The Podcast

Rebecca Pinn started out imagining she'd walk into Bed Bath & Beyond one day and see products she designed on the shelves. Instead she spent a few years as a mechanical engineer designing aircraft lavatories, went back to grad school for product development, and realized along the way that most companies don't actually have an infinite backlog of great ideas waiting to be built. They genuinely don't know what to make next. That realization is what turned her into a strategist instead of a researcher, and eleven years later she's Director of Innovation Consulting at EPAM (by way of Continuum Innovation), spending most of her time helping healthcare payers, providers, and pharma companies figure out what to build and why.

This conversation covers a lot of ground: why the jump from analog to digital product cycles, and now from digital to AI, keeps compressing timelines that used to take companies years to work through; the three types of asks Rebecca actually gets from clients (build a specific thing, figure out how to enter a market, or build innovation capability in-house); why "we need an app" quietly turned into "we need AI" without anyone stopping to ask what the technology is actually for; and why physical and digital products are still, as she puts it, on fundamentally different development cycles, which is a big part of why devices trying to bridge the two have had such a hard time.

The idea I keep coming back to is her point about strategy versus goals. A lot of companies mistake "we're going to make X amount of money" for a strategy, when it's really just a target. A real strategy is a vision of what you want to be in five years, agnostic to whatever the shiny new technology of the moment happens to be, and that's exactly what lets you course-correct when something new shows up without blowing up the whole plan. If you're trying to figure out how AI actually fits into what your company is building, or you're the person in the room who keeps getting asked to have an opinion on it, this one's worth the watch.

Here’s a teaser…

Find Rebecca on Linkedin or…

What You Missed on Sunday

Here’s what we covered in Sunday’s newsletter edition…

bp shut down its venture capital arm in July, citing "disciplined capital allocation," three words that explain nothing. Munich Re closed its own fund in October, the same quarter it posted a record €2.1 billion profit. Seven corporate venture funds have closed in about a year, for seven different reasons, and not one of them had anything to do with how the fund's own investments performed.

This week: why bp kept its fund running for eleven years after its own patents started declining and closed it anyway, why Commerzbank shut down one venture unit and reinforced the other in the same month, and why CVC dollars just hit a record high while corporate investors are showing up to fewer deals than they have in a decade.

Here’s what you’ll find: