May 18, 2015

Organizing for Innovation, with David Bland

On this week’s episode of The Innovation Engine podcast, we look at organizing for innovation. We talk about why corporate innovation is fundamentally broken on a number of levels, what you can do to fix that within your own organization, and what a typical innovation team should look like.

David Bland of Neo joins us to discuss those topics and much more. David is a Principal at Neo, a “full-stack innovation consulting firm,” where he advises corporations and startups alike on how to create and deliver value to their customers. Prior to Neo, David was a pioneer in lean startup and innovation services at BigVisible, where he worked with Fortune 500 companies to establish entrepreneurial teams within huge companies.

He is an author and speaker who helps turn the concepts of lean startup, business model generation, and customer development into actions. You can follow David on Twitter and on Medium and @DavidJBland.

Among the highlights of this week’s episode are:

  • David shares some of his team’s learnings from a recent experiment they did for Toyota to test the concept of a pay-at-the-pump iBeacon application, which he wrote about on Medium
  • Why “Learn” should actually be the first step in the Build/Measure/Learn loop rather than Build
  • We talk about why David thinks 12 weeks is the right amount of time to go from Build/Measure/Learn to Pivot/Perservere/Kill
  • What successful innovation teams and 1980s cartoon robot Voltron have in common

Listen to the Episode

Interested in hearing more? Tune in to the full episode of “The Innovation Engine” podcast below.

About The Innovation Engine

Since 2014, 3Pillar has published The Innovation Engine, a podcast that sees a wide range of innovation experts come on to discuss topics that include technology, leadership, and company culture. You can download and subscribe to The Innovation Engine on Apple Podcasts. You can also tune in via the podcast’s home on Spotify to listen online, via Android or iOS, or on any device supporting a mobile browser.