Intel China's GrowthX Accelerator, Apple Touchscreens & China Trends with Kapil Kane

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kapil Kane, Director of Innovation at Intel China, and Co-founder of the corporate accelerator GrowthX. Kapil and I talk about his journey from his early product development days at Apple working on the first touchscreen, to today where he runs Intel's award-winning accelerator. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Kapil Kane, Director of Innovation at Intel China

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Kapil Kane. He is the Director of Innovation at Intel China, and co-founder of the GrowthX Corporate Innovation Accelerator. Welcome to the show. 

Kapil Kane: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: You are calling in from Shanghai right now in the midst of a pandemic lockdown. Let's talk a little bit about your journey into the world of innovation. 

Kapil Kane: I was doing my PhD at Stanford when I dropped out of the program to join Apple, to build the touchscreen. The very first task, I remember I was an intern at the time. And I was the very first engineer to actually make a drawing of the touch screen. Like a revision 0 0 1.

And my journey started from there. Although the touchscreen project failed. We had to hand it over to this other team, that was working on a secret project, which turned out to be the iPhone. But my last project at Apple was iPad. So, I came around full circle. 

And then I left Apple and joined Intel to actually create a tablet version of Classmate PC, which was inspired by one laptop per child from MIT Media Lab, which is to create an affordable education computing device for the emerging market or for the less fortunate as it was envisioned. And then on, you know, I got into this role of Innovation Director at Intel China. And so that's my journey. 

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Tell us a little bit about how you got to China. And how you got to cofound this corporate innovation accelerator called GrowthX. 

Kapil Kane: Coming to China was with Apple. This is when we were developing the very first Mac Book Air. And at the time, if some of you guys remember, it was called a Unibody. That means it was carved out of a solid block of metal. Whereas everything before that was sheet metal, and hundreds of parts joined together.

So, it was a completely new way of manufacturing a product. And so, we were designing the product as well as designing the manufacturing process at the same time. So, we thought it would be better to have some of the designers move to China so that we can do both designing product and process at the same time. And so, I volunteered. As a, so I was one of the first three product designers to move from Cupertino to China. And I've been here ever since. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's fast forward to today, you're running this thing called GrowthX. How did the idea of a corporate innovation accelerator start and then give us some insight into what's going on with GrowthX?

Kapil Kane: Intel has this amazing culture of innovation. And it's something that I can think of it like the Google's 15% thing. Where we encourage our employees to spend a percentage of their time on things they believe is important for our future. And so, we have lots of this cool innovation that has been created in the labs.

And around 2005, that's when I took over the innovation at Intel China. We saw that there's lots of cool things happening in the labs, but we couldn't find those things being commercialized. Not lending into the market. When I took over this role, this role was created because until that point, there was lots of different efforts of innovation, like very vibrant culture. Even to the date, there's a very vibrant culture of innovation. And we thought we needed some streamlining.

And so that's when they created this position to streamline all the different innovation activities at Intel China. And we have around 10,000 people here in China. So, it's by no means small offsite operation. It's a pretty huge operation. 

Brian Ardinger: Kind of a little bit different than a lot of companies. A lot of companies we hear about the fact that most of the core is not that innovative. And so, they created an accelerator kind of program. Or a lab to kickstart that. But where at Intel, it seems like the reverse it's like you had to kind of harness or extra harness some of the activity. 

Kapil Kane: Exactly. And also, the concept of accelerator is, is quite different. Like if you look at the other corporates who are building accelerators, they are accelerating outside startups with the hope that they will get to know what they're doing. They may be able to acquire them or partner with them. 

But for me, I didn't even know what an accelerator was when I took over this role. And in my very first week, I happened to be in a round table conference at American Chamber of Commerce. And the guy sitting next to me happened to be running China's very first startup accelerator, Chinaaccelerator. The guy, William Bao Bean. He's a legend in China.

And I just happened to ask him what he does. And he explained to me the concept of accelerator. And I thought, you know, maybe I can replicate this right inside of Intel because we are so much creativity. We just need to give them the tools to turn those cool innovations into viable businesses. And that's where the idea for accelerator came along.

And that was the, the birth of GrowthX, where we started up as accelerators. We pick the teams. We make them believe they are actual startups. We have the CEO, CTO, CMO, and we bring them in a batch of cohort. And we have business sprints. We have around eight sprints focusing on different aspects of business. We have mentors.

We have entrepreneurs in residence. And we run this outside of Intel from a coworking space. So, it's just like any startup accelerator. Just the thing is that all the startups are internal projects. And we've been running this for six years now. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about some of the differences or similarities that you've seen between entrepreneurs in the outside versus intrepreneurship. And are there key skillsets, mindsets, tool sets that are similar or different.

Kapil Kane: I think what we are seeing, and it may be different for different companies. For us, most of those innovators will come to our accelerator. They are techies. You know, they get very excited about the technology. And they have no real background in business. So, we spend a lot of time and effort to make them understand that it's not about, can you build it, but should you build it? That's where we focused on changing their mindset. 

If we change their mindset, like, you know, typically they're of this mindset that I will build something, then I will show it to the cust...