In this session, Sean will unpack powerful lessons and insights that the team at U+ has learned in the past 14+ years of building and launching 100+ new ventures inside large organizations, while delivering $2B in value for Fortune 2000s.

In today's dynamic market, innovation remains the key to growth and market resilience. However, a staggering 95% of innovations fail. Find out how leading-edge companies leverage AI to unlock a 5x larger venture idea funnel and make 2x more astute choices.

Discover the crucial need to gather a group of initial customers who not only support your product but also become its biggest fans, speeding up the process of finding the right market. Instead of trying to sell, concentrate on finding early users who believe in your idea, giving you important feedback to make sure it's on the right track.

We're launching new products. We've got a governance process. We're trying to disrupt ourselves. But how do we show ROI on innovation? Business plans are guesses, but the CEO isn't going to accept "I don't know" for an answer and the CFO is having a fit. We need to explain how our ideas can produce real returns.

This session is an interactive, live demo going from an idea to a financial or impact model. We'll calculate our odds of success and the probable outcome of the project. Then we'll compare two projects to make a pivot-or-persevere decision. Only then we can justify funding our project (and our innovation department).

In the face of tightening budgets for innovation—highlighted by the recent public news of layoffs at IDEO, cutbacks at Google X, and the closure of Walmart's Store No. 8—there's a palpable shift in how companies approach their innovation strategies.

Amidst an environment of high interest rates and looming recession, the question arises: What are companies prioritizing when it comes to their growth budgets?

It's evident that many large organizations are channeling their investments towards reinforcing their core businesses and enhancing their brand equity, or seizing quick, value-driven opportunities that promise near-term revenue returns.

Growth and Innovation platforms will become normalized with the introduction of AI to accelerate test & learn capabilities. Join this workshop to learn how you can build yours.

Everyone seems to be talking about venture studios. What is a venture studio? Should your company have one?

Come learn from High Alpha Innovation, the leading corporate venture builder, about what a venture studio is, what it is good for, and when venture building makes sense as an alternative or complement to CVC, M&A, partnerships, or traditional accelerator programs.

This session will address hot topics like:
- How to decide whether to build a venture internally or externally
- How to use venture building to unlock more innovation funding
- When to work with an external venture builder versus building alone
- How to recruit world-class founders to run new ventures
- How to get the governance, incentives, and deal structures right to dramatically dial up the success rate of new ventures
- Common failure modes to avoid

In 2023, we began our corporate innovation benchmarking report – FutureFit.

The aim was simple: to conduct the largest-ever study dedicated to understanding what sets the best innovation teams apart from the rest based on insights from diverse geographies, industries and companies and to share the analysis with ambitious changemakers like you.

In this session, we'll give you an in-depth view of how successful innovation teams are run by revealing the latest performance benchmarks, including budget allocation, rewards & compensation, performance metrics and portfolio performance and look at commonalities in the challenges they face, their innovation strategies, top priorities and ways of working.

Join us to be the first in the world to hear and discuss the results, plus get exclusive access to a brilliant lineup of innovation icons taking part in our panel.

By attending, you will find out:

- What percentage of revenues do top-performing companies allocate to their innovation activities?
- How are the world's leading teams recognised and rewarded for their work in building new products and services?
- What significant obstacles have your peers overcome this year, and what do they foresee over the next 12 months?
- What are the key reasons that some companies outperform others when it comes to corporate innovation?
- What KPIs do leading companies use to measure, manage and improve their corporate innovation performance?
- Where are companies focusing their innovation efforts over the next twelve months, and what bets are they making?
- Why do some companies generate higher returns from their innovation investments than others?
- How are companies and teams organising to drive better outcomes, and what methodologies are they relying on?

From external accelerators to internal incubation programs and corporate venture capital funds, companies have invested billions in over-hyped innovation programs that have mostly failed to deliver tangible innovation outcomes.

Now, a new generation of Corporate Venture Building Models is overcoming past mistakes to provide a new set of principles, methodologies, and governance structures that are finally capable of delivering meaningful near-term growth.

This session will take a hard look at what it really takes to build high-impact ventures, addressing some of the most challenging questions innovation leaders face, such as:

- What are the fundamental principles of successful venture building?
- Is it really possible to build new ventures internally?
- What does a successful venture process really look like?
- How are successful ventures funded and governed?

Incorporating the fundamental principles into your growth innovation strategies and answering these questions can dramatically accelerate new ventures development and deliver more meaningful revenue growth.

If you want to move on from endless cycles of experimentation to in-market activations and from “valuable lessons” to tangible growth outcomes, this session is for you.

During this workshop, you will learn about how to establish sustainability as a part of your decision-making processes.

You will learn how companies are performing sustainability assessments throughout the product development lifecycle and how they are using such assessments to make better, more informed product
investment decisions.

You will also learn how they view and report their innovation portfolio from a sustainability perspective to demonstrate and validate alignment with company sustainability goals.

Are you ready to take your innovation to the next level?

U+ Digital Ventures is introducing FifthRow, the cutting-edge GenAI Innovation Operations platform backed by 14 years of expertise. Join us for a demo session, and unlock the potential of FifthRow.

Learn how it revolutionizes the process of research, discovery, validation, and market testing for ventures. With FifthRow, you can identify and test top solutions for any company, in any market, all at a remarkable 10x faster pace—from Intent to Viable New Venture.

There has probably never been a better time to grow.

A world of emerging customer needs, blurred competitive boundaries, and disruptive new technologies have created an abundance of opportunity. But, while 84% of CEOs say that innovation is critical to their growth strategy, only 6% of them are satisfied with their organisation’s innovation performance.

The most common blockers are:
- Speed: There simply aren’t enough resources dedicated to discovering and validating new ventures, products and services.
- Risk: While Design Thinking, Lean Startup and Agile are understood at a theoretical level - corporate muscle memory snaps back to waterfall.
- Complexity: Navigating convoluted internal systems, policies, and procedures hampers would-be changemakers.

Future Foundry solves this by giving big companies a superpower - the ability to accelerate, de-risk and systematise the development of breakthrough products and services using the discovery and validation methods of Silicon Valley.

Over the last three years, we've launched over 100 ventures, unlocked $15bn in growth and generated a 300x ROI for clients like Hilton, Walgreens, Experian, Reckitt and Microsoft. The key to our success is our Velocity™ method that distils decades’ worth of venture building down into a systematic, scalable and repeatable way to identify, validate and scale new ventures.

Join us for this 45 minute Demo Showcase to find out how Future Foundry is powering innovation at the world’s leading companies and helping them to:
- Inject more pace into their innovation efforts through proven 2-week sprints.
- Manage risk by gradually increasing investment and experiment fidelity as evidence strength increases.
- Achieve a 90% hit rate for new propositions versus a current average of just 10%.

Get a peek inside Shift AI by Mach49, a toolset for innovators that accelerates bringing new ventures to market. In this demo, you'll learn how Mach49's time-tested methodologies and strategies are now available at the click of your cursor—and at a fraction of the cost.

See how to zero in on real customer problems, cultivate a culture of innovation, and make smart, data-backed decisions for success that scales.

Too many innovation programs spend time on "sustaining" innovation: incremental "base hit" changes that are insufficient to meet long-term business growth objectives.

Even “big” opportunities aren’t actually big enough. It's time to change the game the innovation team is playing so it can put more points on the board. In this session, you'll learn how Innovation Navigator helps teams:
• Know what to work on by differentiating between what is important and what is not;
• Gain funding approval by building a business case using the built-in financial model that incorporates uncertainty; and
• De-risk projects by running experiments that deliver critical evidence to inform the business case.

How is AI changing the way that we innovate? Will we be doomed to keep track of every new fragmented tool that launches? Will AI actually replace the job of a corporate innovator? How can you use AI to make better decisions?

In this session, you'll find answers to these questions and our view on how AI could be used as an unfair advantage for today's innovators.

With a demonstration of our new Aucctus platform, we'll give you a sneak peak at what we think the future of AI-powered innovation ought to be.

There is relentless demand for innovation in every business. Operationalizing innovation is key to success.

You have heard this many times: The right Enterprise Innovation Management system can revolutionize how your organization innovates, streamline processes, improve collaboration, and maximize ROI. But there is more to the story.

The key to success is not (only) about digitizing your innovation and solving your innovation challenges with a tool. It is about reading into the complexity that comes with it.

In this session we will investigate:
- How to put you in control of your innovation efforts and
- Innovation Management best practices

You will walk away with a fundamental idea of the foundation needed to drive collaboration, build a culture of innovation, and make data-driven decisions.

Get set for a thrilling journey spotlighting the game-changing roles of suppliers, employees, and customers.

Kicking off, we explore the best practices, weaving through legal hurdles to keep innovation and law hand in hand.
→ You will get insights how to collaborate with externals and manage intellectual property and rights.

Next, we leap into methods and tech that erase boundaries, creating a space where ideas and data merge effortlessly within internal teams.
→ You will see how you can seamlessly collaborate centralized, company-wide and autonomous, decentralized in local groups, yet in a very structured and aligned way.

Moving on, customer collaboration takes the stage. We’ll present the boundaries of customer collaboration in terms of complexity of a product or service and the amount of consumers you can potentially involve.
→ You will get an overview on all the possibilities of consumer co-creation, and to what extend you can integrate customers into your innovation processes

And to cap it off, we'll reveal the art of analyzing ideas, concepts, and data from the whole innovation ecosystem without any risks.
→ You will see how you can search and analyze ideas, needs, and comments from the whole ecoystem and still respect the individual IP rights of external parties.