On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and I talk about hiring talent, tips on growth, why everything looks the same, and why nobody wants advertisements on their refrigerators. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger and Mile Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Podcast Interview Transcript by Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

[00:00:35] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and I have our co-host Robyn Bolton. How are you, Robyn? 

[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: I am good. I've been busy playing Boston Tourist. I've had my sister and her family in town, so we have done all the Boston touristy things, the Freedom Trail, the Duck Tours, visiting our respective alumni colleges. All of that fun stuff. 

[00:01:05] Brian Ardinger: Plenty of Samuel Adams?

[00:01:07] Robyn Bolton: As our duck boat guy tour pointed out, Sam Adams is buried in the old grainery bearing ground, but across the street is a bar. The only place in Boston, you can enjoy a cold Sam Adams while looking at a cold Sam Adams. 

[00:01:20] Brian Ardinger: I have been to that bar and did that exact thing. Yes, it was quite fun.

[00:01:23] Robyn Bolton: Excellent. And how are things in your neck of the woods?

[00:01:26] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I've been spending a lot of time focused on hiring and interviewing folks, so last podcast we're in this process of hiring our new Catalyst interns for the year. In addition to that, I'm on a selection committee for hiring for somebody in the startup ecosystem.

And what it's got me thinking about is how job hunting has changed and trying to find candidates. And then secondly, like hiring for innovation roles and how that differs than hiring in your traditional roles or a known quantity. It's really opened my eyes, not only for myself, but like people on the committee, how they think differently about hiring for these particular roles.

You know, focused on curiosity or speed of learning. And when you're looking at candidates, how do you figure out who possesses those particular types of skills and that 

[00:02:12] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, no, it is a real challenge. I used to, at Clayton Christensen's firm, for a while I was in charge of recruiting and then kind of shifted on to the hiring committee. And it really is a challenge because I'd be looking for people who are interesting and have done unique things and kind of crazy wild things that you're like, wow, how did you come up with that idea?

And then I would have colleagues who'd be like, well, I'm not sure they have the PowerPoint skills. And I was always like, we can teach them PowerPoint, right? I don't want to have to teach someone how to think but can also see their point where it's like. I also don't want to teach you the basic skills of the job. It's a challenge. Yeah. 

[00:02:50] Brian Ardinger: The other thing is, the Catalyst intern role is early college students, and the other one is a more professional role. And so even between age and types of openings, trying to find what are those key levers and what can different people bring to the table when it comes to talent.

[00:03:05] Robyn Bolton: You're searching for unicorns.

[00:03:07] Brian Ardinger: Well, let's start the podcast with some of the things that we've read this week. One of the first articles that we wanted to talk about today came from Jeff Gothelf. He has a blog called Continuous Learning. He actually spoke at the 2019 IO Summit.

Jeff was talking about some experiences that he's seen, and the name of the blog post is No One Wants Ads on their Fridge. And it goes on to talk about how Samsung's latest innovation is an $1,800 fridge that shows advertisements. So the New Smart Fridge will be a walking billboard in your kitchen. He goes on to talk about why that may not be a good idea.

[00:03:43] Robyn Bolton: It kind of sounds like the worst idea ever because I still watch TV that has ads. Well, I mean, streaming still has ads. And when the commercials come on, that's when I go to the fridge. I don't want to see ads when I go to the fridge. And also, if I'm going to be forced to watch ads, I want the fridge to pay me. No, I don't want another billboard in my house. It's a terrible idea. 

[00:04:09] Brian Ardinger: It makes you wonder that Samsung's not a, a dumb corporation. How could they fall into this particular trap where they clearly probably didn't test this or if they did test it. It was testing for a different use case scenario than the majority of people I would imagine want in their kitchen. What are your thoughts on testing products and how this might have happened? 

[00:04:27] Robyn Bolton: I suspect you're right. Either they didn't test it or they tested a different kind of prototype, but I think it all goes back to what we've talked about before. Innovation is something new that creates value. So often I feel like companies forget that implied in that creating value is creating value for the customer, not just creating value for the company.

And so I feel like with Samsung, you said there are no dummies there. They're really smart folks, and they're like, Hey, this is innovation because it's creating value for us. I cannot comprehend a story where it's creating value for the customer. 

[00:05:04] Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It will be interesting to see, obviously, they have a lot of products and they're probably thinking, well, how do we leverage what's on your TV into the living room, into the kitchen? And then obviously the proof will be in the pudding as far as how do they execute this. But just like Jeff, I think the thing that struck our minds was this can't be a good idea. So, we'll see if an or becomes one. 

[00:05:22] Robyn Bolton: Well, and now I'm imagining ads following me of, you know, I get up while there's, you know, a Domino's Pizza ad and it just follows me to the fridge to be like, or you could have Digiorno in the freezer.

[00:05:32] Brian Ardinger: Well, and then you'll have AI-based Siri talking to you in the background, telling you what to do as well. So, alright, well, the second article, or actually it's not an article, it's a YouTube clip, Lenny's podcast. If you follow my newsletter. A lot of times, I've actually posted about Lenny and his newsletter. Does a great job of finding interesting guests and talking about interesting subjects.

His latest podcast is an interview with Albert Chang, who is head of growth at a variety of different subscription-based companies like Duolingo and Grammarly, and I think currently at Chess.com. And his interview with Albert really talks about the growth role within a corporation and how do you find like hidden growth opportunities in your product?

I encourage folks to go out and take a listen to the entire interview, because it goes through a lot of different topics. But ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about how an 86-year-old musical is creating a billion-dollar payoff for a bold innovator, how robots are helping 7-Eleven manage the labor crunch, and how AI work slop is damaging the progress AI is promising. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Mile Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

[00:00:45] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me, I have our co-host, Robyn Bolton. Welcome Robyn.

[00:00:52] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here as always.

[00:00:55] Brian Ardinger: We were together this week at the Bolt Conference in Indianapolis. This is a conference that's put on by gener8tor, a group of folks out of Madison and Milwaukee, and now I think they run over 300 accelerators around mostly non-tech hubs. They host a conference where they bring together startups and corporates to talk about all the amazing things that are going on. Investors can have a chance to invest in these companies, and two and a half days at the ballpark in Indianapolis to talk about innovations. Love to get your thoughts on it.

[00:01:27] Robyn Bolton: You know, the audience they brought together, as you were saying, of startups and VCs, and corporate innovators bringing all together into a very non-traditional space, which I think led to a lot of really interesting conversations. Because everybody was in a different element. And then a great mix of speakers. They had industry-specific keynotes, but then they also had hot takes, which were, you know, a whole variety of speakers giving five to seven-minute single-topic rapid-fire hot takes.

[00:02:00] Brian Ardinger: You got to do one of those hot takes.

[00:02:02] Robyn Bolton: I did do one of those hot takes, which I just love those little bite-sized nuggets of information and insight and stuff to think about.

[00:02:11] Brian Ardinger: A lot of the conversations were with other folks saying, am I crazy, or is the world crazy? 

[00:02:17] Robyn Bolton: And yes, and we did a lot of reassuring of, you are not crazy. The world is crazy. And you're also not alone. There are other people asking the same questions, and go find the other people. They're not just here at this conference. They're in your organization too.

[00:02:36] Brian Ardinger: Some of the themes that obviously were AI and all the new technologies that are changing different parts of different industries. It was interesting to see different industry takes and being in a venue, a lot of times you go to conferences and you hear only about one side or one industry, and it was nice to be able to sit in an audience and see across healthcare and see across ag and see across manufacturing, and see what was resonating.

One of the biggest things that's resonating is this idea that opportunity exists where there is dissatisfaction. And there's a lot of dissatisfaction in markets, in the politics, in the world around us. And so there's no better time to start build, try and do some stuff. 

[00:03:13] Robyn Bolton: The keynote speaker who kicked off the day, Gary Cooper, he just had some great points, and a couple that I wrote down are chaos is not in opposition to creativity, it is the precursor to it.

There's so much noise out there, and for each of us to try to be the signal in that age of noise of creating tangible, undeniable proof that better is possible and it's being built. And I thought that was just such a great message of yes, we're all feeling like the world has turned upside down, and the world is crazy. And we all have agency to do something about it, even in our small own individual way. 

[00:03:55] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I like that talk as well. I like the fact that he emphasized that startups and founders should be thinking less about their product and solution and more about their impact. I think oftentimes we forget about that, you know, or we start the journey that way, but then you get into the weeds of like, okay, what feature do I have to ship or whatever. And you oftentimes lose sight of the fact of what's the impact we're trying to do here, regardless of the solution we created around it. 

[00:04:18] Robyn Bolton: In the face of uncertainty, don't despair, build. And I just thought that was a great rallying cry for all of us. Regardless of where we play in this space.

[00:04:29] Brian Ardinger: We've got a couple of different articles that we're going to discuss today, as our normal convention suggests. So the first thing that we wanted to throw out, there's an article in Bloomberg called The Falls First blockbuster is an 86-year-old musical. I stumbled upon this with Trung Phan. He's on Twitter, and he does a great job with a Saturday newsletter. He calls SAT News on Substack.

He outlined what this article was and some of the things that are going on with the Sphere in Las Vegas. The Sphere, if anyone's not familiar with it, it's that big globe new venue that they built for two plus billion dollars in Vegas as a way to create unique, innovative experiences and the article and Trung's analysis walk through the idea of the Wizard of Oz and how the founders of the sphere bought the rights to that film and decided to recreate it so that could play in this unique venue. And the economics in that, that were behind this particular new innovation.

So James Dolan, he licensed the classic, and from the 1939 Classic, spent about a hundred million dollars adapting it for the LED screen there, and since August 28th when it launched, it's making about $2 million a day with a full target run of about a billion dollars over the course of the time that they're going to run it. 4,000 to 5,000 people are seeing it, and they're paying $150 to $200 each time. And it's really taken off, and it's pretty incredible. So, I'd love to get your thoughts on it. 

[00:05:59] Robyn Bolton: The numbers blew my mind. I mean, I knew of the Sphere. It's huge and you see it all the time whenever they show Vegas, but I knew of it mostly as a concert venue. You know, I think U2 has done a residency there, some other performers, and this was like, okay, this makes, you know, this makes sense. This is a cool event venue.

But then we're talking about the Wizard of Oz, which you can watch on tv, but then the numbers of how many people were going to see it and they're paying a $100 to $150 for a ticket to see a movie that they've probably seen who knows how many times, and can see for free on their phone. That this almost a hundred-year-old movie is going to make a billion dollars.

It was mind-boggling. And I think in Trung's post, he had a video from inside the Sphere during a viewing, and the hilarious thing is that everybody had their phones out. Videoing capturing the Wizard of Oz on the sphere, and as I'm watching it, I'm actually getting motion sick. It was just the mind-warping experience to see the numbers and se...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and Brian talk about why startups fail, the best workplaces for innovators, and the digital detox on college campuses. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Mile Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with Impact. Let's get started.

Podcast Interview Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

[00:00:40] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me, I have our co-host, Robyn Bolton. 

[00:00:46] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Glad to be here as always.

[00:00:48] Brian Ardinger: We are excited to continue on giving our audience the best insights into what we're seeing. 

[00:00:54] Robyn Bolton: Let's get to it. 

[00:00:55] Brian Ardinger: The first article is an article I read in Wildfire Labs called Why Startups Fail Patterns From $2 billion In Startup Failures.

In the article, it talks about some of the research that shows that failure patterns are more consistent than success patterns or success formulas, which makes sense. There's a lot more ways to fail and probably a lot more consistent ways to fail than there are ways to win. The article talks about like, how can startups be more focused on understanding where failure points are? And then what can you do about it?

They had some research in there. CB Insights took a look at startup failures and revealed that 42% failed due to no market need. 29% ran out of cash and 23% had team issues. So I think everybody can relate to those particular common problems and, and not only in the startup realm, but also in the corporate innovation realms. With that, what was your first take on the article? 

[00:01:48] Robyn Bolton: My first take was 42% failing because there's no market was like come on. Like step one is finding a problem that's worth solving. It should absolutely not be that high, but also knowing that people tend to fall in love with ideas and not problems, kind of not surprised.

[00:02:09] Brian Ardinger: It'd be interesting to see what that number is at the very beginning because actually might be higher than 42% because I think a lot of times we don't hear about the initial idea. Initial idea is probably closer to 90% and that's not right. Yes. When you first get off the ground and it's, you know, 42% by the first or second pivot.

Yes. I think that is a common issue. There's so many reasons why I've seen it manifest itself from the standpoint of like, again, you get somebody who's interested in a particular topic or they see something that bothers them and they start going off in a particular solution and don't necessarily realize that may be a problem, but it may be problem number 355 on the list of problems to solve. And therefore, you don't get market traction or enough immediate application to it to trying to solve that particular problems.

Doing things like customer discovery and making that a primary part of the first idea innovation efforts is probably a way to help mitigate that particular pitfall. 

[00:03:03] Robyn Bolton: I always say it's the hill I will die on. Start with talking to your customers or your desired customers and actually listen. You know, ask them open-ended questions and listen. Because I think we also all fall back on like, do you like this idea? And no one's going to call the baby ugly. They know you spent time on it. So you have to ask open-ended questions.

And the other thing, and I've seen this come up more and more in conversations that I'm having with other folks in the innovation space, is this realization that a lot of the tools that we use, especially in corporate innovation, you know, business model canvas, lean startup, things like that are actually best used to develop an idea of once you already know that there's a problem. And in the rush that both entrepreneurs and corporate innovators have of like, oh my gosh, we need to like do something, get something out in the market.

We have all these tools that are proven that are great for getting things out into the market. We naturally gravitate to the canvases and to the frameworks that are like, this is how you go do stuff. 

[00:04:06] Brian Ardinger: You can use those canvases in a way, even at the earliest stages, but you have to look at it from the standpoint of like, this is our best guess day one, and these are going to change, and as long as you're open to changing it. The reason why I do like those particular tool sets is that it is a little bit easier to change than, back in the day when you had to write a hundred page business plan and 65 Excel sheets to justify it. At least it's much easier to take a look at a business model and say, okay, I'm going to take that sticky note off because I talked to a customer and it's like idea wasn't exactly where it needs to be. So, we need to change the sticky note out and try something else or change the model in some way.

But I think a lot of people, again, they go through the. First canvas or the first iteration, and say, okay, this is the plan. We're going to execute the plan. Versus saying, this is a snapshot in time and our assumptions in time. How can we move this particular thing forward and make sure that the canvas maintains reality with what's going on in the marketplace? 

[00:04:57] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, and I think the key is. Post-it notes on the canvas, don't write on the canvas. 

[00:05:02] Brian Ardinger: Right.

[00:05:02] Robyn Bolton: Because then it feels permanent. Post-it notes. 

[00:05:05] Brian Ardinger: The other thing, in this particular article, they talk about solution sets or things, and I encourage people to go take a look at Wildfire Labs. Talk about a clever way to think about the major ways and pitfalls that folks go through. It's fail, fit, acquisition economics, internal alignment, and liquidity planning.

And so, I thought we could talk a little bit about each of those particular ways to checklist, I guess to look at a particular idea. So obviously fit, we just talked a little bit about it, but you know, how do you evaluate the solution? Is it urgent customer need or is it a minor inconvenience in trying to understand that relativity and the fit of the problem.

But not only that, but I think fit to the people trying to solve that problem. And you've probably seen this in the corporate realm as well. You know, a lot of companies go shooting off towards the, the shiny object, whether or not it's a fit for their company or they're good at it or whatever. 

[00:05:54] Robyn Bolton: So many companies when they start their innovation journey, so to speak. They're really hesitant to put any sort of constraints on the work. They're like, blue sky, do anything white space. And the reality is there's always constraints and those are actually really helpful.

Thinking about fit as ...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front-row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper-uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Miles Zero's Robyn Bolton. As we discussed, the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm Brian Ardinger, and today we have our co-host, Robyn Bolton, back. Welcome Robyn. 

[00:00:35] Robyn Bolton: Glad to be back. 

[00:00:37]  Brian Ardinger: We are excited to be back talking about innovation. We were ranked one of the top 15 corporate innovation podcasts out there, so I'm excited to continue this journey and helping our audience understand this world of innovation for this new format that we've been trying. Robyn came on as a co-host. Anything new going on in your world? 

[00:00:54] Robyn Bolton: I think you're being very humble. You weren't just kind of in the top 15 podcasts by a hair. You were... 

[00:01:01]  Brian Ardinger: I think we were four.

[00:01:02] Robyn Bolton: You were up there. 

[00:01:03]  Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It was a sweet spot. It was nice to be recognized.

[00:01:07] Robyn Bolton: Well, and they nailed it.

[00:01:09]  Brian Ardinger: One of the articles that I wanted to talk about today, and actually was a newsletter of a friend of mine, and people who've listened to podcasts or know of innovation, might know of David Bland.

He's the author of Testing Business Ideas, among other things. In his most recent newsletter. He had a little article talking about why most execs regret the projects they didn't cut. The gist of the article was talking about how every executive has a few projects that haunt them, and it's usually the ones that drag on too long and consume too much capital.

And we always hear about the winner, so to speak, and or not betting on the winner, but the idea of a portfolio of things that you've got within your corporate environment of things that you should cut or look at. Could it be a big win if we got rid of this thing? How do you prevent that burning capital on projects that you don't want or don't warrant additional investment and time, energy, and money?

I'd love to get your thoughts on what you've seen in the corporate environment and this idea of cutting your bets off or making sure that you don't continue bets down the wrong line. 

[00:02:07] Robyn Bolton: Sadly, I see it all the time. You know, we call them zombie projects. They're the living dead and sadly kind of the people that are staffed on them. Eventually figure it out. And I feel like they become zombies too. Zombie projects eat their brain.

The thing is, they are consuming really valuable resources. They're taking up the time of really smart people. They're taking up the funding that could be used to go to another great idea that has better potential.

I think back to my early days in P & G's kind of new business development group, in just one single BU, and I think there were probably, at one time, eight different projects, all new brands that were in different phases of development, and ultimately only Swiffer launched nationally and survived for several years.

There was another one called Dryel that launched but didn't quite survive the first several years, and then a whole bunch that just petered out, like you kind of had to wait for the next CEO to come in and do the culling that every CEO does. But in the meantime, it was years of people working really hard on things they cared about that just were never going to work. It was heartbreaking. 

[00:03:26]  Brian Ardinger: It's interesting because I think about why does this happen? Because if you're a startup and you're going down the wrong path, you probably don't hear about it because you just kind of run out of runway and it goes away. Where the challenge in a corporate environment is typically you do have some capital that can continue to be funneled in different ways down projects that may or may not be deserving of it.

And so, I think one of the traps that a lot of corporates fall into is this, okay, we've sunk costs into it. Let's just keep going with it. We know the expectations. It's not going to be a big win or whatever, but it's not going to be a loser if we get rid of it and branded as a loser, or a minimal amount of capital that maybe it is bringing in, the revenue it is bringing in. It's like, well, why should we get rid of it? It's bringing some revenue versus thinking about it from the standpoint of what if we got rid of that $30-50 million investment that we're making every year and reallocated that into newer things that could have more explosive growth or more opportunities.

[00:04:17] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I think you're spot on. And it's funny that no amount of mentioning, naming, whatever the sunk cost fallacy will deter people because there's always the rationalization and this feeling like in order to be successful, I need to launch a successful thing into the market. And years ago I was working with a big pharmacy chain, and to try to head it off, we actually created a enterprise wide award for the biggest hill.

It comes down to what we're rewarded for, right? And if you have an award for killing a project to free up the most resources, and of course, embedded in this reward was what were your learnings? What are the resources getting used for? How are they getting funneled back into innovation? It was amazing that first year, how many zombies got put out of their misery. 

[00:05:10]  Brian Ardinger: And I think it's one of those fundamental things that, again, the momentum, it's very easy in a corporate environment to continue because again, most corporate environments are about executing. And so the momentum of execution continues to push you down a path when maybe your customers aren't asking for the thing that you're doing, or the market's switched or changed, or competitors have come in, and it's no longer the path.

But to change that, there's a cultural thing that I think has to be at least thought about. It's not just trying to find the big wins from an innovation perspective. If you're in corporate innovation, you should also be thinking about what can we cut or what can we do to allocate our resources appropriately and not just go down some particular path because it's what we've been told to do.

[00:05:51] Robyn Bolton: A hundred percent.

[00:05:53]  Brian Ardinger: The second article was actually came from your newsletter. The newsletter talked about what chickens and innovation teams have in common.

[00:06:01] Robyn Bolton: Unexpected reading, but the article starts off with a story of a study that was conducted out of P...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and MileZero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Interview Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and today we have a brand-new format. If you've been listening to the podcast for the last eight or nine years, every week I bring in an amazing guest to talk about innovation. I thought we'd try to mix it up and innovate on the format itself. And for the next few weeks, we're gonna have a guest host.

My guest host is Robin Bolton. She's been a guest on the podcast a couple of times in the past. She spoke at our Inside Outside Innovation Summit in 2022. She's the bestselling author of Unlocking Innovation, founder of MileZero, and a good friend. So, Robyn, welcome to the show. 

[00:01:03] Robyn Bolton: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here and co-hosting. 

[00:01:06] Brian Ardinger: We need to innovate. We need to eat our own dog food. So I figured after all these years of interviewing amazing people about innovation, we'd mix it up a little bit, and every week we'll try to bring you some insights into innovation from what we've seen in the field and use it as a way to get your feedback from the audience as well.

One of the things we thought about is to talk about innovation and what we're seeing, and so one of the things we do, both Robyn and I publish a newsletter, and we're constantly running into new information sources and new people, new insights into what's going on. Thought the first thing we're going to do is talk about the article of the week or what we've been reading.

We have both called together a, a couple of different articles to start the conversation. Since people may not have heard you on the podcast in the past, why don't you give a short intro of how you got into the innovation space and some of your background? 

[00:01:58] Robyn Bolton: I was lucky enough to get into the innovation space kind of as it was forming, which now saying that makes me feel very old, but coming straight out of university, I went to work at P&G and it's when they were doing the very first iteration of creating new products and new brand teams.

And so straight out of school went into a brand team that was working on a new business, and that new business eventually became Swiffer. I got to experience the life of a corporate innovator and all the scars and all the great stories that go with it very early on.

Then, you know, a couple meanderings later, you know, meandered into Arkansas, the Walmart sales team meandered up to Boston to get an MBA, meandered over to Denmark to work for a big consulting firm. Then I ended up back in Boston and had the pleasure of working with Clayton Christensen at his firm. Spent almost a decade there working across a ton of industries, tons of different types of organizations, but always on innovation.

Then, about six, seven years ago, went out on my own, started MileZero, and you know, have continued the innovation adventure since. 

[00:03:15] Brian Ardinger: We've talked a lot about some of the past things that you've done and the ability that you have to work across different aisles, to work in the corporate innovation space from the trenches. I think a lot of people talk about innovation, have seen it in various formats, but not necessarily the depth and the breadth that you've seen it. So that's where I'm excited to have you as a co-host on the shows. 

[00:03:35] Robyn Bolton: Thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here and talking about all this because it's a tough time out there for innovators. You know, whether you're in a company, you're in a startup, you know, you're an entrepreneur, it's tough times and there's always a way through. I think we're relentless optimists, maybe sometimes delusional, but relentless optimist. So it's great to be chatting about it. 

[00:03:58] Brian Ardinger: One of the articles you sent over was CNBC has come up with a Disruptors 50 List, the top 50 disruptive companies out there.

[00:04:06] Robyn Bolton: Anyone hears a list of innovative companies and immediately our heads go to AI and CNBC delivered on that. You know, their number one disruptor is a company that's actually in the military and defense system space using AI. Number two is Open AI. I mean, it's just all the usual suspects, but what caught my attention was that there were actually non-AI companies on there.

It was exciting to see that. So, there was Thrive Market. You know, full disclosure, I'm a member of Thrive Market and basically, it's kind of like a membership to get discounts on what's essentially kind of Whole Foods online. But they’re, I think in the top 10 of the Disruptors 50 list and because of their supply chain.

So, it was great to see something that you could easily consider pretty old school, grocery online, to be in a a Disruptor's 50 list. So, there were some other examples of that that I was just like, alright, okay. Like where the traditional guys were hanging in there. 

[00:05:10] Brian Ardinger: The one that stood out to me was Fruitist, basically innovating on the ancient art of fruit, creating now blueberries the size of your head, and things along those lines. And again, I think it points to the fact that every company has the ability to be an innovator, even in an industry that's been around literally since the beginning of time. How can you do things differently, build things differently, create different types of value in such a way that it disrupts the existing players in the market. 

[00:05:37] Robyn Bolton: And that you don't have to just go all in on AI. We should all be getting more conversant, but AI and innovation are not synonyms. 

[00:05:48] Brian Ardinger: It'll be interesting to see how this plays out. I think in the article it also talked about how the top 10 are largely AI companies and the top five have a valuation of under 500 billion, which I guess is combined total valuation of the past list.

And so the amount of money that's being thrown into the pit of AI, it'll be interesting to see who actually comes out on the other end. And if all the dollars being spent are really being spent wisely, we'll see. But it's definitely, yeah. Obviously driving markets, driving everything that we're talking about right now. So that's important to keep in the conversation but know that it's not the only way to innovate in the world. 

[00:06:22] Robyn Bolton: There are plenty of other ways and you know, the valuations of people far smarter than I look at that and I'm like, you know, I remember the.com boom and bust. I also remember the internet coming out, so you know, we'll see. As you said, we'll see. But there's still lots of opportunity. 

[00:06:39] Brian Ardinger: And it's driving value. I mean, there's actual revenue with these companies, unlike dot.com when it came out, so it's a little different from that perspective. I'm sure this is not th...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Radhika Dutt, author of the upcoming book Escaping the Performance Trap. Radhika and I talk about the challenges with traditional OKR systems and how companies can break free from the performance theater to create a better way to lead, align, and build what matters. 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 business. It's time to get started.

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 Radhika Dutt. She's the author of a new book called Escaping the Performance Trap. Welcome. 

Radhika Dutt: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here again. We talked a few years ago. 

[00:00:58] Brian Ardinger: I should say welcome back. Yes, the last time you were on, I think it was episode 273. And you had your first book that came out, which was Radical Product Thinking. And when you said you're writing a new book, and it focused on things like OKRs and goals and how people are misusing that. I said, hey, we need to get her back on to talk about some of the things that she's seeing. So welcome back to the show. Let's get started refreshing the audience a little bit about your background and, and how you got here. 

[00:01:24] Radhika Dutt: Yeah, my background is I started as an engineer. I did my undergrad and grad at MIT. I started companies and I later went to work at bigger companies and it, it was in so many different industries from broadcast media and entertainment, advertising, robotics, even wine. Oh, and telecom was in there too. Government agencies. It was all over.

And so, the one common theme in working across all of these industries, working all of these, at different sizes of companies, the one common theme was I kept seeing the same set of product diseases over and over, and I was learning hard lessons in terms of how do you build good products and avoid these product diseases?

And so that's what led me to write the first book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. And It's been fantastic, like so many people have read it. It's become the staple when people are building products. And what's most satisfying for me is that really a lot of people describe it as it has changed their mindset, that now they apply product thinking to all sorts of things, even to parenting, to personal life, et cetera.

So that's been wonderful to see. Right. But that it's a philosophy of how do you think systematically about products being vision-driven as opposed to iteration led, and let's just throw things at the wall and see what sticks and keep iterating. It was this vision-driven approach. How do you envision, what is the problem you're trying to solve? The end state you wanna create. And how do you systematically drive that change?

So, what brings me to the second book? A lot of people who wrote to me saying, you know, just how helpful Radical Product Thinking was, there was also a set of people who wrote saying, you know, I love what you're saying in Radical Product Thinking, but what do I do in my organization that sets all these goals and OKRs and I have all these short term deliverables and that's what I have to focus on.

I can't do all of this long-term vision driven stuff. And this question came up to me so many times, I realized we really do need to tackle it. And for a long time, by the way, I was seeing the downsides of goals and OKRs, but for so many years I just didn't know how to articulate for people, why should you stop using goals and OKRs?

What's the, what's the problem with them? But most importantly, even if I could say, look, don't use OKRs, the question was always, well. It's the devil I know. What are you proposing instead? You know, I didn't have an answer until I started trying this new approach and it's worked so well and that's what's driving me to write this new book, Escaping the Performance Trap.

[00:04:03] Brian Ardinger: What is a performance trap? What are you seeing and how does that show up in organizations and teams? 

[00:04:09] Radhika Dutt: You know, whenever I talk about the problem with goals and OKRs, people instantly identify one thing, which is we've all been in these monthly cycles where every month for our monthly business review, oh, what are some numbers we can show so that we can show, look, we are achieving these results, things are going well.

What actually happens, right? Is for leaders, you think, oh, I'm seeing these numbers. My team is being rigorous in terms of metrics. You wanna see the numbers, you want to see rigor, you want to see progress. But what you're seeing is an illusion, because what happens is teams are showing you numbers to say, Tada, look, I achieved whatever you wanted.

What is actually happening in ways that you can't see is whenever there are bad metrics, the incentive is to sweep that under the rug. To not show you the bad metrics. And the reality is you learn more from these bad metrics, quote unquote, because those are the numbers telling you what's not working, what you actually need to do to course correct.

So as a leader, you don't always get the clear view. And one example I'll give is I was working at Avid. Where every movie in Hollywood that won an Oscar was made using AVID's video editors. Such a fantastic number, right? Like every, hundred percent of all Oscar winners, et cetera, used avid. It turned out that our market was getting commoditized. That competitors like Apple and Adobe were entering the low end and even encroaching the middle end.

And so, for us, we kept going further up into the high-end niche, and that's where we were really focusing to be able to make our targets. If you looked at the targets and numbers, everything was looking great, and it just seemed like all we had to do was keep focusing on just whatever we were doing. We were going to hit the numbers, right?

And this is what I see often. This approach works until it doesn't work. What you want in the team is not the incentive to show you what's working, but rather have those open discussions to learn, experiment, et cetera. 

[00:06:20] Brian Ardinger: That's a great point and, and I see this a lot in corporate innovation types of teams. They set OKRs at the beginning of the year and you know, especially in innovation where you don't necessarily know what you're building or why you're building it, and things pivot, and change based on what goes on during the year. Oftentimes they don't go back and reevaluate, you know, what are these metrics that we're looking at and are these the right things to measure?

And, and so I see a conflict a lot of times, especially in innovation where, again, it's not necessarily a here's the business model. We know how to exactly execute it and it's more systematic and, and certain. But when you're dealing with new product development or innovation areas where there's naturally more uncertainty, having and picking at the beginning of the year, here's the one thing that we're going to look at. It almost puts you in a bind from day one. 

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Wayne Li, author of the new book, Design Empathy and Contextual Awareness. Wayne and I talk about the changing landscape of design and some of the important concepts needed to make better products and services. 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.

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 Wayne Li. He's the author of a new book called Design Empathy and Contextual Awareness: Frames of Reference for the 21st Century Creative. Welcome, Wayne.

Wayne Li: Hi, Brian. Great to be here.

[00:00:59] Brian Ardinger: Wayne, it's great to have you back. Why don't you give a little bit of refresher of who you are and where you've been? 

[00:01:04] Wayne Li: Happy to do so. It's been a wonderful journey up to this point. My background is degrees in fine arts and in engineering and product design. Wasn't always a professor, right?

I started, besides my collegiate career, working at design firm such as like IDEO product development and Design Edge in Austin, Texas. And then wound up working at Ford Motor Company and Volkswagen as a car designer. So started out as a vehicle engineer doing chassis and body systems. Helping to actually design the infrastructure of a car and then moved into the studio where you draw and sculpt cars.

So, for listeners who are interested in that, in that side of the business, you're thinking about the aesthetic of the vehicle, the psychology of the vehicle, its placement in society, and how people use it. People in today's parlance is user experience, right? The user experience of a car. I was at Ford for five years.

At Volkswagen I was in the electronic research unit and then I wound up graduate school on the west coast at Stanford University. Was doing what they call interaction design back then, which is human machine interface. What is the interior of the car, how do the controls work, how does the interior look?

And so they have an electronics research lab in Western California right in the Northern Bay area that couples with their advanced studio in Semi Valley in Southern California helping design advanced concept cars and things like that. Stanford's work was creating this philosophy, you now know it's called design thinking.

Or human-centered design. So that was the very first initial work into how to understand how your creative process incorporates different aspects of your mind. In design thinking, they look at triple Venn diagram, so they look at technology, which is like the engineering side. They would call that say like feasibility. And then they have like the business circle, right? Which is, can we make this, can we produce it? Can we sell it for a profit? Now it would be like it's viability. And then there's the desirability or usability side, which is the art or the, the human element. Do people like it? Is it beautiful to look at? Is it easy to use? All those kind of psychological principles. So, Stanford helped to kind of create that philosophy.

Then after that really got into the academia space. I did dabble after graduate school for five years, working at Williams Sonoma as part of the creative staff at Pottery Barn. Home decor products, furniture, all those types of things where we're part of that creative process.

Wound up teaching. Taught at Stanford for seven years, and now I'm at Georgia Tech. They've kind of pulled me from the west coast to the east coast. So I've set up a design thinking center here called the Design Block Innovation Design Collaborative. Stanford's where we said that we were the founding class of, was the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design, which now people know as the D School. Helped kind of set up a similar center here at Georgia Tech, and I've been teaching here for almost 15 years now. It has been a wonderful journey to shepherd students and creatives and young professionals, and I do consulting on the side, so I do work with Fortune 500 companies to figure out their business processes and things like that, their product mixes, that type of thing. Design strategy, product management, all that good stuff. 

[00:03:54] Brian Ardinger: You cover so much. Again, you've been in the trenches. You helped teach. One of the reasons I wanted to have you back on is the fact that I think you can give a lot of insights into the real world stuff. Not just, you know, what's happening today and student perspective and that.

But I wanted to dive into your new book. There's a lot of design books out there. Obviously, design has gotten hotter over the years and it's always been a topic that's, I think, super important for early-stage innovation, to really understand what problem you're solving and then the practical steps of trying to solve that particular problem.

So, the book's called Design, Empathy, and Contextual Awareness. Talk about what that actually means. Contextual awareness. I think a lot of people don't think of design as the context around that. 

[00:04:35] Wayne Li: There's two parts of this, right? So, one is if you think about the customer themselves and the infrastructure around them. So, design empathy is really leveraging all aspects of interest empathy.

We talk about in the book that there are different types of empathy. There's compassionate, there's cognitive, there's emotional, and there's compassionate concern. Utilizing all three in tandem to actually inform your ideas is one way of thinking about design empathy. And then what are those techniques?

You're designing a baby stroller. How do you get into the mindset of a haired parent or how do you go and method act yourself at age two? Part of that is like there are method acting techniques, there are interviewing techniques, there are field observation. The way I like to look at this book is kind of think of it in thirds, right?

I know that when I wrote the proposal to write the manuscript, I was like, there'll be some things that are kind of anecdotal. Anecdotes of me being a designer. And then learning things that I think other students of design or creative professionals, so whether you're a third-year university student in industrial design or architecture, or you're a first-year creative professional. Like a music producer or just, or first-time software creator, right. The making developer.

This book has something for you because it's got a little bit of that Malcolm Gladwell anecdote faith. You're like, what? I did not know that about the field of design. So that's one part of it, and that includes interviews and things like that.

We've got an interview with the co-founder of IDEO, David Kelly. We got an interview with the head of design products at Royal College of Art, Christina Choi. So, there'll be like anecdotes about, you know, things like that. Then, then there's a third business case studies. So you're like, why did this product win and this product fail? Like why did the Nintendo, we work so well with underdeveloped hardware, right? 

And beat...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jeremy Kourdi and Jonathan Besser, authors of the new book, 50 Ideas that Changed the World of Work. From the Growth Mindset to Business Model Canvas, we delve into their guidebook for some of the key concepts, models, and frameworks that are shaping business leadership and workplace dynamics. 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.

[00:00:50]  Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have some amazing guests. Today we have Jeremy Kourdi and Jonathan Besser, authors of the new book, 50 Ideas That Change the World of Work. Welcome guys. 

[00:01:02] Jeremy Kourdi: Hi, Brian. 

[00:01:03] Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you guys on because the title alone got me intrigued to reach out to you the 50 Ideas that Changed the World of Work. And when I got a copy of it, it, it did open my eyes to all the amazing work that has gone on over the years talking about innovation and workplace dynamics, and leadership. And you've decided to take on the amazing work of like, how do you tackle this mass body of work that all these other people have put together and put it into a book of your own.

[00:01:31] Jeremy Kourdi: The first thing is to do it with someone. You'll know this, Brian, you'll certainly appreciate it. That life leadership business, certainly innovation is easier if you have someone that you understand, that you know, that you respect, crucially, that you have a great connection with. I always say one of the great things about rapport and connection is that that then means you can disagree, you can challenge, you can push back. And the other person that you are challenging or disagree with knows you're on their site, knows where you're coming from and appreciates that. 

[00:02:04] Jonathan Besser: I mean, you know, Jeremy and I have known each other for a number of years. We've worked together, we've collaborated, we've disagreed agreeably, we've argued along the way. But yeah, hopefully 50 Ideas is is the output from that discussion, from that partnership, from working together and I think is a different angle that people will enjoy and use. It'll stand the test of time. 

[00:02:24] Brian Ardinger: What I liked about it is, again, you talk about emotional intelligence, growth mindset, blue ocean strategy, SWOT analysis, business model canvas. I mean, the list is, is again, 50 plus, first of all, to pull that together, how did you decide which particular ideas were the ones most worthy of going into a book and, and what was the process of pulling that together?

[00:02:45] Jonathan Besser: There was kind of a mental all wrestle as you went through. You know, I think Jer and I started with, with a, a long list. And yeah, with the help of our publisher and long discussions between the two of us, we whittled it down to what we thought stood the test of time. You know, what do people want to hear and what would be useful to people from, you know, Sun Tzu's Art Of War, which is centuries old, right through to some of the more modern concepts like Lean In. Samberg's Lead In is very, you really very new.

And the the pieces that come in between. That help you understand the, the intention is to give people perhaps the reference book and as a first starting point. You know, the book can be one that is, you can dip into, you know, I just heard about NBTI, let me go into, yeah, to have a look at that chapter, this great reference book, to also the book that feeds through from the 50 different chapters coming through that builds upon concept and idea and references back to itself as it goes along.

It was a collaboration of what we both thought. And you know, Jeremy and I have known each other a long time. We've worked well together over all those years, and it was really the way that it came together. We had a lot of synergy and not too much disagreement. 

[00:03:48] Jeremy Kourdi: The themes we have, I think, are absolutely on the mark, and they, you know, as Jonathan alluded to, as you alluded to Brian, they come out really strongly. And what really interested me was some of those themes. So, you see the rise, particularly over the last 30 years of psychology. Business and leadership. So really not just understanding your customers, which used to be the thing in the eighties and nineties perhaps, but currently it's getting to a level of customer understanding, empathy, customer experience, is the new frontier there.

Getting to a level of that insight really, that's really valuable. So, psychology, and not just relating to customers, but for decision making, neuroscience, coaching, something like growth mindset. So, psychology is a theme that goes through it. And balance with that is rigor and the use of data, particularly whether that's in things like assessment tools for promotion and succession, or career development, or again for innovation. You know, what is our data telling us and have we got the balance right between art and science, between intuition and data? And that's another theme that kind of comes up. 

[00:04:56] Brian Ardinger: What I liked about it, it brings together both classical models and, and modern innovations like you talked about. It reminded me of things that, you know, oh yeah, I studied that back when I got my MBA decades ago. But it was still relevant today, but I hadn't looked at that. Or thought about that particular model in a while. And so, I think... 

[00:05:12] Jeremy Kourdi: Interesting that there's a new context. So, if it's not a new idea, then it's certainly deserving of a new context. So, something like looking after customers is not new. I think frankly, as I sit here in the Uk, that issue needs to come again. You know, the. Service we get from our financial services organizations, maybe globally, certainly in the UK from banks, insurers is, you know, was better in the past than it is now. I think they've kind of been out flanked by technology or the need to drive down costs or shareholder value. Other issues which have changed the world of work, but then they've kind of not adapted customer experience and customer focus to the new context and to take banking as an example, I think there's more that can be done there. So new ideas, but as you say, Brian, kind of perennial ideas in a new context. 

[00:06:04] Brian Ardinger: Some of the ideas maybe have been overlooked and deserve to come back to be at least studied again, and that. Are there particular ideas within the book that you think are more relevant in the disruptive times we're living in today?

[00:06:16] Jonathan Besser: I think they all have relevance. I think there are different pieces. You know, we, we are working in a smaller, faster, quicker, narrower frame with the world the way it's changing with geopolitics, with all the elements that are feeding into it. We got news that's you know, that's appearing on the second.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Robyn Bolton, author of the new book, Unlocking Innovation. Robyn and I talk about the Innovator's journey for unlocking architecture behaviors and culture of innovation and ways you can measure and map your progress. 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  Robyn Bolton, Author of Unlocking 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 Robyn Bolton. She's the founder of Mile Zero and author of the new book, Unlocking Innovation: A Leader's guide for Turning Bold Ideas into tangible results. Welcome, Robyn. 

Robyn Bolton: I am so glad to be here. Thank you. Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: Thank you for coming on the podcast. We've been friends, and long-time listeners of the podcast and newsletter from Inside Outside should be familiar with some of your work. You came out and spoke at our Inside Outside Innovation Summit in 2022, but since then you've got a lot of stuff that's happened. So, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about your new book that's coming up today. Yeah. And talk about innovation. And maybe a little bit of background on how you began your innovation journey. 

Robyn Bolton: So, I began my innovation journey purely by luck straight out of undergrad. After graduating from undergrad, went to work at P&G in brand management and was put on the team that was developing some new cleaning products. And a year after joining the team, we launched Swiffer. 

So, I was part of that kind of amazing journey of corporate innovation. And all the experiences and the scars and, and all of that. And then kind of fast forward a bit, moved up to Boston, got my MBA, did some consulting work in one of the big firms, but then spent almost a decade at the firm that was founded by Clayton Christensen.

Nearly a decade immersed in not just disruptive innovation, but all the different types of innovations that companies do and the challenges that companies face. And then since 2018, have been running my own firm. Mile Zero, which has continued to focus on corporate innovation and really supporting the leaders and the teams who are doing that hard work.

Brian Ardinger: You do some great writing and that. If you've followed our newsletter, I try to find the best articles every week to disseminate to our audience, and you come up there fairly regularly. Stuff that I want to... 

Robyn Bolton: I am always quite honored. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about writing. So, you have a new book out called Unlocking Innovation. What made you decide to write another book on innovation and what is the secret nugget that you wanted to talk to your audience about? 

Robyn Bolton: So, I resisted writing a book for a long time because it's like the last thing this world needs is another book on innovation. But eventually I broke through my own resistance 'cause you know, in reflecting on my career in innovation, I realized that like, hey, the Innovator's Dilemma came out in the late nineties and in the 30 years since that happened, the results, the success rate of corporate innovation has not changed. 

And all that's changed in 30 years is we've kind of had this innovation industrial complex get created of consultants, guilty books now guilty, articles, all this stuff that's grown up, but it hasn't changed the success rate.

And I got curious as to why that is. And I think it is because, and this is what the book focuses on. Is that we've tend to take a really siloed approach to innovation. You know, we come in like, you need this team structure, or you need this process, or this governance, or on the other end of things, you know, we need to build a culture of innovation.

And the reality is, is you have to take a much more holistic approach, which I call the ABCs, that you need to have the architecture of innovation to the process structure strategies. It's necessary, but not sufficient for success. You also need to be really focused on leadership behaviors and how leaders are interacting with innovation teams, how they're supporting innovation.

And you need a culture that, at least at the very beginning, isn't resistant to innovation. So, you need to be working on all three of these things, all of the ABCs all at the same time, but in different ways as the team progresses. 

Brian Ardinger: I think one of the challenges you find with that is oftentimes if one or two people have been given the mantle of the person who has to figure that out. And this is very difficult as a director of innovation or whatever you want to call those folks to be able to move that battleship in in the right direction a lot of times. 

Robyn Bolton: Yes, absolutely. And it gets even harder when, you know, you look at the research and I think it's something like 90% of innovation teams get shut down within three years. Yeah. So, you're tasked with moving a battleship or an aircraft in three years, and you know, we all know that three years doesn't mean you actually have three years to produce results. You have to produce results really in two years so that you're able to keep working in year three before you get shut down.

So, it's this crazy short period of time that you have to produce results and you're working on something that is really a long-term investment. So you have all of these contradictions that as someone who's in charge of innovation, you've gotta grapple with. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think the biggest challenge is the fact a lot of folks don't really understand how difficult that exploration process is to find a winner, quote unquote. In your book, you mentioned a stat, something like one in 50,000 incubated ideas ever reach a million dollars in sales. And so, you think about those types of odds and the types of shots on goal you have to consistently make to explore through that maze of crazy new, bad ideas, to find one or two that actually starts getting traction and making it 

Robyn Bolton: Yeah, exactly It, you know, when you think of, okay, I need incubate 50,000 ideas to get one that makes a million dollars, and oh by the way, the resources allocated to innovation are usually like two people and $10. Yeah. So, the odds are very much stacked against you. But I also know, I mean, you and I both know as innovators, like that doesn't deter you.

You see the potential and you're like, no, we can figure this out. We can do this. And so, this book is very much written for those folks who are the rebels, the realists, and the fixers who are like, no, no, no. We see the potential. We could do this. We're going to give it a shot. 

Brian Ardinger: We talk a lot about finding the curious and the restless within your organization that have more of the tool set skill sets, mindsets around innovation. Knowi...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Duncan Wardle, former head of Innovation and creativity at Disney, and author of the new book The Imagination Emporium. Duncan and I talk about his recipes for innovation and common tactics you can use to make your life and work more creative and inventive. 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 Duncan Wardle, Former head of Innovation and creativity at Disney and author of The Imagination Emporium

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 Duncan Wardle. He has spent 30 years as the head of innovation and creativity at Disney and is releasing a new book on December 10th called The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation. Welcome Duncan. 

Duncan Wardle: Thank you very much for having me actually straight, I wasn't head of innovation and creativity for 30 years, but I actually started as a coffee boy in the London office. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's start there. Obviously, you spent a lot of time at Disney and that. Let's talk a little bit about the journey of how you learned everything about innovation and creativity.

Duncan Wardle: Very first assignment. Basically, I, I was taught persistence. I called that office every day for 27 days to a lovely lady by the name of Julie who was on the reception desk. There were only 16 people at Disney in, back in 1986, and now there's 3000. She got so fed up with taking my phone calls, they made me coffee boy. So, I used to go get cappuccinos from my boss down the road. About three weeks into the role, I was told I would be the character coordinator. That's the person that looks after the walk around characters at the Royal Premier of Who Framed Roger Rabbit at the Odeon Leicester Square, in the presence of the Princess of Wales, Diana. I was like, oh, what do I do? They said, well, you just down at the bottom of the stairs, Roger Rabbit will come down the staircase. The princess will come in along the receiving line. You either greet him, or she'll blow him off and move into the auditorium.

How could you possibly screw that up? Well, that's the day I found out what a contingency plan was because I did not have one. A contingency plan would tell you if you're going to bring a very tall rabbit with spectacularly long feet down a giant staircase towards the Princess Wales, one might want to measure the width of the steps, before the rabbit trips on the top step, it's now hurtling like a bullet at torpedo speed, head over feet, directly down the stairs towards Diana's head, where upon he was taken out in midair by two Royal Protection officers who just flattened him. This very famous picture on Reuters of Roger going back like this.

Two secret service heavies, dude's diving towards him in a suit and a 21-year-old PR guy in Disney at the back. Going, ah, shit, I'm fired. So, I got a call the next day from a person called a CMO from LA. I didn't even, you know, I was like, well, what's a CMO? I thought he was going to tell me I'm fired. And all I heard was that was great publicity.

I was like, wow, who knew? And so, I built a career on having mad audacious, outrageous ideas. But I got 'em done. So, I convinced NASA to take my son's Buzz Lightyear doll into space for the opening of Toy Story. He served 18 months on the International Space Station, the longest consecutive astronaut in space. I'll have, you know. I stole a Turkey from the White House on Thanksgiving Day, took it to Disneyland, happiest Turkey on Earth. 

So I got to do some of the crazy, just mad ideas with Pixar for new storylines and Lucas films and, and Marvel and. One of the biggest challenges is when you are on the outside looking in, oh, they're so creative, it's still a corporation, right? It still has processes and everything else. So I was tapped 10 years ago, and the boss said, right, you are going to be in charge of innovation and creativity. To which my exact response was, what the hell is that? He said, well, I don't know exactly. We just want to embed a culture of innovation and creativity. Everybody's DNA. 

So, I tried three models. Number one, I hired somebody who knew what they were doing and said, make me look good. Number two, I thought I'll create an innovation team. What could possibly go wrong? I'll be in charge of it. Well, no. Nobody outside of legal does legal work. Nobody outside of sales does sales work.

So, if you have an innovation team, you've subliminally said to the rest of the organization, Hey, you're off the hook. These people have it. Number three, we did an accelerator program, which worked to a certain extent, but we only were touching 0.02% of our population. So, I said, right. What if I create a toolkit that has three principles, takes the BS out of innovation and makes it less intimidating for normal, hardworking, busy people.

Makes creativity tangible, for 50% of the people who don't like ambiguity or gray, but far more input, make it fun. Give people tools they enjoy using, then they'll use and when we're not around. So yeah, 

Brian Ardinger: Love the stories. One of the things that. You think of Disney, and most people out in the real world think of Disney as one of the most creative, innovative companies out there, and yet even they said, we need somebody to take care and help us figure out creativity and innovation within our rank-and-file folks that are at Disney. How did that process come about? Why did Disney think, well, we need to be more creative or innovative when everybody looks at them as one of the key people that does it well. 

Duncan Wardle: Think about the theme park division, right? I was with theme parks for a relative, some of my career. And you've got third generation cast members. Their moms and dads work there, the grandparents work there, and this is the way we do it here. And trying to change that culture was like trying to move the Titanic. So, we did, we created this toolkit. Eventually we were training it. We made it so impactful. We had a three and a half year wait list for a voluntary two-day training course.

So, I thought, and then they gave me the Jiminy Cricket, bronze, thank you for 30 magical years of service statue. And I looked at it, I thought, shit, I'm nearly dead. So, I thought I better go do something else. So I left. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do. I went home to Colmore and sat in the pub for six months and felt sorry for myself and thought, what the hell have I just done?

I thought, you know what? I got to write a book. And the reason I love doing things I don't know how to do. And I thought, okay. And I said to the publisher, I said, it's not a book. He said, well, why is it not a book? And I said, well, because nobody reads books. They're always on the bookshelf. We don't have time. We are busy people. 

So, I thought, okay, how do I create an innovation toolkit, but make it accessible to normal, hardworking, busy people who have deadlines and everything else? Wel...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dave Brown, founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration. Dave and I talk about the innovation economy and the importance of immigration, and the impact immigration policy has on its success. 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.

Podcast Transcript with Dave Brown, founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration

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 Dave Brown. He's the founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration, where he works closely with emerging companies, VCs, and private equities to solve immigration challenges. So welcome to the show, Dave. 

Dave Brown: Thanks for having me, Brian. Great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Dave, we've known each other as friends and poker players for a while, but I wanted to have you on the show, because we've occasionally had these conversations about how does the law fit into innovation and specifically the law that you focus on, which is the immigration law. Let's start by giving a little bit of background of the things that you work on. 

Dave Brown: Of course I'm happy to share. You know, the interesting thing about me, I think that draws a lot of the clients we work with is I'm originally from Canada. I was actually a lawyer sitting in Toronto doing a lot of inbound US immigration for startups, companies, founders, and found a special someone who's a US citizen. She was getting a PhD at Stanford.

So, I made a decision since I was supporting all these clients and companies in the Bay Area. That I'd actually moved to the US and so I came here at the end of 2000 and spent about five years in the Bay Area supporting a lot of founders’ companies there before finding myself moving to the Midwest here where my wife originally came from.

But the through point in all of this is that I've been dealing with a lot of individuals over the years who have started companies in a wide variety of tech spaces, and there are a lot of interesting people I've worked with over the years. 

Brian Ardinger: Obviously immigration, you hear it in the news, and I think there's a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings what, what immigration is and how does it play into the tech space and that. So, tell us a little bit about the messaging that is out there in the media about immigration and what are the different nuances around that? 

Dave Brown: Yeah, I guess I would say that the messaging is just wrong to start with. It's unfortunate, and I think that this narrative has been kind of fostered as immigrants or the other, that they're bad, that there's some negative element associated with bringing people into this country. Which is amazing to me because this country is completely founded on immigration and this country, quite frankly, wouldn't exist without immigration in the way it does today.

So, the, the current media blitz is bad, and the thing quite frankly, I'm concerned about is it impacts a lot of what we do. You know, when I run into someone, people always seem to think that I'm dealing with someone at the border. That's someone who's trying to sneak in and take someone's job. And the reality is, is we're all about innovation, right?

You know, the people you talk to in this space, they're all about creating something new, creating something that didn't exist before. When I think about my own journey, I've got a firm with about 50 employees that wouldn't otherwise potentially be employed in this space if I didn't immigrate to this country and decide I wanted to start the firm.

And every day I deal with people who have decided to come to the US to make that choice. And they're kind of fearless. You know, they've already made that choice. They're just going to uproot their family and come to the US. They're comfortable with the idea that they're going to start a company that may never make any money, that may never go the direction they hope it will go.

But they're kind of fearless and they're willing to do that. And that's really what we need. And if you look at the history of this country, this country's been founded by immigrants who have made that step and, and really pushed in that direction. 

Brian Ardinger: If you think about in a lot of the big companies that we think about, Google and others, were founded by those who immigrated here to the United States. Let's talk and unpack a little bit about the visa policies. I think we hear, you know, words like green cards and H1B visas and that. Maybe tell us a little bit about what's the visa policy in the United States now, and how do people get here? 

Dave Brown: The first thing I would say is the visa policy is woefully inadequate for the size of our economy right now. Most of the laws that we deal with and interpret and use to support our clients have been in existence for four or five decades, some even longer than that. And, and at that point, our economy was less than a fifth of the size of our current economy. Our population was about a hundred million less. And so, we really need to revamp our immigration rules.

Really, the legislation itself. But obviously what my job is, is to try and get the best result for someone despite what the challenges may be. And so, there's still tools in the toolbox. We still find a way to make things work. And definitely if we're dealing with someone who's very highly regarded in their particular field, very highly educated, that does open up options for things like the O1 visa, that's a visa for someone who's an alien of extraordinary ability.

And I will say that the thing that we've seen more recently, because it, you can look at what happened under the four years under the prior administration and kind of juxtapose it against this current administration. There were a lot of kind of things that were put in the system four years ago that didn't really make any sense.

That made things harder for people to come in and to maintain status. And we, we had people, quite frankly, who we filed to extend their status. And they were denied on the extension when there was a longstanding policy that if there's no material change and the government had already made a decision that this visa is appropriate, that they shouldn't suddenly say no to an extension of that same visa.

And so, when Biden came back into office, he reinitiated that policy. So, we don't have those kind of weird disconnects when we extend. That's just one example of the changes. 

Brian Ardinger: In a case like that, so, so let's say a person comes to the United States to get a degree, wants to stay on as working in AI or working in the tech sector and such, what does that process look like?

Dave Brown: So, most people who come and get a degree, they have an ability to get a work permit immediately following their degree program. And if they're in a recognized STEM program, science, technology, engineering, or math, they're el...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with John Winsor co-author of the new book, Open Talent. John and I talk about the shifting landscape of talent and tools and dive into what companies need to do to adapt and thrive in a new global marketplace for talent. 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.

Transcript of Interview with John Winsor, CEO and founder of Open Assembly and Co-author of Open Talent

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another Inside, outside episode. We are here today with another amazing guest. Today we have John Winsor. He is the CEO and founder of Open Assembly and Co-author of the new book, Open Talent: Leveraging the Global Workforce to Solve the Biggest Challenges. Welcome to the show, John. 

John Winsor: Hey, thanks, Brian. Psyched to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on for a couple different reasons. One, you've been at the early days of experimenting in this whole world of talent, you know, before covid, before people knew what remote work was and that you've been an advocate for that. I think you started your career in the creative space.

You built Victors and Spoils, which was the first creative agency that was built on crowdsourcing principles. You've started Open Assembly and that, so what's this term, open talent, and what does it mean to you? 

John Winsor: You know, I think people got confused and when we were doing research on it, you know, I started using kind of what I would call alternative, you know, talent models way back in the eighties.

Because I owned a magazine, I couldn't afford to I have a bunch of editors and writers, so I had the readers write a lot of the stuff, and so it worked out really, really well. I sold one of the magazines, Women's Sports and Fitness to Conde Nast, and it was a, you know, pretty a great win. But what we're talking about is we're talking about really the digital transformation of talent writ large.

And so, we believe that there's this kind of seismic shift between companies that set the terms of employment because there's more supply than there is demand. Today, there's more demand than there is supply. And so that's just kind of basic economics that, you know, especially in tech these days. I mean, Korn Ferry says there's 85 million jobs that will go unfilled by 2030.

In the tech world, it's going to cost companies $8.5 trillion. I suspect that's going to be reduced a bit just because of, you know, generative AI and things like that. But my sense is that's still a big deal. We're excited about that. So, one of the things we started talking about, I kind of used the term back in the day, co-creation.

And that was an idea that came out of the magazine work where the customers were actually co-creating, and I coined that word in a book called Beyond the Brand 2002. But as things got going, you know, we started using the word crowdsourcing and then obviously gig got big. But I think gig is a misnomer in that gig to me is all about having somebody be told by, usually by an algorithm of where to work and when to work. 

You know, I need to pick up, you know, Brian at the airport at this time. Whereas, you know, open talent is really a mixture of freelance. We kind have three legs to the stool in this kind of digital transformation of talent at the higher end. It's building external talent clouds, building internal talent, marketplaces, and then open innovation capabilities.

Brian Ardinger: Very interesting. Let's talk about, you've written a new book called Open Talent. Yeah. And it's leveraging some of these new things that we're seeing out there. What made you decide that now's the time to kind of summarize this and help people figure this out? 

John Winsor: Because Harvard Business Review asked me to write a book. We started this journey, you know, I was at Harvard, but we had a thing called the Crowd Academy. We were about to gather the hundred, you know, top thinkers about these kinds of alternative, you know, hiring practices. 

And essentially what happened was that we started a conversation, Balaji Bondili, Dyan Finkhousen, Balaji's from Deloitte, Dyan Finkhousen from GE, and Steve Rader from NASA just on a regular basis.

And then as Covid hit, you know, John Healy had joined the group from Kelly and said, hey, instead of making these kind of monthly and private, let's make these open to the world. And about 4,000 people came to the calls. So. There seemed to be a really a need for figuring this stuff out. And then obviously trying to frame that up and that group was really, really, our community is really, really important to figure out what the idea of a networked organization should be. What's the framework? All those things. 

And, and we felt like one of the things that wasn't happening in the market is that there are thousand platforms out there that are doing this great work. But the problem is, is like if you look at adoption of other things, let's say cloud computing, for an example, cloud computing, you know, the big guys got together, and they decided on common language and common process.

And you know, all of a sudden it was cloud computing. The name was the same across companies and across platforms. And adoption was easy. So for customers, it was really easy to say, okay, I can kind of get what it is, I can start exploring it. Whereas in this kind of freelance open talent space, everybody says it's something different.

Gig, freelance, open talent, everybody uses a different process. There's always compliance and security stuff. Some companies do it, some companies don't. And we really wanted to kind of build that framework for the industry to just to create, you know, a higher amount of adoption from enterprises. 

Brian Ardinger: Obviously with Covid and that there's been a rapid shift for people paying attention to this. So, you know, I, I've been in this innovation space talking a long time, and you talk about disruption and five years ago, 10 years ago, it was like, yeah, yeah, I get it. Disruption may happen. But then you have something like covid and literally everybody's life is somewhat changed or altered. So, it, it becomes more in the forefront. And now we're coming out of it to a certain extent and folks are now trying to figure out, do we go back? How do we move forward? What are you seeing from your corporations out there? It's like, how are they trying to navigate the the new way? 

John Winsor: Yeah. It's really hard, right? It's a generational change. I mean, I think that if you put the hat on of a guy my age, 64, and you've been running a company for a long time, you know your cultures is having your people around you and seeing face to face.

Yeah. And having meetings. If you're a millennial that grew up on your phone, you know, and you've been in the job market for a couple years, you don't really care. You know, you're going to like work where you want and how you want. And so I think there's this big dynamic going on, you...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maria Flynn, author of the new book, Make Opportunity Happen. Maria and I talk about the entrepreneurial journey and some of the hands-on things you can do as an entrepreneur to make the journey more effective and rewarding. 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.

Interview Transcript with Maria Flynn, Author of Make Opportunity Happen and Co-founder of the Digital Health KC Initiative

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 Maria Flynn. She's an entrepreneur, co-founder of the Digital Health KC Initiative, and author of the new book Make Opportunity Happen: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Align Your Own Stars. Welcome, Maria. 

Maria Flynn: Thank you for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm super excited to have you on the show. Our good friend Melissa Vincent, who runs the Pipeline organization down in, in Kansas City, connected us and said, hey, you need to talk to Maria and get her opinions and insights on what's going on in the entrepreneurship space.

And with your new book coming out, we figured it'd be perfect time to have you on the show. Let's give a little background of how you became an entrepreneur and, and maybe a little bit about your journey. 

Maria Flynn: So, I grew up with entrepreneurial parents, so it was kind of in me from a early age. I went on into engineering and that was a great foundation to launch as an entrepreneur.

And then I found myself as an intrepreneur inside a larger company, Cerner Corporation, so healthcare IT. And that was a great training ground to go on in my own entrepreneurial endeavor later, but I had that real urge to go find what that was. When I left Cerner, I went looking for what it was. 

Kind of just out there, leap of faith, not knowing what I was going to find. And I found my co-founders in Orbis Biosciences. It's a pharmaceutical manufacturing technology company. We started in 2008. And we sold it in 2020. And since then, I've been working with entrepreneurs, which is how the book came about, is I was repeating the same stories in a book as a way to scale yourself so that I could help more people. So, I'm excited that it's out in the world now. 

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, let's dive right into it. It's called Make Opportunity Happen. And so, I would imagine that through your journeys, it wasn't just you figuring out how to do all this kind of stuff. What were some of the biggest inflection points in your career that you write about in the book or otherwise that helped you figure out the entrepreneur journey?

Maria Flynn: Yeah, so after you sell a company, you go into a period of reflection. And when I really thought, you know what is my value and what do I do uniquely well. It was around, you know, getting things done and ironically when I started to jot a few notes down, there was a book that came out that was about getting it done. I was like, oh no, somebody came out in the world with the book. And then when I looked at it, I was like, no, my book is very different. 

You need to know many things as an entrepreneur, and you don't have enough time. To read all these books. So, this book is kind of a guide to get fast track on certain things from hiring to firing, to building your board, to raising funding to strategy.

And it's kind of a compilation of all the things I learned from getting things done as a kid, working in my parents' business, to tools that I learned when I was at Cerner, to what made Orbis successful. And it goes through different pillars. It's about execution, perseverance, adapting. And your support system and then your mindset is entwined in all that.

Brian Ardinger: What I liked about the book, and I, and I got an advanced copy of it, it's almost like a textbook or a guidebook that you can kind of pick up at different times during your entrepreneurial journey. You really do a good job of providing kind of templated pieces. Let's say I'm trying to hire, or I'm trying to, you know, understand how to figure out the mentors that I should be working with, and you have little guidebooks or little templates that the entrepreneur can follow to help if nothing else just put some structure around what is oftentimes an unstructured practice of entrepreneurship. 

Maria Flynn: Yes. And so, you can think of it as a series of frameworks that, as you've been through the journey, a lot of this stuff seems like common sense. But when you're starting, like how do you start to think about some of these things?

So that's what these little mini sections are meant to do, to give you a story, to give you some lessons learned that either I learned myself or other people helped me learn. And then a way to go forward and think about it for you. So, it's not just about theory, but it's how do you put something into practice.

Brian Ardinger: You've had a chance to work with entrepreneurs in addition to being one yourself. What are some of the biggest pitfalls or misconceptions about entrepreneurship that you've seen out there? 

Maria Flynn: I think a lot of times people think it's super easy, particularly sometimes, with scientists and they think the hard part is the science and then all the business commercialization is the easy part.

And so, I work with them to help them see people bring different strengths. And sometimes when you pair different magical people, you get something even more magical. And then sometimes you're so ingrained in the entrepreneurial learning that once you start to do something, we've made it sound so hard.

So, kind of a fine balance of like, yes, you can do this, but know that nothing is as easy as you think it's going to be, or as quick as you think it's going to be. So just having the right tools and support system around you that you're going to be successful. And then knowing how to make adjustments. So a lot of times when we start on something, no idea is perfect from the beginning and how do you adjust with market data so that you are getting into something that's viable. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I think that's one of the key points, especially early times with maybe a scientist or entrepreneur that kind of, I, I find this a lot with like software developers who become entrepreneurs. They know how to build things. They build things regardless of its, you know, wanted by the marketplace or how you sell that to the marketplace, and they kind of fall into that particular trap versus listening to customers and, and that discovery process that oftentimes you have to go through to actually figure out what business you are creating and why.

You know, in your book you talk a lot about aligning stars and this metaphor of constellations. Talk about how you came up with that and, and how does that play out in what you've written? 

Maria Flynn:<...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Thomas Thurston, Chief Technologist at Ducera Partners. Thomas and I talk about AI, venture capital, and some interesting data insights into what makes corporate innovation work or not work. 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.

Interview Transcript with Thomas Thurston, Chief Technologist at Ducera Partners

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 Thomas Thurston. He's the chief technologist at Ducera Partners. He was introduced to us from a mutual friend at Amazon, Kate Niedermeyer, who said you have a driving interest in helping corporate innovators and investors be more successful by unlocking insights from data. So welcome to the show Thomas. 

Thomas Thurston: Hey, thanks. Great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you. As I've alluded to in the intro, you're a data scientist, a venture capitalist, focused on this particular space for a long time and a pretty varied background. So, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do.

Thomas Thurston: I like to think of myself as a data scientist who's been in the venture capital industry for almost 20 years now. The idea has always been how can you use. Data, AI, any, any quantitative tools to get insights into what's happening in private markets. So, what's happening with companies that aren't disposing a lot of data that are early stage or otherwise librarial shape environment. 

Today at Ducera Partners, it's an investment bank, where I'm Chief Technologist, as you mentioned. The way I would explain to Ducera which may be a little different in that it's kind of a startup investment bank. And the idea is we want to be disruptive in investment banking and really use technology as a backbone to do that.

So, through AI, through analytics we build in-house, can we do that? Can we really be disruptive in industry that hasn't seen that much change in its business model for a hundred years? And since the bank was launched about six, seven years ago, we've done over $750 billion in transactions. 

We're averaging around a $100 billion a year in deals, and we've done that all with you know, somewhere around 50 people or so, although it's growing quickly. I really do think it's been the technology that's been able to enable us to really change the way we do things. So, I'm proud of that.

My story really started a long time ago when I was at Intel in an incubation group just like everyone else. They had a new business incubator, about a dozen or so projects. We were one of those projects and we were starry-eyed, hoping to build a billion-dollar business for Intel. We got our blue badges ready to go every morning. And it's kind of what you might expect the first year or, so it was amazing. We were doing great, and then one year we were super strategic.

We got this funding a few years later, we were no longer strategic, and it got shut down instead. Those decisions had nothing to do with us. So, one day someone up in top of the ivory tower thought it was optics for strategic, the next time it wasn't. And I'm pretty sure nobody was thinking about our project when that decision was made to shut it down and everything related to what we were doing.

So, I think it just was demoralizing. You give your blood, sweat, and tears to a project. At end of the day, it didn't matter, right? Something completely random blew up your project. And I just remember looking at all these cubicles at Intel and just seeing all these projects just like ours, everyone's smart, everyone's doing their best, everyone's working hard to be innovative and just wondering, does this ever work?

I mean, what? Because you know, at the beginning I thought we couldn't possibly fail. We've got this big, you know, like the best of both worlds. Big company, excitement with a startup. Couple years later, you're so grizzled and battle scarred. You're like, can this, this even possible? Because any of these projects ever work.

And I wanted to know what percentage of the time projects like this succeed or fail at Intel. And of course, I realized that nobody actually knew. Because like every big company, things get started when shut down all over the place. And it's nobody's job to run around and track it and, and kind of make a database out of it.

And if you think about the contrast at Intel, you can measure latency in picoseconds, right? They measure absolutely everything. But when it comes to all the money, I was finding in venture capital and M&A, and new product launches, kind of all this growth, money going to work, there just wasn't much in the way of quantitative metric.

It was like every other company; people do their best deal by deal. You win some, you lose some and hey, and no one could say what percentage of the time it worked. So, I just decided to start studying it myself. Spent over a year collecting data on all the product launches, all the deals I could find, to see were any of the variable’s decision makers had in the beginning correlated at all with how those deals performed 5, 7, or even 10 years later.

Brian Ardinger: Well, that's the first question I want to ask, because I think you're correct that most people don't track it or, or don't track it well. Why is it so hard to track new innovation and especially, you know, at the earliest stages? Is it because they're used to tracking different types of metrics or talk to me about that.

Thomas Thurston: It's something they're all capable of doing. But also, yet I have yet to find a big company that's actually tracking this. Usually as you know, different groups are launching new innovations or products around the company. It's not centralized, so these projects kind of get funded. They come and go.

Usually when they go, they go very quietly or they, the team gets reshuffled or something. So, there's no big announcement, and again, it's just no one's job to try to add them all up and track them. Everyone's doing it off in silos, and as you probably have experienced, there's a venture capital group. They're off doing God knows what in their thing and they're kind of behind some kind of closed door. 

The M&A group is behind another closed door doing something else. They have different stakeholders, constituency. It's not centralized. But if somebody can kind of put their arms and call it data and actually start to mine it. That's the downside. 

Brian Ardinger: And no one wants to talk about failure, especially with an existing company that's making money, et cetera. You know, the last thing you want to do is say, hey, my great idea was a bomb and now what do I do? Versus like in a startup world where it seems to be, if you fail, that's part of the natural process because there are things that fail when you start new things.

Thomas Thurston: Yeah. In big companies, especially. We've...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Elliott Parker, CEO of the Corporate Venture Studio High Alpha Innovation. Elliott is back on the podcast to talk about his new book, The Illusion of Innovation, where we talk about the pitfalls and practicalities of launching innovations in a corporate environment. 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 Elliott Parker, Corporate Venture Studio High Alpha Innovation CEO

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 Elliott Parker. He is the CEO of the Corporate Venture Studio High Alpha Innovation, and author of the new book, The Illusion of Innovation: Escape Efficiency and Unleash Radical Progress. Hey, welcome back, Elliott. 

Elliott Parker: Brian, good to see you. Happy to be here. Thanks. 

Brian Ardinger: It's good to have you back. I think it's been almost two years, 90 episodes since you were back on. So, let's refresh the new listeners about who you are and what is High Alpha Innovation, and then we'll get into the book. 

Elliott Parker: Yeah. So, I'm CEO and founder of High Alpha Innovation. We're a venture builder that works with corporations, universities, and world class entrepreneurs to build amazing what we call advantaged startups that go solve really important problems. 

Brian Ardinger: It's a fascinating model. There's a lot of things that have popped up since our last conversation. We can dig into all of that stuff, but the reason I wanted to have you on is you've got this new book out called the Illusion of Innovation. And I think you've distilled probably a lot of your learnings over the years into this book. The title itself, the Illusion of Innovation, what does that mean to you and why did you title it that? 

Elliott Parker: The book is an act of love and frustration. It's the idea that, the frustration piece is that so much of what large corporations are doing under the guise of innovation doesn't work. Doesn't produce the meaningful change they seek, and often leads to disappointment and we need to fix that. 

The love part is that I want corporations to be successful. We all should want corporations to be successful. There are certain things, certain problems that only corporations can solve that people collaborating through the form of corporation can address. And so, the problem is that corporations over the last 50 years have actually become worse at confronting opportunities and challenges.

There's more capital on corporate balance sheets than ever before. And at the same time, they've become less capable of meaningful innovation. And what I wanted to figure out is why is that and what do we do about it? And that's what the book focuses on. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I mean, you, you think about it maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago, the bigger companies had the bigger R&D budgets, and they were, seem to be exploring and building in different ways. And now you see a lot of this company kind of pulling back on that and like you said, kind of doing innovation theater. Do you think companies can create innovations by themselves today, or you know, what's been broken in the model? 

Elliott Parker: Yeah. I think the way that companies go about it needs to change, actually. That we're in a fundamentally different point in the economy than where we were 50 years ago. And the old model, the corporations could centralize assets and resources inside the wall of the company, control those resources and the transactions between them and generate profit. 

The new model in the economy of today, it's much more decentralized. Meaning small teams and individuals have a lot more power. And can do things that previously only corporations could do.

The challenges that corporations in many cases haven't changed how they go about innovation, R&D, M&A, primary levers for innovation have become less effective than they once were. Still very good options, but less effective than they once were. It's a big problem. The irony of it is, is that they're better managed than ever before.

They're just optimized for the wrong thing. We've gotten really good at managing our corporations to make them safe and predictable. We've gotten a lot better. There's a lot less variance in the system, and it turns out it's that variance that produces learning and produces meaningful innovation. And so, as a result, we're seeing less of it. Companies are better managed. Ironically, it's a problem. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I think you have a quote in the book, growth results from actively seeking surprises, not from predictability. They are two different, I guess, muscles almost. You know, working in a predictable business model, executing on that, optimizing for that is different than I'm in the wilderness. I sense or I have a hunch of a problem here. How do I figure out how to create value from solving that problem or whatever? 

Elliott Parker: You've got to seek deliberate inefficiency, which is a hard thing to do. Our organizations are optimized in every way for capital efficiency, meaning cutting out costs, avoiding problems, making things as predictable and safe as we can.

That does not produce innovation. In fact, that produces sterility over time and produces death. We don't live in systems like that. We don't thrive in systems like that. You've got to find ways to invite some degree of purposeful inefficiency that creates learning by discovering anomalies and things that challenge the status quo.

Brian Ardinger: So, you talk a little bit about how do you embrace that chaos instead of the predictability. Can you talk about maybe some examples or ways that companies can start thinking about surviving or thriving in a chaotic environment versus a static environment? 

Elliott Parker: Yeah. In the end, the CEO of Netflix said it really well. Reed Hastings, he said, chaotic and messy will beat sterility every time as long as that chaos is productive. And that's the trick. It's making that chaos productive. I think the best analogy way that I think about it is what we see in natural ecosystems where there's a tremendous amount of resiliency.

Think about the Amazon jungle and the way the Amazon jungle innovates. Incredibly resilient, and yet none of the innovation is done in a hierarchical way. It's not objectives driven. It's not broadly communicated in the system. It's not centralized. And it's not expensive. Innovation in the Amazon happens in a very decentralized way.

It's a random walk. It's not objectives driven. It is constrained by available resources, but there isn't some master plan. It's not communicated, and it, it happens at the level of individual organisms or cells in that ecosystem. Where if the innovation of mutation fails too bad for that organism, but the ecosystem's fine.<...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Louis Gump, author of the new book, The Inside Innovator. Louis and I talk about his experiences at The Weather Channel and CNN Mobile, as well as a myriad of topics for helping companies better identify and support inside innovators. 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 Louis Gump, Author of The Inside Innovator

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 Louis Gump. He's the author of the new book, The Inside Innovator: A Practical Guide to Intrapreneurship. Welcome to the show, Louis. 

Louis Gump: Thanks, Brian. It's great to be here.

Brian Ardinger: Super excited to have you on the show. Another inside innovator to talk more about what it takes to move the ball forward in today's corporate climate. Before we get to the book, I want to start a little bit about your background and that. I understand you worked in bigger corporations, Weather Channel, for example, and CNN Mobile, and you earn your chops trying to launch new products and services inside big companies. So, let's give the audience a little bit of background about how you got here. 

Louis Gump: Thanks for asking. I did have the opportunity to work with the mobile team at the Weather Channel. I led the team that launched the Weather Channel's iPhone app and Android app. And then along the way there was an opportunity to work with CNN. And so once again, our really talented and hardworking team launched CNN's iPhone app and Android app and we kind of took it from there and built the business. There are many other parts to those stories. 

And then along the way, I've also had a chance to be CEO of two smaller companies. And those experiences gave me an awesome vantage point to understand some of the differences between being an intrapreneur inside a larger company or an inside innovator versus an entrepreneur and leading a small one. And it led to some insights and some observations that, Hey, you know, there are a few things I wish somebody had told me along the way, and so I wanted to write the book. 

Brian Ardinger: Intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship are oftentimes misunderstood or even mis defined, or people have different pictures of what innovation is, and that, let's start there. How would you define intrapreneurship versus entrepreneurship and how does that compare to innovation? 

Louis Gump: Sure. So just to start with a definition. Intrapreneurship is the practice of creating value through innovation and growth inside a larger organization. And on the other hand, entrepreneurship, at least in general, and you can find different ways to define it, but it involves either owning a company or starting a company and being in a role where you can call a lot of the shots.

And so, when you look at some of the distinctions, here are a few. One is the size and complexity of the organizations. Another one is the span of control and influence of the leader of an organization, and I suspect from some of the things I've listened to in your podcast, there are many people who could go on about that for a long time.

The third one is access to resources within a larger organization, sometimes we look at entrepreneurship versus intrapreneurship, and we have a value judgment. Some people may be better, some people may be worse. I tend to toss the value judgments in the trash bin. I don't think they belong really in the center of the conversation, it's really rather what's most appropriate for a situation.

And one of the really wonderful things about working in a large organization is you tend to have some resources and use, well, they can accelerate progress and help you go farther. Also, the structure and the approval processes or something that goodness knows, you could write many books on the ups and downs of this. And then lastly, the risk profile for the person who takes these sorts of things on. Not just as a generic topic, but also at a point in time. 

Brian Ardinger: Some of the things that we talk about, and I like in your book, you kind of have a broader definition or scope when it comes to intrapreneurship or innovation. I think a lot of people, when they hear the word innovation or entrepreneurship, they think they have to come up with the next flying car, transformational type of outcome.

But it sounds like you have the agreement where it can be anything. It can be optimizing your existing business process. It's creating something new, but it doesn't, doesn't have to be transformational from what we've seen in the past. Is that kind of the way you see it? 

Louis Gump: A hundred percent. It's about creating value and it's about contribution. It's less about necessarily how transformative the change is. In the book, there's a story of someone who became really good at repairing diesel locomotives, you know, trains. And you think about that at some level, that is so important to the organization that cares about that. But it doesn't exactly land somebody on the front page of a magazine on the other hand, typically anyway.

On the other hand, you can look at, you know, massive digital transformation. AI is a huge wave right now, it gets talked about. . And so you end up sometimes getting caught up in the technology as opposed to the benefit. And I would say, you know, a true intrapreneur, someone who I refer to as a successful serial intrapreneur, they're always focusing on contribution and creating value.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about why it's important. Obviously, you mentioned AI and transformational things that are happening out there in the marketplace. Technology's changing. Markets are changing and that. Why is it important for companies to even foster or think about creating an environment where entrepreneurship can be possible?

Louis Gump: You know, I think this topic is sometimes underappreciated, especially in organizations that are very strong. They have good cash flow. They have good products. They're kind of moving along at a modest rate of growth a year, but it's healthy and that sort of thing. And it's really about the future. When you think about the future of a company, it's essential, at least over a, you know, sizable period of time.

There are four findings that I have included in the book, and it ended up being in the conclusion. What happened was I wrote the book, had a fairly distinct chapter sequence that I wanted to follow through on, and then I was reading what emerged from the writing process and I was like, oh my gosh, there are some really clear answers to the question you just posed. 

The first one is that intrapreneurs inside innovators, they push organizations to adapt. Sometimes they're not always smiled on. Right. Sometimes they're the disruptor, the squeaky wheel, the distraction, or whatever else you might point to. But a lot of the times, especially when someone...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Paul Jarrett, co-founder of Bulu and one of the original co-hosts of this very podcast. Paul and I talk about Bulu's journey, as well as the future of e-commerce, supply chain, and logistics, and many more things. 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 Paul Jarrett, Co-Founder of Bulu

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, I have another amazing guest. Today, if you've been around Inside Outside for a while, nine years ago, this gentleman and I started the podcast, Paul Jarrett. Welcome to show. 

Paul Jarrett: Oh no. What's up man? You're doing it, man. It's so friggin’ awesome to see…and every email…every, everyday I'm just cheering you on. And this is a little bit surreal, right? 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It's kind of full circle. 

Paul Jarrett: It's a long time, man. 

Brian Ardinger: The first podcast was called Inside Outside, and it was an inside look at startups outside the valley. You and me and Matt Boyd tried to have some conversations about what was going on in the startup ecosystem here in the Midwest, and since then I started Inside Outside Innovation to focus on you know, larger innovation projects, as you went on and, and did some other stuff. 

So, you were the co-founder of Bulu. This was a supply and logistic company based here in Lincoln, Nebraska. You started out in the subscription box space and have, you know, gone through a variety of journeys over the last 9, 10 years. And so maybe let's start there. How did you get started and, and where are you now? 

Paul Jarrett: Actually, probably another way of looking at it is like, oh, you're on your third company or fourth company. Call it pivot. Call it evolve, call it new company. The way I look at it is finding a better problem to solve or a harder problem to solve.

My co-founder, Stephanie Jarrett, and I, who I happen to be married to. We started way back April 12th, 2012, because the first failure was trying to get it on April Fool's Day. And you know, just because you submit it doesn't mean that's the day. So, but yeah, we raised capital. I tell people way too early. We raised like a million and a half dollars before we ever sold a thing.

God bless the people that believed in us. We were In San Francisco, came back to Nebraska, gave a presentation. I think we had all of the mechanics and people were like, yeah, they'll figure out the product later. And we launched a consumer-packaged goods, CPG, direct to consumer brand. It was one of the very early subscription boxes.

We actually call them sample boxes because that was the first iteration. And I would say we were kind of the first non-makeup, non-beauty focused on vitamin supplements, healthy snacks. So, the idea is pay 10 bucks, get a Bulu box, come back to the website, buy full-sized version of the product, stack up your rewards points.

And actually, we were taking the data and we were manufacturing our own products, right? That went amazing. As CEO I take 100% responsibility for probably, I was talking to the wrong sort of investor. Like a software investor for a consumer-packaged goods company. And kind of like subscription was the thing that was common, but it was just different.

We have physical, we have a warehouse, right? I'm in a warehouse right now. But that worked. We grew a really small stint where we built a software based on the data for retail big box buyers to find products that we sampled and put them on the shelf. That's called Bulu Marketplace. It's now called rangeme.com.

Super proud of that. That is, I think, what it feels like to have a billion-dollar tiger by the tail and painful to look back and go, man, we had to get rid of that, but we had to sell it as an asset in order to continue to fund our company to grow. And so then we're kind of sitting there with this Bulu Box thing that's not very appetizing to investors. A small chunk of cash from the sale of Bulu Marketplace and RangeMe.

And we said, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? And it was all the marketing costs for the subscription Bulu Box that was the issue. So, we went to big brands and we said, we know how to do this thing. If you give us these metrics, we'll cook up what a projection looks like for you. And man, it was just one after the other GNC, Disney, like that's when you really actually go like I tell people when your questions go from how are we going to do this to things like, how do we find people. 

Like how do you ship something to, oh, we need to hire people. We need to, that's the moment when you're scaling, and I think the moment when you've kind of locked in the model and you're optimizing is when people are like. What do you do with this extra money? Right? 

And so I tell people, we got to live that life for probably a couple of years where you're like, we have a surplus. Like this is wild. What do we do? Better benefits for people. This is amazing, right? Pandemic strikes like everybody, world in one way or another got flipped upside down.

I would say that with our investors who are awesome and behind us for well over a decade, which is crazy, VCs with a brand for over a decade, the time was up to do their thing. We needed to do ours, you know, is a mutual kind of situation where thank God and everything else involved that we were able to make an offer on the company.

We acquired it a hundred percent. Stephanie Jarrett got that deal done. Hats off to her. My co-founder, who is now the rightful owner. So, I was like, no, you take more percent because number one, you deserve it. Two, you kind of run the show here and three, like maybe we'll get some perks with women owned and whatever, because it actually is a better representation of the diversity, and it's pretty cool to see non-traditional people like, you know, running old school, traditional business. 

Then we kind of sat there and we're like, okay, now what do we do? We have a hundred percent of the company. We have all this history; we have all the assets with Bulu. Okay, we have everything now. Now we got to make it work. 

And so we went back to the table and really just kind of put on that ad of if I were a consultant, what would I do? I would probably come in, learn the business and strip out anything that didn't make a good margin. Anything that they weren't a core competency. I would take out without removing the ability for them to solve a hard problem.

And so, what I tell people is we basically remove the subscription box, the customer service for the subscription box, the financial management, the website build, all of that stuff we ripped out. And what we were left with was this really interesting, we call it true omnichannel fulfillment for consumer brands.

That's an expensive marketing word. So, we say hybrid hub and spoke. And so simply what we say that we do is we now help any consumer brand get on the shelf and ship like a major brand. So t...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, former CEO of Celebrity Cruises, and author of the new book Making Waves. Lisa and I talk about the world of innovation in a legacy industry, role of talent and teamwork, and the skills required to navigate the ups and downs of working in uncertain times. 

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 for Interview with Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, former CEO of Celebrity Cruises

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 Lisa Lutoff-Perlo. She is the former CEO of Celebrity Cruises and author of the new book Making Waves: A Woman's Rise to the Top, Using Smarts, Heart, and Courage. Welcome, Lisa. 

Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: Thank you, Brian. Pleasure to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on board, so to speak. No pun intended. You've had an illustrious career in hospitality going from, I think you started out maybe selling cruise packages all the way to becoming CEO of a, a major cruise line and a non-linear journey along the way. So maybe give us a little bit of background on your non-linear journey to where you are today. 

Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: Thank you. You captured it well. I did start selling door to door in New England where I'm from. Calling on travel agencies and promoting our brand so that they would sell more of us than anyone else. My first promotion with the company came four years later, 1989.

I will have been with the company 39 years this year. Crazy. Then yes, I did so many different things. I was in sales in many different roles for 17 years. I went over to Marketing for five, then I went into operations at Celebrity, one of our other brands for seven years. Then I went back into a bigger operational role at Royal Caribbean, and then finally in 2014 I came back to Celebrity in the position of President and CEO.

So it was a great journey and I learned so much along the way. Which really helped me with the innovation part of what our conversation will be. It was great experience to have done so many different things within our company and also seeing so many aspects of the industry. 

Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things and why I wanted to have you on the show is the cruise industry, it's been around. It's a legacy business. It's been around since what, the 1800s or so moving passengers across the ocean. 

And you've, in your role, both from the beginning to where you are now, moved the bar from what a traditional legacy business was to you know, you're launching the Edge Series and new ships out there and really redefining what cruising looks like. The people that you brought on board, things like that. Can you talk a little bit about how did Celebrity look at innovation process? 

Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: When I became president and CEO, the Edge series was on the drawing board, if you will. It was actually all drawn, and it was ready to go to the shipyard to be built. And I realized that when I came into this role that this new series of ships, there were five on order and it meant a 72% capacity increase over a five- or six-year period of time, which is a big capacity increase. Especially for a brand of our size that really wasn't as well-known as it needed to be and didn't have as much demand, consumer demand as it needed to. 

It wasn't enough of a brand to be reckoned with within our industry. So, I knew that we needed to transform the business. I knew we needed to transform the financial performance. We needed to transform the demand for the brand. And to do that, we needed to be very innovative and transform our brand and how people thought about cruising, especially within the affluent traveler market that we were looking to grow so significantly. 

And our ships aren't small. They're not really large, but they're 3000 person ships. So, you know, I really had to look at it through a completely different lens and say, what's going to be different and innovative about Celebrity that's going to draw people to our brand over others that were supposedly in our competitive set. 

Brian Ardinger: You know, the process of launching a new ship takes a long time. And a lot of times it's probably one of those things, like we talk to startups a lot of times and they talk about this iterative process and it's very fast.

You know, it's like I can quickly, you know, launch a new feature or something and test it with the marketplace. With something like a ship, you know, there's a large lead time at, so it must be more difficult to innovate. So how do you look at innovation and having to be, you know, 10 years ahead of this schedule when you have, you know, a five-year build cycle, for example?

Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: And that's exactly what it is. Sometimes six and sometimes seven, depending. And for Celebrity, at the time we were launching the Edge series, we wouldn't have launched a new ship for 10 years. And that's a long time. If you look at the environment that we're in today, you know that Brian better than anybody.

Right. Everything changes at warp speed, and one of the things I say in the book, which our boss told us all the time, was if Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, they would've set a faster horse. Right? A lot of times you have to be ahead of consumer trends, and a lot of times people don't know what they want until you put it in front of them and they say, oh, wow. What a wonderful idea. 

So you have to be in touch with your brand. You have to be in touch with consumers. You have to be in touch with what's going on in hospitality in general. And you have to take advantage of the things that you have as an industry that no one else has. So being at sea. Consumers always say, we want a bigger connection with the ocean.

So we transformed how people could connect with the ocean. We transformed the culinary experience. We transform design because people always look at ship design as ehhh, you know, nothing special. Why would I who traveled this way and go to these types of places, want to take a cruise because it's so pedestrian, right?

And so my desire and goal was to completely change the perception of how people thought about cruising and use the celebrity brand as a way to break into a whole new different consumer mindset and feel. And that takes a lot of time, energy, effort, and a lot of understanding about consumer trends in hospitality.

Brian Ardinger: So, are there particular things that you really dove into or, or looked at to help give you that insight or guidance as you were building these things out? 

Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: So, we did a lot of research with our customers, not only our customers, but then we cloned them and said, show me other people that look like our customers. Show me other people that look like the consumer we're going after, and what are the things that they are really looking for.&n...

​On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we welcome back Audrey Crane, partner at DesignMap. Audrey and I talk about the challenges and costs of shadow design teams and the impact of having non designers do design work. 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 Audrey Crane, Partner at DesignMap

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 Audrey Crane. She is a partner at Design Map, Author of What CEOs Need to Know About Design and also now a second time guest. Welcome, Audrey. 

Audrey Crane: Yeah, thank you, Brian. Thanks so much for having me back. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you back because it's been a while. You know, you're a long time Silicon Valley design leader and you're now resident back here in the Silicon Prairie here in Nebraska. I think you came right back right before COVID hit. So probably a lot to discuss about that but wanted to welcome you back on the show.

One of the reasons I wanted to have you back is I've been following you and you've been writing about some new interesting topics in and around this world of design and one of the most recent pieces I saw was a post about the cost of what you're calling shadow design teams. So, I wanted to kind of kick off the podcast with a little talk about what do you mean by shadow design teams and what's the implications of that?

Audrey Crane: It's interesting right now there's a lot of conversation about like the value of design, the ROI of design. I don't know if you've heard all the chatter about that. It seems like impossible to avoid. Recently, there's a very popular blog post about the sort of gaslighting of designers with this whole value of design thing.

You know, when we first started talking about it a couple of years ago, I was like, great, you know, designers should talk business. That's part of the bounded problem solving that makes design fun and interesting. And I was all in on that conversation for a long time and I still am. It's the first chapter of my book actually is ROI of Design.

And it's hard to feel like that conversation is getting us where we want to go. It's hard to feel like it's getting us very far. What has been interesting to me is to look, instead of saying to organizations like, hey, you should invest more in design. Like because of the ROI, let's look at what you're spending on design today.

And if that's the most effective spend that you could possibly make. And especially right now, the economy isn't great, especially in the tech industry, like let's look more at operational efficiency. So, with some of our clients and friends, we're running a survey to understand who is doing design outside of the design team.

So, we're asking product managers, engineers, QA people, business analysts, executives, anybody you can get to take the survey, how much time they're spending alone doing design. So, if they're in a room with somebody else, a designer talking about something that doesn't count. We're not worried about that. But we're just measuring, like I'm doing solo work that a designer might normally do.

And the numbers that are coming back are astonishing, like flabbergast. So one client that we did it with, she has a design team of like a dozen. There are 150 engineers. So already you're like, hmm, I don't know if the ratio is quite going to hold up there. But when we ran the survey, there were 22 full time employees worth of design being done by non-designers. Which is crazy. And every time we've run this survey, it's just a shocking number. 

Brian Ardinger: And you talked a little bit about the fact that it seems weird because you wouldn't unknowingly pay designers to code or things along those lines. So why are we paying folks that necessarily don't have the background or expertise of what a true designer could bring to the table? And that is costing companies money, time, resources, things along those lines. Is that the premise? 

Audrey Crane: Absolutely. Yeah. And morale, honestly, it's been interesting. I mean, I certainly have worked with plenty of organizations where there's a front-end engineer, there's a product manager that's doing a lot of design work and they like it.

And when we started running this survey, I expected a lot of the answers to be, yeah, well I do design, but I do it because I like to do it. I think my work is as good as a designer, but most of the time what we're hearing back is, I wish a designer could do it. They're faster than me. I don't feel competent at this.

I am not enjoying it. I have other stuff that I need to do and this is slowing me down, but there weren't designers available to work on this project or more frightening even is I didn't know how to work with the design team that we have internally. The costs are some engineers and some product managers are probably great designers.

I'm sure there are some out there. But generally, if we look across the board, it's probably lower quality design. It's probably slower design. It's also probably taking away from all the work that only an engineer can do or only a product manager could do. So, it's slowing down velocity on other fronts as well.

And it's a morale hit for the people who don't want to be doing it and are frustrated by it and the designers who are on the one hand trying to make a case for investing when this huge investment is already happening in design just like in a different part of their work. 

Brian Ardinger: Obviously organizations probably either maybe don't know this is happening or aren't actively trying to use additional resources on projects and that. What are some of the kinds of drivers that you think are causing companies to put the design effort onto other people's backs versus hiring designers or focusing on the right mix of talent? 

Audrey Crane: That's a good question. I mean, I think part of it is that they just don't realize how much design work there is to do. And so that's the big part of this is like, who knew that in this organization, there was 34 people's worth of design to do, to be done. I wouldn't have guessed that, right. So, it's like kind of that old trope of the alternative to good design isn't no design, it's bad design. Like it's just not happening, right? It can't be happening. That can't be happening. 

So, I think that that's part of it. I do feel like design teams are often perceived just as cost centers. And that's why we're having these conversations about the ROI of design and the value of design. And we do hear some pushback from designers saying, is there an ROI of engineering, is that being calculated?

I'm sure it is in some organizations, but. It's such a prevalent conversation. I do think that people like to do it. I also do think some people, not most people, as it turns out, interestingly, and I also do think that there's the, the Dunning Kru...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Richard Lyons, Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the university's first ever Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer. Richard and I talk about the evolving role of innovation and entrepreneurship at universities, as well as some key trends, opportunities, and challenges. 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 Richard Lyons, Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the university's first ever Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer

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 Richard Lyons. He's the Associate Vice Chancellor at University of California, Berkeley, and the university's first ever Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer. Welcome, Richard. 

Richard Lyons: Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on board. I think one of the first things I wanted to talk about is, what is the role of a Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer at a major university? 

Richard Lyons: Ah, good question. You know, it actually, the role didn't exist four years ago. It started at Berkeley at the beginning of the year 2020. A number of universities, as you know, have launched this job category. You know, most universities that were pretty decentralized places, I like to use the phrase distributed creativity. Things happen in engineering, they happen in business, what have you.

And I think the idea was, well, could we collect ourselves and become, you know, a little bit more than the sum of our parts in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship capacity? That's one way to think about why the job was created. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, you used to run, you're the Dean of the Haas School of Business. How does it differ when you're focused on, I guess, MBAs and the business side of things versus now there's more cross-collaborative curriculum and such. 

Richard Lyons: Yeah, well, I love that question because it's part of what's so much fun about being in this role You know, so CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna, one of the faculty here, shared the Nobel Prize in biochemistry a couple of years ago You know, right, science. I mean, I'm like a half an inch deep in science. I'm an economist just to put it on the table. 

And so, I get to mix with all these lab directors and scientists and not just Jennifer. She's just one of many but, So that idea of boundary spanning, right, in a really fundamental way, touching on people that are doing deep science, but also the social scientists and the humanists, and how do we sort of create a for all ecosystem that everybody's feeling like, yeah, well this, this serves me and is also interesting to me.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's quite interesting, you know, we've seen a lot of trends in higher education. It seems more and more Universities are jumping on this idea of cross collaboration with business. And, you know, you've always had tech transfer and things like that. What are you seeing when it comes to trends and this kind of move to focus on entrepreneurship and innovation?

Richard Lyons: I think the trend is unmistakable. My own view is that you could go right to the mission statements of these universities, because I think 20 years ago, people might've said, you know, the deep why of this university is research, teaching and public service. And, and you still hear that phrase. But, you know, reaching out to, like, Simon Sinek's work, Start With Why, or whoever the idea might be, you know, those are really what and how.

I mean, really important what's and how's. But the deep why is, is impact. And so, if you really thought that the mission was research, teaching, and service, Then you might look at innovation and entrepreneurship and say, oh, we're a public research university at Berkeley, and you're kind of way off on the periphery. But if the deep why is impact, no, you're kind of at the center of the mission, not the only center of the mission. Even at kind of this reframe of university missions is helping people to see that, no, this stuff is mission advancing, folks. This is not mission distracting. 

Brian Ardinger: Some universities get a bad rap when it comes to entrepreneurship. Maybe the old version of tech transfer where, you know, the university wanted to keep control of what was being created on the university and sharing the profits or the upside on that with the professors and venture capital and that. Can you talk a little bit about how maybe that whole tech transfer process and that has evolved and what you're seeing? 

Richard Lyons: Yeah, happy to. So, I was thinking a little bit before we got together here and I thought, well, I want to present four mind blows.

And I think all four of these are related to your question and I don't want to get too edgy, Brian. So, here's one and we don't have to talk about all four, but, but I think it really is an answer to your question. Well, first of all, If you asked a university, is it possible for a startup, or a big company, but let's think startup, to be able to access a mass spectrometer on your campus, or a DNA sequencer, or a shake table, or in on all the IP?

Is there kind of a porous way to access scientific equipment on Campus. And almost every university would say, yes, that's possible, that happens. And MP3s existed when Apple created the iTunes Store. So, Berkeley created a platform, we call it Berkeley RIC, the Research Infrastructure Commons. It's a platform with 27 labs on it, and virtually all the equipment in those 27 labs.

And you, Brian, or a company of any size, could access a mass spectrometer or a cell sorter. And own all the IP it's fully priced. But this creates this sort of porous foundry and its relationship building with a lot of these companies and so forth. So that idea of opening up the infrastructure to innovation and entrepreneurship, because there's a lot of excess capacity if we're going to be honest about it.

In fact, we even spun out a company based on this. It's called Second Labs, secondlab.com. And they're basically prosecuting this, you know, in a nationwide, worldwide way. So that's a fun platform. For us, it was a mind blower. 

Brian Ardinger: The other thing that I think comes into this conversation is the whole funding aspect. How are, and how do private funds work with, you know, public education and that? Some of the trends I know that I saw recently, you were talking about some of the interesting work around shared carried funds and that. So maybe let's talk a little bit about the finance mechanism around funding innovation.

Richard Lyons: Yeah. Thanks for that. So, it actually was one of the things on my list of the four, but I'll just get right to ...