Boris is an expert and tireless evangelist of corporate Innovation Management, Knowledge Management, Social Media and Collaboration. Based on a core belief that companies can harness the untapped potential of the collective intelligence (from customers, suppliers, employees and more) available to them to drive significant new sources of organic growth and value for themselves – Boris has spent more than 10 years working with senior level executives at predominately large companies to teach them how to take advantage of that potential to drive a sustainable process to come up with numerous new products and business models, novel cost reductions, and step-change process improvements.
The author of numerous articles and research reports, as well as a seasoned speaker – Boris has frequently demonstrated a unique insight and vision into corporate processes that is backed up with the experience of working with the senior leadership of over 100 companies – and is often in high-demand by companies looking to exploit that vision to start up or re-invigorate corporate innovation processes to drive the achievement of strategic business goals.
Born a British citizen in Portugal and educated both in the US and in the UK, Boris has a BSc from Imperial College, London and an MBA from the Cass School of Business in London.
Boris Pluskowski is most recently known as the former Head of Professional Services and Implementation at Imaginatik, the leading “collaborative problem solving” software company that provides innovation and idea management solutions to many of the world’s biggest companies including one in five of the Fortune 500.
Boris first joined Imaginatik in 1997 at a time when Imaginatik was primarily focusing on Knowledge Management consulting services. A shared business school professor put Boris and Imaginatik’s CEO together as both were working on similar projects. During the year or so that they then worked together, Imaginatik conducted some groundbreaking work, primarily for IBM, around a process called Active Knowledge. When Imaginatik then started getting into software in 1998, Boris left to further his career in the consulting arena and joined PricewaterhouseCooper’s (PwC) Strategic Management Consulting practice based in London.
At PwC, Boris was an instrumental part of the firm’s post-merger Global Knowledge Management (KM) team tasked with devising and implementing a world-class KM system for one of the world’s most knowledge intensive companies. PwC then moved Boris to Boston, MA in the US where he took on a client facing role in the company’s IT & Strategy practice working with numerous world class companies to help them harness, measure, and exploit the intellectual capital available to them using the latest technological tools.
Imaginatik in the meantime had both grown and then shrunk again as CEO Mark Turrell put it on hold for a few years as he too moved to the US, San Francisco, and started up a new venture called Idea Dollar – the first forays into the discipline that is now idea management. In 2001, Mark decided to reawaken Imaginatik, and moved the company from London, England to Boston, MA. Shortly after the move, Boris left PwC and decided to rejoin Imaginatik and help them develop this new software concept that would later revolutionize the corporate world and kick start the current market for innovation tools and processes.
With Boris in charge of Marketing, Mark in charge of Sales, and Mark’s future wife Yvonne in charge of development, Imaginatik had its restart in an attic in a remote suburb in the outskirts of Boston. Since those early days in 2001, Imaginatik has steadily grown at breakneck speed, growing to a 40 person international company listed on the London Stock Exchange’s AIM market, and producing multi-million dollar revenues. During this time Imaginatik not only created and led a nascent new market for idea, and then later innovation management – but was continuously innovating around the way a business should be run for a company their size – always focusing on how to deliver value both to clients, and to shareholders. Imaginatik’s clients were, and are still, the world’s leaders in innovation including companies such as Whirlpool, Chevron, Pfizer, Hewlett-Packard, Capital One, and IBM to name but a few – most choosing to work with Imaginatik for the company’s reputation for thought leadership, and their ability to provide crucial advice on how to structure a world-class innovation process combined with a comprehensive software tool to support that process.
In 2007, with the company growing even further, Boris decided to step out of the Marketing role and took over the Professional Services and Implementation leadership role at Imaginatik – going back to his true expertise in the thought leadership and consulting arena. Boris led the restructuring of the Professional Services team instituting a new client engagement process that helped to ensure that companies investing in Imaginatik were able to achieve, on average, a 10x return on their investment with Imaginatik.
Boris finally left Imaginatik at the end of 2008 to pursue a long-time goal of a prolonged personal trip to explore Australia and New Zealand as well as seek out further professional growth, and, now back in Boston, MA Boris is available as a consultant, advisor and mentor to innovation executives whilst he finds his next permanent role.
A consummate team player both at work and at play, Boris still plays his main sporting love, rugby (although at ‘Veteran’s” level only nowadays), is a consummate global traveller fascinated with the world’s cultures, and a self-confessed experience junkie looking for new things to try out.
You can reach Boris here.
