Unleashing Innovation: Advancing a Creative, Productive and Competitive Workforce

Panel Composition & Context

• Amy Wilkinson (Moderator/CEO, Ingenuity) launched The Creator's Code, based on a five-year dataset of 200 US entrepreneurs, and serves as a Stanford professor.
• Hilton Romanski (Cisco) oversees startup engagement and internal entrepreneurship; the panel began with a focus on "unconventional order" to highlight diverse perspectives.
• Scott Neal (Gulfstream) leads worldwide sales; Gulfstream previously facilitated the 1999 record-breaking $40M internet sale of a private jet by Mark Cuban.
• Navdeep Bains (Canadian Minister) introduced a bill promoting diversity in corporate Canada and championed the nation's innovation and skills plan in the federal budget.
• Jeff Wong (EY) leads global innovation, recently hosting the "Innovation Realized" conference inside a circus tent; he emphasizes doing "old things in new ways."
• Christian Navin (S&P Global CIO) has a 20-year history in R&D/AI and aims for the "demise of e-mail before landlines" as technology matures.

Defining Innovation: Business Models vs. Technology

• Government Perspective (Bains): Innovation is primarily a "people" and "culture" issue, not just technology; Canada focuses on lifelong learning, digital literacy, and coding disparities between genders starting at a young age.
• Gulfstream Perspective (Neal): Business model innovation drives economic value (citing Blockbuster's late-fee model disruption by Netflix), while technology acts as an enabler; success requires an environment where employees feel safe to propose ideas.
• Cisco Perspective (Romanski): Every company is becoming a technology company; success requires simultaneously identifying big technology transitions and shifting business models (e.g., moving from hardware sales to recurring revenue models).
• EY Perspective (Wong): Innovation management must address disruptions beyond technology, including political shifts (Brexit, US elections), and extends to hiring, retention, and firm organization.
• S&P Global Perspective (Navin): Innovation must transcend silos; ignoring external revolutions like AI/ML leads to missed opportunities; the culture must support "fail-fast" behavior with awards for learning from quick failures.

Strategies for Self-Disruption in Large Entities

• EY: Implements a global innovation team to run "disruptive" projects and integrates innovation into talent acquisition, reviews, and feedback loops rather than treating it as isolated experiments.
• Cisco: Maintains a $2 billion global investment portfolio with ~100 direct startup investments; uses "acquihires" to integrate 46 founders/CEOs from 194 past acquisitions into an internal "founder and CEO" program managing six active projects.
• S&P Global: Establishes "continuous innovation" via short cycles; partners with startups (e.g., Kensho) and uses diverse metrics (mindshare, user conversations) for early-stage projects rather than standard P&L.
• Gulfstream: Relies on "Your Ideas at Work," a formal process where 54,000 employee submissions in the last year generated $65 million in savings; distinguishes between non-negotiable safety and other areas where failure is acceptable for learning.

Approaches to Failure and Risk Management

• Government (Bains): Balances high political risk with a need to drive innovation; carved out 1% of government procurement to specifically target high-risk, high-reward solutions rather than lowest-cost providers.
• Cisco: Differentiates governance for "alpha projects" (early-stage, non-core) by using distinct teams and metrics; measures success via ecosystem traction and mindshare rather than immediate profitability to avoid stifling innovation.
• EY: Reframes failure as "learning" and "iteration" rather than a negative outcome; leadership publicly discusses unsuccessful hypotheses to normalize the process of shifting strategies.
• Gulfstream: Enforces a "zero compromise" policy on safety failures while encouraging calculated failures in cabin design and process improvements.
• S&P Global: Measures new pilots using specific, agreed-upon milestones (e.g., user feedback, mobile adoption) rather than standard financial metrics; emphasizes starting small to manage downside risk.

Building Innovation Ecosystems and Partnerships

• Government (Bains): Proposes a "super cluster" model ($950M investment) to connect academia, industry, and government in specific sectors (AI, quantum computing) to improve commercialization of Canadian R&D.
• EY: Demonstrates ecosystem power by convening auditors, regulators, and clients to redefine the audit practice; notes surprising collaboration among the "Big Four" accounting firms to advance the industry.
• Gulfstream: Utilizes a "Advanced Technology Customer Advisory Team" to co-design future products under NDA; engages directly with customers to define performance and safety requirements.
• S&P Global: Centers ecosystems on the customer (e.g., shifting to mobile-first millennials); leverages alternative data (e.g., foot traffic, social media) to create new intelligence products like oil shipping route optimization.
• EY/General: Forms partnerships across the entire value chain, from university labs to Fortune 500 R&D departments, sometimes without financial exchange or formal NDAs to foster open experimentation.

Entrepreneurial Spirit vs. Corporate Consensus

• Gulfstream: Maintains an entrepreneurial "spirit" through long-tenured employees who recall the company's pre-1980s founder-led era; culture prioritizes individual contributorship within a large division of General Dynamics.
• S&P Global: Balances regulated consensus with empowered individuals in "pockets" who can experiment without immediate public launch; innovation requires "ask forgiveness, not permission" in early stages.
• Cisco: Cultivates agility by hiring 20% of the workforce from startups/acquisitions; leadership roles in growth businesses (security, enterprise networking) are often held by former founders.
• EY: Creates a "safe space" for the global innovation team to operate outside standard decision pathways; argues that large firms have superior assets and should "win" if they maintain the discipline to reallocate budgets and accept internal disputes.

Forward-Looking Focus Areas

• Government (Bains): Significant investment in Artificial Intelligence and talent retention in Toronto and Montreal (leveraging researchers like Geoffrey Hinton) to drive the Canadian economy.
• S&P Global: Expanding AI, machine learning, and big data capabilities to convert raw data into "essential intelligence" for customers, including alternative data sources.
• Gulfstream: Unleashing R&D at the Savannah campus to deploy vision and radar systems, aiming to make aircraft safer through advanced engineering.
• Cisco: Focusing on "applied AI/ML/Analytics" across networking, collaboration, and security; actively engaging with startups at the bleeding edge of these technologies.
• EY: Rapidly scaling AI investment after a 90-day internal contract analysis project achieved "three times better" results than current processes; shifting focus from theoretical AI to enterprise reality.
• Amy Wilkinson (Conclusion): Bets on revolutionizing human talent to enhance creativity and innovation rather than focusing solely on specific technologies.