Innovation Leadership Group
Aligning mindset, methods, and metrics for continuous innovation.
Drawing on twenty-five years of designing and delivering innovation programs for Global 1000 companies, leading universities, and government agencies, we help organizations bridge strategic foresight into action that actually ships.
Our history
Twenty-five years of building the capability for continuous innovation.
Innovation Leadership Group was founded by Dr. Tamara Carleton out of her work at Stanford University, where research into how organizations sustain innovation became the basis for a practical methodology. What began as a coaching practice for executive teams grew into a structured arc — from foresight, through method, into culture — that we now deliver to Global 1000 companies, leading universities, and government agencies on five continents.
The work has evolved. Annual surveys gave way to continuous measurement on the AIM Platform. One-off workshops gave way to programs that train your internal facilitators so the capability outlasts our engagement. The Moonshot Index emerged from twenty years of pattern-matching across the readiness profiles of the organizations we serve.
What hasn’t changed is the conviction underneath: sustainable innovation is built when every member of the organization is given the space, structure, and challenge to work together effectively.
Our purpose
Aligning your people with strategy, foresight, and culture.
We believe innovation is a capability, not a project. It lives in the daily decisions a senior leader makes about which signals to take seriously, which experiments to fund, and which conversations to keep having until they become real.
Our purpose is to help leadership teams develop that capability alongside their strategy and culture — not as a separate workstream that ends when the consultants leave, but as the way the organization works.
Our promise
Converting complexity into sustainable growth.
Most strategy work creates documents. We create capability. The difference shows up in the third quarter, when the original deck is already stale, and the team has to make the next decision without us in the room.
Twenty-five years of evolution, hundreds of engagements with Global 1000 leadership teams, longstanding programs at Stanford and Tata, and a practitioner network across five continents — all of it points to one promise: when you work with ILG, the next decision is easier than the last.
How we work
Three pathways for organizations that take innovation seriously.
Tailored Strategy & Foresight Workshops
Two-day master classes and multi-week engagements that move teams from foresight to action. Anchored in our method canon — Context Maps, White Spots, Pathfinders — and calibrated to your sector and signals.
Learn more →Company-Specific Training Programs
Bespoke leadership-development programs delivered through your corporate university or in Silicon Valley. We design the curriculum, train your internal facilitators, and embed the rituals so the work continues after we leave.
Learn more →AIM Platform & Continuous Measurement
Our Assessment for Innovation Maturity replaces the annual innovation survey with weekly or monthly pulses across 45 Innovation Levers. You see drift, not just snapshots.
Learn more →Why organisations choose ILG
Five things that make the work stick.
- 01
Twenty-five years at the front of innovation practice
Founded by Dr. Tamara Carleton, who teaches innovation at Stanford and has worked alongside Global 1000 leadership teams since the early 2000s.
- 02
A coaching-based, integrative methodology
We don’t deliver one-off training. Our work is structured as an arc — from signals to strategy to embedded ritual — and we coach the people who will sustain it.
- 03
Tool-driven, not slide-driven
Every engagement leaves teams with hands-on artifacts: filled Context Maps, populated White Spots matrices, and Pathfinder roadmaps that become the working plan.
- 04
Bridging strategic foresight into action
Foresight without action is decoration. Action without foresight is luck. We connect both — and we track the connection on the AIM Platform.
- 05
A woman-owned, minority-owned firm
Headquartered in Silicon Valley, delivered globally through trained partners and facilitators, with longstanding programs at Stanford and the Tata Management Training Center.
Our footprint
Our clients
We work with leaders who refuse to outsource the future.
- ▸Senior executives setting ten-year vision and the roadmap to back it.
- ▸Innovation officers and chief strategy officers running portfolio decisions across horizons.
- ▸High-potential leaders preparing to take on enterprise-scale change.
- ▸Leadership teams in regulated and government sectors balancing mission and modernization.
- ▸Corporate universities and learning teams embedding capability beyond a single cohort.
- ▸Boards and investment committees stress-testing strategy against the next decade.
Meet the founder
Dr. Tamara Carleton
Passionate · Dedicated · Professional
Dr. Tamara Carleton is the founder of Innovation Leadership Group and has spent her career at the intersection of strategic foresight, organizational design, and applied innovation. She teaches at Stanford University across undergraduate, graduate, and executive-education levels.
She has authored field-defining work on innovation methodology, advised Global 1000 leadership teams across five continents, and built ILG’s practitioner network of trained partners and facilitators — a network that today delivers ILG programs from Pune to Cape Town to São Paulo.
Working with leadership teams who want to convert foresight into action — and who refuse to settle for innovation theatre.
In their words
What clients say after the work has shipped.
“Innovation Leadership Group has helped us lay fertile ground for our company’s innovation journey — both in practice and in building strong culture.”
“The methodology from the Innovation Leadership Group team was well defined, covering all major dimensions of foresight.”
“I have unwavering confidence in Tamara Carleton and her team’s ability to train top performers.”
“Dr. Carleton helped us develop solutions and understand the underlying problem effectively.”
The InnSPIRE methodology
A five-step arc, run as a loop.
Scan
Map signals, weak and strong, against the contexts that shape your industry.
Probe
Benchmark against the AIM five circles to surface where you are ready and where you are not.
Imagine
Build long-horizon visions and stress-test them with structured wargaming.
Rank
Prioritize the portfolio across Four Horizons — near-term profit through beyond-imagination experiments.
Embed
Activate culture, governance, and rituals so the capability outlasts any single program.
The method canon
Practitioner tools, ready to run.
AIM Pulse
Continuous measurement of innovation capability via weekly or monthly pulse surveys across 45 Innovation Levers.
perspectiveFive Circles Framework
Evaluate innovation readiness across five interdependent dimensions: business, market, technology, future, and organization.
solutionPathfinders
Strategic project planning tool that models the path from idea to outcome and surfaces decision points early.
opportunityWhite Spots
Identify innovation opportunities by mapping where existing solutions and unmet needs do not overlap.
opportunityContext Maps
Rapid creativity tool for collaborative ideation — surface hidden assumptions and reframe the problem space.
Best solutions
Let’s work on your project together.
It starts with a conversation. We listen, ask, and understand your situation before we recommend a path. No deck, no pre-baked program — just thirty minutes to figure out if working together makes sense.
Book a discovery callFrom the journal
Facilitating growth by unlocking human potential.
Article
Optimizing a Project Path to Success
Most multi-quarter initiatives fail at the third milestone, when the original assumptions stop holding. Pathfinders is the tool for surfacing that earlier.
Read full article →Article
Mapping the Opportunity Space
Competition is crowded where the obvious markets are. White Spots is how you find the markets that have not been mapped yet.
Read full article →Article
Generating New Ideas Together
Most ideation sessions fail not because teams lack creativity, but because they share too narrow a frame. The Context Map is a 60-minute fix.
Read full article →Trusted by leading organisations across five continents
