Tony Morgan

Profile

Tony is an Associate Professor in Innovation Management at Leeds University Business School. He joined the University in 2019 following a successful career in technology and innovation at IBM and a highly successful three-year Visiting Professorship sponsored by the Royal Academy of Engineering at the University of Leeds.

Tony is an inspiring educator who takes a practical hands-on approach to teaching and learning, including a focus on experiential learning.

He developed and teaches the flagship "LUBS3990 Innovation Thinking and Practice" module, where students from multiple Schools and Faculties develop key innovation and employability skills with extensive input from external partners and experts from industry. In addition, Tony co-developed and teaches the "LUBS5980M Innovation Management in Practice" MSc and “LUB5723M Creative and Innovative Thinking and Practice MBA modules and is one of the academic leads for the University's "Innovation Management: Winning in the Age of Disruption" online continued professional development course.

Additional focus areas include connecting industry and academia and executive education.

During his IBM career, Tony’s roles included Global Technology Services Chief Innovation Officer for the UK & Ireland, Value Creation Centre Innovation Leader and Client Chief Architect. He also led the creation and delivery of training for teaching innovation management to experienced IBM technical and business professionals and innovation and project related skills to early career professionals as part of the IBM Digital Skills Academy. Tony led training sessions across Europe, in North America and in China.

Focus areas included creative problem solving, commercial awareness, collaboration, communication and story-telling skills and the delivery of short sharp client innovation projects where early career professionals were given the opportunity to use technology to address real world innovation problems in multiple industries.

Tony is the author of the book “Collaborative Innovation: How Clients and Service Providers Can Work by Design to Achieve It” and co-author of the student textbook “Design Thinking for Student Projects” which has been adopted by a number of universities. He is one of the founders of the University of Leeds’ design thinking community of practice and has provided input and case studies into the University’s strategic experiential learning and enterprise workstreams.

Research interests

Tony’s research interests include innovation management, design thinking, employability skills and interdisciplinary and team-based learning.

Current research projects include:

• The ‘I-DE-ES LITE’ fellowship project, which includes a focus on interdiscipiinary and team-based learning.. Find out more details here: https://teachingexcellence.leeds.ac.uk/i-de-es-project/
• The ‘Design Thinking for Higher Education (DT4HE) project, a collaborative project between the University of Leeds, University of Manchester and Lancaster University exploring how design thinking can be applied in higher education, including use of Advance HE’s Professional Skills Framework. Find out more details here: https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/membership/collaborative-development-fund-2023-24/design-thinking-4-higher-education-dt4he

Research groups and institutes

• Centre for Technology Innovation and Engagement