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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tom Daly, founder of Relevant Ventures. Tom and I talk about the challenges big companies have when trying to navigate technology and market changes. And what you can do to avoid some of the common obstacles and barriers to innovation and transformation. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty, join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Tom Daly, Founder of Relevant Ventures
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tom Daly. He is the founder of Relevant Ventures. Welcome Tom.
Tom Daly: Thank you very much, Brian. Pleasure to be here, speaking with you.
Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. You have had a lot of experience in this innovation space. You worked with companies like UPS and ING and I think most recently, Coca-Cola and a lot of the innovation efforts around that world. So I am excited to have you on the show to talk about some of the new things you're doing and I think more importantly, some of the things you've learned over the years.
Tom Daly: I started doing this work before people called it digital transformation or innovation. The Earth cooled, at about the same time I began getting my head around this. I'm an advertising guy to begin with, and I can't prove it, but I think I created the world's first dedicated 30 sec TV commercial to a website. UPS.
In that process, I picked up some vocabulary and I learned some things about how websites, quote unquote work, so that when people started calling, you know, back in the mid-nineties wanting to talk to somebody about the web or the internet, the calls came to me. And it was during that process where I started to build new networks within UPS, learn about new things going on at UPS and discover some of the opportunities. It's been a while.
Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about this ability to turn big ships in small spaces. Talk a little bit about what that means to you and, and what the challenges really are for corporations in, in this whole innovation space.
Tom Daly: The idea of turning big ships in small spaces actually goes back to my boss's boss at UPS who noticed I was toiling. UPS has a reputation as a conservative company. A little bit unfair, there's some truth to that, but not quite what people think.
It's actually a very, very innovative company and has been for its entire history, but it is collaborative. There's a lot of debate and a lot of discussion. So getting new things done, driving new ideas that my boss to encourage me, you'll get there, Tom, but it's like turning a battleship in the Chattahoochee.
So, I don't know where listeners are, but imagine a pretty darn small body of water and a really big ship that you're trying to turn. So, a lot of back and forth, a lot of kissing babies, shaking hands, and just getting, you know politics, but in a good positive way to kind of really understand interests and concerns and build a better program, a better idea.
So that's the idea, and it was encouraging to me. So, this notion of turning big ships in small spaces, it seems to be, to the degree I have any superpowers, that's the one I'm able to kind of figure out how to help larger organizations figure out how to extract value from, you know, kind of what's coming up around the corner.
Brian Ardinger: Obviously you've seen a lot of changes, whether they're technology changes or business model changes that have happened over the years. Where do companies typically run into the problems when they see something on the emerging horizon and they're saying, we've gotta do something about this. What goes through their mind and what can they do to better prepare for some of these drastic changes?
Tom Daly: The thing companies can do to help themselves most be prepared for big ships in the world that we all live and compete in, is, you know, the twin keys of openness and acceptance. Being open to an idea is really important, but it is only half the battle.
Being accepting of the implications of those ideas is really key and the classic example would be Kodak. You know, Kodak early in, open to the idea of digital photography. But equally unaccepting of its implications. So they didn't jump in, they didn't do the things they needed to do, and as a result, very different company Blockbuster would fit in that category.
Certainly, they understood the implications of streaming technologies and the web and the ability to distribute content. Given the retail heavy business, the land heavy business, they just weren't accepting, or at least not accepting fast enough to be able to secure position in the next evolution of how people consumed content. So those two ideas, being open and accepting both in equal measures is critical to getting yourself in a good spot.
Brian Ardinger: Well, you touched on an interesting point. You read about the stories of companies failing or being disrupted, and from the outside it looks like, well, they didn't pay attention, or they didn't know what was going on.
But it seems like, from the stories and the people that I've talked to, it's not that they weren't aware of what was going on. Or the fact that it was going to have a major impact or that they should do something about it. It was more to that line of it, like you said, acceptance of, well, how do we actually do this knowing that we're going to have to change our business models, change the way we make money, change everything about what we currently do to make this radical shift. And it's that classic innovator's dilemma.
Are you seeing that changing nowadays, now that people are kind of more familiar with the concept of this and, and as more and more changes hit corporations, so you're getting faster at having to adapt to this. Are you seeing the world changing or are you still seeing the same problems exist?
Tom Daly: You know, anybody in this space, Brian, doing what I've been doing for as long as I've been doing it, you need to be an optimist. You need to believe that, you know it's all going to happen. That said, the conversations I'm having today in 2023 are pretty darn close to the conversations I was having in the middle, you know, of the nineties, right?
So, whether it was the dawn of, you know, this graphical overlay on the internet, the web, and when browsers enabled, or the introduction of now advertising and marketing opportunities on the web, which didn't really happen at the beginning of the browser era, that followed a little bit later. Or the introduction of mobile phones and then smartphones and all the, it's the same conversations. And they all come from a place of gaps.
I won't say a lack because in some places there is confidence and acceptance and alignment with what's going on. But it's not uniform within organizations. Right. Then there are pockets of people within departments, IT people, marketing people, s...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Tendayi Viki. Tendayi is co-author of the book, The Corporate Startup. He's an Associate Partner at Strategizer and one of the major influencers in the world of lean startup and corporate innovation. On this episode, we explore the evolution of the lean startup movement, how corporations are developing the skills to compete and become more innovative, and we talk about Tendayi's brand new book called Pirates in the Navy. Let's get started.
Find the Interview transcript and more at insideoutside.io.
Interview Transcript
Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started.
Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, all the way from across the pond in London, England, we have Tendayi Viki. Tendayi, welcome to the show.
Tendayi Viki: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here.
Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. We had you out in Lincoln at the last IO Summit. For those folks out in the audience, that have not heard of you. He's an author, innovation consultant, Associate Partner at Strategizer. You're the coauthor of the book, The Corporate Startup, which took a lot of the Lean Startup stuff and applied it to big organizations. You've got a new book coming out called Pirates in the Navy, so I could go on and on, but welcome to the show.
Tendayi Viki: Thank you, man. Thank you. no, it’s an honor to be here. And I had a lot of fun when I was in LIncoln. It was a fun conference and good people all in.
Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I think I want to jump in. You've been in this space, this lean startup movement for a long time, and you really did open the door to a lot of this lean startup stuff that started in the startup world. I think applied it to bigger corporations, this whole innovation process, whether you're doing it in a startup or you're doing it in a bigger company, a lot of the same principles apply. What are the biggest challenges or changes that you've seen over the last decade of how this movement is evolved and what's gotten better? What's gotten worse in the whole process?
Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so it was a really interesting movement because it came out with an interesting philosophy, which is that one of the reasons why any innovation, either from a startup or from a large company, any innovation fails when people that are working on the innovations starts scaling their idea prematurely. Which means they start building the full product and launching it and investing a lot of resources and taking it to market before they really understand who the customer is. What the customer wants. How to reach that customer. How to earn from that customer repeatedly. How to retain that customer. How to create value basically in a sustainable way. And also, how to deliver profits and whether customers are willing to pay. And how much they will have to pay. So that was the philosophy meeting, which was test your ideas before you scale them.
The big challenge then became, well, we understand, we agree. How do we do that? And that's where the movement has been sort of incrementally building all the tools and resources you need to be able to do that work over the last year.
Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about now where you're at. A lot of the times at the early stages when I started consulting or you started consulting, you had to explain the process. You had to get into the weeds of why this was even important. What's changed from that perspective? It seems like people have at least heard of the movement and heard of some of the processes, but maybe they're doing it wrong or there's different assumptions that they've made about the process in the first place. What are some of the things that you're seeing that are challenging in today's world?
Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so I mean, it's not, it's not as hard as it used to be to convince leaders inside established, successful companies that they need to innovate. I think what's harder is getting them to change how they run their companies day-to-day because some of those processes are so calcified. It's so hard to break into those and have them change. I mean, one of the habits that companies have, for example, it's an annual budget cycle. Things that are on road maps that I executed against. You need to complete a five-year projection with a business case in order to get investments. Those are things that have been harder to break down.
How do you have a conversation with the head of finance that they should invest in an idea, but that idea is not promising them any return. What is the sense of comfort that you can give them with that? You have to sort of take into them like a newer tool that was created to say, think about your investments as a portfolio of investments and think about your returns as returns from a portfolio rather than retrench from one idea. That's the way you allow these to fail, but these are concepts that are just emerging. That we're going to have the conversation with leaders around inside the company.
Brian Ardinger: I'm curious to get your insight into whether you think this problem should be tackled across the entire organization. Should it be siloed? We've heard experts in different areas tackle this from different sides with different areas of effectiveness. What's your thought on how innovation should be attacked from an organization perspective?
Tendayi Viki: So that's interesting, especially when you're talking about the Lean Startup Movement, right. One of the problems we had at the beginning of our movement was being allowed to do the work. How do we even get the space to be allowed to test ideas, run experiments, do Agile, Design Thinking? And so what we did was we fought really hard to get these spaces created for us because we needed to show that you can actually work this way. And now I think we have a different problem. I think the problem we have now is what we call the problem of success.
If you are in a discussion of whether innovation should happen inside or outside your organization, you have to ask yourself a question. What happens when you find something that works? What happens when you find a business model that works? What happens when you find that idea that works and now you need light resources to scale. And you know what? I've heard people flippantly say, well, the company will just spin me out. Creating a spinout, it's actually more difficult. And requires much more leadership, attention, and legal and procurement than actually just scaling a product. And so even getting spun out requires some integration back into the company so that these decisions can be made.
This decision of whether or not you should do it inside or outside the organization is whether or not if did you do it outside the ...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Chris Shipley, co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage. Chris and I talk about the changing forces driving the great resignation to the great reset, and how empathetic leadership will be the key to navigating change in creating value today and in the future. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Transcript of Podcast with Chris Shipley, Co-author of The Empathy Advantage.
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, this guest has been on the show before. It is Chris Shipley. She's the co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage: Leading The Empowered Workforce. Welcome back Chris.
Chris Shipley: Hey, I'm glad to be talking to you again.
Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on as always. You've been so gracious to be part of the Inside Outside community for so many years, whether it's speaking in our events or the last time we spoke, you had your first book out, the Adaptation Advantage. And that came out right during the middle of Covid.
And so, I wanted to have you back on with this new book, to talk about what's changed and and where we're going. You've got a new book out called The Empathy Advantage. Tell us a little bit about why you had to write a book coming out of Covid?
Chris Shipley: As you said, The Adaptation Advantage, our first book with Heather and I, it launched in April of 2020. So, we had all of these plans having finished the book at the end of 2019 to do all the things you do to launch a book. And the world came to a stop.
We had to adapt ourselves to really get that book out into the world. But what we recognized or what happened is it kind of became this accidental guide to leading through the pandemic, because everybody was without.
We continued to read and write and work on understanding what was happening and changing in the workplace. During the pandemic, what became really, really clear is that the pandemic didn't cause this disruption. It felt very disrupting, but it was, it amplified, it put a lens on what had been happening for a long time.
So, for example, the idea of the great resignation that really took hold about a year ago, people started talking about it. Well, that's been going on since about 2009. The pandemic created; we had a lens to see it maybe more clearly. It wasn't a new idea.
And so what we realized is that the amplifying effect of the pandemic combined with a workforce that was sent home, given a lot of autonomy, a lot of agency, in how they would do their jobs, they're not gonna come back into an office place and say, oh, you know, all of that stuff that trust you had in me, nevermind micromanagement again, I'll be fine with that.
A new kind of leadership is required to move people sort of back into a mainstream new frame of work that really embraces the way in which these workers are more empowered, they have more autonomy and agency. And we think that the bottom line is it's a change in leadership that centers on empathy.
Brian Ardinger: I wrote a book. I started writing it right before the pandemic, and this idea of disruption and changes are coming and how do you start preparing for it? And then Covid hits, and it made it real. Obviously, for everybody in a way that talking about it and seeing it hitting in different industries might not have.
But nowadays we're coming back into the place where, so we've had a couple of years of practice, so to speak to how do we become adaptive in that. But it still seems like there's a lot of folks getting it wrong or trying to go back to the old way and that. So, what are you seeing when it comes to this natural pull to try to go back to quote unquote normal.
Chris Shipley: We're never gonna go back to normal. And I don't think really we ever do go back to a normal, right? We, there's a new normal and it's, it exists for now and then tomorrow it'll be another normal. And that really speaks to being adaptive.
And so I think one of our challenges is that there's kind of a new mold for leadership, but we're still trying to shove the old ways into it. Right, that being a leader meant I needed to know how everyone worked. I needed to be the absolute decision maker. I needed to be the one who could see everything and guide everyone and manage people to some greater profitability and, and productivity.
That just doesn't fit in the mold now. So, we need to recognize it if, and everything has, so much, has changed through the pandemic.
That what worked, that got us to where we are as leaders is not going to work to take us forward with this newly empowered workforce. And so, being able to, as a leader say, you know what? I don't know. But let's find out. Let's learn together. Let's work together to find this new way. You know, that's really hard for a lot of folks who have been ingrained with this idea that I'm the boss I should be all knowing.
Well, you know what? You can't know everything. Things are moving way too quickly. There's too much. No one holds all the knowledge to, to get some, you know, to get work done today. And so, creating an environment of, of collaboration rather than a, an environment of competition means that people can come together, and problem find and problem solve in a way that you as a leader become more of a conductor or a coach, or a, of a mentor. that empowers and enables workers rather than commands and controls them.
Brian Ardinger: And that's a great point. I was working with a company early in the pandemic and they were talking about, well, how do we adapt to this new hybrid approach? And one of the leaders was like, it's not really our core people that are having to adapt much, it's, it's us as managers that have to learn how to manage differently. And look at how do we create productivity and guidance and everything around that communication with our people because they seem to be adapting fine as far as getting the work done. It's us as managers that are having the challenge or trying to adapt on how do we manage differently.
Chris Shipley: Yeah. I was reading recently in a piece that a large percentage of managers think that they need to closely manage their hybrid workers. That that will make their workers more productive, increase performance, increase profitability, and the data doesn't support that.
Data supports giving people clear direction. Pushing decision making through the organization to cross your team. Being, you know, very clear on desired outcomes, actually produces the kind of performance that, that you're looking for. And in fact, the more there is a sense of oversight, and you know, keyboard tracking and all of the, you must be sitting at a desk in this work space, between these hours that actually tempers performance. It becomes a, you know, a bone of contention frankly, with workers who, like you trusted me a couple of years ago when, when we all got s...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios. Maisha has had an amazing career in corporate innovation, company building and venture capital, and we talk about the new Venture studio model and some of the things that she's seeing in the world of venture. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcription with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Maisha Leek. She's the managing director of Forum Venture Studios. Welcome to the show, Maisha.
Maisha Leek: Thank you Brian. I'm excited to be here.
Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because you've spent a lot of time in all the different cross sections of innovation. So corporate innovation, company building, venture capital. Can you tell us about your path and journey in this innovation space?
Maisha Leek: Sure. I'd love to say it was all brilliantly planned. There's a lot of trial error, error, error, error, and then trial again. I actually got into this world in the interesting route. I was for a long time in Washington DC. I was a policymaker and a fundraiser. And in DC we had oversight of most of the science and innovation agencies. So, everything from NASA to Noah to National Science Foundation, which is about the $54 billion proposition, which is a lot of responsibility.
And we work with your tax dollars, placing the best bets we could to jumpstart the economy or to just position the United States to be competitive. And so that turned in everything from investing in commercial space flight. You see that now with SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and other companies. Those aren't the only ones. And investing in the advancement of batteries, which leads to all of the electric vehicles that we have now and, and sort of their ability to compete with their combustible counter parts.
I knew I was far from all the action that everybody was in, in Silicon Valley and wanted to get closer to it, but by happenstance, met the founder of United Masters. Which was a music and tech company. And did not know what I was doing, except that I was an operator. I knew how to build out teams and build out a company and spent my time doing that.
And we had the right as Silicon Valley goes investors. So had Ben Horowitz on our board. And David Drummond on our board. And was really active in managing those relationships. And when I was thinking about what to do next after spent some time at that startup, I had an executive coach and friends, they were like, you got to get into venture.
And I'm like, that sounds really boring. And their suggestion I think is really apt for folks who are thinking about it. They suggested I would be good in the space because I had experience to do this on Capitol Hill, operating across a range of subject matters. And knowing to be sort of a generalist that can go deep in certain areas and analyze information and make quick judgements.
My first experience was at Adventure Studio at Human Ventures. And that really influenced what I decided to do after that. And most of my time in the venture space, outside of being an angel investor or participating SPVs has really been in the venture studio space.
I love it because of the close connection you can have with the founder and the founding team. It's not sort of like write a check. I'll call you once a month kind of thing. We're in it with them. But it also leans into the place where I'm strong. Which is I'm a really great operator and being able to do that with founders and helping them not make the same mistakes I've made in other companies that I've built or independent of that, also gives me great joy.
So, I've done four Venture Studios - Nike Valiant Labs, Human Ventures, New Lab, which are across the series of categories. New Lab is Frontier Technology. Nike is really best to describe with CPG. Human Ventures, which is in large part direct to consumer. And Forum, which is B2B SaaS. And they all have their challenges. But again, I love the model. I'm an evangelist for the model.
Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about that model. You know, people who've followed the show and that have heard more and more about Venture Studios, and if you've been in the space, you're hearing different flavors of what Venture Studios are.
So can you talk about what is a venture studio from your definition and what were the differences between the different ones that you've started and where you're at currently with Forum.
Maisha Leek: The term studio, when it's combined with venture, actually originates from Hollywood, which I did not know. Essentially, like the idea that the studio from ideation to putting it into theaters would be responsible for the build.
Like they collaborate with some folks, but they wanted to sort of own the vertical of the product that went out to market. And Venture Studios do just that in a venture context. We are building small businesses as fast as possible.
You do different things depending on the category, and there are few ways the model sort of shows up. On one extreme, they're starting with just the idea and there's no founder. On the other extreme, you've built out a business and you're hiring in a CEO. Most of the venture studios I've worked with sort of lean to the front end where we really are interested in and get really excited about the founder. And really help them determine what to build.
And that's really a question of what the problem is that they want to solve. It's not really starting with a solution. And then we take them through a process to de-risk it, diligence it, figure out who the real customers are. What needs to be true for the MVP, and then bring it out to market. Most venture studios do that.
I think that where we get variation is the degree to which the idea is evolved before the team that's going to live with the problem goes out into the world. I think that's where folks tend to have differing points of view about what's most important. And a lot of it's logical. Venture Studios exist because we have a better risk profile than a founder doing it on their own.
I can get into why that is, but you can imagine it's just our expertise. And depending on the Venture Studio and their point of view about what they have to offer in terms of the early ideation, you have some organizations or groups who really want to use every insight that they have and stand up a company. And others who believe that the founder who's taking the risk should do most of that work. That's how folks are making those choices from what I've seen.
Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that seems to be some of the key differentiation. It's how much additional resources perhaps are put towards it. So, some venture studios are very much hands-on. They have a team of developers that the founder can work with to build out, you know, early-stage prototypes an...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Barry O'Reilly, author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise and co-founder of the new Venture Studio, Nobody Studios. Barry and I talk about the ins and outs of a new model of creating and investing in startups called Venture Studios, and we discuss the power of collaborative innovation. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us, as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Barry O'Reilly, Author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise & Co-founder of the Venture Studio, Nobody Studios
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. You may have heard of Barry O'Reilly. He has been part of the Inside Outside Innovation community for a while. He's the author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. And co-founder of Nobody Studios, which we're going to have him talk a little bit more about that. Welcome, Barry.
Barry O'Reilly: Thanks very much for having me. Yeah, it's great to be here.
Brian Ardinger: It's great to have you back. You've followed Inside Outside the community. You've been a huge proponent of what we've done, and quite frankly, a huge mentor to me to understand this whole world of innovation and how do we get through it.
I'm excited to talk about your new venture, which is Nobody's Studios. You've spent a lot of time as an author, as a consultant, working with big companies. Helping really develop the whole lean startup movement. And now you've decided to jump into the investment space and create a a studio where you're gonna hopefully incubate some amazing new startups in the world.
Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. Well, first of all, one thing I want to congratulate you on is your new book. Literally it sits outside in my reading area. There are people that walk past it and see it all the time and pick it up. So, I just want to congratulate you on getting that done, and I really enjoyed reading through it. So, congratulations to yourself on that and highly recommend folks check it out.
So in terms of Startup Studio, the real inspiration for me was, as you said, I've had the chance to work with some phenomenal people over the last number of years. Helping them either identify products that they wanted to build in enterprises or work with scaling startups that were sort of building their business and taking them as far as they could.
And I was enjoying a lot of the sort of advisory side, but I've been sort of doing a lot of that now for, you know, close to a decade. And I was just getting itchy fingers, if you will. You know, I was like helping all these people, like I do a little bit of an angel investing. I, you know, would take sweat equity or be an advisor for these startups.
Help enterprises build products, but I miss a daily grind of sort of being like right in there, building day in, day out. So, I knew I was just sort of looking for the right opportunity for me to bring a lot of my skills to bear and rather than put time in for money, put energy in for equity in these businesses and build something that would fire outlast me if you will.
You know, started to share that with a few people and one of my good friends, Lee Dee, who was actually under advisory board of AgileCraft with me, which we sold to Atlassian and has now become JiraAlign. He introduced me to a guy called Mark McNally. And Mark was based down in Orange County. He was sort of interested or starting this idea of a company called Nobody Studios.
And instantly I was just attracted to the name. Anything that's sort of contrarian and odd. I was like, why did you call this thing Nobody? And you know, part of the mission was we were going to build these companies. We really need to try and like put our egos at the door, if you will, and like be humble, challenge ourselves, work together to build these great businesses.
And really the studio, it in itself is a sort of mix of all the best parts that I believe of the startup ecosystem that I can help with. We're not a VC. We do raise our own capital, but we raise our own capital so we can incubate our companies and ideas that we believe in. But we're not just an incubator.
We have the capital to keep building, and we're not an accelerator where we just sort of put people through a program and give them the Y Combinator stamp and, and they go out the door. So, it's actually bringing all of these components together. We raise our own capital. We have our own ideas that we incubate these companies.
We find founders and teams to help us bring these companies to life. And then the goal is to create really a repeatable, scalable business model and a fundable company where we've incubated something to the point that it's the high-quality business, it's maybe found product market fit, and they're ready to sort of go and get external capital.
And that for us is sort of us doing our job well. But what we're actually optimizing from a business model point of view is to try a aim for early to mid-size exits. So, for those businesses to be actually, purchased, merged into, acquired, maybe even an early I P O, who knows? But that's necessarily our business model.
So, by incubating and building these companies, we're actually looking to exit them for early to mid-stage exits. And that's how we will essentially generate more capital to go back into the studio to build more businesses.
Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit more about the tactics around this. So nobody's studios you're looking to, I think, incubate a hundred companies over the next five years. That takes a lot of people, a lot of founders, a lot of great ideas. How do you tactically go about starting the studios.
Barry O'Reilly: To be honest, and we share that with people. Half of the people run away from us, and half of the people run towards us when they hear that. For me, like that's actually the good sign of a big harry audacious goal, if you will.
It's the calling card for some people. It helps sort of people who aren't thinking like that choose a a different option. With having a big audacious goal like that, you know, it forces you to start recalculating how you build businesses. So, when people hear a hundred companies in five years, they instantly think, oh, that's 20 companies a year.
Like, how are you going to do that amount? But actually, it's a sort of exponential scale that we work on. So, on a first year, which was sort of 2021, our goal was actually to create three companies and learn and build both the systems to create companies as well as the actual businesses themselves. And then last year our goal was to try and create five companies, which was almost, if you will, like a 50% increase in company creation.
And, if you sort of start to work those numbers out over the next five years, we basically go from three to five to 11 to 17 to 32, to 43, and then suddenly you're at a hundred, right? So, it's us also building the infrastructure capabilities and the systems to suppor...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stephen Taylor, Chief Innovation Officer at Untold Content. Stephen and I talk about the importance of storytelling, failure narratives, and its impact on the innovation culture of companies. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Stephen Taylor, Chief Innovation Officer at Untold Content
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Stephen Taylor. He is the Chief Innovation and Chief Financial Officer at Untold Content, where he focuses on helping organizations accelerate innovation through the power of storytelling. Welcome to the show.
Stephen Taylor: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here.
Brian Ardinger: This whole concept of innovation storytelling, it's becoming more and more popular as people are trying to understand like, how do I actually get movement on my innovation initiatives? And a lot of it comes down to, you know, the stories that you tell. So, I wanted to have you on the show, because you have a company that focuses on this. Why don't we talk about the definition? What is innovation storytelling?
Stephen Taylor: Yes. Innovation storytelling is something that is near and dear to my heart. So, I am a chemist by training. I did my PhD in chemistry, did a postdoc. Went out into industry and was there for about a decade. And I felt the pains of how you actually get buy-in, even within a smaller organization. I think we had 250 people.
But how do you actually get buy-in on ideas. Or how do you kill ideas that don't fit? You know, how do you find out what is the right decision. And so that was something that I became very passionate about. And so, when I left industry and joined Untold, I really wanted to spend a lot of time focusing on how do innovators communicate, even as a scientist. How do scientists communicate?
So, what we found through our research is that innovation storytelling is the art and science of communicating strategic narratives and personal stories around innovation objectives in order to drive them forward. It really works on trying to make things that are very strategic, but also bring those personal experiences in.
Because what we found is that organizations have overall these strategic narratives that, that they're trying to force. When you have an idea or something that you're trying to bring forward, you have to ensure that there's good alignment between those stories and that narrative. And so, they really play in concert together. So that's why we include both those as a part of the definition.
Brian Ardinger: Yeah, part of it's like that translation service almost. Sometimes it's a technical translation of, what the heck are you talking about? It's more about how do you align that with the other stories that are being told in the organization so that you can make sure that people understand what you mean.
I think, you know, when I go out and talk to companies, you know, one of the first things I like to do is how do you define innovation? Because I think that alone, causes problems with a lot of organizations. It's like, well, for me it means, you know, creating the next flying car. Where another person in the organization may mean that innovation is creating something new with our existing customers. And so, right. You know, if you don't have alignment from that perspective, you can go sideways really quickly.
Stephen Taylor: We spend time talking about story led innovations versus innovation led stories. So, story led innovation is essentially a project that you may get from your advisor. Or from your boss. And so, a project comes in, the story's already aligned, so it's easy to prioritize that work.
And so, you're just working on communication at that point, a strategic communication. But if you're working on a innovation led story, that's where you come and you find something. Well, now how do you get it in line? How do you make something that's new, that has potential that's maybe adjacent? How do you decide, how do you try to create that alignment narrative? And so those are, those are things that we teach as a part of our curriculum.
Brian Ardinger: That brings up a couple of interesting questions I have around this idea of innovation usually is in this uncertain area. You know, it's, it's a new idea that you want to create in the world that doesn't always align to the execution side of the business. But yet you have to try these things and do a lot of things to move that idea forward, and a lot of times you're going to fail at that. So, can you talk a little bit about power of failure and, and how do you translate that from a story perspective to let people understand that that's part of the process?
Stephen Taylor: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, there's a lot of ways that you can go with this. One way that we think about failure is actually relates back to the Hero’s Journey. So, when it comes to the Hero’s Journey, you know, you can take the whole 17 step process from Joseph Campbell and his original work on the Hero’s Journey, or you can really try to simplify it.
And the way that I like to think about it is you receive the call for a journey. You go out through a transition called the transition from the known to the unknown. You then go on your journey, you do your discoveries, whatever. You collect the boons from the journey, which are the gifts to be given back. You then bring those back through that transition point back to your community.
And then the hero is recognized with monuments and statues and everything. Joseph Campbell's work was really based around tribal behavior. And when you think about tribal behavior, there's a lot of analogies to the innovation groups that are out there in the unknown trying to find what's next.
For the heroes they get these large statues and monuments, but for the failures, they put together rituals. And because the rituals are points where we come back together and actually share best practices, share things that we've learned, to take those learnings from failure and use those to bless back to the community. And so, what we've seen through our research is that there are many points where people are starting to implement these failure rituals.
And so, there's several different examples. There's a classic one, Ben and Jerry's. Ben and Jerry's Failure Graveyard is a classic failure ritual. There's Miter. Miter does Failure Cake. So, within Failure Cake, what happens is that they basically bring out a sheet cake into a cafeteria and they say, If you want a piece of cake, you need to share a failure story. And it's really to get those stories of failure being shared in those best practices and lessons learned.
Then there's also DuPont. DuPont's doing an Annual Dead Project's Day around Halloween. And so, the whole point is to get lots of their innovators and their scientists together to share their experiences...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Paul Skinner, author of the new book, the Purpose Upgrade. Paul and I talk about how companies can use purpose to find better problems to solve, build better solutions, and achieve better outcomes. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us, as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Paul Skinner, Author of the Purpose Upgrade
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we are talking to Paul Skinner. He's the founder of Agency of the Future, and author of the new book the Purpose Upgrade: Change your Business to Save the World. Change the World, Save your Business. Welcome, Paul.
Paul Skinner: Thank you, Brian. It's a fantastic pleasure to make it onto your show for a second time. In some ways, even better than the first time because now I have some sense of what I have to look forward to.
Brian Ardinger: Well, yes. Welcome back to the show. One of the reasons we wanted to have you back on is you've written another book. First time we spoke a couple years ago, your first book had just come out called The Collaborative Advantage.
It was quite an interesting topic and obviously you've expanded on it. One of the things I want to ask, I've just published my first book, Accelerated and I can't imagine writing a second book. So, talk to me about that process of why did you feel a second book was important and give us a little bit of background into that.
Paul Skinner: Thank you for that. And yeah, I, I certainly agree. There's so much work in writing a book that I don't think you really want to set about it until it becomes something that impinges on you so much that you can't not write it. And congratulations on your book. And my prediction is that in couple of years or so, you'll start to feel the urge.
And so, I guess in my case, the second book has in some ways grown out of the legacy of the first book. So, we talked about Collaborative Advantage. I think it was episode 149, so about halfway up to where you are today. And I remember at the time arguing that many of the problems we faced in business were typically not problems we could solve on our own.
Therefore, we needed to forge shared purpose with others. And I proposed collaborative advantage as a somewhat audacious fundamental alternative to the conventional goal of strategy of creating competitive advantage. Now the idea there of course, was that in competitive advantage, that you line up your resources to create a superior offering that you deliver to your stakeholders who are the seen as the passive recipients of that value.
But I felt that that underestimated the value creation process and the role that all our stakeholders actively play in it. You know, people are not just consumers. You know, if we met in a Starbucks and had a chat with an economist and said, who was creating the most value around us? He might say the barista, the franchisee, the brand owner, the landlord. But he probably wouldn't say us, the customers.
But actually, if I met you in Starbucks, the real attraction would be the conversation with you and the warm brown liquid would be relatively incidental. Similarly, you know, investors are not just walking checkbooks, they're people who commit to the future and can help us live up to it. You know, partners don't just have to be suppliers delivering to a contract but can define that future with us.
Communities are not just markets. They're the thing that make it all worthwhile. And our shared home isn't just an asset to be exploited but is the thing that makes life and work possible. Now, if you see stakeholders as the active creators of change and the business there to empower that rather than just sort of siphoning off value, then that means you can raise your ambition.
And I'd say that's a good job because if we look back to the kinds of problems we talked about on the last episode of the show that we did together, then you could say those were the good old problems, really. I mean, since then we've had the biggest global health emergency of our lifetimes, the biggest interruption to life and work as usual.
We've got serious war in Europe since February of 2022. The cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis, food crisis. And so, if shared problems gave rise to the need for collaborative advantage, I believe that bigger problems gives rise to the need for a fundamental purpose upgrade. And the good news is that that can be an important source of renewal if we face up to those problems.
Brian Ardinger: And that's a great point. You know, since we last talked, obviously the world has changed and, and I would say that the idea of collaborative advantage, and that is probably more relevant to businesses now from the standpoint of it's at least in their front of mind.
When the world changes overnight and they've got to, you know, look out for their, not only their customers, but their employees and understand that the world's changing around them. I'd imagine that has opened up the conversation to a number of different companies that you probably worked with or talked to about this particular topic.
What are you seeing? Is this idea resonating and or what are some of the things that you're seeing tactically that companies are doing to embrace this?
Paul Skinner: Yeah, I mean, as it happens, I've spent a lot of my time, I've worked with three groups that you might think as being very sort of separate from each other. You know, business leaders, many of whom will be listening to your show. Of course, seeking to make a profit. Leaders of charities and social enterprises seeking to create social change. And as it happens, I do have quite a background working with leaders in the field of disasters and emergency seeking to ensure safety, survival, and recovery.
And what I found in recent years is that those worlds are not very separate, after all. You know, business leaders are recognizing that they're having to take responsibility for a dizzying array of issues that they hadn't necessarily signed up for when they started their careers.
Leaders of charities and social enterprises are often having to be very business savvy, as well as very oriented towards work through partnerships. Because resources are scarce, donations are difficult to come by. And because of the scale of the problems they face.
And of course, in the world of disasters and emergencies, I think all organizations working in that domain recognize that the scale of those problems mean that they need to work with and through whole of society approaches to solving those problems. Because nobody is big enough to come and solve those problems on their own.
So I think there is a fundamental recognition. You know, in a sense, I think with collaborative advantage, we were already seeing the interconnectedness of the world and our shared opportunities. In the last years, we've also become...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tim Bottke, author of the new book Digital Transformation Payday. Tim and I talk about the challenges of digital transformation initiatives and how companies can better approach the implementation and measurement of them. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best in the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Tim Bottke, Senior Strategy Partner at Monitor Deloitte and Author of Digital Transformation Payday
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tim Bottke. He is Senior Strategy Partner at Monitor Deloitte, and author of the new book Digital Transformation Payday: Navigate the Hype, Lower the Risks, Increase Return on Investments. Welcome to the show, Tim.
Tim Bottke: Hi Brian.
Brian Ardinger: Tim, I am excited to have you on the show. You've got a very interesting book about digital transformation. What is digital transformation?
Tim Bottke: You know what the funny thing is. Like over these four years of research, which I spent preparing, the book. Became clear, there is just no single universally agreed definition of what digital transformation is. And that's driven by the fact that so many different interest groups have worked on the topic. Each with their own agenda.
And very often you'll find that the key word in this term is transformation. And digital, it should be it, it is not always like that should be means to an end, which is transforming. And transformation is also no objective by itself. It needs to happen to make sure that a strategy is established, which helps companies win in the marketplace.
And very often you see with clients and also all the companies I researched for the book, that people transform but don't know what to transform to. And that's why people often ask for a definition. And the definition is it's about a transformation with the objective of being able to have sustainable success in the marketplace. And digital is a tool to do that. There are many others.
Brian Ardinger: Well, I'd love to get a little bit more background on like, how did you get involved in digital transformation and the research that you've been doing on it? What got you excited about it and how did you get your expertise?
Tim Bottke: I've been a consultant now for more than 20 years. And like transformation was always a topic in all these times. Whenever I had, we had the early stage, we had the e-commerce boom. I've been in all these faces, and I work in the TMT industry mostly, so, which has always been more digital. At least that's what we believe than many other industries.
And that's why with all these companies going up, down, growing, being restructured, transformation has always been there. So it has always been a key interest area I've had. And that's why when the digital transformation hype and I'll call it came up, it has come up several times. It just became the core of my work because there was no transformation where there was no digital inside.
And then I had, I still remember this meeting with a dear, really dear client of mine, a CEO who basically said, look Tim, two more years as a CEO in this company. Maybe three. I want to do bigger things. We both know I need to transform this company. Digital transformation is the term. It costs half a billion, and I'm sure I would not see any single benefit while I'm still the CEO.
Is it not a better idea if I start wearing jeans and trainers? As of next week, I make my investor relations team paint our annual report with a lot of digital AI, whatever the term is.
I invest 50 million in this case, in major startup city of the country, put an incubator and then have some innovation speeches written for me, et cetera. Is that not better and safer for my career? Tell me if I go the other route, what will shareholders benefit really? Please tell me and had no answer.
And you know how frustrating that is. At least to me. It was when I couldn't really give a good answer. And it was also clear that mumbling along, throwing a few buzz words wouldn't solve it. So, I went on a quest to solve it. I first started internally. Then no one had the patience to really dig into it because it was, you know, everyone was running high speed digital transformation project after project.
No one wanted to question the bigger theme of value, et cetera. But I still got the go from our leadership to work on it by myself. So, I went back to academia. I found out no one has solved it there either, even though IT transformation, you know, has been a trend for long time. IT value has been assessed in hundreds of articles and books, but it didn't ever jump over to digital.
It was rather the claim people saying, no, these rules do no longer apply. Now it's digital. We don't need KPIs. It's all about scale. It's all about different KPIs. It's let's be Agile. Look, all these things. And then I started saying look, there needs to be a data driven answer. And that took me some time because I also had a job to do in parallel. I'm still a consultant after all, but I fixed it. I solved it. And that's where this book came from.
Brian Ardinger: Yeah. My understanding, you spent about four years researching it, and looking at different ways companies are approaching digital innovation and that. So maybe we'll start with the question, you know, where do companies get digital transformation wrong? You know, what does the research show? What are some of the pitfalls that people are encountering?
Tim Bottke: The good thing is I think there is just one single pitfall everyone needs to be aware of. That digital transformation is an end-to-end journey. And no matter what you do. And I have a framework in my book, which is explaining a bit what end-to-end means. But wherever you start, you need to be sure that you know where you want to get.
So very often the key thing that companies get wrong is they believe they need a digital strategy, but they don't from my perspective. What they need is a strategy, a strategy to win in the marketplace. And very often in current times, digital can play a key role in it. But they often think if they implement the coolest new CRM system cloud-based with AI supported analysis engines inside.
I think the two of us could throw buzzwords now for the next 10 minutes. That this will change anything in terms of success for them in the marketplace. But it doesn't because very often all competitors work on similar things. They very often even use the same software. So, they have the same systems. Often in a few cases, even the same consultants with Chinese walls or whatever.
But so they will never end up in a place where when they finish and they never do, they will be better off compared to where they were before, vis-a-vis competition. They might be a better company, more efficient, leaner, faster, but what if all your competitors do the same faster at the same speed? Then you end u...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford's d.School. Sarah and I talk about her new book, Creative Acts for Curious People and dig into a number of the exercises and activities that innovators can use to move ideas forward faster. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.
Interview Transcript of Sarah Stein Greenberg, ED of Stanford's d.School and Author of Creative Acts for Curious PeopleBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sarah Stein Greenberg. She's the Executive Director of Stanford's d. School and author of the new book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Welcome to the show, Sarah.
Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thanks so much, Brian. I'm really excited to be here.
Brian Ardinger: You know, as a person in the trenches, trying to help companies and teams think through the innovation process. It's kind of hard-to-get people on board half the time. And you've taken and created this new book, that's really the tactical guide of exercise and experiences, almost a roadmap for that. What made you decide to tackle this topic and what do you hope for folks to get the most out of it?
Sarah Stein Greenberg: Oh, great question. We're living through this historic moment right now, where on nearly a daily basis, each of us are trying to solve problems that we have not faced before. So, as we were getting going, we were talking about the challenge of having one kid vaccinated. One kid not vaccinated. People are back in school. There's lots of different risk factors.
Folks are starting in some cases to return to offices. Like what's the new social etiquette. And then at the same time, there are these like community level issues or global issues around whether it's wildfires, which are happening in my area, or really different perspectives about politics that we're experiencing all over the country.
And it's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of uncertainty. So, while we might be used to thinking about like, how do we apply our creativity to innovation and coming up with new products and services, there's also this whole realm of use for our creative abilities that has to do with these kinds of both small personal and large global challenges.
So, I wrote this book because I think that design offers a set of abilities that are really useful when you're trying to tackle problems where you don't know the right answer. Maybe there is no right answer, and you have to bring your full creative self.
These are the kinds of skills and abilities that we seek to help develop in our students at the d. School and with executives and teachers and folks all over the world. And I think there's something in here for everyone, no matter where you are in your creative journey. I think you can find something that will be of use to you.
Brian Ardinger: A lot of folks are understanding that to a real extent this idea of living in constant change and ambiguity and a world in flux. What are some of the key skillsets that you find are important to be able to dabble in that world?
Sarah Stein Greenberg: One is the act of noticing and observing how the world is changing. And, you know, we get really habituated to the routines and the things we see every day. But when you look at what amazing designers do, somehow, they see opportunities that no one else is noticing. But there are really a set of ways, I have a few great assignments in the book based on this to cultivate your own ability to observe and notice differently.
So, one of my favorites is called the Dureve, in which you are able to take a walk and navigate around a space or your neighborhood, or your office building, by using the practices in the Dureve. All of a sudden you notice things that maybe have been there for 25 years, and you haven't noticed these elements. And it awakens you to recognize how many opportunities are around us all the time that are just lying in plain sight, but we are not seeing them. So that's one of those skillsets.
I think another key one is just, we talk about this all the time in innovation and design, but it's about collaboration. Right. And how you get to a state of true creative collaboration and how much trust that requires, an openness, and the ability to navigate together with a group of people who may think very differently about the same things through a creative process.
Brian Ardinger: You talk about in the book, the difference between problem finding and problem solving. Can you outline that and why that is so important to understanding how to work in this innovation space?
Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. I mean, for me, that was one of the critical ahas that I experienced when I first started learning about design when I was a grad student. You know, I think in a lot of more analytical disciplines, you are taught to take the problem that you've been given, break it into small pieces and then figure out how are you going to solve that?
And that is a very valuable set of skills, but in design, we add some stages before you start working on problem solving. That's about problem framing, as you said. And the reason for doing this is that often the way a problem has been framed is a conventional way, right? It's kind of the way that's either out there and sort of the obvious way.
It is what we assume that our customers might need, or we assume that people would care about. But in fact, if you allow yourself that stage of problem finding that's often what drives the innovation, is when you reframe an opportunity and then you start to see it in a whole new way.
Brian Ardinger: Do you have any examples that you can share around that?
Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. One of the examples that I go into detail in the book is the example of a team of students who ultimately wound up founding a new company. And they were tasked with working with a partner, a hospital, a cardiac care hospital in India. And they thought that their mission as a team was to design something that could really assist with like efficiency or sort of patient flow. They thought that they were going to wind up designing something for either the clinicians or maybe for the hospital administrators.
What they saw when they started doing their research was a completely different set of opportunities. What they spotted was the fact that there are many people in the hospital who were coming to accompany their family member and then winding up waiting for hours or days even, and not having a lot of information about how their family member was doing, what their prognosis was.
The students really like feed into this and wound up designing something for those family members. So they have now launched this organization that provides healthcare training to family members during that waiting process. And what that allows...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kevin Leland, CEO and Founder of Halo and Matt Muller, Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter. The three of us talk about the changing world of open innovation and what it takes to connect and collaborate, to solve big industry problems. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Kevin Leland, CEO and Founder of Halo and Matt Muller, Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing set of guests. Today, we have Kevin Leland, who is the CEO and Founder of Halo. And Matt Muller, who is the Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter. Welcome.
Kevin Leland: Thank you.
Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you both on the show to talk about a topic that's near and dear to a lot of folks out there. That's the topic of open innovation and how to corporates and startups and new ideas get started in this whole world of collaborative innovation. Kevin you're the CEO and founder of Halo. What is Halo? And how did you get started in this open innovation space?
Kevin Leland: Halo is a marketplace and network where companies connect directly with scientists and startups for research collaborations. It's about as simple to post RFP or a partnering opportunity on Halo as it is to post a job on LinkedIn. And then once it's posted scientists submit their research proposals. We went live in January. Matt and the team of Baxter was our very first customer. So, the earliest of early adopters and they were a really fantastic partner.
I came across the idea of Halo and got into open innovation really kind of by accident. The original concept for Halo was crowd funding for medical research. So, a little bit different, but we would work with technology transfer offices at universities to identify promising technology that just needed a little bit of funding to get to the next level.
And through that experience, I learned that scientists needed more than just funding. They needed the expertise and the resources of industry. Meanwhile, I was learning how industry was actively trying to partner with these scientists and these early-stage startups, because they realized that they were less good at the early-stage discovery process of research. And so to me, it seemed like an obvious marketplace solution. And so that's where the impetus of the business came and how we started.
Brian Ardinger: Let's turn it over to you Matt. From the other side of the table, from a corporation, trying to understand and facilitate and accelerate innovation efforts. What is open innovation mean to you and how did Halo come to play a part in that?
Matt Muller: As you mentioned earlier, I'm Director of Applied Innovation here at Baxter and I am in our Renal Care Business. And so that's the business at Baxter that's focused on treating end stage kidney disease. And that's one of Baxter's largest businesses. As a company, we have over $12 billion in sales annually, and dialysis in the renal care businesses, is our largest business unit.
And it is an area that we've struggled with innovation. And particularly what we excel at, at Baxter is we excel at treating kidney disease in the home. So, this is a particular therapy called peritoneal dialysis. Patients are able to do it in their home while they sleep.
And one of the big challenges that we have today with peritoneal dialysis is that patients need dialysis solution. They use about 12, 15 liters of this sterile medical solution every night to do their therapy. And today the way we do that and the way we've done it ever since this therapy has been around since early seventies is we literally deliver that solution in bags, by trucks. We make it in big plants in the United States and trucks drive all across the country and they deliver it to patients in their home.
And as a company, we, for a long time have said, we really need to change this business model. It's not sustainable for us. It requires our patients store a lot of water in their home or the solution rather in their home. And they have to essentially dedicate a whole room of their houses to storage of their supplies.
So, we have, for the longest time said, we want to change how this is done. And we want to be able to use the patient's own water in their home. And instead of delivering all these bags of solutions deliver concentrates much like if you go on, you buy a soft drink at the movie theater, it comes from a concentrated box of syrup that is, you add water to it and you have your soft drink.
And so that's our vision. And we've struggled for many years of how to bring innovation into the marketplace for making that pure water that we need in the home. We have a lot of very bright scientists at Baxter. The problem is that as Kevin mentioned before, our scientists are really good at solving particular problems in particular getting products to market.
Where we've been struggling is that the science has not or at least we haven't been aware of the science that could really allow us to break this barrier and make the leap to be able to make this pure solution medical grade solution in the home.
And that's why we've reached out to Kevin and his platform as a way to do that is to go out to a really broad community of researchers to bring new ideas into the company, to help us figure out new ways to approach the problem.
Brian Ardinger: The history of open innovation is long. And there's a lot of things that have been tried in the past. Did Baxter try other methods in the past? Or how did you go about trying to determine what things we should innovate internally and try to solve that way versus when and where we go outside for solutions?
Matt Muller: I would say as a company, we probably hadn't been as involved specifically in the university and in the startups space. So, a lot of times as a company, we have a lot of people that come to us with ideas and looking for funding. Most of the time, it's a very common proposition that they give you.
They need a certain amount of funding, and in three years, they'll have a product. Three years is like the magic number. And the reality is that it's frequently the claims and the charity are very oversold, and we haven't been really successful in that type of space. And so, we've been really looking at different ways to engage a larger community.
The other element of it too, is sometimes when you talk open innovation, we're limited by our existing network of people. And so that is the employees and who they work with. Maybe it's the fact we're in Northern Illinois, we're close to Northwestern University and people here have relationships with professors at Northwestern.
So, we develop those relationships and the open innovation opportunities through those connections. We've been looking into how do we expand that? Reach a broader audience and get a global conne...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire and Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Andrew, and I talk about his entrepreneurial journey building MicroAcquire, and some of the insights he's seeing when it comes to buying and selling startups.
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world. Accelerating change and its certainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses.
Interview Transcript with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Andrew Gazdecki who is the founder of MicroAcquire. And Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Welcome Andrew.
Andrew Gazdecki: Thanks so much for having me, Brian. I'm excited.
Brian Ardinger: I've got my MicroAcquire socks on. So, thank you for that. I'm super excited to have you on to talk about the craziness that is the startup world. And you've had a front row seat for a number of years as a multi-founder. And now with MicroAcquire, let's talk about what MicroAcquire is and how you got into the business of helping startups sell to other folks.
Andrew Gazdecki: MicroAcquire, for those who aren't familiar with it, is the largest startup acquisition marketplace in the world today. We have about 150,000 buyers registered. We've helped over six hundred startups to get acquired that combined acquisition total is 400 million at this point. Almost half a billion. We don't charge any fees. So, you can sell your business on MicroAcquire completely free.
So, I started that business, candidly, as a side project. I just felt that needed to exist. I'd previously gone through two acquisitions, and it was just a mess. Everything from finding the buyers to, there's so much education today on how to grow your business. How to learn sales. How to recruit. And how to fundraise. But then there's nothing on the exit. Which is arguably the most important part of the founder's journey.
And when I sold my first business, which we can talk about, if you'd like, it was a business called Business Apps. Spelled BiznessApps, and kind of the light bulb moment went on when I sold it. I just got a ton of emails and texts from friends that we're also running startups and they were like, how'd you get acquired?
Like, how did you find the buyer? What was the process like? It was like hieroglyphics everyone. Including myself when I went through the process. So, what we're really trying to do at MicroAcquire is democratize startup acquisitions and just make the process easier and more transparent for founders. And also, buyers.
Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the types of startups that are being bought and sold on the platform. And how has that maybe changed since when you first launched?
Andrew Gazdecki: Well, when we first launched, lots of small startups, you know ranging from, we would sell business, and we still do today, but 5k startups, mostly side projects. And since then, we've really expanded, I guess, up market. So, our largest acquisition is just under $10 million.
We have buyers on the platform now that can facilitate acquisitions in the hundreds of millions if the value is there. Yeah, just started with humble beginnings just because I felt this was something that was so needed for the startup ecosystem. Because the other routes to sell your business, unless you're most founders think like Google shows up with a check and hey, you did it. Like you won the lottery.
There's this saying most startups are bought, not sold and that's just not true. You know, you really need to sell your business. And so, the other routes were expensive, borderline highway robbery, and that's, that was really kind of like the main purpose of me launching MicroAcquire to really give another option for founders of this other business.
And if you're curious about the other options, you can hire an investment banker. They're going to charge a big fee. If your startup is too small for an investment bank, because most investment banks will only work with you if your business is of a certain size. And you know, maybe you can get like eight, nine figure exit. And I had previously worked with an investment bank. And their minimum fee was $800,000 for a successful transaction.
The short story there, we got a few offers, but the fee was just, I still had gas in the tank, so I kept going. But it showed me, and I remember telling the bankers, I was like, you guys have the coolest job in the world. I do all this work. And then at the end, you come in and get, you know, a nice payday. So that always kind of stuck with me.
And then I stumbled on to business brokers. Business brokers, if your business is doing let's say less than you know 5 million in revenue. You can work with a business broker. They will typically charge 10 to 15% commission to sell your business. So, 10% to 15%. So that's like a small angel round. So, I just saw it. Okay. Business brokers don't do too much. You know, what would happen if we removed the middleman? And we let buyers and sellers connect directly.
And we help businesses ranging from SaaS companies. That's kind of our sole focus. But we also sell a lot of e-commerce businesses. Communities. Some crypto companies. Direct to consumer. Newsletters. We like to say, we want to be the marketplace for profitable startups. So that's mainly our focus is startups that have traction.
So, we don't list startups that are pre revenue. Content websites. Affiliate websites. Again, mostly focusing on businesses that have, you know, a lot of growth upside. Having a blast running it at the same time, too.
Brian Ardinger: I'm hearing more and more about people using the platform, startup founders, maybe looking to buy a side project or a side hustle versus building something from scratch. Are you seeing that trend happening?
Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah. Like one story that comes to mind is, there's builders and there's scalers. Where a lot of people love to build a business. They love to think of a new idea and bring something to life. And I think fallen, in both those buckets. Builders and scalers. And so people build these wonderful businesses, but they maybe build it to a certain point where they'd like to move on to something else.
Maybe they built it to a few million in revenue and now they're, you know, mostly managing. When they'd really like to be building. And so MicroAcquire is a great outlet for them to meet buyers within like hours. Like the fastest acquisition on my group, where I was within, quite literally hours. Those are obviously outliers.
Brian Ardinger: What are you seeing when it comes to valuation trends and things along those lines? How's the ma...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, IO CoFounder, sat down with Katherine Radeka, author of the new book, High Velocity Innovation and CEO of Rapid Learning Cycles. They talk about innovation and Agile. And specifically how it fits into the hardware space, why everyone needs to be a part of the innovation process, and then most importantly, how companies can better align their innovation efforts with their core business.
Interview Transcript with Katherine Radeka, Author of High Velocity Innovation & CEO of Rapid Learning CyclesOn this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Katherine Radeka, author of the new book, High Velocity Innovation. Katherine and I talk about innovation and agile and specifically how it fits into the hardware space, why everyone needs to working on the innovation process at your organization, and then most importantly, how companies can better align their innovation efforts with their core business.
Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation.Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Katherine Radeka. She is the CEO of the Rapid Learning Cycles Institute and author of the new book High Velocity Innovation: How to get your best ideas to market faster. Welcome to the show, Katherine.
Katherine Radeka: Thank you.
Innovation Journey
Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on to talk about your new book. You have a varied background. I want to talk a little bit about the differences between innovating in the real world versus in the software world. Why don't we give our audience a little bit of background about your path in innovation?
Katherine Radeka: I was working for Hewlett Packard and their inkjet printer division, and I made the transition to working with the blended teams that it takes to put together a printer is a printer, is a blend of the hardware and the ink cartridges and the firmware and the software drivers.
And so program manager in that space has to be familiar with all of those different disciplines. What I learned very early on was that hardware is hard. That the reason why we were always being told to fix things in software is that once they release something to the manufacturing environment, it is a very, very expensive thing to fix.
That became a passion for me, was to figure out how do we deliver hardware more effectively? How do we eliminate the problems that tend to arise in late development? That tend to make hardware programs disappointing. Either late or if they can't be late, they might be down scope, so they're disappointing. Or they might cost too much. To try to figure out how we could make it so that a person that had a great idea for a new physical thing, a new tangible thing, could be just as successful with innovation as a person that has an idea for new software.
Innovation Learning in High Velocity Innovation & Rapid Learning Cycles
Brian Ardinger: You decided to write a book about all your experiences with Hewlett Packard and Keurig and Johnson and Johnson, Whirlpool, all these great companies. And I imagine through that work process, you learned quite a bit about innovation. What's the biggest learning you think the audience will get from it?
Katherine Radeka: One of the things that I learned early on is that if you really want an organization to be innovative, you need to pull innovation from that group. Even for a person that thinks of themselves as creative, they're not necessarily going to be creative in the direction that you want them to be, unless they're well aligned with the direction that the organization wants to go.One of the companies that I feature in the book is a company Gallagher. Gallagher is a security products company based in New Zealand. They invented the electric fence for livestock, but then they expanded from there. And they have relentless innovation as part of their DNA. And so you walk into Gallaher and it doesn't matter who you are, you will contribute to the innovation culture of that company.
They pull it out of you by making it such a strong part of the environment that you're in, by making it tied to your performance there and whether or not you're going to be a successful employee at Gallagher will depend on your ability to innovate by tying metrics and performance goals to innovation success.
The entire organization from top to bottom is aligned around the need for innovation. And more importantly, they have a strategic plan for innovation. They're aligned around the need for the specific innovations...
By having a repeatable process for innovation that they've honed over time. And so you walk in there and the entire organization from top to bottom aligns around the need for innovation. And more importantly, they have a strategic plan for innovation. They're aligning around the need for the specific innovations that are going to enable Gallagher to do what it wants to do in the market.As a result, they can take an idea, they can screen it to see if it's in alignment with the direction they want to go. And then they can execute on that idea very quickly, because everything's aligned. So to create a smooth path for an idea to get to market, then the hardware stays that's especially important because the thing that makes hardware programs much more difficult is the fact that you have these high costs of change decisions.
They can't be revisited later, or at least not without incurring a lot of delay or a lot of costs. What Gallagher has been able to do is to figure out how to create this path that eliminates the need to revisit any of those decisions late in a program, when they're expensive. A lot of what High Velocity Innovation is about is how to help teams make really good decisions when those decisions have to stick.
High Velocity Innovation in Corporations & Rapid Learning Cycles
Brian Ardinger: You mention a case study of a company that's figuring out some of this stuff. Some of the things ring true as far as figuring out the incentives. And figuring out the culture. And that's where a lot of corporate innovators fall down. If I'm a corporate innovator thinking and hearing more about what you're talking about, what are some of the first steps that I should be thinking about for how to implement this high velocity innovation and rapid learning cycles within my own group?
Katherine Radeka: I think the first and most important thing is to understand why your company needs innovation. What is it that they're looking to get from innovation? Because that will help you understand where the most valuable innovation is likely to come from and ho... -
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Rita Gunther McGrath, best-selling author of books like The End of Competitive Advantage, Discovery Driven Growth, and her latest book Seeing Around Corners. Rita and I talk about what companies need to do to navigate the pace and intensity of today's changing environments and what needs to happen to foster the skills, the culture, and the metrics around innovation.
Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Rita Gunther McGrath, Author of Seeing Around Corners and Professor at Columbia Business School
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me is Rita Gunther McGrath. She's the author of Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen. Welcome Rita.
Rita Gunther McGrath: It is a pleasure to be here.
Brian Ardinger: I can't tell you how excited I am to have you on the show. I've been a big fan for a long time. You're a best-selling author of a number of books: The End of Competitive Advantage, Discovery Driven Growth. You're a sought-after speaker and consultant and a long-time professor at Columbia Business School. So, thank you very much for coming on and sharing your insights about innovation.
You've written this new book, Seeing Around Corners about how do you navigate and become better prepared for this inevitable change. What made you decide like this is the right time for this particular book and it came out right before COVID.
Rita Gunther McGrath: For once I got the timing on a book right. Well, the idea of strategic inflection points intrigued me beginning back in the nineties with Andy Grove's work on how Intel had to make this incredible transformation from selling memory devices, to selling microprocessors and what a courageous journey that was for them.
And there hasn't really been a lot done on that theme since then. Not a lot. As we were looking at inflection points and, you know, before the pandemic, the ones I was watching were certainly digital touching every part of everybody's life. The merging of strategy and innovation as separate fields, we know they've really been separate for and now I really, as competitive advantages, get shorter, I think they're really emerging.
And then perhaps the whole issue around productivity, automation, what's the right kind of social contract. And it seemed to me, these were all the kinds of change which feel really slow moving until they hit some kind of tipping point. And that's when you have the inflection point. And what got me intrigued about the book at this particular time was how far ahead you can pick up the weak signals that something really is brewing.
And if you keep an eye on it, right, it can take your business to new heights. And if you sort of stick your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening, that's where we see the great corporate catastrophes.
Brian Ardinger: And your book breaks it down really into three core questions. Like how do you see an inflection point coming? How do you decide what to do about it? And then how do you bring the organization along with you to make that happen. To set the stage, how do you define an inflection point. What's out there? And why is it so important to identify an inflection point.
Rita Gunther McGrath: Yeah. So, I define an inflection point as some external force that exerts a 10X pressure on something about your organization or your business. That would be, that often is technology, but it could be other things. It could be a regulation, it could be social norms, you know, it could be a number of different things. So, for instance, if you're in the energy world today, you know you're staring at dramatic pressure on the fossil fuels business, and that's not a big mystery.
And it's not going to happen overnight, but you know, that's something you're going to have to respond to. So, the reason I think this is an interesting way of thinking is that if you think about it, any business, any organization is born at a certain point in time. And there are things that are possible and things that aren't.
You can almost think of it as like living within an envelope of constraints. So, 30 years ago, if I wanted to get a video message to millions of people. I had to be Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Sky News. I mean I had to own satellites and production equipment and camera crews all over the world. Huge investment required to do that.
Fast forward to today and if I want to get a message that's compelling to 30 million people, you know, I can pick up my device. Hopefully I'm talented enough that I can post it on Instagram or wherever if it goes viral, Voilà. And what have you spent almost nothing.
And that to me is an example of the kind of inflection point that overtakes businesses sometimes before they're really aware of it. Because we built our assumptions around what's possible at the time those assumptions were formed. And when those assumptions change, it's super easy to miss them.
Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I mean, the pace of change is absolutely accelerating. We've got technologies, markets, access to capital. Think about we're filming this a couple of weeks into January. If you think about the first three Wednesdays of January, you had a riot on the Capitol, an impeachment, and an inauguration, and that's just the political side of change.
Is it the inflection points? Are they coming more frequently? Is it the number of inflection points that are happening right now that's making it so dynamic or is it the intensity of these inflection points or both?
Rita Gunther McGrath: Yeah, I kind of go with intensity, right? If I go back to my media example, to think that in the span of just a couple of decades, you went from something that was literally a multimillion-dollar, tens of million dollar required investment to something where any kid on a scooter can do it for nothing.
You know, that to me is just an intensity level of inflection point that I don't think we've really adjusted to. The other thing I would argue is that these inflection points happen before our institutions catch up. And there's always a lag between what's possible, human and technology wise, and what the regulators are there to provide and what is happening with institutions.
So an example that's playing out right now is the whole conversation about personal privacy, the data mining and advertising business that's made out of money, people's personal data and the whole third party data selling kind of things. And in my book, I talk about this as an issue where, you know, institutions and the public in general, just haven't caught up to practice.
So if I go all the way back in time and look at the previous regime, like, what was privacy, how was ...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo's first ever Chief Design Officer and author of the new book, The Human Side of Innovation. Mauro and I talk about the human aspects of innovation and the importance of love in the innovation process. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo's Chief Design Officer and author of The Human Side of Innovation
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Mauro Porcini. He is PepsiCo's first ever Chief Design Officer, and author of the new book, The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People. Welcome to the show.
Mauro Porcini: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure.
Brian Ardinger: I am super excited to have you on the show. I'm big fan of PepsiCo and your work prior at 3M, and you've got this new book out and I wanted to have a conversation about some of the things that you've seen in this world of innovation. How do you define innovation?
Mauro Porcini: That's a good question. Every time you touch, you start score, every time you take something, anything, it could be a product, it could be an experience, it could be an institution, anything in your life. You try to change. And now this change could be directed in a positive way. It could go in a negative way. It could be a major change. Destructive but true as we call those kind changes in innovation world. It could be very incremental, very minimum, but anything you do, the change, the status quo is innovation by definition.
Brian Ardinger: I like that definition because you know, I think a lot of people get hung up on the fact that innovation, they think it has to be the biggest change in the world. It's I've got to come up with the next flying car. But you talk about in your book, innovation is not just about that. It's about incremental improvements. It's just creating value in change.
Mauro Porcini: This point we are both making right now, I think is extremely important because often people out there, media, opinion leaders, are looking at companies investing in innovation, and if they don't produce the next iPhone, they're like, well, they're failing. They're not really extracting the value that they should from that innovation team, that design team, whatever is the form shape of that innovation organization.
And instead, in many situations that innovation is more in the genetic code of the company. Is happening so many different ways in the way you serve a customer. In the way you build experiences. In the way you promote your brands, or you build new ones. Or eventually also in some small incremental products that make your portfolio more meaningful, more relevant. Or financially more interesting for you and your shareholders or more strategic for your company.
So, it's very, very important to make this point. I read a few articles recently. They were attacking and challenging companies that were not producing the next iPhone after these loud investments in the innovation machine. And the reality, many of those companies are actually different companies today than today than what they were in the past. Thanks to that innovation culture that they built.
Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. I heard you talk about design and that great design comes from this earnest desire to make other people happy. Can you expand on that a little bit?
Mauro Porcini: That's how everything started. Thousands of years ago when the first act of innovation or design, because for me, are exactly the same thing happened. When the historic man or woman. Who knows if it was a man or if it was a woman, for the first time, took something that was available in nature, a stone, and modified that to give it a different destination of use. To use the stone as a more effective hunting tool. Or a tool to prepare the food. Or later on to decorate your body. Or later on to celebrate your gods.
By the way, just mentioned, three different dimensions of the Maslow Pyramid. You know, the bottom of the pyramid that is about survival and is safety and is your physiological needs. The center is about self-expression, the connection with others. And then the top that is about something that transcend yourself is bigger than you.
Yeah. And so already those utensils made out of stones were serving specific needs. They were all about reaching your happiness. Because the Maslow Pyramid, at the end of the day, the needs Pyramid is all about reaching what we call today happiness. If you work in all these dimensions. So already back innovation or design was an of love. This is how I start. Also, the book, innovation is an act of love.
An act of love towards yourself. If you were creating this for yourself, but obviously already back then, we were organized in little communities. We have people around us. We wouldn't have the concept of family yet, but you were creating these products also for the people around you. It was an act of love for them as well. And then you started to create more and more product by yourself. At a certain point, there were so many products. You needed help. You needed to start delegating the creation of those products to other people.
And then over there, hundreds of years and thousands of years, we started to organize ourselves in different communities. We invented the idea of work. We invented companies. Then later on brands. And so, what happened when that started to happen is that essentially you start to put scale. Literally scale between you innovator and the people that you love and that you are serving.
The scale plays the distance between the two of you and the love started to get lost in translation in the scale. And instead of love, you started to change love with profit and financial revenue and other things. And so, in the name of profit, eventually you could create products that eventually were not ideal for the people you wanted to serve.
But products that eventually you could extract as much financial value as possible out of. And so, this is what has been happening for hundreds of years, more recently. That we are surrounded by so many mediocre products and services and brands and experiences because they were created in the name of profit instead of the name of love.
What is changing today is that we live in a world, where if you don't create the ideal extraordinary, excellent solution for people needs and wants, the solution could be once again, a product, service, a brand, or experience. Somebody else will do it on your behalf. Why this was not happening 20 years ago, 30 years ago was simply because if you were a big company, you could protect your product. With big barrier to entry. Made of scale of production, of distribution, and communication.
Today. Instead, anybody out there can come up with an idea, get easy access to funding through kickstarter.com or their proliferation in...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lorraine Marchand. Lorraine is the author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset. She and I discuss how innovation starts, how you can build your muscle of innovation through exploration and experimentation, and much more. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best in the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Lorraine Marchand, Author of The Innovation Mindset
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Lorraine Marchand. She is executive managing director of Merative, which is formerly IBM Watson Health. And she's author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry. Welcome to the show, Lorraine.
Lorraine Marchand: Thank you, Brian. Really happy to be here.
Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you. You have been in this space for a while. For the past three decades, you have been in product development, working with companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and Covance, and Cognizant. How did you get involved in the realm of innovation?
Lorraine Marchand: Well, it started when I was actually pretty young. I was reared by my dad, who was an inventor. And when I was growing up around the house, he would always challenge my brother and me, to find three solutions to every problem, usually problems that he would identify. And one summer morning, he really brought that point close to home. And he took us to a local diner called the Hot Shops Cafeteria in Wheaton, Maryland.
And our job was to determine what was slowing down table turnover. So we sat in the big red vinyl booths eating our breakfast of scrambled eggs and orange juice. And after three days of using our stopwatches and writing down notes, and even interviewing waitresses and bus boys, we determined that the culprit was sugar packets. People were spewing them all over the place.
True to his tenant that we had to find three solutions we did. And we ended up taking one to an MVP, minimal viable prototype. And that was the sugar cube. And we ended up selling it to the Hot Shops cafeteria that summer, and pretty soon it was distributed throughout the Baltimore Washington area.
So early on, I learned that problem solving was fun and lucrative. And fast forward throughout my career, whether it was at the National Institutes of Health or Bristol Myers Squibb, or founding my own startups and the diagnostics and ophthalmology area, I found that I really did love this idea of being able to clearly define a problem, and then as my dad had taught me kind of systematically evaluate and choose solutions.
And to me, the heart of the innovation mindset that I write about is an insatiable curiosity, a passion for problem solving, and embracing change. And so I have found myself, whether in large corporations or in startups, desiring to be that agent of change and bringing that problem solving methodology that I learned so early at the age of 13 with me in all of my career endeavors.
Brian Ardinger: I love that story and I love, you have this in the book that one of the key mindset essential steps is this innovation starts with at least three ideas. Can you talk a little bit more about why it takes more than one idea to get something going and that process?
Lorraine Marchand: You know, I like to say that first of all, your first two ideas, one of them is probably a solution that you've already been mulling over before you even confirmed that you had a problem. Because I find that we, as human beings, love to go into solutioning mode before we've really carefully defined the problem.
So, if you are making your way around a problem, you probably have a bias in terms of what one of the solutions is. The second solution is always to do nothing, right? The competition is always the default, the status quo, I'm not going to change.
So right there, you already have number one and two. So you have to be true to the problem solving discipline and this idea of brainstorming and coming up with the three solutions, because it could be that third one that is the winner. If you go a little bit beyond the three, I'm okay with that, but I don't allow my students or any of the individuals I coach to cheat and come up with fewer than three. That you can't do
Brian Ardinger: That makes perfect sense. Like you said, you've been in this space for a long time and you've, you've helped create products, you've helped create companies and that. What are some of the biggest maybe obstacles or misconceptions that people have about innovation and starting this particular process.
Lorraine Marchand: I think a lot of people are intimidated that they think that innovation has to be at the hands of some of the quintessential greats like Edison and Jobs and Musk and Gates, etc. And so, the first thing I like to do is educate and inform individuals that not all forms of innovation are disruptive. They're not all big hunt.
And it is absolutely honorable, and it could be your style of innovation to create incremental improvements. To do more renovation, retooling something for another type of use case. To be optimizing, which actually my story about the Hot Shops Cafeteria, truly if I'm honest about it, it's more about optimizing than truly innovating.
But I'm okay with that because like you, I'm very passionate about just encouraging more people to access the freedom, the excitement, the job satisfaction that comes from innovating. And I'm okay to use a broader set of terminology in order to attract more people to just find ways to get started. So that's the first thing. I think people are really put off by that.
And then I think that a lot of innovators find that it's very difficult to do customer research. Where do I find the customer? How do I talk to them? Do they want to talk to me? How do I really write a question guide that doesn't bias them toward my solution? So that's one that is very difficult to do, and I find that a lot of individuals will gloss over it.
You know, I, I say you have to talk to a hundred customers. And my students look at me with their eyes crossed going, I can't possibly do that. I can't even find five. And I say, well, how are you going to sell your product if you can only find five people to talk to about it? Okay. Right there.
And then I would say the other area is pivot. I'm a real fan of pivoting you never fail. Some people will argue with me, but I like to say, you don't fail if you're constantly adjusting your strategy based on the data, based on the market dynamics, and you're moving in the direction where you keep learning and improving what you're doing and moving it closer to the customer. We don't fail, we pivot. But a lot of founders, fail to see the warning signs. That maybe things aren't taking off the way they thought. And so pivoting too late can be pretty dangerous. ...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kevin Strauss, Author of Innovate The 1%. We talk about Kevin's experiences creating products in the biomedical space, as well as his background as the founder of Uchi, a social app designed to strengthen relationships and behaviors. We also talk about the importance of both mental and physical health in the innovation process. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Kevin Strauss, Author of Innovate The 1%
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Kevin Strauss. He is the author of Innovate The 1%: Seven Areas to Nurture for Success. Welcome to the show, Kevin.
Kevin Strauss: Thanks a lot, Brian. I'm glad to be here.
Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. You are a innovator, an author, emotional health and wellness expert. Founder. How did you get involved and excited about this whole innovation space.
Kevin Strauss: I think it's a combination of a few things. And I really have to bring it back to my father. As a kid, and for the first 18 years of my life, I would just follow him around and be his little helper and we would just get into every kind of project around the house possible.
And that led to the engineering degree and just problem solving. And not only problem solving, but coming up with other ideas, because my dad would do that a lot. Where he would just want to do something in the house. It wasn't solving a problem, but it was just creating something that he wanted to see, you know, in the home.
So, I think that's where it really got started.
Brian Ardinger: You have a little bit different career. You're not in the software space per se. And you spent a lot of time in the health tech space. So, give us a little background on how you went from engineering to where you are now.
Kevin Strauss: It started with engineering. He always loved the mechanical side of things, but I've always been fascinated with the human body and like how it all works and everything. That's when I went straight to a biomedical engineering degree, and I just love all that. Ended up getting like a dream job out of graduate school designing total hip replacement. So that launched me into medical device.
But then there was a time that I was working at a company, where we were doing a lot of grant research. And these grants were funded by NIH. And we would come up with ideas, whatever they happen to be, and propose them. And if we won the grant, we'd do the research with the ultimate hope of bringing it to US society as a product, as a company.
And in that time, I was thinking a lot about my dating life, which wasn't working out so well back then. And I was trying to figure out why my dating life wasn't working out. You know, I boil it all down to self-esteem of the people I was dating, but then 15 years later, figuring out it was my own self-esteem issues. That was also part of the problem.
And it's putting all of that together and understanding why people do what they do. In 2001, it really boiled to the top where I had an epiphany that it seemed to me that most arguments occurred because people weren't sharing their true thoughts and feelings. Right.
And that really took me into this other direction. We were doing some human behavior modification work at that company with the grant research. But I just kept pursuing that on my own. And with the work I was doing at the office. And trying to understand why people do what they do. Why do I do what I do?
Where's all this behavior coming from? And that led me down a 20-year rabbit hole, which is understanding human behavior, which I really attributed to emotional health. It sent me down that path of emotional health and relationships and connection, and that's what's really driving behavior, and that's what led to the Uchi App, which is a tool to help strengthen relationships.
Brian Ardinger: Your background again, you've been in product development. You have 80 patents to your name, I believe. And peer reviewed in a variety of different areas. And so, you've been at the forefront of taking an early stage idea and creating products around it. It's interesting to see the pivot that you've made into the human side of that. And it's not just about figuring out what feature to build or whatever, but it's about the team and it's about other things. So maybe talk a little bit about the book, Innovate the 1%, and some of those areas that we need to nurture, whether we're developing a product or developing a dating life.
Kevin Strauss: The book became this like 20 years, 30 years of my career and everything that I've learned in, solving problems, and bringing products solutions to fruition. But when I actually sat down to finally write the book, I ended up writing the book in 39 days because it was just dumping, like brain dumping everything down. So, when you have an idea and you start executing on it, that actually happens to be chapter seven of the book, which is Strike While the Iron is Hot.
If you've got an idea, write it down. Talk it out with people. Play with it. You know, don't let it just, oh, I'll remember that later. I can't tell you how many ideas I've had, you know, in the middle of the night or driving, and I'm like, oh, I'll definitely remember this. This is amazing. And then I completely have no idea what that idea was.
But you know, the first chapter is where it gets started, which is identify the problem first. Until you identify the true root problem, you're not going to actually solve it. And so often what we're doing in society is we think we know the problem, but it's actually just the symptom. And that's what behaviors are. Behaviors are only symptoms of a deeper problem. And what I learned in my career is once you identify the true root problem, the solutions are usually shockingly simple. And that's how I've been able to come up with like 80 patents.
Brian Ardinger: Can you gimme some examples of how you go through that particular process to pull away the onion and figure out what is that core root problem?
Kevin Strauss: So, asking why. And I think there's like different schools of thought, like three whys or seven whys. I probably ask like 50 whys. You know, like I just don't ever stop. Like, is this really what we're trying to get to and talk to the right people about it. You know, I mean, for a lot of these medical devices, it's not just about talking to the surgeon, right? The orthopedic or neurosurgeon when it comes to all these spinal implants and all. It's talking to the scrub tech, the nursing staff.
You know, we would have meetings with the central supply at a hospital because central supply is the one who cleans the instruments. And if they can't clean the instrument properly, you know, you could transmit infection and...
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Neil Soni is the author of The Startup Gold Mine: How to Tap the Hidden Innovation Agendas of Large Companies to Fund and Grow Your Business. Neil spent years with startups, focusing on the sales and marketing side, trying to sell into large organizations. He then moved to Estee Lauder, where he specialized in external innovation. After seeing both sides, Neil wanted to create a resource to help startups understand the corporate side and corporations to understand the startup side.
- - Neil Soni will be at the IO2022 Innovation Accelerated, Lincoln, NE - Sept 19-20. - -
Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Cofounder, spoke with Neil about how to succeed through corporate/startup collaboration.
Pitfalls of Corporate and Startup collaboration
- Different timeframes
- Size of deals
Incentive structures for partnerships
- How comfortable is the corporate team in innovating? If comfortable, they’ll have a higher tolerance for misses. Look at the entire portfolio.
- Companies that allow intrapreneurship, give employees new outlets to thrive.Should you expose corporates to startups?
- Inside large companies (10,000+) it’s an echo chamber. They only see direct competitors.
- Need someone looking outside at competition. Expose the corporate team to new ways of startup thinking.
- Startups also get exposure to see how their tech can apply to different domains.In The Startup Gold Mine Book
- Understand what is going on behind the scenes. What is your corporate counterpart doing?
- How is your colleague rewarded or punished? Are they paid for the home run? Are they new to the company?
- Corporations have been very interested in the book to shed light on the startup side.
- Reduce the language barrier between corporates and startups.To connect with Neil go to neilsoni.com or on Twitter at @therealneils. You can also get his book, The Startup Gold Mine on Amazon.
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Originally released April 2019 -
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Hussain Almossawi, author of the Innovator's Handbook. Hussain and I talk about the common misconceptions about innovation and how some of the best brands in the world approach design and the creative process let's get started.
Don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated Sept 19-20, 2022 - Lincoln, NEInside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Hussain Almossawi, Author of the Innovator's Handbook
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Hussain Almossawi. He is the author of a new book called The Innovator's Handbook: A Short Guide to Unleashing your Creative mindset. Welcome Hussain.
Hussain Almossawi: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
Brian Ardinger: You are an award-winning designer, creative director, consultant. You work with companies like Nike and Apple and Google and, and many other well-known brands. I think I'd love to start the conversation with are these companies that you've worked with, that we know as creative and innovative as we think they are. Or do they struggle with innovation, like the rest of us?
Hussain Almossawi: Innovation is a process. And it's all about the mindset. What I really saw in these companies was we do see this big and huge brands with maybe like thousands of employees that work for them. The reality is that it's all made up of small teams. And these small teams are made up of five or six people.
And that's where like innovation happens at the core of those companies. What I really saw in these companies was failure after failure, after failure. Trying to reach to a vision that was set. And then throughout that process and throughout that journey being flexible and going from point A to B to C. And having that flexibility to move forward and push things forward. And that's really where innovation happens.
Brian Ardinger: It's pretty interesting. And we'll maybe dig into some of the examples and that, from what you've seen, that works and that. But you've got a new book out. Same time as my book, it's called the Innovator's Handbook. I love the design of it. It's a square book. Which is kind of unique to the marketplace and that. So, you spent a lot of time and care in the design and creativity of the book. So, I really appreciate that. But I wanted to dig into the content. Talk us through why somebody should pick up a book on innovation when there's so many out there. What makes this one different?
Hussain Almossawi: Sure. So, so for me as a designer and like growing up as an aspiring designer, I always looked at innovation as just like everybody else as something that really wows you. And is something that's amazing.
And you want to take parts in it and you want to innovate and become an innovator. But at the same time, you kind of feel lost and don't know how to do it. So, it just feels very overwhelming, especially when you're first starting out. Throughout my career, working with these different companies, working with amazing teams and brilliant minds.
What I wanted to do was to kind of break it down into simple insights that help shift your mindset when you're innovating. And innovation isn't supposed to be complex or difficult or hard. There are small things that you can do or understand that will allow you to, to think outside the box. For example, I'm speaking about myself, from my perspective. When I was designing and trying to innovate growing up, I always wanted to reinvent the wheel.
I always wanted to do things very different, but that's not the case with innovation. With innovation, you can take things that already exist, see how you can evolve them. Take two different products that exist in the market. See how you can bring them together. There's always room for improvement. So this idea and concept of doing something that is groundbreaking and never done before, that's not really true with innovation. But it seems that way, especially for young designers.
I mean, my book is geared towards young designers and aspiring designers, fresh out of college. And I want to share those perspectives and things that I saw that I wish I knew like 15 years ago. So that's like one thing. Do you evolve a product? Do you act or do you react. Do I come up with a groundbreaking product or do I create something that I'm building on something that's out there? That's like one point.
Brian Ardinger: I think that's one of the, the most important points that when I talk to folks, when it comes to innovation is getting a clear definition of what innovation means. I think a lot of us immediately jump to, I've got to come up with the, the new flying car kind of concept. When you're saying that innovation starts a lot of times at just incremental improvements and optimizing and looking at things slightly differently.
And I, I think that's such a great way to approach innovation because it does open it up to anybody who has opportunity to make those types of changes. You don't have to be, you know, the Steve Jobs or the Elon Musk of the world to actually innovate.
Hussain Almossawi: Absolutely. I mean, even like with successful brands, like Apple and automotive companies and all those, if you look at the products that they've done the past 10, 20 years, it's always incremental changes and it's always improving one thing after the other.
And I saw that a lot, like being in the footwear industry, with the different brands. It was year after year, we had the same story. Like for example, it was a shoe about lightweight. In 2020, what does lightweight look like? 2021, it looks a bit different because the technology is different. We failed a bit. We've learned a bit from the past, from the things we did in 2020
So now 2021, we have a better shoe. 2022 is a better shoe and so on. So, there's always room for improvement and technology's always growing. There are new materials. There's new process. Collaboration. The idea of collaboration is huge in innovation. You meet new people, you get different perspectives, you learn new stuff. And you bring all those back into the process and into the design of the product.
One interesting thing that we did like in the footwear industry, and it's done in different industries. For example, in footwear, let's say we were talking about a good shoe. What we would do is like, look at the, how are seat belts made? Look at the automotive industry. Look at the aerospace industry. Then look at things that really have nothing to do with footwear, but bring those ideas back into footwear and build something out of it. And that really leads to us asking better questions, understanding the process better, and coming up with innovative and groundbreaking ideas.
Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting topi...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alla Weinberg, Author of the new book, A Culture of Safety: Building a Work Environment Where People Can Think Collaborate and Innovate. Alla and I talk about how companies can increase their efficiencies, their collaboration, and their velocity of output, simply by focusing on developing physical, emotional, and psychological safety in the workplace.
- Alla Weinberg will be speaking at IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated - Sept 19-20 - Lincoln, NE -
Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript of Alla Weinberg, Author of A Culture of Safety
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Alla Weinberg. She is Author of A Culture of Safety: Building a Work Environment Where People Can Think Collaborate and Innovate. Welcome to the show.
Alla Weinberg: Thanks, Brian. So happy to be here.
Brian Ardinger: I am excited to have you here. One of the things I was doing in preparation for this particular call, was I was looking at your website. You're a founder of a company called Spoke and Wheel where you help companies build cultures, where people feel safe and respected and able to do their best work. And you have a quote on your website that 82% of employees don't trust their boss to tell the truth. Clearly that's a problem.
Alla Weinberg: So that's the problem
Brian Ardinger: I wanted to start there. What's the state of today's workplace?
Alla Weinberg: I think especially with COVID and, the very sudden move to remote work, it's even harder to build trust with coworkers, with employees, because we don't even see each other in person anymore.
And if you want to have those social interactions, that has to be very intentional. So, you have to create a meeting and set that on the calendar. And a lot of times trust is built over time in those very small moments. That I remembered, you know, that you had an anniversary and I wished you a happy anniversary because we had a conversation about that, where I asked about how, you know, the health of your dog is doing. Small life things that just get built up in the very small moments, that get built up over time. And we're definitely missing that right now in our work environments, especially virtually.
Brian Ardinger: It has definitely changed the workspace, but that this was affecting before COVID. There was a lot of issues around trust and safety and things like, let's go back a little bit in time and tell us how you got involved in writing and focused on this particular subject.
Alla Weinberg: So, I got inspired to write this book based on my own experience. I spent two years working in a global multinational enterprise level company, where I felt unsafe for two years. And it started to really affect my health, my mental health, my physical health, my emotional health. And it got to the point where I didn't want to physically, when we still are doing that, go to the office, go to work anymore.
And I eventually ended up leaving that experience. And from that, I've really decided, Hey, you know, the way that we're working together now isn't working. I want to help people like myself create work environments where they feel safe, where you want to go to work, where you can do your best work. And you're really excited to do the work together.
And the other thing is that I realized is especially in a corporate world, it's very, still very much focused on the individual. You know, we have individual performance reviews. We have individual bonuses as bonus structures, promotions, et cetera. But very little of the work that we do is really at the individual level. We have to do work in teams together with other people. And that's where things tend to fall apart. That's where there's a lot of room for improvement, I think.
Brian Ardinger: So, what does a culture of safety look like? You mentioned a couple different things in your experience where not only psychological safety, emotional safety, physical safety, what does a culture of safety look like?
Alla Weinberg: Culture of safety and as you mentioned, looks like three different and three different levels. So physical safety, meaning I feel safe in my body. Like it feels like I fit in. It feels that I belong regardless of size, of color, of gender, of age, of the number of art that I have on my body. You know, my body can fit in and I feel safe in my body.
And this is biologically how we're wired. Because, you know, tens of thousands of years ago, we used to live in tribes, and we relied on that group to survive. So, people in the tribe looked out for us, literally for our physical safety. So, if a lion was coming or a different member from a different tribe was coming to attack us, we would be protected by other people.
And so, it's still to this day, how our brain is wired. So, when we're at work, we want to still feel that other people will value our physical bodies and that we're safe with them. And safety in itself just means I'm internally relaxed. My nervous system is relaxed. I'm not anxious, worried on alert, ready to fight or flight.
I feel open. I feel open to connection. I feel open to new ideas. This is where innovation comes in. There's a sense of relaxation around that. And I'm not worried about, Hey, how do I say something to this person? Should I say anything? What do I say? If I say anything at all. There's no like strategizing or calculating that's happening in the background.
And part of that is being able to share your feelings with someone and that's a very vulnerable thing to do, but it's very much missing from the workplace. Trust comes from sharing vulnerably. So, if I say to you, Hey, you know, it really hurts my feelings when you don't reply to my Slack messages, I'm being vulnerable and I'm sharing my feelings.
But I'm also saying to you in a lot of ways, I want to connect with you. I want to have a good working relationship with you. This is what's going on. And if I can say that and feel like you can receive it, you know, well, and you're like, Oh wow. You know, I really didn't know that you were feeling that way. We can have a conversation about it.
Then next time, when I have an idea, I'll feel much safer to say too. It's like, Oh, I have this idea about this direction we should go in. What do you think? I won't think twice. I won't hesitate. I won't to calculate when sharing that idea.
Brian Ardinger: Can you give me some examples of where these particular types of safety come into play. Where can companies actually start redefining or looking, or even evaluating where they stand when it comes to these types of safety?
Alla Weinberg: Yeah. I've actually been thinking a lot about that this morning. Funnily enough, I wanted to write a series of posts about where do you begin. Where does...
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Doug Shapiro, VP of Research and Insights at OFS. Doug and I talk about some of the trends in office design, the importance of developing workspaces that foster creativity, and some resources that you can use to plan both your work and your home environment. Let's get started.
Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.
Interview Transcript with Doug Shapiro, VP of Research and Insights at OFS
Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. And I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. We have another amazing guest was always. Today we have Doug Shapiro. He is the VP of Research and Insights at OFS, which is a sustainable office furniture manufacturer. And also, the host of a podcast called Imagine a Place. So welcome to the show, Doug.
Doug Shapiro: Hey, thanks. Super excited to be here.
Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you, because you know oftentimes on our show, we talk a lot about innovation and talk about product design. And I'm fascinated by your background in this idea of place design. And designing environments that can be innovative or creative and spur that. So, I wanted to have you on the show on that. I think I wanted to start with the first question, how has the idea of place and especially the workplace changed over the years that you've worked in this space?
Doug Shapiro: Well, the idea of place has evolved as we've kind of taken in also new data around not just an understanding of what place does first. But even new data around how place affects us from a health standpoint. From a mental standpoint, we understand the impact of biophilia on our brains and things like that, that we really haven't understood as deeply in the past.
So, there's some scientific evolution and then there's also cultural evolution of really understanding the purpose of place and what it means for our workforce. I mean, we've all kind of gone through that here recently, where it just used to be this thing you had to go to every day to get your work done.
And of course, that's evolved into being much more of a, of a center for collaboration and creativity. That's the part that I'm super passionate about is how does place support creativity. So, I'd love to get into that today with you.
Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that. So, you know, in the past, you hear a lot about open office complex and, and this idea of collaboration and that. And you seem to have folks that really enjoy that particular way of working. And now you are seeing people, you know, working at their homes and that. What are some of the things that really make a place work for somebody?
Doug Shapiro: The most important word I would say is choice. Because, you know, if you track your activities throughout a day, it's rare that you're gonna spend an entire day engaged in one part of your brain doing that same activity over and over again, right.
If that's the case, you don't really need a lot of choices, but the reality is there's moments where you need peace and quiet. There are moments where you need energy. There are moments where you need to be with others. And then we also have our own neurodiversity about us. I mean, some people are very hyposensitive. And they need high energy environments. And other people are hypersensitive, and they need to be in places that are more relaxed to do their best work.
So, the key is choice. I think that's the way you make environments work for people today. I'm really drawn to this evolution away from knowledge work into creative work. And I think that's a major change we're seeing in workplace today. I think it's really heavily driven by AI and the impact of AI on our jobs. So that's something I'd love to kind of get in with you and explore and see how we're moving from knowledge work to creative work.
Brian Ardinger: So, tell me a little bit about what you're seeing with the clients that you're working with. And the things that you design to make it effective in that particular environment.
Doug Shapiro: I think it's really, almost like a, a major cultural change to embrace maybe how far we have to go to be great at creative work. I actually, I've thought about this. Knowledge work. That phrase has been around since the fifties. Peter Drucker coined it. And what we're going through today, in fact, I heard this really cool statistic from Workplace Economic Forum, that 40% of people, office workers, feel that their jobs will become irrelevant in the next five years.
That's a huge number. And so, the way I thought about looking at it is it's really not that 40% of jobs will be irrelevant, but 40% of the way you do your job right now will become irrelevant in five years. Meaning, so in, in 10 years, we're probably not going to do the jobs that we do now, the same way we do them. Right. It'll evolve. And I think AI is at the, is the undercurrent kind of shifting that.
Brian Ardinger: Obviously the pandemic and, and COVID and the move to work at home has currently changed that. And I think if you would've had that question posed, you know, three years ago, how much your work would've changed. You know, most people are now very comfortable on zoom and, and all this kind of stuff. And all of that is accelerated and changed the way we work. I hear what you're saying when it comes to that, and I can see it even evolving faster over the years to come.
Doug Shapiro: I agree. I think the pace will increase. So, you know, how does an environment respond to that sort of pace? Agility is, is that the key of that, you know. Investing less in physical structures that are anchored and permanent. But more in tools and structures that have the ability to keep pace with change. So, we're seeing that. We're seeing this sort of phrase soft architecture kind of emerge where people are investing in forms of separation and space creation that are more mobile and easier to manipulate. Really even from a day-to-day standpoint.
So that's one way space is, is evolving. I feel like our biggest challenge is how do we get as good at creative work as we've become at knowledge work? That's the big, big shift I'm thinking about. Because I feel like our whole office system, our culture, it was based on efficiency, recording, passing, storing information. Using logic to make decisions like that was what the office culture was built on. And that is key to being great at knowledge work being great at creative work is a whole different animal and requires, I mean, it's really a sea change we're looking at.
Brian Ardinger: It's interesting you phrase it that way because it very much maps to why corporates are typically not very good at innovation. You know, they've developed systems and that in place for exploitation. You know, they figured out a business model that works. They optimize for it. They hire for it. They do all that. And innovation is very much the opposite.
Very much like you said, the creative side of things where you're in ...
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