50 Essential Thought Leaders in Venture Building and Corporate Innovation Globally

Last updated: June 2026

Introduction

If you are trying to understand who is genuinely shaping how organisations build new ventures, drive intrapreneurship, and escape the trap of innovation theatre, this is the directory you need. The 50 people on this list have produced the frameworks, the books, the studios, and the research that separate organisations that actually build new businesses from those that run endless workshops about building new businesses.

As of June 2026, corporate venture building has reached a defining moment. The Global Corporate Venturing Symposium reported that the average lifespan of a corporate venture capital unit is just over three years, yet more than 60 percent of large corporations in Asia now engage in some form of external innovation programme. The Gartner Hype Cycle identified corporate venture building as an emerging trend in 2023 and 2024, and by 2025 practitioners were reporting that it had matured past the hype into a discipline with governance, metrics, and repeatable playbooks.

The people on this list are the ones who built that discipline. Rather than recycling the handful of names that appear on every general leadership list, this directory surfaces the leaders who belong at the top of any serious conversation about venture building and corporate innovation. Some are Stanford professors. Some run venture studios in Indianapolis, Toronto, or Antwerp.

Some are researchers in Rome or Vienna. All of them are actively contributing to the conversation in 2025 and 2026.

If your organisation is trying to build something new, the people on this list are worth following. To discuss how to build the leadership culture and team alignment that makes innovation programmes actually work, reach out to Jonno White at jonno@consultclarity.org.

Why Does Venture Building Matter?

The organisations that create the most value in the coming decade will not be the ones that optimise their existing businesses most efficiently. They will be the ones that build new businesses while running their current ones. According to research from the Bain and Company Venture Ecosystem, of the eight companies that have created the most economic value globally in recent years, nearly all are serial business builders, reinventing their core business and building new ventures at scale.

The problem is structural. Large organisations are optimised to execute, not to explore. The incentives, processes, governance frameworks, and talent models that make existing businesses efficient are the same forces that kill new ventures before they can prove themselves. This is the central challenge that every person on this list has dedicated their career to solving, in different ways, from different angles, with different tools.

The field now has a name, a methodology, a research base, and a growing number of practitioners who have moved from theory to practice and back again. Corporate venture building, venture studios, intrapreneurship programmes, open innovation ecosystems, and ambidextrous organisation design are no longer experimental. They are established disciplines. The people on this list are their leading practitioners.

Jonno White runs executive offsites and leadership development sessions that help leadership teams build the communication and alignment capabilities that make innovation programmes sustainable. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team's needs.

How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, they have made a specific, documented contribution to the field of venture building or corporate innovation through published work, built platforms, established institutions, or created frameworks in active use. Second, they are currently engaged with the field through original posts, publications, programmes, or speaking in 2025 and 2026. Third, they represent genuine disciplinary and geographic breadth, spanning researchers, practitioners, investors, educators, and ecosystem builders across more than a dozen countries.

Rather than recycling the same small cluster of names that appear on every general innovation list, this directory brings together the people who genuinely deserve to be far better known across the full scope of the field.

The Strategic Case for Building New Ventures Inside Corporations

The most fundamental question in corporate innovation is whether building new ventures is actually a legitimate strategy rather than a distraction. The leaders in this category have built the intellectual foundation that answers that question, often through decades of research and advising at the highest levels of global business. The clearest argument for corporate venture building starts at the strategic level: competitive advantage is increasingly transient, and organisations that rely on sustaining a single position will eventually be disrupted by companies that do not yet exist.

1. Rita McGrath

Rita McGrath holds the position of Professor of Management at Columbia Business School, where she has spent three decades developing the most practically rigorous framework for corporate innovation in existence. The transient advantage framework, introduced in her 2013 book The End of Competitive Advantage, fundamentally reframed how organisations should think about strategy, arguing that the goal of building durable competitive positions is increasingly counterproductive in rapidly shifting markets. Discovery-driven planning, co-created with Ian C. MacMillan and introduced through the Harvard Business Review, gives organisations a structured methodology for committing to uncertain growth initiatives.

Her most recent work builds on Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (2019), which gives boards and executives a vocabulary for detecting early signals of strategic discontinuity before competitors do. Ranked number six on the Thinkers50 global list in 2025 and the recipient of multiple Thinkers50 Strategy Awards, McGrath maintains one of the most consistently substantive LinkedIn presences in the strategy and innovation space, engaging weekly with the most pressing questions facing corporate leaders navigating uncertainty.

2. Alex Osterwalder

Alex Osterwalder is the co-creator of the Business Model Canvas and founder and CEO of Strategyzer, based in Switzerland. He co-authored Business Model Generation with Yves Pigneur, including contributions from 170 co-creators, in 2010, producing the book that introduced business model thinking to millions of practitioners globally. His subsequent books including Value Proposition Design, co-authored with Yves Pigneur, Greg Bernarda, and Alan Smith, and The Invincible Company, co-authored with Yves Pigneur, with contributions from Alex Smith and Tendayi Viki, advanced the toolkit for building innovation portfolios inside corporations.

In 2025, Osterwalder was featured alongside Rita McGrath at number three in the Industry Leaders list of 25 management consultant leaders shaping the profession, a recognition that reflects his sustained influence on how senior practitioners think about business model innovation. He posts frequently on LinkedIn, driving substantive discussions about the fundamentals of building new business models, and was recently joined by McGrath in a conversation about whether the pursuit of AI advantage is consuming attention that should go toward the basics of value creation.

3. Gary Hamel

Gary Hamel is a visiting professor at London Business School and the founder of the Management Lab, where he has spent more than three decades making the case that management itself is the primary barrier to corporate innovation. Named by the Wall Street Journal as the world's most influential business thinker and described by Fortune as the world's leading expert on business strategy, Hamel is the most reprinted author in Harvard Business Review history, having written more than 20 articles. His work with co-author Michele Zanini on Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, published in an updated and expanded edition in 2025, provides a data-driven blueprint for replacing bureaucratic models with humanocracy.

The 2025 edition of Humanocracy extends the original 2020 research with new case studies from organisations that have committed to implementing the model in practice. A recent LinkedIn post from Hamel challenged leaders to think about the specific management innovations needed to build truly innovative organisations, noting that management innovation itself has stalled on an outdated S-curve. He teaches on London Business School's Senior Executive Programme three times a year and remains actively engaged with the global corporate innovation community.

4. Charles O'Reilly III

Charles O'Reilly III is the Frank E. Buck Professor of Management at the Stanford Graduate School of Business and co-founder of Change Logic, the strategic innovation advisory firm he established with Michael Tushman and Andrew Binns. One of the world's leading authorities on organisational ambidexterity, O'Reilly helped define the concept as the ability of an organisation to simultaneously exploit its existing business and explore new ventures. His co-authored books Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma with Michael Tushman, and Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game with Andrew Binns and Michael Tushman, form the most practically grounded academic framework for corporate venture building available.

A 2024 California Management Review article from O'Reilly on how Microsoft transformed its culture through five distinct change levers illustrates the specificity and practitioner applicability of his research. He has taught at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Columbia, and Harvard Business School, published over 100 papers and six books, and has won multiple Distinguished Scholar and Best Paper awards from the Academy of Management. His courses at Stanford GSB including Beyond Disruption: Entrepreneurial Leadership Within Existing Organizations are among the most sought-after executive programmes on the topic.

5. Lisa Bodell

Lisa Bodell is the founder and CEO of FutureThink, one of the largest sources of innovation research, tools, and training globally, and the author of two books that address the most persistent barrier to corporate innovation: unnecessary complexity. Kill the Company: End the Status Quo, Start an Innovation Revolution (2012) and Why Simple Wins: Escape the Complexity Trap and Get to Work That Matters (2016) argue that complexity is the primary impediment to innovative thinking inside large organisations, and that eliminating the processes, meetings, and rules that consume cognitive resources is the essential first step in building a venture-capable culture.

Bodell has worked with clients including Google, Pfizer, and Citigroup across sectors from healthcare to financial services. A regular contributor to Forbes and a frequent keynote speaker, she brings to the corporate innovation conversation a framework grounded in the practical reality that most people inside large organisations have more good ideas than they have the time, clarity, or permission to pursue. Her simplicity framework gives teams concrete tools for recovering the cognitive space that venture building requires.

6. Henry Chesbrough

Henry Chesbrough is the adjunct professor and faculty director of the Garwood Center for Corporate Innovation at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, and Maire Tecnimont Chair of Open Innovation at Luiss Guido Carli University in Rome. Widely credited with coining the term open innovation in his 2003 book of the same name, Chesbrough has spent two decades documenting how organisations create and capture value by combining internal and external ideas, technologies, and pathways to market. His work has been cited nearly 100,000 times, making him one of the most influential researchers in management history.

His follow-up Open Innovation Results: Going Beyond the Hype and Getting Down to Business (2019) addressed the gap between open innovation theory and practice, providing a framework for moving beyond innovation showcase events and partner programmes that function as substitutes for genuine new venture creation. He runs the Berkeley Innovation Forum and the European Innovation Forum, practitioner communities that convene corporate innovation leaders twice a year for direct, peer-level knowledge exchange. In 2022, Chesbrough received the Viipuri Prize from LUT University in Finland for his sustained impact on innovation research and teaching.

7. Kaihan Krippendorff

Kaihan Krippendorff is the CEO of Outthinker Networks, a global think tank of chief strategy and innovation executives, and a Thinkers50 member recognised as one of the eight most influential innovation thought leaders in the world. After beginning his career at McKinsey, he founded Outthinker with a focus on helping large organisations develop the internal entrepreneurial capacity to build new competitive advantages rather than simply defending existing ones. His five books on strategy and innovation include the widely cited Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs (2019).

Driving Innovation from Within synthesised three years of original research and more than 150 interviews with internal innovators and senior innovation experts including Rita McGrath, Steve Blank, Roger Martin, and Gary Hamel to identify seven barriers to corporate intrapreneurship and the IN-OVATE framework for overcoming them. The book remains one of the most cited practical guides for building internal innovation programmes inside large organisations. Krippendorff has generated over $2.5 billion in revenue for clients including BNY Mellon, Citibank, L'Oreal, Microsoft, and Viacom, and is an active LinkedIn contributor on strategy and innovation.

8. Vijay Govindarajan

Vijay Govindarajan is the Coxe Distinguished Professor at Dartmouth's Tuck School of Business and a former professor-in-residence and chief innovation consultant at General Electric. Known globally as VG, he is the originator of the Three Box Solution, a framework that helps organisations simultaneously manage their existing business, selectively abandon legacy practices that hold the organisation back, and build genuinely new ventures. His book The Three Box Solution: A Strategy for Leading Innovation (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016) has been adopted as a core strategic framework by dozens of global corporations.

VG is also the co-originator with Chris Trimble of the performance anatomy framework for building breakthrough businesses inside large corporations, and co-originator of reverse innovation, the concept that innovations developed in emerging markets can create entirely new global categories when applied to developed markets. A regular Harvard Business Review contributor since the 1990s, he remains actively engaged advising C-suites on the specific organisational mechanisms that make new venture creation survivable inside existing organisations whose primary incentives point in the opposite direction.

Venture Studio Architects and Corporate Venture Builders

The venture studio model, in which a dedicated team systematically builds multiple new companies using shared infrastructure, capital, and expertise, has emerged as one of the most promising approaches to corporate new venture creation. The people in this category have built studios, advised corporations on building them, or created the practitioner knowledge base that defines how they work. The venture studio concept sits at the productive intersection of the startup world and the corporate world: it brings startup-style speed and accountability to the process of building new businesses, while using the assets, networks, and resources of established organisations as its foundation.

9. Elliott Parker

Elliott Parker is the founder and CEO of High Alpha Innovation, a venture builder based in Indianapolis that partners with corporations, universities, and entrepreneurs to co-create what he calls advantaged startups: new ventures embedded with structural competitive advantages their standalone counterparts cannot replicate. He built his career at Innosight, the growth strategy consultancy founded by Clayton Christensen, before leading the innovation studio function at High Alpha and spinning out High Alpha Innovation as its own entity. To date, Parker has launched over 40 venture-backed startups through the model.

His book The Illusion of Innovation: Escape Efficiency and Unleash Radical Progress (2024) argues that most of what large corporations do under the name of innovation is designed to look like innovation rather than produce it. The book is a direct challenge to the hackathons, innovation labs, and incubator programmes that consume corporate innovation budgets without building new businesses. Parker posts regularly on LinkedIn with sharp, specific observations on what distinguishes genuine venture building from innovation theatre, drawing on the operational reality of actually building and funding ventures with corporate partners.

10. Marcus Daniels

Marcus Daniels is the Founding Partner and CEO of Highline Beta, a hybrid corporate venture studio and pre-seed venture capital firm based in Toronto, Canada, trusted by over 40 global institutions to build new ventures beyond their core since 2016. With over 26 years as a serial technology entrepreneur and operating executive, Daniels has led more than 100 growth innovation programmes, venture builds, and investment deals for corporations including RBC, Intuit, and AB InBev. Highline Beta's portfolio spans financial services, insurance, manufacturing, and consumer goods.

Daniels is one of the most articulate practitioner voices in the corporate venture studio space, contributing regularly to Fast Company, speaking at innovation conferences, and sharing specific operational insights on LinkedIn about what separates venture studio programmes that produce results from those that stall. A recent collaboration with Highline Beta ETH, focused on the future of finance at the intersection of traditional finance, AI, and Ethereum, illustrates the breadth of venture building practice his firm has developed over nearly a decade of corporate-startup co-creation.

11. Ben Yoskovitz

Ben Yoskovitz is a Founding Partner of Highline Beta and the co-author, with Alistair Croll, of Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster (O'Reilly, 2013), one of the most widely cited books in the startup and corporate innovation ecosystem. With over 25 years of experience founding and scaling technology companies, including GoInstant which was acquired by Salesforce, Yoskovitz brings deep product and analytics expertise to the question of how corporate ventures should measure progress, make decisions, and know when to pivot.

His specific contribution to the venture building conversation is the application of metrics-driven product thinking to corporate ventures, drawing on the One Metric That Matters concept from Lean Analytics to push internal teams toward clarity about what they are actually trying to learn. In a podcast interview on Startups Decoded in April 2025, Yoskovitz discussed how the venture studio model fundamentally changes the risk profile of corporate innovation by replacing large speculative bets with a portfolio of structured, data-driven experiments. He posts regularly on LinkedIn and via his newsletter Focused Chaos.

12. Philippe De Ridder

Philippe De Ridder is the co-founder of Board of Innovation, a global corporate innovation and venture building firm with hubs in New York, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Shanghai, Singapore, and other cities around the world. Board of Innovation works with the world's most ambitious businesses to design and build new products, services, and ventures, combining strategic design capabilities with deep expertise in the corporate venture building process. De Ridder and his team have worked with global corporations across consumer goods, financial services, manufacturing, and technology sectors.

An active LinkedIn contributor, De Ridder posts consistently on the intersection of corporate strategy, venture building, and AI-powered innovation processes. A 2026 post examining the dangers of linguistic convergence in corporate AI-generated documents, and the cognitive implications of outsourcing written thinking, illustrates the depth and originality he brings to the field. Board of Innovation has built over 100 new ventures and innovation programmes for global clients, and its AI-powered venture building approach has made it one of the most frequently cited examples of innovation practice in the European corporate ecosystem.

13. Scott D. Anthony

Scott D. Anthony is a Senior Partner at Huron Consulting Group, formerly managing partner of Innosight where he served from 2012 to 2018, tripling revenues and leading its $100 million acquisition by Huron. Based in Singapore since 2010, Anthony has advised CEOs at Procter and Gamble, Johnson and Johnson, General Electric, Singtel, and numerous global organisations on designing innovation strategies, building innovation capabilities, and managing transformation. He is the most published digital author on HBR.org and has run over 150 sessions for Harvard Business Corporate Learning.

His book Eat Sleep Innovate: How to Make Creativity an Everyday Habit Inside Your Organization (Harvard Business Review Press, 2020), co-authored with Natalie Painchaud, Andy Schwartz, and David S. Duncan, applies behavioural science to corporate innovation through the BEANs framework: behaviour enablers, artefacts, and nudges that make innovation a habitual organisational practice rather than an episodic event. Anthony has authored nine books published by Harvard Business Review Press, and his Singapore base gives his work a specifically Asia-Pacific perspective that complements the predominantly US and European voices in the field.

14. Hans Balmaekers

Hans Balmaekers has been the Chief of Innov8rs since 2014, building it into the world's leading professional community and conference platform for corporate innovation practitioners. Innov8rs connects people working in corporate innovation, intrapreneurship, new ventures, and transformation roles inside large organisations, giving them a space to learn from peers, share what is working, and develop the field's collective knowledge. In 2025, he hosted the Innov8rs conference in Phoenix, focused on what is actually working now in corporate innovation across industries.

The Innovator's Handbook, published annually by Innov8rs, has become one of the most widely circulated practitioner resources in the corporate innovation space. A 2025 interview with Balmaekers articulated his core observation that corporate innovators do not need to be motivated but liberated: freed from the bureaucratic and political constraints that prevent them from acting on the ideas they already have. Based in the Netherlands, he speaks at major conferences globally and maintains an active online presence as a connector and synthesiser of practitioner knowledge across the full breadth of the corporate innovation field.

15. Nicolas Sauvage

Nicolas Sauvage is the President and Board Member of TDK Ventures, a $500 million technology-focused corporate venture capital arm of TDK Corporation, and Chair of the Global Corporate Venturing Society. A former student of Professor Ilya Strebulaev at Stanford, Sauvage has built TDK Ventures around a distinctive set of principles about what corporate venture capital should accomplish, prioritising strategic value creation and long-term learning over financial returns measured in isolation. He holds board observer roles across multiple portfolio companies and brings a collaborative, values-driven approach to the work.

As Chair of the Global Corporate Venturing Society, Sauvage is focused on strengthening practitioner-to-practitioner learning across the corporate venture capital ecosystem and elevating the standards of leadership within it. He posts regularly on LinkedIn with substantive thinking on board governance, portfolio company leadership, and what distinguishes corporate venturing that genuinely serves strategic innovation from programmes that serve performance optics. His combination of academic grounding from Stanford and deep practitioner experience makes him one of the most thoughtful voices on the governance of corporate innovation programmes globally.

Open Innovation and Corporate Venturing Strategy

16. Tendayi Viki

Tendayi Viki is an Associate Partner at Strategyzer and the author of three books on corporate innovation that have become standard references for practitioners worldwide. Born in Zimbabwe and based in London, he co-designed and implemented Pearson's Product Lifecycle, an innovation framework that won Best Innovation Programme 2015 at the Corporate Entrepreneur Awards in New York. His first book The Corporate Startup, co-authored with Dan Toma and Esther Gons, was awarded the 2018 CMI Management Book of the Year in Innovation and Entrepreneurship.

His subsequent books The Lean Product Lifecycle co-authored with Dan Toma and Esther Gons, and Pirates in the Navy: How Innovators Lead Transformation, extend the framework by addressing the political and cultural realities of sustaining innovation inside organisations not designed for it. Shortlisted for the Thinkers50 Innovation Award and named to the Thinkers50 2018 Radar List, Viki has worked with AkzoNobel, Air France, Lufthansa, Pearson, Standard Bank, Salesforce, Unilever, and TD Ameritrade. He contributes regularly to Forbes and maintains an active LinkedIn presence on corporate innovation practice.

Intrapreneurship and Internal Ventures

Intrapreneurship, the practice of building new ventures inside existing organisations using the skills and mindset of an entrepreneur, has a long history but a relatively recent body of rigorous practitioner knowledge. The people in this category have built the frameworks, research, training programmes, and books that define what effective intrapreneurship looks like in practice. Building new ventures from within an established organisation is harder than building them from scratch. The organisation's immune system, designed to protect the existing business, identifies new ventures as a threat and moves to eliminate them.

Understanding that dynamic and building practices that work within it is the core contribution of the intrapreneurship tradition.

17. Véronique Bouchard

Véronique Bouchard is a Professor at emlyon Business School in France and the founder of L'Institut de l'Intrapreneuriat, the first institution in Europe specifically dedicated to advancing the professionalisation of intrapreneurship practice and research. Holding an MBA and PhD from the Wharton School, Bouchard has spent decades studying why intrapreneurship programmes succeed and fail inside large organisations, developing both the academic frameworks and the practitioner tools that enable corporations to run effective intrapreneurship initiatives.

In 2025, she edited the Elgar Encyclopedia of Corporate Entrepreneurship and Intrapreneurship, published by Elgar, a comprehensive academic and practitioner reference that brings together leading global researchers and practitioners in a single authoritative resource. She is actively engaged with both research and practitioner communities through L'Institut de l'Intrapreneuriat's events, training programmes, webinars, and community of practising intrapreneurs across major French and European corporations. Her work is the most rigorous academic foundation available for organisations designing intrapreneurship programmes in the European context.

18. Nicolas Bry

Nicolas Bry is an innovation practitioner, author, and educator who has dedicated his career to helping large corporations build the conditions in which intrapreneurs can create new ventures. Based in France and active across the African innovation ecosystem through his work with Orange's African operations and as a mentor for Seedstars, Bry bridges the European and African innovation worlds in a way that few practitioners do. He teaches at Dauphine ParisTech and has been a TEDx speaker and winner of the ISPIM Prize for innovation management.

His book The Intrapreneurs' Factory: A Practical Guide for Corporate Managers, to Leverage Intrapreneurship for Their Business, Their Employees, and the Greater Good (2019) was named one of the best new intrapreneurship ebooks by BookAuthority and praised by Ash Maurya, creator of the Lean Canvas, as full of concrete examples, recipes, and tactics from top corporates. Bry is a prolific LinkedIn contributor on corporate innovation, AI-powered intrapreneurship, and the lessons from building innovation ecosystems in both developed and developing market contexts.

19. Simone Ahuja

Dr Simone Ahuja is the founder and CEO of Blood Orange, a global innovation and strategy firm based in Minneapolis, and one of the world's leading practitioners on intrapreneurship as a strategic organisational capability. She is the co-author, with Navi Radjou and Jaideep Prabhu, of the international bestseller Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth (Jossey-Bass, 2012), and the author of Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business Before Someone Else Does (Harvard Business Review Press, 2019).

Jugaad Innovation introduced the concept of frugal, flexible, and inclusive innovation to a global corporate audience, demonstrating how innovation principles from resource-constrained emerging markets can be applied by multinationals to build more resourceful, human-centred ventures. Ahuja has served as an advisor to MIT's Practical Impact Alliance and Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, and she provides advisory and keynote services to organisations including 3M, UnitedHealth Group, Procter and Gamble, Target, Stanley Black and Decker, and the World Economic Forum. She remains actively engaged on LinkedIn and in corporate innovation speaking globally.

20. Diana Kander

Diana Kander is a New York Times bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, innovation consultant, and keynote speaker who entered the United States as a refugee at the age of eight. Her first book All In Startup: Launching a New Idea When Everything Is on the Line (Wiley, 2014) is used as required reading in over 100 university innovation courses and by numerous large organisations to help employees think more entrepreneurially. The book presents the core skills of startup methodology, including customer discovery, hypothesis testing, and business model validation, through accessible narrative.

Her subsequent books The Curiosity Muscle and Go Big or Go Home extend the framework with a methodology for sustaining entrepreneurial curiosity as an organisational habit rather than an episodic event. Kander has served as entrepreneur-in-residence at H and R Block, Commerce Bank, and several government agencies, and as an MBA professor at the University of Missouri. She speaks regularly at major corporate innovation events and coaches innovation teams on the mindset shifts that allow employees at every level to identify and pursue new venture opportunities rather than waiting for permission to innovate.

21. Steve Blank

Steve Blank is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, author, and academic widely credited with creating the Customer Development methodology that underlies the modern lean startup approach to building new ventures. His book The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company, co-authored with Bob Dorf (2012), is the definitive practitioner guide to the Customer Development process and has been used by hundreds of thousands of founders and corporate innovators worldwide.

Blank's 2013 Harvard Business Review cover story Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything redefined how large companies think about innovation at speed, and his frameworks for applying Customer Development inside large corporations have been adopted by organisations including Boeing, GE, Intel, and numerous government agencies. He teaches at Stanford, Berkeley, Columbia, and NYU, and his blog has accumulated a readership of millions over two decades of writing on entrepreneurship and corporate innovation. His direct influence on the founders of the lean startup movement, including Eric Ries, makes his contribution foundational to the entire field.

22. Andrew Binns

Andrew Binns is a co-founder of Change Logic, the strategic innovation advisory firm he established with Michael Tushman and Charles O'Reilly, and the lead author of Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game (Wiley, 2022), co-authored with Charles O'Reilly and Michael Tushman. Based in the United States, Binns works with CEOs, boards, and senior teams as they lead significant business change, bringing to the advisory relationship both the academic rigour of his research with Tushman and O'Reilly and decades of direct experience advising major corporations.

Corporate Explorer provides a practical roadmap for the specific kind of manager who can lead new venture creation inside a large organisation: someone who combines the entrepreneurial discipline of a startup founder with the political and organisational intelligence of a corporate change leader. Binns argues that such people already exist inside most large organisations and that the leadership challenge is to create the environment in which they can operate, rather than importing entrepreneurship from outside. His work is grounded in direct engagement with the corporate explorers who have actually built new businesses inside established organisations.

23. Michael Tushman

Michael Tushman is the Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, where he has spent decades studying how organisations manage the simultaneous demands of operating their existing business and building new ventures. Together with Charles O'Reilly, he is the co-originator of the ambidexterity concept as applied to corporate innovation, and the co-author of Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator's Dilemma (Stanford University Press, second edition 2021) and Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game (Wiley, 2022).

Tushman's research directly addresses the leadership challenge at the heart of corporate venture building: how senior leaders can maintain the dual commitments required to run the existing business well while simultaneously protecting and nurturing new ventures that threaten to cannibalise it. His work on architectural innovation, punctuated equilibrium, and organisational evolution has shaped how a generation of management researchers think about discontinuous change. His advisory practice through Change Logic translates that research into practical guidance for corporations navigating disruption in real time.

Research and Academic Foundations

The academic research base for venture building and corporate innovation has never been stronger. This category includes the researchers building the empirical foundations of the field, from Stanford's venture capital data to MIT's venture studio playbook, from Luiss University's taxonomy of venture builder archetypes to Cambridge's work on frugal innovation. Many of them have crossed the boundary between academia and practice, building platforms, writing playbooks, and advising practitioners directly. Their work gives the field its legitimacy and its precision.

24. Fiona Murray

Dame Fiona Murray is the William Porter Professor of Entrepreneurship and Associate Dean for Innovation at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a leading international policy expert on the transformation of scientific research into deep-tech startup ventures. In June 2025, she served as faculty director for the launch of the MIT Proto Ventures R&D Venture Studio Playbook, a comprehensive open-source framework for universities, national laboratories, and corporate research and development offices seeking to establish their own in-house venture studios.

Quoted at the launch, Murray described the venture studio model as making research systematic rather than messy and happenstance, capturing the core insight that drives MIT Proto Ventures since its founding as the first in-house venture studio within a major research university. Murray is also Vice Chair of the NATO Innovation Fund, has served on the British Prime Minister's Council on Science and Technology, and was awarded a CBE for her services to innovation and entrepreneurship in the United Kingdom. Her work spans defence, health, and food security, and the policy frameworks that translate research investment into commercial and social impact.

25. Ilya Strebulaev

Ilya Strebulaev is the David S. Lobel Professor of Private Equity and Professor of Finance at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he is the founder and director of the Stanford GSB Venture Capital Initiative. He is the co-author, with Alex Dang, of The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, 2024), which presents nine principles drawn from Stanford's decades of research into how venture capitalists make decisions and how those frameworks can transform corporate innovation.

Strebulaev has spent two decades building one of the most rigorous empirical datasets on venture capital, tracking more than 4,000 unicorns and 100,000 founders and investors. The Venture Mindset argues that the counterintuitive approaches venture capitalists use to navigate radical uncertainty are directly applicable to how corporate leaders should think about new venture investment and innovation portfolio management. He posts daily research insights on LinkedIn, drawing on data covering tens of thousands of startups and investors, making his profile one of the most information-dense in the corporate innovation space.

26. Alex Dang

Alex Dang is an innovation executive and author with experience at Amazon and McKinsey, and the co-author alongside Ilya Strebulaev of The Venture Mindset: How to Make Smarter Bets and Achieve Extraordinary Growth (Portfolio/Penguin Random House, 2024). Having witnessed first-hand how Amazon and McKinsey apply venture-style thinking to large-scale business building, Dang brings to the book a practitioner perspective that complements Strebulaev's two decades of academic research at Stanford.

His contribution to The Venture Mindset is to ground the Stanford research in the operational realities of applying venture capital decision-making frameworks inside large organisations, where the governance structures, risk appetites, and incentive models are fundamentally different from those in an independent venture capital fund. The book has been warmly received by practitioners, with Eric Schmidt, former CEO and Chairman of Google, describing it as full of powerful, practical lessons on changing how we think and act. In April 2025, Dang joined Strebulaev at TU Wien and WU Wien for a keynote and panel discussion on the core principles behind entrepreneurial success.

27. Paola Belingheri

Paola Belingheri is a Lecturer in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Luiss University in Rome, Italy, and the co-author, with Christian Lechner, of Venture Builders and the Creation of Scaleups: De-Risking Entrepreneurship to Drive High-Growth Companies (Springer, 2025), an open-access academic book that provides the most comprehensive classification and empirical analysis of venture builder models published to date. Drawing on a unique dataset of interviews with European venture builders, the book identifies key design archetypes and their impact on entrepreneurial ecosystems.

Belingheri has previously co-founded several startups and has experience with multiple incubation and acceleration programmes, giving her research a practitioner grounding that pure academic work in this space often lacks. The book is freely available as open access, making the empirical foundations it provides accessible to practitioners, policymakers, and academics alike. Her work on venture building represents one of the most important contributions to the empirical foundations of the field produced in the 2020s, providing a precise vocabulary for distinguishing the many different models operating under the venture builder label.

28. Christian Lechner

Christian Lechner is a Full Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Free University of Bolzano in Italy, with over 20 years of experience in teaching, research, startup advising, and policy development. He is the co-author, with Paola Belingheri, of Venture Builders and the Creation of Scaleups (Springer, 2025), and one of the leading academic voices on the venture builder model as a mechanism for creating high-growth enterprises from scratch.

Lechner's research examines how venture builders leverage structured processes, expert guidance, and shared resources to systematically create new companies, distinguishing them from traditional accelerators and incubators in ways that matter for both practice and policy. His work is particularly valuable for organisations seeking to understand not just how to build a venture studio but which of the many possible design choices for such a studio will produce the outcomes they are looking for. The classification framework he and Belingheri developed provides the clearest available typology of the venture builder model in its many forms.

29. Jeanne Liedtka

Jeanne Liedtka is a Professor of Business Administration at the Darden School of Business at the University of Virginia and one of the leading academics on the application of design thinking to corporate innovation and venture building. She is the co-author, with Tim Ogilvie, of Designing for Growth: A Design Thinking Tool Kit for Managers (Columbia Business School Publishing, 2011), which brought design thinking methodology to a business audience in a rigorous, practical form, and the co-author of Solving Problems with Design Thinking: Ten Stories of What Works.

Her research on innovation-driven growth, published in the Harvard Business Review and the Rotman Management Magazine, examines how design thinking creates the conditions for new business model creation inside existing organisations. Her work draws on direct engagement with corporations attempting to apply design methods to the earliest stages of venture development, where the structured hypotheses of traditional business planning are least useful. Liedtka's contribution is to show that the empathy, creativity, and iterative prototyping of design thinking are not soft skills but hard capabilities that can be taught, measured, and built into corporate venture development processes.

30. Tim Kastelle

Tim Kastelle is an Associate Professor at the UQ Business School, University of Queensland, in Brisbane, Australia, and one of the most widely read academics working on the practical dynamics of innovation management. Known for his accessible writing on innovation strategy, network effects in innovation ecosystems, and the organisational conditions that allow new ventures to form and grow inside established institutions, Kastelle reaches a practitioner audience that few academics in the field can match.

His research examines how organisations can make better decisions about which innovation bets to pursue, how to build the network structures that allow innovation to spread across an organisation, and how the dynamics of open innovation ecosystems differ from those of closed corporate R and D programmes. He writes regularly for his blog and for management publications, and brings a specifically Australian and Asia-Pacific perspective to a field that is often dominated by US and European voices. His work is particularly relevant for organisations outside the Northern Hemisphere seeking to build corporate innovation capacity.

Global Voices in Frugal and Emerging Market Innovation

Some of the most important thinking about how organisations can build new ventures with limited resources, in resource-constrained markets, and across cultural boundaries has come from researchers and practitioners who study the developing world, bridge multiple ecosystems, or have built innovation programmes in contexts where the standard Western corporate innovation playbook simply does not apply. The people in this category have expanded the field's geographic and conceptual range, showing that frugal innovation and jugaad thinking developed in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia are not just relevant to emerging markets but provide principles that advanced-economy corporations desperately need.

31. Navi Radjou

Navi Radjou is a French-American scholar and innovation advisor based in Paris, a Fellow at the Judge Business School at the University of Cambridge, and a member of the World Economic Forum's Global Future Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. Listed among the Thinkers50 top 50 management thinkers in the world in 2025 and the recipient of the 2013 Thinkers50 Innovation Award and the 2025 Thinkers50 Regenerative Business Award, Radjou is the co-originator of the frugal innovation and jugaad innovation frameworks.

He is the co-author, with Jaideep Prabhu and Simone Ahuja, of Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth (Jossey-Bass, 2012), and the author with Jaideep Prabhu of Frugal Innovation: How to Do More with Less (The Economist/Profile Books, 2015), which won the CMI Management Book of the Year Award. His most recent book The Frugal Economy: A Guide to Building a Better World with Less (Wiley/Thinkers50, 2023) extends the argument to show how frugal innovation principles apply to entire economic systems facing resource constraints. He has given a TED talk on frugal innovation with over one million views.

32. Jaideep Prabhu

Jaideep Prabhu is the Jawaharlal Nehru Professor of Indian Business and Enterprise and Director of the Centre for India and Global Business at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. One of the leading academic voices on the globalisation of innovation, Prabhu's research examines how corporations can use emerging markets as laboratories for developing affordable, sustainable innovation approaches that global markets increasingly demand.

He is the co-author, with Navi Radjou and Simone Ahuja, of Jugaad Innovation: Think Frugal, Be Flexible, Generate Breakthrough Growth (Jossey-Bass, 2012), described by The Economist as the most comprehensive book on the subject of frugal innovation. A 2026 paper in PNAS, co-authored with Corrado, Gupta-Rawal, and Kattuman, on how India's frugal space innovation provides key lessons for emerging nations continues his intellectual project of translating emerging market innovation practice into frameworks that advanced-economy corporations can actually use. He holds a Bachelor of Technology from IIT Delhi and a PhD from the University of Southern California.

33. Rohit Bhargava

Rohit Bhargava is the founder of the Non-Obvious Company and a three-time Wall Street Journal and USA Today bestselling author of ten books on trends, innovation, and the future of business. Known for his Non-Obvious trend series, which publishes annual predictions for business and social change and has been read and shared by over a million readers, Bhargava is one of the most widely read voices on anticipatory thinking for corporate innovation. He spent 15 years in leadership positions at Ogilvy and Leo Burnett before founding his own companies.

His work is particularly valuable for corporate innovators trying to identify the weak signals of emerging trends before they become consensus, giving venture building teams a framework for building the pattern recognition that distinguishes well-positioned new ventures from those that arrive too early or too late. An adjunct professor at Georgetown University, he has delivered keynotes in 32 countries to organisations including NASA, Intel, LinkedIn, and the World Bank. The Non-Obvious Book Awards, now in their 2025 season, have become a respected recognition platform for new thinking in innovation and trends.

34. Faye Wongso

Faye Wongso is the Founder and Chairperson of KUMPUL.ID, one of Southeast Asia's leading innovation and entrepreneurship ecosystems, based in Indonesia. Her work sits at the intersection of corporate innovation, impact entrepreneurship, venture building, and community development across the region, making her one of the most important bridge-builders between the global innovation conversation and Southeast Asia's rapidly growing startup and corporate innovation ecosystem.

A recipient of the US Department of State's International Visitor Leadership Program fellowship in creative economy and entrepreneurship, Wongso brings a perspective on venture building shaped by the specific challenges and opportunities of building new ventures in Indonesia and across the region: resource constraints, regulatory complexity, diverse cultural contexts, and the particular dynamics of ecosystem building in markets where innovation infrastructure is still being constructed. KUMPUL.ID's C4C Summit 2026 is scheduled as one of the region's largest gatherings on impact, innovation, and collaboration across Southeast Asia.

35. Jan Sedlacek

Jan Sedlacek is the co-founder and managing partner of Stryber, a strategic growth advisory and corporate venture builder with operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific. After beginning his career in strategy consulting at Roland Berger and in marketing leadership at Kuoni, Sedlacek founded Stryber in 2016 with a conviction that strategy and execution must come from the same hands. His firm has successfully built over 100 ventures for corporate clients using a proprietary AI-enhanced methodology refined across hundreds of projects.

Stryber's approach distinguishes itself by operating only two fundamental growth options for corporate clients: building new businesses through venture building, or expanding through mergers and acquisitions, rejecting the consulting industry's tendency to offer strategies without accountability for execution. Sedlacek is a frequent speaker on corporate venture building and posts regularly on LinkedIn with specific operational insights on what separates corporate venture building programmes that produce lasting revenue from those that become expensive innovation exercises. His firm's Central European and Middle Eastern perspective adds geographic depth to a field long dominated by US and Western European voices.

36. Salim Ismail

Salim Ismail is the Founder and Chair of OpenExO, the global transformation platform built on the frameworks from his bestselling Exponential Organizations (2014), and the co-author, with Peter H. Diamandis, of Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact (2023). A former Founding Executive Director of Singularity University and the founder of Yahoo's internal incubator Brickhouse, Ismail brings a perspective shaped by deep operational experience inside large corporations and a data-driven argument about the organisational structures that enable new venture creation at scale.

The ExO model identifies 11 attributes of organisations that have achieved exponential growth and provides corporations with a diagnostic framework for assessing how well their organisational design supports rapid venture creation. OpenExO has implemented the ExO model with clients including Procter and Gamble, HP, Visa, BHP, and Stanley Black and Decker, generating returns measured in billions of dollars. He spoke at the Economic Club of Grand Rapids in October 2025, where he described the transformation of organisations from the current management S-curve to the new models required for exponential innovation.

Innovation Culture, Ecosystem Architecture, and the Human Dimension

Building ventures requires not just a strategy, a process, and a model. It requires building the kind of culture in which people actually behave entrepreneurially, take calculated risks, share knowledge, and challenge the assumptions that hold the existing business back. The leaders in this category have focused on the human and cultural conditions that make corporate innovation possible. They address questions including how to create psychological safety for experimental risk-taking, how design thinking changes the way people approach ambiguous problems, how to build open ecosystems for corporate ventures, and how simplifying language and process can liberate creative capacity.

37. Joost Minnaar

Joost Minnaar is the co-founder of Corporate Rebels, a platform, book, and global community built on the premise that organisations must be fundamentally transformed to unleash the innovation capacity of their people. Together with co-founder Pim de Morree, Minnaar has spent years visiting the world's most progressive organisations, documenting what makes them different from the bureaucratic norm, and translating those insights into a manifesto for organisations serious about building cultures where venture creation can happen continuously.

The Corporate Rebels book, co-authored with Pim de Morree and published in 2020, has sold tens of thousands of copies and built a loyal global community of practitioners who share the belief that autonomy-driven, purpose-centred management models are not just inspiring but practically achievable. Minnaar posts frequently on LinkedIn with examples of organisations making this transition, maintaining one of the most engaged communities in the corporate innovation space. Based in the Netherlands, he and de Morree have documented progressive organisations across dozens of countries, making their platform one of the most international in the field.

38. Michele Zanini

Michele Zanini is the managing director of the Management Lab and the co-author, with Gary Hamel, of Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them, published in an updated and expanded edition in 2025. An alumnus of McKinsey and the RAND Corporation, Zanini brings analytical rigour to the question of how organisations can systematically dismantle the bureaucratic structures that prevent new venture creation and replace them with models that are genuinely capable of continuous innovation.

The Humanocracy research, developed over more than a decade with Gary Hamel, is built on surveys of hundreds of thousands of employees and examines the specific structural, process, and cultural mechanisms through which bureaucracy destroys organisational capacity. The 2025 edition extends the original 2020 work with new case studies and tools developed through direct implementation work with organisations that have committed to the transformation. Zanini is the analytical engine behind the Management Lab's empirical work, translating the philosophical arguments of Humanocracy into measurable programmes that organisations can implement and evaluate.

39. Terence Mauri

Terence Mauri is the Founder of Hack Future Lab, a global think tank on the future of leadership and organisations, and a Partner with MIT Solve, the MIT initiative to address the world's most pressing challenges through innovation. Author of The 3D Leader: Take Your Leadership to the Next Dimension (2024), Mauri works at the intersection of leadership development, exponential technology, and organisational reinvention, with a specific focus on what it takes to build organisations that are psychologically and structurally equipped to create new ventures.

Based in the United Kingdom, Mauri speaks at major corporate innovation events globally and has been featured in Fast Company, Forbes, and Wired. The 3D Leader argues for three winning mindsets essential to leaders navigating the era of venture building and exponential change: Think Bold, Choose Brave, and Go Beyond. These are grounded in the cognitive science of decision-making under uncertainty, which Mauri draws on from his work at MIT Solve and his research with global business leaders at Hack Future Lab. His MIT partnership gives him access to cutting-edge research on innovation ecosystems and venture creation.

40. Sherry Coutu

Sherry Coutu is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and business advisor based in the United Kingdom, best known for authoring the Scale-Up Report on UK economic growth (2014), which identified the gap between early-stage startup growth and the scale-up phase as the most critical bottleneck in the innovation ecosystem and directly influenced UK government policy on supporting high-growth companies. She has co-founded or co-led several technology companies and serves on the boards of organisations including the London Stock Exchange Group.

Coutu is one of the most important voices in the UK innovation ecosystem on the question of what it takes to build the corporate and institutional conditions in which new ventures can scale, drawing on decades of direct experience as both a venture-backed founder and an investor in the ventures of others. Her work on the Scale-Up Report has had measurable policy impact, contributing to the creation of dedicated scale-up programmes, tax incentives, and institutional support mechanisms in the UK that have improved the conditions for corporate venture building. She remains actively engaged in advising both government and corporate innovation leaders.

41. Don Tapscott

Don Tapscott is the founder and Executive Chairman of the Tapscott Group, one of the world's leading authorities on innovation, media, and the economic and social impact of digital technology on business and society. The bestselling author of more than 16 books including Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World (2016), co-authored with Alex Tapscott, Tapscott has spent three decades advising governments and business leaders on strategy in the digital age.

His work on digital transformation, open-source innovation, and the changing economics of knowledge and collaboration has shaped how corporations think about the platforms and ecosystems within which new ventures can be built and scaled. Based in Canada, Tapscott has consistently combined rigorous original research with accessible, forward-looking frameworks that give corporate innovation leaders a roadmap for navigating technological change. His influence on how digital-era organisations think about co-creation, platform economics, and collaborative innovation makes his work foundational to the venture building conversation in the technology sector.

42. Stefan Lindegaard

Stefan Lindegaard is a Copenhagen-based author, speaker, and advisor on open innovation and corporate entrepreneurship who has spent more than two decades helping large organisations build the external partnership strategies that allow them to access innovation beyond their internal capabilities. He is the author of The Open Innovation Revolution: Essentials, Roadblocks, and Leadership Skills (Wiley, 2010), one of the first practical guides to implementing open innovation inside a large organisation.

Lindegaard is one of the most consistent LinkedIn voices on the dynamics of corporate-startup collaboration, corporate venture capital, and the specific leadership skills required to sustain open innovation programmes over time. His perspective as a European practitioner who has worked with corporations across Scandinavia and the wider European innovation ecosystem gives his work a useful counterpoint to the Silicon Valley-centric perspectives that dominate much of the open innovation literature. He has worked directly with corporate innovation leaders across more than 30 countries, making him one of the most globally experienced practitioners in the field.

43. Gijs van Wulfen

Gijs van Wulfen is a Dutch innovation expert and the creator of the FORTH Innovation Method, a structured methodology for building new business models from scratch inside established organisations. Author of The Innovation Expedition: A Visual Toolkit to Start Innovation (BIS Publishers, 2013) and multiple subsequent books and guides, Van Wulfen has trained and facilitated innovation teams across more than 100 organisations in over 20 countries.

The FORTH Method provides corporate innovators with a step-by-step process for moving from opportunity identification through concept development to business case creation, with a strong emphasis on the customer-facing, empathy-driven insights that de-risk new venture investments at the earliest stages. Based in the Netherlands, Van Wulfen is a frequent keynote speaker at corporate innovation conferences across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, and maintains an active LinkedIn presence as one of the most widely followed innovation methodology practitioners in the field.

44. Rohit Talwar

Rohit Talwar is the CEO and founder of Fast Future Research, a foresight, futures research, and innovation advisory firm, and one of the most prolific public voices on the intersection of exponential technology, business model innovation, and corporate venture strategy. Based in the United Kingdom, Talwar has written and co-edited more than 15 books on the future of business and has advised organisations across sectors on how to prepare their innovation and venture building strategies for an exponentially changing technological environment.

His work on how corporations should develop the foresight capabilities that make venture investment decisions more robust over time horizons of five to ten years is particularly relevant for organisations trying to avoid the failure mode of building ventures that are relevant for the current technology landscape but not for the one that will exist when they reach scale. Talwar speaks at innovation events globally and is an active contributor to LinkedIn, Forbes, and major business media on the specific strategies required to build ventures that will be commercially viable in the technology landscape of the 2030s.

45. Safi Bahcall

Safi Bahcall is a physicist, former public-company CEO, and the author of Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries (St Martin's Press, 2019), which was an instant Wall Street Journal bestseller and was selected as a best business book of the year by Bloomberg, the Financial Times, Forbes, and the Washington Post. Bahcall founded Synta, a biotechnology company developing new drugs for cancer, led the company's IPO, and served as its CEO for 13 years before turning his attention to the management and leadership question at the heart of corporate innovation.

Loonshots draws on the physics concept of phase transitions to explain why organisations that were once open to breakthrough ideas suddenly become rigidly opposed to them. The book introduces the concept of the loonshot nursery, the protected space inside an organisation where breakthrough ideas can survive long enough to prove themselves before the organisation's immune system kills them. Bahcall has worked with CEOs and leadership teams of Fortune 500 companies, hypergrowth startups, investment funds, and government agencies on the structural and cultural conditions required to sustain breakthrough innovation. He was named E&Y New England Biotechnology Entrepreneur of the Year in 2008.

46. Constanze Coelsch-Foisner

Constanze Coelsch-Foisner is a postdoctoral researcher at the MIT Sloan School of Management and the co-author, with Fiona Murray, of the March 2026 MIT Sloan Management Review article Is a Venture Studio Right for Your Company?, one of the most widely shared academic analyses of the venture studio model published in the past year. The article examines venture studios as an emerging organisational form for maximising value creation through innovation, drawing on research into how different studio configurations produce different outcomes.

Based in Germany and the United States, Coelsch-Foisner represents the emerging generation of researchers building the empirical foundations of venture studio practice through systematic analysis rather than practitioner anecdote. Her work with Fiona Murray at MIT Sloan gives her access to some of the most rigorous data available on how venture studios perform across different configurations, industries, and organisational contexts. Her 2026 MIT Sloan article is being widely used by corporate innovation leaders as a decision framework for determining whether a venture studio is the right model for their specific strategic context.

47. Alistair Croll

Alistair Croll is a Canadian author, entrepreneur, and advisor who co-authored Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster (O'Reilly, 2013) with Ben Yoskovitz, one of the most widely used books in startup and corporate innovation teams for thinking rigorously about what to measure and why. He is also the co-author, with Emily Ross, of Just Evil Enough: The Subversive Marketing Handbook (2025), which examines the role of unconventional, challenger-strategy thinking in building ventures that break through the noise of crowded markets.

Croll founded and chairs FWD50, a conference on digital government and innovation in Canada, and Startupfest, the International Startup Festival in Montreal. A Visiting Executive at Harvard Business School, he has spoken on innovation in more than 20 countries and was featured at the AccelerateOTT 2026 conference in Ottawa discussing how the way startups are built has fundamentally changed. His work is particularly valuable for corporate venture teams trying to apply data-driven discipline to the ambiguous early stages of venture development, where the instinct to measure everything risks obscuring the one metric that actually matters.

48. Josh Linkner

Josh Linkner is the co-founder and Managing Partner of Mudita Venture Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Detroit that closed its debut fund at $85 million in 2023 and announced a $125 million Fund II in June 2025 to expand its mission of supporting high-growth startups outside traditional tech hubs. A serial entrepreneur who founded and led five technology companies that collectively created over 10,000 jobs and were sold for a combined value of over $200 million, Linkner brings to the venture building conversation the perspective of someone who has actually built companies from zero to exit at scale.

His books on innovation and creativity, including Big Little Breakthroughs: How Small, Everyday Innovations Drive Oversized Results (2021) and Disciplined Dreaming: A Proven System to Drive Breakthrough Creativity (2011), give corporate innovators practical frameworks for embedding creative habits across an organisation. A professional jazz guitarist who studied at Berklee College of Music and has performed over 1,000 concerts, Linkner weaves live jazz improvisation into his keynotes to demonstrate how the principles of improvisational creativity, constraint, and ensemble thinking apply directly to the innovation challenges organisations face.

49. Amy C. Edmondson

Amy C. Edmondson is the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and the world's leading researcher on psychological safety, a concept she introduced in a 1999 paper that has since become one of the most cited frameworks in organisational behaviour. Her book The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth (Wiley, 2018) makes the direct argument that psychological safety, the belief that one can speak up, take risks, and make mistakes without fear of punishment, is the foundational condition for the experimentation that corporate venture building requires.

Her 2023 book Right Kind of Wrong: The Science of Failing Well extends the framework by examining the different types of failure and what organisations can learn from each, providing a nuanced alternative to the Silicon Valley formulation of fail fast. This work is directly applicable to the governance of corporate venture programmes, where the fear of failure is the primary reason that potentially transformative ideas are never funded or built. Edmondson is an active LinkedIn contributor and one of the most frequently cited researchers in corporate innovation leadership discussions globally, connecting the academic research on safety and learning to the practitioner reality of building new ventures.

50. Erica Dhawan

Erica Dhawan is the world's leading expert on digital body language, the specific patterns of written and digital communication that build or destroy trust and collaboration across virtual and hybrid work environments. Author of Digital Body Language: How to Build Trust and Connection, No Matter the Distance (St Martin's Press, 2021) and Get Big Things Done: The Power of Connectional Intelligence (co-authored with Saj-nicole Joni), Dhawan has worked with organisations including AT&T, Coca-Cola, Disney, and Ford on building the communication cultures that allow distributed, cross-functional, and globally dispersed innovation teams to function effectively.

Her work is directly applicable to corporate venture building teams, where the challenge of building trust and effective collaboration across the boundaries between an established organisation and a new venture is often the proximate cause of failure. Rated the number one speaker on top women keynote speakers lists and a regular Harvard Business Review contributor, Dhawan brings a rigorously researched framework to the cultural and communication conditions that either enable or prevent the effective operation of corporate innovation programmes. She has spoken at events for AT&T, Coca-Cola, Disney, and the World Economic Forum.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several people were seriously considered for this list and deserve acknowledgment even though editorial choices prevented their inclusion. Eric Ries, whose Lean Startup methodology introduced build-measure-learn cycles, minimum viable products, and validated learning to a generation of corporate innovators, influenced the entire field even though his work predates much of the current practice of venture building as a corporate discipline. Clayton Christensen, whose disruptive innovation framework remains foundational to how corporations understand the threat from new ventures, shaped the thinking of nearly everyone on this list. Clayton passed away in January 2020, and his ideas have never been more relevant.

Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek appear on almost every leadership list of this kind, and for good reason given their contribution to the broader field. This list chose to give those spaces to leaders who have made equally significant contributions specifically to the venture building and corporate innovation field, including practitioners from Europe, Asia, and the developing world whose voices deserve wider recognition.

What Are the Biggest Mistakes Organisations Make in Corporate Venture Building?

The single biggest mistake organisations make in corporate venture building is treating it as a communications exercise rather than an investment exercise. They launch innovation labs, run hackathons, host pitch competitions, and declare commitment to innovation without making the structural decisions, governance changes, and long-term capital commitments that actual venture building requires.

Innovation theatre, a term used by multiple people on this list including Elliott Parker, Tendayi Viki, and Scott Anthony, describes the extensive set of innovation activities that generate impressive press releases and internal presentations without creating new businesses. The organisations that fall into this trap share several characteristics: three-year funding horizons, measurement of innovation activity rather than outcomes, and governance frameworks that impose existing business models on nascent ventures.

The second most common mistake is confusing an innovation portfolio with a venture building programme. The two are distinct. A corporate venture capital fund invests in external startups. An accelerator programme mentors early-stage founders.

An internal venture studio builds new businesses from scratch using the corporation's own assets, knowledge, and networks. Mixing these models without clarity about which one is being run, and why, produces the worst outcomes of all three.

The third mistake is building ventures without a genuine customer insight foundation. The customer discovery process that Steve Blank introduced, the business model validation tools that Alex Osterwalder systematised, and the empathy-driven design thinking frameworks that Jeanne Liedtka developed all point to the same principle: new ventures built on assumptions about what customers want fail at a far higher rate than those built on validated learning from direct customer engagement.

How Should an Organisation Get Started with Corporate Venture Building?

The first step is to be honest about what problem you are trying to solve and what resources you are genuinely prepared to commit. Corporate venture building works best when senior leadership is specific about the strategic questions it wants new ventures to help answer, not just the general ambition to be more innovative. Before building a venture studio, commissioning a venture portfolio, or launching an intrapreneurship programme, the leadership team should articulate three things clearly: which of their existing business models is under the greatest disruption threat, which adjacent markets they have assets and knowledge that could give new ventures structural advantages, and what governance and funding model they will use that genuinely mimics the patient capital and protected space that startup venture building requires.

The second step is to assess your current culture honestly using the frameworks of Amy Edmondson and others on this list. Psychological safety is not a nice-to-have in corporate venture building; it is a prerequisite. If your organisation punishes people for making mistakes, for challenging assumptions, or for advocating for ideas that threaten existing business units, your venture building programme will be colonised by the same defensive behaviours that make your existing business resistant to change.

The third step is to choose the right model for your specific context. A venture studio model like those operated by High Alpha Innovation, Highline Beta, and Board of Innovation is appropriate for organisations that want to build new companies systematically and have the governance patience to see them through to independent viability. An intrapreneurship programme as described in Tendayi Viki's Corporate Startup and Veronique Bouchard's work at L'Institut de l'Intrapreneuriat is appropriate for organisations that want to harness the entrepreneurial potential of their own people. Open innovation as developed by Henry Chesbrough and Stefan Lindegaard is appropriate for organisations whose primary challenge is accessing external ideas and technologies rather than building from scratch.

The fourth step is to hire or develop the specific people Elliott Parker and Charles O'Reilly call corporate explorers: managers who combine entrepreneurial discipline with the political intelligence to build internal support for ventures that will challenge the existing organisation's assumptions. These people exist in most large organisations. The leadership challenge is to find them, give them protected space, and back them with the patient capital and governance flexibility that new ventures require.

Jonno White works with leadership teams to build the communication, trust, and accountability cultures that make corporate innovation programmes sustainable. To discuss bringing Jonno in for an executive offsite or leadership programme, email jonno@consultclarity.org. International travel is often far more affordable than clients expect.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between venture building and venture capital in a corporate context?

Corporate venture capital involves investing in existing external startups in exchange for equity. Corporate venture building involves creating entirely new companies from scratch, typically by combining the corporation's assets, networks, and market access with entrepreneurial talent and startup methodology. Both are legitimate corporate innovation tools, but they answer different questions and require different capabilities. Venture capital is appropriate when external startups already exist in a space you want to enter.

Venture building is appropriate when no suitable external startup exists, or when the corporation's assets give a new company structural advantages unavailable to an independent startup.

How was this list compiled?

Every person on this list was selected based on three criteria: documented contribution to the field through published work, built platforms, or established institutions; current, active engagement with the field in 2025 and 2026; and genuine disciplinary and geographic breadth. The list spans more than a dozen countries, representing researchers, practitioners, studio founders, ecosystem builders, and investors who together cover the full scope of venture building and corporate innovation practice.

Can I hire someone to facilitate corporate innovation workshops or executive offsites for my leadership team?

Yes. Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator and experienced executive offsite facilitator who works with leadership teams inside innovative organisations to build the communication, alignment, and accountability capabilities that make innovation programmes sustainable. Many organisations find that the most important factor in the success of their venture building programme is not the strategy or the model but the quality of the leadership team's conversations and decisions. Jonno helps teams get better at both.

Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss your team's needs.

Is corporate venture building relevant to organisations outside the technology sector?

The most important corporate venture building stories of the last decade have come from organisations in manufacturing, financial services, agriculture, healthcare, logistics, and government, not just technology. The tools, frameworks, and practices represented by the people on this list have been applied in every sector. The underlying challenge, building new ventures inside organisations optimised for execution, is entirely sector-agnostic.

What role does leadership culture play in corporate venture building success?

Leadership culture is probably the single most important determinant of whether a corporate venture building programme succeeds or fails. Amy Edmondson's research on psychological safety, Gary Hamel and Michele Zanini's work on humanocracy, and Elliott Parker's observations from over 40 venture builds all converge on the same finding: organisations whose leadership culture makes it safe to take risks, challenge assumptions, and be honest about what is and is not working produce far better venture building outcomes than organisations that run the same processes but have defensive or politically charged leadership cultures. To discuss Jonno White's executive offsite and leadership development work, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Final Thoughts

The 50 people on this list have collectively built the intellectual, methodological, and operational foundations of one of the most important management disciplines of the early 21st century. The challenge of building new ventures inside established organisations is not new. What is new is the rigour, the evidence base, and the practitioner toolkit that these leaders have assembled to address it.

The organisations that take corporate venture building seriously in the next decade will not be those that run the most hackathons or announce the most innovation labs. They will be the ones that have done the hard work of building the leadership culture, governance frameworks, organisational structures, and patient capital commitments that give new ventures a genuine chance of succeeding. The people on this list have provided the roadmap. The work of building is still yours to do.

For more on the leadership dynamics that make innovation programmes succeed inside established organisations, read my blog post on thought leaders in private equity and venture capital leadership at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-pe-vc, and my post on thought leaders in entrepreneurship globally at https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-entrepreneurship-globally And to discuss what Jonno White can deliver for your organisation, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements.

Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

Next Read

If this list sparked your thinking about innovation and organisational transformation, you might also enjoy my look at the most influential thought leaders shaping entrepreneurship globally, which covers voices from the startup founding tradition who complement the corporate innovation perspectives in this list.

Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leaders-entrepreneurship-globally