Mitchell Lewis Ditkoff is the co-founder and President of Idea Champions, a leading edge management consulting and training company. He specializes in leading highly engaging creative thinking and collaboration sessions that enable individuals, teams and entire organizations to develop new products, services, and breakthrough ways of doing business. Educated at Lafayette College and Brown University. Since 1986 Mr. Ditkoff has been working with a wide variety of Fortune 500 and mid-sized companies who have recognized the need to do something different in order to succeed in today's rapidly changing marketplace. These clients include: GE, Merck, Allianz, Lucent, NBC Universal, AT&T, Goodyear, Pfizer, A&E Television Networks, General Mills, MTV Networks, Duke Corporate Education, Infosys, Ernst & Young, Moen, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. At the heart of his work lies the fundamental belief that a company's most important capital asset is the collective brain power, creativity and commitment of its work force and that this asset can be significantly leveraged when people are provided with the appropriate setting, systems, tools and techniques to think (and act) out of the box. Prior to his work with Idea Champions, Mr. Ditkoff was a principal in Ki Learning Systems and a Senior Consultant with the Inner Game Corporation - both organizational development firms dedicated to catalyzing superior performance in the workplace. In addition to his consulting work, Mr. Ditkoff is also an accomplished public speaker and writer. Author of Banking on Innovation, Free the Genie, It's AHAppening! and co-author of Ingenuity Bank, the next generation in idea management software, Mr. Ditkoff has appeared on numerous radio and television talk shows. Additionally, he is a poet and founder of Face the Music, the world's only interactive business blues band. He lives in Woodstock, New York, with his artist wife, Evelyne, and their two children, Jesse (12) and Emilia (9).