If you want to understand innovation in the financial sector, you talk to Mona Vernon. We know. We did—and we learned quite a bit. As the Chief Technology Officer at Thomson Reuters Labs, Vernon insists that innovation must business-case and use-case focused. Like Continuum, she insists on making it real. In this pointed conversation with our Lee Moreau, Vernon talks clearly and well about demonstrating value, selling innovation to executive leadership, hiring the right people, and managing a properly balanced portfolio of innovation projects. On episode 21 of The Resonance Test, Vernon says many valuable things. It's worth investing the time to hear her say:
• "Fundamentally, one of the values of Thomson Reuters is partnership."
• "If you look at the pace of change in financial markets, trying to do everything yourself doesn't make sense."
• "We are not a group of people playing with toys and foosball. We are actually extremely business-case focused."
• "I don't want your ideas. I want the problem you're seeing with customers."
• "In the process of defining a problem statement, you start seeing the solution."
Host: Pete Chapin
Editor: Kyp Pilalas
Producer: Ken Gordon
About the Author
Lee MoreauPrincipalLee Moreau is a Principal at Continuum, a global design and innovation consultancy. An architect and strategist, Lee combines a unique capacity for complex-systems thinking with a deeply empathic perspective, which he uses to critically engage and re-imagine the contemporary world.
Through research, analysis, and imagination, Lee helps Continuum’s clients understand their entanglement within their own complex set of cultural, material, and economic circumstances. Lee has led service design projects for a diverse group of clients that blur the boundaries between content and experience.
Ken GordonChief Communications SpecialistKen makes EPAM Continuum’s work visible to the necessary people. He creates superlative content, works with colleagues to do the same, and employs social networks to share it widely.
A card-carrying humanist, Ken co-founded QuickMuse, the improvisational writing website, and JEDLAB, the Jewish education community. He has written for TheAtlantic.com, the New York Times, and many other pubs.
Ken has an English degree from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and an MA in English from the State University of New York at Albany. He framed both diplomas long ago, but can’t seem to find them now—a fact he considers all-too-human.
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