Posters

Abstract

Each year, organizations invest billions in R&D, yet many of these efforts fail to deliver meaningful business returns. Promising technologies often get stuck in development, while breakthrough ideas are buried under layers of bureaucracy or doubt. As a result, executive teams grow skeptical of innovation efforts and begin to favor low-risk, low-return projects that provide short-term stability but do little to drive long-term growth. A major cause of this pattern is the widespread confusion between R&D and innovation. R&D converts resources into ideas. Innovation, by contrast, converts ideas back into resources through commercialization. Without the ability to complete this cycle, companies struggle to generate return on their R&D investments. The invention of the computer mouse at Xerox—later commercialized by Apple—is a classic example. Organizations that lack systems to support both R&D and innovation often operate reactively—chasing trends, fighting internal fires, and relying on one-off, heroic efforts instead of structured, repeatable processes. This talk explores how to build a systemic approach to innovation—one that aligns R&D spending with corporate strategy, governance, culture, and leadership. It draws from the award-winning book The Corporate Startup, which offers a proven framework for embedding innovation capabilities within large organizations. In this inspirational talk we’ll also share the real-world case of Ocean Winds, an offshore wind company, and how it applied this framework to generate measurable business outcomes. The session features Dan Toma, co-author of The Corporate Startup, and Daniel Santa Cruz, Director of Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Ocean Winds, sharing actionable insights into building sustainable innovation engines.