Agile Giants: Lessons from Corporate Innovators

Steve Blank & Alexander Osterwalder are world famous entrepreneurs and authors whose work in many ways launched the Lean Startup movement. We had a great conversation at CSL's Corporate Entrepreneurship Forum. We are in the process of sharing all of the videos from this year's Forum on the 2020 Forum Website . But I also wanted to share a few highlights here on Agile Giants.

If you live in Pennsylvania or one of the surrounding six states, you've likely pulled into a Sheetz Gas Station not to get gas, but to order & eat food.  That's right high-quality quick serve food customized to your preferences. Sheetz pioneered this "made to order" quick-serve style food in a gas station. On this week's episode of Agile Giants Mary Beth Green shares her experiences building a te...

I'm sure you are familiar with Johnson & Johnson, but do you know their innovation strategy? On this episode we're joined by 2 Corporate Innovators within J&J Michal Preminger and Stephen Pitt to discuss their innovation strategy.

After transitioning from an entrepreneur to CVC at Intel Capital, Pradeep spent the last two years setting up and leading National Grid's CVC group. We talk about both his experiences launching a new corporate fund in the energy space as well as his experiences and lessons from a career at the storied Intel Capital. We also talk about how CVC needs to react during this Covid crises.

Joseph's papers have been some of the most interesting academic research on corporate venture capital in recent years. We do (eventually) get to this at the second half of the podcast, but honestly I could have talked to him for hours and kept going down fascinating tangents around how innovation really works in the early part of the episode. Each of these topics could have been their own podcast....

Wil Morgan has been an investment manager, entrepreneur and venture capitalist. Now he has a fascinating role inside Jaguar Land Rover around corporate innovation. We have an awesome conversation to start Season 3 of Agile Giants, both focusing on his current work at JLR as well as lessons across his career for traditional and corporate entrepreneurs. One of the things I really appreciated about o...

On the last episode of Season 2, we do another Q&A episode - focusing on specific questions you the audience have for me.    The questions fell into four categories: There were a lot of questions about this unprecedented time we're living in, and especially how it relates to the overall economy, companies commitment to innovation, and to education.  I also got a few questions on one of the CSL, th...

When you think about "academic thought leadership" in entrepreneurship, Yale Hochberg is at the top of most lists. For me, as a VC, she is best known for her work on the Seed Accelerator Rankings. But as you'll hear on this week's episode of Agile Giants - Yael has done a ton of interesting work around innovation and entrepreneurship including recently starting a firm focused on corporate innovati...

Friend & collaborator Laurie Barkman comes back as the first repeat guest on Agile Giants.  Since our first recording, she has launched a consulting firm (SmallDotBig), launched a podcast and returned the Tepper classroom as an instructor.  We have a great conversation on growth and innovation especially in times of transition.  Laurie's LinkedIn SmallDotBig website Succession Stories webpage Link...

As a special episode this week, we're broadcasting the full audio of our annual CSL Demo Day. If you would prefer to watch the video, you can see the full video of Demo Day on the Corporate Startup Lab site .  You can also learn more about the project course there. 

In the last few years, companies have made huge investments in digital transformation. Companies need to leverage these investments to unlock business model transformation. One of the most common business models that we see is this platform model. My guest this week, Alex Moazed, the founder and CEO of Applico wrote the definitive book on platform businesses, "Modern Monopolies". And now his firm...

Frontier tech - emerging technologies such as robotics, computer vision and machine learning - are transforming so many of our industries. Established companies need to understand and figure out the right way to react.  On this episode of Agile Giants, I sit down with Vin Tang, the Co-Founder of Samsung's Q Fund. The fund's tagline is: "we're more CVPR, less CES."  Referencing the annual research...

Most people probably know Vanguard as the firm that you can buy index and mutual funds from. They were the first investment group to offer index funds to individual investors. On this week's episode, we look at how they are continuing to innovate. Warren leads a group that is doing both inside-out and outside-in innovation. It's a great conversation, three things I encourage you to specifically fo...

Optum is probably the largest software company that you've never heard of. It does over $100 billion a year in revenue, but is part of United Healthcare Group. United is one of the six largest companies in the United States and the largest health insurance company in the US. On this week's episode of Agile Giants, I'm joined by Paul Nielsen from Optum. Paul has had a storied career as an entrepren...

One of the thing's I've observed over and over again from the best corporate innovation leaders is how data can be fuel for their innovation programs. On this episode of Agile Giants, I bring on a true academic thought leader on this issue - Rebecca Nugent. Rebecca is a chaired professor in statistics and data science at CMU. She's built some really amazing programs both at the undergrad and gradu...

About 18 months ago, Bill Pescatello returned to corporate venture after a stint in a traditional VC fund (Lightbank). Evolv is a $100 million firm created in partnership with Kraft Heinz. Bill already had CVC experience as he started his career post business school working at NBC's Corporate Venture group. We talked on the episode about why Bill decided to return to CVC and how Evolv Ventures is...

We are continuing our conversation for another week on Corporate Venture Capital (CVC). This time returning to academia and having a conversation with Professor Song Ma from Yale. He has written three papers that influenced my thinking significantly. We talk about each in this week's episode.  You can follow the links to all three from Professor Ma's Faculty page and also encourage you to follow h...

This week our conversation continues to focus on corporate venture capital. However, we go from Harvard Business School to a "serial CVC" as Matt has been at 3 different corporate venture groups — Comcast, Cisco and now Citi Ventures.  Matt has a great perspective from all three of those experiences and we also talk about specific things unique to the approach Citi Ventures takes given reporting s...

Professor Josh Lerner is an academic giant. His 2013 article in HBR on Corporate Venturing is constantly being referenced in conversations as companies explore setting up their own Corporate Venture Capital group. He also has written a number of best selling books, which we reference on today's episode and talk about the impact for each of you as corporate innovators. I think this week's conversat...

I'm excited to start a second season of Agile Giants with my friend Matt Fleckenstein. Matt has been a VC, traditional entrepreneur and corporate entrepreneur inside Microsoft and Salesforce.  Matt & I talk about his observations generally across those experiences as well as his current role where he really leads innovation across an interesting portfolio of Microsoft Products including IoT, mixed...

Dave & I have known each other for a long time. We first got to know each other through his involvement helping lead a Cincinnatti based startup accelerator, The Brandery. More recently, Dave came out with a book a couple of years ago called Predicting the Turn. There's a ton I enjoyed about this week's episode, but actually probably the thing I enjoyed the most was the detour we took into corpora...

Rita McGrath is a legend in the field of corporate innovation. She developed the methodology used by so many companies today "Discovery Driven Planning" and has written numerous best-selling books.  She recently had a new book come out " Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen"   On this episode, we talk about her new book as well as observations on how...

On this week's episode, I respond to a question I'm getting more and more from you on social media & via email is: How does each of these different techniques highlighted in Agile Giants fit into a company's overall growth strategy?  (Or if not that exact question a version of it)  I try to provide some context in this quick episode, but the biggest point is there are synergies across these tactic...

After helping start Comcast Ventures, Rich left with 2 other partners to start Touchdown Ventures.   On this week's episode, we have a great conversation about his perspective on CVC as well as unpacking the model that Touchdown Ventures is pioneering.   I've asked you for feedback on email, Twitter, LinkedIn & Instagram about the kind of content you're looking for.   I remain interested in that f...

After 8-years, working in various roles across the organization, three years ago Keith Berry founded the Moody's Analytics Accelerator at the directive of the Board. This is a group inside Moody's focused on launching innovative products typically via a partnership with a FinTech startup.  As many of you are thinking through how to set up your own innovation lab or accelerator, there are a ton of...