Corporate Explorer

5Incubate: How Corporate Explorers Learn Through Experimentation

In 2013, Balaji Bondili was a consultant for Deloitte Consulting in New York.¹ He had built a successful career helping firms in the medical and life sciences industries. However, he was tired of the consulting grind. Each project looked much like the last. He wanted to build something new, even if it meant having to leave the firm. When a new Office for Innovation opened, Balaji saw it as an opportunity to build something from within, to become a Corporate Explorer. He made it his mission to figure out how Deloitte could access a wider pool of expertise in digital technologies, such as machine learning and artificial intelligence. The reality was that neither Deloitte nor its large, established client firms were first choice for digital natives and data scientists. The market for this talent was as hot then as it is now. Those with the best skills wanted to work for young, bold, and cool firms or shop their talent to the highest bidder on a project-to-project basis. Signing up to a corporate career with a multiyear progression to partner was not attracting the right candidates to Deloitte. Even with aggressive large-scale hiring, they had a difficult time keeping up with demand.

Bondili proposed giving Deloitte access to high-value, hard to hire expertise via a crowd-sourced platform. Crowdsourcing had emerged as a means for engaging experts remotely, without employing them directly. Experts are recruited to ...