Innovation Storytellers

Well-established companies are born out of innovation, and will continue to thrive with innovation. But why do big companies sometimes struggle to innovate and break new boundaries? 

This week on Innovation Storytellers we have Tendayi Viki, Author of Pirates In The Navy and Associate Partner at Strategyzer. In this episode, he shares the factors that make innovation work, what it takes to get people to rally behind an idea, and the important role of corporate intrapreneurs in the pursuit of innovation. He also talks about creating business models and ecosystem designs for innovation.

GUEST BIO

Tendayi Viki is the author of Pirates In The Navy and Associate Partner at Strategyzer where he helps large companies to innovate for the future while running their core business.
Tendayi was previously the Director of Product Lifecycle at Pearson, A FTSE100 global education company. He co-designed and helped implement Pearson's Product Lifecycle which is an innovation framework that won Best Innovation Program 2015 at the Corporate Entrepreneur Awards in New York.

Tendayi holds a Ph.D. in Psychology and an MBA, and has written three books: Pirates In The Navy, The Corporate Startup, and The Lean Product Lifecycle. He is also a regular contributor at Forbes Magazine.

Richard Branson once said, "A company's employees are its greatest asset, and your people are your product." This is exactly the kind of principle and energy that Yves Pitton and Kevin D’Silva cultivate within their respective companies.

They believe that there are geniuses and innovators among everyday employees, and so by encouraging them to voice out their own opinions and giving them the space to pitch their best ideas, it helps the company move towards innovation as well.

In this episode of Innovation Storytellers, Yves and Kevin talk about giving employees the platform to innovate and test their hypotheses and how this can play a pivotal role in moving a company towards its own growth goals.

Guest BIO

Yves Pitton is the CEO of VTX, the largest independent and private telecom operator and service provider in Switzerland. He is an experienced, hands-on, and impact-oriented senior executive with extensive international experience and passion for innovation, growth, turn-around, and change management in the industrial, high-tech, media, and Private Equity business.

Kevin D’Silva is a Thought Leader in Enterprise Innovation, Founder & CEO of Ideateplus. He is also a serial intrapreneur and founded programs that provide enterprises with a rapid innovation process that helps them achieve customer-validated experiments while developing the competence of their employees.

As big companies turn into larger corporations, they tend to lean more towards optimization and stability, instead of continually experimenting with novel ideas. This lack of friction in larger companies also becomes their weakness as they lose their drive to innovate.

For Fred Schonenberg, CEO and Founder of VentureFuel, this is where the role of smaller, more radical startups comes into play. When big, stable corporations partner with these startups, they are able to spark innovation.

In this episode of Innovation Storytellers, Fred talks about the magic that happens when big and small companies work together towards creating innovative products.

In this episode of Innovation Storytellers, I interview Christian Ponce, Director of Corporate Strategy at LogMeIn, which is the company who prides itself for one of the world’s most groundbreaking innovations – the LastPass password manager and vault app.

LastPass’ original founders didn’t really plan to turn it into a vault app. They simply wanted a password manager that can make it easier for people to access their accounts remotely, but after being acquired by LogMeIn in 2015, Chris and his innovation team came up with other purposes for the app.

When asked about how they did their brainstorming sessions, Chris states that it was through transparent, open conversations, and by continually looking for inspiration and input outside of their team, that they were able to find new ways of using the app and making it useful to everyday people.

Tune in as Chris and I talk about the role of the innovation team and how they encourage other teams in their company to engage in conversations that bring about innovation. We also talk about how they go through the process of fine-tuning their products and services, selling the idea to executives and investors, and drawing in early adopters.

Is your organization suffering from “pivotitis”? While pivoting in itself is not bad, pivoting without a clear vision in mind can be unproductive and can result in a product that lacks function or impact (or both).

In this episode of Innovation Storytellers, Radhika Dutt, Co-Founder of Radical Product Thinking, joins us to talk about what ‘radical product thinking’ means and how we can apply this kind of agile method in product development to our own products and services.

She also gives us some advice on how to know when you need to pivot, creating product iterations with a purpose, and tapping into early adopters for your product or service.

Radhika Dutt is currently Advisor on Product Thinking to the Monetary Authority of Singapore, Singapore’s financial regulator and central bank. She serves on the board of the independent publisher, Berrett Koehler, and the Association of Product Professionals. She also teaches entrepreneurship and innovation at Northeastern’s D’Amore McKim School of Business.

Radhika co-founded Radical Product Thinking as a movement of leaders creating vision-driven change and is a frequent speaker at business events and conferences around the world.

Radhika is also the author of the upcoming book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. She is an entrepreneur and product leader who has participated in four acquisitions, two of which were companies that she founded. She advises organizations from high-tech startups to government agencies on building radical products that create a fundamental change.

Every innovator’s goal is to create a product or service that can create an impact and transform people’s lives. For Nicolas Bry, Founder of Orange Startups & Intrapreneurs Studio, that journey starts with identifying problems in the market and seeing where your product or service can be used.

In this episode of Innovation Storytellers, Nicolas and I talk about how Orange Money became the go-to mobile finance service for over 50 million people in Africa, and how they were able to expand to the Middle East.

Nicolas also shares how their background in telco has helped them tap into the market and build a reputable brand for Orange Money.

About Nicolas Bry

Nicolas Bry is an International Innovation Executive, expert in corporate innovation programs, and innovation labs, designing places where good innovation thrives. He currently helps the 20 innovation managers of Orange Africa to develop their projects locally.

Previously, he created several open innovation programs: innovation with employees (Orange Intrapreneurs Studio), innovation with consumers (Imagine with Orange), innovation with entrepreneurs (Orange African Toolbox). Consolidating this experience with the ones of 40 corporations, he wrote The Intrapreneurs' Factory in 2019, a practical guide to leverage intrapreneurship for your company.

Nicolas is also a passionate speaker (TEDx) and a Masterclasses lecturer at Google Academy and Tech/Business Schools.

I love being able to showcase women in innovation who are leading the charge when it comes to creating change. 

In this week’s episode of Innovation Storytellers, I interview Danielle Winandy, a serial entrepreneur at heart who has been the Head of the RISK Innovation Office at BNP Paribas since 2017. 

Despite working in a traditional field, Danielle shares how important it is for her to always stay 10 steps ahead of “business as usual”—and to translate what 10 steps ahead looks like to the rest of the organization in terms of solving real problems for people from a global perspective. 

As Danielle says, innovation is the study of change—which means, as practitioners, we have to be flexible, energetic, and open to evolution as individuals and organizations. 

In this interview, we also talk about the importance of leading by example by prioritizing cooperation over competition. And why any effective communication requires Innovation Storytelling that leads with empathy and connects with people where they are, from the heart.

BIO

Danielle Winandy is a serial entrepreneur at heart with 13 years’ experience in financial services and innovation. Since 2017, Danielle has been the Head of the RISK Innovation Office at BNP Paribas. Her current role involves creating an environment that fosters innovation by introducing intrapreneurship programs, methods, models and metrics.

Danielle is committed to issues such as women in leadership and their progress within the workplace. She also co-founded Women in Cyber Network @ BNP Paribas, a global community that aims to bring more women to technological jobs, especially Cyber Security.

Danielle holds certificates from Harvard Business School in Disruptive Strategy, Sustainable Business Strategy, a master on Design Thinking from MIT and she became a Futurist certified from Institute for the Future in 2020. She is passionate about people, Sustainability and Innovation.

In challenging times, it’s critical that we remember how innovation is always about people, first and foremost. 

That is never more true than when we’re talking about creating cultures of innovation inside of companies, where burnout can quickly snuff out the most promising of creative sparks. 

In this episode of the Innovation Storytellers podcast, innovation consultant Sonja Kresojevic shares the duty we all have as leaders to model the right behavior to those we lead in order to mitigate the rise of chronic stress at work. That means finding ways to lead more mindfully, while creating space for others, including colleagues and loved ones—and Sonja shares a few ways we can do this.

She also talks about the importance of curiosity, and why we need to spend more time asking the right questions in order to speed up the innovation cycle. If you want to create an energized culture of innovation at your organization, you don’t want to miss this episode!

Sonja Kresojevic works as an innovation consultant, system thinker, sensemaker, speaker, facilitator, connecting people, and initiatives that inspire me. She combines 20 years of innovation strategy, digital transformation, and delivery experience with inner leadership work, having gone through deep transformative experiences and studies covering psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, poetry, and spiritual leadership. She advises, writes, and speaks on a range of topics relating to human-centric transformation, conscious leadership, innovation, and purpose.

Her latest venture Seedtime Collective focuses on working with leaders who need support navigating uncertainty, finding their sense of purpose, and co-creating future scenarios from a place of emergence.

Jeff George is the Senior VP of R&D at The Hain Celestrial Group, a leading umbrella brand for organic and natural food products, and a true advocate for storytelling over statistics.

As he shares in this episode, the recent environment led the company to deepen its conversations with consumers in order to get a better sense of the struggles people were navigating in their daily lives—whether that was working multiple jobs, navigating layoffs, or worse.

It was retelling the stories of those consumers that became a powerful way to sell innovation ideas at a critical time, especially when it came to key decision-makers and executives. 

Jeff also talks about the ways in which we can use the past to inform the future, how failure is a necessary part of the innovation process, and why it’s important to celebrate productive mistakes bypassing the lessons along to the teams we lead. 

Brant Cooper is the New York Times bestselling author of The Lean Entrepreneur and CEO of Moves the Needle. With over two decades of expertise helping companies bring innovative products to market, he blends agile, design thinking, and lean methodologies to ignite entrepreneurial action within large organizations. 

Brant has a unique take on disrupting our current way of thinking in order to be closer to customers, move faster, and act bolder. He has experienced monumental milestones such as IPO, acquisition, rapid growth, and crushing failure.

He serves as a global keynote speaker, mentor to entrepreneurs, and trusted advisor to corporate executives. His mission is to teach leaders how to find personal and economic growth through creating new value for fellow humans.

Brant travels the globe speaking with entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs about how to discover and create new value; about empowering individuals to make the change they want to see in the world.