Building an internal culture that embrace external ideas
How Nestlé and Diageo are turning internal culture into a growth engine.
Previously on Open Road Ventures: in the last episode of Venturing Insights, I shared Why every company needs innovation ambassadors. If you missed it, you can catch up here!
Most corporate innovation fails not because of a lack of ideas, but because the organization isn’t ready to absorb them.
In Episode 11 of The Corporate Venturing Podcast, we explore how two global leaders (Nestlé and Diageo) are breaking that pattern.
What you’ll get from this episode
How Nestlé’s accelerator changed the way employees approach problem solving.
Why Diageo built a partnership lab to venture into uncharted markets.
The hidden blockers—structures, incentives, and mindsets—that make corporates allergic to startup speed.
A framework for aligning internal transformation with external venturing.
Meet the guests:
Mar Serra, PhD is Global Lead for Product Applications at Nestlé and former head of the Nestlé Accelerator. With nearly 20 years in R&D and operations, she has transformed food-tech science into consumer-ready solutions, scaling startup-style innovation inside one of the world’s largest food companies.
Benjamin Lickfett is Global VP of Breakthrough Innovation at Diageo, the company behind brands like Johnnie Walker and Guinness. A former startup founder and consultant, he now drives Diageo’s Fusion Partnership Lab, working with scaleups worldwide to tackle pressing challenges with fresh technologies and business models.
Key insights from the episode:
Culture before capital: Both Mar and Benni stress that partnering with startups is meaningless unless teams are trained to embrace new ways of working. Structures, incentives, and mindsets often block external ideas more than technical hurdles.
From resistance to readiness: Nestlé’s accelerator program showed how employees, once exposed to startup-style problem solving, returned to their roles with new confidence: not in having all the answers, but in figuring things out together.
Collaboration as a growth engine: At Diageo, partnerships are a core capability. Benni’s team deliberately ventures into spaces where the company has no existing expertise, using collaborations with startups to experiment with entirely new business models.
Internal meets external: Both guests highlight the tension( and the opportunity) between internal transformation and external venturing. Companies that learn to align these two fronts turn uncertainty into growth.
Why this matters:
Reports like The State of Corporate Venture Building 2025 underline that corporates investing 20% of growth capital into new ventures see 2% higher revenue growth compared to peers who don’t. But money alone won’t do it: the culture inside must be ready to welcome and scale outside ideas.
And that’s exactly what McKinsey’s data shows: the biggest challenge in innovation management is culture (23.8%), followed by sustainable innovation (11.2%) and intrapreneurship (10.9%).
In other words, organizations say they want to innovate, but the real obstacles are internal: structures, incentives, and entrenched habits.
This episode is a practical roadmap for leaders seeking to shift their company from idea collectors to true innovation builders. Listen to the full conversation here:
A huge thank you to Mar and Benni for joining this conversation and sharing hard-earned insights!
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As usual, a soundtrack for you: