Bill O'Connor

Bill O’Connor is the Founder of THE INNOVATION AGENCY, an innovation consultancy based in San Francisco/Silicon Valley; he is also a faculty member at Singularity University, where he focuses on Innovation, Emerging Technologies, and the Future of Work.

Over the past 10 years he has conducted 600+ innovation engagements with 250+ corporations from 50+ countries, working with 8,000+ professionals, 4,000+ executives and C-Staff, and 25+ CEOs. O’Connor has worked with companies such as Google, Apple, Renault, Tesla, Nike, Airbnb, IDEO, RBS, Starbucks, Twitter, Bechtel, Autodesk, Facebook, GE, IKEA, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the World Bank, helping people to improve and expand their innovation mindsets, toolsets, and skillsets.

His work has appeared in The Economist, Forbes, Fast Company, and the MIT Press Innovations journal; and he has worked with universities and business schools such as Stanford, Berkeley, Oxford, Wharton, INSEAD, and Princeton, via research projects, keynote speeches, and innovation workshops. His work has also been written about in The Net and the Butterfly.

His team is currently researching how Nobel Prize winners innovate in conjunction with the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm.

O’Connor also sits on the advisory boards of 3 disruptive (hopefully!) startups.

He served as lead speechwriter for the CEO of Autodesk from 2006-2016, working directly with him on 325 speeches, presentations, and written works. He also served for seven years at the Editor-in-Chief of the Autodesk emerging technologies journal Autodesk: POV, where he wrote and edited 290 articles/interviews on subjects such as innovation, future of work, AI, Internet of Things, AR/VR, quantum computing, etc.

O’Connor lives on a mountain just north of San Francisco with his wife Andrea and their dog Zinzino, a globally celebrated canine innovator.