Agile Giants: Lessons from Corporate Innovators

David is probably best known as the co-author of Testing Business Ideas which he co-authored with Alexander Osterwalder. However, he’s had an incredible impact on innovation both at startups and large companies. He helped GE develop their infamous FastWorks program in partnership with Eric Ries. He also coached emerging product teams at Adobe and even helped Toyota apply the Lean Startup practices to their innovation groups. Before his transition into consulting, David spent over 10 years of his career at technology startups, and he stays connected to the startup scene today through his work at several Silicon Valley accelerators.

Show Links

• Precoil (David’s consulting firm)
• Testing Business Ideas (Amazon)
• David’s Twitter Account
• David’s Instagram Account

There may be no more important topic in 2021 to innovation leaders than how to think about managing and organizing your team.

On this week's episode of Agile Giants, I sit down with Stefano Mastrogiacomo to talk about his new book High-Impact Tools for Teams.

Show Links:

• High Impact Tools for Teams (Amazon)
• Stefano on Twitter
• Team Alignment website

How do you truly operationalize a mandate to become more innovative? There are plenty of resources that talk about the importance of innovation, but over the year's I've really grown to appreciate author & innovation consultant Tendayi Viki's pragmatic advice.

On this week's episode, we talk about his work and walk through companies at different points in their innovation evolution and Tendayi offers practical advice he'd offer their leadership teams.

How do you apply the lean startup methodology to the military? Well, that's the subject of this week's episode of Agile Giants. Pete Newell, whose name may sound familiar because Steve Blank mentioned him at the Corporate Entrepreneurship Forum as the co-author of his upcoming book, Innovation Doctrine.

Pete is the CEO of BMNT Inc., a Silicon Valley based innovation consultancy and early stage tech accelerator. He's a retired US Army colonel and the former director of the US Army Rapid Equipping Force. You'll hear on this week's episode a little bit about what Pete's been doing both with BMNT and in the classroom with Steve Blank. And again, just like we did on Steve's episode, teasing this book coming out that I know so many of you are excited about, Innovation Doctrine.

Tim Murphy leads the One SRC Services group within Philips Sleep and Respiratory Care. He joined our Forum to discuss his experience with data based corporate startups and more generally business model transformation.

As mentioned last week, 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.

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 team and putting an innovation process that is working to re-invent the category again.

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. I hope to have Joseph back on Agile Giants again soon.