From six years spent at Starbucks to designing a new countertop coffeemaker that cranks out cold brew, Mesh Gelman has been working at the cutting edge of coffee. During his time at Starbucks, he witnessed the rising popularity of cold beverages, a trend that his new startup, Cumulus Coffee Company, aims to capitalize on. In this podcast episode, we talk with Gelman about coffee trends; developing a new product from scratch; the difference between big organizations and start-ups; and his past work as an innovation consultant ..read more

In this episode, we catch up with Geoffrey Moore, the best-selling author, consultant, and venture capitalist whose groundbreaking work has shaped how we think about innovation strategy. If you’ve ever talked about a technology "crossing the chasm" from the realm of early adopters into the early majority, or your company has put a high potential project into the incubation zone, you’ve been using language given to us by Moore. His best-selling books including Zone to Win, Inside the Tornado, and Crossing the Chasm — and lately, he’s been publishing a series of insightful LinkedIn articles on t ..read more

In this episode, we talk about the challenges of innovating in biopharma with a veteran of that industry, Dan Seewald. Seewald is the former Head of Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer, the $100 billion pharma giant headquartered in Manhattan, and now the founder and CEO of the consulting and training firm Deliberate Innovation. Among the questions that InnoLead CEO Scott Kirsner covers with Seewald: How do you create space for new ideas in a regulated industry? What's your advice on exploring the potential of AI?  How do you effectively communicate an internal innovation initiative? How do y ..read more

Who’s leading the charge on generative AI in big organizations? How are they managing the tension between moving quickly and not making major missteps? And what use cases are they moving forward with?  In this episode, we dive into the rapidly-evolving world of generative AI with Paul Baier, the CEO and co-founder of GAI Insights.  Baier talks about the vendor landscape and shares several examples of first-mover companies, including McDonald's and Walmart, that are making strides in deploying generative AI. You can subscribe to our podcast, “Innovation Answered,” on Spotify, iTunes ..read more

"For too long," says Todd Dunn, "many organizations have not developed innovation as a strategic and ongoing source of competitive advantage. Instead, some organizations have used it for reputational points in the public eye, but not to deliver measurable value to consumers, customers and the company." That's a big problem, argues Dunn, who was most recently the Vice President of Enterprise Innovation at Advocate Health. Advocate is headquartered in Charlotte, NC, and it’s the fifth biggest nonprofit health system in the US.  In this episode, we talk with Dunn about what went wrong i ..read more

Design thinking is a well-known concept in the innovation sphere — it often comes up in conversation, at conferences, or in passing. But for as much as people talk about design thinking, not everyone understands its full scope — and even fewer people use it in their day-to-day work. To help bridge the gaps, we created this "beginner's guide" podcast. For this episode, we wanted to ask some basic questions about what design thinking is, how non-experts can get up to speed, the challenges experts have seen when introducing it to others, and how it can help come to viable solutions. We chatted wi ..read more

This bonus episode of "Innovation Answered" features Matt Baker, Head of Corporate Strategy at Dell Technologies. AI has generated so much interest with the release of ChatGPT; the announcements from Google, Baidu, Microsoft, and Alibaba about chatbots and generative AI; and increased adoption of art-focused AI platforms like DALL-E and Midjourney. So we decided to explore the basics and background of the technology — and what happens next. This episode focuses on what AI is; generative AI; how it could affect jobs going forward; and how large companies' adoption of AI may create competitive a ..read more

In this episode, we’ll dive into four questions: what is an innovation space? What are the pros and cons of physical versus virtual spaces, what are the qualities great spaces possess... and what common mistakes do people make in setting them up and running them. For expert perspective, we consult Michelle Cohen of CME Group, Andy Miller of AARP, and Michael Cross of Entergy. Our "beginner's guide" podcast episodes take on important topics at the 101 level, without jargon or complexity, assuming that you may be new to the job of making innovation and change happen inside a big organization. We ..read more

In our Persistent Innovators miniseries, InnoLead and Wade Roush explored the cultures of four large companies that have pushed the innovation envelope for decades: Disney, Apple, Lego, and Novartis. But who else deserves recognition? From making pizza ever more convenient at Domino's, to finding new markets at FujiFilm, we dissect the practices and strategies at six more persistently-innovative companies, with input from guests like Bill Taylor, Braden Kelley, and Rita McGrath. Special thanks to our friends at PatSnap and Innovation Academy for sponsoring this miniseries ..read more

How do big companies stay innovative across many decades, and in different industries? That’s been the driving question of our Persistent Innovators miniseries. In the fourth and final episode we turn to company in a very different kind of business: discovering and developing new drugs. And we focus on the global pharmaceutical giant Novartis, formed in 1996 from the merger of the venerable Swiss companies Sandoz and CIBA-Geigy. At its Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, opened in 2002, Novartis invented a new style of biology-centric drug discovery that has changed practices across t ..read more