Duncan Wardle Biography

The former Vice President of Innovation & Creativity at The Walt Disney Company, Duncan Wardle spent his 25-year career at Disney developing some of their most innovative ideas and strategies. Ideas that would forever change the way the company expands its impact, trains its employees, and solves problems creatively.

What sort of ideas? Instead of asking “How Might We … make more money?” Duncan asked “What If there are no lines in the Disney Parks? No gates at the entrance? No reception desks? No lines for favorite attractions to pay for F&B.”

Fast forward to Disney’s Magic Band, piloted and rolled out across Walt Disney World, eliminating the need to check in at the hotels, waiting to get into a Disney park, lines to ride, etc. Disney’s Magic band has resulted in record revenues and essentially created an open source monitoring of consumer likes and dislikes, informing all future products and services.

Duncan Wardle and his team were tasked with leading the creative process for LucasFilms, Pixar, Marvel, Disney Imagineering, Disney Parks and ESPN. Realizing that innovation and creativity were not inherent traits, but something that could be taught and learned, Duncan founded the Innovation Catalyst Team. This team was used to teach employees across all the Disney properties how to develop their own “thinking toolkit,” which would enable them to strategically and repeatedly create moments of innovation within their business units.

The program was a massive success, and during Duncan’s tenure, the group trained over 5,000 professional and executive Disney cast members. Participants walked away from Duncan’s program with the ability to think more audaciously when solving challenges and create innovative new storylines, products and services throughout the entire Disney universe.

While Duncan Wardle loved the challenge of running the creativity and innovation teams at the world’s most creative company, he understood that his ability to successfully teach others to develop an innovation and ideation toolkit was something that could have a massive impact for people and organizations across the globe. And so, he left to launch his creative consulting company id8, which has quickly become one of the top innovation consulting firms in the world, and in the process, has allowed Duncan to share his creative consultant services and innovation workshops to thousands of employees and executives at companies such as Ford, McKinsey, Coca-Cola, NBA, Apple, Johnson & Johnson and Forbes.

With an infectious energy and playful collaboration, Duncan Wardle pushes executives and their teams to overcome preconceived ideas, act more audaciously, and develop their own innovation “light switch”, which is a method to activate their creative brain and access the ideas that turn ordinary companies into industry leaders.

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