Ep. 287 - Andy Binns, Coauthor of Corporate Explorer on Beating Startups at the Innovation Game

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andy Binns, Coauthor of the new book, Corporate Explorer. Andy and I talk about the innovation imperative facing corporations today. And what they can do to foster an entrepreneurial environment, to create corporate explorers within their companies. Let's get started.

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Interview Transcript with Andy Binns, Coauthor of Corporate Explorer

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 Andy Binns. Andy is the Cofounder of ChangeLogic and coauthor of a new book called Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game. Welcome to the show, Andy.

Andy Binns: Hey Brian, thanks very much for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. You have been in this innovation space for a while with McKinsey and IBM. Now you have a new book called corporate Explorer, which is exploring a lot of topics that I think are near and dear to the heart of a lot of our listeners is how can we, as corporations, become better at this whole innovation stuff? Why is innovation becoming so important for corporations to figure out?

Andy Binns: That is really actually the point isn't it. And we try to open the book Corporate Explorer by saying, look, a lot of what we're talking about is really old. And it's been around forever, right? And even the notion of a corporate explorer didn't turn up in the last few years. 

You know, one of the earliest ones that I know of is the creation of the ATM machine. The ATM machine, Della Ru a UK based currency printer literally has the license to print money. And it's like, well, surely people want to access this differently. And this guy comes up with the notion of the ATM machine somewhere in, Surry in south of London, with Barclays Bank in the 1960s. And this was a 300-year-old corporation. 

This can be done by corporations, but to your point, it's got more important. And it's got more important because we know that digital is there. And transforming not only a business, but an industry. You cannot safely set within automotive and say, all those guys over in consumer devices no longer have anything to do with us. That's true there, but it’s there in a dozen other industries you care to name. 

And so, this notion of disruption that Clay Christiansen taught us all about. It's kind of like it's present. We don't dispute it. And we certainly don't dispute it after the last two years we've had. This high degree of uncertainty is present.

And so, a lot of corporations, even those who are doing really well today, I think see that the dynamics of their industry are changing at such a pace that they can't ignore a bunch of different innovations. Either because they want new revenue streams and or they need new capability. Both of these stories are going on.

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, they're being forced to. It's kind of spot on. We've got technology advancements that are coming on. We've got new changes in marketplaces. We've got a pandemic. All these things are colliding at once requiring companies to think and act to move faster than they've ever had before. And yet, we still find example after example of companies that are struggling with this. And overcoming obstacles that you would think that they'd be able to overcome. Because they have quite a few advantages from a corporate perspective.

Andy Binns: Absolutely. And that's why corporate innovations beat startups at the innovation game. Now they don't beat them every time. They may not even beat them half the time. But they do. And the point about assets is exactly why they do that. Right. It's when you can leverage brands customer access, technical capabilities, whatever it might be, then that's, what's going to bring you success.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into that a little bit more. What are the key advantages that corporations maybe aren't recognizing or aren't using to the fullest extent when they are wanting to do more innovation initiatives? 

Andy Binns: One of the stories we tell in Corporate Explorer is that analog devices, a really strong technology innovation company, electrical engineers. Running around making phenomenal semiconductors. Worrying about the speeds and feeds of that circuits. And then they start to observe a change in the world, particularly the industrial markets where there's this opportunity to connect their sensors, accelerometers, and various other ones to the cloud. And to use analytics, to observe the functioning of the machine.

Right. It's a great space, a lot of startups are active in. And they build this product line around condition-based monitoring. They make some acquisitions to build it out so they can do acoustic sensing as well as motion and all the rest of it. 

But if you're a startup and you go into, tell the same solution. No one's ever heard of you. You go into Analog Devices, you're 60 years old, and your brand is based on never retiring a product and always meeting your supply commitments. But totally different conversation. 

The market access is a real opportunity in many cases for these corporations. And also, they can access customers in different ways because they matter as a supplier to a bunch of automotive industry clients or whatever it might be. So, I think that's a big area. 

The other area is sort of some of the permission to play. So, another case that we give in Corporate Explorer is of the insurance company, Unica in Austria, where they move into sort of a digital insurance product. And again, they already have the actuaries. They can already design the insurance product. They already have the licenses from the relevant European authorities to sell insurance. So again, they can just move that a little bit faster when they are using these assets to make things happen. 

Brian Ardinger: So, having said that corporations still aren't necessarily good at innovation. They stumble on the fact that a lot of times they get focused on executing and optimizing their existing business model. For fear of messing up that apple cart, they don't necessarily take the next steps and that. How do you create that culture of innovation such that they are willing to take risks and leverage those advantages they do have? 

Andy Binns: We talk in the book about these being the silent killers of exploration. A term we borrowed from Mike Beer and the silent killers is that actually there isn't a deliberate agenda to stop innovators. Right? Sometimes it feels that way, but it's rarely the case. Mostly they're on autopilot. 

They're on autopilot because they're focused on the short term. They wanted to eliminate risk to the degree that that's possible. They want to preserve the way they think business should be d...