Bay Area Corporate Venture & Innovation Monthly Networking Meetup/Reception

​Join Zachary Rainey and Dr. Diana Joseph for a candid fireside chat on what corporate open innovation actually looks like from the inside — not polished theory, but real examples from the trenches.

​Diana will share the frameworks from her new book, Open Innovation Works, including alignment canvases, innovation dashboards, and the "prove-out journey" approaches that replace the alphabet soup of disconnected steps — NDAs, MTAs, POCs, pilots — with a coherent, hypothesis-driven path. One of her sharpest findings: the biggest obstacle to effective open innovation isn't the external partner. It's getting your own organization aligned.

​Zack will pressure-test those ideas with Fujitsu's lived experience — what they've tried, what worked, and candidly, what "fell flat on their face" across accelerators, incubators, CVC, consortia, and beyond. A hyper connector with his Fujitsu colleagues, Corporate Partners and the broader ecosystem as with external startups, he contributes the operating reality to the chat.

​This session is built for corporate innovation managers, CVC leaders, and open innovation practitioners at multinational organizations — people navigating the daily work of translating strategy across business units, cultures, and borders.