In this episode of The Digital Executive Podcast, host Brian Thomas sits down with Itai Green, global innovation strategist and author of Innovation or Elimination, to make the case that in today's AI-accelerated world, innovation is no longer a competitive advantage — it's a survival requirement. Itai opens with a perspective only a founder-turned-advisor can offer: corporations that want to partner with startups must learn to speak startup, move at startup speed, and respect the very real financial stress that most founding teams are operating under. He then explains why the stakes have fundamentally shifted since the arrival of generative AI — the pace of technological change now outstrips the pace of corporate decision-making, and any company that ignores that gap is already falling behind. But the biggest barrier, Itai argues, isn't budget or technology — it's people. Drawing on hundreds of innovation boot camps run inside global corporations, he walks through his proven process: gather executive challenges, map fifty relevant startups, run a one-day boot camp, and watch organizations that were resistant to change walk out ready to pilot with seven of the ten startups they met. The result, repeated across business units, is a company that thinks and moves differently within six months. He closes with a warning that no industry is safe — not banks, not tech companies, not SaaS platforms — pointing to the story of Wix, a five-thousand-person company nearly disrupted by a single bootstrapped startup, as proof that the next threat is always below the radar. His advice: become the first door entrepreneurs knock on, before your competitors even know the startup exists.If you liked what you heard today, please leave us a review - Apple or Spotify. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices