About Us
SkyLift Innovations is not just a strategy and design consultancy – we aid businesses in realizing impact for humanity, using design, serious creativity, targeted research efforts, and even invention, rapid prototyping and change management approaches. We also help realize internal impact via risk assessments and recommendations in culture, policy, and your future. We can also assist with brand, marketing, and aesthetic endeavors. We’re right there with you as you drive sky bound, just as a good co-pilot should be. Our goal is your success, and together we can climb!
SkyLift Innovations, LLC was founded by Keith Gordon in 2017 after realizing these and other incredible parallels between aviation, science, design and running a profitable business. The good news is the parallels run much deeper!
For example, once in motion, a business is susceptible to market forces, much like an aircraft is susceptible to physical forces. We realize a business is very much like an aircraft in flight – to ascend it must achieve LIFT by creating THRUST to overcome its DRAG and WEIGHT! How much lift are your generating and what is causing you drag? Can you change your weight or thrust characteristics? We also realize that an aircraft at rest achieves nothing, much like a business that is locked into by its own status quo. We understand that often times flight path changes must be made “in-flight,” and they take precious time.
SkyLift helps businesses identify and overcome their business inertia, decrease their institutional, operational and parasitic drag to attain sufficient and efficient thrust from their value propositions. This approach will help you obtain Skybound LIFT in order to achieve your goals and create IMPACT (radically optimized usefulness, per unit time).
Creating sufficient “Thrust for Lift” is one-half of the equation, yet designing strategies and actions for true “Impact through Innovations” allows businesses to really soar, glide and maneuver freely! Our goal is to help you realize truly creative innovations. We don’t use that word lightly. (See our Blog post on this topic).
SkyLift Innovations is built to help you advance your business model and create regenerative growth that sustains – in the shortest time possible, whether the goal is evolutionary or revolutionary innovation – we address holistic business challenges and vexing problems for our clients.
Keith H. Gordon - Innovator, Designer, Owner & CEO, SkyLift Innovations, LLC.
Keith is an entrepreneur, business and service designer, photographer, storyteller and retired Naval Officer who hails originally from central NJ, where he began a journey that led him through Annapolis and the US Naval Academy at the impetuous age of 17. Following graduation, Keith cut his teeth as a naval aviator, world traveler, and amateur photographer and after 20+ years of faithful service on his 42nd birthday at the rank of Commander, he honorably retired from the US military ... where his story began anew.
Inspired design has always been a passion and a forte. Keith is great with coming up with useful and tractable ideas. Keith created new concepts for Naval Aviation and US Navy leadership at the intersection of people, policy and future technology for over 20 years, and following an MBA and a MA in Design, he created new business concepts as Director of Strategy and Innovation for an up and coming R & D firm, where gained the insight and foresight for SkyLift Innovations, LLC.
Whether a risk-mitigated strategy for a Navy special project, a future-based wargame to test a think-tank theory, a cutting-edge tactic for fellow pilots, or a new business model for profit, Keith designed and influenced everything from safety systems and user interfaces for air operations to tactics in combat zones. He’s even designed and generated new and successful business models for startup CEO's. He became sought after for his unique project and creative expertise at every turn, where he exceeded expectations with clear, technically sound designs that ensured the Navy and his clients remained relevant far into the future.
After 25 years since USNA graduation, 20 years as a Naval Officer, 15 years in the cockpit, 10 years on sea-duty, 5 selections to the USN's highest level think-tank (and 5 graduate degrees, plus 5 years as a Director of Strategy and Innovation), Keith realized ONE radically optimized human perspective; human comes first, especially if inventions are to become innovations where they must first be scalable and adopted. If this is true, why not design innovations from scratch with users and humanity in mind! No radical strategy or concept survives first contact with the culture - and culture is uniquely human owned. A strategy for innovation must account for humans at every step, plus both the internal and external environmental challenges that pose great risk to new concepts. Design of this sort takes nerve, foresight, calculated iteration, and insight to administer real change for impact and adoption! Keith knows how true innovations are achieved and brings his theory and design background to clients through SkyLift Innovations!
His passion for true innovations incorporates human-centered design as one critical element; for human-factors must be baked in, not bolted on! This is even true for the most troubling of national security problems. Keith is skilled at research and the early technical, design and step—jump level of iterative thinking required to reach impact sooner. Keith has a keen eye, highly tuned listening skills, a creative intellect. Coupled with expertise in ethnographic, cultural and market assessments, and with both engineering and human-factors sensitivities - he's your man for the job.
Keith is now consulting, speaking and designing – with a focus on innovative approaches for businesses who navigate the complex and vexing landscapes of innovation. Design is more art than science, and his passion for aviation, photography and invention inspires and feeds his soul! Because human inspiration and impact is valued by SkyLift Innovations – in his spare time – Keith can be seen with family and friends, or with his dogs, his camera or his community.
