The Innovation Circle
A peer forum for senior leaders shaping what comes next.
Most senior roles come with a built-in peer group. Leading innovation inside a large, complex organization usually doesn’t.
The role sits across strategy, technology, transformation, new growth, and the core business — highly visible, endlessly cross-functional, and difficult to benchmark against any one playbook.
The Innovation Circle brings together a deliberately cross-industry group of senior leaders navigating that complexity from different vantage points — creating a trusted space to compare approaches, work through real challenges, and learn from leaders carrying similar mandates in very different contexts.
The Innovation Circle Summit
A private working session for senior leaders shaping what comes next.
November 12, 2026 · Silicon Foundry · San Francisco
The inaugural Innovation Circle Summit brings together a carefully selected group of senior innovation, transformation, AI, and emerging technology leaders for a day of substantive peer exchange.
Rather than spend the day listening to people talk about “innovation 101,” participants will experience the Circle in practice: working through real challenges, comparing how other organizations are responding, hearing direct signal from the Silicon Foundry ecosystem, and building relationships with people who understand what the role actually demands.
The Summit also serves as the starting point for the founding Innovation Circle community.
What Members Get/Experience
The Innovation Circle is built around the real work members are navigating — not presentations, panels, or passive content.
Members bring live challenges, decisions, and emerging priorities into a facilitated peer environment designed to surface relevant experience from across the group.
The goal is not to arrive with the answer. It is to leave with better perspective.
Conversations move from:
Here’s what I’m navigating.
Here’s how others have approached something similar.
Here’s what that changes for me.
Over time, the value compounds as members build context for one another’s organizations, mandates, leadership environments, and ambitions.
Circle Sessions
Facilitated, confidential working sessions centered on real member challenges, strategic questions, and the evolving innovation agenda.
Silicon Foundry Signal
Curated perspectives from the ecosystem: emerging technologies, business models, behaviors, companies, and shifts worth understanding before they become obvious.
A Trusted Peer Cohort
A deliberately small group of senior operators who can move beyond surface-level networking into candid, useful exchange.
Ongoing Connection
Relationships and dialogue that continue between structured sessions, creating a peer group members can draw on throughout the year.
The Innovation Circle Summit
An annual in-person gathering designed to bring the broader community together around the questions shaping the next era of enterprise innovation.
A note on confidentiality
Circle discussions operate under the Chatham House Rule, creating space to talk candidly about organizational realities, failed approaches, difficult decisions, stakeholder dynamics, and emerging opportunities.
Who It’s For
The Innovation Circle is designed for senior leaders helping shape what comes next inside large and complex organizations.
Members may lead:
- Enterprise innovation
- Business or digital transformation
- AI strategy and transformation
- Emerging technology
- Foresight and futures functions
- Corporate venture
- Strategy and innovation
- Adjacent enterprise mandates with significant cross-functional influence
- Title matters less than mandate.
Members are in the arena: they own meaningful decisions, influence resources and priorities, navigate senior stakeholders, and are accountable for translating new possibilities into business impact.
The Circle is intentionally cross-industry and curated for enterprise mandate, perspective, curiosity, generosity, and candor — creating relevance through shared leadership realities and value through different operating contexts.
The group is intentionally cross-industry and curated for enterprise mandate, perspective, curiosity, generosity and candor.
Why the Circle Works
The Circle is designed around a deliberate tension: Members have enough in common to understand one another’s realities, but enough difference in industry, organization, experience, and perspective to challenge one another’s assumptions.
That makes it possible to:
- Compare how other enterprises are approaching similar challenges
- Surface blind spots that are difficult to see from inside one organization
- Work through live decisions with experienced operators
- Understand how the innovation mandate is changing
- Separate meaningful signal from noise
- Build relationships with people whose judgment you trust
Powered by Silicon Foundry
For years, Silicon Foundry has helped leading global organizations navigate emerging technology, new business models, and the forces reshaping industries.
The Innovation Circle extends that vantage point beyond company-to-Silicon Foundry relationships and into something equally important: leader-to-leader exchange.
Members gain access not only to Silicon Foundry’s ecosystem perspective, but to the collective experience of other executives building, testing, transforming, and leading inside complex enterprises.
That combination gives members both an outside-in view of what is changing and a trusted network of peers helping interpret what it means.
Membership
Each Circle is intentionally small, with approximately 8–12 members, and assembled around mandate, seniority, contribution, and cohort chemistry. Participation is curated rather than open enrollment.
Most members participate with company sponsorship, and Silicon Foundry can provide materials to support internal approval conversations.
Confidentiality & Cohort
The Circle is intentionally limited to a small group of senior innovation, transformation, and AI leaders operating inside large organizations.
All discussions operate under Chatham House Rule, creating a trusted environment where members can openly discuss challenges, failures, organizational realities, and emerging opportunities.
This is not a networking group or sales environment. The value comes from candid peer exchange, practical guidance, and shared experience from leaders navigating similar responsibilities.
Membership Model
The Innovation Circle is the first time Silicon Foundry has offered an individual executive membership. Historically, participation in the Silicon Foundry ecosystem has been through enterprise-level corporate memberships. The Circle extends that network, insight, and community directly to senior leaders.
Founding cohort participation is offered through a limited number of annual memberships. Most members participate with company sponsorship; materials are available to support internal approval conversations.
Membership details are discussed during the cohort fit conversation.
Request an Invitation
We are building the founding Circle deliberately.
If you are responsible for innovation, transformation, AI, or emerging technology inside a complex organization and believe this kind of peer environment would be valuable, we would like to learn more about you.
Nominate a Leader
The quality of the Circle depends on the people in it.
If someone comes to mind who is thoughtful, credible, actively doing the work, and would elevate the room, we welcome nominations.
FAQ
Approximately 8–12 members. The group is intentionally kept small enough for everyone to participate meaningfully and develop real context/space for one another.
Members participate in approximately six facilitated Circle sessions annually, complemented by three Silicon Foundry Signal sessions, ongoing member connection, and the annual Innovation Circle Summit. Most recurring sessions are virtual.
The Summit is a private, in-person working session bringing together senior leaders from across the Innovation Circle community.
Participants work through real challenges, exchange perspectives with peers, hear curated Silicon Foundry ecosystem signal, explore how the innovation mandate is changing, and build relationships with leaders carrying similar responsibilities.
The inaugural Summit will take place November 12, 2026 at Silicon Foundry in San Francisco.
No. The Innovation Circle is a distinct executive membership experience powered by Silicon Foundry’s network, ecosystem perspective, and relationships.
Participation is curated. We consider the scope of a leader’s mandate, level of responsibility, operating experience, ability to contribute meaningfully to peers, and overall cohort chemistry. The quality of the Circle is part of the experience.
We will review your background and role. If there appears to be a strong fit, we will invite you to a brief cohort fit conversation to better understand your mandate, current priorities, and what you are looking for from a peer community.
For leaders entering through a direct referral or Summit invitation, the process may be streamlined.
Founding members are part of the first Innovation Circle cohort and will help establish the chemistry, norms, and standard for the community as it grows.