Creating Cultures of Innovation: Black Ops and Viruses

At our last Intrapreneur Alliance Event, we were pleased to showcase Ben Yoskovitz of Highline BETA as our featured speaker. Ben is well-versed in the field of innovation, having spent many years in the startup world, co-authoring the book Lean Analytics, and now leading Highline BETA as they consult with large companies to help them create new ventures and promote innovation.

When Ben joined us, he gave an informative and thought-provoking presentation he entitled Creating Cultures of Innovation: Black Ops and Viruses . His presentation focused on models that he helped to create and test that have helped large already established companies to discover new ideas and opportunities that are different from their main line of business.

Ben has some different ideas about intrapreneurship than we have traditionally seen from our guests at these events because he believes that intrapreneurship isn’t necessarily about innovating to improve a business. Instead, he believes that intrapreneurship can be used to find new and interesting ideas that can grow into their own ventures. Ben believes that most established businesses are established because they already have a successful model for making money, and there is no reason to change that model if it’s working. What he says these companies should be doing instead, is looking for different ways that they can bring in new revenue streams.

He explains in depth why it’s important for companies to employ this line of thinking and then goes on to show examples of how he has been able to help companies, such as RBC, to create programs that follow through on it.

Unfortunately, there was a slight mishap during our filming of the event that caused most of our footage to blur. However, we believe that Ben’s presentation is informative and interesting enough to stand on its own without seeing Ben actually present it. His presentation contained a lot of information for companies that want to create or improve their cultures of innovation to think about and learn from, so we still wanted to make sure that we could share it with you.

The following video is the audio from Ben’s time in front of our audience over his presentation slides. Take a watch for yourself:

If you’d like to learn more and take part in conversations around how intrapreneurs are creating the futures of their respective companies, we invite you to join our Intrapreneur Alliance Facebook Group .