Babak Forutanpour on how to start a grass roots innovation program in a big company

babak forutanpour How do you start a grassroots innovation program within your company?

On this episode of the Big Bang Podcast we interview Babak Forutanpour, Founder of Qualcomm’s FLUX employee-run open innovation program and creator of @TheAryaBall.

A couple of years ago I had the opportunity to interview Babak to find out the story behind FLUX. In a wide ranging interview he shared with me his experience in starting an innovation program inside Qualcomm, as well as the fantastic results they’ve achieved. What started as an 8 person experiment, four years later is a global initiative.

Below is the audio of our conversation.

Here are a few questions we discussed with Babak:

How do you start a grassroots innovation program inside a large corporation?
What are the goals of such an innovation program?
What process, if any, did you develop to come up with ideas as a group?
What were the main the obstacles, if any, that you had to overcome to get traction with this initiative?
What advice do you have for established companies that want to start an innovation program/think tank like Flux?

Have experience with employee-run open innovation programs that you’d like to share?

Awesome! Let us know on Twitter @jorgebarba and @adrianpedrin.