Recap of the Corporate Innovation Summit 2024

On February 27th, the week of the Mobile World Congress 2024, we hosted the third edition of one of our favourite events: the Corporate Innovation Summit.

We have been organising this event since 2020, for all professionals of the world of innovation in all its shapes and forms: open innovation, corporate venturing, acceleration programs and the C-levels of the most innovative scaleups. This event congregates 100-200 individuals working in companies from all around the world that want to have a different networking event after MWC closes its doors for the day.

In previous occasions, we've had the Chief Innovation Officers and other managers and directors of innovation of leading companies like Decathlon, FC Barcelona, Philipp Morris, ASICS, Vueling, Moody's and more. You can check the videos for our 2020 and 2023 editions, respectively.

In this occasion, we hosted a stellar lineup consisting of:

• Dorit Dor (CTO at Check Point Software)
• Mark Bünger (CTO @ Futurity Systems)
• Pauline Roux (Partner @ Elaia)
• Pau Minoves (ex-CTO @ Typeform)
• Anthony Waller (M&A at CMS)
• Carmen López (Innovation @ Naturgy)
• José Velasco (Partner at BCG X)

In the first panel, we discussed the roles of different actors in the process of innovation, ranging from fostering new ideas in big corporations to M&A, going through spinning off companies vs. doing it internally, how VCs come into play, what is the return of innovation in big corporations and how and if to involve external collaborators like consultancies or product agencies in these projects.

Pauline Roux, Partner at Elaia, provided a pretty contrarian view of how most VCs repeat hearsay of "less than 5x is a write-off" and how this point of view is actually counter-productive to innovation. Further, she and Anthony Waller (M&A partner at CMS) provided interesting exchanges regarding the roles of lawyers, providers and VCs during M&A processes, and why the big sales are just a minority of the processes that happen all the time.

In fact, big corporations acquire whole companies on a weekly basis - like Google - to absorb talented teams in small- and medium-sized businesses to get their founders for a few years in the company. In most of the times, they don't even need the rest of the team. In fact, Carmen Lopez, in charge of Innovation scouting at Naturgy, shared how innovation projects work to increase employee happiness in the company and how they managed to reduce attrition over the years involving their personnel in innovative projects, pushing them outside of their confort zone.

In the second panel, we switched gears and moved to the technical side of things with three respected CTOs. Dorit Dor, CTO at Check Point Software, a company of almost 15000 employees, has seen many waves of innovation and technology while being a C-level of the company since 1995. In fact, she mentioned that in 1987, the year she graduated in computer engineering, a national newspaper published an article of how AI would destroy al programmers' jobs. It seems that these rumours go in circles and come back every now and then.

She then shared how they try to shed technical debt in every innovation process and what a challenge this is for such a big company. In comparison, Pau Minoves (former CTO at Typeform) shared his framework of frictionless deployments and how they used a very agile methodology to spur and foster innovation at Typeform, a company that did multiple deployments to production per day. For more detail about these processes, check the Life on Mars episode we recorded with Pau about this.

Many insightful remarks were shared during the two panels, and the event concluded with a welcoming session of networking over delicious 5-star catering with all the attendees, speakers and sponsors of the event at the Hyatt Regency Tower Hotel.