Metta

Metta We help Startups, Global Businesses, Investors (and more!) be more and 🌿 🌎

In this episode, Patricia Kroondijk, Corporate Venture Director at Canon Marketing Japan, joins Innovation Brief co-host...
22/09/2026

In this episode, Patricia Kroondijk, Corporate Venture Director at Canon Marketing Japan, joins Innovation Brief co-host Gabi Matic to talk about what 25 years at the intersection of strategy, finance, and corporate venturing actually teaches you.

Patricia has spent a decade and a half at the sharp end of corporate innovation: building venture programmes at Hitachi across energy, mobility, and decarbonisation, co-founding Studio 2050 Ventures, and now running Canon Marketing Japan’s 65 million euro fund across Europe and MENA while simultaneously building the company’s next business. She also founded Venture Leap, a programme focused on helping corporate professionals develop the one thing she believes AI cannot replace: judgement.

A conversation for anyone building innovation inside a large organisation, and trying to figure out when to push and when to move on.

🔗 Listen to the full conversation with Patricia Kroondijk in the link in bio

CorporateInnovation

“There’s no such place called away... and once you know that, you can’t un-know it.”In our latest episode of the Innovat...
09/09/2026

“There’s no such place called away... and once you know that, you can’t un-know it.”

In our latest episode of the Innovation Brief podcast by Metta, Maggie Lee joins Gabriela Matic & Gabriella G. Hernandez to talk about what sustainability leadership actually demands right now, and what the sector urgently needs to do differently.

Maggie has spent nearly two decades working across WWF, the UN Environment Programme, and now one of the world’s most influential consumer brands: Coca-Cola, as the Senior Director of Sustainability for ASEAN and South Pacific. She’s led seafood traceability projects, plastic credit systems, and circular economy pilots across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, and she’s kept asking the same question throughout: where does it all actually go?

In this episode, we also explore:

💡 Why innovation doesn’t have to be rocket science, and what a hotel toothbrush kit has to do with environmental progress

🤝 How four competing food delivery companies agreed to a shared plastic standard in one meeting

🌍 What impact measurement looks like when your beneficiaries are ecosystems that can’t speak for themselves

🌏 Why Southeast Asia is one of the best places in the world to pilot green solutions right now

🔭 What strategic foresight is, and why it should become the next critical thinking

⚠️ Why the USAID cuts are a warning for the whole sector, and what sustainability leaders need to do before the next wave hits

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Maggie Lee - Substack link in the comments below

“Innovation isn’t measured by how novel an idea is. It’s measured by whether people continue to use it, adapt it, and ch...
12/08/2026

“Innovation isn’t measured by how novel an idea is. It’s measured by whether people continue to use it, adapt it, and champion it long after you’ve stepped away.”

In this episode of the Innovation Brief podcast by Metta, Sarayu Agarwal, Global Innovation and Design Advisor at the Aga Khan Foundation, joins co-hosts Gabriella Hernandez and Wil Benton to talk about how human-centred design and community-led innovation are being used to address serious challenges like poverty and inequality.

Sarayu supports innovation across 13 countries, from East Africa to Central and South East Asia. She’s seen what happens when a team of outside experts shows up, hands a community a “solution”, and leaves… it rarely works. What actually lasts, in her experience, comes from working with community members and helping them build their own solutions to the challenges they face.

In this episode, we also explore:

✅ Why “community-led” doesn’t always mean communities always get their first choice - and how her team navigates the tug-of-war between what a community wants, what a government will support, and what a donor will fund
✅ The story behind the open access toolkit her team built to put design methods directly into the hands of local partners and communities, not just specialists
✅ Where she sees AI actually helping in this work and where it falls short
✅ The importance of spending less time behind a screen, more time in the field with people

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Sarayu Agarwal - link in bio

“The technology will keep changing. The discipline of building things with people, rather than around them, is the part ...
14/07/2026

“The technology will keep changing. The discipline of building things with people, rather than around them, is the part that doesn’t.”

In this episode, Dr Nicola Millard, Principal Innovation Partner at BT, joins Innovation Brief co-host Matt Briggs to talk about what 35 years inside one of Britain’s largest corporations actually teaches you about why innovation succeeds, and why, far more often, it quietly dies.

Nicola has spent over three decades at BT building chatbots before anyone called them chatbots, running home-working trials before anyone called it hybrid work, and watching wave after wave of technology hype crash into the much slower, much harder work of getting people to actually use what innovation teams build. She describes herself as half technologist, half psychologist, and it’s the second half, she argues, that does most of the heavy lifting.

Most innovation leaders talk about embracing failure. By her own account, Nicola has lived a career littered with projects that didn’t work, and more often than not, the failures traced back to the same theme: organisations obsessing over the technology and skipping the people part. This conversation will make you think differently about what it actually takes to make innovation land.

🎧 Listen to the full conversation with Dr. Nicola Millard — link in bio

Innovation is people business. 🤝 In this episode, Dr. Selina Lehmann, Innovation Manager at MAHLE leading the venture cl...
01/07/2026

Innovation is people business. 🤝

In this episode, Dr. Selina Lehmann, Innovation Manager at MAHLE leading the venture clienting programme, joins Innovation Brief host to talk about what happens when you combine years of hands-on corporate innovation experience with rigorous academic research into AI and ideation.

Selina has spent over five years running idea management at scale across Mahle’s global sites before moving into venture clienting, bringing external startup solutions into one of the world’s leading automotive suppliers. She also holds a doctorate from the University of Hohenheim, where her research explores how AI can transform the way companies generate, develop, and evaluate ideas, recently published in the Journal of Product Innovation Management.

Selina is honest about what good idea management actually is. It’s not a system problem, it’s a people problem. Evaluators get overwhelmed, employees feel unheard, and the biggest bottleneck isn’t a lack of creativity, but the struggle to put that creativity into words. AI can help relieve some of that pain; it can’t replace the empathy the work demands.

A conversation that will change how you think about where good ideas actually come from.

🔗 Link in bio to listen to the full episode

🎙️At TechTides Belfast last week, our co-founder Gabriela Matic gave a keynote titled “The Last Human Skill in the Age o...
18/06/2026

🎙️At TechTides Belfast last week, our co-founder Gabriela Matic gave a keynote titled “The Last Human Skill in the Age of AI.”

Her argument: we haven’t just outsourced tasks to AI, we’ve systematically outsourced the discomfort of not-knowing itself. And that discomfort is exactly the condition that produces original thinking.

Gabi walked through real examples of moments where curiosity dies in organisations, and what the research actually says about how AI is reshaping human reasoning.

Stay tuned for the full blog!

What would it take for Northern Ireland to become one of the UK’s fastest-moving innovation ecosystems?Our co-founder Wi...
18/06/2026

What would it take for Northern Ireland to become one of the UK’s fastest-moving innovation ecosystems?

Our co-founder Wil Benton tackled that question on the “Bridging the Gaps” panel at TechTides Belfast last week, alongside leaders from Day1.vc, Innovation City Belfast, and PorterShed.

The takeaway: NI has the research, talent, and institutional assets, what’s missing is the commercialisation layer that turns knowledge into scalable companies, and the patient, long-term investment (public and private) to back it.

The case for Belfast itself? Agility. It’s compact, multi-point, and easy to navigate, assets other cities take years to coordinate across multiple authorities and universities. That should make it one of the easiest places in the UK to start and scale.

Stay tuned for the full blog to learn more!

We’re bringing together businesses, community organisations, creatives, campaigners, policymakers, and citizens for an h...
18/06/2026

We’re bringing together businesses, community organisations, creatives, campaigners, policymakers, and citizens for an honest conversation about climate action — and we’d love for you to be in the room.

Together with Climate KIC and B Lab, we’re hosting Bursting the Climate Bubble as part of London Climate Action Week, an interactive session and networking event exploring how broader, braver, and more inclusive coalitions can drive real impact in our communities.

Expect facilitated networking designed to spark unexpected connections, honest discussions, light catering, and good company.

🗓 Tuesday 23 June, 5:00–6:30pm BST
📍 City of London Club, 19 Old Broad Street, London EC2N 1DS
🎟 Free — link in bio

Our Head of Communications & Sustainability .hernandez, will be there on the day, feel free to connect with her for more details!

Who in your network should be in this room? Tag them below 👇

“How hard can it be?” - the sentence behind some of his biggest breakthroughs, and some of his biggest failures.In this ...
17/06/2026

“How hard can it be?” - the sentence behind some of his biggest breakthroughs, and some of his biggest failures.

In this episode, Dirk Ploss, digital pioneer and Associate Director, Early Innovation at Beiersdorf, joins Innovation Brief co-hosts Wil Benton and Gabi Matic to talk about what innovation really looks like when you’re building before anyone else has written the rules, and what three decades at the frontier of digital transformation actually teaches you.

Dirk has spent his career operating just a few years ahead of the curve: from helping transform one of Germany’s largest retailers from mail order to e-commerce, to running entrepreneurship and early innovation programmes inside one of the world’s most recognisable FMCG companies. He’s founded startups, watched two of them fail, and kept going anyway.

According to Dirk, here’s what most innovation frameworks get wrong - transformation isn’t just technical or commercial, the hardest layer is always emotional. Getting people to believe the future will be better than the past. That’s the work nobody puts in the slide deck.

He’s equally clear-eyed about how to actually get things done, something he’s now turning into a book built around a deceptively simple idea: not every task deserves your full attention, and knowing the difference is the skill most of us never develop.

🔗 Listen to the full conversation with Dirk Ploss - link in bio

Here’s a number worth sitting with. Over the past 30 years, tool capabilities in industrial engineering have increased a...
21/04/2026

Here’s a number worth sitting with. Over the past 30 years, tool capabilities in industrial engineering have increased a thousandfold. Outcomes? Up just 30%.

In the latest episode of the Innovation Brief, we sit down with Pina Schlombs, Sustainability Lead and Senior Thought Leader on Industrial AI at Siemens Digital Industries Software. Drawing on nearly a decade of building the sustainability and industrial AI domain at Siemens (and earlier experience at Volkswagen) Pina shares what real transformation looks like inside complex organisations.

We explore why most companies are still optimising a status quo that’s running out of road, and the tougher question leaders rarely ask: if we started from scratch today, what would we build? The conversation dives into how Siemens embedded sustainability into core workflows, where AI truly adds value by navigating complex trade-offs in real time, and why thinking beyond costs to include impact and trajectory is critical for better decisions.

From the importance of a strong digital backbone to the role of culture in shifting from playing not to lose to playing to win, this episode unpacks what it really takes to scale meaningful change, and what’s coming next as AI begins to better understand the physical world.

🎧 Listen to the episode and read the blog: https://open.substack.com/pub/innovationbrief/p/culture-code-and-climate-ai-industry?r=2eddu3&utm_medium=ios

—

The Innovation Brief podcast is for the people building, funding, and governing innovation - inside corporates, governments, and ecosystems across the globe.

💌 Subscribe to the Innovation Brief for more insights.

The Innovation Brief is produced by Metta, an innovation consultancy specialising in research, programme design and delivery, and ecosystem building worldwide.

Learn more: https://www.metta.partners

Address

الشرق
Kuwait City

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Metta posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Contact The Business

Send a message to Metta:

Shortcuts

Share

Category