you need a growth engine
not an idea factory
Does your innovation program generate ideas - or build businesses?
For the past decade, corporations have flocked to Silicon Valley, building innovation centers to chase technology trends, meet startups, and absorb its innovation culture.
Most failed to translate those efforts into meaningful growth back at headquarters -but a few succeeded, unlocking their next phase of growth.
At Hill88, we studied what works - and what doesn’t - as corporates try to tap into the world’s innovation capital. These insights are captured in The Corporate Innovators Playbook: Turning Ideas Into Profits (2026), where Steffen Bartschat and Paul Campbell introduce the Innovation Canvas, a framework to assess and improve corporate innovation programs. The Innovation Canvas describes the key elements of successful innovation programs and the synergies that turn them into growth factories. The goal is to create a hybrid process, combining the best of two cultures – startup agility and corporate scale.
hire the experts that wrote the book on how to deploy corporate innovation
Hill88 can assess and diagnose your innovation program - and provide a flow of outside ideas and potential startup engagements at a fraction of the cost of an innovation center outpost.
How We work
Advisory Hill88 can provide benchmarking and detailed assessments of your innovation program, along with the necessary prescriptions to move the good ideas further within the corporate R&D pipeline in order to generate profits. This is a light-touch engagement to provide advice as adjustments are made and new challenges encountered.
Exclusive Hill88 can also work more intensely on long term (>6 month) engagements to provide personalized services that can include scouting, opportunity generation, and startup introductions. We only work with 2-3 customers at one time with this arrangement, and in non-overlapping industries. Unlike an accelerator membership, the opportunities we generate are exclusive to your company - they won’t be shopped to your competitor in parallel!
Connected The valley is full of “experts” that arrived here only three years ago. Put to work a 30 year veteran with real credentials as a corporate innovation executive, author, startup mentor, and active angel investor with an extensive network.
Technical With an R&D background, we can engage your team on their own terms—building trust and delivering advice that resonates in practice, not just in theory. This background is also critical for matching corporate technology needs and startup innovations as well as anticipating new market opportunities. Hill88’s principal has extensive experience running engineering teams both in consumer and enterprise sectors covering hardware and software products in a variety of industries, including Artificial Intelligence, consumer entertainment, media, wearables, and automotive.
Confident Feel confident that you are hiring an experienced executive that understands how to successfully navigate in both corporate and startup circles.
(Partial) List of current & past clients:
Stanford University Graduate School of Business
Bissell
Whirlpool
Amway
Steelcase
Faurecia
Cisco
IBM
Electronic Arts
Rovi
The Learning Company
Broderbund
"Hill88 has had a significant impact on our company's R&D strategy, resulting in new development programs and startup investments. HIll88's scouting is precisely focused on our needs."
- Rob Huber, VP Innovation, Faurecia