About me

MY BACKGROUND

My name is Kevin Holt. I am a strategic planning consultant, innovation consultant, and meeting facilitator based in Phoenix, Arizona. I founded and am the sole employee of Co.Innovation Consulting. I’ve built a network of complementary providers that I can call on when needed.

I do face-to-face and online strategy consulting, innovation labs, and meeting facilitation. If that strikes you as an odd combination, consider 1) that strategies often require innovative solutions, 2) that superior strategies and solutions are produced by teams, and 3) that teams do the best job of thinking together when they are facilitated.

I started the company in 2001 to realize the idea of using processes, platforms, and people to enable a team-size group to do a better job of thinking together—in other words, to be better at collaborative innovation. See the Facilitation page for more.

Prior to forming the company, I held officer-level real estate (development & acquisition) and consulting positions in the hotel industry, including a seat on the executive committee of a national hotel chain.

I’m a voracious reader. (A bookaholic is another way to put it.) I’ve built a 2,000-book library that contains large collections on strategy, creativity, innovation, design thinking, customer research, meeting methods, group dynamics, groupware, collaboration, collective intelligence, and cognitive science.

I received a BS degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an MBA from Arizona State University.

MY COMPANY

Co.Innovation is short for Collaborative Innovation.

Collaborative innovation is about working together to generate and implement creative ideas. When done right, a group is able to generate ideas that none of the group members previously possessed or could have come to on their own. (That's a sentence worth reading twice.)

Collaborative innovation is needed now more than ever because:

  • Global competition and rapid advances in technology require ever-more sophisticated strategies and solutions. 

  • Problems have become so complex that no one person has the skills to solve them.

The byline Collaborate > Innovate > Compete is an abbreviated way of saying that collaboration drives innovation and innovation drives the superior strategies and solutions that are required to compete (or operate) effectively.

The logo is an abstract depiction of two people thinking together by iteratively stimulating each other’s thoughts. As the old saying goes, “Two heads are better than one,” and as the newer version puts it, “Nobody is as smart as everybody.”

Perhaps it's time you get serious about putting collaborative innovation to work for you.

MY EXPERIENCE

I’ve done a multitude of meetings and workshops throughout the United State and in London, Geneva, Singapore, and Delhi as well as online. Clients include commercial, government, and nonprofit organizations. Representative clients are:

  • Avnet

  • Best Western International

  • Burba Hotel Network

  • CGG Geoscience

  • ComRent International

  • Cornell University

  • Derive Systems

  • Florida Solar Energy Center

  • KEO Marketing

  • MeetingNews Magazine

  • MONY Realty Capital

  • National Golf Course Owners Assn.

  • Pyramid Hotel Group

  • St. Vincent de Paul

  • Synthetic Resources

  • United States Forest Service

“Differentiation Strategy: Winning Customers by Being Different should be required reading for every board and leadership team. Kevin’s explanation of the principles and practice of differentiation is extraordinary.”

G. Peter Bidstrup, Founder & Emeritus CEO of Doubletree Hotels

MY BOOK

Routledge published my book Differentiation Strategy: Winning Customers by Being Different in June 2022. Following is the publisher’s description of it.

“This comprehensive and richly illustrated book explains how to create a differentiation strategy—a strategy for being different in a way that causes customers to prefer your products and services to those of your competitors. Filled with frameworks, tools, and templates, this book will enable you to create a compelling answer to the question: Why should I buy from you instead of your competitors? What makes you different? The first half of the book provides an in-depth analysis of the concepts and principles that underlie the practice of differentiation, including the meaning of competitive advantage, competitive strategy, and customer-perceived value. The second half of the book explains how to create a differentiation strategy by identifying the target of your strategy, using customer research and creative problem-solving to design a unique offering, devising a value proposition that emphasizes a key benefit and the reasons to believe you will deliver the benefit, and designing the activity system that will implement your differentiation strategy.”

At the same time, I launched a ten-hour e-learning course that serves as a field guide to the book. Included with the course are a software tool for creating a strategy canvas, facilitator’s toolkits, and customer interview templates.

You can find more information on the Strategy page.