Episode 13: Resilient by Design: Why Intrapreneurs Win in Efficiency-Obsessed Times with Kaihan Krippendorff

In a moment when AI is rewarding efficiency and headlines spotlight shrinking management layers, strategist and author Kaihan Krippendorff argues the real advantage comes from optionality—and from empowering intrapreneurs across the enterprise. We dig into why the MVP-and-hyperscale era is giving way to longer feedback cycles and thesis-driven bets, what distinguishes innovation programs that outperform, and how to fund and govern “everyone innovates” cultures without blowing up what already works.

Kaihan breaks down the data behind four innovation models (dedicated team vs. everyone innovates; central fund vs. distributed P&L funding), why themes—not pure financial goals—should steer CVC, and the seven common blockers that stall progress (from “not-no” approvals to business-model conflict). We explore second-order effects (think microwave → workforce shifts), the inefficiency of internal idea marketplaces, partnering vs. building, translating early-stage metrics for CFOs and boards, and reorganizing around small P&L teams that buy and sell services internally.

You’ll learn

• How to architect portfolio bets tied to strategy—not just quarterly EPS
• Funding mechanisms that force real BU buy-in
• Practical tactics for intrapreneurs to navigate politics and get a true “yes”
• A two-part playbook: help people see themselves as intrapreneurs and retire the false “old vs. new” dichotomy

 The CVC Open Innovation Summit Europe takes place November 25–26 in Berlin, during AsiaBerlin Innovation Week. Positioned as a bridge between Europe, the U.S., and Asia’s fast-growing ecosystems, the summit is a curated, invitation-only forum for senior leaders to tackle the issues shaping innovation: AI, geopolitics, energy resilience, health, sustainability, and more. Listeners are invited to request an invitation at cvc-summit.com → E

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Transcript

Steve: 0:00

Thank you. Welcome to Inside CVC, the podcast that brings together leaders in innovation and capital investment to explore the trends shaping the business of corporate venture capital. I'm your host, Steve Smith, and together with Philip Willigman, we're speaking to corporate investors, entrepreneurs, and ecosystem builders driving the future of innovation. Each episode, we dive into the strategies, the partnerships, and the big ideas behind venture investing at the intersection of business growth and emerging technology. InsideCVC is brought to you by UPath Advisors, helping corporations and startups unlock sustainable growth through strategic partnerships. To learn more, visit upath.com. That's the letter U hyphen path dot com. And to catch up on all of our episodes, search InsideCVC on your favorite podcast platform or visit upath.com forward slash podcast. Today, we're joined by strategist, author, and innovation thought leader, Kaihan Krippendorf. Kaihan has advised Fortune 500 executives and global leaders on how to ignite and drive meaningful innovation. In our conversation, he explores why entrepreneurs, employees who innovate from within, are often the real drivers of breakthrough innovation, and why courage, alignment, and culture matter as much as strategy when building innovation capability. We talk about how corporate leaders can avoid the common pitfalls that stall venture and innovation programs, why measuring impact requires more than quarterly returns, and how balancing efficiency with opportunity can prepare companies for the future, especially in the age of AI. Here's our conversation with Kaihan Krippendorff. Thank you for joining us on Inside CVC. You're out there, you're advising a lot of people these days, senior leaders across industries. I'm curious, why don't we start with what are you hearing? Where does innovation, where is growth sitting on the leaders you're advising? How are they thinking about it right now? And where does it sit on their sort of strategies of business objectives?

Kaihan: 2:12

I think that innovation is always important and the pendulum swings between what the innovation approach is. And so like maybe every three years or four years is sort of what I sense is they set up an innovation team and like the average life of innovation teams about three years. And then they'll make switch. They might go organic acquired back and forth. But I think innovation, what's changing right now with regard to innovation is that where innovation was more about organic growth. I think now innovation is more about creating options or optionality or what's the word I'm looking for? Resilience. Is that

Steve: 2:51

part of that driven by that resilience? How much does sort of flexibility play

Kaihan: 2:59

into that as well? Maybe speed to market? the next quarter or the next year, I believe in the thesis because I think the foundational technologies are shifting and people are starting to take bets on longer-term

Philipp: 3:31

hypotheses. Just to follow up on that, I personally love what you're saying. I think it's the right way to do innovation. I don't think quarter by quarter. But over the last couple of months, I've heard from a lot of innovation units, a lot of corporate venture units who actually closed shop or at least didn't rehire. How do you see that play out? Is it like really, is that two different cams in the Fortune 500? Like ones were actually saying, really, let's put some bets out there because The world is changing. There's so much uncertainty. We cannot really plan anymore if it's going to work or not. So we have to put a bit down and see how, do our best effort. How do you see that? I

Kaihan: 4:12

think it's always been this kind of, these two sides of the camp of having the separating innovation, having the ambidextrous organization, the Mike Tushman, the Andy Binns, innovators, the explorer versus exploit kind of framework. I think that is a good approach to insert innovation. And I'm good friends with both of them. And so I hope I don't upset them by saying I believe in the other view, which is having broadly everyone innovate, creating the culture of innovation and giving everyone permission to innovate. And when we looked at these 367 companies that have appeared on most innovative lists on Forbes and on Fast Company, well, we found that only 12 of them actually outperformed their peers. So the rest are not doing innovation in a way that's actually producing differentiating results. And of those 12, nine of them have a more bottoms up, everyone innovates kind of approach. And the ones that don't have that approach are a lot of them are pharmaceuticals, which are this big R&D spend that's required on innovation. So it makes sense to kind of like have R&D be separate. So a good way to think of it, I think, is that Robert Walcott, my co-author of my last book, he's a professor at Kellogg in Chicago Booth. He has this great framework, which says there are basically four approaches to your innovation program. Either I'm going to simplify his language. Either everyone innovates or there's a dedicated innovation team. And where does the funding come? Either there's one big pocket of funding or the innovator has to get money from the P&Ls, so it's distributed funding. So at the dedicated innovation team, the big funding bucket, there you have like the Google X, the big bets, the big fund, right? Of these 12, and that's a small sample set, but it's pulled from 367 of those 12, 9 of them are on the bottom left, which is everyone innovates and we're not going to guarantee you a lot of money. You have to go convince the P&L to get the funding. And you guys know as CBC experts, it's easy for a business unit to say, yeah, let's do it when they don't have to put up the money. But then when you're like, okay, now we're ready to actually commercialize it, they're like, well, maybe next year. I don't have the funding this year. But getting them to commit early on, give them kind of early buy-in.

Steve: 6:34

It really is the rise of that concept of entrepreneurs that you write about. For the benefit of our audience, take a moment and maybe define what you mean when you say entrepreneurs are the new entrepreneurs and why that's so important, why that's different in today's business cycle.

Kaihan: 6:52

Yeah, and if I get a little bit kind of loud and passionate, this is something I'm very passionate about. Say an entrepreneur is just simply someone who is an entrepreneur, but they're working inside an established company. And I love entrepreneurs. I'm an entrepreneur. Most of the people, a lot of people hang out with our entrepreneurs, you know, but my wife works at a company. She's a, she's a corporate person, but she has the same kind of creativity and passion and business sense and kind of understanding of the market. So I think there are lots of people like that. So I went and I looked and I said, who are the primary drivers of innovation society? And I looked at this list of the 30 most transformative innovations for the last 30 years devised by this, this set of, of professors. But anyway, long story short, the majority, meaning seven of the most transformative innovations in the last three decades have come from employees working inside established companies, not from entrepreneurs. Now, it's a little bit kind of, I think that the foundational innovations, the internet, email, DNA sequencing, that require, that's kind of a platform innovation. And then you'll see the entrepreneur, then you'll see Facebook build on top of that. And you'll feel Netflix build on top of it. You'll see the entrepreneurs building on top of, but the foundational innovations, 70% of them come from introverters. And so I think that there's sort of a danger that we over-index on the stories we tell about entrepreneurship only because it diminishes the passion of the would-be entrepreneur to go and try to build something. One of my missions is to flip that narrative.

Philipp: 8:26

I think that resonates well. I mean, Steve, just imagine back when we were building the future of mobility practice as entrepreneurs at Deloitte, how difficult it was sometimes and kind of like getting going. So, Kaihan, with that, what are some of the common blockers that really start innovation efforts inside complex organizations? And even though if the intent is strong, so what are the things entrepreneurs have to overcome?

Kaihan: 8:53

In my book that you're referring to, I have seven. The first is intent, but there's another one that I'll bring up too. So really quickly, intent is that they've just given up. Need is they don't understand what the company strategy is. So they're looking for the innovations in the wrong places. They don't generate enough ideas is the third one, options. People will just come up with one idea, but they need to have a portfolio of lots of ideas in order to be successful. The next is business model. There's business model conflict between your innovation and the company's business model. The next is they ask you to write a business plan to take it in action, but you need to take an action to get the data to do the business plan. So they don't allow you to do that kind of agile experimentation. The next is your team. it's hard to pull together the team because the team is sitting in lots of different parts of the organization. You need someone from finance, someone from marketing, someone from R&D, and someone from operations, someone from sourcing, and it's hard to pull you guys together. And then the final thing are just kind of some environmental factors, which is mostly around leadership and culture and incentives that make it difficult. So you have to kind of manage this cultural, political quagmire. The other one that I'm kind of really interested in now that I've been studying that is not part of that, which is the inefficiency of the internal idea marketplace. Often the solution already exists inside your company and you don't know, it's not easy to find the person who has that solution. And I think that in the uncertainty that we live in today, it is increasingly important that we enable our people to see opportunities, seize opportunities, find solutions for them. And the great thing about, especially in uncertainty, is solutions that are already tested. It a much shorter time to market, right? Because they already work. They just work in a different place. And now you adopt it. Like the Ikea guy who decided he was going to take the legs off of a table and fold them and put them into the back of his car. That didn't require a lot of R&D, but that created the flat pack box that transformed the company and the industry. So I think that there's a lot of opportunity, especially in these times of uncertainty, to create that agility by matching existing solutions with needs.

Philipp: 12:31

Let me do a quick follow-up on that. Obviously, you know, talking about innovation within an organization oftentimes means you are creating something which is new for the organization. But if you think about partnering, for example, sometimes with startups, I personally found in my career, oftentimes you knew that there were somebody out there who was already doing something similar than what a team internally has come up with. But then you have a lot of pushback, like, oh, we can do it better, or we are like this big organization We don't need to partner with a startup. Any thoughts on that? And is it sometimes better to bring somebody from the outside in or is it better to actually develop it inside? We'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Kaihan: 13:15

First of all, I'm encouraged by the fact that you got to that stage because in my experience, often they don't even look to see what startups are already doing and they think that they can just make it up themselves. They can build. It was my job to show them. To do that, right? Yeah, exactly. And so that's such a valuable function because often they operate in these silos, right? whatever their IBM or their GM or their whatever. And they just think that the world ends at the, at the gate of their, the security gate of their building. Right. And there's, and there's so many inches. So that's why I think it's important to be, yeah, to be, to be at least aware of what startups are already doing. I think that there's like a lot of excuses. I think there's like a, there is the, we can do it better. There is, Oh, it's risky. Like, Oh, that's, that's B2C and we're B2B or this is enterprise. And then there are the incentives of, it not being made here. But I think a good advantage of having some kind of partnership or investment strategies allows you to expand the portfolio of your options with lower costs, right? Jeff Bezos says, if you have one in 10 chance of a hundred times payoff, you gotta take that bet every time, but you gotta be ready to lose nine times out of 10. Most companies aren't willing to lose nine times out of 10, but if you're building a solution inside, but you're also partnering with three other ventures, you now have four bets.

Steve: 14:32

You write about opportunities Efficiency driven versus efficiency driven a lot. And I want to ask you a direct question, but a bit of a context. When I hear you say entrepreneurship, and to me that requires people, right? Brainpower, people, creativity, all of these things drive entrepreneurship. And I think about that. And then I think about AI. And I think about some of the things, even Salesforce CEO this week saying 30 to 50% of the companies right now is already running on AI. We're seeing these things about AI. potential large massive middle management white collar sort of layoffs coming as a result of of ai ai is also a lot driven around efficiency at this point right making the business better so when you sort of think of entrepreneurship and opportunity driven versus efficiency driven and balancing ai and potential the people costs there how are you thinking about that or if i'm a senior leader how do i sort of balance or think of all of those things

Kaihan: 15:33

luckily the pursuit of the efficiency and the pursuit of opportunity are not mutually exclusive. And so pursuit of the inefficiency is like the natural first step because that's kind of what we can see where the applications are. So it makes sense to pursue that. And it gives you like immediate return that gets you immediate cash and buy-in. So it makes sense to do that. That's not going to be what makes the difference. I mean, let's take the microwave and the vacuum cleaner. These are two efficiency tools and they were introduced because they would reduce the time that took you to eat and took you the time to clean the room, to clean and build your house, right? So you have the first order, which is efficiency. But then you have the second order, which is it's easier to cook small meals than large meals because the microwave works for an individual meal, but not for a whole family. So what happens then? It's no longer efficient, more efficient for everyone to sit around the table at the same time. It is equally efficient, maybe even more efficient for people to eat their own meal at their own time. So now we see family's less often eating together. It also reduces the time that it takes to clean a house. It used to be 40 hours a week. And then with these technologies, it went down to 15 hours a week. And who was doing most of the cleaning, at least in the US and Europe? Women. Now, women had a 40-hour job, but now they only have 15 hours. And so what are they going to do with their time? Oh, they're going to get jobs. And there, that triggers the surge in women participation in the workforce. And there were all these legal and social changes that are often pointed to as the reason for that surge. But I think, no, it was simply the microwave and the vacuum cleaner and the washing machine that triggered these second-order consequences. So I think that in AI, we should pursue the efficiency. Can I cook this faster? Can I vacuum this faster? But we are not even seeing what the social, political, second-order consequences are yet.

Steve: 17:27

Do you think those second-order consequences will come faster than they did compared to the microwave? come to the

Kaihan: 17:34

stove? It's a good question. I think that technology moves faster. I don't know that regulation moves faster. I don't know if humans change their behaviors faster. I don't think that laws are going to change faster necessarily. So I think there are going to be things that are slow to change. Like Jeff Bezos' favorite quote of like, people always ask me, what's going to change in 10 years? What I'm more interested in is what's not going to change in 10 years. I think there are a lot of things that are not going to change or going to change very slowly. And it is in contrasting those things that are usually technology driven, they're going to change very quickly, and those things are going to be slow to change. And that contrast is where you're going to kind of see how things evolve.

Steve: 18:10

Yeah, I think that's one of my fears when I hear these things is, can humans keep up, right, to the behavioral change and the human change?

Kaihan: 18:20

Well, yeah, we take a long time to change our behaviors, yeah. Because if we could live 70 years and two years and become fruit flies and we could evolve more quickly, then that would be the way that we would... Keep up. But I don't know if I would want to live there.

Steve: 18:38

Philip.

Philipp: 18:40

Let me try to get to our next question from this. I would think really, really important actually dialogue we're having right now. And we should have actually more discussions about this topic. And let me try to weave it into the question. So if you think about, you write a lot about the architecture in companies and organizations, which is needed to actually drive transformation, right? Given Given the changes we are seeing, given the discussion we just had on AI, you do call out, you have to align around your portfolio bets with a clear vision. Given the speed we are talking about, right? How do you see innovation and corporate venture units playing a role in this architecture right now?

Kaihan: 19:22

Well, I think that because of some of the technologies we're talking about, that transaction and coordination costs are coming down. And if we go to the theory of the firm, why does the firm exist? What we see is the firm exists because because it's more efficient to coordinate and transact in a hierarchical structure versus other ways, marketplaces, ecosystems, democracies. And so what I'm thinking is, and I have some data to show this, is that companies that are embracing alternative ways to architect how their people coordinate with each other and move away from hierarchical structures into other forms, particularly market forces, and the way to do that is really simple. Break your team, break your entire organization in teams of 10. Don't give those people a budget. Give them a P&L. Take your CVC program and embed it in each of those teams and have them exist as independent P&Ls. Then take your support functions, your finance, your IT, your marketing functions, your legal function, and break them down into small teams and have those teams try to sell their services internally. And then you evolve from this hierarchy into this market-based ecosystem of of individual teams. And what that really does nicely is that I think it takes the line of what does it mean to be in the corporate and not in the corporate. It makes that line from black to gray. And you start seeing more interaction with the entrepreneurial community. Because that's how Silicon Valley works. That's how the ecosystem in which these ventures are born. They look like that, right? Small teams, funding. If I can convince people to invest in me, if I can make money that I can reinvest I think that companies

Steve: 21:09

are starting to look like that kind of entrepreneurial ecosystem. Yeah, we

Kaihan: 21:37

had a great session last week with our chief innovation, chief strategy officers. And Philip has come to one of those events before. And we had a woman and I highly recommend maybe you consider having her on your podcast. Her name's Gina O'Connor. She's a professor at the university. She spent like three decades studying kind of internal innovation structures. And like one of the eight things that she at the end of that, she said, there's eight things. And one of them is to not Organize your CVC efforts around a financial goal, but rather around themes. Innovation arenas is what she calls them, if I'm remembering correctly. And these are kind of hypotheses. And you're making that, going back to what we talked about before, making that long-term bet. I believe that AI is going to transform our industry in this way. And so what are our, I want you to look for opportunities there. So you have like five or six kind of opportunity areas. is. But I do see a lot of times that companies just treat the CVC as just another asset class. Like we're exposed to a core operating and we also want to be exposed. We want to take our capital allocations should be balanced to include some venture. And that venture has nothing to do with the strategy of the company. I talked to one head of innovation for this large Italian financial company and she's like, yeah, we do these arenas and themes and we do this incubation and they'll go out to universities and get students to come up with ideas and do competitions and whatever, give them the whole award kind of thing, right? And they have a CVC arm that invests, but she doesn't even know what the CVC is investing in. She doesn't know what their portfolio is. So the CVC is not, it's not strategic. All it's doing is like any venture capital firm, it might have kind of some kind of investment thesis, but that investment thesis is not tied to the company strategy. I think what the CVC should be doing is saying, you said these are the seven investment areas. And even though we think growing plants on Mars is a great opportunity, that's not part of our strategy. We're going to invest in these seven, right? And then it becomes integral to the strategy.

Steve: 23:45

I know we also talked about, started the conversation earlier saying that innovation should not be tied to quarterly returns, right? And so what you're describing there, I mean, certainly it doesn't, in my opinion, it links it to those quarterly returns, having that strategy, or at least it links the CVC strategy to the rich terms of the company again I agree I don't think there necessarily should be quarterly returns but to your point it is I would suspect that setting it up that like that contributes very directly the line of sight to how this is going to deliver returns to shareholders is pretty clear but my sense would be that also makes it easier to go to those different parts of the organization under your entrepreneurship model to get those other pieces of the organization to buy in would

Kaihan: 24:31

that be

Steve: 24:31

fair

Kaihan: 24:32

yeah absolutely absolutely And the challenge is the translation of what the objectives are for different phases to other phases, right? Like companies should always be doing five things. They also be killing off things. They should be dreaming about things. They should be putting the pieces together to grow things. They should be scaling things and they should be operating things. They should kill them off again. And the metrics that you use for each of those five are different. And unfortunately, the thing is, companies really care about ultimately or who the success of their leadership is defined by is determined by is the investors. And so they're investing, they should be doing five things, but their investors only care about one thing. They only care about quarterly EPS. And you can't use quarterly EPS to tell you if your discovery activities or incubation activities are valuable. So I think it's really interesting to look at how to translate that. Like Dan Toma, who wrote a book called Innovation Accounting, he's got some good thoughts on how to bridge that gap. I think that customer lifetime value is a good tool to help you take these things that could become long-term and translate them to immediate things that investors will value. So I've only started looking at that, but I'm interested in the metric side of how to translate.

Steve: 25:47

Yeah, well, I mean, it's something that Philip and I had been challenged with the companies that we advised around the future of mobility. The technology exists to create these ecosystems of connected, autonomous, shared, electrified vehicles. vehicles, right? But the verdict is still out to this day if people are actually going to open their wallets and pay for that stuff, right? And so when you think about the movement of people from one place to another and all of the rich things it can be and the seamless things it can be, clearly the value proposition hasn't been made enough at scale for all the billions of dollars that these companies are investing in things that drive themselves and these very connected experiences inside the vehicle for people to say, I want that. And to your point, you're seeing the ebbs and flows of where this isn't a priority in the boardrooms of many of these automotive

Kaihan: 26:40

and mobility companies. not looking at revenue growth. They're looking at something else. And so that allows them to value playing that. One of my favorite classes I took in business school, undergrad business school at Wharton was options, derivatives. And I remember this professor telling me this thing. He said, like, you can get into any business you want. Here's what you do. You buy a bunch of call options on the business, and then you sell a bunch of put options on the business. And what you've simulated is the return on the business. And then you can go into that business today. And then the afternoon, if you don't think it's a good business, you can exit from the business. The thing is that That is because you're able to engage with it with a marketplace-based kind of entry. But in a corporation, you've got to hire people and go through the vet. It's a hierarchical approach, right? So yeah, it's so much to explore there. It's a great question.

Philipp: 27:47

Well, we're on the topic of finance here, right? And what is the organization looking for in terms of returns and KPIs? So can you maybe provide a bit of advice to our audience here? Corporate venture capital units, also innovation units, When they get organized or set up at the beginning, there's an alignment and everybody's excited. Some people call it, oh, this is a CEO. He wants to have a bit of a playing field, right? And it's a great start. But they all agree it's going to be long-term bets, right? And then if things get a bit harder, then suddenly the CFO turns around and says, hey, where's my return? Where's the money? Where's the payback? How can an innovation unit or the CBC unit play with that and really get ahead of it to make sure that some of these programs who may turn out in a year don't get shut down.

Kaihan: 28:39

Understanding the political challenge of innovation is one of the key distinguishers of successful entrepreneurs. And for my last, for that book, Driving Innovation, I interviewed about 150 of them. And like a lot of them would say something like, you got to make the distinction between a yes and a not no. And you will always, you'll often hear not no, but it's not actually a yes. And then we what hits the fan at the end of the year and you can't show the ROI, then you realize you didn't really have a yes. So I don't know what the solution is, but it's probably like probing and just saying clarifying. I just want to be clear. In a year from now, we're not going to show any return, but we're going to show you a bunch of investments that 70% are going to be underwater, but the 30%, I don't know what that is. And in three years, maybe you will see the return, but the return is going to be this, and that's going to be 2% of our total value. But if we don't do that, then it's not going to buy us the Horizon 2 option that's going to pay off five years from now. I think a marriage therapist would probably be very good at that.

Philipp: 29:47

To add to that, I do think being in the European environment for the last weeks, I've observed that innovation and also investing in ventures is oftentimes a CEO thing. They kind of went to Silicon Valley or I went to like a startup environment and they really enjoyed it and said, we need to do that. We need to play there as well. And then they get it going, find like overachiever in the company who takes it and builds it out. But nobody really understands it and understands how, you know, what the investments look like, what the talent looks like and what it really takes to make it happen. And then the first or two things don't work out. And then suddenly a year and a half later, it is, it's history.

Kaihan: 30:28

Yeah.

Philipp: 30:28

So it's a good, I think great advice, what you're saying, like you're really have to make sure that you ask for the real yes and not like maybe.

Kaihan: 30:37

I don't know if this is going to really like connect for you guys, but like I've been thinking about this analogy, like probably when you guys were teenagers, there was a period where you started like getting into working out. And at least for me and most of my friends, the big concern was, oh, I don't want to get too bulky. And you don't realize how hard it is actually to build that kind of muscle, right? And I think that maybe our CEOs and executives are kind of like that. They don't appreciate what they're actually signing up

Philipp: 31:06

for

Kaihan: 31:06

early on.

Philipp: 31:08

I like that. I think we need to get Arnold Schwarzenegger to explain how actually he was. Because he's been an

Kaihan: 31:14

entrepreneur, he's been a politician, he's been a business builder. I

Steve: 31:18

think that aligns a lot with what you already write about, right? You write about the importance of a when it comes to innovation. You write about the importance of courage, right? That strength could be a factor of courage. Personally, I think, for me, courage is probably one of the rather underrated values of leadership. I think empathy and vulnerability rank up there, that as well. And so I'm curious, what's your point of view in terms of beyond the courage, beyond the alignment, What are those things, those behaviors that leaders need to do in these to drive innovation

Kaihan: 31:59

across some of these silos? And not necessarily your experience, but other people. When people do this, this happens. Other companies have done that. This has happened. And maybe learning from companies outside. So that's one way to kind of create the courage. I think that for a leader to really encourage innovation, I think you have to start with understanding that your job is to create the context for people to see and seize opportunities and rally the resources to pursue them. And so what that requires is them to understand what your strategy is. is and to have the freedom to get the resources and take the actions to pursue them. You need to move away from, I'm the CEO and these are the seven things and these are the projects and we're going to execute against these. You need to create the direction and the freedom.

Steve: 33:10

I will say, I mean, we've all taken these personality tests, these corporate, these sort of professional personality tests in our lives. And I'm the one, Deloitte had its own, actually consults with people called Business Chemistry. And one of the things that always I took away from that and something very, very, you know, I think core to who I am as a professional, as a leader is, you know, I'm known in that as a driver, right? And I say often funny, I will drive us off the bus and this cliff, this bus off the cliff, right? And that courage, but I need those guardrails, those people that describe themselves as guardians and innovators to sort of keep us on the road and keep us in the direction and, you know, to your point in leadership and so forth. I don't necessarily think there's a question here. I think it's just, you know, sort of validating what you're saying around these different sorts of personality traits, these different philosophies of who you are as a leader to driving innovation.

Kaihan: 34:10

Yeah, I think that who you should be as a leader, I think, depends certainly on the industry context and the corporate context. And I don't really know what the answer is. But I'll just say, you just said guardrails. It just thought me about, made me think about this time I was driving with of my family from Italy to Switzerland. And we're going over the mountain instead of through the tunnels just to get seas. And on the Italian side, there are guardrails on this windy road leading up to the top of the mountain. And as soon as you cross the border in Switzerland, there are no guardrails. The road goes, but it's just grass. So I think that the role of guardrails does depend on the culture. And are you a culture that kind of follows the rules or are you a culture that pushes the boundaries? And should you as an organization be following the rules or pushing the boundaries now? It really is situational.

Steve: 35:00

I love that. I had no anticipation that that was going to go in that direction. I love that analogy or that comparison to your drive. So, Philip, I'll hand it over to you to close us out.

Philipp: 35:11

Yeah, no, this is great. I was just watching the new Formula One movie last night, so I don't know. I haven't seen it yet.

Kaihan: 35:18

I would

Philipp: 35:18

want to see it. Yeah, I highly recommend watching it. No commercials, but I highly recommend watching especially if you are with guardrails or no guardrails. So I think it may give you a very different perspective on what it means to have guardrails or no rules. But let's keep that actually in mind. We'll be closing out today's episode. So what would your playbook look like for a Fortune 500 company who is trying to scale from incremental innovation to real transformation without blowing up what works? What is your recommendations to the CXOs and head of innovation, head of CVCs out there. How can you make that happen in this world right now?

Kaihan: 35:59

To simplify it, I would say two things. The first is get your people to see themselves as entrepreneurs rather than entrepreneurs. That means they have freedom. They need to understand what their objectives are, what the market needs, and do all those things. And the second thing, I think, is we need to remove the idea that it's old versus new. It's too much of a simplification that you have the old business and the new business. There are lots of things about your core business that are going to last for years and years and years and should not change.

Steve: 36:43

That was Kaheen Krippendorf sharing his perspective on how companies can unleash entrepreneurs, overcome the blockers to innovation, and architect organizations that thrive on transformation. If you enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow InsideCVC on your favorite podcast platform and visit us at upath.com forward slash podcast for transcripts and all of our episodes. On behalf of my co-host, Philip Willigman, I'm Steve Smith. As always, thanks for listening to InsideCVC. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.