Seeding Innovation

Build and grow a company ready for the next generation of consumers

In Seeding Innovation: The Path to Profit and Purpose in the 21st Century, veteran entrepreneur, award-winning author, global strategist, speaker, and Rice University Innovation and Entrepreneurship professor, Robyn O’Brien, delivers an insightful and data-driven roadmap to authenticity and smart leadership in the face of accelerating technological, environmental, and social change.

In the book, you’ll discover how to build resilience, authenticity, market share, and purpose into your business plan and move beyond box-ticking, virtue signalling, and one-dimensional metrics. This approach strengthens your business model, enhances your bottom line, attracts investors, fortifies employee retention, and more.

With her characteristic candour and attention to data, combined with deep experience on the frontlines of industry change, Robyn explains how you can transform concepts like paradigm blindness, scarcity, imposter syndrome, rejection, and fear. These transformations help build durable, lasting, and profitable businesses that integrate social and environmental principles with courage and integrity to drive long-term shareholder and stakeholder value.

You’ll also discover how to:

• Develop a purpose-driven product line that holds strong appeal for new generations of consumers and avoid the ruthless practices associated with PR nightmares and externalised costs.
• Build an iconic company that focuses on integrating meaningful change to inspire customers, investors, and employees and that eschews meaningless press releases and virtue signalling.
• Overcome imposter syndrome and naysayers using the S.T.O.P. Protocol ™.
• Develop supportive scaffolding and a resilient mindset to leverage courage and gain market share.
• Build boards (not echo chambers), understand why equity and governance matter, and how diversity benefits your bottom line.
• Integrate authentic marketing and storytelling into your brand strategy to drive revenue and capture market share.
• Avoid the dangers of silos, fundraising traps, and toxic capital and build a model with value-aligned, informed investors.
• Spot greenwashing, gender washing, and carbon washing, and more importantly, learn how to avoid them within your organisation and drive change.
• Address headlines around ESG and DEI metrics to meet the needs of asset managers and investors, build successful teams, and integrate goals central to outperformance and higher returns.

Gen Z and the modern consumer are looking for companies with authenticity—they want transparency and purpose from brands that are future-proofing for the planet they’re inheriting. With this changing consumer focus and mindset, there emerges an urgent need for emotionally intelligent leadership. Along with profitability, 21st-century leaders must focus on environmental stewardship, equity and justice, employee retention, recruiting, collaboration, and other key aspects of modern business.