The answer is a third way: systematically generate volume, measure ruthlessly, and concentrate resources on the ventures that earn it.

This session with Ben Yoskovitz walks you through a practical framework for building and pruning an innovation portfolio — from why you need more bets than you think, to how to identify your winners early, to what it actually takes to double down and win.

Startups don’t get their model right first time — they test, learn, and iterate. Your innovation team should work the same way. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll use the Innovation Team Model Canvas to map your team’s operating model, expose untested assumptions, and pressure-test whether your activities, resources, and partnerships add up within your budget.

You’ll leave with a first-draft canvas and a concrete next step to test your biggest uncertainty within two weeks.

In this session, Nair will dissect the phenomenon he calls AI-Obsession —the mind’s unhealthy over-reliance on artificial intelligence—and its dangerous side effect: cognitive atrophy. He invites you to bypass both AI-fear and AI-dependence, instead cultivating the capacity to be Insight-powered and AI-enabled.

Join the session to get Mohan’s actionable strategies to strengthen human resilience, elevate problem-solving capacity, and stay Unreachable—not in the sense of isolation, but in achieving a depth of thought and creativity that AI alone cannot replicate.

Join this session for a fireside chat with Elliot, and discover why the incentives, governance, and time horizons required for world-changing inventions are precisely what large organizations are engineered to destroy. Learn the structural reasons your innovation efforts fail and the one critical shift corporations can make to build the future. Hint: it’s more about accessing the atomic unit of innovation than trying to create it inside.

1 – Internal mis-alignment — key stakeholders don’t know what to expect, or worse yet, hate what’s coming their way.
2 – Choosing the wrong partnership practice for your organization’s needs- corporate incubators won’t maximize learning, POCs won’t maximize visibility, etc.
3 – Misunderstanding crucial tactical and operational distinctions for corporate partnership.

Besides exploring these common issues, three members are invited to jump on the hotseat and bring their open innovation question/challenge , to get direct guidance from Diana (and all three selected members will receive a copy of the new book Open Innovation Works).

If you’d like to be one of three members working directly with Diana, email community@innov8rs.co with your open innovation question/challenge.

This session with Microsoft’s Taylor Black introduces ideaflow—the organizational throughput of ideas from generation through testing to strategic routing—as the framework that separates AI-accelerated innovation from AI-accelerated noise. Drawing from venture studio practice across seven institutional contexts, we’ll examine why orchestration, not just generation, is now the competitive surface, and why human judgment at the routing layer is the capability most organizations are failing to invest in.

You will learn a practical framework for organizational ideaflow so that you can use AI to accelerate innovation without outsourcing the judgment that matters most.

Three takeaways:
– When generation is free, the bottleneck moves to curation and routing—and most organizations haven’t moved with it
– Agent sprawl is idea sprawl at machine speed: the same structural failure, compounding faster
– Taste—knowing what’s good, what’s ready, and where it belongs—is the durable competitive advantage in an AI-native innovation portfolio.

In this session, Jennifer and Jessica from Tech It Forward- an Israel-based open innovation and technology scouting company- share practical lessons from ten years operating on the ground in Israel with global corporates across industries.

They explore what makes the Israeli ecosystem fundamentally different, why traditional open-innovation approaches often fall short, and which organizational enablers are required to move at ecosystem speed.

Moving beyond average performance is not a strategy problem. It is a leadership capability problem. In this session, Misha de Sterke, author of the new book ‘The Death of Average – How Leaders Drive 10xGrowth’, will confront what actually holds innovation back inside large organizations. Because 10x growth doesn’t come from better processes.

It comes from leaders who are willing to make bold choices, empower real ownership, create learning cultures, demand accountability—and, most importantly, challenge themselves.

Most organizations optimize stability. But innovation demands something far more uncomfortable. It demands leaders who are willing to embrace uncertainty, tension, and responsibility—rather than manage them away.

So the real question is:
Are you here to improve the system…
or to fundamentally challenge it?

This session will challenge how you think about growth, leadership, and your own role in making it happen.