1 Harnessing the Elusive Expertise of Big Picture Thinkers Robin Adams 1 , Candee Krautkramer 2 1 Purdue University, School of Engineering Education 2 Kimberly-Clark Corporation, Corporate Research and Engineering Abstract Many businesses place a high priority on harnessing local expertise, in part due to concerns about the loss of expertise due to retirement. Expertise comes in many forms from specialized technical knowledge to more elusive forms of knowledge such as capabilities associated with driving breakthrough innova- tions. This research project is a university-business collaboration to support growing breakthrough talent and succession planning of retiring experts in Kimberly-Clark Corporation (Kimberly-Clark), a Fortune 500 Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) multi-national company. We hypothesize that big picture thinking (BPT) is part of an ability to drive a breakthrough mindset for realizing innovations that can redefine the consumer experience, reimagine commercialization pathways, and revolutionize business success and growth. We further hypothesize that BPT can be studied, charac- terized, and developed as a form of expertise: by articulating BPT competencies we can enable their de- velopment at Kimberly-Clark. This project involved three research phases integrating qualitative and quantitative methods to identify: characteristics of BPT to substantiate track records and guide succession training, BPT indicators to iden- tify emerging and expert BPTs, and contextual features that could nurture, promote, and enable BPT. Research outcomes summarize five BPT themes, prevalence and inter-relationships across themes, and quantitative analyses of BPT clusters to identify indicators that differentiate clusters. BPT themes include: Making connections to create new possibilities, Formulating problems for holistic beneficial impact, Organizational literacy to enable change, Painting the picture to help others see the potential for impact, and Open and flexible learner. In this paper we describe this project, present research outcomes, and discuss theoretical and practical implications for making visible an “elusive” form of expertise – big picture thinking. Theoretical impli- cations emphasize how study outcomes align with existing literature and reveal two aspects of BPT not well understood (e.g., organizational literacy and painting the picture), as well as insights into methodol- ogies for harnessing an elusive form of breakthrough expertise. Practical implications emphasize the importance of language in operationalizing a form of expertise central to business success, and translating study outcomes into recommendations for enabling early, middle and late-career BPT talent development. Keywords Big Picture Thinkers, Knowledge Elicitation, Innovation, Expertise Indicators, Professional Deve- lopment, University-Business Collaboration