Join an ODF Community Conversation

July 16 | 11 AM – 12 PM (ET)

Building a Culture of Innovation Through Design
Designing Innovation In Culture, Capability, and the Architecture of What’s Possible

Presented by Stephanie Wade, Founder and CEO, Ascendant

Most organizations don’t fail at innovation because their people lack creativity. They fail because their structures, systems, and unspoken rules drive day to day interactions that make creativity feel slow, undervalued, and risky.

This session reframes innovation culture not just as an aspirational value, but as an organizational design challenge, something that can be intentionally architected, measured, and evolved. Drawing on her work leading civic innovation at Bloomberg Philanthropies, the U.S. Government Innovation Lab@OPM, and now through her global consulting firm Ascendant, Stephanie Wade brings a practitioner’s lens to the question every organization designer quietly wrestles with: How do you build an organization where innovation isn’t an exception to how work gets done, it’s the foundation?

Through Ascendant’s Innovation Maturity Model, real-world cases, and facilitated conversation, this session invites participants to audit their own organizations, honestly, and leave with a sharper sense of where the design levers actually are.

What participants leave with: A sharper diagnostic vocabulary for talking about innovation culture as an organizational design problem. A framework they can apply to their own context immediately.

Who This Is For: Organization designers, HR and talent leaders, strategy practitioners, and anyone wrestling with the gap between an organization’s stated commitment to innovation and its actual capacity to deliver it.

Stephanie Wade is the Founder and CEO of Ascendant, a global innovation consulting firm that partners with public, private, and non-profit organizations to solve their toughest challenges. Under her leadership, Ascendant helps organizations build strategies, train staff to apply cutting-edge practices, coach senior officials to foster cultures of creativity, and design solutions that make government services more effective, efficient, and equitable.

Previously, Stephanie served as Director of the U.S. Federal Government’s first design-based innovation lab (Lab@OPM), where she led transformational change on some of the nation’s largest programs, built and delivered innovation training to federal staff, and launched a thriving government-wide innovation community of practice.

She also served as Lead for Innovation and Design at Bloomberg Philanthropies, where she oversaw a $65 million portfolio of programs that enabled more than 400 cities worldwide to tackle complex social challenges. In addition, Stephanie served as a strategy, performance management, and innovation expert at Booz Allen Hamilton where she worked across multiple agencies in the United States Federal Government and with the Judicial Department in the United Arab Emirates to generate collaborative strategies, create organizational change, and measure impact. While there, Stephanie helped build Booz Allen Hamilton’s human-centered design and innovation practice.

Stephanie has served as adjunct faculty at several premier academic institutions, is a Founding Faculty Member of an AI course to support Veterans in advancing their careers, is a sought-after public speaker, and holds a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and a Bachelor’s in Sociology and Studio Arts from Boston College.

Marcia Murphy is a UK based consultant specializing in operating model and work system design. She works internationally with firms across a wide range of industries, from PE-backed rapid growth businesses to major multinationals, and her experience spans both external consultancy and senior in-house roles.