Our stories
A surprisingly wide range of expertise and experience has fed the KILN System. Meet our principals:
Gregg Fraley
is a serial entrepreneur and international expert in creative problem solving providing consultancy to Fortune 500 corporations. A keynote speaker on company innovation and commercial creativity, Gregg’s business novel Jack’s Notebook features on reading lists from University of California Berkeley’s MBA to Judge Business School and City University in the UK. Always a pioneer, his Emmy-award winning team at Warner Cable’s QUBE earned a cable ACE Award for innovation. As board member for the Creative Problem Solving Institute (CPSI) in the USA from 2003-2007 when he moved to Britain, Gregg has trained scores of professionals in Creative Problem Solving (CPS) using the Osborn-Parnes model. He continues this work through KILN, a firm he co-founded in 2010 to create IdeaKeg, a unique subscription service for company teams to generate breakthrough thinking. As a consultant to corporations, his projects span culture assessment, ideation and qualitative research, as well as training scores of professionals in Creative Problem Solving (CPS), idea generation, creative selling and team building.
Gregg’s creative streak extends into the arts. He’s an illustrator, one-time professional photographer and his top-selling business book takes the form of a novel: Jack’s Notebook rightly earns its place on many MBA syllabuses. As an improvisational actor, Gregg cracked comedy’s toughest city, Chicago, where he performed with Players Workshop of Second City and with Improv Olympics.
An intelligent, fun keynote speaker, it’s no wonder Gregg’s TED talk at TEDxNASA in late 2009 has attracted several thousand YouTube hits. Innovation Excellence named Gregg one of the Top 40 Innovation Bloggers in 2012.
Indy Neogy MBA FRSA
For the past decade, Indy has been preoccupied with the problems culture poses for businesses. At KILN, Indy plays a pivotal role curating IdeaKeg and formulating a sustainable team process for FuseTrail that can work across cultural settings.
Indy’s book When Culture Matters:A 55-Minute Guide to better cross-cultural communication was published in mid 2012.
Indy heads the culture and innovation practice at Throughline. He is qualified to consult on culture using the Hofstede© Model and using Sense-Maker™ to capture weak signals within company cultures.
From 2005-2009, Indy independently consulted on cross-tribal communications in financial services, professional services and other sectors. As a Centre for Innovations in Health Management associate, Indy investigated and published on management paradigms in health services across Europe.
A decade earlier, Indy was an aerospace engineer working spacecraft landing gear at MIT…while earning a combined degree in Engineering and Film. Flash forward to 2000, and Indy was a live action photographer pioneering SLR solutions for real-time 360-degree capture of human movement…in between stints in the dugout documenting FA Cup matches.
By 2002, Indy had become a technologist in a groundbreaking internet media streaming company. The buzz of the start-up, the grind of the fast-growing business and the convulsions of corporate acquisition made for a rich mix. Determined to focus on business, Indy took an MBA at University of Leeds in 2005. His was the flat everyone visited.
Kate Hammer PhD FRSA
These days, Kate is a commercial storyteller. Kate’s future-tense short stories feature in KILN’s team process FuseTrail. Also, Kate has been instrumental in constructing KILN’s brand ethos, material presence and pricing.
Two decades ago, Kate studied Semiotics at Brown University and acting at the elite NYU Graduate Acting Program (where movie star Billy Crudup was Hamlet to her Ophelia). Later Kate completed a fully funded PhD on the intersection of theatre and anthropology. Hers was the first doctorate granted by Roehampton University’s now world-class postgraduate research programme in theatre and performance studies. Besides publishing in all the expected places, Kate also wrote a biography for kids on rock legend Tina Turner.
Kate’s interest in multiculturalism led her into international social marketing with global leader PSI. As a manager of cross-border teams, she helped launched Cuba’s first-ever commercially branded condom and win EU funds to create an HIV Voluntary Counselling and Testing (VCT) centre in Namibia that has now gone nationwide.
Her move into the commercial world came in 2000, when Kate joined start-up technology company Legion – now the standard in pedestrian simulation for large environments. In the early day, Legion was a brand-new category that needed validation, a story and heroic early adopters. Building Legion’s market presence led Kate into commercial storytelling. Since then, she has advised and captured stories from a gamut of companies: blue-chip corporations, mature technology ventures and rough upstarts.