Alexander Manu Senior Partner and Chief Imaginator InnoSpa International Partners Toronto, Ontario

Alexander Manu is a strategic innovation practitioner, international lecturer and author. He works with executive teams in Fortune 500 companies in industries as diverse as consumer packaged goods, media, advertising, mobile communications and manufacturing.  Alexander lectures around the world on innovation, imagination, change agents and strategic foresight.  He is a Senior Partner and Chief Imaginator at InnoSpa International Partners, teaches “Innovation, Foresight and Business Design” at the Rotman School of Management , and is a Professor at the Ontario College of Art and Design and in Toronto.

In his client and research work, Alexander is involved in transforming organizations by exploring and defining new competitive spaces, the development of new strategic business competencies and creation of imaginative innovation methods. He believes that the exploration of possibility requires imagination as a prerequisite for strategic change and innovation.  For over 20 years Alexander has enabled global companies as diverse as Motorola, LEGO, Whirlpool, Nokia, Navteq and Unilever,  to develop policies and strategies that address emerging issues through strategic foresight and pre-competitive business models.

Author of “Everything 2.0: Redesign your Business Through Foresight and Brand Innovation”, 2008,  “The Imagination Challenge :Strategic Foresight and Innovation for the Global Economy” , 2006, “ToolToys: Tools with an Element of Play”, 1995, and “The Big Idea of Design”, 1999 , as well as of over 40 articles published in national and international periodicals, Alexander has an exceptional and sustained activity as an international lecturer, being invited to give over 300 keynote lectures in 23 countries.

A past president of the Association of Chartered Industrial Designers of Ontario, he was elected twice on the board of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID). A past member of various advisory boards active at government levels in Canada and the Far East, he has consulted on foresight strategies for the Department of Canadian Heritage, the China External Trade Development Council, Taiwan Design Centre, Korea Institute of Design Promotion and is a founding member of Design for the World (Barcelona), an international NGO that provides and promotes humanitarian design solutions.

Alexander has been a guest lecturer at over 45 distinguished post secondary institutions around the world. A graduate of the Institute of Fine Arts of Bucharest, Romania. (MDA – Industrial Design 1978), he was elected in 1994 an Academician of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in recognition to his contribution to the development of design and the visual arts in Canada.

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