The Innovation Show

"You know how I know what the real culture of a company is? [Two] things. Who gets the money and who gets promoted."
Robert Burgelman, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of Strategy is Destiny and Inside Corporate Innovation, returns to The Innovation Show to discuss how companies renew themselves from the middle. His new paper with Sasanka Sekhar Chanda revisits three Intel decisions through James March's model of exploration and exploitation. Top management keeps backing an autonomous initiative while it teaches the company something new, and support stops when the learning stops.
In this conversation, Robert reveals:
- The fab capacity rule that moved Intel from memory chips into microprocessors years before top management recognised the shift
- Why a margin rule told him more about Intel's culture than any values statement, and how the same logic cost Intel the iPhone chip
- How Andy Grove spent $750 million on ProShare video conferencing, a business that never passed about $30 million
- Why Intel's own people called its RISC processor a YARP, years before ARM made the architecture dominant in mobile
- The Grove line that sank Intel's networking pitch
- Why the burden of proof always sits with the innovator
- The people map that helped build Nike's women's business, and why Infosys Consulting needed one
- How to spot a strategic inflection point by watching the rate of change in growth
- What a 3M executive told him about the famous 15% time
- Why the parking lot on Friday nights and Saturday mornings reveals your real innovators
Chapters:
00:00 Growth Problems Insight
01:18 Culture Money Promotions
02:31 Intel Weeds Seeds Setup
05:12 Three Intel Cases
10:02 Cognitive Rules ProShare
20:43 Define Autonomous Strategy
30:26 Intel Capacity Rule Shift
39:22 Strategic Context Battle
47:25 People Mapping Politics
53:58 Signals Inflection Derivative
57:00 Encouraging Autonomy 3M
01:02:46 Tragic Heroes Conclusion
01:05:16 Where To Find Paper
Read the paper (Stanford GSB working paper): https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/autonomous-strategic-behavior-organizational-learning-top
Robert Burgelman at Stanford GSB: https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/robert-burgelman
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 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, with conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.
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

"A good idea and a bad idea look very similar early on." David J Bland
David Bland, founder of Precoil and lead author of Testing Business Ideas with Alex Osterwalder, helped DuPont and its semiconductor spin-off Qnity build an experimentation capability that surfaces risk early and speeds up commit, correct and cut decisions. The work contributed to a 2026 IRI Innovation Excellence Award for Outstanding Innovative Culture. Across 35 real growth opportunities, DuPont saved over $12M by stopping weak projects and has so far generated about $24M from the ideas that passed their tests.
In this conversation, David reveals:
- How DuPont saved over $12M by stopping projects early, and earned about $24M from the ones that survived
- Why David opens and closes his keynotes with his own bad calls, including a kitty litter brand later sold for a billion dollars
- Why a leader should never facilitate their own team's assumptions mapping session
- How the assumptions map changed its labels three times before a whiteboard session with Alex Osterwalder at Stanford
- Why most business plans amount to "creative fiction in Excel"
- The leadership whiplash that drags companies between Six Sigma efficiency and innovation drives
- Dead Projects Day, the Halloween event where DuPont leaders dressed up to explain the projects they killed
- Why sales and legal belong in the room before the first experiment runs
- How to use AI as a sparring partner while keeping your critical thinking
Chapters:
00:00 AI As Sparring Partner
00:53 Innovation Leaders And Whiplash
04:00 Meet David Bland
09:47 Productive Failure And Assumptions
15:12 Leadership Swings And Efficiency
17:36 DuPont Case Study Origins
21:53 Big Bets And HIPPO Dynamics
23:48 Facilitating Assumptions Mapping
29:45 Evidence Labels Evolve
31:59 Business Plans Are Hallucinations
34:53 DuPont Derisking Results
39:20 Making Change Stick In DNA
42:28 How DuPont Built Capability
47:49 Socialise Wins And Kills
50:50 Bring Sales And Legal Early
52:56 Where To Find David Bland
Find David Bland at https://www.precoil.com and https://davidjbland.com
Read the DuPont case study: https://www.precoil.com/articles/case-study-dupont
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: 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.
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of Testing Business Ideas, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes, with conversations on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.
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

"They don't quit their job cold turkey. That's not what I've observed firsthand."
Only twelve companies have ever been worth more than a trillion dollars. Ten of them are American. Eight of those ten were started fractionally, by people who were still in a job or still in school when they built the first version.
Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC in the Bay Area, where she has made over 150 early-stage investments across a decade, with around a dozen exits through IPO and acquisition by Fortune 50 companies. She was one of the earliest investors in Instacart and has sold companies to Goldman Sachs, Ford and Caterpillar. She also teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and UC Berkeley, and writes the Monthly Note. She joins Aidan McCullen to explain fractional founders, the people who de-risk an idea before they ever hand in their notice.
In this conversation, Shuo reveals:
- Why 8 of the 10 American trillion-dollar companies were built fractionally, and 1 in 4 of the Fortune 500 too
- The Salesforce story most people get wrong: Larry Ellison wrote Marc Benioff a cheque to go and compete
- How Jensen Huang and his co-founders designed NVIDIA after work, while still employed in semiconductors
- Why "the organism rejects the organ" explains almost every intrapreneur who ends up leaving
- What frontier firms actually are, and why giving staff access to AI tools now counts for nothing
- Why revenue per employee has become the number startups check before every single hire
- The human-to-agent leverage ratio, and why this is the last generation of leaders who manage only people
- How Spirit Airlines' bankruptcy revealed that decades of internal data was its most valuable asset
- Why 95% of the world's data sits inside private enterprise databases, and why that is gold to AI labs
Chapters:
00:00 Fractional Founder Myth
03:04 Meet Shuo Chen
05:12 Why Founders Side Hustle
08:28 Proof From Trillion Firms
10:15 Keeping Intrapreneurs Close
13:15 Frontier Firms Defined
15:53 Revenue Per Employee Era
22:22 Advice For Students
28:58 AI Writing And Learning
34:58 Spirit Airlines Data Gold
41:20 Tool Spotlight Woolf
47:12 Wrap Up And Links
About Shuo Chen: Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC, an early-stage venture firm investing in the future of work, and teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and UC Berkeley. Read her Monthly Note at https://shuo.iovc.io and connect on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shuo-c
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. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.
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.
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for the weekly essay behind the show: 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

"When's the last time you thought about your suppliers as your partner in innovation?"
Paul Nunes, co-author of Jumping the S-Curve, Big Bang Disruption and Pivot to the Future, returns to talk to Aidan McCullen about the companies that come back from the dead. Motorola is the case study, combinatorial innovation is the engine, and the uncomfortable question underneath it all is what your company would actually be worth in pieces.
In this conversation, Paul reveals:
→ What a Lazarus taxon is, and why a handful of companies reappear decades after everyone wrote them off
→ How Motorola collapsed, sold to Google largely for its patents, and found a second life under Lenovo
→ Why a drone is really a phone camera, a gyroscope and some software, and what that means for your R&D budget
→ The $180 to $200 phone strategy that won the markets Apple and Samsung were not designing for
→ Why Kodak kept making billions long after everyone declared it dead
→ The million-dollar Porsche nobody could restore, and why somebody bought it anyway
→ Why Shockley Semiconductor should be a household name, and what the Traitorous Eight really cost it
→ Why putting your name on a stadium or a football shirt may be the first signal of decline
→ The line every chief strategy officer eventually says: it wasn't that we didn't know what to do, we no longer had the people to do it
→ Why the man who built the Learjet also built the car radio that became Motorola
→ Why price deflation, not competition, may be the fundamental strategy problem of the next decade
00:00 Innovation And Downfall
01:13 Sponsor And Guest Intro
02:18 Lazarus Companies Explained
05:54 Motorola Rebirth Story
07:30 Combinatorial Innovation Basics
14:41 Modularity And Supplier Innovation
19:18 Partners Turn Competitors
24:33 Motorola And Nonconsumers
27:56 IP And Hidden Value
34:57 Vanity Marketing Signals
39:32 Talent Curves And Seed Corn
44:44 Deflation And Strategy Pressure
48:01 Closing Thoughts And Wrap
About Paul Nunes
Paul F. Nunes is co-author of Jumping the S-Curve, Big Bang Disruption, Pivot to the Future and Mass Affluence, and spent years as Global Managing Director of Research at the Accenture Institute for High Performance. His research on growth, disruption and reinvention has been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes. 
Find Paul Nunes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-nunes-5351773/
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 at 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.
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of one of Paul's books, with thanks to Kyndryl.
About The Innovation Show
The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.
Connect:
🌐 https://theinnovationshow.io
📨 Substack (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
#Innovation #PaulNunes #CombinatorialInnovation #JumpingTheSCurve #Motorola #Disruption #Leadership #Strategy #Modularity #Podcast #AidanMcCullen #TheInnovationShow #Thinkers50 #Reinvention

"You don't want innovation. What you want is a tweak that won't be too uncomfortable."
Dov Baron, five-time Top 30 Global Leadership Guru and author of The Art of Belonging, sits down with Aidan McCullen in Vancouver to explain why identity addiction is the hidden reason behavioural change fails — in athletes, in leaders and in entire organisations. From a childhood of poverty in Salford to a 1990 free-climbing fall near Whistler in which he died five times, Dov traces how identity forms, why we get neurochemically hooked on it, and what it takes to build a culture where people belong rather than fit in.
In this conversation, Dov reveals:
The five levels of the emotional source code — and why most behavioural change fails at the identity level
What identity addiction is, and why a retired Olympian, a triple-bypass survivor and a burnt-out CEO all suffer from the same thing
How a 120-foot fall, ten reconstructive surgeries and a dead cat on the couch forced Dov to choose between three lives
Why "success creates atrophy" and real innovation only happens when things are hard
The one-day-a-month experiment that gets people wanting to come back to the office
Why the Great Resignation and COVID's "great pause" were a crisis of meaning, not pay
Why a boss's sideways look is enough to kill an idea — and what psychological safety really means
Why the superstar responsible for 40% of your sales may be costing you money
The "when you did X, I felt Y" exercise that turns conflict into connection
00:00 Belonging Over Fitting In
02:03 Meet Dov Baron
02:28 Early Life And Spiritual Roots
04:50 From Therapy To Source Code
08:46 Identity Addiction Explained
12:37 Near Death Wake Up Call
17:17 Cat Moment And Purpose
23:19 Parallel Dave And Choices
26:03 Pain Drives Change
35:50 Innovation Needs Discomfort
37:51 Building Workplace Community
39:21 Great Resignation Meaning Crisis
41:25 Meaning Over Metrics
42:41 AI And Human Work
44:59 Practice Not Luck
49:33 Psychological Safety
55:10 Lenses And Belonging
01:00:01 Leaders In Transition
01:01:09 Toxic Stars And Meaning
01:09:31 Conflict As Connection
01:18:23 Closing And Sponsor
About Dov Baron: keynote speaker, five-time Top 30 Global Leadership Guru, twice named to Inc. Magazine's Top 100 Leadership Speakers, creator of the Emotional Source Code framework and author of The Art of Belonging: How Conformity Silences Genius and How to Unleash It. Find the book and the Cultures of Belonging course at https://dovbaron.com
About the host: Aidan McCullen is a 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 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 about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com and https://www.kyndryl.com/institute
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of The Art of Belonging, with thanks to Kyndryl: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.
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