Eugene Ivanov and Andrew Binns - Corporate Explorer Fieldbook Finale

It was Seneca who said every new beginning comes from some other beginnings end and we've come to the end of the corporate explorer fieldbook series. And I want to thank all the authors who came onto the show throughout twenty twenty four and I want to thank the sponsors our benefactors in twenty twenty four for that series Wazoku who are pioneers of total innovation.

Transforming how organizations solve challenges, drive growth and deliver measurable results as the world's only networked innovation marketplace wazoku connects people ideas and technology to create scalable impactful innovation you can find wazoku at www. wazoku. com and you can meet the team from wazoku including the ceo simon hill who will be speaking at and attending the reinvention summit here in ireland april twenty ninth and thirtieth.

2025. And you can find out more about that at the reinvention summit. com. Let's get stuck in to this bittersweet moment, this Seneca moment. And let's get started with the episode, the finale with Andy Bins and Eugene Ivanov. We welcome back to the show Andy Binns and we welcome to the show for the first time eugene Ivanov welcome to the show Thank you very much for inviting me. great to have you back and the great to meet you eugene.

i thought we'd start as a way of bringing a full circle with the preface of the book because we did cover this at the very very start Andy the, genesis of the book came from a moment of seeing these brilliant people who are practicing theories.

Without sometimes knowing what theories they were practicing and you thought actually we need to capture that because we've captured the theory before in the corporate explorer book, we've captured that in mike tushman charles o'reilly's work before you wrote that book the corporate explorer but this was different this was something about bringing that scar tissue to life.

Through words so maybe we'll start with that That's very well said scar tissue the, the job of building new businesses from inside established corporations is not easy. And I started recently with a large firm discussion. about working with them. And I started out as, I'm not going to bring some magic recipe. There is no single simple way of getting this done.

It's hard work and the genesis of corporate explorer, but I think more corporate explorer field book, because we had so many conversations about the first set of ideas in the book is this insight that it's already happening . You know, my revered and beloved colleagues, Michael and Charles, didn't invent the ambidextrous organization. It's been happening for as long as there have been corporations which have sought to grow and to develop.

All we've done is start to harness an understanding of what they do, what works, what doesn't. And that's what's going on here. So necessarily the theorists, the writers, those who are studying the practice are always chasing the practitioners. We're always behind , and hoping to bring as much of their work to success as possible. With all due respect to, the work that Mike Charles, Andy done before. This was already kind of, you know, moving train.

So we just wanted to, to give another impetus to it. And we start , this book with this line The real work for author starts when the book is published. And that's what happened to Andy when they published prior book. So he got engaged in conversation with people. People wanted actually to talk about this book. We all read a lot of wonderful books.

You close this book put it on the shelf and forget it, but this book was different, and people wanted to continue this conversation, and that's, , what happened, and again, as your show shows that it's what is happening with this book, and that justifies what Andy and I believe that this book is not a collection of answers, it's a library of questions.

Andy asked me before we came on air what were my observations from doing the show, does a couple of shows i did and really feel myself very privileged where for example doing all the work ofClayton Christiansen n studying that chronologically doing the same with tushman o'reilly which led me to, Andy to the corporate explore book which led me to the corporate explorer field book to be able to go through that in a systematic way chronologically

is really really interesting but i see the evolution as well of. It's so much different talking about this information from the outside vs actually doing the work and the difficulty in doing that work and gone yeah i know the theories of read the articles of read the books but actually when i get to it there so much challenge what i loved about the book.

Was the feedback i got from so many listeners to the show over the years and they're like you know what i love your show but i really love this because it tells me that i'm not the broken one the resistance i'm experiencing. Everybody experiences that even the best companies in the world and now i have a language to be able to articulate Yeah, this is right because there's, there's sort of scripts we have.

about any system we're a part of where it's like we always do that at this company, right? Or,, I speak with many of your Irish compatriots about the Ireland rugby team, and there are certain traits. About how the Irish talk about their rugby team. And the reality is what's going on in their rugby team is the same as the English and the French and the South Africans. But somehow we give it this sort of particularly highly critical, you know, stance. But what's the same is more consistent.

Right? And , sometimes we lose sight of that, because we're so in our own company, but actually most of the challenges that, the Corporate Explorer faces are genErich and can be solved with , some thoughts , but as I say that, I want to make sure I don't sound like it's a single recipe because it has to be adapted for a context necessarily. episode that really stood out for me that you did was Erichh Kruschitz at UNIQA.

It was a brilliant exposition from my friend Erichh about what it takes to actually build an ambidextrous unit. The sort of practical issues that are involved, and in some of them, you know, Erichh and I disagree. I'll talk to him tomorrow. We work side by side on many of these things. And he makes a judgment about how to do this in the context of building a business in health, building a business from an Austrian insurance company. So it's all context.

There's a lot of judgment that goes into this to make it work. that's another element is the unique configuration of your business. The timing of your business maybe, your country that you're operating in all these things have a dramatic effect.

The thing i loved about the episode was that sometimes the people who start the business are not the people you need later on as you go to scale it and that even happens to a new unit inside the company and there's difficult questions to be out there but when you have some type of mental model which the book gives you, to be able to foresee these things you can prepare for them and that's what i loved about that episode with Erich that he was saying look there

was still fear we didn't see coming down the line but now i have the way to actually communicate that so it saves you having to go through that hassle. I just cannot resist reminding you this line by Leo Tolstoy that, you know, "all happy family look alike and all unhappy family look in different way." I think that, you know, business world is perhaps different because I don't know about successful families successful businesses.

Businesses that have troubles with corporate innovation, with corporate exploration actually have all the same problems. . They, in a sense, look alike, and, , our book basically highlights this, problem, leads them and try to, to give some advice of how to overcome that.

I'm going to build on your Tolstoy quote, because there's another quote by Tolstoy, which is a nice segue, which is everybody thinks of changing the world, but nobody thinks of changing him or herself and this idea of personal renewal.

And the reason I bring that up is the world of consulting or even the world of business in any sense, if you're a corporate explorer unit, you can't really think about it now without thinking about the.

Massive transformative effect of AI and you mentioned AI in passing in the book but since you publish the book it's become a major transformation force that has been trust upon everybody not everybody is really ready for that i thought we'd mention that because i'm sure if you're rewriting it today you'd probably include a little bit more on a because we have to. And Eugene, you've thought a lot about this.

In many ways, I noticed that in November there was a two years as this famous Chat GPT, GPT 3 was published. And I remember that back then, 2022, November, Andy and I were actually very busy preparing our manuscript. So I'm sure that neither of us paid too much attention to this topic. Well, here we are two years, from that. . The books mentioned artificial intelligence twice in passing. I like to say that that now artificial intelligence is not even the elephant in the room.

I would say it's a dinosaur. And, we both believe that artificial intelligence a very general transformative technology is still a little bit looking for its purpose. A little bit for applications. However, I would argue that corporate explorers could actually disproportionately benefit from it. And I explain because of cost factor. There is many things that. There a debates what artificial intelligence can do, what cannot do, what cannot it do better. What we know that it can do decently.

It does for only a fraction of a price. And corporate explorers with limited resources. With small teams and often starting actually by themselves all alone. They can benefit from this cost factor. Because there are many applications that can do basically sitting in front of their computers without being engaged in time and money. sucking exercises. And again, at least for this for this period of time, I think that corporate explorers will disproportionately benefit from this technology.

one of the things that I also picked up was our friends Wazoku sponsored the series. I know you work with them , very closely. And one of the things they do is engage the open innovation community. They bring the Wazoku crowd comes in. And again, thinking about the efficiency that AI brings, one of the things that we noted was once you have your corporate explorer.

Units setup or your section of the business setup once you have that mindset instilled in the business there is another way to actually accelerate things and that's engaging and open innovation i thought we'd say a bit more on that you do touch on it in the book, you also do a lot of this work in combination with wazoku and in yourselves with change logic.

As someone who monitors open innovation closely, I can see that the bridges between open innovation and corporate exploration actually very strong. , it was curious that , I read an article about, different models of open innovation. And they actually mentioned original Charles and Michael, papers. Because they now say that implementing different models of open innovation, outside out, outside in, and so on, may require ambidextrous organization, because of incompatibility of model.

So business academic literature already benefits from this corporate exploration, approach. The reverse, what I see immediately, it's one of my favorite, chapters in the book written by Christine Griffin, from ChangeLogic, and John Greco from Analog Devices about ecosystem. And actually handling ecosystems is difficult. We all know that. And perhaps even more difficult for corporate explorers without kind of experience in this area.

And open innovation provides a lot of very interesting and depth material how to handle, how to implement. Knowledge flow from, ecosystems. So there is, a healthy exchange that is emerging from different pieces of literature, which we always have to welcome. Yeah. I learned from Eugene on open innovation more than I know myself. And as you say, from Wazoku, who, I think are the leaders in this space , and , AI.

Potentially totally disrupts open innovation and takes it to a whole new level because the capacity for it to intersect different threads of ideas and knowledge and experience and to identify patterns. This is exactly where it is strongest. And so that ideation piece, , of innovation is potentially, I think, the area of deepest revolution. Right. And so I think if we go forward five years, we're just going to be doing this in a very different way. Fundamentally different. I think incubation.

Also, we're going to be doing it in a fundamentally different way because we can spin up prototypes and test them. So much faster. I mean, the whole area of, agentic workflows. Right? Which is a great phrase to say AI agentic workflows. And I've, I sort of tried to learn what it means, which has been just sort of putting together different AI agents to create an automation of a set of customer experiences.

And this is then something that you can now do if you, , understand this well enough, fairly fast and test it out with potential customers. In a way that previously would be a year of work or, or obviously coding apps through, voice commands, which today, you can do, but the outcome isn't that great. In a year's time, it'll be awesome. right? So that is really, substantial.

And I think this is going to be , the power for corporate explorers, because so many of those on the ideation and on this incubation piece you're going to be looking for ways to, apply these insights faster than everybody else. These advantages. are there for corporation. They're also in the world. And as Eugene says, the cost is so much lower. So the startup threat, you know, the, red book, you know, how corporations beat startups, right? This is premised on the notion you can beat them.

Well, maybe in the world of AI, you can't anymore. And so my appeal to corporations is you've got to up your game on letting corporate explorers free because the capacity of an engaged. Motivated to find business opportunities is so much more powerful than your top down strategies. And so you need to be able to release that energy and use these tools to discover, places where there are, there are, you know, where value creation can happen. And so there's this sort of.

I think potential, speed, energy coming into corporate innovation in the next five years. And, and, and it's going to be something that, I don't think we can predict. Certainly corporate explorer, field book, second edition, or maybe it's a whole new book for the age of AI is going to be full of how you use these technologies in ideation and in incubation, and then maybe also in scale to bring them to life.

You hinted at this and the maybe for the corporate explorer field book part two is the importance of leadership so. You ask me before coming on air what was one of the big lessons i had one of the things that was certainly reinforced is ideation is where most innovation shows or any kind of show and transformation will talk about because it's the easy fluffy stuff anything's possible when it comes to ideation.

Incubation is kinda going great we got that there's a lot of biases that go with that perhaps i fall in love with my idea perhaps it's the bosses idea that the boss like so we back that one. To get me some extra runway but when the rubber hits the road is scaling and scaling needs leadership and, really need such oversight with that there's so many biases and resistance to change that happen and only reveal themselves.

When you're at scale level i thought we'd maybe leave it on this as a almost like you know at the end of a movie when it's leaving opportunity for sequel to go, the leadership sequel the importance of leadership in order to bring all this to life great things in threes and, and there's no use writing The Empire Strikes Back if you don't do Return of the Jedi.

So I agree, and I, and I think that the, the most consistent question that I get asked after, I've done a talk is, it's about leadership. How can we engage leaders so that they can see the opportunities that exist for corporate exploration? And I'm, you know, my own view is that we spend too much time in corporations or in leadership discussions blaming people. The CFO doesn't get it. The CEO is too short sighted.

These are, maybe it's true on occasion, I have no question that just in any population there is a, you know, normal distribution of willingness to explore and insights and all the rest of it, but it's much more useful if we think about why.

Why are they taking the attitudes they are and how can we move them, and shape their actions closer to , where we see the areas of opportunity and also learn from them, the book "Corporate Explorer" started with me sitting with my friend, Vincent Roche from Analog Devices and telling him the idea. And he said, you know, Andy, I don't want a book for me. I know what I need to do. I've read Michael and Charles's work. What I need is ideas.

I need people to put ideas I can invest in on my table, and that is what I pursue. And so this is what CEOs need. And Vincent isn't alone. I know many other CEOs that are the same. He incidentally, Analog Devices, and helped build some extraordinary new businesses based on the work he's done to license Corporate Explorers , in Analog Devices. But that is the job of leaders. Now, the job of the Corporate Explorer. Is to earn the right to get those ideas on the table.

And they've got to think about the influence network more consistently, coherently than we often do. I often draw the contrast between if you are seeking venture capital funding versus whether you're seeking it within a corporation. If you're seeking venture capital funding, you would know exactly what Aidan McCullen has backed in the last five years. What he likes in a business plan, what he's thinking about right now, what his shoe size is and where his kids go to school.

You would be that interested in what it takes to get Aiden's support, but somehow, Aiden, the SVP of product, , we see him as , a position holder who we just need to take a business case to. No, he's still a living human being with interests and biases and ambitions. things that he wants to achieve. And we've got to tap into that if we're really going to move leaders and help them to see the possibilities that exist in the ideas that we propose.

I believe that without leadership, you cannot do anything. I work my 20 plus years in open innovation. I know that without leadership, open innovation doesn't work because open innovation shakes up the fundamental of innovation as a company in such a way. that without strong leadership. And I think that with corporate exploration is pretty much the same.

I recently I spoke with a group of MBA students from University and one of them asked me, okay, well, you know, I'm working for the company , and I'm not supported. Leadership doesn't want , to listen to me. What should I do? And I kind of, almost on impulse, I said, well quit it. Hosts were unhappy with this response. perhaps expected something polite, but it's honest response.

So, while I support Andy, fully support that we need kind of, you know, to create this to do list for, for leaders, I would expect to compose, in the sense of to do list for corporate explorers. So it shouldn't necessarily be a book, but it's some, something what I see, it's kind of a project, maybe a crowdsourced project that, We outline all the steps that corporate explorers should take to, you know, from, from, from conceiving of the idea to scaling up.

And just at every point and milestone, the problems that they would get with their leadership and what to do about that. The place where I really agree with you, Eugene, is that many of the answers lie in your peer group. And that's true in any profession, any activity, right? It's about other people who are facing similar problems and learning from them. That's why professional societies and, and and so on exist and have such an important role.

And part of the problem as a corporate explorer is you often don't have. Access directly to your peer group, and you talk about, Hey, it turns out I was a Corporate Explorer. I didn't know that. And you probably didn't know that there were others like you. And so, I would encourage people to join up to our LinkedIn group, which is the Corporate Explorer Club, and we have some Corporate Explorer.

Learning pods, starting to run as well, because what we need to do is create more of a sense of learning community here, because that's how you get through some of these challenges that are so consistent and common, and out of that may come some of the answers to how to engage leaders in the future. It's that mix of the network. I think that's so important because there's such , psychological resilience that's needed when you're a corporate Explorer.

And that's really what, one of the things I wanted to bring to life. The red book, the corporate Explorer is really the theory behind it. And then the black book, the corporate Explorer field book is the theory in practice, which But in here, you'll also find a support network. And as Andy said, there's a support network Andy, where could people find that network or where can they reach out to you to Find more Andrew J. M. Binns.

And there's the Corporate Explorer Club is, is on LinkedIn or find us at changelogic. com. brilliant? And I want to thank once again, our friend, our mutual friend, Simon Hill, the CEO of Wazoku who sponsored this series, and you can find Wazoku and their 700, 000 plus corporate explorers or open innovation network, if you want to call them that, what they call connected collected intelligence and you can find them at wazoku.

com for now, and with my great thanks for supporting this entire series across twenty twenty four, the authors of the corporate explorer field book eugene ivanov and andy bins thank you very much. Thank you, Aidan, and thank you to Wazoku