Innovation Expert Discusses Winning by Changing the Game

The first keynote speaker of the 2025 Fall Conference in San Diego opened his presentation by sharing that he has personally contributed to helping our industry mitigate our workforce challenges: his 15-year-old son is a future civil engineer. Innovation expert Kaihan Krippendorff is an engineer by education himself; he’s a proud graduate of the University of Pennsylvania School of Engineering. Instead, the infrastructure he focuses on strengthening is corporate teams.

It’s 1968 and the Summer Olympics are being held in Mexico City. American athlete Dick Fosbury dazzles the world with his unique backwards high jump. The Fosbury Flop would bring the U.S. Olympic Gold and become the dominant high jump technique. Krippendorff played the video of that pivotal moment in sports history and posed the question: Why was this significant?

Because Dick Fosbury and the Fosbury Flop changed the game. Safety pads had been placed on the opposite side of high bars for 15 years before that fateful day in Mexico City. But, for whatever reason, high jumpers continued to leap forward over the bars. What Fosbury’s winning technique showed is that “right now is a great time to change the game.”

Krippendorff built on that sports metaphor with another. Showing a chart with the average height of NBA Most Valuable Players since 1960, he pointed out an interesting pattern: they’ve been getting shorter. Given that most MVPs (not all, but most) NBA MVPs are league-high scorers, why are shorter players racking up high point totals? Because in 1979, the NBA officially introduced the three-point shot, which leans more on skill and less on height. The game changed.

All of this to say, Krippendorff explained, that winning teams learn to play a new game. “If you play the way you always play,” he said, “the outcome is predetermined.” Continuing the NBA example, he added, “Three-point shots allow you to play the game differently.”

For businesses, playing the game differently begins with asking two questions: “What business are we really in?” and “What would that kind of company do?” And then DO that. Krippendorff pointed to the early days of Netflix, when it first began encroaching on Blockbuster’s market share. This innovative new service spurred Blockbuster to fight back by creating a website that very few people remember: Blockbuster.com was an online version of the brick-and-mortar store in your local strip mall. Netflix, on the other hand, didn’t even HAVE a website—just a page that was specifically curated to the preferences of the customer. That was the difference. “Blockbuster was thinking like a store. Netflix was creating an individual experience.”