After a career building new products and founding the innovation programs at two Fortune 200 companies, David Lee has learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t when trying to get large, established companies to embrace innovation.
Why you should listen
David Lee leads new venture incubation at Cox Communications, the largest private telecommunications company in America. His team explores emerging frontiers and tries to build elegant solutions to a wide range of important areas, including supply chains, digital assets, marketing, gaming, energy and more. Their driving goal is to make the world better for the next generation.Lee's innovation career has spanned banking, technology, logistics and communications. His teams have enabled hundreds of people to launch dozens of new products and businesses within an enterprise environment. He believes that to solve problems that really matter to the world, it’s up to leaders to establish pathways that enable people to explore and experiment, and to give them permission to turn their ideas into tangible, pragmatic solutions.
Prior to joining Cox, Lee was the VP of Innovation, Venture Capital and New Ventures at UPS. He started his career in banking, growing up in the advanced technology lab at Bank of America, where he was an early member of the strategic venture capital group. His first major internal startup was aimed at serving the needs of people saving and planning for retirement. At SunTrust (now Truist), he cofounded and ran the Innovation Programs team. He studied economics at the University of Virginia and earned his MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
