How Caterpillar Is Testing Bold Ideas Without Risking the Brand, with Nancy Yaklich
Description
What does it take to build new ventures inside a 100-year-old industrial giant, without getting buried in bureaucracy or damaging the brand?In this episode of Beyond the Core, Ben and Marcus sit down with Nancy Yaklich, a seasoned innovation leader who’s led Venture-building initiatives at Cargill, Best Buy, UnitedHealthcare, and now Caterpillar, where she’s pioneering a shadow brand called EcoForge to launch and test new business ideas beyond the core.Nancy shares her step-by-step playbook for validating ideas, getting legal and executive buy-in, working with startups, building shadow brands, and navigating the tension between innovation and risk in a legacy organization.We cover:⏱️ Timestamps0:00 – Intro: Innovation beyond the core1:00 – What is EcoForge and why Caterpillar needed it4:00 – Shadow brands: testing without hurting the mothership6:00 – Getting legal and execs to say “yes”9:00 – Spin-in vs spin-out: how Nancy thinks about scale12:00 – The “adjacency space” and why it’s full of hidden opportunity15:00 – Bottom-up forecasting vs bloated TAMs17:30 – Pitching new ideas with strategic angles19:00 – Why innovation teams must sit high in the org22:30 – Building portfolios, not projects24:00 – The “dud” concept: normalizing failure28:00 – Selling learning inside large orgs31:00 – Venture building ≠ innovation theatre33:00 – No cookie-cutter playbooks: adapting to each org38:00 – Partnering with startups and navigating slow systems41:00 – Nancy’s advice to other corporate venture leaders44:00 – Why now is the best time to swing bigWhether you’re in corporate innovation, building a studio, or just trying to make new ideas happen inside slow-moving systems, this episode is a masterclass in how to do it right.Subscribe for more conversations like these.
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