Diversity, Inclusion, and Innovation: Creating a More Inclusive Workplace
Breakout Session
Wednesday, May 24 11:15am – 12:15pm
| Diversity, Equity and Inclusion initiatives had a resurgence during COVID, with increased awareness within the Fortune 500. A key concept within the Diversity Equity Inclusion space – Belonging – is the secret sauce to delivering impact from DEI initiatives. If Diversity is having a seat at the table, and Inclusion is having a voice, Belonging is believing that your voice will be heard. Belonging cannot be mandated by HR or C-Suite leaders; it must come from employees. Unfortunately, many organizations don’t know how to measure Belonging, interpret results, and act on them in a way that improves a sense of Belonging among employees while driving business results. During this interactive roundtable, Dr. Navin Kunde, formerly head of Open Innovation at The Clorox Company, will share how the DEI culture team he led measured Belonging within R&D, interpreted the results, and then dove underneath the surface via employee focus groups to uncover barriers and potential solutions. He will discuss challenges in communicating the importance of increasing Belonging to leaders and managers, and the difficulty of putting in place practical steps to deliver this aspiration in a way that would be well-received by a skeptical R&D and innovation community. Dr. Kunde will discuss both Barriers to Belonging as well as the Solutions implemented at Clorox, but the ultimate goal of this session is to share his insights and experiences so they can be useful to other R&D and Innovation leaders and managers who are serious about improving Belonging. |
Meet the Speaker
Dr. Navin Kunde is an innovation executive with over two decades of experience in innovation strategy, operations, and people leadership in Aerospace & Defense, Business Consulting and Consumer Goods. Most recently, he spent 12 years with The Clorox Company, a US-based consumer goods company in the Fortune 500, as a member of the Corporate Innovation team supporting the Clorox, Burt’s Bees, Brita, and RenewLife brands. Dr. Kunde is a globally renowned practitioner and thought leader in the field of Open Innovation, which enables business and enterprise teams deliver results faster, cheaper and better by enabling access to external data, products, technology, talent, and customer insights. Before joining Clorox, Dr. Kunde spent seven years at The Corporate Executive Board in Washington DC, advising Global 1000 innovation and operations executives, and before that, he worked for five years at Cessna Aircraft Company in Product Engineering and Supply Chain.
He has a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University, and an MBA from Cornell.