Helene Cahen

Founder and Principal Consultant; Strategic Insights

Bio

Helene Cahen helps companies address their innovation challenges. As an experienced Innovation Consultant with over 20 years of insight, she focuses on working with organizations to create best practices for developing innovative products/services and building effective teams. She has a proven record of guiding organizations toward user-centered innovation, helping them discover solutions that address their evolving needs and support change.

Ms. Cahen has received accolades for her valuable assistance to Fortune 500 companies, small businesses, and non-profits. She has been a lecturer, coach and facilitator for the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business where she taught innovation principles and is currently a coach for the Haas Executive Program.

Ms. Cahen’s previous experience includes managing multi-million-dollar marketing research budgets for The Clorox Company and directing agency advertising campaigns for Unilever, Nestle and Kraft Foods in France. She has held executive and management positions in advertising, marketing research, HR, finance, and sales as well as VP of Innovation for an online start up.

Born and raised in Paris, France, she graduated with a business degree from elite Sciences-Po Paris and earned a Master’s of Sciences degree in Creativity and Change Leadership from the State University of New York.

She is often a speaker on the topic of Design Thinking and Creativity at conferences such as American Creativity Association, Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI), Creativity Expert Exchange, and the Design Thinking Unconference.

Driven by her personal interest in education and growth, she was instrumental in co-creating a TEDx youth event and is on the advisory board of CodeChix, a non-profit focused on helping the retention of women engineers.