Bernard C. Kümmerli

Bernard C. Kümmerli is a former Senior Partner in Innosight’s European offices. He has worked with global clients to design strategies for enduring growth, build innovation capabilities, and put in place VC like governance system to make dual transformation happen. He has helped his clients around the world implementing breakthrough innovation techniques such as growth opportunity discovery tools, jobs-to-be-done research methodologies, and emergent strategy development processes. He is an expert in driving highly complex projects where many functions, regions, stakeholders with different cultural background and mindsets, and decision makers are involved. Bernard is a strong believer in the power of connecting rigorous analysis and strategy execution with discovery skills of associating, questioning, observing, experimenting, and networking.

Bernard writes on leadership topics including most recently co-authoring the new Harvard Business Review article “Unite Your Senior Team.”

Bernard has been leading Innosight internal initiatives in the area of organizational design and best-in-class governance systems. He has also designed and implemented a unique “boot camp” approach that has been successfully applied by clients around the globe, an immersive team experience to drive impact through transformative innovation in an entrepreneurial setting, grounded in early alignment with top management and best-in-class expertise.

Prior to Innosight, he spent more than 10 years at Bain & Company where he was a Partner. There he worked with global organizations as well as leading private equity and venture capital firms on strategy development and implementation, change management, vision design, new product development, and M&A. After Bain, Bernard founded Spider, a consulting and investment firm specializing in innovation and growth management. There he worked closely with creative agencies and industrial design firms such as Lunar Design and Young & Rubicam from the WPP group.

Bernard regularly acts as an advisor and member of global innovation councils with top executives at large corporations to assure the successful de-risking and scaling of transformative and disruptive business models as integrative part of ambitious growth strategies.

Bernard received his Bachelor’s Degree in fine arts (industrial design) from California College of the Arts in San Francisco and his Master’s Degree in Economics with distinction from the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). Bernard speaks fluently German, French, and English and lives with his wife and three children in the French part of Switzerland.