Alexander Manu

Alexander Manu is a strategic innovation practitioner, international lecturer, and author. He is a Senior Partner at Equilibrant, a boutique consultancy that provides strategic counsel and future-based advisory to executive teams in Fortune 500 companies across industries as diverse as consumer packaged goods, media, logistics, advertising, communications, and manufacturing. He is a professor at OCAD University in Toronto and, since 2007, has served on the Schulich Executive Education Centre (SEEC) faculty at the Schulich School of Business. In 2018, he became the Global Innovation Steward at Holofy, a video-powered sales engagement tool. Between 2007 and 2019, Alexander was an Adjunct Professor at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, where he introduced Innovation, Foresight, and Business Design into the MBA curricula.

In his client and research work, Alexander transforms organizations by integrating disruption into everyday business, defining new competitive spaces, developing strategic business competencies, and creating imaginative innovation methods. He believes exploring possibilities requires imagination as a prerequisite for strategic change and innovation. Over the past three decades, he has enabled global companies such as Motorola, LEGO, Whirlpool, Nokia, Navteq, and Unilever to develop policies and strategies that address emerging issues through strategic foresight and pre-competitive business models.

Alexander Manu was the Founder (2005) and Director of the Beal Centre for Strategic Creativity, a non-profit research think tank in Toronto. There, he developed methodologies in strategic foresight focused on the intersection of behaviour, technology, and business capability.

Author of Transcending Imagination: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Creativity, released by CRC Press/Taylor & Francis on April 19, 2024, Alexander Manu is also the author of The Philosophy of Disruption, 2022, Dynamic Future-Proofing: Integrating Disruption in Everyday Business, 2021, Transforming Organizations for the Subscription Economy, 2017, Value Creation and the Internet of Things, 2015, Behaviour Space: Play, Pleasure and Discovery as a Model for Business Value, 2012, Disruptive Business, 2010, Everything 2.0: Redesign your Business Through Foresight and Brand Innovation, 2008, The Imagination Challenge: Strategic Foresight and Innovation for the Global Economy, 2006, ToolToys: Tools with an Element of Play, 1995, and The Big Idea of Design, 1998, as well as numerous articles published in national and international periodicals. Emerald Publishing Group will release his forthcoming book, “The Disruption Continuum - Reinventing People and Purpose in an Era of Constant Change” on September 3, 2025.

Alexander Manu has been an international lecturer of exceptional and sustained impact, having delivered over 600 keynote lectures in 27 countries. A past president of the Association of Chartered Industrial Designers of Ontario, he was twice elected to the board of the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID). He has served on advisory boards at government levels in Canada and Asia, including for the Department of Canadian Heritage, the China External Trade Development Council, the Taiwan Design Centre, and the Korea Institute of Design Promotion.
He is a founding member of Design for the World (Barcelona), an international NGO dedicated to humanitarian design. He has also been a guest lecturer at over 45 distinguished post-secondary institutions worldwide. In 1994, he was elected to the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in recognition of his contribution to the development of design and visual arts in Canada.