Innov8rs Learning Lab on Strategy, Leadership, Governance & Portfolio Management, 11-13 October 2022

Sometimes innovation portfolios can be perceived as theoretical and feel more like an academic exercise than an executable plan. In this session, learn how to move your innovation portfolio from theory to practice.

We’ll cover 7 tactics you can take away to kickstart your portfolio including:
– Just getting started
– Establishing the right cadence
– Reporting wins, barriers and decisions needed
– Standardizing reporting and data collection
– Developing decision criteria
– Funding phases and what that means
– Making room for refactoring

As an innovation consultant for dozens of billion-dollar companies, an innovation researcher for MIT and the innovation lead for Mark Cuban Companies, Rachel saw the same repeated challenges. The innovation field was set up for failure. She knew something needed to change. After more than 15 years of testing methodologies and processes to improve innovation outcomes, Rachel founded Productable, a SaaS startup enabling innovation at scale.

Alceo and Misha will introduce key concepts around growth strategy and portfolio management based on their extensive and practical experience. In this session they will introduce key concepts around the topics on how to fund and make decisions on portfolio level and manage it properly.

Misha de Sterke is a creative entrepreneur and venture builder for Fortune 100 companies, as well as a two-times awarded author and senior partner at Innoleaps. Misha’s focus lies on helping clients protect, grow or transform their business. Combining a strategic perspective with a pragmatic and effective style of implementation where Strategy = Execution. Alceo Rapagna is Senior Partner and CEO of Innoleaps Group – the innovation company active in startup acceleration and open innovation services with Startupbootcamp, in corporate innovation and venture building with Innoleaps and in digital talent recruiting and secondment with The Talent Institute. Alceo was formerly Chief Digital Officer of OTB Group (1.5B€ fashion group with brands as Diesel, Marni, Maison Margiela), Chief Digital Officer of RCS Mediagroup (1.2B€ publisher with titles as Corriere della Sera, Gazzetta dello Sport, El Mundo, Marca) and Senior Partner at McKinsey & Company (European lead Marketing & Sales and Consumer Practices). An active angel investor, Alceo is cofounder and equity partner of the venture club Moffu Labs (40+ investments, including the fintech unicorn TrueLayer).

Most people shove their mistakes under the rug, where in fact they hold key lessons for the future and can avoid bad investments. In this talk, Leonard will share my biggest personal regrets in managing a portfolio of 23 startups. And you know what’s the most interesting part? Every innovation leader makes at least one them! Join me for an honest conversation with inspiring cases and learn how you can improve your Portfolio Management skills.

Since 2016, Leonard Bukenya has been a Partner at Amsterdam-based corporate innovation studio Amsterdam, helping clients develop new business models and innovation strategies. Leonard started his corporate innovation career in 2007 at KPN, The Netherlands’ largest telco, where he founded the corporate startup ‘Olllo’. After that he headed the business development team and innovation lab at Sanoma Media Group. Next to his role at Aimforthemoon, Leonard is a Supervisory Board Member at the Dutch Aids Fund.

There are top-down and bottom-up innovation efforts but those of us tasked with innovation know success in matrixed organizations also depends on how far our influence extends out beyond our direct circle. Do we get business units on board so they receive new ideas? What about finance, so they don’t oppose and resist ideas when they get involved down the line? Or scarce IT resources? Learn how to connect people to the mission, outside your span of influence, and create Catalysts who unfreeze the middle. Catalysts don’t have a formal innovation role or report to you – they may head business units, work in legal, finance, IT, dev ops, product management, and more. Their support of your efforts is essential and how you unfreeze the middle, just like rock salt melts a sheet of ice, so you can bring ideas all the way to market.

Gretchen spent 15 years as a partner in consulting firms helping Fortune 500 clients find new billion-dollar opportunities to connect with their customers. She was invited to teach MBA students and executives at a top b-school as Executive Director of Innovation and never looked back. As the Founder of DTLiveLAB, she created a “learn-by-doing” approach that combines engagement rewards, live interviews, real-world examples, and a live coached sprint. Employees emerge with vocabulary, a deeper understanding of the big picture, and excitement about how they can support organizational transformation in a way training can’t, helping clients become customer-obsessed organizations at a rapid pace.

There is no denying that the way teams work has changed. With digital at the forefront, the structures behind the scenes must also adapt. Designing a corporate strategy to incubate the next generation of leaders and ideas will help your organisation combat the uncertainty of the future and instil a digital product mindset to thrive.

In this session, we discuss pragmatic solutions to bring back to your organization like:

– Turning silos into multidisciplinary teams
– Trading command and control for autonomy
– Replacing waterfall with an agile mindset

Solange Sobral currently leads CI&T operations in EMEA, promoting innovation and digital transformation for large organizations. In addition, Solange leads the company’s global ESG committee and supports the creation of humanized and inclusive management programs. She is a passionate proponent of Diversity and Inclusion in the workplace and is dedicated to illustrating both the cultural and business value of an inclusive workplace. Solange is an independent board member of Unidas, a car rental company in Brazil, and of VIVO, a Brazilian Telecom company. Solange is a volunteer consultant for the DEI Committee at Itaú, the largest bank in Latin America.

Eva is the founder of the Global Women leadership Academy, a number 1 international and best-selling author, international speaker, executive leader in Fortune 500 Company and business owner to empower women to skyrocket their lives.

Marco has more than 20 years of professional experience in various roles in strategy, marketing, sales, IT and transformation. He obtained a Master in Business Administration at INSEAD and a postgraduate degree at London Business School. Throughout his career he concentrated increasingly on translating strategy into execution and driving transformation. Currently he is leading ING’s strategy and transformation to become a scalable digital bank that delivers a superior customer experience and connects to other platforms in the ecosystem. In addition to his work at ING, he is closely associated with London Business School as a lecturer on strategy, digital transformation and agility and involved with several Start-ups and Charities.

Are you charged with driving innovation inside a mature company, but your leadership team is well,…not that innovative? This is a common but delicate situation. Let’s face it, the skills that got your leaders to the top are not the ones they need to avoid disruption today. In this engaging talk, Suzan Briganti, CEO of Swarm Vision, will share how Swarm introduces leadership teams to the whole new operating system of the innovation age. How Swarm enables leadership teams to recognize, model and reward the innovation behaviors that drive innovation….while maintaining their existing leadership strengths.

Suzan grew up in Silicon Valley. During her early career, Suzan played a key role in many industry firsts, from the first internet-enabled consumer electronics, to the first female sexual desire drug. Suzan has founded three successful start-ups, an eponymous fashion brand; Totem, the innovation consultancy, and now Swarm Vision. Swarm is the innovation system that drives rapid innovation results in large enterprises with the workforce you already have. Suzan has several issued patents, and won HR Tech Product of the Year for the Swarm Innovation Profiler. She represents the United States on ISO 56,00, Innovation Management standards.

Studies have shown that – over a long horizon – ‘serial business builders’ create higher Total Shareholder Return than companies who aim at growing via M&A or companies who aim growing organically but do not put business building in a top spot… But building new businesses in a corporate is not easy. Only 3 percent of corporate startups create a new business with more than USD 50m annual revenue. The Lean Scaleup is a Best Practice framework for corporate entrepreneurship, co-created by 20+ leading companies and business schools. In this session we dive deeper into the points that the company’s leadership needs to focus on to beat the odds.

Frank Mattes is an expert in corporate business-building, advisor to Corporate Innovation and Corporate Venturing, and author of two books on corporate business building. In the last four years, Frank focused on the corporate business-building problem: why do large companies struggle dramatically in building new businesses from innovation – and how can they improve? Together with 20+ industry leaders from many sectors, Frank co-created the Lean Scaleup™ framework. This framework comprises Best Practices in how to create new sizable, profitable businesses The Lean Scaleup is the latest addition to the corporate entrepreneurship toolbox. It takes the Lean Startup into the corporate context, extends it to an end-to end journey from idea to scale and comprises the Best Practices from some of the world’s finest companies. To help corporate innovation practitioners improve in business-building, Frank founded the consulting agency Lean Scaleup and published the book with the same name in May 2021. The book was co-written with two dozens of corporate practitioners and two leading business schools, UC Berkeley and the London Business School. Please find more on the book and the Lean Scaleup framework at www.leanscaleup.com/book Before Lean Scaleup, Frank founded innovation-3, a consulting agency specialized in non-incremental innovation), was with the Boston Consulting Group and Member of the Board of a B2B scaleup. Frank holds two M.Sc. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Southern California, Los Angeles and Ulm University (Germany).

Many corporate executive boards do not have a Chief Innovation Officer, as part of the board. Despite highly engaged executives, that knows the value of innovation, they fail in engaging the middelmannagers. This leads to a gab between the aspiration for Innovation and the execution.

Those responsible for the execution, on the other hand, they are often excluded from the executive’s budget discussion. So let say the budget for next year states that new innovation will contribute to the toppling for next year with a 10% of the current top-line, but the “now” is a black box not connected with the real status of the innovation project or their ability to impact the toppling. Innovation projects, as we know, do not always follows excel projections.

In this session, we will discuss how companies can connect innovation to the strategy and the budget process in a better way and how they can connect the middel managers, in a higher degree, to the innovation effort.

Morten has +25 years experience as an entrepreneur and management consultant. As a practices lead for Strategy and Innovation he has worked in multiple industries helping large corporations with strengthening their innovation efforts. Morten has advised many executives boards on setting the aspiration for Innovation and creating innovation strategy and road maps. Hen also helps them with helping large organisations building their digital infrastructure for innovation to connect, ideate and incubate.

We’ve worked closely with and studied hundreds of companies, and the evidence is clear: top performers organize innovation in a decentralized manner. In this session, we’ll explain why that is the case and how these top innovators operate in order to help you get started on your path towards your organization becoming a more successful innovator.

Jesse is the Co-founder and Chief Growth Officer at Viima, the most widely used and highest rated innovation management software in the world. He’s passionate about helping leaders drive innovation in their organizations and has been recognized as one of the leading thinkers on innovation.