The Corporate Innovator's Playbook: Turning Ideas Into Profits

Your company generates plenty of good ideas, but how many of them have been turned into businesses that move the revenue needle?

This is the key challenge facing all corporate innovation efforts—how to scale a promising idea into a global business. The Corporate Innovator’s Playbook provides the recipe.

Paul Campbell and Steffen Bartschat are practitioners who have led corporate innovation programs for the last decade in one of the world’s premier innovation hubs, Silicon Valley. While solving their own internal challenges, they have also keenly observed the successes (and failures) of their corporate peers and the fast-moving world of startups.

They’ve translated the body of their experiences into the Innovation Canvas, a framework to assess and improve corporate innovation programs. The Innovation Canvas describes the key elements of successful innovation programs and the synergies that turn them into growth factories. The goal is to create a hybrid process, combining the best of two cultures—startup agility and corporate scale.

As global competition accelerates in the age of AI, developing an efficient innovation funnel is more critical than ever. This book delivers hands-on advice to on-the-ground teams, driving measurable impact within their organization.

Paul Campbell (MBA, Chicago Booth) is a global innovation leader who has built multi-billion-dollar businesses for companies like HP, Philips, Schneider Electric, and W. L. Gore. As Chief Innovation Officer, he drove capital efficiency and R&D returns, guiding leadership teams to foster cultures that accelerate innovation. Paul has launched new products and business models in health wearables, medical devices, PC gaming, and consumer electronics. He is a Professor of Practice at Hult International Business School, San Francisco, teaching innovation and entrepreneurship, and has served as a guest lecturer at UC Berkeley Haas and a senior advisor to the World Economic Forum.

Steffen Bartschat (BS, MS, Carnegie Mellon, MS, Stanford Business School) has lived and worked in Silicon Valley for over thirty years, initially as a senior engineering executive at IBM and Electronic Arts before shifting to the startup world. While serving as COO at wearable startup Lumo Bodytech, he advised $20B automotive supplier Faurecia on its Silicon Valley strategy. Steffen now runs a consulting business helping corporates improve their innovation strategies and helping startups grow their business. He is an active angel investor and has served as Board Director for one of his portfolio startups.