The Innovation Show

A surgeon changes her technique halfway through an operation. A mountain biker rebuilds a part in his garage. Both innovated, and the companies that made their equipment probably never knew.
MIT Sloan's Eric von Hippel coined the term lead users in 1986 and has spent 50 years showing where new ideas really come from. His books, from The Sources of Innovation to Free Innovation, changed how researchers and companies think about innovation. He returns to The Innovation Show with a new lens called systems of use. Look at everything a person combines to get a job done, their own behaviour included, and users hold advantages that manufacturers struggle to match.
What you will learn
• Why a UK survey found 100 consumers innovating for themselves for every person a company hired to develop consumer products
• How a food company killed a promising athletic gel by surveying the wrong people
• What mountain bike klunkers and an orthopaedic surgeon's back taught the bike industry about suspension
• Why John Heysham Gibbon had to build the heart-lung machine, the operations and the valve supply himself
• The four advantages users hold over producers inside a system of use
• Why a tennis racket maker can sell you a bigger head and can never change your serve
• How frosting on the kitchen floor reveals the value of temporary innovation
• What AI-assisted user innovation means for manufacturers
Chapters
00:00 Cold open, the athletic gel "flop"
00:48 Kyndryl and introduction
01:10 The mountain biker and the surgeon
03:10 Welcome back Eric von Hippel
03:35 User innovators and producer innovators
06:20 The hidden 100 to 1 ratio
07:40 Why companies still ignore users
08:30 Spotting user innovations online
09:20 The athletic gel "flop"
10:15 Systems of use, life buoys and Russian dolls
12:00 Mountain bike klunkers and the first suspension
15:50 John Heysham Gibbon and the heart-lung machine
17:50 A listener's pillow and the system of sleep
19:50 Frosting on the floor and temporary innovation
22:00 Behaviours manufacturers cannot sell
23:15 The MacGyver principle
24:30 Producer innovation is the special case
25:00 Advantage one, a market of one
28:20 Advantage two, sticky need information
30:10 Advantage three, design freedom and the tennis racket
33:55 Advantage four, speed and cost
36:00 AI-assisted user innovation
36:50 Bricolage and the pooper scooper
37:50 Wrap-up
Eric von Hippel
Books and papers, free under Creative Commons: https://evhippel.mit.edu
MIT Sloan: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/eric-arthur-von-hippel
Systems of use paper, Research Policy (2026): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2026.105534
Previous conversations with Eric von Hippel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URSWL7vCaME
https://youtu.be/VWOeX6FS-zo
https://youtu.be/s2EeXDp9rk4
About the Host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen
About The Innovation Show
The Thinkers50 award-winning podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. Discover the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com/institute
Website: https://theinnovationshow.io
Thursday Thought: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Most organisations have plenty of ideas. Scaling them is where innovation dies, says Harvard's Linda Hill.
Linda Hill is a Harvard Business School professor, an ethnographer of leadership, and co-author of Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press) with Emily Tedards and Jason Wild. Her earlier book Collective Genius studied leaders at Pixar and beyond who build organisations able to innovate time and again. Genius at Scale goes further, into large, old, regulated organisations that research says are hostile to innovation. The result is the ABC framework of Architects, Bridgers and Catalysts.
In this conversation, Linda Hill reveals:
• Why leading innovation is a different job from leading change
• What a hospital CEO in Abu Dhabi meant by "leading through a fog"
• How 400 to 500 nurses ran A/B experiments to improve their own operations
• Why only 4 of 91 CEOs and C-suite leaders would accept the innovation job Ajay Banga offered at MasterCard
• The three roles of Architect, Bridger and Catalyst, and the practices behind each
• Why Microsoft's Copilot depends on bridgers inside both Microsoft and OpenAI
• How Renault's CEO tried to build a citizen movement behind electric vehicles
• Why bridgers rarely get the credit, and what leaders owe them
Chapters
00:00 Scaling Innovation Challenge
01:39 Episode Setup and Giveaway
02:24 Meet Linda Hill
05:28 Collective Genius Origins
08:27 From Innovation to Scale
11:55 COVID Innovation Ecosystems
16:09 Leading Through the Fog
21:17 Hospital Innovation Architecture
23:26 Mastercard Reluctant Innovators
29:51 ABCs Architect Bridger Catalyst
36:18 Bridger Work and Recognition
41:45 Wrap Up and Sponsor
Win a copy of Genius at Scale. Watch on YouTube, spot the colour of the two books on Linda's desk, and answer in the comments or reply to the Thursday Thought, with thanks to Kyndryl.
https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Read Linda's article at the Kyndryl Institute, Why continuous modernization demands more than just technology change
https://www.kyndryl.com/gb/en/institute/2026/09/continuous-modernization
About the Host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley).
https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen
About The Innovation Show
The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. Learn more at https://www.kyndryl.com
Website https://theinnovationshow.io
Thursday Thought https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow
LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

"Nobody ever measured management properly." Henry Mintzberg
Henry Mintzberg has spent a lifetime taking management myths out of sight for the sake of insight. The McGill professor and Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award recipient joins Aidan McCullen to discuss his new book, Bust Those Management Myths, and explains why the effective strategies are learned as much as they are planned.
In this conversation, Henry Mintzberg reveals:
• Why the flat earth theory works perfectly well for building runways in Holland
• How the Egg McMuffin splits a class of managers down the middle on what strategy is
• The bees and flies in a bottle, and why too many bees are making strategy
• What Wayne Gretzky meant when he said he skates to where the puck is going to be
• Why top and middle management are dangerous metaphors
• Chains, hubs, webs and sets, explained through a wedding
• Why MBA programmes graduate technocrats who measure like mad
• The single disconnect behind eight of the book's myths
Chapters
00:00 Strategy Position vs Perspective
01:49 Meet Henry Mintzberg
03:33 Myth Our Theory Is True
05:37 Updating Theories Over Time
07:20 Measurement Madness Myth
09:16 Strategy as Position and Perspective
11:15 Myth Strategies Are Planned
15:34 Intuition Experience and Bees
20:29 Myth Beyond Hierarchy
23:10 Chains Hubs Webs Sets
27:49 Management Art Craft Science
30:26 Targets Disconnect and Context
32:54 Left Brain Right Brain
Resources
Bust Those Management Myths (Berrett-Koehler): https://bkconnection.com/products/9798890571724_bust-those-management-myths
MythSite, the book's companion site: https://mythsite.org
Planning on the Left Side and Managing on the Right (HBR, 1976): https://hbr.org/1976/07/planning-on-the-left-side-and-managing-on-the-right
Rebalancing Society: https://rebalancingsociety.org
Henry's website and blog: https://mintzberg.org
About Henry Mintzberg
Henry Mintzberg holds the Cleghorn Chair of Management Studies at McGill University in Montreal and is a recipient of the Thinkers50 Lifetime Achievement Award. Bust Those Management Myths is his twenty-second book. Others include The Rise and Fall of Strategic Planning, Managers Not MBAs, Simply Managing and Rebalancing Society.
About the Host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen
About The Innovation Show
The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. Learn more at https://www.kyndryl.com
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Website: https://theinnovationshow.io
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen

Your company is spending real money on AI and the CFO wants to know what it is getting back. David Rogers calls the awkward silence that follows the AI value gap.
David Rogers wrote the first book on digital transformation. He returns to The Innovation Show to unpack the AI value gap, drawing on a Harvard Business Review article he co-wrote with Krishnan Sankaranarayanan, who leads AI transformation at Eastman. When AI fails to show up in the financial results, David traces the shortfall to strategy, and he shows leaders how to fix it.
In this conversation, David Rogers reveals:
• Why one minute saved by AI vanishes in one company and transforms another
• The AI value equation, and why its three factors multiply
• Why handing AI to a team with no P&L ownership kills the return
• The "magic wand" myth that frontier labs sell to executives
• How AI drones cut plant downtime by 30 to 40 percent in oil and gas
• Why Netflix points its AI at customer retention instead of acquisition
• How two chemical companies in the same industry need completely different AI bets
• The one discipline to apply before you start any AI pilot
Chapters
00:00 What is a value driver?
01:45 Why AI fails to show up in financial results
03:00 The AI value gap and the awkward CFO conversation
08:10 Why one minute saved can vanish or transform a business
12:30 The AI value equation
15:00 Four reasons companies skip strategic alignment
23:40 Step one, define your value drivers
27:10 Step two, know where you sit in the value chain
30:30 Step three, trace opportunities to the income statement
33:00 Step four, decide how you will measure financial return
34:40 Listener question on AI adoption and organisational change
37:40 Strategy is your moat
39:00 David's next book on transformation in the AI era
Resources
The AI Value Gap Is a Strategy Problem: https://davidrogersdigital.substack.com/p/the-ai-value-gap-is-a-strategy-problem
Harvard Business Review article: https://bit.ly/HBR-Value-Gap-SS
David's website: https://davidrogers.digital
David's books: https://www.amazon.ie/s?i=stripbooks&rh=p_27%3ADavid%2BL.%2BRogers
More from David Rogers on The Innovation Show
The Digital Transformation Roadmap Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efliq61GF9M
The Digital Transformation Roadmap Part 2: https://youtu.be/Wd5Av-8ME6Y
Digital Transformation Playbook (10 Years On): https://youtu.be/z7eNk-J0KV0
About David Rogers
David Rogers is a globally recognised authority on digital transformation and a longtime faculty member at Columbia Business School. He is the author of The Digital Transformation Roadmap, The Digital Transformation Playbook and The Network Is Your Customer.
About the Host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen
About The Innovation Show
The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. Learn more at https://www.kyndryl.com
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Website: https://theinnovationshow.io

"Nintendo unlocked a completely underserved market by simplifying the game console." Alexander Osterwalder
Alexander Osterwalder returns to The Innovation Show with a world first. The co-founder of Strategyzer and creator of the Business Model Canvas shares the Value Stack, a brand new tool built on six patterns of value creation. Strategyzer has stopped writing books. Alex explains why the team has moved to applied playbooks, and how the patterns help any team articulate its value proposition and then test which benefit matters most to customers.
What Alex shares in this episode
- Why Nintendo won a huge new market with an inferior console
- How Henry Ford turned a handcrafted luxury into a car his own factory workers could buy
- Why trust was a feature for Airbnb and the entire proposition for FedEx overnight
- How Google Ads rescued advertisers from wasting half their budget
- Why Salesforce Trailblazers prove identity builders work in B2B, well beyond Harley-Davidson
- How Diners Club invented the credit card proposition from nothing
- Why Amazon Web Services scores on two patterns at once
- Why Strategyzer swapped dense books for playbooks
Chapters
00:00 Wii Ease Booster Hook
00:41 Sponsor Kyndryl
01:18 Guest Intro Value Stack
02:18 From Books to Playbooks
02:56 Six Value Patterns Overview
04:18 Ease Boosters Nintendo Wii
05:54 Access Boosters Ford Model T
06:48 Confidence Builders Trust
07:38 Value Catalysts Google Ads
08:20 Identity Builders Communities
08:54 Market Shapers Credit Cards
09:57 Playbook Demo and Discount
10:43 Giveaway and Where to Find
12:00 Events Closing Thanks
12:40 Sponsor Outro Kyndryl
Get 20% off Strategyzer playbooks at https://www.strategyzer.com with the code INNOVATIONSHOW20.
Win a digital copy of The Invincible Company. Name the gentleman on Alex's slide (he co-authored one of Alex's first books) by replying to the Thursday Thought, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Alex joins Aidan in Dublin on 1 and 2 December for Enterprise Ireland client sessions. Looking for a keynote speaker on innovation or change in Ireland that week? Get in touch at https://theinnovationshow.io
About the Guest
Alexander Osterwalder is the co-founder of Strategyzer and the inventor of the Business Model Canvas. He is lead author of Business Model Generation, Value Proposition Design and The Invincible Company. https://www.strategyzer.com
About the Host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more about Aidan: https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world's leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com
About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.
Website: https://theinnovationshow.io
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen