Design Thinking and Open Innovation in the Gen-AI Era
Harsh Wardhan, innovation strategist in Big Tech, on stripping the theatre out of design thinking now that AI can do the busywork.
With Harsh Wardhan
From The Corporate Venturing Podcast, brought to you by Open Road Ventures
4 things this conversation gets into
- 01Stripping away the theatre from design thinking
- 02Gen-AI: delegate tasks, not thinking
- 03Time to evidence matters more than time to market
- 04A simple heuristic for build versus buy
Harsh Wardhan is an Innovation Strategist at a major Big Tech company, where he leads design for Search and Labs, and was formerly a founding member of a Design Lab at a big automotive OEM. He sits at the intersection of high-CapEx automotive constraints and the high-speed ambiguity of Generative AI.
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
In this episode, I’m joined by Harsh Wardhan, Innovation Strategist at a major Big Tech company (leading design for Search & Labs) and formerly a founding member of a Design Lab in an big automotive OEM. Harsh sits at the unique intersection of two worlds: the high-stakes, high-CapEx constraints of the automotive industry and the infinite, high-speed ambiguity of Generative AI.
We strip away the "theater" of innovation (the sticky notes and workshops) to focus on the hard metrics and methodologies that actually de-risk ventures, whether you are bending metal or writing code.
In this episode, Harsh shares insights on:
🎭 Stripping Away the Theater
🤖 GenAI: Delegate Tasks, Not Thinking
🏭 Speedboats vs. Cruise Liners
📉 Time-to-Evidence > Time-to-Market
🏗️ The "Build vs. Buy" Heuristic
🚫 The "Post-It Note" Trap
We close the episode on Harsh’s definition of meaningful work and why a lack of a concrete plan at the start is the biggest red flag in corporate labs.
Resources:• Open Road Ventures Newsletter• Bundl Venture Club
🎧 Follow the podcast for grounded stories and practical lessons 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.