The Innovation Show
The Innovation Show is a business innovation podcast hosted by Aidan McCullen, recipient of the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award and author of Undisruptable. Each week Aidan interviews the authors, researchers and practitioners reshaping how organisations think about innovation, leadership, change and reinvention. The guest list reads like a who's who of innovation. Gary Hamel joined Aidan for an 18-part series. Seth Godin was the show's first guest, and Rita McGrath, Dee Hock, Robert Burgelman, Alex Osterwalder, Joe Bower, Clark Gilbert, Scott D. Anthony, Michael Tushman, Charles O'Reilly, Sven Smit, Paul Daugherty and Paul Nunes have all followed, alongside hundreds of thinkers you may not have heard of yet and will be glad you did. With 667 episodes, the show is a library for leaders who want to see disruption coming and for managers looking for practical ways to bring better ideas to work. This is the podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes.
Episodes
"Nintendo unlocked a completely underserved market by simplifying the game console." Alexander Osterwalder
Alexander Osterwalder returns to The Innovation Show with a world first. The co-founder of Strategyzer and creator of the Business Model Canvas shares the Value Stack, a brand new tool built on six patterns of value creation. Strategyzer has stopped writing books. Alex explains why the team has moved to applied playbooks, and ...
"If there's something that's terrible, it's this fuzzy value proposition with AI slop."
Alex Osterwalder, co-founder of Strategyzer and inventor of the Business Model Canvas, returns to The Innovation Show with a field report on AI value proposition design. A few weeks ago he argued that AI should never replace the human struggle of value proposition work. Drawing on recent work with a large client's product owners and product mana...
"You know how I know what the real culture of a company is? [Two] things. Who gets the money and who gets promoted."
Robert Burgelman, the Edmund W. Littlefield Professor of Management at Stanford Graduate School of Business and author of Strategy is Destiny and Inside Corporate Innovation, returns to The Innovation Show to discuss how companies renew themselves from the middle. His new paper with Sasanka Sekhar Chanda revisits thr...
"A good idea and a bad idea look very similar early on." David J Bland
David Bland, founder of Precoil and lead author of Testing Business Ideas with Alex Osterwalder, helped DuPont and its semiconductor spin-off Qnity build an experimentation capability that surfaces risk early and speeds up commit, correct and cut decisions. The work contributed to a 2026 IRI Innovation Excellence Award for Outstanding Innovative Culture. Across ...
"They don't quit their job cold turkey. That's not what I've observed firsthand."
Only twelve companies have ever been worth more than a trillion dollars. Ten of them are American. Eight of those ten were started fractionally, by people who were still in a job or still in school when they built the first version.
Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC in the Bay Area, where she has made over 150 early-stage investments across a dec...
"When's the last time you thought about your suppliers as your partner in innovation?"
Paul Nunes, co-author of Jumping the S-Curve, Big Bang Disruption and Pivot to the Future, returns to talk to Aidan McCullen about the companies that come back from the dead. Motorola is the case study, combinatorial innovation is the engine, and the uncomfortable question underneath it all is what your company would actually be worth in pieces.
...
"You don't want innovation. What you want is a tweak that won't be too uncomfortable."
Dov Baron, five-time Top 30 Global Leadership Guru and author of The Art of Belonging, sits down with Aidan McCullen in Vancouver to explain why identity addiction is the hidden reason behavioural change fails — in athletes, in leaders and in entire organisations. From a childhood of poverty in Salford to a 1990 fr...
"Exploitation pays your salary. Exploration pays your pension." — Steve Blank
In Part 3 of The Innovation Show's Strategyzer series, Alex Osterwalder returns to tackle the problem every leadership team quietly struggles with: the core business kills everything that looks different. Building on James March's exploration vs exploitation, Tushman and O'Reilly's Lead and Disrupt, and Clay Christensen's I...
"You're gonna run up a hundred wrong hills, and you're still not gonna get a good understanding of the map."
Alexander Osterwalder, co-author of Value Proposition Design and founder of Strategyzer, returns for Part 2 of our series. Last week: which projects to retire. This week: value proposition design in the age of AI — why generative AI can formulate a brilliant value proposition, but only if you'...
"Spreadsheets are a fantasy made explicit. They're not a metric. What you can measure is the evidence that the business case could work."
Alexander Osterwalder, creator of the Business Model Canvas, CEO of Strategyzer and author of The Invincible Company, Testing Business Ideas and Value Proposition Design, returns to The Innovation Show. He walks Aidan McCullen through the evidence-based innovation playbook he uses with companies ...
"If you launch more projects than you finish, you're a bad leader. Your role is not about launching projects — it's about finishing them."
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez, creator of the project ec...
"Structural uncertainty is simple. The game itself is in question. The playing field is in question. You're no longer playing with uncertainty inside the rules — the rules are the thing that's moving."
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"You don't have to be a methodological genius. These are patterns — 43 simple patterns that anyone can use to include every voice in shaping what happens next."
Keith McCandless, co-develop...
"AI doesn't have judgment in it — it produces judgment-shaped artifacts."
Usman Sheikh, founder of High Output Ventures and author of the Framebreak newsletter, has spent years writing about how AI will reshape...
"Innovation isn't a gift. It's a simple, repeatable five-step process that anyone, at any level, can learn — with nothing more than a stack of Post-it notes."
Carla Johnson, author of RE:Think Innovation, is o...
"The act of modularizing your product is the very act of inviting your future competitors into existence."
Carliss Baldwin and Kim Clark, authors of the landmark Design Rules: The Power of Modularity, join Aidan McCullen for an Innovation Show exclusive. Their book is the Rosetta Stone of platform ...
"Narcissists do draw people in. They start with really appealing visions — and then the wheels come off."
About 2% of people are narcissists. Among CEOs, it's roughly 16%. Jennifer Chatman — Dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley and one of the world's leading scholars of or...
Steve Jobs sold barely 100 computers a month at NeXT — and told his team they'd sell 100,000. This is the decade everyone skips.
Author Geoffrey Cain joins Aidan McCullen for part two on Steve Jobs in Exile, the story of the wilderness years between Jobs' 1985 ousting from Apple and his retur...
Steve Jobs was nearly bankrupt — down to his last $150 million, burning $50 million a year, with every product failing and every investor gone.
Award-winning journalist Geoffrey Cain, author of Steve Jobs in Exile: The Untold Story of NeXT and the Remaking of a Technology Visionary, joins Aid...
One developer. Six months. An $80 million sale to Wix. That's not the future of work — it's already here.
In this special panel from the Kyndryl Institute and The Innovation Show, host Aidan McCullen brings together four of the world's sharpest minds on strategy, i...
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