What I Do
A brief summary of my professional activities, and an intro to my current and future ones.
I’m good at reframing. At finding the question underneath the question, and at making the structural logic of a situation visible to the people inside it who are too close to see it clearly. I enjoy the early stage of hard problems, before the answer exists, when the work is still figuring out what the right question is. I’m drawn to conversations where someone needs a new lens, not a familiar solution, and where the instinct to reach for the established playbook is precisely what needs to be examined.
In recent years I’ve worked with corporations building or rethinking their innovation function, private equity firms considering venture building as a strategic capability, startups at moments where the founding assumptions need honest stress-testing, and academic institutions looking to discuss innovation practice at the frontier rather than through the retrospective case study. The common thread is that the organisations involved were trying to do something they hadn’t done before, in territory that didn’t yet have a map.
If you’re building or running an innovation function inside a large organisation - or deciding whether you should - I’d be glad to discuss it. Same if you’re a PE firm or family office thinking about venture building as part of your strategy, a startup wrestling with a strategic question that doesn’t have an obvious answer, or an institution that wants to discuss what’s actually happening at the edge of innovation practice rather than what the consensus says is happening.
I’m also available to speak. The topics I find most worth arguing about in public are the ones that appear settled but aren’t: why thirty years of venture methodology have produced no improvement in survival rates, what the current AI reorganisation wave actually requires from the organisations living through it, and why the most important strategic moves in innovation are almost always invisible at the moment they’re made.
If any of this is relevant, drop me a line.