Building Internal Culture to Embrace External Ideas
Mar Serra of Nestlé and Benni Lickfett of Diageo on why innovation programmes struggle when the culture is not ready for them.
With Mar Serra and Benni Lickfett
From The Corporate Venturing Podcast, brought to you by Open Road Ventures
4 things this conversation gets into
- 01The clash between corporate scale and startup agility
- 02Spotting and developing the right internal champions
- 03Adapting governance to move at startup speed
- 04Why return on learning matters as much as ROI
Mar Serra is Global Lead for Product Application at Nestlé and previously headed the Nestlé Accelerator in Lausanne. She is joined by Benjamin Lickfett, Global VP of Breakthrough Innovation at Diageo. Together they bring lessons from two global giants on balancing core business discipline with entrepreneurial freedom.
Davide Ritorto is a management engineer from Italy with an international MBA, currently working at Lamborghini. He is what some call an intrapreneur, passionate about open innovation and corporate venturing, and driven by curiosity about how things work and how to make them work even better. Through Open Road Ventures he sets out to inspire and inform other innovators, intrapreneurs and dreamers.
He founded Open Road Ventures as a weekly publication on open innovation and corporate venturing, and The Corporate Venturing Podcast grew out of it. He also mentors startups at Motor Valley Accelerator and sits on the Open Innovation Advisory Board at UC Berkeley Haas.
The Corporate Venturing Podcast is made by Open Road Ventures. The Bundl Venture Club is a partner of the show.
Read the full show notes
🎙️ Welcome to a new episode of The Corporate Venturing Podcast!
Why do so many corporate innovation programs struggle? Not because of a lack of ideas, but because their internal culture isn’t ready to embrace them!
In this episode, I sit down with Mar Serra, Global Lead for Product Application at Nestlé (and former head of Nestlé Accelerator in Lausanne), and Benjamin Lickfett, Global VP of Breakthrough Innovation at Diageo, to explore how to build internal cultures that truly support external ideas.
Together, we dive into the real challenges (and the practical solutions) for creating openness inside large organizations:
🌍 The cultural clash between corporate scale and startup agility
⚡ Why innovation fails without the right structures, incentives, and psychological safety
🛠️ Concrete tactics: accelerators, mentorship, reverse mentoring, hackathons, and “celebrating the kill”
👥 Spotting and developing the right internal champions (because innovation isn’t for everyone)
📐 How to adapt governance and processes (like Diageo’s Ignite model) to move at startup speed
🚀 Maintaining momentum once pilot hype fades—turning wins and failures into long-term belief in innovation
🎯 Securing leadership alignment without slowing everything down
💡 Why Return on Learning is as important as ROI
Both Mar and Benny share candid lessons from Nestlé and Diageo: two global giants learning to balance core business discipline with entrepreneurial freedom.
And we close on a personal note: the most rewarding transformations they’ve witnessed: individuals and teams returning from innovation programs with new confidence, resilience, and mindsets that ripple across the company.
If you’re building corporate innovation teams or trying to spark cultural change inside your organization, this episode is packed with practical wisdom and hope that it is possible.
Resources:
🎧 Follow this podcast for more grounded stories from inside the world of Open Innovation and Corporate Venturing.
Keep listening
All episodes
New growth plays, every fortnight.
What is working inside the world’s biggest consumer brands, straight to your inbox.