Krista Nelson
Krista started at Children’s Mercy Hospital in March of 2015 as Director of Innovation Development. In this role she leads the development of the Hospital’s Innovation Strategy and serves as the convener for innovation throughout the organization. Krista advances innovation initiatives through the CMH innovation life cycle phases (initiation, incubation, pilot, operational, evaluation, scale) including the oversight of the innovations performance based on predetermined outcome and success metrics at each phase in the cycle. She also acts as an innovation agent to set the direction for new initiatives while collaborating with innovators and key stakeholders throughout the innovation life cycle. Krista fosters an innovation culture throughout the organization in alignment with the Hospital’s Strategic Plan and carries out activities that build a culture of innovation.
Krista most recently spent 3 ½ years at Hallmark Cards, Inc. in Kansas City as an Innovation Leader. In this role she provided strategic direction in the front end of product development creating and providing insights for consumer, trends, marketplace, industry, and capabilities. She developed strategic migration road maps to set product direction and future state and facilitated ideation, product opportunity, business model elaboration efforts based on these maps. Krista led a key initiative called Learning Forward that focused on defining key assumptions, prototyping, and testing and iterating the solution by executing learn plans, all leading to new product and service revenue opportunities. Krista also led a 3 month deep dive into defining discontinuities (mega-trends) that brought clarity to industry and marketplace disruptors coming in the next 3-5 years to help drive strategic direction and focus.
Prior to this, Krista spent nearly 20 years developing new products, services and software solutions in the Financial Industry.
Krista is a graduate of the University of Kansas with a B.S. in Business Administration.