You can’t afford to learn every lesson the hard way. And you don’t need to.
Innovation is expensive, not just in money, but time, energy, and credibility.
And these business innovation experts?
They’ve already stumbled, experimented, tested frameworks, and worked across industries and org sizes.
By following them, you’re essentially:
- Crowdsourcing patterns, seeing what’s working across companies, industries, and countries in real time
- Stress-testing your assumptions, before you drop $200K on a pilot or burn six months on the wrong MVP
- Getting unstuck, faster. A single insight or mental model from someone like Alex Osterwalder or Simone Ahuja can reframe a problem your team has been chewing on for weeks
- Building vocabulary for complex conversations, especially helpful if you’re convincing leadership, legal, or finance to invest in new ideas
That’s why we’ve handpicked 10 business innovation experts who are not only redefining how innovation works today but are also actively building the future.
You don’t even need to read their books.
Sometimes, one LinkedIn post, podcast clip, or newsletter issue gives you exactly what you need to shift direction or validate an idea.
Free mentorship, basically.
#1 Sam Zellner — Innovation Leader, Prolific Inventor, and Visionary IP Strategist
If you’re serious about innovation and intellectual property, Sam Zellner needs to be at the top of your follow list in business innovation experts.
Most people talking about innovation have never filed a single patent. Sam Zellner?
He’s the name behind 200+ patents (yes, really), and he’s still building tools to help others innovate better.
He previously served as Executive Director of Innovation and Patent Development at AT&T, helping one of the world’s largest tech companies protect and scale game-changing ideas.
He’s been named multiple times in the IAM Strategy 300 list – a global index of the world’s leading IP strategists.
Today, Sam leads InspireIP, a software solution that helps organizations turn ideas into impact with structured idea and IP management.
He’s also the visionary behind PQAI (Patent Quality AI), an open-source AI initiative transforming how inventors and researchers conduct prior art searches, making the patent process more accessible and accurate.
But you don’t follow Sam just because of his resume.
You follow Sam because he’s solving a real problem most innovators feel on a daily basis.
He’s making invention disclosure and idea validation faster, smarter, and actually usable.
And because he’s inventing and experimenting himself, his content is practical. No “10,000-foot thought leadership.” It’s here’s:
- How you set up a scalable innovation process.
- What’s broken in corporate IP workflows, and how to fix it.
- How AI should (and shouldn’t) be used in innovation.
- How you manage ideas, from the first scribble on a whiteboard to a legally protected, investment-ready invention.
#2 Rita McGrath — Strategy Professor, Author of “Seeing Around Corners”
A Columbia Business School professor and global strategy expert, Rita McGrath has helped redefine how we think about competitive advantage.
She emphasizes transient advantage, urging businesses to continuously evolve rather than cling to outdated strengths.
Follow her for strategic innovation, market inflection points, business foresight.
Rita isn’t the “classic business school professor.” She talks about the death of sustainable competitive advantage and why businesses today need to keep moving.
Rita’s advice? Stop building moats. Start building radar systems.
Her latest book to check out: Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen.
Want to try it? Start mapping signals from customer complaints, product usage data, and competitor patents. Look for patterns. Don’t wait until it becomes “a trend.”
Why follow Rita?
Because she doesn’t wait for the storm, she shows you the clouds before they gather.
Her posts, talks, and tools help you develop a radar for change, and not just chase the next shiny thing. If you’re leading strategy or innovation at any level, she’ll show you how to stay relevant.
#3 Steve Blank — Father of Modern Lean Startup
Steve Blank pioneered the customer development model that reshaped how startups launch.
His teachings laid the foundation for the Lean Startup movement, empowering entrepreneurs to test, iterate, and scale smartly.
Follow him for innovation in startups, customer-centric design, entrepreneurial strategy.
He basically taught the world that assumptions kill products. His advice to startups: talk to customers early. And his advice to corporates? Same thing, just harder.
He has been part of, or co-founded eight Silicon Valley startups.
These have run the gamut from semiconductors, video games, personal computers, and supercomputers.
Steve’s last company was E.piphany, an enterprise software company.
Steve currently teaches entrepreneurship and national security innovation at Stanford. He was awarded the Stanford University Undergraduate Teaching Award in the department of Management Science and Engineering.
And was honored with the Earl F. Cheit Outstanding Teaching Award at U.C. Berkeley Haas School of Business.
If your team is still building things before talking to users, you’re burning time and money.
Steve gives you a reality check with practical steps to de-risk ideas early. Every post is a prompt to ask better questions before you commit resources.
#4 Navi Radjou — Thought Leader in Frugal Innovation
If you want to build big results on a tiny budget, Navi Radjou is your guy, you top pick from the business innovation experts list.
He’s the co-author of two landmark books: Jugaad Innovation and Frugal Innovation, which flipped the script on how we think about constraints.
Instead of seeing them as blockers, Navi shows how scarcity can actually fuel creativity.
This isn’t armchair theory.
He’s studied, and advised, global companies like Renault, GE, and Unilever on how to innovate like a startup, even inside massive organizations.
And with global R&D spending becoming tighter post-2023, his philosophy is more relevant than ever.
He’ll show you how to:
- Spot creative workarounds your team’s already using, and systemize them
- Design with local relevance, especially in underserved or price-sensitive markets
- Build inclusive, sustainable products that scale without needing VC burn rates
- Rethink how you define “value” beyond just features or tech specs
Bottom line? If your 2025 roadmap is ambitious but your budget isn’t, Navi gives you the mental models, examples, and practical wisdom to keep moving without compromise.
#5 Tendayi Viki — Corporate Innovation Expert
Ever tried to launch bold ideas inside a slow-moving organization?
Then you already know the pain Tendayi Viki writes about.
He’s a Partner at Strategyzer (yes, the folks behind the Business Model Canvas), and he works with brands like Pearson, Standard Bank, and Rabobank to help them not just talk innovation, but actually do it in a way that sticks.
Tendayi’s superpower? He helps build repeatable innovation systems that let ideas grow inside even the most risk-averse orgs without blowing up everything else in the process.
Why follow Tendayi?
- If your team keeps spinning on one-off brainstorms but nothing ships…
- Or if your org gets stuck between “move fast” and “get 12 approvals first”…
- Or if you’ve got the talent, but no process to scale good ideas…
He teaches:
- How to run a balanced innovation portfolio (think: R&D + core ops, not either/or)
- How to align innovators with leadership without killing creativity
- How to measure innovation without making it a soul-sucking KPI factory
He’s the voice you need in your feed if your org talks big about innovation but struggles to make it repeatable, fundable, and outcome-driven.
#6 Dr. Simone Ahuja — Innovation Culture & Intrapreneurship Expert
Innovation doesn’t always start in R&D.
Sometimes, it starts with the nurse, the sales rep, or the line manager who just sees a better way to do things.
Dr. Simone Ahuja has spent her career helping companies unlock those voices.
She’s the bestselling author of Disrupt-It-Yourself, a regular Harvard Business Review contributor, and a leading thinker on employee-led innovation.
Her sweet spot? Helping large companies move from top-down innovation to grassroots creativity that actually sticks.
Simone’s approach is deeply people-first.
She teaches companies how to build innovation culture from the inside-out, not just hire external consultants or host flashy hackathons.
You might probably be sitting on hundreds of ideas right now and most of them haven’t even been voiced.
Simone helps you:
- Spot the intrapreneurs you already employ
- Build safe spaces for employees to test ideas (without needing approval from 4 layers up)
- Create lightweight systems for idea capture that don’t die in SharePoint
- Hardwire innovation into daily behavior
#7 Alex Osterwalder — Creator of the Business Model Canvas
Known for developing Business Model Canvas, he’s helped thousands of companies, from startups to Fortune 500s, rethink their models and build innovation portfolios.
You can follow him for business model innovation, value proposition design, and corporate innovation frameworks.
You know how CFOs track ROI and risk in financial portfolios?
Alex teaches companies to do the exact same thing with innovation.
He shows you how to:
- Map and balance your innovation bets—core, adjacent, transformational
- Design clear value propositions using tested frameworks (Value Proposition Canvas, anyone?)
- Build governance models that let innovation scale without needing a unicorn every quarter
- Move from Post-its to a real portfolio—with risk-adjusted returns and resource clarity
Alex’s work is deeply practical. Whether you’re a startup trying to validate product-market fit or a corporate innovator figuring out where to invest your $10M innovation budget, his tools are the ones teams actually use.
#8 Lisa Bodell — Founder of FutureThink, Simplicity Champion
Lisa’s work cuts through the clutter.
Her book Kill the Company is a must-read for teams drowning in complexity. She helps organizations foster simplicity, agility, and creative problem-solving.
It’s all about simplification, mindset shifts, and organizational innovation with her.
Lisa’s team runs hands-on workshops that help people drop:
- Pointless meetings
- Legacy processes that no one questions
- Decision bloat that takes 10 people to say “yes”
Why you should follow her?
Because no matter how many design sprints or innovation labs you run, nothing changes if your team is buried in busywork.
Lisa helps you:
- Spot the real blockers to agility (hint: they’re often self-inflicted)
- Build habits of simplification into your workflows
- Create org cultures that say “no” to what doesn’t matter, so they can say “yes” to what does
- Redesign work for clarity, not chaos
Her LinkedIn is full of practical, swipeable simplification tips, from meeting templates to mindset prompts.
She doesn’t preach innovation as a moonshot. As one of the top business innovation experts, she helps you create the space to actually breathe, think, and build.
#9 Scott Anthony — Senior Partner, Innosight
Most leaders want to innovate and hit their quarterly numbers.
But juggling both feels like walking a tightrope with no net. That’s where Scott Anthony steps in.
As a Senior Partner at Innosight (the firm co-founded by Clayton Christensen of disruptive innovation fame), Scott helps big companies pull off something most struggle with.
And this struggle is acting like startups without breaking like startups.
If you’re stuck in that frustrating loop of “We need to innovate” but also “Don’t mess with the current business”… Scott will help you break it, with a system that works.
He gives you frameworks for:
- Balancing exploration and execution without creating internal turf wars
- Building innovation portfolios the way you manage financial ones, diversified, measured, and intentional
- Getting leadership buy-in with actual strategy, not just Post-it notes and buzzwords
And the best part? No vague mantras. Just real talk from someone who’s seen what works and what explodes.
#10 Safi Bahcall — Author of “Loonshots”
Safi isn’t like your typical business innovation experts—he’s a physicist turned biotech CEO who thinks like a scientist but writes like a storyteller.
And he coined a term you’ll never forget: Loonshots.
Those seemingly absurd ideas that quietly become the next radar, vaccine, or iPhone.
Most companies say they want breakthrough ideas. But then they bury them under layers of approval, budget battles, and KPIs.
Safi Bahcall calls this out and offers a better path.
In his bestselling book Loonshots, he explains how real innovation happens when organizations protect early-stage ideas, not over-manage them.
He’s not just waxing poetic. Loonshots is now required reading inside Fortune 500 innovation labs.
And it’s helping leaders shift their orgs from “efficiency-first” to “discovery-friendly, ”without turning the place into chaos.
He helps you:
- Spot the structural reasons why your org might be killing breakthrough ideas
- Build “idea nurseries” instead of idea graveyards
- Shift the balance between artists (the crazy thinkers) and soldiers (the executors), both are needed, but they need different environments to thrive
If you’re tired of “big idea” theater and want actual systems that let loonshots survive, this guy’s your north star.
In a Nutshell
Yes, you need to make your own mistakes to grow.
But no, you don’t need to make every mistake yourself.
You can learn from business innovation experts like Steve Blank on validating assumptions early. Or from Alex Osterwalder on structuring innovation bets.
But real growth? That happens when you take those ideas and apply them inside your own messy, imperfect org. Where maybe you still test the wrong assumptions, fail, learn, and iterate.
That’s where growth lives.
You’re getting access to someone’s playbook, but you’re running your own version of it, through your context and constraints.
Think of your feed as a strategy weapon, not a doomscroll trap.
Following the right people won’t walk the path for you, but it will give you a better map. One that shows you:
- the dead ends to avoid
- the shortcuts worth trying
- the terrain you’re heading into
You still have to walk it. But now, you’re not walking blind.
