#innovation-strategy

#innovation-strategy

BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into the groundbreaking ideas in Harvard Business School case studies. Today on Cold Call, we're looking at a sport where innovation doesn't come from flash or funding, but from rethinking first principles. The sport is speed skating and we're dropping this episode during the 2026 Winter Olympics. The US men's Speed Skating team is coming off years of disappointment, searching for a breakthrough in the team pursuit event. The innovation works.

Sir Demis Hassabis, the recently minted Nobel laureate and CEO of Google DeepMind, believes humanity is standing on the precipice of a "new golden era of discovery." But reaching this utopia will require navigating a turbulent transition period-a decade-long sprint that Hassabis describes as a necessary disruption for the $3.9 trillion tech giant he helps lead. Speaking to Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell on the Fortune 500: Titans and Disruptors of Industry podcast, Hassabis offered a vision of the future defined by "radical abundance." It is a world where artificial intelligence has successfully bottled the scientific method to solve the planet's most intractable problems.

The U.S. Olympic men's and women's sprinting teams have won more gold medals than any other country in history, but the men's 4×100-meter relay team has suffered four blistering defeats in the past two decades. Why? An absolute whiff at the critical point when a runner has to instinctively reach back and trust their squadmate enough to perfectly place the baton in their hand.

The most successful organizations are implementing cross-functional finops teams with representation from engineering, operations, and finance to holistically address resource optimization.