Indeed, even in a dress-down dark sweater, Bob Iger looks somewhat mechanical. His mouth is geometrically straight, his face built of some cool composite. His hair, obviously, is great. That he can remain so mirthless even while wearing red-rimmed 3-D glasses and a fedora embellished with little flickering lights is something of an accomplishment. Gradually he ventures into the Dish; an austere computer-generated experience chamber with bent dividers at Disney’s Imagineering labs, a short drive from his office in Burbank, Calif.  He is presently in a woods—with childish, rich green trees and splendidly shaded blooms, each including a large number of skimming pixels. Out of nowhere, Iger stops and professes to incline toward one of the virtual trees on his way. A column of observers off to the side—which incorporates a few individuals from his supervisory group and a portion of the technologists who made the three-dimensional forest—emit Technology in eased chuckling. Iger is having some good times.

The Dish, essentially utilized as a testing site for future rides and encounters, is the primary quit during a two-hour voyage through the best in class tech underway at the organization’s amusement parks. Despite the fact that Iger, the CEO of the Walt Disney Co. (DIS), is a successive voyeur at Imagineering, today is an exceptional visit. Every year the concoction engineers, programming designers, and roboticists in this specific research division—one of five at the organization—have a chance to officially display their most out of control (and, with any karma, financially reasonable) advancements to the chief.

Photo of Bob Iger, CEO of Disney taken for Fortune in NY. A scene with Millennium Falcon in Pinewoods Studio, Buckinghamshire, England, is a composite picture made by Industrial Light and Magic for Fortune. Photograph by Wesley Mann for Fortune. The composite scene made by Industrial Light and Magic for Fortune

Photo BY WESLEY MANN FOR FORTUNE. COMPOSITE SCENE CREATED BY INDUSTRIAL LIGHT and MAGIC FOR FORTUNE

The 10,000-cubic-foot computer-generated reality room, as of late moved up to fuse the most recent designs, and sound hardware is a decent beginning. In the background, an arrangement of superfast organized PCs refreshes the 3-D landscape 60 times each second with the goal that each time Iger moves his head, his point of view of the trees is adjusted. High-goals projectors, in the interim, pillar a huge number of pixels onto the 14-foot-high dividers, whose corners have been adjusted to make the experience progressively vivid (most VR rooms have level dividers with sharp corners). The innovation is still excessively costly and unwieldy to work in a domain like Walt Disney World Resort—envision to what extent the line would be for a ride that takes only each individual in turn—yet some time or another soon, virtual backwoods could be going to a recreation centre close to you.

This sort of “blue sky” experimentation has consistently been a piece of Disney’s ethos, returning to the times of multiplane cameras (to add visual profundity to the foundation in the 1937 film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs) and early utilization of exact robots (Disneyland’s Enchanted Tiki Room, which highlights electromechanical singing fowls, spearheaded the idea in 1963). In any case, over six decades prior, when originator Walt Disney originally made Imagineering as the organization’s imaginative arm, computer-generated reality chambers were nearly as outlandish as talking creatures.

Quick forward to today, and not exclusively is computer-generated reality a genuine reality, yet the tease among innovation and excitement has advanced into an insoluble—but now and again quarrelsome—marriage. From Netflix to YouTube, purchasers have more carefully circulated substance to look over than any other time in recent memory. Individuals wherever are progressively associated and increasingly portable, and are requesting more get-it-now benefits like Amazon Prime and Google Express—all of which make remaining in line, in any event, for a thrill ride, feel like an exercise in futility.

Iger helped Disney get a headstart on those patterns by making huge and early wagers on new advancements, even some that were apparently inconsistent with the organization’s plan of action. One of his first requests of business, when he accepted the top position in 2005, was to put scenes from the TV hits Lost and Desperate Housewives, the two of which broadcast on the organization’s ABC arrange, on iTunes. It was the primary arrangement of its sort. The next year he got things started by offering free full-length TV shows on the web (notwithstanding ABC, Disney possesses ESPN, Pixar, Marvel Entertainment, and Lucasfilm). All the more as of late, he has put resources into everything from RFID-empowered wristbands at Disney World to intelligent portable applications to motion pictures that are shot by rambles.

For sure, it’s difficult to highlight one significant establishment at Disney that isn’t being moulded or reshaped, by some imaginative new innovation. Endure the runaway 2013 shot Frozen, where artists made a huge number of individual snow particles and afterwards planned calculations to educate each piece how to consolidate with some other, or vacillate in the breeze, or tumble off a rushing snowball—making each winterscape in the motion picture feel significantly more genuine. “There are a lot of organizations that emphasis on substance and part of organizations that attention on innovation, however, I think Disney is one of a couple of organizations that do both similarly,” says Sheryl Sandberg, head working official of Facebook (FB) and an individual from Disney’s governing body since 2010.

Iger encircles himself with individuals who are saturated with the two universes, yet he has settled on an intentional choice not to have a central innovation official. Indeed, he’s the nearest thing the organization has to a focal head of tech. And keeping in mind that there are numerous exercises to gain from the manner in which he has run Disney over the previous decade, this one is straight-up there: Not just do they present media organizations need to begin thinking like innovation organizations—their CEOs additionally need to begin thinking like CTOs.

That attitude has served the organization well. In November, Disney declared its fourth continuous year of record income, rounding up a yearly $48.8 billion in deals, an 8% expansion throughout the prior year. Under his supervision, the organization has conveyed an all-out investor return of 341%, contrasted and 104% for the S&P 500. The brands he has burned through billions eating up seem, by all accounts, to be paying off: Two of the five greatest motion pictures in 2014 were made by Marvel Entertainment, which Disney gained in 2009. Furthermore, Frozen, the most noteworthy netting enlivened film ever, is as yet printing cash for the organization. Then Disney’s interest in MagicBands, RFID-empowered wristbands that let guests gain admission to the parks and purchase stock, is beginning to pay off: Guests who use them are spending more by and large (Disney won’t state the amount more).

Not the entirety of Iger’s wagers have received benefits—it took the organization’s gaming division five years to escape the red—yet he’s had enough enormous victories that this past October, Disney’s board re-established his agreement through 2018. (The 63-year-old Iger was initially scheduled to resign one year from now.) The expansion implies that Iger will get the chance to see whether probably the greatest wager will prove to be fruitful: in the not so distant future the main Star Wars motion picture since Disney gained George Lucas’ film realm in 2012, The Force Awakens, will hit theatres.

Among once in a while, the CEO has a Millennium Falcon–daily size agenda—including picking a successor and a conceivable major corporate rebuilding. (There is a theory that he’ll overlay Disney’s intelligent unit into the purchaser items gathering.) in the not so distant future, the principal amusement park in China—a $5.5 billion venture—will open to general society, testing Iger’s capacity to develop the organization on a worldwide scale. Also, in spite of the fact that he rushed to explore different avenues regarding iTunes, he still can’t seem to locate the perfect advanced dispersion model for content that extends from live occasions on ESPN to new motion picture discharges. On the off chance that there’s one consistent about innovation, it’s that it’s always showing signs of change. Like never before, an accomplishment for any edutainment investor boils down to knowing which stages and thingamajigs to wager on—and when.

At the point when I initially meet Iger on a late October morning, he’s remaining over his office work area, eyes stuck to a video gushing on his PC. In his grasp is a torpid iPad. Great Morning America is playing on a huge TV screen over the room.

“I’m performing various tasks,” says Iger, a previous upstate New York meteorologist who started his vocation at ABC in 1974 and who presently drives the world’s most important media organization and its 180,000 workers. Known for his 4:30 a.m. exercises and fanatical timeliness, Iger is an included at this point hands-off administrator, state many organization insiders and previous workers met for this story.

He wasn’t the undeniable pick for the activity, in any event, all things considered. Previous Disney CEO Michael Eisner is credited with restoring a thrashing Disney, harking back to the 1980s, yet he was additionally reprimanded for his hesitance to openly name a successor—just as his affinity for fighting with other force players. In mid-2005—after a period set apart by an unfriendly takeover endeavour and fights with investors and previous board individuals (counting Roy E. Disney, the child and nephew of the organization’s two originators)— it was reported that Eisner would go out an entire year before his agreement terminated. In the background, the board had enlisted a selecting firm and took a gander at a few potential substitutions, including a bunch of outer competitors and one inner executive: Iger. Despite the fact that Iger’s job in the organization—head working official—would appear to have made him a characteristic contender for the top employment, he needed to go through months pitching his vision for change to the board (at its centre, Iger’s technique had three “columns”: putting resources into imaginative substance, universal extension, and mechanical development). The hard sell worked. In October 2005, Iger moved into the general CEO suite on the 6th floor of the “Group Disney” working in Burbank, arranged on a 51-section of land studio parcel.