Episode 38: Corporate Startups and Innovation Accounting with Esther Gons

Many of you, innovators out there will have been faced with the following question by a senior leader about an early-stage innovation idea: “Yeah, but what’s the ROI?” Of course, sometimes you just don’t know yet and it’s a bad question at a bad moment in time. But then again: Management is there to manage, whether it’s about the core or about new ventures. So how can we measure innovation? Our guest today took a brilliant approach to this problem she calls “Innovation accounting”.

Esther Gons is one of those thinkers in innovation that just seems to win a prize with every new publication. Together with Dan Toma and Tendayi Viki she wrote “The Corporate Startup” which won a 2019 Golden Axiom Business Book Award and the 2018 Management Book of the year Award. The latest book “Innovation accounting” again won a 2022 Axiom Business Book gold Award. Esther is the founder and CEO of GroundControl, an innovation management software that helps corporate startup teams with the structure and learning for new business models. Esther is an international speaker, an entrepreneur for over 20 years and has mentored several hundred startups as an investor in the NEXT startup ventures, lead mentor in the Rockstar accelerator program or in the Lean Startup Machine weekends.