ELFA Innovation Lab: A new experience that delivers

In mid-September, I attended the inaugural ELFA Innovation Lab in Denver. While I had been a regular attendee at its predecessor, the ELFA Operations and Technology Conference, I was eager to experience this new iteration. There was a great sense of energy and enthusiasm across all three days of the event. I don’t know if it reflected the positive business conditions or simply the excitement of the new format but attendees seemed light on their feet and genuinely engaged in their conversations.

Overall, I left Denver impressed—not only with the quality of the innovation insights and fresh content, but also with the tangible steps taken to truly deliver on the “Innovation Lab” experience.

Reflecting on my experience during the flight back to Minneapolis, I was quick to identify three key changes created by the Innovation Committee and adopted by the ELFA that made this conference true to its name: the progression of keynote speakers and their themes, a variety of new attendee participation tools, and the Innovation Excellence award – both its design and the award.

The Innovation Lab experience kicked off with a keynote by Safi Bahcall—physicist, award-winning entrepreneur, and public company founder/CEO. As the author of Loonshots, Bahcall connected innovation and strategy in the context of market disruption, with or without new technology. His message set the tone for the conference: technology is important, but it isn’t the only way to create innovative change.

My biggest takeaway from Bahcall’s talk was the critical role of experimentation within a culture free of fear-of-failure. That mindset is second nature in many product development teams, but it remains rare in operational cultures, especially in equipment finance, where spreadsheets often dominate decision-making. Because Bahcall had personally delivered innovation for growth, his teachings were both pragmatic and verified by results.

On Day Two, the lens shifted to data and analytics, which are critical in understanding how to design experiments as Bahcall advised. Economist Tim Mahedy leaned into what he called “boring FED data,” but delivered a surprisingly entertaining and deeply interesting analysis of the somewhat unique characteristics and drivers of today’s economic environment. His analysis created an understanding of the environment that is critical to gaining the confidence to try new things and charge forward.

Charging forward was the assignment for the closing keynote speaker, Charles Clark. A former U.S. Olympic sprinter, Clark faced unexpected challenges and uncertainty throughout his career, yet persevered to become one of the ten fastest men in the world. Clark’s message is designed to help leaders and individual contributors alike put down “the victim mentality” and focus on “winning.” His story reminded attendees that innovation, like sprinting, is about pushing through the adversity of uncertainty and keeping your eyes on the finish line. In closing the experience, Clark brought the conference full circle around resilience, experimentation, and momentum. Experimenting the way Bahcall describes it is hard, and Clark helped give the audience the confidence to take those chances and win. Innovation is both personal and organization. I felt the ELFA Innovation Lab keynote series told that story.

My second takeaway was how the ELFA team enhanced participation by embracing new participation technology. The conference team hired renowned photographer Aaron Huey, known for his work with National Geographic and TED, who has created the Facely app. The app allowed participants to quickly and easily find themselves within the photos Huey took at the conference—an inventive way to blend creativity, technology, and engagement. What struck me most, though, was learning in conversation with Huey that he had written the app himself. It was a reminder that innovation often comes from multi-talented individuals who see a need and create the solution.

Similarly, Beckham Thomas, ELFA Innovation committee member and a key contributor in planning the Innovation Lab experience, wrote a new app for event that uses an LLM to enable attendees to query and analyze the transcripts of a recorded session. The interface quickly answers questions like “What were the most important points of this talk?” Beckham’s app addresses one the more frustrating experiences I have had when attending a well-designed conference with a wealth of interesting content—“you can’t be in two places at once.” AI can’t do time travel yet, but it works very well with FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).

But I think the biggest proof point of the new Innovation Lab experience was the Excellence in Innovation award itself. The audience was provided two great examples of innovation - real innovations, not just technology hype as sometimes is the case—presented exceptionally well by both finalists—Cisco Capital and Fleet Advantage. Cisco Capital demonstrated an openness to rethinking the traditional way of doing business; they experimented with new workflow behaviors using Gen AI tools to reduce mundane credit reporting and better leverage the time, judgement, and expertise of their underwriting staff. They also showcased fantastic results and outstanding team engagement with new AI solutions designed to improve overall business speed and productivity.

Fleet Advantage leveraged their deep customer empathy to focus their innovation muscle on customer behaviors. The great thing about the Fleet project is that it showed innovation doesn’t always require new technology. Instead, the team identified a pain point their customers disliked—in this case, end-of-lease challenges—and found a way to eliminate that friction to create stronger engagement. Fleet’s impact is already evident across the transportation market, where more customers are shifting behavior by choosing to lease rather than buy using a new product offering—enable customers to do things differently for their own benefit. Fleet demonstrated how a legacy player can leverage customer empathy and expertise to make meaningful changes to customer experience and as a result the business grows.

Attendees were asked to vote on the winner. ELFA was taking a risk by trusting the audience to select the most innovative contestant, although with such deserving finalists it wasn’t too much of a risk. I would have been equally pleased to see either one take home the win. Cisco showed innovative, rapid adoption of new AI technology and Fleet Showed broad customer-based impact with careful workflow re-construction. A mobile engagement App and QR codes again made audience participation fluid and we chose a winner: Fleet Advantage.

If you skipped the ELFA Innovation Lab thinking it would be more of the same, you may be second-guessing that decision. From both a construction and content standpoint, I found it to be one of the strongest conferences I’ve attended. I’m already looking forward to applying what I learned—and one day, I hope to be on stage alongside innovative leaders like Fleet and Cisco.