Driving Innovation Through Collaboration – Visionary of the Year

Fred Schonenberg

Hi, I'm Fred Schonenberg, and thank you for joining me on the VentureFuel podcast. At VentureFuel, we help companies find new solutions by partnering with the best startups from around the world. On the show, you'll learn the secrets of business leaders who tap into startups and the founders driving extraordinary results. We'll consider new ideas, stretch our mindsets beyond the status quo, and in the process, discover how to leap the competition and fuel personal growth. 

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the VentureFuel Visionaries podcast. I'm your host, Fred Schonenberg. I'm so excited for this episode because it is a celebration of some of our best guests. Every year, we hold a Visionary of the Year award, and we're down to our final nominees, five leaders who are redefining corporate innovation and how organizations, startups, and individuals can collaborate together to drive innovation that ignites change. They're proving that the best breakthroughs come from partnerships that bridge industries, scale new ideas, and challenge the status quo.

So today, we have a bit of a mashup of the best of the interviews with these five nominees. So you'll hear from Charlotte Newman from Amazon Web Services on supporting founders worldwide and localizing innovation for global impact. 

Charlotte Newman (Amazon AWS)

Because of our global footprint, I felt really committed to the fact that this couldn't just be work that was done in the U.S., that it had to matter in other parts of the world. So I've been a sponsor to a number of things like AfricArena across the continent. Last year, I was in Egypt. I was in Kenya, Ghana. I've lost track. Senegal, lots of different places. And also in India, we did two incredible forums for women founders in Bengaluru and Delhi.

And I've learned a lot also, too, across these different spaces. It's been fascinating to have one-on-one conversations with founders in different parts of the world, particularly women. That's been a big focus in some of these other markets to really figure out like what really moves the needle there and to make sure that we are localizing the programs that we create so they're relevant wherever we are.

Fred Schonenberg

Marita McGinn from MassRobotics on how public-private partnerships are fueling the next wave of robotics and AI together.

Marita McGinn (MassRobotics)

With our nonprofit model and the equity-free model, our breadth of who we can actually help increases tenfold.This is our first program. I want to have some amazing successes in there. Then I think the ten startups that we've selected, it's going to come true. But we also have an assistive technology company that is doing incredible work for the users that they're actually helping. But who knows that they're going to be a huge business, right? Assistive technology, it might not be super VC-backable, but their technology needs help. And their founders can really use this work, this technical and more business work. So I think with the equity-free piece, it feels like the right thing to do.

Fred Schonenberg
Sokwoo Rhee from LG Electronics, one of our highest-listened-to episodes last year on breaking barriers between startups and large corporations to drive meaningful collaborations.

Sokwoo Rhee (LG Electronics)

We cannot bring everything into our organization. So we have to find a way to work together, partnerships, collaboration. So that is the idea of what I call outside in. So let's bring these talents outside. When I say bring in, some of them we're going to hire, some of them we're going to acquire as our LG resources. But at the same time, we can partner with the startups. We can invest in those startups. And we can even acquire them. At the same time, we may not even acquire them. We can come down, we can enter into a sort of like a collaboration agreement, for example. So, in the end, we want to create a next venture as a new venture for LG's businesses. So we're going to launch new businesses outside of LG Electronics in this new exciting area.

Fred Schonenberg

Dan Kihanya. Dan is at Path Ahead Ventures of REI, and we talk about how collaborations go beyond funding, building a community where founders connect, grow and scale together.

Dan Kihanya (Path Ahead Ventures, REI)

The way we look at our role is just try and meet founders where they are. How can we be helpful in a valuable and transparent and scalable way? And so some of the things that we're working on this year after we started with programming and capital was community building and sort of always-on resources. So those have been the themes that we've been working on this year. Since we have a lot of founders, they want to get together with each other. They want to get together with their communities and with the industry as a whole. So community now is becoming pretty important for us.

Fred Schonenberg

And last but not least is Kyle Basler-Reeder of ExxonMobil. I had a great conversation with Kyle early in the year about venture clienting, connecting startups with real world problems and commercial deals at large organizations.

Kyle Basler-Reeder (ExxonMobil)

You know if we're looking for getting perspective in a new area, you get a hold of people and you can do it in a workshop setting with multiple people. You do it one-on-one. If it's about the sort of acceleration, again, partners like VentureFuel, these kind of places where you can go and you define the problem. What am I looking for? What have I tried in the past? What are the specs that I need? And then you blast it out there broadly. So having an external partner to help us navigate that. And then the last one around the new ideas, I think the kind of these global crowdsourcing platforms, that's the way to go. 

Again, having that third party to help you when it comes to specifically finding like a startup opportunity. You know what I would say, we often like to be in what I call the venture clienting role, the venture clienting role, where basically it's a problem we have. We want to come and we want to be a partner. We have technical guidance. We know the problem very well. We also have the ability to do broad testing, piloting at our facilities. That's a huge advantage we bring. And then the biggest advantage is we can be a really big customer. Right. So it's kind of like, hey, you have your first customer. They're willing to help you to help design the product. They're willing to help you pilot the product. That seems like a really no regrets situation to be in if you were a small startup company.

Fred Schonenberg

What's really exciting is none of these Visionaries are talking about collaborations and innovation as academic exercises. They're actually making it happen. They're driving change.
They're scaling the solutions. And I'm really happy to share some of the insights and best of the best from these episodes. 

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the VentureFuel Visionaries podcast. Really appreciate your time and interest to find out more. Please go to venturefuel.net or check us out on LinkedIn. And of course, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend or a colleague and subscribe and give us feedback on whatever app you're listening to the podcast. Look forward to having you on the next episode. Take care.