How do you best introduce the concept of lean innovation, demonstrate the linkage to intelligence, and discuss how it might improve the corporate intelligence professional’s ability to impact decision-making?

Lean innovation methodology is being used by numerous angel investors and venture capital firms, start-up accelerators and incubators, government labs, graduate school programs and corporations to reduce risk and accelerate commercialization of new products and services. The approach emphasizes the importance of testing a market / customer problem before testing a solution, and forming customer centric value propositions.

Lean innovation does this by focusing on many of the same things intelligence does: hypothesis formation, evidence collection, insight formation, action and iteration around business models; rather than technologies. As open innovation increasingly becomes a more common approach used by corporations to innovation and grow, intelligence professionals can improve their influence and value by linking their expertise and methodologies to those of lean innovators.

Learning objectives:

  • Learn how Lean Innovation multiplies the value of intelligence for commercialization risk reduction.
  • Examine case studies from a variety of industries to contextualize the process to your own.
  • Discuss how investors – including large corporate leadership – are deciding where to place their bets in creating the future of your organization.

Clay Phillips is VP Business Development of LaunchPad Central, where he leads the cultivation of new relationships and consulting engagements involving the application of lean start-up innovation methods with large enterprises that need to accelerate and improve the commercialization of new technologies and business models. With 30 years of accumulated experience, his professional interests and expertise are in the areas of business development, strategic intelligence, transformative innovation, and alliance management.

As an independent advisor, he helped technology start-ups discover new growth opportunities, worked with an NGO on sustainable mobility technology and business model strategies, and served as an instructor for an NSF sponsored Innovation Corps program focused on energy and transportation led by the University of Michigan and Next Energy, a Detroit based incubator.

As an executive for General Motors, he led and participated in some of the most critical decisions faced by the company. These included working with Clayton Christensen and his team on disruptive technologies and business models in the transportation sector for a new R&D structure and investment portfolio, leading the strategic due diligence effort for several major alliance partnerships, serving as a founding member of the company’s corporate venture capital arm, running the company’s strategic intelligence effort, and overseeing the development of commercialization, open innovation and partnering strategies for several advanced technology internal start-up programs.

Clay served as an intelligence officer with the U.S. Navy. He holds a BA degree from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut and an MBA from Columbia University in New York City. Clay is an avid musician who plays guitar and sings in a classic and originals rock band that performs exclusively for charities and fundraising events.