Paul Mugge
Paul Mugge has 35 years in product development, global business strategy, and business innovation services at IBM and 15 years of researching and teaching innovation as the Executive Director of the Center for Innovation Management at NC State University. It was through this experience that Mugge learned that more important than technology or product innovation is business model innovation. It, by far, is the hardest to copy—and the most important to establishing long-term growth. He captured these ideas—and the actual methods to perform business model innovation—in a book he co-authored with Dr. Stephen Markham titled, Traversing the Valley of Death: A practical guide for corporate innovation leaders. More recently, Mugge got caught up in the biggest business model innovation of our time—digital transformation. In his latest book titled, Trust: The Winning Formula for Digital Leaders, he and his co-authors, Abbu and Gudergan, explore how "building trust"—and not their technological competence —sets the leaders of this phenomenon apart. Most importantly, Mr. Mugge has spent his entire career, both at IBM and NC State University, listening and sharing what he has learned with scores of organizations that intend to separate themselves through managing innovation.