Members-Only Meetings

We regularly convene IL members for discussions on topics of interest — which members suggest. These meetings take place on Zoom, and they are designed to be candid conversations among peers, as opposed to passive webcasts. If you’re a current IL member and are logged in, you will see a short registration form (or calendar links) beneath the description of each meeting. We always like to hear suggestions for future meeting topics from our members.

For a complete calendar of all of our in-person and online gatherings, please visit our events page.

Friday, July 24th at 1 PM ET: Vibe Entrepreneurship + Intrapreneurship: Building Digital Prototypes, Not PowerPoints

For most of business history, the expensive bottleneck in innovation was building: turning an idea into something real enough to put in front of a customer. So we pitched instead of proved, and forecasts stood in for evidence. AI has now collapsed that cost, and with it, the last excuse for staying in discovery. A working prototype is an afternoon’s work; a synthesized evidence base, a week’s. The result is not “AI helps people make apps.” It is a fundamental shift in how fast a venture can travel from idea to evidence, and from evidence to revenue.

This session, led by Jaap de Vries, Principal Innovation Specialist at the property insurance firm FM Global, will examine that shift across two settings: solo founders and small teams (vibe entrepreneurship), and innovation teams inside established firms (vibe intrapreneurship) and across the full venture-building arc: Analyze, Build, and Sell. We will look at concrete outcomes (an AI-built startup acquired for $80M in six months; enterprises shipping thousands of employee-built applications) alongside the hard evidence skeptics bring (95% of corporate AI pilots showing no measurable P&L impact; production failures that turn impressive demos into “prototype theater”). The throughline: AI dramatically lowers the cost of creation but does nothing for the cost of judgment, governance, and production. The organizations that win will exploit the first while disciplining the second — and treat learning not as an end, but as the cheapest path to a defensible outcome.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for where AI accelerates the entrepreneurial journey, where it doesn’t, and how innovation leaders can convert cheap experimentation into shipped results rather than activity.

Wednesday, September 23rd at 12 PM ET: Building Strategy + Innovation Capabilities (at a 198-Year Old Insurance Carrier)

In this session, Andrew Morse, AVP of Innovation at The Andover Companies, shares how he built an innovation function from scratch at a 198-year-old mutual insurance carrier — growing from a team of two with no process (and colleagues asking “what does innovation even do?”) to an award-winning team of five embedded in the company’s most important initiatives.

You’ll learn how to:

• Earn credibility fast by solving the business’s real, current-day problems before chasing transformational “horizon 3” ideas
• Pivot from an outside-in to an inside-out model — and why solving core problems earns you the right to look to the horizon
• Build innovation capabilities one at a time (human-centered design, culture, solution scouting, strategic foresight) instead of launching everything at once
• Spread an innovation mindset beyond the core team through challenges, rotational programs, and involving business units at every step
• Bring outside perspective in via VC partnerships and peer networking
• Turn strategic foresight into real planning decisions — not just presentations — with foresight-led workshops and a multi-year organizational roadmap.