This week we are joined by entrepreneur, author and venture capitalist, Brad Feld. Brad is a co-founder of Techstars, a platform for startups to access funding and entrepreneurial networking, and is also the co-founder of venture capital firm, Foundry Group. Brad is the author of several books on startups as well as an entrepreneurial advice blog. He sits on the board of several technology startups and was an early investor in Fitbit, Zynga, and Harmonix.

What Was Covered

• How startup ecosystems have changed – and become more democratized – in the 30 years in which Brad has been active within them
• How digitization of production, distribution, customer relationships, etc., is making strategic “moats” much more penetrable than they were before
• How diversity of an ecosystem builds resilience but how our biases (both conscious and unconscious) make this difficult for us

Key Takeaways and Learnings

• Those large organizations that are extracting greatest benefit from startup ecosystems are doing so not through control (typical of a hierarchy) but through engagement and feeding back learning into their own institution – creating high levels of “return on learning”
• This large company engagement with entrepreneurs also builds loyalty, so that as startups grow they can become a positive weapon rather than a threat
• Great innovation leaders combine continua practical skills development (getting good at your work) with endless and radical self-inquiry (embracing lifelong learning and exploration)

Resources and Links Mentioned in this Podcast

• Brad's blogs Feld Thoughts and Venture Deals
• Get in touch with Brad on Twitter, LinkedIn and via email
• The Innovation Ecosystem Podcast Episode 044 - Combining Startup and Corporate with Jenny Fielding of Techstars
• The Innovation Ecosystem Podcast Episode 011 - Innovative Disruption with Larry Cunningham
• The companies co-founded by Brad Feld: Foundry Group, Techstars, Mobius Venture Capital
• The companies Brad invested in: Uber, Fitbit, Zynga, Harmonix
• Other mentions: Kauffman Foundation, Cox Enterprises, Amazon, Target, Metro, Barclays, Cedars-Sinai, Rover, Reboot.io
•  Brad Feld's books
• The Ideal Financial Reporting Tempo for a VC-Backed Company, blog post published on Feld Thoughts (January 2017)
• Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, edited by Peter D. Kaufman
• Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't, a book by Jim Collins

In this episode, we are joined by Luis Perez-Breva, a lecturer and research scientist at MIT’s School of Engineering and the Director of MIT’s Innovation Teams Program. Luis has extensive experience in both innovation practice - via his involvement in multiple startups - and innovation research - through his academic work.  He recently published his first book, Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong.

What Was Covered

• Why Luis sees following “innovation recipes” is inherently wasteful and essentially high stakes gambling
• How the best innovators both prepare for scale at each stage and excel at applying their “parts” to identified problems
• How a corporation’s existing products and services give it an innovation advantage over startups

Key Takeaways and Learnings

• Luis’s tried and tested method, anticipating failure at each ‘scale’, which can help innovators to prepare and solve as many foreseeable faults as possible
  - what he being “productively wrong” as a way to avoid “failing predictively”
• How to use linear processes to improve the non-linear process of building innovation
• Innovating the skillset; how companies learn and repurpose what they do today to provide entirely different products in the future

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Podcast

• Innovating: A Doer’s Manifesto for Starting from a Hunch, Prototyping Problems, Scaling Up, and Learning to Be Productively Wrong – a book by Luis Perez-Breva
• Get in touch with Luis Perez-Breva via LinkedIn, Twitter and email - lpbreva@mit.edu
• MIT School of Engineering website
• The Morning Ledger: Why you probably work a giant US company, a report by Rhea Rao, The Wall Street Journal Blog, April 2017
• The Innovation Ecosystem Podcast Episode 058 – Dual Transformation and Why Noah’s Arc Management Can’t Work with Scott Anthony of Innosight