Resources

Insights about how Nike pursues innovation, from a December 2025 member meeting with Jordan Rice, COO of Nike Innovation.

PowerPoint presentation delivered in 2022 by Alexandru Darie, a veteran of Schneider Electric, Signify, Sensata, and Phillips Lighting. Provides insights and best practices for digital transformation; lean startup; discovery-based planning; agile; and scrum teams.

Includes great content on making the case for open innovation; dealing with intellectual property concerns; and examples of challenges NASA has conducted and solutions/technologies it has found.

This one-page document provides a simple snapshot of the company’s focus areas, academic partnerships, and the national lab relationships driving R&D strategy.

Overview of a mobility innovation contest was by Ford in collaboration with the City of Austin to crowdsource innovative solutions that improve mobility — especially access to health services, food, education, and essential amenities.

2025 PDF on the PepsiCo Labs model for delivering End-to-End Program Pilots.

Enterprise Design Thinking is IBM’s approach to applying design thinking at the speed and scale the modern enterprise demands. It’s a framework for teaming and action. It helps teams not only form intent, but deliver outcomes.

This 33-slide PPT and related video tackle the question of innovating over the long-term, with lots of concrete examples, and references to the approaches of Thomas Edison, Clayton Christensen, and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, among others.

This 33-slide PPT and related video tackle the question of innovating over the long-term, with lots of concrete examples, and references to the approaches of Thomas Edison, Clayton Christensen, and Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, among others.

Developed for use at a high-profile media company, this 29-page PDF playbook is “a reference to guide you through a repeatable end to end innovation approach.”

This deck, assembled by InnoLead, highlights the 14 most essential concepts in corporate innovation to help organizations foster creativity, agility, and leadership. We define each concept, provide a visual or framework that helps make it concrete, and recommend books, articles, or online resources to learn more.

End-to-end process for sourcing, piloting and scaling startup partnerships.

Define decision rights, funding gates and escalation paths for innovation work.

While not a policy, per se, InnoLead members might be interested in seeing Cigna’s publicly-posted “approach” to ethical AI. The brief statement from the $195 billion healthcare insurer disclosed that is has an AI Center of Enablement that governs AI “guardrails, systemic controls and processes” and ensures the responsible use of AI. The cross-functional Center includes individuals from technology, security, legal, compliance, marketing, and other departments.

Weighing in at 27-pages, the Microsoft AI Standard explains the operationalization of six AI principles related to accountability, transparency, fairness, and other topics.

As GenAI makes its way into product offerings, companies are providing addendums to their Terms of Use that coverage GenAI user guidelines. $19 billion software company Adobe, for example, has published a bulleted list of new guidelines that govern the use of Adobe’s GenAI features.

Orbit is a platform being developed by the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship to support new venture development, and they’re interested in giving early access to corporate leaders from the InnoLead community, to test it out and provide feedback.

This spreadsheet lays out the strengths and weakesses of different approaches to driving innovation. It’s excerpted from our 2024 report, “Driving Growth Through New Ventures and Corporate VC.”

Our latest PDF download offers help defining innovation spaces; understanding the pros and cons of virtual and physical spaces; and gives experts’ advice about setting up an innovation space.

Capture what worked, what didn't and the scale/kill recommendation after a pilot.

Lightweight proof-of-concept terms covering scope, IP, data and pricing.

Created inside publicly-traded companies, this PowerPoint deck lays out various options for setting up innovation organizations; defining roles; creating processes and pipelines for moving projects forward; and measuring outcomes.

In February 2022, we convened an InnoLead members’ meeting on Zoom to talk about how companies were using their physical innovation spaces, or experimenting with virtual ones.

This data visualization shows the methods in which innovative organizations look for and identify new emerging tech. 

Adapted from the Business Model Canvas to better fit the needs of the corporate world, this Idea Canvas allows you to follow a high-level scientific process when evaluating ideas and then use the criteria from the Idea Canvas when testing or validating that idea. Developed by a Senior Director working in the retail industry.

An exercise to do with colleagues: If you were given 100 pennies to invest in different open innovation partners, like small suppliers, universities, startups, etc., where are you investing resources and time today? Where is innovation actually coming from? What should you do differently? 

What resources do other corporates have in place for interacting with the startup ecosystem? What do they find most challenging? Explore the answers in these five data visualizations.

Reusable agenda and minutes format for portfolio and governance reviews.

Deck from 2019 providing a thorough overview of the lean startup methodology, along with many helpful templates. Used inside a manufacturing company to help guide the development of mobile apps, as well as hardware, IoT connected products, and research initiatives.

What metrics matter most right now? On a recent videoconference, InnoLead members shared a few…