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4 min read
How Orbia hit 75% engagement and a 1.25-person NHS team built an innovation culture, and why RBI redesigned a program that scored 9.3/10.
Program Management
Leadership
Intrapreneurship
Culture & Capabilities
Careers
Ideation
Talent & Teams
5 min read
At Orbia, the employees behind the ideas present to the CEO, keep the credit and front every new campaign. Engagement sits at 75%, against a benchmark of about 30%.
At Clatterbridge Cancer Centre, staff had good ideas but didn’t see themselves as innovators. With no project budget, the innovation team set out to change that, giving staff an ideas hub, 30-minute “Time to Think” slots and a faster route through governance.
Skills & Personal Development
3 min read
RBI’s Innovation School won an award and drew more than 260 applications for 80 places. The team put it through its own design thinking process anyway, and changed four things.
When a leader’s words tell employees that innovation belongs to someone else, their ideas stay hidden. Linda Hill shares why that happens and four moves that bring every employee in.
Patrycja on keeping 80 initiatives funded through repeated cuts, David on finding growth in a $5B portfolio, and Noel on why “on hold” is the worst place for a pilot.
Stakeholder Alignment & Engagement
Governance
Strategy
Portfolio Management
10 min read
Tenneco, Bard and Carrier show what it takes to get people and money behind the strategy leadership signed off on.
Incubation
Metrics & Accounting
A $5 billion division discovered its existing portfolio already held enough potential value to meet its growth goals. Seeing it took four steps: cut what blocked bigger opportunities, size each project, sort it by prize and odds, and move money as the evidence changed.
AI Transformation
Patrycja Anna Jakubiuk runs about 80 innovation initiatives, most of them AI applications for drug development. She shares four ways she keeps them funded when finance asks for new savings several times a year.
What Bosch promised its board instead of revenue. Plus: how JLR, Old Mutual and PwC set up ventures to last.
Corporate Venture Capital
Venture Building
Ecosystem Engagement
Technology Trends
Startup Collaboration
Foresight
Organization & Structure
8 min read
Bosch’s venture unit creates startups to explore markets the company has yet to enter. It builds them on unused patents and places them in separate companies outside the corporation, run by outside founders and venture studios.
Scaling
Only 22% of venture building programs give founders equity. At JLR, Old Mutual and PwC, founders get a stake — while every venture starts life as its own company.
Units that last don’t try to remove their internal tensions. Seven years of research with more than 100 corporate venture leaders shows the routines they use to manage those tensions instead.
CIBC’s innovation team now reports its refusals next to its demos. Plus Sun Life, Philips and Lufthansa on getting AI into real work with a known toolkit: start small, test fast, and prove the business value.
9 min read
Sun Life’s global innovation team didn’t try to bring AI to all of claims at once. It picked one task, gave it to leaders with the authority to decide on the spot, and tested every choice against client impact, technical feasibility, and business value.
At Philips, AI can cut a seven-months decision on a new value proposition to about a day. To get business units to adopt the tools, the central team first connected the data and showed each unit its savings in euros.
Lufthansa Group leaders kept running into the same three AI problems: work that colleagues had to redo, teams that stopped asking why, and pilots running in parallel across units. The Lufthansa Innovation Hub trains leaders to fix all three, starting with their own beliefs about AI.
At CIBC, Camilo Gonzalez Barrero’s enterprise innovation team treats saying no as core work. The team records its refusals and reports them alongside its demos and patents.
How Synthomer, ILUNION Hotels and Experian reworked theirs when it stopped fitting the business context.
Synthomer's central innovation team lost its pipeline, its agenda, and the divisions' trust. David Ring redefined its role around one rule: only do what makes each division more successful than it would be alone.
6 min read
ILUNION Hotels has run innovation through three operating models in 12 years. Each one delivered, then hit its limit: first capacity, then reach. The third is now running into a question of control.
Experian kept governance light so its tiger teams could move fast. The overhead moved instead to unclear expectations, duplicate AI stacks and a six-week wait for funding.
Deliver on the roadmap, and ask what's missing from it.
Paqui Lizana scanned the innovation roadmaps of Europe's 20 most innovative companies. Every roadmap pointed inward. Here are the three questions she says are missing.
Clarify what's out of scope, design the portfolio first, make foresight a habit, roll out AI around a real job, and replace the big pitch with small commitments.
