Agile Giants: Lessons from Corporate Innovators

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 our conversation was focused on making connections (both internally and externally) Wil was across the innovation ecosystem for Jaguar Land Rover.

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:

1. 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. 
2. I also got a few questions on one of the CSL, the Corporate Startup Lab tools, the Option-Gate.
3. Next, not surprising, given the focus on corporate venture this season, I did have some questions around that as a strategy and how companies should think about CVC.
4. And then the last topic was actually a personal one, but a number of you asked, about my professional plans between now and the start of season 3.  I'll talk about some of my plans at the end of this episode, if that's interesting to you.

Show Links: 

• CSL CVC Sentiment Research
• HBR: Roaring Out of Recession

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 innovation. It was a highlight to have her join me on Agile Giants

Show Links: 

• Yael's Personal Homepage
• Yael's Consulting Firm: Flywheel Innovation
• Yael's Twitter
• Yael's Rice Website
• Seed Accelerator Rankings website

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
LinkedIn Succession Stories Podcast Community
Mission statement generator

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 operationalizes these insights inside incumbent businesses.

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 event, the Conference Of Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition versus the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas.

This is clearly a different type of venture fund, but there are a lot of lessons for other corporate venture investors. 

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 focus on as you listen:

1. The way they approach startups and how they think about those collaborations.
2. The synergies experienced between outside-in and inside-out.
3. How they think about talent and mindset.

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 entrepreneur and now has brought that mindset to Optum and United Healthcare. He's really a change agent internally and helping the company rediscover their entrepreneurial vision.

We've worked together on a number of projects (including the Optum Startup Studio we chat about on the episode). While I knew a lot about Paul and his role, it was a fun conversation about enabling change and driving innovation.

Show Links:

• Optum Startup Studio
• Paul's LinkedIn Page

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 graduate level around data science and really across the entire university. She also has partnered with me on some interesting executive education programs. As you listen to this week's episode, let me challenge you to think about how data can be fuel for your innovation programs.

Show Links:

Integrated Statistics Learning Environment

Rebecca's Faculty Page