John W Lewis

Helping people and organizations to understand innovation and its value.

John’s approach is to encourage more effective and innovative behaviour by facilitating the development of knowledge and experience. The foundation of his approach is an understanding of why innovation is important, what innovation is, and how, where and when innovation happens. In particular, he identifies the strategic role of innovation in the accurate evaluation of opportunities.This provides the basis for effective attitudes, behaviours and structures, at both the personal and organizational levels.

John delivers presentations, and publishes articles on innovation and strategy. He also provides innovation assistance to large and small organizations.

John is continually driven by a desire to find better approaches and applies many years experience of communicating complex topics and of “doing innovation” in industrial, sales, academic and commercial environments.

Experience

Strategic Innovation

John takes a diffusion-based approach to understanding innovation management. This is provided by his company Neat Strategy Ltd. (click for information).

“John shares his thoughts around the Innovation Strategy “Where to Aim?”. He makes some pretty compelling points that are hard to argue. Thanks John for sharing!”
Paul Tran, Brightidea.com

Software development training

John has 20 years experience of delivering commercial software training in the UK, Europe and the USA. This involves communication of complex subjects to professional staff in organizations of a wide range of sizes. He focuses on helping professional software developers, mainly in large corporations, to make the paradigm shift to object-oriented software architecture, design and programming.
He owns and operated Holosoft Ltd. which provided software training services and publishes courseware on object-oriented software development.

“John did coach my team for the OCJP exam. His lectures and practicals focused on a deep understanding of the underlying Java concepts and principles, rather than simply teaching for the exam.I gained more deep knowledge in 3 days than in years programming. John has excellent communication skills and often explains complex concepts in very simple, easy to follow examples. I would recommend John to everyone who has to pass the OCJP and wants to be a very good software engineer! Needless to say that all my team passed the exam with high marks on the first attempt.”
Dr Sven van der Meer, Master Engineer, Ericsson

Research & Development

John has 14 years experience of process and product development in industrial, academic and commercial organizations.

As a Research Engineer, EMI, Hayes, UK, he researched optical and thermal properties of polymers and developed processes for the production of video discs and credit cards.

As an Application Engineer, General Instrument in München, Germany, he customised high-speed rectifier products in support of sales people in Europe, in liason with production people in Taiwan.

At Oxford University, he researched optical holographic diffraction, developing mathematical formulations and numerical simulations.

At PA Technology, Cambridge, UK, he operated and led technical consulting projects for commercial and government clients, specialising in optical diffraction.

At the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell, he developed simulations of optical guided wave devices and neural networks.

“John was always a delight to work with, having complementary skills in software to my hardware leanings. He is always strongly customer focused, with a singular ability in distilling sometimes half formed client needs into a concrete route forward, and then seeing it through to delivery.”
Dr Craig Sawyers, Senior Consultant, PA Technology

Personal

Dr John W Lewis holds a B.Sc.(Hons) in Applied Physics from Bath University, a D.Phil. in Engineering Science from Oxford University, and has held a Research Fellowship at Brasenose College, Oxford.

At various times, he has enjoyed skiing, rowing, sailing, playing golf, and flying aircraft.

He is based in Devon, United Kingdom.