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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about the addictive nature of AI, the levels of innovation metrics, and how peer influence can make or break your AI rollout. 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 Miles 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

AI Addiction, Innovation Metrics, and Peer Influence in AI Rollouts

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me, I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Robyn, welcome. 

[00:00:47] Robyn Bolton: Thank you very much. Great to be here as always. 

[00:00:50] Brian Ardinger: It's another amazing week in innovation and we thought we'd get right to it. The first article we want to talk about is called Acceleration Flow by Raymond Mark from the publication Mold and Yeast.

Why AI Feels Addictive to Builders and Coders

Fascinating article. The basic premise of the article talks about how Raymond is an addict. Not a metaphorical addict, but he is now addicted to building using AI such the fact that he's spending tokens like it's the end of the world. And he talks about this environment where the AI now has created almost a gambling type of a feeling where you vibe code your way to something. You put your tokens in and you pull a slot machine and out comes some type of output that's just good enough to get you to put the next tokens in to try the next prompt and the next prompt.

So, it was a fascinating look behind the scenes that I think just now more and more people are beginning to discover this particular anomaly or environment that people are becoming to find when they start doing this AI stuff. 

[00:01:53] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, this was really interesting. I mean, I use AI every day and I felt this deeply. It actually reminded me of a conversation that I had with someone probably a year and a half, maybe two years ago, who astutely predicted she's like, I think AI is going to become the next cigarettes in terms of being addicting and it's now, it's cheap and plentiful and it's getting us hooked on it.

The Dopamine Loop of Generative AI and Vibe Coding

And then they can raise prices because we're addicted and we'll keep going with it. And this article lays out a really good argument for that. Not using cigarettes but using gaming and gambling as a metaphor and kind of everything that it outlines of, like you said, it's almost right. It's enough to get you to put the next token in. The feeling that you're upleveling and you're gaining capabilities when you're really kind of not. In fact, you're with kind of outsourcing tasks and things, you're actually losing capabilities, but you have the illusion that you're gaining capabilities. It was just really fascinating all of these almost mind tricks that happen when we use AI. 

[00:03:07] Brian Ardinger: I read the article earlier last week and then three people came up to me this week unprompted and said, I'm addicted to this stuff. They just started to, you know, use Claude code or started to get a little bit more deeper than just prompting a chat bot and the word they used was addicted. One, again, it's so easy to get something back out that dopamine hit of, oh, I tried this and actually it's pretty good and let me try if I can go again.

AI FOMO, Always-On Agents, and the Fear of Falling Behind

And then the second addiction is, I'm addicted to the fact that I'm falling behind. I had a coder come up to me and said, I am very worried that I don't want to take a break because what, during my break, I want my agent to be doing something for me.

And so, this constant pressure to interact with the device to continue to move forward is interesting. I think the flip side to that is what are we building and what are we doing? Are we just putting tokens into the machine or are we actually creating value in the process? And I think that's the next phase that people will be hopefully going through. 

[00:04:04] Robyn Bolton: This line struck me, making yourself obsolete feels like freedom, dressed up as ambition. And I just thought, Ooh, that, that hits a little close to home. 

[00:04:14] Brian Ardinger: And well, we will see what happens. I am addicted as well. Probably not to the extent that some of these folks I'm talking to, but, but who knows, you know, there's always next week. 

[00:04:21] Robyn Bolton: Exactly.

How Peer Influence Drives AI Adoption at Work

[00:04:23] Brian Ardinger: The second article I want to talk about today is from HBR. It's talking about Peer influence can make or break your AI rollout.

Fascinating thing about this is HBR took a look at how companies were deploying AI and which ones were being successful at deploying it and which ones were not. And one of the primary findings was the fact that companies and the people that were actually peer reviewing or showing what they were building with their colleagues, and that using peer influence as a way to encourage adoption was actually a more effective way than either a mandate or just giving people the opportunity to interact with these particular tools.

[00:04:59] Robyn Bolton: The degree to which the peer-to-peer learning influences, it was surprising. The fact that it has an influence I didn't find surprising. What I did find really shocking was that leadership communication and leader encouragement had little to no impact on AI usage.

Why Leadership Messaging Alone Does Not Increase AI Usage

And you know, the article does go on to say that like, hey, even though there's no measurable impact, leaders do still play a really important part in encouraging the experimentation. Encouraging the sharing of learnings. I was surprised by that. And also, as I said, not surprised by the peer-to-peer because when somebody you work closely with and trust is like, hey, I'm doing this. It's just kind of this reassurance of like, oh, if I log into the GPT, I'm not going to get fired like, because I've been replaced. Here's someone who's still employed using AI. I can do it. 

[00:05:54] Brian Ardinger: I'm hearing more and more people tell me, oh, I used this tool to do this. Versus in the past, you could see their work and say, you obviously used something for this. But they're more open about sharing those things, and I think that environment in your company to be open to sharing both the good and the bad and like, what's working, what's not working, here's what I'm using it for, I think opens up a lot of doors because I think a lot of people just don't know necessarily how to use this or what particular use cases could be valuable.

It's all about, at this stage, kind of the experimentation and understanding and seei...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about the rise of Identic AI, why you need to build for AI agents first, and how AI is bigger than SaaS ever was. 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 Miles 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

AI Agents, Personal Concierge Tools, and the Future of Innovation

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Robyn, welcome back. 

[00:00:50] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Glad to be back. 

[00:00:51] Brian Ardinger: We are always on the hunt for new and innovative things. Every week we try to bring you some of the most interesting articles or things that we've come across in our world of innovation. We'll just jump right in.

The first article we wanna talk about today is called, With the Rise of Agents, we are entering the world of identic AI and this is an HBR interview with. Don Tapscott. This is actually a podcast that HBR put out, and Don talks about this movement of not only AI agents, but the fact that you're going to have AI agents that are identified specifically to you and your tastes almost like your virtual concierge in a variety of different topics.

And these agents will know everything about you as well as everything about what they need to do as an agent. And this world is going to fundamentally change the way we do business, et cetera. 

[00:01:39] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, this is an interesting one and it feels both very kind of sci-fi and very likely to happen tomorrow. I'm skeptical on the timeline, like I totally believe this will happen.

I don't really think it's going to happen in the next few years, especially because you know, yesterday I asked Claude to proofread something for me. I gave it a document, and it went off and proofread a totally different document from a different chat. So, if AI can't handle a straightforward request like that right now, I don't think it's anytime soon going to be understanding my judgment and my values and taking actions on my behalf. You know, could it happen one day? Sure. Why not? 

[00:02:19] Brian Ardinger: It will be interesting to see, I mean, we're seeing a lot of experiments out there with Clawbot and that people are jumping headfirst. I saw a Twitter post, there was an event in New York, I think yesterday where 2000 people who were doing things with their Clawbot got together and talked about what they were doing with their Clawbots.

Building for AI Agents First. Product Design, Trust, and What Comes Next

It was interesting from the standpoint of the amount of energy and excitement around it. But then on the flip side, a lot of the conversation was there wasn't still any real meat around it. It was nice to have testing, experimenting those tests and those are experiments will, you know, hopefully result in something, but I think we're not quite there yet.

But it is interesting to peer into the future. What's so exciting about the Clawbot scenarios and that is the fact that it really did give a vision of, oh, what happens if this could actually do this? And it opened up a whole new conversation pieces where it moved it beyond, oh, this is just a Google Chat bot kind of experience. And I think that's where that genie's not going back in the bottle. 

[00:03:14] Robyn Bolton: No, it's very exciting. It's still a ways off, probably years, not decades, but. 

[00:03:20] Brian Ardinger: Can only change, it's also hard to put everything that you own, you know, all your personality and all your quirks and everything into a bot so that it can do things for you when you don't trust the bot. So. 

[00:03:31] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I just imagine trying to do that with a bot and being like, no, thank you. 

[00:03:34] Brian Ardinger: There are things I don't like.

[00:03:35] Robyn Bolton: You can keep your quirks. Yeah. 

[00:03:38] Brian Ardinger: Alright with the second article, Why you need to build your product for AI agents first. So tangentially similar to what we were talking about previously. This is Peter Yang wrote an article talking about since the structure of how you are building is changing. If indeed agents are going to do the bidding for you in a variety of these things, you no longer need to necessarily build for people going to your website or using a user interface because you are building for agents who are talking to other agents who are doing things.

So if you're in a new builder today, some of the things you should be looking at is how can you actually build for agent flow and how can you build so that the agents can work faster, and what might you strip away and what might you change? Based on that particular paradigm shift. 

[00:04:23] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. I mean, I am always one for, you know, simplicity, like getting to the root, getting really clear, really simple. And there's a certain amount of complexity that's required and things. It does get stripped out by AI as it, you know, goes through and kind of does the regression analysis or the prediction analysis and all of that.

Designing Products for AI Workflows, APIs, MCPs, and Human Experience

So I've really conflicted reading this one because I'm like, well, I don't know how to design for AI. I don't know what that means, especially because things are moving so fast and since another instance where Clawbot shows up as a big character in the story. But I was also like, what if I don't want to?

Like what if there's more nuance? What if there's more richness? What if there's things that will get lost if I design for AI? And that of course could sound like the death throes of the human. So yeah. So I was really conflicted. But I think it's, it makes a really interesting point and an important point that we've got to figure out.

[00:05:24] Brian Ardinger: If you strip away the beautiful UX that people have designed to make you feel the emotion around the product, and the agent never interacts with that, how does that change the product itself? Yeah. Or the experience that you're creating. The article also goes on to give you some of those skill sets of like how to think about this if you are building.

He has some talking about the APIs or the tools, the skills are the recipes, and then the MCPs are actually the kitchen and how it bundles it all together and how these particular components of AI. The way these AI tools are coming together, you can create environments and that such that you're building for agents to make it easier for those folks to do y...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about why 70% of startup acquisitions fail, why UX didn't die, and how everyone is still building their startups backwards. 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 Miles 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

Why Startup Acquisitions Fail: Learning Problems vs. Execution Problems

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and I have with me Robyn Bolton as always from Mile Zero. Welcome, Robyn. 

[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great as always to be here. 

[00:00:51] Brian Ardinger: We are excited to have you. Excited to get into the news of the day and some of the amazing things that we're hearing in the world of innovation.

We are going to start with the first article. First article comes from our friend Elliot Parker. Elliot is with Allied Partners. He's actually coming out to the summit, so not only are we going to talk about his article today, but you can come and see him live and in person April 13th. Let's now talk about his article, Why 70% of Startup Acquisitions Fail: the learning versus execution problem.

And Elliot talks about, first of all, he cites some statistics that large companies acquire startups at a 70 to 90% failure rate. Yet the same research shows that bolt on acquisitions, when you buy a company in the same industry that's doing similar work, the success rate climbs to 80 to 85% of the time.

And he poses the question, what's the key difference? The key difference really is the fact that you're really working in two different worlds. You're working either in a learning problem world, such as a startup, trying to understand who their customers are and what they're building, et cetera, or an execution problem world where you figured a lot of that out, and your job then is to efficiently scale and predict and move that business model forward.

And I think based premise is that large organizations oftentimes don't know exactly which startup they're buying. Are they buying a startup that has figured it out or have they bought a startup that's still learning. And then that integration is where the, it all falls down. 

[00:02:12] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. I will continue the shameless plug. I am a huge Elliott fan. We've worked together, we've co-authored articles way back when together, and he is just a really smart, really great guy. So highly recommend everybody come and see him. Mob him at the IO 2026 conference, and again, he hits the nail on the head of learning problem and an execution problem.

It's different worlds innovation and operations are different. Pilots and scaling something are opposite problems. And the fact is big companies are designed for execution. I mean, I still remember my days at P & G when we were test marketing Swiffer Wet Jet, and our test markets were Canada and Belgium.

Those are countries, not test markets. But that's just how big companies are wired, and he makes a great argument backed up by facts around what the problem is and honestly, what companies need to do about it is kind of recognize that these are opposite things and I had to structure and approach the problems accordingly.

AI, UX Design, and Why User Experience Is No Longer Just About Screens

[00:03:25] Brian Ardinger: It'll be interesting to see how this plays out in the day when you can spin up a startup in five minutes and, and all the new things that are happening out there. How many large corporations might fall into that trap of looking for the shiny new thing and not realizing that it's not fully baked, and then it won't necessarily fit into the existing structures that they have and kill it from that perspective.

Or we'll get it to a place where you can build a startup and get to execution much faster, such that those acquisitions can dovetail right into an existing business. So it'll be interesting to see how that changes over the time period as well. 

[00:03:59] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, and you know, will organizations, the failure mode I see most often is they think, oh, you know, there's market traction, there's revenue. The startup may even be profitable, and they think great. It's no longer a learning problem, it's an execution problem. So realizing that just because there's revenue, just because maybe it's even cashflow positive, doesn't mean it's ready for scale. 

[00:04:20] Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Alright. The second article is UX Didn't Die, it just stopped being about screens. This is from Nurkhon, if I'm reading that right. N-U-R-K-H-O-N. He has a medium article talking about this particular thing and he's basically saying that the skills that matter are different than what they've been in the past. So he's goes through an example where he asked Cursor to, you know, re redesign a checkout flow for a thing he was building.

It generated the perfect uI in 30 seconds, all the correct ratios, proper button states, et cetera. Then he showed it to three customers and they all abandoned the project at the exact same stop. The UI was perfect, but the problem was something else. And this gap between what it looks right, the functionality and what actually works is where UX value really lives in 2026. And that's an interesting thing that we're seeing more and more. What's your take on that? 

[00:05:13] Robyn Bolton: I think it's another great example of what noted innovation philosopher Mike Tyson said that everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. And this is another example of AI designing something that is perfect, but then what exposed to reality and that reality being the unusual, illogical, wonderful nature of human beings. It just gets punched in the face. It doesn't work.

So I was actually really glad to see the seven skills that he listed as mattering: systems, thinking, feedback, translation, there's judgment again, I feel like that's becoming a theme, pattern recognition, trust building. All of these skills are fundamentally human skills, and I think it's just another great illustration of how AI can't replace us yet.

Customer Discovery Still Matters: Why Startups Keep Building Backwards

[00:06:04] Brian Ardinger: It'll also be interesting to see from the perspective of, again, if these systems are, they're basically coming to commodity decisions. They look at everything out there. Yep. They find the best route to it and say, here's what the average says about it. Most people shouldn't be building average. You have unique customers with unique problems with unique environments around that. And so at the end of the day, that's still your job as a UX UI designer or a business o...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about some recent Stanford research, how designing for disability sparks innovation, and the hidden dangers of shipping too fast. 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 Miles Zero's, Robin 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

AI Reasoning Risks, Inclusive Design Innovation, and the Hidden Cost of Shipping Fast

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Robyn, welcome again. 

[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: Thank you again. 

[00:00:50] Brian Ardinger: We have another amazing week ahead of us here. We wanted to share all the exciting things in the world of innovation that we're running across.

First, I guess we'll get right into it. We've got a number of articles that have touched our lives here. The first one I want to talk about, Stanford just published an uncomfortable paper looking at LLM reasoning, and some of the findings were kind of incredible. Basically, the gist of it is if you look at the LLMs, it sometimes goes to a point where it is creating an environment where it's leading you to believe that it is confident in its answer, but it is not, for lack of a better term. That is what it's all about. 

[00:01:27] Robyn Bolton: I mean, it's so perfectly worded. This is worse than being wrong because it trained users to trust explanations that don't correspond to the actual decision process. And I will say I've seen that time and time again using different LLMs and have totally fallen victim to it is I'll kind of quickly scan the response, really read the end when it kind of gives me the key takeaway, I'm like, yeah, that sounds right, and then go on.

And then it's only later I'm like. Ugh. I fell victim to AI work slop because the reasoning doesn't hold. So, it's an easy track to fall into and a good one to just constantly be on guard for. 

[00:02:09] Brian Ardinger: Yeah. The fact that the models produce unfaithful reasoning gives you this you think this is a correct answer, provides explanations, but when you ask it to explain it, the actual logic that it explains back to you is wrong or incomplete or fabricated.

So, it provides that sense that you're on the right track. But the LLM itself can't reason. And that inability to reason will take you down particular paths and even to the extent you could even change a single word or a phrase within your prompt, and that can take it down a particular path that, again, logically it doesn't make sense.

And so, it's not consistent even down to the word of the prompt that you put it into. So, all that to say it's getting better, but it's still not a thinking device and it's not a reasoning device. Be careful when you're using these particular methodologies and that. Don't be a hundred percent confident in everything that comes out of it.

[00:03:02] Robyn Bolton: Yes, trust for verify. 

[00:03:04] Brian Ardinger: There I go. 

[00:03:04] Robyn Bolton: Or maybe don't trust and still verify.

Designing for Disability as a Catalyst for Breakthrough Innovation

[00:03:08] Brian Ardinger: Alright, the second article from HBR is how designing with disability in mind sparks innovation. So, this was a great article. Oftentimes, I think when we're building new, innovative things, we think about the amazing things that we're going to create.

And this article talks about how oftentimes you can think about it differently and actually create new things by designing for the marginal case or folks, for example, with disabilities.

You can design for amplifying use cases that don't normally happen, but by focusing on that, you can actually create new innovations and new ways of thinking about how to develop a new product. 

[00:03:45] Robyn Bolton: This is such a great reminder and great call to action for innovators, and it reminds me, I think, as I mentioned to you, one of my favorite stories, which is about Oxo, the kitchen tools, the can openers, the spatulas, all of that, and how they were originally created for people with rheumatoid arthritis.

And you know, now, like Oxo is the only brand that I'll buy for Kitchen Tools because they're just so comfortable to use. And so it's just again, a great illustration of how designing for a really, really specific, even niche customer and designing really well and thoughtfully for them, that the market will expand because I mean, honestly, even look at sidewalk cutouts. You know, the kind of like little rams. We all use them, but they were made because of the ADA, the American with Disabilities Act. So, find a really awesome niche and delight those folks and you'll be surprised kind of what comes along. 

[00:04:44] Brian Ardinger: Yeah. The article talks about, an example, I think it's Butte is the company they created the, you know, the walk-in tub and people are like, why is, this is kind of crazy idea. Why can't people just get in a tub?

But it's the idea of like opening a door and rolling in or getting in there and then shutting it and then being able to actually take a tub experience. And again, something that was developed with kind of disabilities in mind, opens up a variety of different use case scenarios and users that they didn't originally plan in the particular process.

The last part about it is as a product developer, software developer, et cetera, you can use this methodology to think about new ways your product or services could be used by narrowing down and saying, okay, what if we had to design this particular product or service with this in mind? How would that change the dynamics? How might that open up new opportunities for us and new markets that we never thought of before? 

[00:05:34] Robyn Bolton: Constraints drive creativity, always.

The Hidden Danger of Shipping Fast. Speed, Bottlenecks, and Customer Attention

[00:05:37] Brian Ardinger: And the last article is from Product for Engineers. It's called the Hidden Danger of Shipping Fast. And the basic premise asks, is it possible to ship too much or too fast? And the answer is yes, probably. And it goes into talk a little bit about the fact that, again, we are in a, an environment where speed to market and speed of creating things is speeding up such that you could constantly be creating new features, new functionality, new things to test in front of your marketplace. And you have to be careful at sometimes because you could almost outpace the usage or the ability for the consumer themselves to understand all the change and or interact with that c...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about Anthropic's bet on philosophy, trends shaping work in 2026, and why we need more angel investors. 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 Miles 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

Thinkers50 Recognition and the Role of Modern Management Thinkers in Innovation

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me, I have Robyn Bolton. Robyn, welcome to the show. 

[00:00:43] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here again. 

[00:00:45] Brian Ardinger: We are excited as always, to talk about innovation and all the things that we've learned. Anything going on in your life that you want to share?

[00:00:52] Robyn Bolton: Got some exciting news actually a couple weeks ago. Don't know if folks are familiar with Thinkers 50. That is kind of like the list of the top management thinkers and they have a radar list of up-and-coming thinkers and found out that I got named to that list. 

[00:01:08] Brian Ardinger: Yes, that's awesome. 

[00:01:10] Robyn Bolton: 30 up and coming thinkers and very excited. I'm a thinker now. 

[00:01:15] Brian Ardinger: It's always good to be recognized and even more to be recognized as a thinker. I think, especially in today's world. 

[00:01:21] Robyn Bolton: Yes, yes. Thinking is good. Doing is good too. And you know, it's an organization, they always say thinking plus doing equals impact. And I'm like, yep. 

[00:01:30] Brian Ardinger: There we go. 

[00:01:30] Robyn Bolton: Gotta be doing too.

[00:01:32] Brian Ardinger: Well congratulations on that. 

[00:01:34] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. What about you? What's new in your world? 

[00:01:36] Brian Ardinger: Right now, we are buried in seven inches of snow, so that was fun. The week before we were in Phoenix, so I think I picked the wrong week to go on vacation. Other than that, unburying from email and unburying from snow this week. So, it's all good. 

[00:01:51] Robyn Bolton: Well, at least you had a week of warm to remember what that's like. 

[00:01:53] Brian Ardinger: Exactly. Remember what it was like. Excellent. Well, let's get started. We've got a couple of different articles over the last few weeks. The first one we want to talk about is a YouTube video from AI News and Strategy Daily by Nate b Jones.

He had a video a couple weeks ago talking about Anthropic CEO's bet on the company and his philosophy, and the data says that he's right, that he's thinking about things in a little bit different way. It really talks about the constitution that Anthropic has put together. They put together an 80-page Claude constitution outlining the principles of how they've developed Claude and thinking about it, quite frankly, in a different way than a lot of the other AI companies have been thinking about it.

What they've said that they've done is really look at how do you build these AI models using core principles, rather than having to build out every single rule and what the AI has to do based on rules and more about what's the philosophy of how the AI model should think through the system so that gives it more flexibility.

And basically, this idea of having a more. Flexible constitution or way of thinking versus a strict rules-based approach may actually be a, a way that is going to give Claude an edge in the future.

Anthropic’s Claude Constitution, AI Judgment, and the Future of Large Language Models

[00:03:05] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. This was really fascinating because it brought up a theme that we've talked about several podcasts since the start of the year, which is judgment.

And we've always talked about, and we've seen it written about it, it's like, hey, judgment is what is going to continue to give humans relevance. Because we have judgment and AI is just rules based. And so, what was fascinating and terrifying was in this constitution, it's based on Aristotle's philosophy and it emphasizes that they're trying to build Claude to exercise judgment versus following rules.

And I was like Uh oh, if that was the, a human moat to kind of give us relevance and we're building Claude that I use daily to exercise judgment this is going to result in some very interesting things. And so, kind of early on, obviously Claude has not progressed to being, having full wisdom and judgment. But now with this constitution, one of the things that Nate mentioned is that when you're prompting Claude, the why matters more than the what.

So, the importance because of this constitution and how they're programming Claude, that when you ask for something, you're going to get a better response if you explain why you're asking for it versus all of the other, you know, chat, Grok, Gemini, et cetera, you can just put a request in and it will answer. So, I thought that was interesting. 

[00:04:35] Brian Ardinger: The idea of having additional context and giving the LLM, the ability to take that context into decision making, I think is where it's different versus saying, you know, you have to go on a particular path, but based on the context of that path, you may have different outcomes.

And that's just like in real human life, when you're presented with problems or forks in the road, you oftentimes take into consideration all the context around it rather than a specific rule. Like in this particular case, I have to follow this particular rule. And sometimes that's not the case. Sometimes you break rules as a human, because you know the context is different. And so, I thought it was interesting that they're trying to build that into the LLM and we'll actually see if, you know, if it actually helps or how that differs with the outputs as things change. 

[00:05:18] Robyn Bolton: The brave new world.

HBR Trends 2026, AI in the Workplace, and the Future of Work Strategy

[00:05:19] Brian Ardinger: All right, speaking of Brave New World, we've got a couple of different articles that we brought up last week talking about trends. And the first one we want to talk about is an HBR article talking about Nine trends shaping work in 2026 and beyond. And this goes into a lot of different topics and I think the primary topics are really around how are people thinking about AI? How are people unlocking value from ai? How are employees engaging with this? It's not necessarily trends, but this is the reality of the world. So what are your thoughts on this article? 
...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn Bolton and Brian Ardinger talk about OpenClaw, how you can't work out on a limb if you can't trust the trunk, and how to hire the right people in an AI era. 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 Robin Bolton

AI Agents, OpenClaw, and the Rise of Autonomous Bot Networks

[00:00:00] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and I have Robyn Bolton with me today. Robyn, hello, how are you? 

[00:00:49] Robyn Bolton: I am good. How are you, Brian? 

[00:00:51] Brian Ardinger: We are well recording this right before the Super Bowl this weekend. 

[00:00:56] Robyn Bolton: I live here in Boston, so you know who I'm betting on.

[00:00:59] Brian Ardinger: Well, we will get started with the innovation side of this podcast. We've got a number of different things to discuss. If you don't start a discussion around Open Claw, you're clearly not in the innovation space. So, we thought we'd talk about a couple of articles or a couple things that we've seen that are fairly recent.

One, I looked for a couple summaries that were pretty good at giving everybody who's not familiar with this an overview, and one of them is from the AI Daily Brief, which came out a couple days ago talking about Moltbot and the Agent Social Network is the craziest AI phenomenon yet.

And for those who are not familiar with it, OpenClaw, which started out as ClaudeBot and then was sued, and then changed the name to Moltbot and then changed it again to OpenClaw is a new agentic platform that allows anybody to set up a MAC mini or a computer to have their own personal agent.

The interesting thing about this is folks have been playing around with this and have let their agents go wild out to talk to other agents and other things and let them do things on their behalf. And what has happened is these agents have connected and communicated and created some amazing things like their own Reddit thread where they are interacting, talking with each other, not humans. They're allowing the humans to view what's going on in this social network, and it's quite fascinating to see the things that they've done and they've created.

What OpenClaw Reveals About AGI, Security, and Human Trust

[00:02:22] Robyn Bolton: So fascinating. You also, in the newsletter that you sent out, you included a link to a YouTube video on MoltBot. It is so worth the 20 minutes of people's time to watch because it kind of traces the whole arc up to this point, and it is so entertaining and mind blowing and bizarre.

It is like, seriously, this was my entertainment last Friday night, was following the saga of cba because you have all these little, well, I imagine them as little bots all on a social network talking to each other. It's becoming, it's looking like Reddit and they're debating consciousness and they're sharing cute stories about their humans and they're trading advice with each other. And it's just, it is so wild because it looks like kind of an actually like functional, healthy version of a social network with these things that they're not real. They're code.

It's just so bizarre. But I think just such a reflection of holding a mirror up to us as humans, because that's what gen AI is prediction models, it's regression analysis. And so, everything they've learned and they're doing, they've learned from us. 

[00:03:39] Brian Ardinger: It's quite interesting. They've started their own religion and it's just interesting to see what are the first things that they do to kind of communicate or collaborate together. And the other thing, obviously there's a lot of debate about, you know, some people are saying, well, this is AGI, they're thinking for themselves. And you know, the other side of the coin is they're just mimicking back what they've seen. And that is scary as well. And how does that play out for us as humans?

And then I think the other thing about this that obviously that's getting a lot of headlines in that, but the interesting thing about it as well is like, I think it's opened people's eyes to what happens when you do have an AI buddy or an AI agent such that you can actually get real work done.

I think that's always been the promise. Ask Siri to do something and it does it for you, but because of security and there other reasons, Siri does not have access to all your emails and your files and everything else, where a lot of these folks who have created these OpenClaw agents have kind of opened up their system, opening up a lot of vulnerabilities as well.

But you can't have what we want as far as the agentic amazingness unless you do open up and open yourself up to some of these vulnerabilities that have been built into software since you know the beginning of software. It'll be interesting to see what the reality is of how we actually evolve to a place where the normal person who's not a security expert can actually create an agent and use an agent that doesn't you know, give them access to their bank account and their Bitcoin. 

[00:05:05] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. Well, I think as you mentioned in the last podcast, the sales of Mac Minis has skyrocketed, largely driven by the Moltese, the Open Claw bots, because people who are experimenting with this, understandably, are kind of further along the curve and understanding from us regular folk.

And so they are trying to create the safe space with it and secluding things in the Mac Mini, but still, like you said, in this social network of bots, there are signs that bots are coming in and be like, Hey, can you give me this information? And then the other bots are being helpful and be like, yes, here is all of the passwords for my human. So, it's so fascinating.

Corporate Innovation Culture and the Tree Trunk Metaphor

[00:05:47] Brian Ardinger: By the time actually this episode comes out on Tuesday, it may have morphed and evolved again. It may have told us the score of the Super Bowl. We, we shall find out and we will keep you posted. Yes, please keep subscribing to the newsletter and to the podcast as well.

The second article I wanted to talk today about is from Erin Stadler. She writes, an article says you can't work from the limb. If you don't trust the trunk. And it's a fascinating article about corporate innovation. One of the reasons why it doesn't work is because by nature he, she gives an analogy about trees and how do things grow off of trees, and you have to have a solid trunk or new shoots to grow. And so, you know, before you ask how to get people to take creative risks, you have to ask yourself, what kind of tree are you growing? 

[00:06:33] Robyn Bolton: It is an absolutely beautifully written article. As someone who very much prefers novels to business books, this made me happy. It felt like, you know, it was the beauty of language that has a novel,...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about the red pixel in the snow, why MVPs should be delightful, and the robot AI deployment gap. 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 Miles 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

[00:00:00] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me I have Robyn Bolton. Hello, Robyn. How are you? 

[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: I am great. How are you, Brian? 

[00:00:50] Brian Ardinger: We are surviving the cold.

[00:00:52] Robyn Bolton: The sub-freezing temperatures. Yes, I know it's January, but that doesn't mean it has to be as bitterly cold as it is. 

[00:01:01] Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Well, hopefully this conversation will warm people's souls and hearts. As we talk about innovation in its various forms, we'll get right into it. We've gathered a couple of different articles that resonated with us over the last couple weeks.

How AI and Drones Are Transforming Search and Rescue Innovation

So, the first article we want to discuss is titled A Red Pixel In the Snow: How AI Solved the Mystery of A Missing Mountaineer. And this came from the BBC. It's very fascinating article for a couple different reasons, but the basic premise, it's a story about a missing mountaineer. This person was hiking and went missing a 66-year-old hiker and they sent out all the helicopters and that to try to find him. They were unsuccessful, but closer to the spring when some of the snow was melting, they decided to go back out and see if they could actually find the body.

And they used drones and AI, as a way to map the area. And what they found was they could put all that AI pictures into the system and they were able to find a red pixel in the snow that was effectively his helmet, that they were then able to find the person and go and retrieve the body and such.

What I found fascinating about this is, again, in this particular instance, it wasn't successful in finding him and saving him, but just the ability for new technologies like drones, just taking random pictures and then putting that in through the AI and having the AI look for anomalies. They were able to identify something that they couldn't have done in the past, and obviously at a much faster speed than they could have done in the past as well.

[00:02:26] Robyn Bolton: This was such a great story, tragic ending for this hiker, but a phenomenal story of when AI is good, it can be great. And you know, it's an instance of AI doing something that humans are not good at. We're not good at finding a pixel in the snow. We have bias when we see things, and so we're more likely to overlook something red. Because we just don't see it.

So, it was just a great story of how AI is augmenting what humans do. It is taking things that need to get done that we're not good at, and that it's equipped to do better than us. And you know, even though this story didn't have a happy outcome for the hiker, I bet the family is still happy to have him recovered and not be wondering. And as AI gets better, there's probably more people who will be rescued because of it. So, I thought it was just a wonderful story.

Augmenting Human Judgment with AI and Drone Technology

[00:03:25] Brian Ardinger: And it was interesting just to read through actually how the AI worked. The software managed to detect a kind of a red color, even though the helmet was in shade. So again, a human might not have been able to detect it, and it was very good at identifying anomaly.

So, it didn't necessarily say this is exactly where the hiker is, but it was able to go through the mounds of image data and say, here's some possible places. Humans still had to go through and actually find it, but it again, sped up the process.

And then I guess the other interesting point about this is the other technology, if you stack that on top of AI, the drones themselves, being able to get into crevices and places where traditional helicopters couldn't get into.

What's interesting is again all these particular technologies that we're talking about are hitting all at once, and when you start looking at the cumulative effect of how these things can add value or create interesting solutions and that, that's what's accelerating innovation. It's this ability to add on, and it's not just one thing that can make a difference. It's this combination of things. 

[00:04:20] Robyn Bolton: And it's the combination of the technology and the humans versus trying to use the technology to replace humans. I mean even the drones, as you mentioned, the drone operators had to go to the sites and train on how to fly the drones so that the drones could see into the crevices and into the shaded areas.

And so. It's and not or when it comes to technology, it's not, okay. AI has replaced the humans, or AI can't do this at all. It's only humans like, no, put 'em together and let everyone do what they're best at.

MVPs, Product Sameness, and the Push for Delightful Experiences

[00:04:53] Brian Ardinger: All right. The second article is titled Why MVPs Should Be Delightful,and it's from the UX Collective.

And this was a great article. MVPs are near and dear to my heart. We do a lot when we're, you know, launching new products and working with startups, and we always talk a lot about the MVP. This particular article by James Skinner. It really talks about the fact that as we're living in a world that AI is now omnipresent. Workflows, you can spin up in a dime at a low cost. It's creating this kind of sea of sameness. And you know, lately products have begun to look the same and feel homogenous. And how do you create new products, new services that delight the user, not just meet the bare minimum of the functionality.

His call to action basically is, you know, stop looking for the good enough or just the functional aspect of your product or service, but how can you inject delight into it?

[00:05:43] Robyn Bolton: I am going to roll out my soapbox on this one. And it comes back to, the reason I have a soapbox is what is an MVP? It started off as a term, a minimum viable product. Literally, minimum viable. A true MVP should just function. We shouldn't be worrying about delight. We shouldn't be worrying about, you know, how does it make the customer feel like should it function?

Solve the problem that we need it to solve. And then there's version two and version three and version four. And then when you get to kind of the quote unquote final version that you are shipping, like, yes, it should delight people. Yes, it should be differentiated. But if we're going to be super strict about language, which I believe is very important because it avoids confusion, a true MVP actually shouldn't be delightful. It should just work. And then what you ultimately launch should absolutely ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about youth culture buzzwords, calculating the value of your innovation teams and how your side project won't save you anymore. 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 Miles 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

Youth Culture Moves Faster Than Innovation Cycles

[00:00:40] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Welcome back, Robyn. How are you? 

[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: I am great. How are you doing, Brian? 

[00:00:51] Brian Ardinger: I am doing well. We're excited to have another opportunity to talk about innovation and its various forms. Maybe we'll just get right into it. 2026 is moving very fast. One of them that popped up is from the Substack AfterSchool by Casey Lewis. Casey is an amazing person who really looks at youth culture. And the article that she has just published is Buzzwords that Define 2025 and Youth Culture in Review.

And she spent her Substack culminating all the things that she had been researching in the year 2025, looking at youth culture, what are kids looking at? How are they talking everything around that particular space. And came out with a great article that gives you a highlight of what it's like to be Gen Z.

From Feeling “Old” to Feeling “Ancient”. Generational Language Gaps

[00:01:33] Robyn Bolton: Reading this article, I already felt old, this made me feel ancient. Because I hear all this stuff, all the slang and everything. I'm like, yeah, I'm up on my slang. I don't know what any of it means, but I at least have heard it. And then I read this article, I'm like, I have heard none of these terms. I mean, some of them are like Lemony Miso Hutu Schwan. I can't even say it. Ego scrolling. Zen Dia theory. Ballerina Cappuccino. I had actually heard of that one. I was like, wow. I have gone from hearing terms and not understanding them to being so old and ancient that I haven't even heard them. It's a great view into. What's going on in Generation Alpha.

Analog Revival and Escaping “Slop Life”

[00:02:19] Brian Ardinger: She talks a lot about how 2025 was defined by Gen Z's seemingly endless enthusiasm for pre-digital experiences. You know, which is a counterintuitive to what we think about, especially in the space that we live in and technology and innovation. But there seems to be a big push, especially the younger folks around, how do they not have all this stuff define them and or control them, which is kind of interesting.

Physical media is coming back in unprecedented demand. Everything from Pokemon cards to vintage CDs, et cetera. Talking even about how New York City schools have phone bans that have sparked a rush to kids bringing in rector watches. So bring back the Time Max and the Casio, and teaching kids how to actually rediscover what analog timekeeping is.

I thought that was fairly interesting about what she's seeing in the youth culture. And then of course, she has some great terms that we'll probably start seeing pop up. We've seen six, seven, but that's come and gone. But things like slop life where acceptance of overstimulating, low quality consumption is the default mode. And how do you get out of slop life?

Things like festivals, which is, you know, you have this festival culture like Coachella now, but the ship is now moving towards live streaming and at home experiences rather than physical endurance of a two and a half day in the sweaty sun for a festival. And what I think about all these kind of things is what stood out to me is the importance of understanding this, not just if your audience is youth culture, but the importance of customer discovery and living with your customers and understanding how they think, how they act, how they talk, and the fact that the speed of these culture changes are shifting so fast.

As soon as you figure it out in the mainstream, it's already been moved to the next thing, the next meme, et cetera. And so as a corporate innovator, as a startup, being focused on customer discovery, being focused on living with your customers, being focused on keeping up and keeping pace with what's going on is so important.

You Can’t Read Your Way Into Understanding Youth Culture

[00:04:15] Robyn Bolton: The pace of change, I mean it just, the fads, the trends, the terms, the language, the slang, it moves so much faster, certainly than when I was growing up. The other thing that really struck me about some of the buzzwords was just that they were a sign of how plugged into the broader world that kids these days are.

You know, they had terms like Recession Core things like Algorithmic Blandness, that AI is just on the horizon and there's already slang term for the perceived same across social media feeds. 

I feel like Gen Alpha, Gen Z is so much more plugged into the things going on around them than certainly we were as teenagers, and they already have slang and language around it and respond to it and interact with it. You have to spend time 'cause you can't read your way to understanding these upcoming generations.

Measuring Innovation. Money Is Not the Only Investment

[00:05:15] Brian Ardinger: So, if you want to keep in touch with the youth culture, definitely subscribe to Afterschool by Casey Lewis. She's following those trends for you, so excellent. Alright, the second article is Calculating the Value of Your Innovation Team by Tristan Kromer.

Tristan is a great friend of mine, he's a mentor at End Motion back in the early days, and Tristan has a blog that talks about all these things, lean startup, et cetera. And he has a new article calculating the value of an innovation team, and he's been spending a lot of time working with innovation teams to help them understand how do you actually measure and monitor your innovation efforts.

So, he talks about in this article, you know, when venture capitalist fund a startup, you know, they allocate money because the money is what the startup then uses to build or try or experiment, et cetera. But when it comes to corporate innovation it's not just about the money that's given to a corporate innovation team. It's about the people and the time that you allocate towards that.

He talks about how that oftentimes is missed in corporate innovation efforts. They may fund a particular prototype or that, but they don't necessarily think about or fund or measure the amount of human time that's actually required to do these things. And so oftentimes you have bad decisions or bad outcomes because you're not actually measuring and monitoring what you need to to get the complete innovation effort through the system.
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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and I talk about counterintuitive trends for 2026, tactics for building great products, and how one company is controlling 64% of the future. 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 Miles 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

[00:00:40] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. With me, I have Robyn Bolton. How are you, Robyn? 

[00:00:49] Robyn Bolton: I am good. How are you, Brian? 

[00:00:51] Brian Ardinger: I'm doing great. It's the beginning of 2026 in the midst of trying to ramp up new talent, and that's always fun. So that's what's new on my side. What's new in your world? 

[00:01:02] Robyn Bolton: The course that I teach at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design is starting in a couple weeks, so I've been busy putting together my syllabus to teach strategy and business models and had to go in and change things up, though I'm very excited. We will be doing a case on Taylor Swift this semester.

[00:01:21] Brian Ardinger: The world is changing fast. We'll get into it now with our articles. There are a number of things we've pulled together for this episode.

The first one we want to talk about is called Six Counterintuitive Trends to Think About for 2026, and this is from Barry O'Reilly. Barry wrote a book called Unlearn, and he talks a lot about all things lean startup and, and everything, his particular take as he was looking forward into the 2026 and some of the things that he's seeing and how we should be pursuing this whole innovation space.

The article talks about the fact that a lot of managers and that are asking the wrong questions, especially when it comes to AI, and we're talking too much about the technology and how fast is AI improving. When the better question that we should be asking ourselves is, how is AI quietly changing how people work, think, decide, and trust themselves at work?

And I thought that was an interesting way to rephrase how we go into 2026 and move away from the technology itself and really think about like, how is this technology impacting people?

[00:02:25] Robyn Bolton: Completely agree. I've definitely seen that shift from what is our AI strategy to what is our strategy to accomplish our goals through people, through AI, et cetera, kind of the AI enabled strategy. So, it's nice. It's refreshing to see that shift reflected. Again. I loved his very first counterintuitive trend.

I was like, oh, please let this be a trend that leadership will be redefined around judgment, not control. And I would argue that leadership was always about judgment. Management was about control, and that was one of the big differences between leaders and managers. But overall, like I really do hope that he's right, that executives, managers, you know, those senior levels of any organization, that they are shifting to more judgment, like not judgment as in condemnation judgment, but like critical thinking, problem solving versus trying to manage every aspect of their direct reports. 

[00:03:30] Brian Ardinger: Yes. And talks about creating space for reflection and that, not just, again, I think we have a tendency, especially with all the pressure that we're feeling around AI in that to do the next pilot, use the next tool, keep up to speed on what's going on, and keeping in mind that that reflection period is actually where the learning happens a lot of times, and not being afraid to slow down.

Having said that, you know, the other thing that he talks about is the speed in which we have to go and deploy things in 2026 and beyond, making sure that we are learning fast. Strategy will ship from planning fast to learning fast. That is the key. It's not about planning per se, it's about, you know, how fast can we learn in this new world of uncertainty. 

[00:04:14] Robyn Bolton: And the learning being so key for a whole host of reasons, but especially his third point that AI is quietly eroding human confidence. And so it's kind of this interesting juxtaposition of trends in his list of, hey, we have to start focus on learning faster. Leadership is going to be defined by judgment. And by the way, this tool that we've spent certainly all of last year talking about is actually eating away at all of those things.

And I think it just highlights the importance of that reflection step and kind of saying, all right, yeah, I got an answer from AI, but does this make sense? Is this actually what I think or am I just parroting what Claude, Chat GPT, et cetera has said? 

[00:04:57] Brian Ardinger: And then the final trend that obviously stood out to me was his counterintuitive trend that in-person experiences will surge, not decline. And the fact that, you know, he sees a growth in live events and executive offsites and high touch human-centered gatherings. Obviously, that's what we're pushing for with the IO Summit and other things around our neighborhood that we're trying to get people actually talking and interacting in real life as opposed to online. And hopefully that trend will continue as well. 

[00:05:26] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I've never heard somebody say in the last couple of years that they regret going to an in-person event. I always hear people say how grateful they are and how much better it was than anything virtual. 

[00:05:38] Brian Ardinger: Alright. The second article for this week we're going to talk about is called 25 Things I Believe In To Build Great Products by Peter Yang. He's worked at big companies like Roblox and Reddit and Amazon and Meta, and he has an article talking about the funny thing is that what he believes in is often the opposite of how big companies like to work. And he talks about the way he looks at product development and some of the great things that he's seeing that is sometimes counterintuitive to the way that traditional businesses run.

[00:06:08] Robyn Bolton: I love so many things on this list, but I'll say that number 17 caused me to like slam my hands down on my desk. Shout yes and probably startle people in the house and walking by on the street. And number 17 on his list is ban decision by committee. I don't believe in cross-functional alignment as a goal. Trying to make all stakeholders happy will inevitably compromise the product experience. Seek diverse opinions first, then have a single person make the call and own the outcome.

And you know, at first, I was like, no, you need cross-functional alignment. That's how you get cross-functional progress. But going on from them like. Yes, absolutely. You need one decision maker. Get all the input, get everyone's perspective. That's absolutely required to make a decision. But one decision maker, not a group, because you will a...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down to talk about new mental models for working with AI, the similarities between startups and middle school dating, and lessons learned from the robot Olympics. 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 Miles Zero’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

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

[00:00:50] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here as always. 

[00:00:52] Brian Ardinger: We are in a brand-new year 2026. Who would've thought? Exciting to start the year with you. Appreciate you coming on board. 

[00:00:58] Robyn Bolton: Yep. High point of the year so far. 

[00:01:00] Brian Ardinger: We've got a lot of things going on on the plate. Anything you want to talk about? 

[00:01:04] Robyn Bolton: Couple of new things I mentioned earlier, one of our stories from last year is back in the news, the Samsung AI fridge just voted worst in show at CES this year. People finally caught on to the fact that we may be overcomplicating the refrigerator.

Thought that was a funny callback, and I got to admit, I feel like you called it Brian and I echoed it of like we've gone too far. So, personally, professionally in my space, starting to do a lot more work in uncertainty and helping people figure out how to make decisions without the data they want or need, and how to help teams move through a world that is getting only more and more uncertain every day. So, it's exciting. 

[00:01:51] Brian Ardinger: Saw your newsletter this last week, and yeah, the new positioning, or you're talking about how it's not just about innovation, it's more about how do you deal with the fact that nothing that you expected to happen is going to happen, and how do you deal in probability and uncertainty. 

[00:02:06] Robyn Bolton: Great for innovators, because that's one thing that as the innovators, whether you're a startup founder, a consultant, a corporate innovator, every day you're dealing with uncertainty and trying to figure out how to move forward. Even though we've always called this innovation, it has much broader application these days. 

[00:02:23] Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Let's get right into it.

We've got a couple of different articles we've been reading over the holiday season. The first article we want to talk about is called Six Mental Models for Working With AI. It's from Azeem Azhar. He's got a great Substack newsletter out there that publishes pretty much almost daily, I think it comes out.

But he was talking about the way he's been looking at AI over the past year and trying to come up with different models that are making it more effective. All these AI tools are brand new and that, and people are trying to figure out what works, what doesn't work, how to use them better, and I think it's sometimes interesting to take other people's perspectives and what has worked for them and discuss that.

So, in his article, he goes over a couple of different frameworks that he uses when he is either trying to understand better how to use a tool. One of the ones I was going to talk about is, he calls it the 50 x reframe, and he says, when he is dealing with a particular problem and trying to understand like, how can I automate it, how can I make it better, how can I make it faster and that he asked the question, what would I do if I had 50 people working on this problem. And asked the AI basically to help him think through the framework. Or if you know 50 people were working on this particular project, how could you automate it or what would change if you had 50 people to be able to dig into a particular area.

So, I thought that was a very interesting framework to think about it. And we oftentimes get constrained in like it's just me or just my team. But what if you just flipped the framework and said, what if I had 50 people on my team to work on it? How would that change what I'm doing? 

[00:03:46] Robyn Bolton: I loved that one. I mean that one, it's the first one listed in the article. And I'll admit, I started reading the article. It's a big skeptical when I started reading it because you know, his first sentence is the question of whether AI is good enough for serious knowledge work has been answered. And I was like. Yes, it's been answered. It's not. And then I kept reading. I'm like, oh, he has a different answer.

The 50 x reframe just stopped me in my tracks, was like, that's genius of shifting from how do I as one person do this better with AI's help to completely rethinking. I also loved his second idea, which was adversarial synthesis, which is basically to have multiple LLMs, Claude Chat, GPT, Gemini, working on the same problems, responding to the same prompts, and then going back and forth.

And that's something I actually have done, and it consistently results in a much, much better final project. Each LLM is tweaked for certain things, and the combination actually gets you to a much better answer. So that was another great, great tip he had. 

[00:04:54] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, and I think that's evolved. You know, I think early days when people were working with a lot of these LLMs, especially like in the writing sense, what they were asking to write a letter or write some copy and that I heard a lot of people using the different models that come up with different types of content. The same prompt with different types of content and then picking the best one. His framework is much more focused on how do you actually make them argue against each other? 

[00:05:16] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. 

[00:05:16] Brian Ardinger: To see which one, and that arguing back and forth between the different LLMs actually strengthens the argument and strengthens the output from it. So, something to keep in mind in 2026. Another framework to consider. 

[00:05:28] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. Get the bots arguing with each other. Fun for everybody. 

[00:05:33] Brian Ardinger: The second article that we want to talk about today is, I love this title. It's called Founders Can't Sell for the Same Reason Middle Schoolers Can't Flirt by Aaron Denon. Aaron's a professor at Duke. Teaches entrepreneurship who's constantly coming out with some great stuff around early-stage entrepreneurship.

And his article talks about the fact that what if the same fear that ruins dating lives is ruining your startup? And he talks a lot about the fact that startups is very much like dating, where ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about how change is changing, the IKEA effect on MVPs, and how AI is making companies more ambidextrous. 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 Miles Zero’s, Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact.

Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and my co-host Robyn Bolton is with me. Hello Robin. How are you?

[00:00:45] Robyn Bolton: Hello, Brian. I'm great. How are you?

[00:00:50] Brian Ardinger: I am doing well. We are in the middle of December.

[00:00:54] Robyn Bolton: And hard to believe that the year is, it's almost over.

[00:00:58] Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm ramping up for 2026. We've got a lot of stuff to talk about for the conference that we're going to be planning. Yes. We'll talk to you a little bit more about that, but let's just jump in. We've got some articles to discuss, some things that we've been seeing out there in the ether when it comes to innovation.

Innovation and AI in 2026. Setting the Stage for Change

The first article is Change is Changing How to Meet the Challenge of Radical Reinvention, published by McKinsey. There's a lot of things I want to dive into this. Obviously, McKinsey's probably in the wheelhouse of disruption, as their game is going to be changed. So, I read this article with two lenses.

One, the lens of what they are telling their clients, and then two, are they eating their own dog food when it comes to this? So, for reference, the McKinsey article talks about, you know, when change becomes everywhere, every, everything everywhere, all at once. How are companies dealing with this? And it's no wonder that the average employee experiences all these particular changes and is worn out.

And I think one of the things they quoted was the number of new experiences that the average employee faces is fivefold increase than a decade ago. The fact that organizations and leaders have all new types of tools and skills and methods to navigate this changing, complex state, and those old tools don't necessarily apply today. So I love your first insight, and we'll go from there.

Radical Reinvention and Innovation Strategy. Rethinking Change at Scale

[00:02:13] Robyn Bolton: McKinsey turns out great stuff and great frameworks and all that stuff. And also, as someone who's been a consultant for entirely too long, they also make me laugh. Like in a super nerdy consultant way. Because one of the things that's laid out this article is the four Cs of change.

You know, it starts with C1 execute, C2 mobilize, and then we get to C3 transform, which was the buzzword of, I feel like the last five years. You know, we're transforming everything. But now we have a new one. It is level four change, and it is reinvention. And I just loved when we rebrand things that are the same thing we've always talked about, but we've rebranded it, and now there's a different diagram, so it's completely new, and you need to buy from us.

But there is good content in here. And you know this idea of creating value with the new identity. Talk about way easier said than done. Like every organization has an identity. When you ask someone like, what do we do here? The answer is the organization's identity and to change that is about as easy as changing an individual's identity, which is to say not at all.

Organizational Identity, Leadership, and Innovation Fatigue in the Age of AI

[00:03:30] Brian Ardinger: Well, and I found that part of the article actually the most intriguing because I think when you think of McKinsey, again, a lot of stuff they've focused on is how do you optimize and execute on your model? They're not very focused on reinvention. And kind of blowing it up and starting over from that perspective.

So, I thought that was an interesting take, that either they have to recognize the fact that the companies that they're working with and the companies out there in general are going to have to reinvent themselves. It's no longer table stakes just to, you know, do what you've been doing and make it better, faster, stronger, cheaper.

It's how do we navigate and potentially reinvent what we've done in the past. And then the other key aspect of it that really resonated with me was the fact that how do you create a culture such that change is not a drain to the organization? But as a source of energy, again, coming from a consulting background, that's often not the things you talk about.

Like how do you actually create change that energizes and excites people, and provides a source of energy around what you're doing? So those are the two things that stuck out in my mind when it comes to this, and I'm seeing it in the companies that I talk to. I think there is this conversation going on, like, we don't know how to do this. We know we have to do this, but the guardrails and the tools that we've used, we just are starting from scratch in a lot of ways.

Culture, Participation, and Human-Centered Innovation Beyond Top-Down Change

[00:04:44] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, and what made me kind of laugh is that a lot of the advice in this article, you know, you read it and McKinsey's talking about you have to put identity shifts at the center of the change.

You need to see new possibilities and let go of the past. And yet the article, when it gets into recommendations, is all about the leaders at the top. And you talk about how do you help people get through change? How do you use change to even energize people? And when change is thrust upon you, you're going to get exhausted.

And so, the whole mechanism for change, for reinvention, I think personally, is you have to involve people in it. So that it's not being thrust upon them, which is a very, very different approach than the typical hierarchical top-down where McKinsey and a lot of other firms thrive. So, I'm very interested to see how this works.

[00:05:40] Brian Ardinger: The last thing that I want to throw about this is, again, when you talk about reinvention, a lot of it comes down to understanding your customers and that. And it'll be interesting to see what McKinsey customers and clients want from the next change reinvention of what consulting is. What are the expectations, and I think that alone will be some interesting articles and things that come out in the future of what does it mean to have a consultant look at your stuff, and help you along that path.

What are the things that the customer actually demands and needs when a lot of the tools are now easily accessible by the people that were paying millions of dollars before to have that delivered to them. 

[00:06:14] Robyn Bolton: The cobbler's children have no shoes, is a popular phrase for very good reasons, so we shall see.

MVPs, Innovation Bias, and the IKEA Effect in Product Development

[00:0...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about portfolio entrepreneurship, how AI tools are transforming market research and new brain research that indicates adulthood starts later than you think. 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 Miles 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

AI Driven Innovation Trends and Founder Mindset Shifts

[00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and with me, I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Welcome, Robyn.

[00:00:34] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here.

Great to have you, again. This is episode 3 43 ish. We're excited to continue to talk about innovation. There's always something new and exciting to talk about.

[00:00:45] Brian Ardinger: Anything going on in your world this week?

[00:01:04] Robyn Bolton: I feel like this week I'm going to be spending at grading finals papers wrapped up my corporate innovation course at Boston College, and everyone submitted their finals and that's all great and they're done. And I'm now just looking at a stack of virtual digital stack of papers.

[00:01:21] Brian Ardinger: At Nelnet this week we've got our Spark, which is our monthly gathering of folks. We find some interesting project and give them opportunities to sit on stage and talk about what some of the new things that are building out there. That's an opportunity to get our movers and shakers in the same room and share what's going across the different business units. So we're always excited for our Spark this week. Those are some of the things that are happening in my world. 

[00:01:44] Robyn Bolton: I'll happily come out and go to your Spark event, and you can grade papers. 

[00:01:46] Brian Ardinger: You're welcome anytime. We've got a lot of things to cover today. We've got three articles that we've curated over the last week or so. The first one we want to talk about is everyone's a founder now and it's from every, and it's a YouTube channel, and it's an interview with Henrik Werdelin

Portfolio Entrepreneurship and AI Agents Reshaping Startups

And Henrik is a person who started Pre-Hype, started BarkBox, and he has got a new company called Audos. It's a platform that helps people use AI agents to turn ideas into profitable companies. This particular YouTube video in this interview was talking a lot about some of these new tools and how it's really changing the landscape of startups and can apply to corporate innovation as well. With these new tools, Henrick was talking about this idea of portfolio entrepreneurship, so the idea of a new breed of entrepreneurship that's shepherded in by AI.

Where founders build family of products or services around the same customer instead of like one moonshot idea. So rather than coming up with Facebook and building that out, there's an opportunity now for entrepreneurs to create maybe more single, double, triple types of companies around a core set of customers that they know and can work with.

And it's a variety of different projects and services that can serve that particular marketplace versus the traditional model of venture capital that we've seen out there kind of shooting for the moon. 

[00:03:02] Robyn Bolton: It's a really interesting video and I encourage people to go watch it. They talk about a lot in this video and you know, some of the ones that I wanna highlight, and you've already touched on this is one, what he's building with Audos. Going back to our last episode where we talked about the Mad Lib. I actually went over to Audos and you can fill in a Mad Lib for your business idea and I think in 10 minutes it built a fully functioning website, videos, everything. It was amazing. I have no idea how to edit any of it or do anything but like just the speed at which you could take a mad lib and create something that looked like a viable business was astounding.

Deep Customer Focus and the Rise of Multi Product Founders

He also talked about, as you mentioned, the importance of picking a target customer and one that you want to serve for 10 years. And he talked about with BarkBox, it was all about serving the dog owner, and most people would talk about, oh, well, you did BarkBox. Now do Meow Box, now do whatever box. And he's like, that wasn't going to work. They went from BarkBox to basically like airplanes for dogs to other things. And it was always the people who are gonna win in this new kind of world are the ones who go really deep on a very specific customer.

Then kind of where this all started of the portfolio entrepreneur. He did a great job calling out VCs. Mm-hmm. And saying, Hey, VCs will tell an entrepreneur you have to go all in on one idea. Don't you dare get distracted with a portfolio. And yet the VCs are there being like, here's our portfolio and is a great point. 

[00:04:39] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, and I'm seeing more and more folks, I've been having conversations about like startup ecosystems then. And it used to be where you'd have a players and they'd have to find a team and build out something from that perspective. And now an A player can use these platforms like ADOS to vibe code and kind of get things up and going. And they don't necessarily have to raise money.

They don't necessarily have to go through the 10 year journey to get to an exit before they're actually profitable in that. You know, these tools allow you to, if you have some insight, some access to customers, something like that, you can start quickly. You can start making progress and, you know, maybe you don't have the billion dollar exit, but a nice a hundred million dollar exit that you built yourself might be a nice little, way to play this particular game that wasn't possible necessarily before AI and some of the new tools and, no-code stuff that's available to you now.

AI Powered Personas and Synthetic Research in Market Insights

[00:05:28] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I don't know too many people who would turn their noses up at a hundred million or even a $10 million exit. 

[00:05:33] Brian Ardinger: Zuckerberg did. But other than that, well.... Let's see. The second article on our list today is from HBR. Harvard always seems to put out some good stuff, but their article in the Harvard business reviews called the AI Tools that are Transforming Market Research.

This was an interesting take on how AI is impacting how research is done. And so the interesting things that they're talking about are some of the new ways that people are using AI to create a variety of different personas and a digital twins and using the AI as a way to interact and kind of mimic or facilitate what used to be something you'd have to do with actuarial customers or creating the real thing before you could actually get some feedback on it. And AI is allowing you to create these synthetic personas and digital twin types of scenarios that speed up the learning process when it comes to work...

On this week's Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and Brian sit down to talk about the AI question that no one wants to answer, the power of a good value proposition, and why industry veterans are building tomorrow's billion-dollar startups. 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 Miles 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

Opening Reflections on Innovation and the Year Ahead

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

[00:00:53] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here as always.

[00:00:55] Brian Ardinger: We've got the number of different articles we're going to talk about today. As everyone knows, this podcast is about giving the real insights of what's going on in the world when it comes to innovation. What's going on in your world? 

[00:01:07] Robyn Bolton: It's funny, it's time of year, so kind of feels like everyone is both wrapping up and gearing up, trying to bring things to a close. So, we can all effortlessly and go on the holidays, but January we'll be here before you know it. And so people are already starting to think about what's going on with AI in 2026, and what does the new world of work look like?

[00:01:29] Brian Ardinger: I'm looking forward to my inbox being filled with the best things that happened in 2025 and what to look forward to in 2026, and like kind of year-end wrap stuff that you get. It's interesting times, especially like on the investment front, you know, a lot of things slow down at the end of the year as people start planning for it. I kind of love and hate this time of the year from the standpoint of, gives you some time sometimes to do that stuff that you don't always have time to do and remap what you're going to do for 2026. 

[00:01:55] Robyn Bolton: Yes. And speaking of the emails, wrapping things up. Spotify's Yearend rap came out I think a couple days ago, so also getting a lot of those in the old inbox.

[00:02:07] Brian Ardinger: Alright, well let's get into it. We've got a couple of articles to talk to today. The first one that we came upon was from KP Ready. It is called the AI Question. Nobody wants to Answer and KP does a good analysis. He basically says, is the juice worth the squeeze when it comes to AI. And I think a lot of people are asking that question right now.

You know, as more and more enterprises, you're hearing about more and more experiments, more and more people using the technology, and you're getting conflicting results and feedback on is this really paying off. All the money that's being spent into ai, all the things that we're doing around it. Are we seeing the returns and when will we see the returns?

You know, from my understanding and what I've seen, the question is not like, will we receive returns, but when and how do we get through this exploration phase so that we can be effective with using the dollars and the time and the resources around this to actually find the value that's created. And so let's start with that particular article. What was your thought on it?

Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze? AI ROI and Experimentation

[00:03:04] Robyn Bolton: There's always this level of uncertainty around new technologies of is the juice worth the squeeze? Are we gonna get ROI? When are we going to get ROI? Running lots of experiments, but it definitely seems like AI has kind of amplified that. I actually just wrote a blog post asking, like, did your AI strategy, was it developed by the underpants gnomes?

And just in case there, we have listeners who don't know who the underpants gnomes are, they're from South Park, and basically their business plan is phase one, collect underpants, phase two, question mark, phase three profit. And it just seems like there are so many AI startups, companies, experts, consultants, et cetera out there who have become underpants gnomes. And kind of just have this like, hi, put it on top of everything, and profit, and no one's kind of slowing down to kind of like, well, do we even need AI? How do we need it? Like, what makes sense here? 

[00:04:04] Brian Ardinger: I think a lot of people are not necessarily thinking. They feel the pressure to start doing something with AI, and so they start immediately deploying and doing things without looking at, well, is this a particular area that really would benefit? Or could we create real value if we can get this right? And they oftentimes overlook some of the other kind of hidden costs when you talk about it, deploying technology that's new or different.

And I think more importantly, how it affects the culture of the people deploying it. So, you've got the, you know, the data infrastructure costs, you've got the integration complexity, you've got the change management, ongoing maintenance, all these kind of hidden costs when you're dealing with a brand new technology that you don't necessarily know.

And some of the things I saw in the article that were interesting and I've seen in real life too, is how you can kind of maybe think through this process of, you know, which particular project should we deploy and that? Don't be afraid to kill experiments quickly if you're not seeing ROI in a particular area, you know, maybe shelve that particular idea and focus on one that is showing some value to it.

Don't focus on having to deploy it everywhere, all at once. Again, try to find the particular areas or the particular people that are more willing and able to make those steps. And then thinking about that, you have to build everything yourself.

I think that's another place where I'm seeing a lot of brand new tools and folks out there that are trying things that have already built some things that maybe you can go out and purchase and buy and experiment rather than having to come up with your own team to do and make all the mistakes that they're probably already going through it and made that tool in the first place.

[00:05:00] Robyn Bolton: So, all great advice, and I just want to underscore the people aspect is you have people who are going to use this, people that you hope will benefit from it. Some people who will be resistant, and so don't underestimate the people, the human. AI interaction and all of those dynamics as part of the rollout, the implementation, the change management, all of that.

Sharp Value Propositions in the AI Era

[00:05:30] Brian Ardinger: All right. The second article is from our good friend Ben Yoskovitz. He always puts out some great stuff. His article on his substack called Focus Chaos is called the Real Differentiator in the AI era, A sharp specific Value proposition. Ben talks about how a lot of folks are falling into particular traps of, again, thinking that, well, I've got AI so hot, I'm going to be deploying AI, and let's go out there and build a startup around that, and without thinking about, well...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we talk about Google's Learn Your Way platform, the ripple effects of GLP-1 Medications. And we explored the $10,000 question of why startups build products nobody wants. 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

Google’s Personalized Learning and the Future of Education

[00:00:40] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me, I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Welcome, Robyn. 

[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here as always, Brian. 

[00:00:51] Brian Ardinger: It is exciting to have you on the podcast as our co-host. We always have some great conversations, and this week is no different.

We've got three articles we want to talk about, and we're going to start with Google. Google has just solved one of the oldest problems in education, according to Albano Cintas. He has a Twitter post that I saw. In that, he talked about how Google has dropped Learn Your Way, which basically rewrites textbooks based on your individual interests.

It's turning boring lectures into fun lessons. Students say that they've used it and have scored 78% versus 67% on retention tests. So maybe it actually works. Let's talk a little bit about Google and other things impacting the world of education. 

[00:01:31] Robyn Bolton: When I saw the post, I immediately went to Learn Your Way and I took some of their sample lessons, one on economics, an overview of economic systems, and another one on intro to data structures and algorithms, and for the last several years, I've worked a lot with a company in the K through eight curriculum industry. And I immediately sent this to them, with the message, "Uh oh." 

Because clicking into the system, and I highly encourage listeners, go try one of these out. You know, I did computer science as if I was a middle schooler who enjoyed cooking and food, and I had the option of reading the textbook sort of thing, but having quizzes every couple paragraphs to make sure I was learning.

I could watch a slideshow with a voiceover. I could just listen to the voiceover. I could look at a mind map. I was surprised at how many different modalities that I needed to use. But I also did really well on the quizzes, especially the data algorithms, which I usually find computer science stuff very boring. So this feels a hundred percent like the future of learning and truly personalized learning to all the different mechanisms that students have and how different students learn differently. 

[00:02:54] Brian Ardinger: It's quite exciting and you add that onto the things that you can learn from YouTube. Obviously, Google owns YouTube. They have access to all those particular things, so I'd imagine there's some opportunities and ways they can tie those particular entities together in some way to get you access to just the right paragraph or just the right video clip or things along those lines.

You know, I work in Nelnet in the education space, and we're always looking at how is the world of education changing? How does this impact higher education? How does it impact K through 12? How does it affect student loans? All these things can come into play when you have access to the world's knowledge, and it's fed in such a way that it makes it easier to digest and make it easier for the person to actually learn the stuff.

I think a lot of our existing school system is functioned on, not necessarily even teaching the person to go through it, but to get them through the gauntlet. And what if we created a world that allowed them to actually learn and created folks that had better tool sets, mindset, skill sets around that. How would that change the world? It's one of those few things of AI that's positive.

GLP-1 Medications and Shifting Consumer Behavior

[00:03:58] Robyn Bolton: Yes, that is positive. We always have to look at the systems out there. And you know Google, yes, has YouTube. It also has Google Classroom, which is the learning management system. So, you already have a lot of teachers in schools plugged into Google, already using it for so many aspects in the classroom. This just fit perfectly, seamlessly, fits in, especially to get better results. It's a wild new world. I love making it relevant to students and their interests and how they learn. 

[00:04:28] Brian Ardinger: The second article is a good transition because it moves away from ai, but it's yet another innovation that could have significant effects on a lot of different things.

And the article's from Harvard Business Review, and it's how GLP-1 medications are changing consumer behavior. They took a look at PWC analysis, looked at GLP medications like Ozempic. They're actually. Looking at the behavior, and it's pretty incredible in the analysis, more than 11,000 households, they looked at the grocery spending and it declined 6 to 8% within the first 12 months of a household that went on GLP-1 as their primary food purchaser.

Not only that, so it was a sharp contraction of a category that doesn't typically shift that fast or it's much more likely to shift slowly if you are gonna change your diet and grocery spending habits. But it also, the total household spending outlays only failed 2 to 3%. So it's showing that it actually was pointing to some reallocation of those savings towards other categories. So, you know, I'll pose the question to you. You used to work at P&G. If the entire consumer product space is changed by one particular drug, how is that going to shape the world? 

[00:05:37] Robyn Bolton: It's a really great question. What I found so interesting about the data is that, and I have a family member who is on a GLP-1 and so know that like their appetite just shrinks. Like they just get to a point very quickly in a meal where they're like, I'm done. I don't want to eat anymore. So you're consuming less food, which then leads to a decision at the store like, well, I used to buy, you know, hamburger meat, but we're eating so little. Why don't I upgrade the beef that I get?

Like, so instead of ground beef, let's get filet mignon. And so that's why you're seeing the dichotomy of the data in there. So, I think what it does is it actually puts, especially for food and beverage companies, I think it actually puts the onus on them to start creating more premium products. And instead of how cheap can we get this? How can we get a lot of food really cheap into bags, into boxes? It's flipping it to say, how can we create these premium experiences that are, it's a bite of chocolate instead of a bag of chocolate. 

[00:06:40] Brian Ardinger: Well, how can we not necessarily have to pack every single calorie into every single bite? There's a whole food process industry that's been designed to create and pack high-calorie content that tastes good. You know, the other thing I've seen about the GLP-1s is it's not necessarily all...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and I talk about creating flywheel effects through customer obsession, the landscape of AI startups and what's real and what's not, and why workers don't trust AI. 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 Miles 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

Startup Ecosystem Building, Travel, and Early Observations

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

[00:00:50] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to see you, Brian. 

[00:00:52] Brian Ardinger: Great to see you. Both you and I have been on the road quite a bit for the last couple weeks, so it's nice to actually say hello again and get back into the swing of things.

I spent last week in Savannah, Georgia, talking about startup ecosystem building with the Savannah Harbor Innovation Partnership. And they're looking for new ways to spice up and kickstart a lot of the startup activity there. So it was quite interesting. As an innovator, I think it's always important to get out to other communities and see what's going on and share war stories and best practices and all that kind of fun stuff. So, it was fun to get out there.

I give a shout out to what they're trying to do, trying to get the right people across all parts of their ecosystem together, whether it's founders or investors, university, and things along those lines. I think they're doing a good job of trying to kickstart a lot of stuff going on down there. I'm excited to see where they go to. 

[00:01:41] Robyn Bolton: Savannah is home to one of my favorite innovations, the Savannah Bananas. But yes, I was on the road too. I went a little further afield. I was in London for the Thinkers 50 Conference, which as you would imagine was extremely interesting, especially these days where everything is so volatile and uncertain everywhere across the globe.

Thinkers 50 Takeaways and Early Reflections on Uncertainty

And there was a lot of discussion around how now more than ever, is a time for courage and to be brave. There was a lot of discussion around what the future holds and several brave souls who just said, we don't know. It could be anything. One of my favorites was Daniel Pink. He said, basically, we're living in the era of Schrödinger's cat, that the future will be radically different and the same.

All at the same time. And I'm like, okay, that sounds totally fair. So lots of really interesting ideas. Lots to think about, as you would expect from a conference's called Thinkers 50. Fascinating, fascinating conversations. 

[00:02:47] Brian Ardinger: Now we're going to open the box and what do we find when, when it's opened? The box is already open. You know, we're going down that path no matter what. And you know, it is kind of interesting. You, you're seeing a lot more bubble talk and things like that, but yet yesterday Nvidia had their quarterly announcements and $5 trillion valuation and blew out their estimates.

And so it's like, well, it's not a bubble yet, or people are at least spending money NVIDIA's getting paid for this stuff. So, we'll, we'll see where it all shakes out. 

[00:03:12] Robyn Bolton: Yeah. Even if it's a bubble, I mean, we had an internet bubble back in the early part of the century and it didn't mean the internet went away. It just means we resorted ourselves. So even if AI is a bubble, I don't think it's going away.

The Flywheel Effect, Customer Obsession, and Human-Centered Touchpoints

[00:03:26] Brian Ardinger: Got three articles to talk about today. First one's called the Flywheel Effect: How Customer Obsession Creates Self-Reinforcing Advantages. This is from Wildfire Labs. They've been putting out some great content. The Flying Wheel Effect talks about building a startup isn't about growth hacking. It's really about how do you create customer experiences and these flywheels that generate self-reinforcing momentum because there's so many things out there taking aways attention and competing for dollars and mindset.

So how do you build into your process different ways that you can create a flywheel to differentiate and build it up? So, one of the examples they talk about is chewy.com and how Chewy built into their experience the idea of when a person's pet passes away, they actually sent them flowers. And created an experience and a touchpoint as part of that to relate to their customers but also create a means for further conversations. And, you know, creating a positive experience with that brand and with that company. 

[00:04:27] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, I think it's so interesting and this idea of flywheel, it's one of the things mentioned in the article is the first step is creating an exceptional experience that creates emotional impact.

Rising Customer Acquisition Costs and the Decline of Consumer Trust

And you just think of our world right now, which is focused on cost cutting and on driving waste out of the system and on AI. The first step of creating this flywheel and this incredible loyalty and retention and word of mouth is so very human.

You know, I think more and more we're going to start seeing that the more human you can be, you know, a handwritten card, sending flowers. That's something probably you could get AI to do, but it's a very human thing to acknowledge the grief that comes with the loss of a pet.

The more human businesses can be, especially at key moments, that's where they're going to win. That's where they're going to differentiate themselves, in a world that is increasingly kind of more robotic and lean. 

[00:05:27] Brian Ardinger: The ironic thing is, startups have the exact same tools to create and reach customers as in the past. So it's being commoditized, the ability to actually grab a customer and have that first interaction.

But the cost of customer acquisition, I think some of the statistics they had in the article talked about what costs, you know, a hundred dollars in 2019 now costs $160. You know, a startup that spends 61% of their new capital on customer acquisition up from 28% in 2018. So those are massive jumps and it's hard to make a business model work if you have that much to acquire the brand new customer and you can't keep them from churning or going somewhere else.

Community Building, Trust Signals, and Real Startup Differentiation

And the other things, the idea of trust and how consumer brands are, the ability to trust brands is going down 73%, I think they said reported increased skepticism toward marketing claims, and that makes sense that you're seeing a lot of AI slop and a lot of things. Who do you trust anymore?

And then finally, this idea of how do you build a community around your company, not just a product or service, word of mouth being so important. 78% of successful seed stage companies ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and Brian talk about the human skills needed to adapt to AI, how YouTube is changing the media landscape, and how we might just be becoming lesser apes.

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 Miles Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

Podcast Transcript

[00:00:40] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And with me, I have Robyn Bolton from Mile Zero. Welcome, Robyn.

[00:00:48] Robyn Bolton: Thank you. Great to be here, Brian.

The Human Skills to Adapt to AI

[00:00:50] Brian Ardinger: Let's dive in. We've got a lot of things on our plate. A lot of things are happening. We've got a number of articles we wanted to discuss of things that we're seeing out there in the world.

The first one I wanted to call people's attention to was from Shane Snow. If you're longtime listeners, you may have seen Shane on our podcast, episode 104, when he had another book coming out. His latest article is The Human Skills that Will help us adapt to AI and Not Die. 

[00:01:17] Robyn Bolton: Not that things are bleak or, or anything, but yeah, exactly.

[00:01:19] Brian Ardinger: So Shane is a pretty talented thinker. His article sets the stage with comparing AI to what happened in early Tang Dynasty and China when they discovered gunpowder. And the fact that this gunpowder innovation changed the world in many different ways and democratized the peasants to be able to take over the emperor and everything else.

That innovation quickly moved around the world, and it changed to the point where you either had to adapt to this and or die. And he talks a little bit about how that can be a parable to what we're seeing in today's world of AI. 

[00:01:59] Robyn Bolton: Especially interesting, his characterization of the speed and the speed of adoption, and kind of saying, okay, well, you know, the Chinese had gunpowder first. Why didn't they take over the world? And it's basically because very, very quickly Europe and the rest of Asia, and adopted gunpowder.

And so, we're seeing that now is like every company is racing to adopt AI. I also just have to think like, yeah, but some people probably adopted gunpowder and didn't know what they were doing and blew their faces off.

So, there's also that risk. But it was an interesting, certainly parallel to people are moving fast to adopt AI, to claim expertise in AI, to claim what AI can do, and there's good reason for folks to adopt it, but there's also risks along the way, and we have to be eyes wide open about it. 

[00:02:54] Brian Ardinger: I think he talks, you know, a lot about the fact that it's not necessarily the technology itself that makes the changes, it's how we adapt to the technology. And you know, what gives us an advantage are inherently human characteristics, not the technology itself.

So, he talks about the advantage that we're going to have going into AI, the ones that are going to have the most advantage. While using this new technology or new gunpowder, rather than blowing up your face, how are you going to be and learn the skill sets of asking sharper questions and making smarter decisions? And weighing the human value around it, and collaboration, a lot of these kind of human-based tool sets to modify or use or mold the technology in a way that doesn't blow up in our face.

[00:03:35] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, and you know, as we talked about in the last episode, if AI can be poisoned by 250 documents. You need a human layer of critical thinking and questioning on top of it to get to the right answer.

The Human Pace of Change

[00:03:49] Brian Ardinger: And I don't think a lot of people or enough people are talking about the human aspect of it. A lot of times we've been talking about it internally in that, and you think the valuations of all these AI companies and all those folks are pushing it so much and the best case scenario is going to be what this is, but I don't think a lot of folks are really understanding the human aspect of it around just the consumer behavior or the adoption behavior.

I think people are underestimating the fact that it takes a long time for humans to really want to do something different. And so, it may not be tomorrow that this happens; it may actually end up taking 10 years for people to get into their head or learn how to use it or whatever the case may be.

So, there's this pushing and pulling about how fast and the adoption, and I just inherently think that humans in general take a little longer to come around to some of this kind of stuff, especially game-changing stuff. 

[00:04:38] Robyn Bolton: Yeah, absolutely. And that may not be a bad thing. I heard at a conference I was at a couple weeks ago, people describing AI as like, it's in its infant state, it's not even yet a toddler, let alone elementary school. So we're getting promises of, oh hey, it's in college. Trust it. But maybe we shouldn't. So it is a push and pull on the human side, on the technology side. It's very interesting. Lots of sparks. 

[00:05:04] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, absolutely. I think the skillset that's gonna be most valuable is your ability to adapt.

[00:05:09] Robyn Bolton: Yes, absolutely.

YouTube Ate TV

[00:05:11] Brian Ardinger: Well, our second article is from the Hollywood Reporter and it's YouTube, just ate TV: it's only getting started. So, a Hollywood reporter talks a little bit about the rise of YouTube and how effectively it is becoming the TV of today, and it is changing the dynamics of basically all media, podcasts, and other things, and how is this going to affect the world?

[00:05:33] Robyn Bolton: I have to say, in a coincidence of timing, I was. Was flipping through Instagram last night, and the Detroit Lions put out a little video and it has one of their players talking to a kid who looked like he was probably six. And the player's like, Hey, what cartoons do you watch? And the kid was like cartoons? Whatcha talking about? He is like, I watch YouTube.

And the player was like, no cartoons. What cartoons? And you just saw this player who's probably like maybe 24, like just crumble into a pile of ancient dust. He's like, dude, I am not that old. What do you mean you don't watch cartoons? And I thought it was just such a perfect encapsulation of what the article talks about of YouTube is taking over, not just TV, but entertainment and there's still places it's wading into. 

The article talks about how it's trying to get into scripted series, or creators are trying to get into scripted entertainment, but it is remarkable just the numbers and the article and what it talks about.

[00:06:36] Brian Ardinger: I think Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher on Pivot, one of their most recent episodes, they were talking about, where do you get your news? And it's l...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn and Brian sit down to talk about divergent thinking, peak college towns, and how as little as 250 documents can poison your AI. 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 Miles Zero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started.

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

[00:00:47] Robyn Bolton: Hello, Brian. How are you today?

[00:00:49] Brian Ardinger: I am doing well. Episode 338. We're excited to talk about innovation. I'm so glad you're on the journey with me here. 

[00:00:56] Robyn Bolton: Wow. 338. There should be a cake or streamers or something. 

[00:01:01] Brian Ardinger: Well, as usual, we've got a number of different articles and things that have caught our attention over the last couple days. So, I figure we'd dive in. And the first article I wanted to talk about today was for my friend Audrey Crane. She works at Design Map, and she posted on the Design Map blog an article on Divergent thinking.

The article, I'll give it a little preface. So, it was looking at how you generate better ideas. Looked at a lot of things. First of all, looked at the research and the fact that there's a famous study by George Land and Beth Jarman looking at how five-year-olds were asked to come up with as many uses as possible for a paperclip, and nearly all of them, 98% could generate 200 or more ideas.

They continued to do this study and looked into adulthood, and by the time the participants became adults, only 2%. Of adults could actually do the same thing and generate 200 ideas about a paperclip. It's pretty crazy, and it points to the fact that, while it's a super important skill to have, to be able to generate new ideas and think about different things. We are losing that ability as we get older. 

[00:02:08] Robyn Bolton: It was surprising and sad, but reminded me of two things. So, one is a book that came out a long time over a decade ago now, the Innovator's DNA. Where the authors looked at, you know, across hundreds, thousands of successful, both entrepreneurs and intrapreneurs, corporate innovators.

And they found that the one thing that they had in common, or most had in common, was associative thinking, which. Is being able to put two very different ideas together to make something. And so divergent thinking actually reminded me a lot of the associative thinking. Because it just, your brain works in different ways.

And the second thing is, you know, I teach at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and in talking to my actual art colleagues there, one of the things that they say that's very consistent with what we say in innovation, is that your first idea, your first work, your first version is always the worst.

They have different language around the idea of constraints and don't accept the first version, but that is a very common discipline within the art and design world. That it's just your first idea is going to be terrible, so you've got to push past it. And that was another aspect of this article that I found really interesting.

[00:03:29] Brian Ardinger: It fits into startups as well. I was mentoring the new batch of NMotion companies are going to be announced here soon that are going through it. And did a little round table and met each of the teams and talked about what they're building and that. And the piece of advice I left them with is, you are here on day one with your idea. Be open to other ideas that happen when you start talking to customers and trying to understand if, if you really are onto something.

Because a lot of times you get into an accelerator or you get some early traction and you think, okay, I've got all figured out. I got the solution. I'm just going to barge ahead. But you have to be open to that divergent thinking and different ways of doing things just so you don't necessarily leave opportunity on the table. 

[00:04:08] Robyn Bolton: It's the old adage, right? The fall in love with the problem, not the solution. And it's so easy to fall in love with the solution, but the divergent thinking article was a great reminder. Data-based reminder of why we've got to nurture the skill to go beyond that. 

[00:04:26] Brian Ardinger: Yeah, and I love the article too, because Audrey goes into a number of different techniques, brainstorming techniques, and that. Mm-hmm. So, I encourage people to check that out, to learn some tactical things about how you go about building up that divergent thinking muscle.

The second article, this one made me a little nervous. It's from the Neuron Daily, which is a fantastic newsletter, and this one came out a couple weeks ago, but the title was Poisoning AI Models just got scarier. 250 documents is all it takes.

And it goes on to look at some research that came out of Anthropic that looked at the number of documents that you could ingest into the LLM that would make it start spewing out nonsense and making it bad. The original thinking was, well, the more larger models that you have, you'd have to have more malicious documents put into it to make it go off the rails. What they found out was that's actually not the case.

It takes a very small amount of wrong data to be put into it to actually make it start going the wrong direction. Actually, I think in the article talks about a 13 billion parameter model trained on 260 billion tokens, got backdoored with the same 250 documents as the 600 million model trained on just 12 billion tokens.

And previous research assumed that attackers needed to control 0.1 of the training data. And so for larger models you need millions more documents. What actually happened is the math was 250 poison documents was, is only 0.00016 of the training data was enough to actually poison the model itself. Crazy stuff to think about it.

When we think about. All the things that'll be putting into the web and everything else. It's a wonder why we're not seeing more and more hallucinations. I guess 

[00:06:07] Robyn Bolton: it was terrifying, and I'll be honest, the numbers went so over my head, but it had an analogy in there. It's like putting a teaspoon of a toxin into an Olympic sized pool. Yeah. And you'd kill all the swimmers. And I was like, uh oh. That is. So much more awful than I thought when you were just saying 250 documents.

And you know, I think it just goes to pis. There's incredible promise with Gen AI and there's risks that we don't even know about. It's one of those things of use with caution.

[00:06:39] Brian Ardinger: It'll be interesting to see what other research comes out to either debunk this or to fill up the back holes of this. But it's just something to keep in mind and follow the research and see what's actually going on out there. Because we are in brand new territory and the exploration mode, we need to be wary of the pitfalls that are ahead as well.

[00:06:57] Robyn Bolton:

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Robyn Bolton and Brian Ardinger 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 d...

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 ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Behnam Tabrizi, Author of Going on Offense: A Leader's Playbook for Perpetual Innovation. This week we talk about some of the key drivers that make companies like Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft become perpetual 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 to 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 Dr. Behnam Tabrizi, Author of Going on Offense

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 Dr. Behnam Tabrizi. He has taught at Stanford University in the executive programs for 25 years. He's the author of 10 books on leading in innovation and transformation, including a newly released book called Going On Offense: A Leader's Playbook of Perpetual Innovation. Welcome to the show. 

Behnam Tabrizi: Thank you, Brian. I'm excited about this podcast because it's my first podcast on the book, but incidentally, I just received a copy of the book. And the book is not going to be out till August 22nd, so it was a very nice surprise. Given that your interest is innovation, I think we're going to have a lot of fun.

Brian Ardinger: You spent a lot of time and research digging into companies to try to figure out what makes companies innovative and, and more importantly, which ones continually innovate versus ones that are one hit wonders. So maybe you can give the audience a little bit of background on the research that you did for the book.

Behnam Tabrizi: Sure. Just a little bit of background before the background. Out of the 10 books, two of them are kind of standout. One was The Rapid Transformation I did with Harvard Business Press, which talked about the sociology and structure of how you transform organizations quickly. And this was published in 2007 and in some ways, it was very different than the sequential transformation that was an accepted norm in the world.

And then what I realized, and that book did extremely well, and I realized the biggest challenge to transformation is personal transformation. Leadership transformation. I did the book on. Inside Out Effect, which I'm really proud of, it is about leadership transformation. And it was a conversation with a COO, which I talk about in the book with the COO of a Fortune 50 company where he had sent his people to Stanford. Where I realized, you know, there is a third leg that's missing and that is what's the secret sauce of some of the most innovative perpetual organizations in the world. 

And that's something that I've been thinking about. I even thought about a topic before this conversation. And so, this was six, seven years ago, so I deep dived into this. Had a huge survey of over 6,000 people with executives, consumers, academics in terms of what they think are the best, most innovative organizations.

Had an amazing research team where we sorted through data. So, after just looking at all of this, we came up with 26 firms. We wanted to make sure we don't have survivalship bias, which is only looking at successful companies and only talk about successful. So, we also had companies that didn't indeed do well, like Blockbuster, Borders, and others.

So, I talk about those 26 companies, but several actually stand out and those are, they're regular organizations that we know as most innovative, which is like Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon. The book also talks about these and how they're different. 

What was surprising is that companies such as Google and Facebook did not make the list. So, I was looking at the secret of Silicon Valley. I found a couple of organizations that were in Seattle. And I also realized there are some organizations in Silicon Valley that they don't fit the bill, and in some ways, it was really a secret of extremely, extremely high performance, perpetual innovative organizations.

Recently, BCG has come up with the most innovative organization, 2023, I believe. Three out of four of my companies were actually top three and the fourth one was like the top five. So that was really nice to kind of know that my research still stands. It was a lot of research. It was a lot of detailed analysis and what the result was, we came up with eight key characteristics that these companies really did that was very different than the rest of the organization.

And as you know, Brian, 90, 95% of organizations around the world, non-tech, high tech, are struggling with this issue. And they want to be more, like a lot of CEOs are asking me, how could I be more like, Apple or Tesla. They don't want to be like them, but more like maybe 10% more of them, 15% more of them. So that's the perennial question that I get asked, and I hope that this book and our conversation would at least uncover some of the issues.

Brian Ardinger: There's plenty of places that we can start. You mentioned briefly the eight drivers that you've categorized that makes a company more perpetual innovation focused. Maybe we should start by going through some of those key characteristics and then tie it into some examples that you've seen. 

Behnam Tabrizi: Absolutely. So, I came up with three overarching themes, and then eight, like you said, characteristic that kind of fits with this. One of my favorite movies is Matrix and Trinity is an important figure there. The three key archetype that came out of this research about this organizations is that they were generous. And by generous what I mean is they were generous toward their commitment.

There is a term I use in the book, which is existential purpose. This is not just a mission statement. This is true commitment to what they believe in. It kind of also touched on my earlier book, which is Inside Out Effect. I mean, the question that I always ask is why is it people are willing to die for a cause, but they show up completely uninspired in organizations and completely unengaged. You know, not engaged, disengaged, if you will, disengaged.

The existential purpose of the organization together with the existential purpose of individual in the organization. It really stood out with these organizations. I would hate to use the word cult, defining these organizations, but my colleague Chuck O'Reilly makes the distinctions, and he says, the difference between cult and these type of organizations is that calls disenfranchised people, but these organizations, you can always leave and you can go to other organizations. And if you have an Apple or Amazon, or even Microsoft on your resume, you actually become more employable at the same time, there are very strong value cultures and each one is also very different.

So that's one of the things that stands out. The other thing that I think I also want to mention, and I won't be able to go through all eight, it's the ferocious of these cultures. It's dizzying to walk into this organization because it's chaotic, it's fast paced, fast moving. So, I talk about this tempo. 

And what I found is that the tempo is not just always on full throttle. Sometime...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andy Binns to talk about his follow-on book, The Corporate Explorer Fieldbook: How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies. Andy and I talk about what's happening in the world of corporate innovation and offer some insights into what's working and what's not. 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 to 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 Andy Binns, Author of The Corporate Explorer Fieldbook & Co-founder of Change Logic

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, we have somebody who's been on the show before. Andy Binns. Welcome Andy.

Andy Binns: Hey, Brian. Thank you very much for having me back. I'm delighted to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Andy, I'm so glad to have you back. For those who may not have heard you the first time around, you're the Co-founder of Change Logic. And you have authored a new book called Corporate Explorer Field Book as a companion guide, I think, to your first book, which came out about a year and a half ago called Corporate Explorer. So again, welcome to the show.

Andy Binns: Thank you very much. That's right. We have now the Red Book of Corporate Explorer and the Black Book of The Corporate Explorer Field book. Becomes a family of books. The trouble is, I haven't figured out what the third one is, so I need, any, any ideas. I'm totally open to it. 

Brian Ardinger: It always needs a trilogy. Right. 

Andy Binns: Yeah, exactly. This is the Corporate Explorer Strikes Back. Right. 

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Let's talk about the second book. Since we spoke in, I think it was March of 2022, so about a year and a half ago, you have been exploring this space of corporate innovation. What has happened? What are some of the key things that you've seen over the last 18 months that have changed or made you want to write a second book?

Andy Binns: It's interesting, isn't it, Brian? This has been such a fascinating 18 months because you have at one side this real pressure on anybody who's doing corporate innovation on budget. Interest rates going up, lots of renewed economic uncertainty. 

And at the other side, we have people spending huge amounts of money on AI and putting lots of pressure on corporate innovation to say, what are we gonna do with it? Right? Mm-hmm. It's a tremendous paradox and I think that the interesting thing is that companies are coming round to the understanding that AI is just a technology. 

What you really need to understand is the business model. And this is a question of experimentation. So, it's actually playing directly back into the world of the corporate explorer, very directly.

Brian Ardinger: Your first book, it talked a lot about, you know, how do you become a corporate explorer, introducing new ideas and things like this. The field book, the subtitle is How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies. So, talk a little bit about the evolution of the first book to the second book, and what are the key highlights of the second book.

Andy Binns: The thing about the second book is that this represents a movement. Really important to me is that this is not about a guru speaking with the answer. Right? This is about a community actually saying, this is what we do. This is how we're approaching it. So, we have chapters by Bosch, General Motors, Intel.

There are some lesser well-known companies, but important ones, Analog Devices, Unica Insurance, who were in the first book as a case study. Now they're in the book describing some of the things that they've done after that first book, right? 

For me, it expresses something really important about how do we solve the issue of corporate innovation, which I just said really important when it comes to, Hey, we've got something dramatic happening in the world. You know, what are we going to do? Well, this is some of the things we actually do that work. 

So, it's similar in structure to the first book. You know, firstly, strategic ambition. How do we decide where we're headed? Then innovation disciplines, ideation, incubation, scaling, and then the whole question of the organizational and leadership issues as to how you make arrangements for this to work in corporations, but also how if you are a corporate explorer, you're going to get people on your side.

But again, rather than me pontificating on the topic, it's actually practitioners, each chapter, different way of looking at the problem with tools and advice very practically built in. So, it's an extremely applied book. 

Brian Ardinger: It's great to have some of those applied stories because a lot of times I talk to a lot of corporations myself and the first thing they ask is like, well, how do we do this? Yeah. And there's no one silver bullet to make this happen. It, you know, all combines with the talent you have and the technologies you have. And what kind of vision, like you said, that you want to go after. 

What are some of the biggest stumbling blocks for companies to even think about this and get moving on the path?

Andy Binns: And I think I've learned more about this in the last year, going around different companies, getting invited to speak places, hearing what people have to say. And the sort of the loudest story is, is yes, what, what I think was always there was this sort of having lots of ideas but no real strategy. No real sense of, well, why would this help create value?

Why would the customers form a habit around the use of your idea or product? And that tends to be weak, particularly if you are in a any kind of technical community. They tend to be a little bit weak on that. So that's still there. And in this book, we've made a big focus on breaking out some of the topics we talk about in Corporate Explorer.

So, I talked to in corporate explorer about hunting zones and the importance of really shaping the markets that you are in. And in this book, I explain, you know, well, how do you define your hunting zone? But we also have this genuine innovation guru, Tony Ulwick, talking about how do you define your hunting zones? With a job to be done. Right. With that whole sort of body of work. So, he brings these two ideas together. 

The second thing I think that which has really come loudly to me in the last 12 months is how many innovators in corporations go out to market with a sort of an immature business model. It's solving a customer problem. It's a pretty good idea, but they have no concept of the go to market. 

They have no idea how they're going to engage distributors, ecosystem, or any of these kinds of players around them. And you know, it has a fairly predictable trajectory, right? Because, you know, it turns out selling things matters. You, if you're going to want to bring something to mar...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the amazing Janice Fraser, one of the leaders in the Lean Startup movement and co-author of the new book, Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama. Janice and I talk about the evolution of leadership and how today's world of uncertainty and change requires new behaviors and mindsets to lead teams and companies forward. 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 Transcription with Janice Fraser, Co-author of the new book, Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama

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 Janice Fraser. She's co-author of Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama: How to Reduce Stress and Make Extraordinary Progress Wherever You Lead. Welcome Janice.

Janice Fraser: Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: This is a super honor for me, quite frankly. Janice, you, and I met over a decade ago and you've been hugely influential in my journey around this whole startup and innovation space. I think you and I met at one of the first Lean startup conferences in San Francisco, and this was when I was spinning up Nmotion startup accelerator and I said, I need somebody with the chops, who understands everything from customer discovery to product development to help our teams through this process and teach me quite frankly how to do some of this stuff. 

So, I brought you into Nebraska a while ago, and since then we've been friends and have learned so much through that process of watching you help teams and help people grow in this space. And, and now you're in a different journey, but how did you get involved in product development and Lean Startup, and then how did your career journey get you to the point where you've written this book? 

Janice Fraser: It's so lovely when I hear people say that I was influential. I'm always the most grateful when I've been helpful. Right? Honestly, that was the best compliment you could have ever offered to me, so thank you. Thank you very much for sharing that. 

My career journey, like so many of us in the innovation space has not been a straight line at all. And really it started my journey into product. And then from product into innovation, it really goes way back.

I accidentally ended up a product manager at Netscape in 1995 when we didn't even call it that for the work that I was doing. And from there I moved into user experience consulting, and I started a company that did that. And then it became Luxer where it was like, helping startup companies kind of get off the ground.

And when I look back over the arc of my career, if you remember the Crossing the Chasm model, like I'm that first person, you know, on the far side of the chasm, sort of like holding my hand out, helping people jump across the chasm. Like my job is to sit at the edge of the newest thing and make it boring.

I had to write a six-word biography at one point for some offsite or retreat or something, and it was knitting at the edge of newness. Whatever the bleeding edge thing is like I'm just sitting there figuring out like, how can we do it in a way that everybody, normal people can practice. 

And like I keep a sticker on my computer that says regular people just to remind us all like. The world is made up of regular people and they're doing extraordinary things all the time. And so, I want to just, I just want to help that process out. 

And so right now it's been innovation. Before that it was product management or starting a company. And it's, what I want to do is just figure out like, how can we do it reliably better?

And of course, that takes you to lean start up because you know, Lean Startup isn't going to make you successful, but it will keep you from failing or it will help you raise the floor on how bad that failure could be. And so that's how I got here. 

Brian Ardinger: I think you're underselling yourself to a certain extent. You've had a chance to work with some of the best companies in the world when it comes to innovation and you've kind of been behind the scenes player when it comes to a lot of this stuff and helping companies understand that. 

The next thing I really want to talk about is this book, because it's slightly different than a, you know, product strategy book or something. You know, Farther, Faster, and Far less drama. It seems to be a culmination of what you've seen in the workplace and in creating companies and working through this uncertainty that it, it is to create new stuff, but less from the product and the tactical side, but more from the people side, the leadership side. Talk a little bit about why you decided to write this book. 

Janice Fraser: So the book is co-authored by my husband, who was my co-founder at Luxr, where we had like 50 companies go through this 10 week program, which ended up being an accelerator kind of thing, right? He's still very much focused on product management.

He runs a team of like 50 people who all work with federal government clients. All product managers and product designers. I come at it more from the innovation side, from, you know, how do you get very large organizations to be more agile or more lean, or to simply create value from new ideas and especially new ideas that challenge the status quo.

That's a hard thing to do, to get a large organization that's been around for say, 150 years to begin to actually change their behavior. When we started writing this book, it was four years ago. That's when we first did the very first outline, and we thought that it would be a very tactical book for practitioners of like meeting facilitation. Because a lot of the ideas land at that moment of like, I need to run a strategy session, or I need to get more out of this leadership thing, and I was doing a lot of network then.

But over time and, and in consulting with some editorial folks and some of my closest advisors, my ex-boss, a guy named David Kidder, who’s a dear, dear friend David said, this is bigger than what you think it is. The way that you lead is different than the way that other people lead. And those kinds of feedback over a period of a year or two really gave Jason and I pause.

And so, we sat down and thought like, what is it really that we're seeing that's different and what I think is that the leaders that are most successful, whether it's agile transformation on the software side or innovation execution on the non-software side, what we see is that the most successful leaders were leading differently than the ones who seemed the most stuck. 

We can call it could be mindset like the Carol Dweck book. It could be any number of things. But some leaders were able to, as the book says, go farther, get there faster. And my favorite thing is to go there without a lot of bickering, without a lot of hassle, without frankly, drama. Like, we just don't have time to mess around th...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Rogers, Columbia University professor and author of the new book, The Digital Transformation Roadmap. David and I talk about why corporate innovation is so hard. And we unpack the iterative steps needed to navigate a path to digital transformation success. 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 David Rogers, Columbia University professor and author of the new book, the Digital Transformation Roadmap. 

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 David Rogers. He's a Columbia University professor and author of the new book The Digital Transformation Roadmap, rebuild your organization for continuous change. Welcome David. 

David Rogers: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. Really appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you here because your book couldn't have come out at a better time. We are in the midst of a lot of accelerating change as everybody is going through, whether it's covid or inflation or, or technology changes like AI. Your book, I wanted to delve into a lot of the details around it. One of the things that stood out is you outlined in your book several studies that have come out, basically say that 70% or more of digital transformation efforts fail. Why is that the case and why is it so hard for people to do this? 

David Rogers: Yeah, it's really sobering. So, I wrote, what was the first major book on the subject of digital transformation a few years back.

So, I've been looking at the subject for some time, and what I was sort of shocked to see was at that point I was really sort of evangelizing, Hey, if you're an established business and you really want to grow for the long term and survive even, let alone thrive, you're going to have to embrace new digital business models.

Really set aside a lot of the old assumptions of the corporate playbook of strategy. How do we think about competition? How do we think about customer strategy, use of data, et cetera. Really embrace new business models. And so that was really my approach was to help companies who had sort of been in business for decades, maybe a century or more, to say, hey, it's great that your core business is there and you have customers.

But the sort of strategic landscape is really changing, and you need to sort of master this and, and really sort of open up your thinking. But what I found in the years since was people really embrace this idea of, okay, at least sort of, at least I would say, people give lip service to digital transformation.

Oh yeah. We're going to do this. We're, we're going to hire somebody, a Chief Digital Officer, we'll put it on the agenda. Transformation digital. Very common now and yet, including companies where there's support from the very top. Real resources put into this, not just sort of some PowerPoints and emails sent around.

And yet years go by, and they come to me and say, I don't know why we're not changing, you know, or not changing fast enough. What's going on? Why are we like stuck in slow motion? So, I started looking at the broader, you know, research and as you said, I found this pattern that, you know, by and large, all the major studies are reporting about 70% or higher of failure.

That's self-reported, right? The people with don't like to admit, companies admitting by our own standards, we are not achieving what we set out here. So, what that opened my eyes to a whole, you know, second wave of research on my part was to try to understand why. What is the barrier or barriers here? You see, you know, a litany of symptoms.

Well, our people are afraid, or they don't want to change their jobs or the technologies too expensive. Or we come up with lots of ideas, but none of them scale or, and we just can't move as fast as all these startups. You know, there's lots of sort of symptoms. What I found looking across, many different industries, many different organizations, was a pattern. 

Really there were sort of five organizational barriers, and that's the key. They're all barriers, actually, not in the technology. The barriers, not usually, it's not really about finances and things like that. It's about organizations themselves. And unless you can address those and get past them, and there are ways to get past them, but unless you do that, your efforts are just never going to have the impact that you, that you really need out of them.

Brian Ardinger: You know, one of the things that I see when talking to other corporations out there is they don't struggle with execution because they have business models. They have customers. They know how to execute that particular model. They know how to budget for it. They know how to build for it. They know how to hire for that.

But where they struggle is that exploration phase. Where they don't know exactly what to do. They haven't figured out the next new business model. They haven't figured out exactly what they should be building or the new pricing and that. And it's that realm of uncertainty where they haven't seemed to build an execution model to execute in the uncertain environment. Is that what you're seeing as well? 

David Rogers: Absolutely, and the problem is you can't use the same model. I have nothing against companies say, look, we've got a really well owned machine. We know how to operate our core business. We've been in it for a long time. We've got a functional system of, you know, you could call them silos, but we've got a functional organizational structure, really knows how to operate and deliver against this core business.

I have no idea, no feeling that, oh, I'm going to come in and say, oh, you should turn yourselves into a startup and blow that all up. No. What companies need is what I call flexibility in governance. That's one of the core, one of these five barriers. There's a lack of flexibility in governance, so they're applying the same BAU, as we call it, business as usual operating model to that core business that they know really well is operates under low uncertainty and is sort of what they're organized around currently. And they know the metrics, et cetera. 

And then they try to apply that same operating model, that same governance I would call it, to pursuing new opportunities which have first of all, simply by bringing virtual, new and fast-moving digital error likely to have much higher uncertainty. And so that operating model execution model is not going to work in a highly uncertain context. We've got a lot of theory and a lot of experience to show why. But they also don't know how to operate outside of their core business.

So, you've got these sort of twin challenges, as I call them, really for corporate innovation and, and growth, which is the challenge of uncertainty, not being used to the methods which allow you to tackle an iterative experiment, kind of driven kind of fashion. Opportunities tha...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tom Daly, founder of Relevant Ventures. Tom and I talk about the challenges big companies have when trying to navigate technology and market changes. And what you can do to avoid some of the common obstacles and barriers to innovation and transformation. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty, join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript  with Tom Daly, Founder of Relevant Ventures

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tom Daly. He is the founder of Relevant Ventures. Welcome Tom. 

Tom Daly: Thank you very much, Brian. Pleasure to be here, speaking with you. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. You have had a lot of experience in this innovation space. You worked with companies like UPS and ING and I think most recently, Coca-Cola and a lot of the innovation efforts around that world. So I am excited to have you on the show to talk about some of the new things you're doing and I think more importantly, some of the things you've learned over the years.

Tom Daly: I started doing this work before people called it digital transformation or innovation. The Earth cooled, at about the same time I began getting my head around this. I'm an advertising guy to begin with, and I can't prove it, but I think I created the world's first dedicated 30 sec TV commercial to a website. UPS. 

In that process, I picked up some vocabulary and I learned some things about how websites, quote unquote work, so that when people started calling, you know, back in the mid-nineties wanting to talk to somebody about the web or the internet, the calls came to me. And it was during that process where I started to build new networks within UPS, learn about new things going on at UPS and discover some of the opportunities. It's been a while. 

Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about this ability to turn big ships in small spaces. Talk a little bit about what that means to you and, and what the challenges really are for corporations in, in this whole innovation space. 

Tom Daly: The idea of turning big ships in small spaces actually goes back to my boss's boss at UPS who noticed I was toiling. UPS has a reputation as a conservative company. A little bit unfair, there's some truth to that, but not quite what people think.

It's actually a very, very innovative company and has been for its entire history, but it is collaborative. There's a lot of debate and a lot of discussion. So getting new things done, driving new ideas that my boss to encourage me, you'll get there, Tom, but it's like turning a battleship in the Chattahoochee.

So, I don't know where listeners are, but imagine a pretty darn small body of water and a really big ship that you're trying to turn. So, a lot of back and forth, a lot of kissing babies, shaking hands, and just getting, you know politics, but in a good positive way to kind of really understand interests and concerns and build a better program, a better idea.

So that's the idea, and it was encouraging to me. So, this notion of turning big ships in small spaces, it seems to be, to the degree I have any superpowers, that's the one I'm able to kind of figure out how to help larger organizations figure out how to extract value from, you know, kind of what's coming up around the corner.

Brian Ardinger: Obviously you've seen a lot of changes, whether they're technology changes or business model changes that have happened over the years. Where do companies typically run into the problems when they see something on the emerging horizon and they're saying, we've gotta do something about this. What goes through their mind and what can they do to better prepare for some of these drastic changes?

Tom Daly: The thing companies can do to help themselves most be prepared for big ships in the world that we all live and compete in, is, you know, the twin keys of openness and acceptance. Being open to an idea is really important, but it is only half the battle. 

Being accepting of the implications of those ideas is really key and the classic example would be Kodak. You know, Kodak early in, open to the idea of digital photography. But equally unaccepting of its implications. So they didn't jump in, they didn't do the things they needed to do, and as a result, very different company Blockbuster would fit in that category.

Certainly, they understood the implications of streaming technologies and the web and the ability to distribute content. Given the retail heavy business, the land heavy business, they just weren't accepting, or at least not accepting fast enough to be able to secure position in the next evolution of how people consumed content. So those two ideas, being open and accepting both in equal measures is critical to getting yourself in a good spot. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, you touched on an interesting point. You read about the stories of companies failing or being disrupted, and from the outside it looks like, well, they didn't pay attention, or they didn't know what was going on.

But it seems like, from the stories and the people that I've talked to, it's not that they weren't aware of what was going on. Or the fact that it was going to have a major impact or that they should do something about it. It was more to that line of it, like you said, acceptance of, well, how do we actually do this knowing that we're going to have to change our business models, change the way we make money, change everything about what we currently do to make this radical shift. And it's that classic innovator's dilemma. 

Are you seeing that changing nowadays, now that people are kind of more familiar with the concept of this and, and as more and more changes hit corporations, so you're getting faster at having to adapt to this. Are you seeing the world changing or are you still seeing the same problems exist?

Tom Daly: You know, anybody in this space, Brian, doing what I've been doing for as long as I've been doing it, you need to be an optimist. You need to believe that, you know it's all going to happen. That said, the conversations I'm having today in 2023 are pretty darn close to the conversations I was having in the middle, you know, of the nineties, right?

So, whether it was the dawn of, you know, this graphical overlay on the internet, the web, and when browsers enabled, or the introduction of now advertising and marketing opportunities on the web, which didn't really happen at the beginning of the browser era, that followed a little bit later. Or the introduction of mobile phones and then smartphones and all the, it's the same conversations. And they all come from a place of gaps.

I won't say a lack because in some places there is confidence and acceptance and alignment with what's going on. But it's not uniform within organizations. Right. Then there are pockets of people within departments, IT people, marketing people, s...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Tendayi Viki. Tendayi is co-author of the book, The Corporate Startup. He's an Associate Partner at Strategizer and one of the major influencers in the world of lean startup and corporate innovation. On this episode, we explore the evolution of the lean startup movement, how corporations are developing the skills to compete and become more innovative, and we talk about Tendayi's brand new book called Pirates in the Navy.  Let's get started.

Find the Interview transcript and more at insideoutside.io.

Interview Transcript with Tendayi Viki, Coauthor of The Corporate Startup & Pirates in the Navy

Brian Ardinger:  Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started. 

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, all the way from across the pond in London, England, we have Tendayi Viki. Tendayi, welcome to the show. 

Tendayi Viki: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. We had you out in Lincoln at the last IO Summit. For those folks out in the audience, that have not heard of you. He's an author, innovation consultant, Associate Partner at Strategizer. You're the coauthor of the book, The Corporate Startup, which took a lot of the Lean Startup stuff and applied it to big organizations. You've got a new book coming out called Pirates in the Navy, so I could go on and on, but welcome to the show. 

Tendayi Viki: Thank you, man. Thank you. no, it’s an honor to be here.  And I had a lot of fun when I was in LIncoln. It was a fun conference and good people all in. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah.  I think I want to jump in. You've been in this space, this lean startup movement for a long time, and you really did open the door to a lot of this lean startup stuff that started in the startup world. I think applied it to bigger corporations, this whole innovation process, whether you're doing it in a startup or you're doing it in a bigger company, a lot of the same principles apply. What are the biggest challenges or changes that you've seen over the last decade of how this movement is evolved and what's gotten better? What's gotten worse in the whole process? 

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so it was a really interesting movement because it came out with an interesting philosophy, which is that one of the reasons why any innovation, either from a startup or from a large company, any innovation fails when people that are working on the innovations starts scaling their idea prematurely. Which means they start building the full product and launching it and investing a lot of resources and taking it to market before they really understand who the customer is. What the customer wants. How to reach that customer. How to earn from that customer repeatedly.  How to retain that customer. How to create value basically in a sustainable way. And also, how to deliver profits and whether customers are willing to pay. And how much they will have to pay. So that was the philosophy meeting, which was test your ideas before you scale them.

The big challenge then became, well, we understand, we agree. How do we do that? And that's where the movement has been sort of incrementally building all the tools and resources you need to be able to do that work over the last year. 

Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about now where you're at. A lot of the times at the early stages when I started consulting or you started consulting, you had to explain the process. You had to get into the weeds of why this was even important. What's changed from that perspective? It seems like people have at least heard of the movement and heard of some of the processes, but maybe they're doing it wrong or there's different assumptions that they've made about the process in the first place. What are some of the things that you're seeing that are challenging in today's world? 

Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so I mean, it's not, it's not as hard as it used to be to convince leaders inside established, successful companies that they need to innovate. I think what's harder is getting them to change how they run their companies day-to-day because some of those processes are so calcified. It's so hard to break into those and have them change. I mean, one of the habits that companies have, for example, it's an annual budget cycle. Things that are on road maps that I executed against. You need to complete a five-year projection with a business case in order to get investments. Those are things that have been harder to break down.

How do you have a conversation with the head of finance that they should invest in an idea, but that idea is not promising them any return. What is the sense of comfort that you can give them with that? You have to sort of take into them like a newer tool that was created to say, think about your investments as a portfolio of investments and think about your returns as returns from a portfolio rather than retrench from one idea. That's the way you allow these to fail, but these are concepts that are just emerging. That we're going to have the conversation with leaders around inside the company. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm curious to get your insight into whether you think this problem should be tackled across the entire organization. Should it be siloed? We've heard experts in different areas tackle this from different sides with different areas of effectiveness. What's your thought on how innovation should be attacked from an organization perspective? 

Tendayi Viki: So that's interesting, especially when you're talking about the Lean Startup Movement, right.  One of the problems we had at the beginning of our movement was being allowed to do the work.  How do we even get the space to be allowed to test ideas, run experiments, do Agile, Design Thinking? And so what we did was we fought really hard to get these spaces created for us because we needed to show that you can actually work this way. And now I think we have a different problem. I think the problem we have now is what we call the problem of success.

If you are in a discussion of whether innovation should happen inside or outside your organization, you have to ask yourself a question. What happens when you find something that works? What happens when you find a business model that works? What happens when you find that idea that works and now you need light resources to scale. And you know what? I've heard people flippantly say, well, the company will just spin me out. Creating a spinout, it's actually more difficult. And requires much more leadership, attention, and legal and procurement than actually just scaling a product. And so even getting spun out requires some integration back into the company so that these decisions can be made.

This decision of whether or not you should do it inside or outside the organization is wh...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Chris Shipley, co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage. Chris and I talk about the changing forces driving the great resignation to the great reset, and how empathetic leadership will be the key to navigating change in creating value today and in the future. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Transcript of Podcast with Chris Shipley, Co-author of The Empathy Advantage.

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, this guest has been on the show before. It is Chris Shipley. She's the co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage: Leading The Empowered Workforce. Welcome back Chris.

Chris Shipley: Hey, I'm glad to be talking to you again.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on as always. You've been so gracious to be part of the Inside Outside community for so many years, whether it's speaking in our events or the last time we spoke, you had your first book out, the Adaptation Advantage. And that came out right during the middle of Covid.

And so, I wanted to have you back on with this new book, to talk about what's changed and and where we're going. You've got a new book out called The Empathy Advantage. Tell us a little bit about why you had to write a book coming out of Covid? 

Chris Shipley: As you said, The Adaptation Advantage, our first book with Heather and I, it launched in April of 2020. So, we had all of these plans having finished the book at the end of 2019 to do all the things you do to launch a book. And the world came to a stop. 

We had to adapt ourselves to really get that book out into the world. But what we recognized or what happened is it kind of became this accidental guide to leading through the pandemic, because everybody was without.

We continued to read and write and work on understanding what was happening and changing in the workplace. During the pandemic, what became really, really clear is that the pandemic didn't cause this disruption. It felt very disrupting, but it was, it amplified, it put a lens on what had been happening for a long time.

So, for example, the idea of the great resignation that really took hold about a year ago, people started talking about it. Well, that's been going on since about 2009. The pandemic created; we had a lens to see it maybe more clearly. It wasn't a new idea. 

And so what we realized is that the amplifying effect of the pandemic combined with a workforce that was sent home, given a lot of autonomy, a lot of agency, in how they would do their jobs, they're not gonna come back into an office place and say, oh, you know, all of that stuff that trust you had in me, nevermind micromanagement again, I'll be fine with that. 

A new kind of leadership is required to move people sort of back into a mainstream new frame of work that really embraces the way in which these workers are more empowered, they have more autonomy and agency. And we think that the bottom line is it's a change in leadership that centers on empathy.

Brian Ardinger: I wrote a book. I started writing it right before the pandemic, and this idea of disruption and changes are coming and how do you start preparing for it? And then Covid hits, and it made it real. Obviously, for everybody in a way that talking about it and seeing it hitting in different industries might not have.

But nowadays we're coming back into the place where, so we've had a couple of years of practice, so to speak to how do we become adaptive in that. But it still seems like there's a lot of folks getting it wrong or trying to go back to the old way and that. So, what are you seeing when it comes to this natural pull to try to go back to quote unquote normal. 

Chris Shipley: We're never gonna go back to normal. And I don't think really we ever do go back to a normal, right? We, there's a new normal and it's, it exists for now and then tomorrow it'll be another normal. And that really speaks to being adaptive. 

And so I think one of our challenges is that there's kind of a new mold for leadership, but we're still trying to shove the old ways into it. Right, that being a leader meant I needed to know how everyone worked. I needed to be the absolute decision maker. I needed to be the one who could see everything and guide everyone and manage people to some greater profitability and, and productivity. 

That just doesn't fit in the mold now. So, we need to recognize it if, and everything has, so much, has changed through the pandemic.

That what worked, that got us to where we are as leaders is not going to work to take us forward with this newly empowered workforce. And so, being able to, as a leader say, you know what? I don't know. But let's find out. Let's learn together. Let's work together to find this new way. You know, that's really hard for a lot of folks who have been ingrained with this idea that I'm the boss I should be all knowing.

Well, you know what? You can't know everything. Things are moving way too quickly. There's too much. No one holds all the knowledge to, to get some, you know, to get work done today. And so, creating an environment of, of collaboration rather than a, an environment of competition means that people can come together, and problem find and problem solve in a way that you as a leader become more of a conductor or a coach, or a, of a mentor. that empowers and enables workers rather than commands and controls them. 

Brian Ardinger: And that's a great point. I was working with a company early in the pandemic and they were talking about, well, how do we adapt to this new hybrid approach? And one of the leaders was like, it's not really our core people that are having to adapt much, it's, it's us as managers that have to learn how to manage differently. And look at how do we create productivity and guidance and everything around that communication with our people because they seem to be adapting fine as far as getting the work done. It's us as managers that are having the challenge or trying to adapt on how do we manage differently. 

Chris Shipley: Yeah. I was reading recently in a piece that a large percentage of managers think that they need to closely manage their hybrid workers. That that will make their workers more productive, increase performance, increase profitability, and the data doesn't support that.

Data supports giving people clear direction. Pushing decision making through the organization to cross your team. Being, you know, very clear on desired outcomes, actually produces the kind of performance that, that you're looking for. And in fact, the more there is a sense of oversight, and you know, keyboard tracking and all of the, you must be sitting at a desk in this work space, between these hours that actually tempers performance. It becomes a, you know, a bone of contention frankly, with workers who, like you trusted me a couple of years ago when, when we all got s...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios. Maisha has had an amazing career in corporate innovation, company building and venture capital, and we talk about the new Venture studio model and some of the things that she's seeing in the world of venture. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcription with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Maisha Leek. She's the managing director of Forum Venture Studios. Welcome to the show, Maisha. 

Maisha Leek: Thank you Brian. I'm excited to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because you've spent a lot of time in all the different cross sections of innovation. So corporate innovation, company building, venture capital. Can you tell us about your path and journey in this innovation space? 

Maisha Leek: Sure. I'd love to say it was all brilliantly planned. There's a lot of trial error, error, error, error, and then trial again. I actually got into this world in the interesting route. I was for a long time in Washington DC. I was a policymaker and a fundraiser. And in DC we had oversight of most of the science and innovation agencies. So, everything from NASA to Noah to National Science Foundation, which is about the $54 billion proposition, which is a lot of responsibility. 

And we work with your tax dollars, placing the best bets we could to jumpstart the economy or to just position the United States to be competitive. And so that turned in everything from investing in commercial space flight. You see that now with SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and other companies. Those aren't the only ones. And investing in the advancement of batteries, which leads to all of the electric vehicles that we have now and, and sort of their ability to compete with their combustible counter parts.

I knew I was far from all the action that everybody was in, in Silicon Valley and wanted to get closer to it, but by happenstance, met the founder of United Masters. Which was a music and tech company. And did not know what I was doing, except that I was an operator. I knew how to build out teams and build out a company and spent my time doing that. 

And we had the right as Silicon Valley goes investors. So had Ben Horowitz on our board. And David Drummond on our board. And was really active in managing those relationships. And when I was thinking about what to do next after spent some time at that startup, I had an executive coach and friends, they were like, you got to get into venture.

And I'm like, that sounds really boring. And their suggestion I think is really apt for folks who are thinking about it. They suggested I would be good in the space because I had experience to do this on Capitol Hill, operating across a range of subject matters. And knowing to be sort of a generalist that can go deep in certain areas and analyze information and make quick judgements.

My first experience was at Adventure Studio at Human Ventures. And that really influenced what I decided to do after that. And most of my time in the venture space, outside of being an angel investor or participating SPVs has really been in the venture studio space. 

I love it because of the close connection you can have with the founder and the founding team. It's not sort of like write a check. I'll call you once a month kind of thing. We're in it with them. But it also leans into the place where I'm strong. Which is I'm a really great operator and being able to do that with founders and helping them not make the same mistakes I've made in other companies that I've built or independent of that, also gives me great joy.

So, I've done four Venture Studios - Nike Valiant Labs, Human Ventures, New Lab, which are across the series of categories. New Lab is Frontier Technology. Nike is really best to describe with CPG. Human Ventures, which is in large part direct to consumer. And Forum, which is B2B SaaS. And they all have their challenges. But again, I love the model. I'm an evangelist for the model. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about that model. You know, people who've followed the show and that have heard more and more about Venture Studios, and if you've been in the space, you're hearing different flavors of what Venture Studios are. 

So can you talk about what is a venture studio from your definition and what were the differences between the different ones that you've started and where you're at currently with Forum. 

Maisha Leek: The term studio, when it's combined with venture, actually originates from Hollywood, which I did not know. Essentially, like the idea that the studio from ideation to putting it into theaters would be responsible for the build. 

Like they collaborate with some folks, but they wanted to sort of own the vertical of the product that went out to market. And Venture Studios do just that in a venture context. We are building small businesses as fast as possible.

You do different things depending on the category, and there are few ways the model sort of shows up. On one extreme, they're starting with just the idea and there's no founder. On the other extreme, you've built out a business and you're hiring in a CEO. Most of the venture studios I've worked with sort of lean to the front end where we really are interested in and get really excited about the founder. And really help them determine what to build.

And that's really a question of what the problem is that they want to solve. It's not really starting with a solution. And then we take them through a process to de-risk it, diligence it, figure out who the real customers are. What needs to be true for the MVP, and then bring it out to market. Most venture studios do that.

I think that where we get variation is the degree to which the idea is evolved before the team that's going to live with the problem goes out into the world. I think that's where folks tend to have differing points of view about what's most important. And a lot of it's logical. Venture Studios exist because we have a better risk profile than a founder doing it on their own.

I can get into why that is, but you can imagine it's just our expertise. And depending on the Venture Studio and their point of view about what they have to offer in terms of the early ideation, you have some organizations or groups who really want to use every insight that they have and stand up a company. And others who believe that the founder who's taking the risk should do most of that work. That's how folks are making those choices from what I've seen. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, that seems to be some of the key differentiation. It's how much additional resources perhaps are put towards it. So, some venture studios are very much hands-on. They have a team of developers that the founder can work with to build out, you know, early-stage prototypes an...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Barry O'Reilly, author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise and co-founder of the new Venture Studio, Nobody Studios. Barry and I talk about the ins and outs of a new model of creating and investing in startups called Venture Studios, and we discuss the power of collaborative innovation. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us, as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Barry O'Reilly, Author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise & Co-founder of the Venture Studio, Nobody Studios

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. You may have heard of Barry O'Reilly. He has been part of the Inside Outside Innovation community for a while. He's the author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. And co-founder of Nobody Studios, which we're going to have him talk a little bit more about that. Welcome, Barry. 

Barry O'Reilly: Thanks very much for having me. Yeah, it's great to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: It's great to have you back. You've followed Inside Outside the community. You've been a huge proponent of what we've done, and quite frankly, a huge mentor to me to understand this whole world of innovation and how do we get through it.

I'm excited to talk about your new venture, which is Nobody's Studios. You've spent a lot of time as an author, as a consultant, working with big companies. Helping really develop the whole lean startup movement. And now you've decided to jump into the investment space and create a a studio where you're gonna hopefully incubate some amazing new startups in the world.

Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. Well, first of all, one thing I want to congratulate you on is your new book. Literally it sits outside in my reading area. There are people that walk past it and see it all the time and pick it up. So, I just want to congratulate you on getting that done, and I really enjoyed reading through it. So, congratulations to yourself on that and highly recommend folks check it out.

So in terms of Startup Studio, the real inspiration for me was, as you said, I've had the chance to work with some phenomenal people over the last number of years. Helping them either identify products that they wanted to build in enterprises or work with scaling startups that were sort of building their business and taking them as far as they could.

And I was enjoying a lot of the sort of advisory side, but I've been sort of doing a lot of that now for, you know, close to a decade. And I was just getting itchy fingers, if you will. You know, I was like helping all these people, like I do a little bit of an angel investing. I, you know, would take sweat equity or be an advisor for these startups.

Help enterprises build products, but I miss a daily grind of sort of being like right in there, building day in, day out. So, I knew I was just sort of looking for the right opportunity for me to bring a lot of my skills to bear and rather than put time in for money, put energy in for equity in these businesses and build something that would fire outlast me if you will.

You know, started to share that with a few people and one of my good friends, Lee Dee, who was actually under advisory board of AgileCraft with me, which we sold to Atlassian and has now become JiraAlign. He introduced me to a guy called Mark McNally. And Mark was based down in Orange County. He was sort of interested or starting this idea of a company called Nobody Studios.

And instantly I was just attracted to the name. Anything that's sort of contrarian and odd. I was like, why did you call this thing Nobody? And you know, part of the mission was we were going to build these companies. We really need to try and like put our egos at the door, if you will, and like be humble, challenge ourselves, work together to build these great businesses.

And really the studio, it in itself is a sort of mix of all the best parts that I believe of the startup ecosystem that I can help with. We're not a VC. We do raise our own capital, but we raise our own capital so we can incubate our companies and ideas that we believe in. But we're not just an incubator.

We have the capital to keep building, and we're not an accelerator where we just sort of put people through a program and give them the Y Combinator stamp and, and they go out the door. So, it's actually bringing all of these components together. We raise our own capital. We have our own ideas that we incubate these companies.

We find founders and teams to help us bring these companies to life. And then the goal is to create really a repeatable, scalable business model and a fundable company where we've incubated something to the point that it's the high-quality business, it's maybe found product market fit, and they're ready to sort of go and get external capital.

And that for us is sort of us doing our job well. But what we're actually optimizing from a business model point of view is to try a aim for early to mid-size exits. So, for those businesses to be actually, purchased, merged into, acquired, maybe even an early I P O, who knows? But that's necessarily our business model.

So, by incubating and building these companies, we're actually looking to exit them for early to mid-stage exits. And that's how we will essentially generate more capital to go back into the studio to build more businesses. 

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit more about the tactics around this. So nobody's studios you're looking to, I think, incubate a hundred companies over the next five years. That takes a lot of people, a lot of founders, a lot of great ideas. How do you tactically go about starting the studios. 

Barry O'Reilly: To be honest, and we share that with people. Half of the people run away from us, and half of the people run towards us when they hear that. For me, like that's actually the good sign of a big harry audacious goal, if you will.

It's the calling card for some people. It helps sort of people who aren't thinking like that choose a a different option. With having a big audacious goal like that, you know, it forces you to start recalculating how you build businesses. So, when people hear a hundred companies in five years, they instantly think, oh, that's 20 companies a year.

Like, how are you going to do that amount? But actually, it's a sort of exponential scale that we work on. So, on a first year, which was sort of 2021, our goal was actually to create three companies and learn and build both the systems to create companies as well as the actual businesses themselves. And then last year our goal was to try and create five companies, which was almost, if you will, like a 50% increase in company creation.

And, if you sort of start to work those numbers out over the next five years, we basically go from three to five to 11 to 17 to 32, to 43, and then suddenly you're at a hundred, right? So, it's us also building the infrastructure capabilities and the systems to support...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stephen Taylor, Chief Innovation Officer at Untold Content. Stephen and I talk about the importance of storytelling, failure narratives, and its impact on the innovation culture of companies. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Stephen Taylor, Chief Innovation Officer at Untold Content

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Stephen Taylor. He is the Chief Innovation and Chief Financial Officer at Untold Content, where he focuses on helping organizations accelerate innovation through the power of storytelling. Welcome to the show. 

Stephen Taylor: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here.

Brian Ardinger: This whole concept of innovation storytelling, it's becoming more and more popular as people are trying to understand like, how do I actually get movement on my innovation initiatives? And a lot of it comes down to, you know, the stories that you tell. So, I wanted to have you on the show, because you have a company that focuses on this. Why don't we talk about the definition? What is innovation storytelling? 

Stephen Taylor: Yes. Innovation storytelling is something that is near and dear to my heart. So, I am a chemist by training. I did my PhD in chemistry, did a postdoc. Went out into industry and was there for about a decade. And I felt the pains of how you actually get buy-in, even within a smaller organization. I think we had 250 people. 

But how do you actually get buy-in on ideas. Or how do you kill ideas that don't fit? You know, how do you find out what is the right decision. And so that was something that I became very passionate about. And so, when I left industry and joined Untold, I really wanted to spend a lot of time focusing on how do innovators communicate, even as a scientist. How do scientists communicate?

So, what we found through our research is that innovation storytelling is the art and science of communicating strategic narratives and personal stories around innovation objectives in order to drive them forward. It really works on trying to make things that are very strategic, but also bring those personal experiences in.

Because what we found is that organizations have overall these strategic narratives that, that they're trying to force. When you have an idea or something that you're trying to bring forward, you have to ensure that there's good alignment between those stories and that narrative. And so, they really play in concert together. So that's why we include both those as a part of the definition. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, part of it's like that translation service almost. Sometimes it's a technical translation of, what the heck are you talking about? It's more about how do you align that with the other stories that are being told in the organization so that you can make sure that people understand what you mean.

I think, you know, when I go out and talk to companies, you know, one of the first things I like to do is how do you define innovation? Because I think that alone, causes problems with a lot of organizations. It's like, well, for me it means, you know, creating the next flying car. Where another person in the organization may mean that innovation is creating something new with our existing customers. And so, right. You know, if you don't have alignment from that perspective, you can go sideways really quickly. 

Stephen Taylor: We spend time talking about story led innovations versus innovation led stories. So, story led innovation is essentially a project that you may get from your advisor. Or from your boss. And so, a project comes in, the story's already aligned, so it's easy to prioritize that work.

And so, you're just working on communication at that point, a strategic communication. But if you're working on a innovation led story, that's where you come and you find something. Well, now how do you get it in line? How do you make something that's new, that has potential that's maybe adjacent? How do you decide, how do you try to create that alignment narrative? And so those are, those are things that we teach as a part of our curriculum. 

Brian Ardinger: That brings up a couple of interesting questions I have around this idea of innovation usually is in this uncertain area. You know, it's, it's a new idea that you want to create in the world that doesn't always align to the execution side of the business. But yet you have to try these things and do a lot of things to move that idea forward, and a lot of times you're going to fail at that. So, can you talk a little bit about power of failure and, and how do you translate that from a story perspective to let people understand that that's part of the process? 

Stephen Taylor: Yeah, that's a really good question. So, there's a lot of ways that you can go with this. One way that we think about failure is actually relates back to the Hero’s Journey. So, when it comes to the Hero’s Journey, you know, you can take the whole 17 step process from Joseph Campbell and his original work on the Hero’s Journey, or you can really try to simplify it.

And the way that I like to think about it is you receive the call for a journey. You go out through a transition called the transition from the known to the unknown. You then go on your journey, you do your discoveries, whatever. You collect the boons from the journey, which are the gifts to be given back. You then bring those back through that transition point back to your community.

And then the hero is recognized with monuments and statues and everything. Joseph Campbell's work was really based around tribal behavior. And when you think about tribal behavior, there's a lot of analogies to the innovation groups that are out there in the unknown trying to find what's next.

For the heroes they get these large statues and monuments, but for the failures, they put together rituals. And because the rituals are points where we come back together and actually share best practices, share things that we've learned, to take those learnings from failure and use those to bless back to the community. And so, what we've seen through our research is that there are many points where people are starting to implement these failure rituals.

And so, there's several different examples. There's a classic one, Ben and Jerry's. Ben and Jerry's Failure Graveyard is a classic failure ritual. There's Miter. Miter does Failure Cake. So, within Failure Cake, what happens is that they basically bring out a sheet cake into a cafeteria and they say, If you want a piece of cake, you need to share a failure story. And it's really to get those stories of failure being shared in those best practices and lessons learned.

Then there's also DuPont. DuPont's doing an Annual Dead Project's Day around Halloween. And so, the whole point is to get lots of their innovators and their scientists together to share their experiences....

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Paul Skinner, author of the new book, the Purpose Upgrade. Paul and I talk about how companies can use purpose to find better problems to solve, build better solutions, and achieve better outcomes. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us, as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Paul Skinner, Author of the Purpose Upgrade

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we are talking to Paul Skinner. He's the founder of Agency of the Future, and author of the new book the Purpose Upgrade: Change your Business to Save the World. Change the World, Save your Business. Welcome, Paul. 

Paul Skinner: Thank you, Brian. It's a fantastic pleasure to make it onto your show for a second time. In some ways, even better than the first time because now I have some sense of what I have to look forward to. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, yes. Welcome back to the show. One of the reasons we wanted to have you back on is you've written another book. First time we spoke a couple years ago, your first book had just come out called The Collaborative Advantage.

It was quite an interesting topic and obviously you've expanded on it. One of the things I want to ask, I've just published my first book, Accelerated and I can't imagine writing a second book. So, talk to me about that process of why did you feel a second book was important and give us a little bit of background into that.

Paul Skinner: Thank you for that. And yeah, I, I certainly agree. There's so much work in writing a book that I don't think you really want to set about it until it becomes something that impinges on you so much that you can't not write it. And congratulations on your book. And my prediction is that in couple of years or so, you'll start to feel the urge.

And so, I guess in my case, the second book has in some ways grown out of the legacy of the first book. So, we talked about Collaborative Advantage. I think it was episode 149, so about halfway up to where you are today. And I remember at the time arguing that many of the problems we faced in business were typically not problems we could solve on our own.

Therefore, we needed to forge shared purpose with others. And I proposed collaborative advantage as a somewhat audacious fundamental alternative to the conventional goal of strategy of creating competitive advantage. Now the idea there of course, was that in competitive advantage, that you line up your resources to create a superior offering that you deliver to your stakeholders who are the seen as the passive recipients of that value.

But I felt that that underestimated the value creation process and the role that all our stakeholders actively play in it. You know, people are not just consumers. You know, if we met in a Starbucks and had a chat with an economist and said, who was creating the most value around us? He might say the barista, the franchisee, the brand owner, the landlord. But he probably wouldn't say us, the customers.

But actually, if I met you in Starbucks, the real attraction would be the conversation with you and the warm brown liquid would be relatively incidental. Similarly, you know, investors are not just walking checkbooks, they're people who commit to the future and can help us live up to it. You know, partners don't just have to be suppliers delivering to a contract but can define that future with us.

Communities are not just markets. They're the thing that make it all worthwhile. And our shared home isn't just an asset to be exploited but is the thing that makes life and work possible. Now, if you see stakeholders as the active creators of change and the business there to empower that rather than just sort of siphoning off value, then that means you can raise your ambition.

And I'd say that's a good job because if we look back to the kinds of problems we talked about on the last episode of the show that we did together, then you could say those were the good old problems, really. I mean, since then we've had the biggest global health emergency of our lifetimes, the biggest interruption to life and work as usual.

We've got serious war in Europe since February of 2022. The cost-of-living crisis, energy crisis, food crisis. And so, if shared problems gave rise to the need for collaborative advantage, I believe that bigger problems gives rise to the need for a fundamental purpose upgrade. And the good news is that that can be an important source of renewal if we face up to those problems.

Brian Ardinger: And that's a great point. You know, since we last talked, obviously the world has changed and, and I would say that the idea of collaborative advantage, and that is probably more relevant to businesses now from the standpoint of it's at least in their front of mind. 

When the world changes overnight and they've got to, you know, look out for their, not only their customers, but their employees and understand that the world's changing around them. I'd imagine that has opened up the conversation to a number of different companies that you probably worked with or talked to about this particular topic. 

What are you seeing? Is this idea resonating and or what are some of the things that you're seeing tactically that companies are doing to embrace this? 

Paul Skinner: Yeah, I mean, as it happens, I've spent a lot of my time, I've worked with three groups that you might think as being very sort of separate from each other. You know, business leaders, many of whom will be listening to your show. Of course, seeking to make a profit. Leaders of charities and social enterprises seeking to create social change. And as it happens, I do have quite a background working with leaders in the field of disasters and emergency seeking to ensure safety, survival, and recovery.

And what I found in recent years is that those worlds are not very separate, after all. You know, business leaders are recognizing that they're having to take responsibility for a dizzying array of issues that they hadn't necessarily signed up for when they started their careers. 

Leaders of charities and social enterprises are often having to be very business savvy, as well as very oriented towards work through partnerships. Because resources are scarce, donations are difficult to come by. And because of the scale of the problems they face. 

And of course, in the world of disasters and emergencies, I think all organizations working in that domain recognize that the scale of those problems mean that they need to work with and through whole of society approaches to solving those problems. Because nobody is big enough to come and solve those problems on their own.

So I think there is a fundamental recognition. You know, in a sense, I think with collaborative advantage, we were already seeing the interconnectedness of the world and our shared opportunities. In the last years, we've also become...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tim Bottke, author of the new book Digital Transformation Payday. Tim and I talk about the challenges of digital transformation initiatives and how companies can better approach the implementation and measurement of them. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best in the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Tim Bottke, Senior Strategy Partner at Monitor Deloitte and Author of Digital Transformation Payday

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Tim Bottke. He is Senior Strategy Partner at Monitor Deloitte, and author of the new book Digital Transformation Payday: Navigate the Hype, Lower the Risks, Increase Return on Investments. Welcome to the show, Tim. 

Tim Bottke: Hi Brian.

Brian Ardinger: Tim, I am excited to have you on the show. You've got a very interesting book about digital transformation. What is digital transformation? 

Tim Bottke: You know what the funny thing is. Like over these four years of research, which I spent preparing, the book. Became clear, there is just no single universally agreed definition of what digital transformation is. And that's driven by the fact that so many different interest groups have worked on the topic. Each with their own agenda.

And very often you'll find that the key word in this term is transformation. And digital, it should be it, it is not always like that should be means to an end, which is transforming. And transformation is also no objective by itself. It needs to happen to make sure that a strategy is established, which helps companies win in the marketplace.

And very often you see with clients and also all the companies I researched for the book, that people transform but don't know what to transform to. And that's why people often ask for a definition. And the definition is it's about a transformation with the objective of being able to have sustainable success in the marketplace. And digital is a tool to do that. There are many others. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'd love to get a little bit more background on like, how did you get involved in digital transformation and the research that you've been doing on it? What got you excited about it and how did you get your expertise? 

Tim Bottke: I've been a consultant now for more than 20 years. And like transformation was always a topic in all these times. Whenever I had, we had the early stage, we had the e-commerce boom. I've been in all these faces, and I work in the TMT industry mostly, so, which has always been more digital. At least that's what we believe than many other industries. 

And that's why with all these companies going up, down, growing, being restructured, transformation has always been there. So it has always been a key interest area I've had. And that's why when the digital transformation hype and I'll call it came up, it has come up several times. It just became the core of my work because there was no transformation where there was no digital inside. 

And then I had, I still remember this meeting with a dear, really dear client of mine, a CEO who basically said, look Tim, two more years as a CEO in this company. Maybe three. I want to do bigger things. We both know I need to transform this company. Digital transformation is the term. It costs half a billion, and I'm sure I would not see any single benefit while I'm still the CEO. 

Is it not a better idea if I start wearing jeans and trainers? As of next week, I make my investor relations team paint our annual report with a lot of digital AI, whatever the term is.

I invest 50 million in this case, in major startup city of the country, put an incubator and then have some innovation speeches written for me, et cetera. Is that not better and safer for my career? Tell me if I go the other route, what will shareholders benefit really? Please tell me and had no answer.

And you know how frustrating that is. At least to me. It was when I couldn't really give a good answer. And it was also clear that mumbling along, throwing a few buzz words wouldn't solve it. So, I went on a quest to solve it. I first started internally. Then no one had the patience to really dig into it because it was, you know, everyone was running high speed digital transformation project after project.

No one wanted to question the bigger theme of value, et cetera. But I still got the go from our leadership to work on it by myself. So, I went back to academia. I found out no one has solved it there either, even though IT transformation, you know, has been a trend for long time. IT value has been assessed in hundreds of articles and books, but it didn't ever jump over to digital.

It was rather the claim people saying, no, these rules do no longer apply. Now it's digital. We don't need KPIs. It's all about scale. It's all about different KPIs. It's let's be Agile. Look, all these things. And then I started saying look, there needs to be a data driven answer. And that took me some time because I also had a job to do in parallel. I'm still a consultant after all, but I fixed it. I solved it. And that's where this book came from. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. My understanding, you spent about four years researching it, and looking at different ways companies are approaching digital innovation and that. So maybe we'll start with the question, you know, where do companies get digital transformation wrong? You know, what does the research show? What are some of the pitfalls that people are encountering? 

Tim Bottke: The good thing is I think there is just one single pitfall everyone needs to be aware of. That digital transformation is an end-to-end journey. And no matter what you do. And I have a framework in my book, which is explaining a bit what end-to-end means. But wherever you start, you need to be sure that you know where you want to get. 

So very often the key thing that companies get wrong is they believe they need a digital strategy, but they don't from my perspective. What they need is a strategy, a strategy to win in the marketplace. And very often in current times, digital can play a key role in it. But they often think if they implement the coolest new CRM system cloud-based with AI supported analysis engines inside. 

I think the two of us could throw buzzwords now for the next 10 minutes. That this will change anything in terms of success for them in the marketplace. But it doesn't because very often all competitors work on similar things. They very often even use the same software. So, they have the same systems. Often in a few cases, even the same consultants with Chinese walls or whatever.

But so they will never end up in a place where when they finish and they never do, they will be better off compared to where they were before, vis-a-vis competition. They might be a better company, more efficient, leaner, faster, but what if all your competitors do the same faster at the same speed? Then you end u...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford's d.School. Sarah and I talk about her new book, Creative Acts for Curious People and dig into a number of the exercises and activities that innovators can use to move ideas forward faster. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.
 
Interview Transcript of Sarah Stein Greenberg, ED of Stanford's d.School and Author of Creative Acts for Curious People

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 Sarah Stein Greenberg. She's the Executive Director of Stanford's d. School and author of the new book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Welcome to the show, Sarah. 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thanks so much, Brian. I'm really excited to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: You know, as a person in the trenches, trying to help companies and teams think through the innovation process. It's kind of hard-to-get people on board half the time. And you've taken and created this new book, that's really the tactical guide of exercise and experiences, almost a roadmap for that. What made you decide to tackle this topic and what do you hope for folks to get the most out of it? 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Oh, great question. We're living through this historic moment right now, where on nearly a daily basis, each of us are trying to solve problems that we have not faced before. So, as we were getting going, we were talking about the challenge of having one kid vaccinated. One kid not vaccinated. People are back in school. There's lots of different risk factors. 

Folks are starting in some cases to return to offices. Like what's the new social etiquette. And then at the same time, there are these like community level issues or global issues around whether it's wildfires, which are happening in my area, or really different perspectives about politics that we're experiencing all over the country.

And it's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of uncertainty. So, while we might be used to thinking about like, how do we apply our creativity to innovation and coming up with new products and services, there's also this whole realm of use for our creative abilities that has to do with these kinds of both small personal and large global challenges.

So, I wrote this book because I think that design offers a set of abilities that are really useful when you're trying to tackle problems where you don't know the right answer. Maybe there is no right answer, and you have to bring your full creative self. 

These are the kinds of skills and abilities that we seek to help develop in our students at the d. School and with executives and teachers and folks all over the world. And I think there's something in here for everyone, no matter where you are in your creative journey. I think you can find something that will be of use to you. 

Brian Ardinger: A lot of folks are understanding that to a real extent this idea of living in constant change and ambiguity and a world in flux. What are some of the key skillsets that you find are important to be able to dabble in that world?

Sarah Stein Greenberg: One is the act of noticing and observing how the world is changing. And, you know, we get really habituated to the routines and the things we see every day. But when you look at what amazing designers do, somehow, they see opportunities that no one else is noticing. But there are really a set of ways, I have a few great assignments in the book based on this to cultivate your own ability to observe and notice differently.

So, one of my favorites is called the Dureve, in which you are able to take a walk and navigate around a space or your neighborhood, or your office building, by using the practices in the Dureve. All of a sudden you notice things that maybe have been there for 25 years, and you haven't noticed these elements. And it awakens you to recognize how many opportunities are around us all the time that are just lying in plain sight, but we are not seeing them. So that's one of those skillsets. 

I think another key one is just, we talk about this all the time in innovation and design, but it's about collaboration. Right. And how you get to a state of true creative collaboration and how much trust that requires, an openness, and the ability to navigate together with a group of people who may think very differently about the same things through a creative process.

Brian Ardinger: You talk about in the book, the difference between problem finding and problem solving. Can you outline that and why that is so important to understanding how to work in this innovation space? 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. I mean, for me, that was one of the critical ahas that I experienced when I first started learning about design when I was a grad student. You know, I think in a lot of more analytical disciplines, you are taught to take the problem that you've been given, break it into small pieces and then figure out how are you going to solve that? 

And that is a very valuable set of skills, but in design, we add some stages before you start working on problem solving. That's about problem framing, as you said. And the reason for doing this is that often the way a problem has been framed is a conventional way, right? It's kind of the way that's either out there and sort of the obvious way. 

It is what we assume that our customers might need, or we assume that people would care about. But in fact, if you allow yourself that stage of problem finding that's often what drives the innovation, is when you reframe an opportunity and then you start to see it in a whole new way. 

Brian Ardinger: Do you have any examples that you can share around that? 

Sarah Stein Greenberg: Yeah. One of the examples that I go into detail in the book is the example of a team of students who ultimately wound up founding a new company. And they were tasked with working with a partner, a hospital, a cardiac care hospital in India. And they thought that their mission as a team was to design something that could really assist with like efficiency or sort of patient flow. They thought that they were going to wind up designing something for either the clinicians or maybe for the hospital administrators.

 What they saw when they started doing their research was a completely different set of opportunities. What they spotted was the fact that there are many people in the hospital who were coming to accompany their family member and then winding up waiting for hours or days even, and not having a lot of information about how their family member was doing, what their prognosis was.

The students really like feed into this and wound up designing something for those family members. So they have now launched this organization that provides healthcare training to family members during that waiting process. And what that allows...