Corporate Innovation Strategy: Return Maps, Managing Up & Forecasting with Chuck House
Release Date: 02/18/2026
Alex Osterwalder — Which Projects to Fund and Which to Kill
The Innovation Show
"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 like Honeywell to decide which growth projects to fund, which to change, and which to retire — so you get a real funnel, not a tunnel. In this conversation, Alex...
info_outline
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez — Powered by Projects and the Project-Driven Organization
The Innovation Show
"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 economy concept and author of Powered by Projects, joins Aidan McCullen to explain why agile — a 20-year-old idea — is no longer enough, and why the next evolution is the project-driven organization (PDO): a company rearchitected around dynamic, empowered, cross-functional project teams. In this conversation, Antonio reveals: Why EY's Project Everest collapsed despite a perfect plan — and what it says...
info_outline
Rita McGrath & Sangeet Paul Choudary — Rule Makers, Rule Takers and Structural Uncertainty
The Innovation Show
"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." Rita McGrath wrote The End of Competitive Advantage and gave us transient advantage. Sangeet Paul Choudary wrote Reshuffle and won the 2025 Thinkers50 Strategy Award. Aidan McCullen puts them in the same room to ask a question neither can answer alone: in an age of AI, is advantage getting shorter, or are a small number of firms locking in something far more durable by making the rules...
info_outline
Keith McCandless — The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures
The Innovation Show
"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-developer of Liberating Structures and co-author of The Surprising Power of Liberating Structures, joins Aidan McCullen to explain why most meetings are either over-controlled or under-controlled — and how simple shifts in everyday interaction can unleash a culture of innovation from the frontline to the C-suite. In this conversation, Keith reveals: Why the first field test of Liberating Structures happened in...
info_outline
Usman Sheikh — How AI Will Reshape Consulting: The End of the Pyramid
The Innovation Show
"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 professional services — and the world has now caught up with the puck. In this conversation with Aidan McCullen, he explains why the consulting pyramid — the structure behind every major firm — is coming apart, and what replaces it. In this conversation, Usman reveals: Why firms became pyramids: leverage, margin, and a talent academy paid for by the client's billable hours How...
info_outline
Carla Johnson — RE:Think Innovation and the Wheel of Innovation
The Innovation Show
"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 on a mission to teach one million people to consistently come up with new, great and reliable ideas. In this anniversary-edition conversation, she takes Aidan McCullen through her updated Wheel of Innovation — observe, distill, relate, generate, pitch — and the cautionary tales that show why so many good ideas die in the boardroom. In this conversation, Carla reveals: Why a...
info_outline
Carliss Baldwin & Kim Clark — Design Rules: How IBM Created Ecosystems (and Competitors)
The Innovation Show
"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 strategy — the mechanic underneath the Innovator's Dilemma — and it has never been more relevant than in this age of AI. In this conversation, Carliss and Kim reveal: Why the power of modularity underpins Moore's Law — and everything digital around us How IBM engineers, locked in a...
info_outline
Jennifer Chatman — Transformational Leader or Narcissist?
The Innovation Show
"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 organisational culture — joins Aidan McCullen to explain why narcissistic leadership is so often mistaken for visionary leadership, and how to tell the two apart before one wrecks your company. Drawing on her widely cited article with Stanford's Charles O'Reilly, "Transformational Leader or Narcissist?",...
info_outline
Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile, Part 2: NeXT's Failures, Pixar's Lifeline and the Road Back to Apple
The Innovation Show
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 return. Cain reframes the NeXT era not as a triumphant hero's journey but as a cascade of failure, ego and self-sabotage that quietly forged the leader Jobs became. In this conversation, Geoffrey reveals: Why the "reality distortion field" stopped working the moment the $6,500 NeXTcube shipped How Jobs...
info_outline
Geoffrey Cain — Steve Jobs in Exile: NeXT, Failure, Revenge and the Remaking of a Visionary
The Innovation Show
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 Aidan McCullen to tell the story the official Jobs narrative leaves out: the dozen years between his firing from Apple in 1985 and his triumphant return. Drawing on unbroadcast NeXT footage, new interviews and internal documents, Cain reveals the failures, the revenge and the near-misses that forged the...
info_outlineWhy does corporate innovation fail so often — even with talented teams and strong ideas? In this episode of The Innovation Show with Aidan McCullen, intrapreneur and innovation veteran Chuck House returns to explain why innovation dies when projects, programs, and strategy aren’t clearly connected — and why executives often misjudge innovation timelines because they’re optimizing established businesses.
Chuck breaks down the 4 intrapreneur traits (curiosity, perspective, resilience, and comfort with data) and the overlooked career skill that makes or breaks intrapreneurs: managing down AND managing up. Learn how to build team trust, navigate organizational politics, make “invisible work” visible, and persuade decision-makers to keep the right bets alive.
He also challenges traditional project review approaches (IRR, cost/schedule targets, early sales projections) and introduces his practical alignment tool: the Return Map — a living, cross-functional view that integrates investment, revenue, and profit over time, assigns accountability across functions, and forces iterative re-forecasting as reality changes (slips, market windows, manufacturing costs, and sales forecasts).
In this episode
-
Why innovation feels like “snakes and ladders” inside large organisations
-
Steve Jobs as a blueprint: iPod → iTunes → iPhone as a strategic cycle
-
Managing up: credibility, trust, and navigating corporate politics
-
Why HQ metrics can kill risky projects too early
-
Brunnergrams vs strategy: what engineering tracking misses
-
How Return Maps improve alignment, accountability, and forecasting
-
Teaser: a future conversation with Kodak digital camera inventor Steve Sasson
Sponsor: Kyndryl