Innovation is both extremely important to the life of a corporation and also extremely tricky to regularly achieve and maintain. There are certain strategies that tend to yield higher innovation, but at its heart are the people, the corporate explorers that drive things forward.

Andrew Binns is the co-founder and manager of Change Logic, an advisory firm, and the author of several articles and books. His latest book, Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game, co-written with Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman, is about the differences in how corporations and startups approach encouraging innovation, and analyzes those efforts for how effective they are.

Andrew and Greg discuss the innovation industry and the three stages of innovation. They talk about the differences between product-centric and customer-centric thinking, the paradox of limiting uncertainty and innovation, corporate explorers, and which ones end up succeeding. They discuss the concepts of feedback and it’s counterpart, ‘feedforward,’ and some examples of successful corporate innovation cultures.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

It’s all about passion, not process

45:45: Corporations get wrapped up in thinking that the answer is about process, right? I can't tell you how many people ask me, "How do you make a repeatable process of this?" when they haven't even done it once. Have something to repeat, please. And then structure—how do we get the right organization structure around this? And we miss the importance of the individual with passion to solve a customer problem who is going to find that strong personal motivation. Because whether you're a corporate explorer or an entrepreneur, you are signing up for a really hard life. (46:37) And if you're going to live through that, you need passion. You need to be committed to solving the problem that you face. And that's what all of these examples in Corporate Explorer tell you about.

18:32: The thing that we know about innovation is that you need to hold open your ability to learn and see multiple possibilities.

How business logic kills the explorer in corporate innovation

21:32: You've got to pursue your innovation to the scale of the opportunity, the scale of the market, not the scale of what you think can get past your manager or what you can squeeze through the stage gate process. That is exactly how exploit or core business logic kills the explorer in corporate innovation.

Re-orienting ourselves when we talk about risks

25:23: This is a fundamentally important thing to re-reorient ourselves in terms of how we engage in talking about the topic of risk. Because one thing is for sure: in a traditional corporate career, you do not get rewarded by saying, "I don't know," right? That is counter-cultural. So unless you take it head-on, it's going to be hard to make progress.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

Guest Profile:

His Work:

Andrew Binns on Google Scholar
Work in California Management Review
Work in Harvard Business Review
Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game
The Missing Discipline Behind Failure to Scale

282. Fostering Corporate Innovation feat. Andrew Binns

unSILOed with Greg LaBlanc