The Corporate Venturing Podcast
#22 - Open Innovation at NASA w/ Steve Rader (Former NASA Leader of Open Innovation)
In this episode, I'm joined by Steve Rader, who spent 36 years at NASA's Johnson Space Center and built its open innovation capability, leading the Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation and the NASA Tournament Lab. This is not an episode about the famous NASA crowdsourcing story, the one where an outsider beat the physicists at predicting solar radiation storms. That story gets told at every conference. This is an episode about what happened inside the building, when a team had to turn one lucky result into a repeatable capability across an agency of engineers who considered themselves the experts. Steve's argument is that the crowd was never the hard part. At its peak, NASA's program ran around a hundred challenges at a time across an ecosystem of roughly 50 crowds. Finding solvers was solved. What broke things was upstream and downstream: engineers who had never framed their work as a problem to be solved, and the unglamorous plumbing of legal, procurement and implementation authority. In this episode, Steve shares insights on: ️ Why NASA never used the solar flare winner's solution as delivered, and what it took instead Open innovation as a discovery mechanism, and where it sits in the funnel The problem analysis step most teams skip, which resurfaces later as failed implementation The ownership filter: NASA turned down challenges from people who could not implement the result How budget picks the tool, from a free internal challenge to a $20 million prize What the crowd is still for once most submissions are AI-assisted Steve closes by redefining expertise. A subject matter expert is not the person with the best ideas. It is the person who understands the problem best. That reframes what open innovation actually threatens. It does not replace your experts. It tests whether they know their own problem well enough to recognise a solution when it arrives from another industry. Resources: Open Road Ventures Newsletter Steve Rader on LinkedIn Crowdsourcing, Jeff Howe Open Innovation, Henry Chesbrough Michael Tushman on ambidextrous organizations, Harvard Business School Follow the podcast for grounded conversations on what actually shapes innovation and corporate venturing, beyond the frameworks, beyond the hype.
