The Innovator’s Advantage is happy to announce that Tanja Yardley has joined its team as an innovation coach, trainer and faculty member. She will help facilitate the Innovator’s Advantage Academy, coach leaders and teams through innovation initiatives, and deliver innovation training programs.
“Tanja’s results-oriented career and her depth of business, leadership and innovation experience bring a unique vantage point to our team,” said Dr. Evans Baiya, The Innovator’s Advantage co-founder. “Her approach to thinking and problem-solving has already been pivotal for our clients.”
Since completing her Physiotherapy degree at the School of Rehabilitation Medicine at Queens University in 1992, Tanja has amassed over 25 years of experience in private sector healthcare leadership. After establishing, growing and selling her chain of rehabilitation clinics, she spent a decade as a Provincial Vice President for Canada’s largest national healthcare company. Tanja orchestrated strategy and operations across more than 50 interdisciplinary sites while coaching and developing leaders and teams across multiple market segments. Her efforts resulted in the most rapid growth of any single province, more than doubling the size of her segment through targeted market share growth and acquisitions. During this time, she devoted herself to understanding social sciences, neuroscience and leadership theory, becoming a graduate of The Complete Leader Program and The Innovator’s Advantage Academy and eventually a faculty member for both programs.
In addition to extensive experience with start-ups, business development, growth strategy, and acquisitions, her 2018 appointment as a National Healthcare Innovation Lead positioned her in the emerging science and technology space. Here she was able to focus on demographic and market trends and illuminate future-facing opportunities. She currently works in Canada’s western health-technology hub, bringing ideas to life through collaborations with tech inventors, the healthcare businesses who bring these innovations to the real-world environment, the researchers performing clinical trials and the patients whose lives are impacted.
“Teaching innovation brings me such joy! I feel like an ‘idea farmer,’ helping people figure out how to bring a simple thought along the full innovation process—feeding, watering, tweaking, repositioning, bringing it into the light—until they have something of value to harvest,” said Tanja.
The Innovator’s Advantage is an innovation ecosystem, comprised of training, education, coaching, tools, and resources that help companies innovate and create more value. Using a six-stage process, The Innovator’s Advantage Faculty helps leaders and their teams identify, define, develop, verify, commercialize, and scale their ideas. To learn more, visit www.theinnovatorsadvantage.com. | Header photo by Bram Naus via Unsplash.
