innovation

Kristyn Corrigan is a Principal at Applied Marketing Science (AMS), where she leads the firm’s Insights for Innovation practice. With nearly 20 years of consulting experience, she helps B2B and consumer-facing companies use customer insights to develop more successful products, services, and experiences.

Kristyn is a recognized leader in advancing VOC methods, including pioneering the use of AI-powered techniques to uncover customer needs with greater speed, depth, and scale. She specializes in in-depth interviewing, ethnographic research, and helping teams prioritize what matters most to customers to fuel innovation.

She also trains and coaches organizations to build their own in-house VOC capabilities. Her work has been featured in Fast Company and Marketing News, and she is a contributing author of the 2023 PDMA Handbook of Innovation and New Product Development. Kristyn serves on the PDMA Board of Directors and is a frequent speaker at leading industry conferences and podcasts. She has also guest lectured at institutions including MIT Sloan and the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.




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Decoding Decision Dynamics: Leveraging AI to Optimize Business Processes

In today’s fast-paced B2B landscape, the quality and speed of decision-making can make or break competitive advantage. This presentation explores how advanced AI models, fine-tuned with historical decision data, can illuminate the hidden dynamics of your internal processes. By reconstructing stakeholder interactions and inferring the critical discussions behind key business decisions, we reveal actionable insights that empower you to streamline decision-making, balance stakeholder influence, and enhance strategic outcomes. We illustrate this with the product recall process. Join us to discover how decoding your decision dynamics can lead to improved process transparency, reduced bottlenecks, and ultimately, a more agile and effective organization.

Raj Grewal is the Townsend Family Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Area Chair of Marketing at UNC, Kenan-Flagler. Dr. Grewal’s recent research explores critical areas such as customer relationship management, consumer search behavior, peer effects, agency theory, rational inattention and customer value strategies.  He teaches Customer Value Strategies and Marketing Analytics in online and executive MBA programs, as well as a course on Empirical Economic Models in the PhD program.

His areas of expertise include: Competitive Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Corporate Social Responsibility and Social Networks

Before joining the UNC Kenan-Flagler faculty, Dr. Grewal has taught at several prestigious institutions, including the Pennsylvania State University, Indian School of Business (Hyderabad and Mohali), Washington State University, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Cincinnati.

At Penn State, he served as the associate research director for the Institute for the Study of Business Markets (2005-2015). He advanced research at the intersection of business-to-business marketing and strategy, contributing to the development of insights that continue to influence both academic scholarship and industry practices.

Min Ding is Bard Professor of Marketing at Penn State Smeal College of Business. Min’s current scholarly interests are in three domains: (1) Empathy and Decision Making, (2) Creativity and Innovation (Logical Creative Thinking [LCT]; Innovation in Medicine; Transformative Leaders and Firms), (3) Digital Intelligence (Artificial Intelligence) and Digital Reality (virtual reality, mixed reality); and (4) Human and Societal Development.

His current work in marketing aims to develop tools with substantive value for practitioners, focusing on audio and visual data. He and his (former) students have developed face screening model for print advertising Video-based Automated Recommender for garments, Contour-as-Face method that balances privacy and perception in online settings such as dating sites. Ongoing research projects include voiceprint for brands, voice-based empathetic methods, voice morphing, smart advertisement display system, and methods for understanding the innerworkings of deep learning models.

He is the Editor-in-Chief of Customer Needs and Solutions, and series editor of Perspectives on Sustainable Growth (Springer).




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Breaking the Echo Chamber:  How to Mitigate Confirmation Bias in AI-Driven Research

Laura Patterson is a growth strategy consultant to business leaders. Obsessed with helping companies take a customer-centric, data-to-insights, performance management approach to growth and to making business decisions with more confidence. She is a trusted advisor with global customers within the technology, cybersecurity, financial services, life sciences, and manufacturing industries.

Laura collaborates with firms to accelerate profitable customer-centric growth by mobilizing leading-edge analytics, leveraging proven frameworks and processes, and integrating lessons from best practices. Her clients tap this expertise to foster faster, more confident decisions, organizational alignment, operational excellence and to build critical skills. As a trusted partner with scores of firms since 1999, she works side-by-side in creating and driving strategies that produce results.

With research funds often limited, many B2B companies see generative AI as an easy and affordable way to conduct market, customer, and competitive research. Beware. Its potential for amplifying confirmation bias has emerged as a critical challenge. Confirmation bias, the tendency to favor information that aligns with pre-existing beliefs, can distort research outcomes and hinder effective decision-making. When paired with AI, this cognitive bias can create echo chambers that reinforce flawed insights, skewing business strategies and outcomes. Engage in an interactive conversation about how AI can unintentionally exacerbate these biases the risks and implications of AI-amplified confirmation bias strategies to counteract these effect.

Laura will offer four practical tips to ensure AI serves as a tool for objectivity rather than a bias amplifier. Come with you ideas too. Let’s collaborate on how to harness AI’s power for research while safeguarding the integrity of your research and decision-making processes.




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Value Pricing & Selling Using Best Practices

Joanne Smith is the Founder & President of Price-to-Profit Consulting.

Prior to founding Price to Profits Consulting in 2013, Joanne was the former Corporate Head of Marketing, Pricing and Customer loyalty for DuPont. Joanne transformed DuPont’s pricing from weak to outstanding while delivering unparalleled profits.

She is the author of The Price Negotiation Playbook, The Pricing and Profit Playbook and Pricing in a Crisis Playbook and on the faculty for the Professional Pricing Society (PPS) and The Institute for the Study of Business Markets (ISBM).

With more than 20 years of global business, marketing, sales and pricing expertise, she now works with B2B and B2B2C companies – around the globe – helping them develop world class pricing and profit strategies as well as training sales organizations.

Joanne is best known for her practical, pragmatic approach and her ability to build courage, confidence and conviction in businesses or commercial teams to take bold pricing actions.

Many businesses struggle to price, or set their price premium, on new innovative products, unique existing products and/or value-added non-product features (e.g., services, reliability). They are further hindered by the inability to validate their price in the market. The best practice for pricing setting in the B2B world, is value-in-use pricing. Listen to Joanne and hear her best practices for setting and using Value Pricing and Value Selling.




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De-risking New Growth Through Lean Innovation

Learn how DuPont uses Lean Innovation to reduce early stage risk and make informed investment decisions for new areas of growth.

We’ll review the Vespel® case study together and dive into how the team:

• Extracted desirability, viability and feasibility risk
• Prioritized risk using assumptions mapping
• Created a detailed learning plan for rapid experimentation
• Ran a series of small experiments to gather evidence
• Made an informed investment decision with leadership
• Q&A

David J. Bland is a highly sought-after speaker and thought leader in the fields of innovation, entrepreneurship, and product development. He is recognized for his engaging and dynamic presentations, which draw on his extensive experience working with startups and Fortune 500 companies. With a focus on practical, actionable insights, David helps organizations develop a culture of innovation and implement effective processes for creating and launching new products and services.

David is the founder and CEO of Precoil, an innovation consulting firm and is the author of “Testing Business Ideas”, an internationally best selling business book in over 20 different languages. His writing has been featured in Harvard Business Review. David has guest lectured at Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, London School of Business and at many other high profile institutions and conferences.




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Essential Questions About Growth That Leaders Must Answer – That AI Shouldn’t

George S. Day is the Geoffrey T. Boisi Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He founded the Mack Institute for Innovation Management at Wharton, where he is presently serving as Faculty Emeritus in Residence.

He has consulted on innovation and growth strategies with over 40 global corporations and served on 12 Boards of Directors.

There are three essential questions about the role of innovation that a firm’s leadership must answer: How much faster can we grow from within? Do we have the right organization to achieve our growth ambitions? How can we capture growth opportunities sooner, when the present devours most of our attention? These questions cannot be delegated to an AI agent. This talk will address these questions, provide answers based on research on organic growth leaders, and suggest why AI agents shouldn’t be expected to answer them.




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AI Transformation of Understanding Customer Needs

AI is changing the VOC interviews we conduct in the front-end-of-innovation, allowing better and fewer “human” customer interviews, thus accelerating the front end. But that’s not all: It’s allowing better preparation, probing, and publishing of customer insights from our everydaycustomer meetings… which will lead to transformational market foresight from our CRM systems. In this session, you’ll get hands-on practice with the astounding power of AI that exists today.

Dan Adams is one of the foremost experts in B2B innovation, Dan has trained tens of thousands of global marketing, technical and sales professionals across every conceivable B2B industry.  In recent years, Dan Adams and his team have conducted significant original research into the behaviors that drive B2B organic growth. Because he regularly works with the largest B2B firms in the world, he can help your leadership team establish a dependable roadmap to profitable, sustainable organic growth.

He helps firms understand what customers want in a new product, launch their new product explosively and critically, avoid “landmines” that blow up high-stakes projects (de-risking).  Dan is author of “New Product Blueprinting: The Handbook for B2B Organic Growth.”




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