Dr David Kennedy

Board & Senior Management

David is an R&D, Innovation and Sustainability leader with over 20 years of experience developing and delivering growth-enabling strategies for some of the world’s most successful healthcare, home care and personal care brands.

Sector and Service Expertise

David brings extensive experience in the delivery of innovation and sustainability strategies, from building and leading global teams, to structuring organisations and operating models. His expertise spans all verticals of R&D, from front-end innovation, technology strategy and open innovation to new product development, project management and launch, through to portfolio management and product optimisation.

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Strengths and Career Achievements

David is Director of Client Delivery at Skarbek Associates. Prior to this, he led R&D for SC Johnson Lifestyle Brands in Europe. Here, he was responsible for R&D and innovation, developing and managing the pipeline and ensuring consistent delivery of innovation to the market. He was accountable for the Sustainability strategy on category-leading brands, such as Ecover and method. David was a member of the European Leadership Team that managed all strategic and tactical decisions of the business and delivered consistent double-digit growth.

Previously, David held senior roles at Reckitt where he developed breakthrough innovation and technology strategies for their consumer healthcare brands and most notably, established and ran the Global Open Innovation function. Over the course of 4 years, David established the team, built the capabilities, the operating model and the metrics, making OI a fully functional core capability of the business.

Prior to Reckitt he held R&D roles at Kimberly-Clark and Akzo Nobel. David holds a Ph.D. in Biophysical Chemistry and a degree in Chemistry.

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Our client’s key stakeholder quoted that the lean and agile innovation set-up Skarbek has created in partnership with them is driving “disproportionate impact vs. the size of the investment”. It got the full blessing of our client CEO and Chairman of the Board and is being scaled across all of its global brands.
Tanguy Pellen
Partner at Skarbek