Inside Outside

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 VenturesBrian 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, salespeople. They see the same opportunities. But there are also folks who do not see the future in the same way. And that's where that acceptance problem comes in. So I ask questions, I do a little survey. And I ask people really fundamental questions, one of them having to do with innovation. Now, where do you put your company in terms of new technologies and how quickly they would be used. Like you see yourself among the first to use emerging technologies?I'm asked almost around 2000 people this question. And interestingly, overall, 16% of people would say, yes, our company is among the first. But if you drill down into that, you see CEOs of the C-suite at 36% believe they are the first to use technology, but only about 19% of VP and director level. So that gap needs to be studied.It could be that CEOs are both open and accepting, but just can't bring their organization along with them. And get people to the same head space. Or it could be that the, you know, VP director level folks see something different. We're not among the first, and it's this overconfidence among the C-suite, who happen to believe, but it may not be the reality of what you don't see it. What you're looking at C-Suite is really not what's going on. Regardless of how you interpret that gap, there is a gap. And understanding it, managing it, dissecting it, interrogating it is kind of what's really important. Brian Ardinger: You know, a lot of this change and the, the ability to accept change and, and adapt to it comes down to incentives. What are you seeing or what have you seen that's worked when it comes to incentivizing teams or even the C-Suite to put new things into place and to react and adapt to new changes? Tom Daly: It's going to happen; it's going to change. My technique, it may be more patient than others. I don't know how to make it go super-fast. I just know that lots of back and forth. You know, I think that the thing to do is demonstrate that this is real. I'll tell you an example, a little technique that I used back before the advent of mobile payments. Before people using their phone to buy things was really as prevalent as it is today. It was possible, but not a part of many people's experience.So, at the time I was at Coca-Cola, our products were sold in a lot of retail environment where these capabilities were being slowly introduced. But I was also working among a group of people, none of them are ignorant, they just didn't believe it was happening. I organized what I called a mobile payments safari.I got a local little tour bus. And planned out a route to Coca-Cola Company customers. Dunkin Donuts, local Burger Joint, Home Depot. All of these companies using Mobile payments in one way, shape, or form. And I made everybody kind of get the appropriate app, sign up for the appropriate services. They paid early days of Square. I didn't pay for this bus ride out of my own budget. I had each participant use Square to see how that worked. Took them to Dunkin Donuts to go get their coffee or Coke and donut. Talk to the counter, see customers, so on and so forth throughout the day. Now, by the end of the day, it wasn't Tom's opinion, my language I gave everybody the same inputs that I had. With the benefit of those same inputs. They reached the same output. They reached the same conclusion, alignment gaps closed. People started to realize, oh yeah, that's, it is happening in the world, you know where I live. Brian Ardinger: That's a great exercise, and I think more and more folks need to pay attention to that. You know, we talk a lot about the customer discovery process and that. Especially when we're working with startups, because at that early stage, they're trying to figure out who their customers are. Is their market and everything else. I think the challenge when you get to a kind of an established company is they think they know who their customers are or they, you know, read about it or hang out with the same competitors. And so, there's a natural tendency to think they know what's going on in the world and that ability to step outside the office and see what's really going on. And, you know, firsthand knowledge I think is so important for whether you're launching a new product or just trying to, like you said, understand a new technology set and how that's impacting or could impact your current business. Tom Daly: Brian, I think there's a lot to that and it's incredibly helpful, but the other thing that you need to be able to do is tell the stories around that and help people understand it in a way that's digestible. Before I organized this local payments safari, I circulated a couple of case studies, one of which super impactful I think you know, that again, back to a square example, the, Salvation Army, you know, that famous red kettle collecting coins around the holidays. There was a early and really interesting experiment where Salvation Army was using Square to accept payments. Why? Not because everybody was using their phone to buy stuff, but they were using credit cards. They were not using cash. So, they didn't have change in their pockets, and you know, felt bad in the Red Kettle. So, they said, well, we got to find a way to get some money. You know, the storytelling that I created was, you know that the coins that go on the kettle in December, are the coins that go on a vending machine in July.And if people don't have the money to put into that red kettle, they're going to be the same dilemma. And we just got to catch up with us. So, we have to find ways to remove that payment friction. Then I happen to be focused on mobile technology at the time. The point is the storytelling and finding ways to connect these trends and whether it's super easy. Nope, no language, no technical stuff. You didn't have to understand just, oh yeah, I get it. No coins. Brian Ardinger: So, I'd love your insight into how important it is to get buy-in across the organization, or how difficult is it for the average manager within a company to help push the transformation agenda forward. Versus having corporate buy-in and, and everybody aligned. Can you talk a little bit about what are the skill sets, tool sets, things that people need from a manager level to make this stuff happen? Tom Daly: I wish I had the one silver bullet to tell you some new blinding revelation. I don't. It's the usual suspects, Brian. You know, you need to be informed. You kind of need to know a little bit about how the watch is made. Not just sort of the superficial part of kind of what you saw. This, your technologist is probably more likely to understand a little bit of the underlying technology, but you may not have the language or experience or vocabulary to talk about how that interacts with people. If you're a marketing person, you probably have the skillset to talk about the stories and the like, but you don't have the technical knowledge. Whether you're coming at innovation, regardless of the perspective that you're coming at an innovation discussion or transformation discussion knowing both is important. You can't just kind of say, oh yeah, and well payments, you kind of have to know a little bit about how the watch is made. So certain amount of curiosity, critical, tenacity, perseverance. You know, we've captured my personal style, that big ship, small spaces constantly creeping towards the destination.Other people will have different styles at different techniques. But it is all captured by the same notion of perseverance, tenacity, persistence, et cetera, et cetera. So, no unique, I do have a couple of resources though that would be helpful for folks. You know, first thing folks might want to do is wherever they buy their books, great book written by a fellow named Kumar Metta, who wrote something called The Innovation Biome. And the Innovation Biome is a book capturing case studies from cultures of innovation, big companies. You know, Amazons of the world, Apples. What do they do culturally to enable these environments? You know, you'll use a reference, a culture will Yes, within Amazon. So it's not the manager's job to say no. Sort of the manager's job to say, okay, but yes, but let me help you get this through so you can get the information that you need.So, you know, I've worked with folks in the past, you know, who facilitate meetings that allow executives to get together, break out of the day-to-day. Some of the techniques we've already touched on, talk to customers, walk around where people are living and doing their day-to-day thing to see where your ideas fit. Where there are problems that you can solve. Simple stuff. But if you don't do it and you spend your time looking for that silver bullet, you're gonna miss it. Just do it. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. The last topic I want to talk about is, obviously again, you've been in a lot of different industries and that. You pay attention to a lot of the trends that are going on. Obviously in the, in news this week, in, in the past few weeks, the whole AI movement and chat, GPT-4, and I'm, I'm talking to a lot of different companies saying hey we see this thing coming, we have no idea how to attack it or use it or whatever. What are you seeing when it comes to the AI trend and what is your input for helping companies try to navigate that early stage? Tom Daly: We would agree. A generative AI overall kind of a a big deal. Going be super transformative. This book that I mentioned, the Innovation Biome. The author Kumar Metta talks about the fallacy of the next big thing, and he picks apart you know, the first fallacy is that, you know, it's the next thing. So generative AI is here. But it's like day one, right? I mean, not literally, but you know, broadly speaking. So, what it will truly become, who knows, right? I mean, so don't get too fixated on it as a thing at this moment in time. Allowing yourself to just project forward and imagine scenarios down the road of what a future could look like, because eventually it will get there. Lots of folks you know, back in the day of 56 K modems. Nobody will ever buy you anything. Music won't ever happen. And this blockbuster streaming thing. Well, 56 became 124. 124 became EF whatever. And you know, here we are on our phones doing things that were unimaginable really not that long ago. Generative AI is only important if it turns into a billion-dollar idea for you.If you set that standard, you're going to miss it. Right. Think about small, quick little wins things that you can do today. Learn the technology. Introduce it into your organization. Become familiar with it, and don't worry about the long ball, right? Singles and doubles. Three yards caught. Where are your sports? Whatever you're thinking. Start with what you can do and don't despite what I just said about learning how the watch is made, you'll be overly focus on a specific thing, right? Chat Gpt, GPT-4, whatever it is, open up the aperture. Think more broadly about where these things, what's the real root essence of it? Not a specific manifestation of it. If you give yourself that latitude, it's important to you even if it only saves two seconds a day for somebody. If it saves two seconds for somebody, maybe it saves two seconds for everybody. A company that matters. It'll magnify itself if it's real.Brian Ardinger: I also find that you mentioned opening up the aperture, and I think a lot of times when I'm talking to C-suite folks or team leaders and that they oftentimes think that they have to have all the answers. And especially in larger organizations, you have a lot of people in the depths of the organization that I believe are curious and restless in and around these particular topics. And sometimes all it takes is opening that up and saying, hey, who else in the organization has access or information or insight or a desire to help us figure this kind of stuff out?And if you opened up the conversation, I think that sometimes takes the pressure off of the lead team to have to have all the answers or figure it out all themselves. I think what you'll find is there are people and pockets within the organization that can help you move faster if you just allow them to help you do that.Tom Daly: Brian, that's what I was trying to get to with the kissing babies and shaking hands and politics isn't a bad thing. It's not a bad word. It's people. It's sitting down, grab a cup of coffee with your colleagues, you know, share your idea. Why you might be enthusiastic or excited about a particular opportunity, but be open and, and listen when they tell you why that might work.Big organizations, a lot of specialized skills and capabilities and these are intricate machines built over a long time and my clever little idea looks like a bit of grit. No, it's just going to come up the work style. They'll do it. Tell me why. Partner? Why is it going to go up the works? That'll help me think about it more deeply.Come back to you and say, well, I think I've solved that problem. What's next? Oh, okay, you have. Good now. Hey, let's go rope in this other person. And then you just build that consensus. Now again, in smaller organization, that cycle goes faster. But the principles say if you just show up with an idea when you went home on Friday, we did it this way.Here we are Monday morning. We're doing it a totally different way. Gaps in alignment, confidence and trust are going to come back and bite you. My analogy is turning a big ship. That's the rocks. Those are the rocks that are going to sink you. You're going to get stuck. It's just a lot more work to get unstuck. And had you just charted the course a little bit more methodically?For more informationBrian Ardinger: Makes a lot of sense. Well, Tom, we live in fascinating times. I appreciate you coming on and, and sharing your thoughts and insights over the past couple decades of how to navigate this changing world that we're living in. If people want to find out more about yourself or about relevant ventures, what's the best way to do that?Tom Daly: Best way would be just to visit relevantventures.com website. Of course, you'll find me, you know, a couple of Slack channels here and there. You'll find me on LinkedIn. I am wide open to sharing these ideas. It's how I learn and how I get better. And I hope someone has an idea that they want to discuss, because I love to share what I've learned along the way.Brian Ardinger: Sounds great. Well, Tom, thanks for bringing on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation. Tom Daly: Thank you. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

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 sent home to figure this thing out. Why are you not trusting me now? Brian Ardinger: So, back to the book. What does an empowered workforce look like? And maybe what's the mindset of an empowered workforce. Chris Shipley: Enforced by, or a reckoning that came because of the pandemic. It was just for many families it was an existential crisis, right? How are we going to get by? Our work has changed, maybe our income has changed. We've lost family members. We're homeschooling our, our children, you know, all of the things that we all know, and we all wrestled with repositioned where work fits in our lives. And we used to talk about work life balance. And I think the biggest shift now is that people are thinking about life work balance. I do my work around the things in my life that are important. Family, my physical health, my mental wellbeing, and I will make decisions as a worker that favor my family and my wellbeing over my employer and his business, or her business and their profitability because I matter most now.My family matters most. And so that worker, you know, combined with labor shortages and all sorts of other, other issues are just having to say it's not worth it. It's not worth it for me to sacrifice my personal time. My family, my health to work in many cases in an environment where I feel I'm not being paid appropriately. In conditions that aren't conducive to health and wellbeing.Pick any number of factors. That evaluation is happening in the minds of workers. And they are recognizing that they now have the power to say no. They have the power to leave that work and to go find some job somewhere else that's going to help them be in the right place in their priorities. Brian Ardinger: And you talk about this in the book, but it's a movement towards employees and people in general wanting to have more impact. You know, they've realized that things can have a major impact on their own lives, but this movement towards how do I have an impact in the work that I do. And I have a choice now to be able to make those from a company perspective, you got to make sure that employees really understand the mission and, and align that as well because impact seems to be driving a person's commitment to the organization versus almost anything else. Chris Shipley: It would be easy to say, ah, damn, these, these empowered workers, and they want to fulfill their purpose and be cynical about it. The truth is that's your greatest secret weapon. If I can tap somebody's, their passion for whatever they want their impact to be, that becomes an intrinsic motivator.I no longer have to, you know, cajole my workers to work a little bit longer or provide incentive to work on a different project. I put them behind the thing that they most want to do and they outperform. I think if you can, as a leader, make the shift from they work for me to, I work for them. I figure out how to tap that power that's within them to be their best self and to do their best work. That's a win for the company. That's a win for my leadership. Brian Ardinger: Well, and the environment is such now that maybe it used to be in the past where you had to pull your talent from a local base. You might not find everybody in your local base that align to what you are trying to build or the impact you're trying to have.But now you have access to a global workforce that's been trained on working remotely or otherwise, and so you almost have an advantage to being able to find those tribes of people that you know resonate with what you're trying to build and have an opportunity to find different talent or cultivate different talent than you had in the past as well. Chris Shipley: I think that's absolutely right. So, you've got a global workforce, so it's both harder and easier sometimes to navigate. But you've got a lot of other options now. So do your employees. Right. They have lots of other places they can turn and so really taking that time to hire well and to engage with your current workforce to, to understand do we have alignment of purpose?And recognizing that there, that's magic. And when there's not, then your job as a leader is to help those people find a place where they can be more purposeful so that you can focus back to the mission of your own organization. You know, and it's tough, much harder in many ways to be that coach and conductor than it is to be a command-and-control leader because I've got absolute authority do as I say, and I can go home and have my steak for dinner and, and be happy that I was a good leader today.To think here we are in a hybrid situation, and I want people to come into the office, but not to come into the office to do the same work they could do from home without the commute, without the hassle of getting ready for work every day. What's that experience going to be like? I could in the past just call a meeting and expect everyone to show up in a conference room.Now they have to really think about what's that meeting's purpose and how do we get everyone to prepare and to understand our goals so that when we do come together to think together, it's actually to a specific purpose. And not just, wouldn't it be nice to see everybody around the same conference room again. That's a much more deliberate piece of leadership than we ought to have a meeting so that everyone can round robin about, you know, what's on their to-do list today. Brian Ardinger: One of the things I like about the book, you talk about the superpowers that the new management slash companies need to have as far as if you're going to be a good leader, what are some of those superpowers that you need to start embracing. You know, vulnerability of not knowing and awareness and candor. I don't know if you want to speak to some of the superpowers that people should be cultivating when it comes to leading in this new world. Chris Shipley: It boils down to one, I think, which is be human. When we can connect with people in our humanity, when we can recognize that the people who work for us are complex, messy human beings, and we are complex, messy human beings. And we can lead with empathy to understand that, then the powers that it comes from transparency, from vulnerability, from honesty and candor, those kind of flow naturally. When I think about superpowers, it's really how do we give ourselves as leaders permission to be fully human and to engage with the people who work for us in a fully human way? Brian Ardinger: What do you think the costs are? If you ignore this shift. Chris Shipley: You're going to be constantly trying to hire people and train people, and hire people, and train. You'll put yourself in that revolving door of building workforce rather than being in a place where you're building the capacity of the people who are coming to work. Do you want to spend your leadership time as a hiring manager trying to fill the position for someone who was not well aligned and for whom you did not well care? Or do you want to open up yourself to the risk, be a little bit vulnerable about your own humanity and their humanity and make those adaptations as you need to in order to really empower people to do good work. Brian Ardinger: So, you've had a chance to work out in Silicon Valley and other places and that who's getting it right now. Are you seeing any shining examples of folks that seem to be getting this more right than others? Chris Shipley: I think we're in a period of great experimentation. And I think that there are some companies that are trying hard. I think that Airbnb and his email to staff or at the beginning of the pandemic, which was essentially, I don't really know, but as I know, I'll share what I know.It's hard to be the person at the vanguard to say, I have no idea where this is going, but hey, follow me anyway. You can get people to follow if you are open and candid about that. I think so many challenges that leaders had during the pandemic were, I don't know, so I'm going to wait until I know. Rather than to say, okay, today we're going to act on this bit of information that we have. And when that information changes, here's how we'll make decisions again. Kind of that framework rather than, rather than absolute decisions, here's the framework that we're going to use to make decisions. You kind of mitigate as much uncertainty as possible.I may not know how things are going to work, but I know how I'm going to make decisions around new information, new knowledge. Sharing that out with a team helps to bring the level of stress down because I can watch for those same indicators and have a better sense of where we're going to go as an organization. I think the companies that are doing that, the leaders who were able to do that, to give their people frameworks to understand and frameworks for decision making were in a far better position than those who felt like they had to give an absolute answer, but then changed in a week. And then it changed the week after that. Leaving people to think that my management's wishy-washy. They making decisions all in whoop saw back and forth. That became very frustrating. Leaders, we think we have to know it all, and one of the toughest things to do is to say, I don't know, but here's how we're going to learn together. Brian Ardinger: Do you think the potential for the pendulum to swing back, I'm thinking through like an Elon Musk on Twitter and, and the way he's manhandled, the taking back of that company and bringing back people in the office and firing them and going back with a more autocratic way of governing a company. Do you think that the pendulum is potentially moving back that way, or is that a anomaly, or what are you seeing? Chris Shipley: I think I really appreciate Elon Musk and his leadership style for making it painfully clear to everyone else just how not to do workforce management. What we have seen reporting out of Twitter in the sort of random firings, because he's in a mood one afternoon, is the kind of arbitrary leadership. It's crippling for an organization; it's paralyzing for an organization. And so, thank you for that example, because we'll know what not to do. The challenge here is that, and you know, we've talked about this before, change is happening so quickly that you just don't know and so I don't know where you have a choice but to be vulnerable about that lack of knowing.Heather and I talk about this all. Are we wrong? Is there some other way to lead that looks like the models that we all grew up with and they keep coming back to no. The only way to lead now is with a heavy dose of human empathy because we're all in this together and it is a grand experiment. And some companies are going to work their way through it more quickly. Others are going to really struggle, but I think again, with an empowered workforce, workers will navigate to the experiments that are working.Brian Ardinger: Let's say I'm a manager or a leader in an organization and I'm struggling with this new world. Are there resources or hints or tips that I can implement tomorrow that would help me figure this out a little bit faster or more effectively?Chris Shipley: Well, by next Wednesday there will be this new book on the market called The Empathy Advantage. I think that's a good place to start. Of course. I guess I would start with your people. What do your people need? Even, you know, over the years as I didn't make tough decisions or have difficult conversations, what became the most motivating factor for me in doing hard things was recognizing that the people that I lead really do know the answers.And they're waiting for me to, to do the right thing. Recognizing that you don't lead alone. You lead among a group of people who you have entrusted with your business in some fashion. And the kinds of conversations that tap into their knowledge and their insight about themselves, about you and your organization is extraordinarily valuable.I think that ability to, again, put aside the, I need to know it all. And go speak to your people. What do they need? What are they seeing? That I think is probably the best first step for any leader.Brian Ardinger: It almost seems like you're opening up your team to becoming leaders themselves and co-leading or co-creating and, and that speaks back to, you know, the motivations. If I'm an employee and I'm given the opportunity to both speak my mind and have a contribution, that should go a long way in making me want to be part of that organization moving forward as well. So it's almost to your best interest because you are effectively growing your, your next leadership team as well.Chris Shipley: Yeah, I mean, people want to be valued and valued for what they know and for what they see and what they experience. Why would you not want to tap that value that plays back into a workforce that is more engaged, that is a shared sense of purpose and driving to the same outcomes. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Chris, I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation again to talk to us about what you're seeing in the world. I always appreciate your insights and that. If people want to find out more about yourself or, or the new book, what's the best way to do that? Chris Shipley: Drop by my website, which is cshipley.com. Drop by your local book seller and ask for The Empathy Advantage. I think those are both good places to start, but I would say also just listen to your podcast. I think you, you deliver great value to your readers and I'm happy to be part of it today. Brian Ardinger: Well, thanks Chris. I appreciate you being a friend and colleague of the changing world we're living in and looking forward to having you back on the show soon. Chris Shipley: Thanks very much. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

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 StudiosBrian 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 and things along those lines. All the way to, obviously capital's involved.But it, it's interesting to see even the last three or four years, how that model has evolved. You know, some of the earlier venture models, you know, High Alpha out of Indianapolis or Highland Beta Toronto, they're looking at different models. You've got Nobody's Studios out in New York and the Philippines. And then you've got, obviously some of these, what were more traditional startup accelerator programs, whether it's Techstars or others that are, are looking at kind of a venture model where again, it seems to be how do we find the early founder with some magic sauce. And then put the magic sauce together to create companies together. Rather than looking for a company out there, which would be more, I guess, a traditional venture model in general.Maisha Leek: It's interesting. I love how you put that last point. The debate, I think, amongst people who are in the venture studio space is like, well, what matters more, the idea or the founder. I think that the way they're setting up venture studios is really an answer to that individual group's point of view on that question. I personally believe that the founder is the one thing you cannot de-risk. Human beings are human. And you know, you can pivot a company, you can pivot a strategy, you can change who is sitting where. But when it comes to the founder, you really wanna have conviction before you build. And I think a ton of folks are seeing that as the whole game. In large part, because early-stage investors are only looking at the team, right? So, it stands to reason that where venture studios can really play the game super, super well is making sure they've got that really, really tight, and then getting into the idea and the problem space from there.Brian Ardinger: And that makes perfect sense. You know, at the earliest stages, most ideas are crap, and they have to be worked through. And so the uncertainty itself, you're looking for somebody who can work through that uncertainty and adapt to the changing things that they learn along the way. Maisha Leek: A hundred percent. And somebody also who has a game plan for themself, which I find doesn't come up as much. But you know, I was talking to a founder this morning that was having a rough day, early on a Monday. And essentially, am I making the right choice for my life? How do I do that? Having a plan for all of those rough moments, it's like one of the most important things an investor or even a studio or a founder can put together before they even dig into the idea, because it's your right. The way a business shows up today. Fifteen years from now, it's going to be completely different. And really having a game plan for how to address the uncertainty, the significant amount of volatility that you'll face and keep your head is probably some of the most important details about being a founder that I don't think get enough of your time.Brian Ardinger: So obviously a founder's a core component to creating any new company. What are some of the ways that you both source founders and what do you look for. Maisha Leek: This is the best question. It's also the hardest. There are a range of approaches. I think that over time you start to build a network of founders that trust and know you.And when you say that you're standing up the studio and that you want to build, they tend to refer people that they're really excited about. Just starting from scratch. I mean, you really do want to spend time doing what we're doing right now. Demonstrating your capabilities in conversations and writing. Really posting a ton. Trying to draw people in.Being a judge at competitions. Talking to your network of other investors. There are a ton of folks that are further down the line and they meet founders who are too early for them to consider for their deals. I've talked to my entire network about getting folks to refer those folks to us. And then also not being afraid to look in places that you don't suspect. And so at the studios that I've worked with, we always have a complete open door. We do not require a warm intro for you to engage us. That's intentional. You're a needle in a haystack. I don't want to have the door closed. And when I have talked to every and anyone about the studio model, about what we can offer, about how to think about joining us.From a profile perspective, there's what I'm looking for and then there's like where those people are. I have the same challenge any startup has. Who is your customer? Right? I went to the first one. There are about like three types of people, right, that are very stages of availability. There are folks that are experienced founders who seek out venture studios because they've had to do it alone before. And they know that doing it alone is not worth it. it's not efficient. They want to move quickly, understand if there's real meat to their idea, and dig into that fast. They tend to come to venture studios actively, actively always talking to founders despite how deep they are into their build. It's just going to be top of mind for them. There's a ton of people who don't see themselves as founders but have all the experience. These are my favorite to cajole and to taking the risk. They tend to be a human, we used to call them the person behind the person, right? These are folks that have COO roles or Head of Biz ops or revenue, or chief of staff roles. They spent a significant amount of time learning how to build a business by being the number one, number two, or the sidekick to the person that's doing it.They've got to learn the category really well. They have a ton of insights, and they might be thinking, well, my next role is to sort of be the number two. Invariably though, based on that experience, they have strong points of view about what's missing from the market. They just had to do it. And they have all the experience of an experience founder, and I'd like to almost always pull those people in and have them think about what it might look like if they were in a leadership chair.Brian Ardinger: In that particular environment, are founders coming to you with an idea or a series of ideas that they want to explore? Or are they coming to you saying, hey, what do you know out there? What are you seeing from an opportunity perspective? And I'll sift through that and pick one that might resonate with me. Or what's that, I guess, spectrum of coming in with an idea versus coming in with a blank slate.Maisha Leek: it's a mix of both. The last like profile of somebody who might come to us as like an entrepreneur, someone who's been inside a big company, and they're always the first task with standing up the new thing. And so, you're hearing the mechanics like that folks have internalized. To your point about ideas, it depends on the studio, right? But I've seen folks come in with a strong point of view. I know exactly what I want to build. I know exactly the problem I want to address. Sometimes that's exciting. Sometimes that's problematic. Our process in the early days is designed to tear your idea apart. And so, if you're wedded to it, it can be a bit challenging.And then folks that don't have an idea, I've spent time with a number of business designers helping them think through the problem that they're really excited about and pulling out the thread that might be the one that we want to dig into. The trick of all of that in terms of founders is like, you should have a strong point of view about a problem space. You don't have to have the idea fully formed. So, you should know I'm fired up about logistics. I've spent 10 years as like the head of business development here and I really want to pull this apart. I have less experience than that, but I have actively been tinkering. Because I think that this problem that I've experienced is really a challenge. Those are the best people. They're ready to go. They've got a chip on their shoulder and something that they want to address. And Venture studios a really great place for them. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I often talk to founders and that, and like you want to find those founders that want to spend time with that problem and or customer segment because not necessarily having a solution around it, but you know, they know they're going to be spending 5, 7, 10 years of their lives. You want to get up every day focused on that and really digging into it versus, I'm just chasing the next greatest trend because it sounds like the next thing to do. Maisha Leek: Fastest way to burn yourself out or to get frustrated really quickly. Because we're talking about years and years of your life. You got to love the problem or the customer.Brian Ardinger: You mentioned on the corporate entrepreneur side of things, and have you seen different flavors of this Venture Studio model being deployed, I guess within a company versus externally Forum Ventures? Maisha Leek: I have, yeah. I have a ton of friends that are leading innovation teams inside big companies, and they frequently connect up with Venture Studios primarily because we can help them move faster. Internally for the corporates, what can be an amazing opportunity can also be your challenge. The innovate team, is a great opportunity to build against the problems either facing the business internally, like so you're building for inefficiencies within the business, and you want to build tools, services, platforms, whatever.And then some who are only thinking externally around mark, market cap or market share. It's like, all right, we are really tight with these customers. We want to expand to these others. Let's build out small brands that can go help us expand our reach, essentially. And the challenge for folks inside a highly matrixed organization that are building a studio or building an innovation team is really like who amongst your colleagues can actually play in that sandbox?It's not always what you think. They are of the generals. The guys and gals who've been around the company forever. They know where all the bodies are buried. The new sandbox has switched on. They're like, great. I want to jump in there and play. They're the deal maker inside the company. Not always. They're great, right? But not always the profile, the founder you want to look for. You're really looking for folks that really are ambitious about standing up something new. Are great storytellers inside the company but aren't wedded to company culture in a way that will slow them down. There are a ton of tricks for leaders of innovation teams that are internal on how to draw those people in and protect yourself from the rest. That's a story for another time. Brian Ardinger: The other topic I want to dig into, obviously venture studios require money or capital and, and they differ than a traditional, I guess, fund investment and that. Can you talk about the Venture Studio model from the investor side. And why that particular path versus, I guess, a traditional fund. And what's different and, and what's good or bad about the different approaches?Maisha Leek: Like I've heard people describe it a few ways. Some LPs describe it as like investing into an index fund. When you get a batch of companies at a cheaper rate. That's fine. Feels a little off brand. I think that for investors in large part, the value is that you get a de-risk asset faster and equity in that de-risk asset cheaper than you would finding a company on your own.And so, I find that LP is into venture studios have been brought along on that narrative journey. They can see the numbers. I mean, Venture Studios at this point have so much track record. I mean, we're perhaps like maybe 20 years in in terms of Venture Studios being around. Don't quote me on that. And essentially the track record, you know, suggests right that companies that come out of venture studios have like a 30% higher success rate than the ones that are stood up on their own.They return to fund faster, they have a 72% chance of raising their subsequent rounds C day and CB that, you know, all of the conditions are really right to make it something that's super, attractive as an investment. And investors into studios I think are, are dialed into that. And more and more now that more and more venture students are coming online across a series of categories.Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about how you see the Venture Studio, the life cycle of a company. So, if it's one thing, if you build it yourself and you go out and raise venture capital, you're building all your teams yourself, you're scaling it. Where in the Venture Studio model, obviously kickstart it and stand it up, does the company itself, when does it go on its own or does it continue with the studio or talk about those inflection points. Maisha Leek: Yeah, I think it's a, that's actually a strategic question for the studio, and also a good opportunity to provide advice to founders that might be listening in. Essentially, the best studios in my experience, have a time boxed plan for your journey. Doesn't have to be rigid. There's less likelihood of success when it's a sort of a meandering X metric that we'll move you through. I mean, really strong venture studios have a plan for after your company is built, the MVP, the number of people that you need on your team, how we're going to prepare you to go into the market to raise money, the number of customers we want you to have, and then move you through.Your question was about like what's the long tail of support? Really great Studios show up in the way that great funds would. Once you're a portfolio company, our interests are aligned with yours. We are a hundred percent dialed into your success. If you need something. Phone home kind of approach. And I think that having the staffing or the plan for that is really helpful for a founder to hear when they're evaluating venture studios that they might engage with.Right after I have my set of customers, after I've done my raise, what is our relationship going to be is the right question to ask there. But I've seen a range of folks on how they navigate that. Sometimes it's ad hoc, the GP is the only person interacting and sometimes it's, there's a real plan with a platform team that folks are tapping into as they're on their growth journey.Brian Ardinger: What are you excited about? Are the particular trends or the particular things that you're really digging into in 2023 and beyond? Maisha Leek: Yeah. I am personally super excited about logistics and transportation. I think that personally that it's an exciting moment for a few reasons. One, the technology allows us to do this more efficiently than we ever had. The migratory patterns that we saw post covid are pretty fascinating. We once had Class A, class B, class C cities. It's sort of turned that entire dynamic on its head. It's sending people your way, Brian. Brian Ardinger: Exactly. Maisha Leek: Yeah, and I love that. I don't know what that means, but I love it. I'm very excited about it. From a macro perspective, you know. I'm a millennial, right? So, this is like, I guess the fourth or fifth global crisis that I've lived through. What's really exciting about that, to the degree that can be exciting, is I think that folks are in a very salt of the earth, meat and potatoes way, rethinking their relationship with work and their responsibility for their own careers and lives.And I think it's going to lead not surprisingly to a surge of people starting their own businesses because they want to be, they want to take ownership right for their futures. And I'm really excited about that. I also think that the conversations that younger generations, gen Z, for example, are having around work, will lead to hopefully the resurgence of labor unions.I think that there is a period of time where we sort of walked away from that because you know, the worker and the employer were really at a better eye to eye level sense. I think that we're seeing a lot of the convulsions out of the tech sector teach us that that's not the case. And we do need a fair arbiter to make that work.I come from a long line of union workers. And so, in the venture world, I'm excited that venture studios are no longer taboo. I was mentioning earlier when I first told people I worked at Venture Studios, they were like, oh, it's not a fund. And now all, every day I hear somebody talking about getting into the space. I think that's great. I think Venture Studios will be the really strong gateway to capture those other three trends that I mentioned. You know, people are reconsidering their relationship with work, their expectations of what good company stewardship have changed, and just our needs from an infrastructure perspective have shifted because our behavior and venture studios are going to be best suited to dig into those problems and questions for us. So that's what I'm really excited about. We'll see, I'll watch this back in five years and see if I was right about anything. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: I'm excited about it because anybody who can help move ideas faster into the ether and create value along that way, that's what we're all about. So, I'm excited to hear your journey in the future. And in the interim, if people want to find out more about yourself or about Forum Ventures, what's the best way to do that? Maisha Leek: I am hyperactive on LinkedIn and getting more and more active every day. Definitely DM me. Definitely reach out. I'm also an angel investor. I'm standing up a syndicate in the next little bit here. I'm really, really, really obsessed with small businesses and founders. I mean, my family has come from five generations of entrepreneurs. It's really game changing work, and I'd love to be a part of that. So hit me up there. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Maisha, thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation and best of luck. Maisha Leek: Thank you, Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

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 and source a lot of these founders.At the same time, the studio is growing in maturity and understanding and people, if you will, as we go along. So, it's very much think big, start small, which many people probably have heard me say many times and then scale over time. And that's literally how we've got on. Currently we are into our second year. We actually have 11 companies that are in development. Four are already in market and it's working. So, it's very exciting to be sort of just like learning by doing. There's lots of mistakes we're making along the way. But the great part about it is when lessons are learned, they're compounded across the entire portfolio.Say we make a mistake about how to kick off founders on company two. If we correct it on company three, then every company benefits from that afterwards. And that's been one of the probably most unique aspects of this, is the speed at which we learn when we make corrections. We're actually able to propagate that across a huge number of companies. So, it's been very exciting. Still lots to do, but we're up and running. Brian Ardinger: So, this idea of a venture studio, there's other folks that are doing it. I've seen other folks trying to maybe pair with corporates where they work with a corporation and help incubate ideas and companies that come out of that corporation and that. Then, obviously you have the traditional kind of Techstars accelerator model, that kind of stuff. How does this actually work? So, do you have a stable of either ideas or a stable of founders and you put them together or how's it come together? Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, so there's three ways that businesses, if you will, are sort of come into the studio. First, we have our own set of ideas. Surprise, surprise, there's no shortage of ideas for businesses. But we do have an internal process where we review a lot of the ideas. We do some initial customer discovery, and the ones that we have conviction on, we start to essentially make a first small investment in.And a lot of the reasons that would make us sort of green light, if you will, one of these ideas is not only seeing that there's an opportunity in the market, but we have a potential founding team in place. And we've discovered, cuz we are co-founders of these businesses. And remember, we're not just on the sidelines cheering like I'm a co-founder, not only of Nobody's Studios, but every single company that we create. Like I'm in there in those companies, day in, day out. The next way is actually we do mini acquisitions. We think eventually we'll do like 30% of our own, probably 30% that we do these mini acquisitions. These are like typically, I'll give you an example of one of our companies is Thought Format. It's a serverless, no code platform.And these were two brothers based in London who had been sort of working their day jobs and building this product in their evenings and weekends. And I actually met them at a conference in London probably about four years ago, and they just instantly struck me as two guys who were really like figuring it out.I was impressed that they would, you know, still work a day job and then work other evenings on weekends on bringing this thing to life. So when we started the studio, I instantly called them and said, look, how about we basically give you the opportunity to go full-time and work on this product? And interestingly, one of our other businesses, Ovations, which is an on-demand speaker platform, is built on top of Thought Format.So, we instantly started to get this platform that we can accelerate our product development, but also accelerate the value of these companies by collaborating together. And then finally, we think one option will be that we will do some corporate collaborations, but the, the way we sort of think of it is more of a, a made to acquisition type model.So, what we do is we tend to have very open dialogue with a lot of these corporates who have to make acquisitions actually for their business to survive. But the price of startups are so expensive now based on the valuations that they raise at. Most founders are pricing them out of their most likely exit, which is an acquisition from day one. Right? They might be a Series A company and they take 10 million at a 50 million valuation and they have to sell that company at half a billion dollars. But so investors will get the money that they're expecting back. So, you know, no enterprise in their right mind is going to pay half a billion dollars for a Series A stage company.Yeah, exactly right. So, so what we've discovered is actually if we have these very open dialogues with a lot of businesses to say, well, you probably need a data analytics solution for your business. So, you probably need, some sort of AI automation, a service for your business. We have what we describe as sort of a open conversation with them, and if we think it's a business that we believe in, and they could potentially be an either an early investor or a acquirer of that business, we may go build it. Right. And for us, if we incubate, because most of our companies we incubate for just under a quarter million dollars, and if we incubate it for that and sell it for 20 million, we'll do that all day and twice on Sundays. Brian, and so that's sort of a very different approach for how the open market is operating, if you will. Again, I think that's going to be a big competitive advantage for us. Brian Ardinger: Do you see those corporate environments where the startups have access to an early test customer, for example, is that a, a benefit or are you seeing it more as a acquisition and or test run. Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, well this is the fun thing about test customers, right? So, we have this notion of building blocks in our studio where Thought Form is a great example. It's a building block for another one of our company's Ovations because it sits on top of it. So Thought Form's first ever customer, if you will, was another company in our portfolio. One company was like, oh, we'll build on your platform, and we'll be able to give you fast feedback on your platform, how it performs, what works, what doesn't in a relatively sort of safer environment.So, what's really powerful for us is that we're building all these businesses that create capabilities that we need internally in our own business, and then we can build our more customer facing, B2C type products, if you will, on top of those services. So, we're getting this sort of virtuous loop straight out the gate.First set of early customers to testament that are also part of your portfolio, so, it's collaborative, if you will. Because they're both getting benefits from working with one another. That's sort of been another like little bit of a secret sauce for us, if you will. Where we've been able to accelerate the development of a lot of these companies.Or another company we're building is one called Web Delics, which is basically the WebMD of psychedelics to help people understand plant-based medicine and therapies. And straight away, that's a, if you will, a content business. And we've built another one, Parent Tipity, which is a parent creator community. Now, there's a lot of behaviors and aspects of these businesses that are similar, both in terms of how they're producing content and become information sources. So, when we build those capabilities for one of our businesses, we can essentially share them across all the businesses that are content focused. We just get these massive sort of uplift inefficiency about how quickly we can build. How cheaply we can build. Like some of these companies were launching for under $50,000. Right? Which is, that's as much as you pay for a pitch Deck in San Francisco. It's pretty fun. Brian Ardinger: How big is the team then? I'm as assuming that you add folks onto the particular startups as they grow and, and kind of expand. Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, so we have people that work at the studio level, so folks like myself as a chief incubation officer. I'm working across the portfolio. And then we have teams that, people that work within the individual new companies or NewCos as we tend to call them, or portfolio companies. So, at, at the moment we're probably in the region of about a hundred folks, I would say, either both in the companies that we're building or in the studio itself.And the studio really comprises of everything from. A typical executive team is, Mark McNally. He's our Chief Nobody, as we call him. I look after incubation. We've a marketer, we've a C F O, Head of Operations. And then like just staff that help. Don't work across the companies. Product leaders. Technology leaders and so forth.And then within each of the companies, it can sort of vary as you mentioned, but we always look for sort of a triad to start. So, a tech lead, a product lead and design lead. And then there's a lot of marketing, business operations, team support, project management to sort of get them moving. And then engineers. So that's pretty much how the teams have formed and pretty fun making progress. Brian Ardinger: It's a great model and, and I'm excited to see where, where it goes. One of the interesting things about the model too is how you went about and how you're going about raising capital and, and making it accessible to not your traditional just, angel investors or accredited VC firms out there. So can you talk a little bit about Nobody's Studios and your partnership with Republic and how you're going about raising capital for the studio. Barry O'Reilly: Yeah, so one of the core tenants of the studio is that we're global first and we're also crowd enabled. Or is what we call crowd infused. One of the questions about like, why would we create a hundred companies in five years?Like we can't hire enough people to create those companies, that it's just impossible. So, one of the things that we flipped our mind around is, well how can we actually bring more people into the Nobody community to be part of our world? Initially when we were starting to build our companies, we were thinking we're going to need a lot of people to help us ideate, to help us, do customer research, to test, as you were asking earlier.And then we started thinking also about like ownership, if you will. So many people are locked out of the venture ecosystem and have probably wondered why it might look like, imagine I could own a piece of Google before it became Google. Or how do I even get involved in owning a piece of a startup?And as you said, for a long time, that right, if you will, has only been given to very high net worth individuals or people that were in certain circles that would even have access to these type of deals. So, we wanted to try and shift that a bit and give access to all. As well as create this huge community of owners and studio and actually contributors to the studio.So, while we've raised a lot of our own capital through traditional means of angel funding, and we've done really well, we've raised close to 4 million, if you will, through private markets. But then we want to bring more people to that system. So, we became one of the first venture studios ever to offer equity crowdfunding to the world, which means anyone. You don't have to be an accredited investor, just any person on the street. You'll be a bus driver, a nurse, whatever you are. You're able to invest and own a piece of Nobody's Studios and become a venture investor. And we're really, really proud of that because we've sort of opened up and given access to all where anybody who's interested in early-stage business startups or our technology and the impact it's going to have on their future, they can actually own a piece of the studio, just like the same shares that I own.By going to Republic and making an investment from a couple hundred dollars right up to a couple of thousands and being Nobody. So, it's really special. We've had, you know, hundreds of of people already join. And what's special about that is that now these people are owners, but they can also contribute to the companies we're making. Give us feedback, bring their ideas, and that gives us more, if you will, human capital as well as financial capital to build all these businesses, we're going after. Brian Ardinger: I like the concept quite a bit. The fact that this democratization of innovation, everything from technology to access to markets to the pandemic, have all kind of converged in such a way that you can build anything from anywhere now. And why not open up that from a capital perspective as well, is an interesting take on the whole process and hopefully, yeah, like you said, it will provide a competitive advantage for you as well to actually access talent that may not have been able to access in the past because of different barriers or or ways of working.Barry O'Reilly: Absolutely. Right, and you know when, now you know when you're a Nobody shareholder. You got an idea, where do you think you're going to bring it? Right. And that's great. That's an advantage to us, as you mentioned. This is really special for us. You know, like to have so many people who want to ideate with us, build with us, challenge us, give us feedback on our ideas before they go to market.And this is really going to be something quite special, I think, where people can sort of live within a realm that they've never maybe had the opportunity to and maybe have always wanted to. And technology is going to have such a huge impact on our future, so why not own a piece of that future or own a piece of the companies that are going to shape it? And giving people that access is something that we're, we're really proud of and we're excited to see, what more we can do. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Well, I'm looking forward to my t-shirt and being, being a Nobody myself. If people want to find out more about, Nobody's studios or the fundraise through Republic, what's the best way to that?Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. So if you're curious to learn more about what we're doing and make an investment, please go to Republic.com/nobodystudios where Nobody Crowd on pretty much every social media platform and NobodyStudios.com if you want to dig in and see what's on our website. Thank you very much for inviting me to share a little bit of our story.I'm delighted you've become a Nobody. Your t-shirt is in the posts, where you're going to be seeing a Nobody Studios Venture investor photo on your Twitter feed, I'm sure soon. So, yeah, thank you for joining us, on this mission. I'm sure it's going to be the adventure of a lifetime. Brian Ardinger: Well, Barry, it's always a pleasure to spend time with you, so thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and looking forward to having further conversations as the world unfolds. Barry O'Reilly: Thank you very much.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.   

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 ContentBrian 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. But you have to have those points of sharing. And what we found in parts of our research is that 83% of large organizations share innovation stories, but only 26% share stories of failure.But because a lot of innovations fail, you lose so much. And so, implementing these, these rituals into their yearly practices can go a long way to capturing those insights, but also unifying their community. Brian Ardinger: So, do you have any tactics of, let's say I'm working in an organization, and I buy into the fact that I need to celebrate these failures and at least tell these stories so that you know that not everything's going to be a success when you go through something new. How do you get buy-in to even have a ritual, like a failure cake, or things along those lines? Stephen Taylor: A lot of times getting buy-in for that is showing the value that's created. So being an innovator, trying something first. And so, a lot of times what we've found is that people are really actually excited to share these failure stories. Because it's things that they hold onto that really drive them.And so, them being able to share those with the group is really strong. But one of the biggest values is actually hearing someone who is, let's say for instance, you have a hero because within the Hero's Journey, you have people that basically go out onto their journey, they come back and then they may never go out on a journey again.But that's not the life of an innovator, of a scientist. They constantly have to go back to the bench or go out and do stuff again. So, to hear someone who maybe is a hero from one project, and they have war that's existing for them. For them to say, hey, you know, here's a failure story of mine. Think of how that sounds to someone who's a new scientist or a new innovator that's really gung-ho on their first project.You know, to be able to hear that, you know, this may not work out and that's okay. I've had a whole slew of failures throughout my career. I'm still here and still doing great stuff. You know, that's really helpful and it helps people be able to realize like this is not my baby. You know, this is a project that I'm working on. We're going to push it as far as we can. We're going to try to achieve the goal, and if it doesn't work out, there's going to be the next thing. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about the process that a company can go through to tell better stories and to put this actually into practice. Are there particular methodologies or tactics that companies should be looking at or walk me through the process.Stephen Taylor: We had a podcast called Untold Stories of Innovation. And in that podcast, there was a qualitative research study. And one thing we wanted to hear is like how people utilize stories in their innovation cultures, but then also listen to the stories and dissect them. And we heard several different story frameworks used time and time again. And the two that are most prevalent are ABT and CAR.CAR is very well known. It has a lot of different names to it, but it's Challenge Action Results. And the importance of Challenge Action Results from a natural language processing standpoint is that it alleviates cognitive tension. Basically, says like, here is the challenge. Here's the action we took. Here are the results that we got.But in order to alleviate cognitive tension, we had to create cognitive tension. And that cognitive tension is actually created through a framework called ABT. That ABT (And, But, Therefore) is popularized by Randy Olson. The framework for ABT is ordinary world and something at stake, but there's some type of tension, there's some problem, there's something that's preventing us to realize the value that's there.Therefore, here's our proposed solution. And when those two get paired together, you basically have a framework to present and solve a problem. But then you can interlace into that lots of different story patterns. To make storytelling one very strategic and very mission focused, but also very purposeful and concise.Brian Ardinger: So, is this something that product teams and that at the beginning of the project start literally mapping out what story they think the new idea is going to go on? Or how does this actually work in practice? Stephen Taylor: It really works in practice by understanding who your audience is and what you're trying to get out of what information that you're needing, what buy-in you're needing. I'm really trying to map the story that you're sharing with that audience. Because there is no one story framework that rules 'em all. You know, you can talk about brand story, you can talk about Hero's Journey. There's a variety. And so, the more that you practice and practice from a standpoint of trying to understand your audience and what it is that they need in order to make a decision that you're hoping for them to make, that really helps you with crafting something that really gets at that goal. Brian Ardinger: So, I would imagine that the teams need to develop different types of stories. So, for example, inside stories where they're trying to communicate to management or other collaborators within the organization and that story of what they're building and why. May be different than an outside story, which would be maybe to the marketplace or to the consumers. Am I reading that correctly? Stephen Taylor: Yeah. Oh, absolutely. So prime example, we had an interview with Jim Murkowski from Ecolab. And they told a story about this new technology that they had developed for detecting Legionella, for Legionnaire's disease.And it was, you know, we do this whole breakdown of the story in our courses. He uses a framework, he uses CAR because it was in the past, we're informing people. So, it's challenge, action, results, and just it is the most clean, obvious innovation to do. They basically took a process that took two weeks to get results and now people can actually get that result in minutes. And make you know, really good decisions based on the information.But that story that you tell external is nowhere near what happened actually internal to that organization. Because Eco Lab was the group who actually did all the water testing. And so internally it was a story of self-disruption. Because you can imagine the feedback they got when they came out with this new technology and say, hey, we don't need to do testing in the lab anymore. You know, we don't need water samples. They can do it on their site. Everything was fear pushback. Like, oh, you know, the quality. Oh, you know, can you really trust them to do it right. You know, all these things. Because it was going to disrupt a lot of systems that they already had in their organization. So, the storytelling can't be the same because the challenge that you're trying to solve is fundamentally different.Brian Ardinger: How would you go about testing your stories to know if you have the right story to the right audience? Are there particular ways that you should be testing your stories or talk a little bit about that. Stephen Taylor: Having those ritual opportunities, there's a lot of these already built in. You know, groups have group meeting pretty often. You know, you get feedbacks through your emails when you're sharing information. There's lots of these points, but you had to look at them as being strategic. Innovators spend 30% of their work week in some form of storytelling. We put out a survey. We had a hundred people fill out the survey. It was 12 hours a week. We've worked with probably 300 to 500 innovators so far in the last year. They've completed the same survey. Theirs was like 12 to 15 hours a week. So, you're spending a lot of time either crafting stories, sharing stories, or listening to stories. And if you take that time very seriously and start thinking about it very strategically, you can start using those opportunities as a way to get feedback on the stories that you're sharing and seeing what is resonating, what is not resonating. So, these meetings, the emails, the water cooler conversations, those are all strategic points that you have where you can actually build up these skills. Brian Ardinger: One of the biggest challenges that I've seen working with companies is oftentimes you have different business units that value innovation differently. And so, telling that initial story that innovation is important, often sometimes falls on different audiences. So, do you have any advice or thoughts on how do you get alignment on just the concept of why innovation is important and the stories you need to tell around that? Stephen Taylor: Yeah, so, so that's a really good point. Always within any project, you know, project teams do this naturally is identify who are the stakeholders. But then are you actually going out and spending time with the stakeholders?Do you take a day? How much time could we save in our storytelling, if we took a very slow step, first, went and spent a day with our consumers or with our stakeholders and just heard the things that they talk about, you're not there to make decisions. You're just there to observe. What do they do? What are the major discussion points?Am I actually presenting information to them that they really care about. Or am I just throwing information out there that is not aligned with the conversations that they're having? If we can use storytelling to create those points of alignment between those business units that have different priorities, which most of them will, you can make the time that you're spending communicating more effective and more efficient. Brian Ardinger: How can someone learn to be a better storyteller? Are there particular things they should be reading or looking at, or resources they should be delving into? What's a good way to become a better storyteller? Stephen Taylor: Obviously at Untold, we have a course that's entirely built upon innovation storytelling. We really are the first group to really look at storytelling from an innovation perspective. We bring in a lot of peer review literature and really try to paint this cohesive, basically try to pull a lot of the information together on what is the best practices to date. And then how do we use these strategic frameworks and these patterns? So that's the first thing is that I'm going to plug in ourselves because I think that the experience that we create and the outcomes from the experience are really, really impactful.And what I'm going to say is that, again, storytelling is something that is evolutionary. You become a better storyteller. So you go through the trainings, but you don't stop there. You constantly look for new resources. And so one of the things that we give out as a part of our course once you complete it, is that you get a book on storytelling. But it could be something like the Fearless Organization because psychological safety has big impacts on people feeling like they can share stories.So, there's lots of books and there's lots of literature out there that you can continue to dive into. There are things like pep decks that have little introductory parts for storytelling. But it's one of those things that us as innovators who are not afraid to go out into the wilderness, into the unknown and take the first step is that we have to be able to do that with our education and realize that this is a journey as well.And the more that we learn about storytelling, the more that we see ourselves as innovators within these larger organizational narratives and also within our own personal story. Continue learning. Don't stop at one. Lots of perspectives out there on storytelling that are fantastic. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Well, that's a great way to end because one of the last questions I always ask is, how can people, if they want to learn more, reach out to you and your company? Stephen Taylor: www.untoldcontent.com. You can also reach out to me. My name's Stephen Taylor. My email is stephen@untoldcontent.com. So, you can reach out to us in those ways. The other thing that I would recommend everyone look at is a new venture that we are starting up called Narratize.So, you can go to Naratize.com and at Narratize we are working on developing a storytelling platform for busy professionals. A communication platform for busy professionals. The idea is can you create a white paper in a day or in a couple hours. It's an AI-based tool that really helps you share the insights that you know to create these deliverables that you have to work on. So, it is currently a pitch builder. But it is quickly evolving into lots of other points of content. You can check us out at naratize.com as well. Brian Ardinger: Obviously the world is changing quite a bit with AI and Chat GPT and all these kinds of things and makes it easier and harder at the same time to tell your story. So yes, Stephen, I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your insights on that. I look forward to continuing the conversation and hearing more stories in the future. So, thanks very much. Stephen Taylor: Awesome. Thanks Brian. I really appreciate it.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.   

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 UpgradeBrian 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 very tangibly aware of the interdependencies of the world and how our risks and our problems are so connected to each other as well.Which is why, you know, for so many of us and for so many businesses, the problems that most come to determine our success or impinge on us may be what economists call exogenous variables. They're things that come from outside our prior scope of reference that were not in the plan and that we were not expecting, but end up being, you know, the biggest driver of change.Brian Ardinger: So how does the concept of a purpose upgrade kind of relate to other areas that are obviously top of mind for a lot of companies in that E S G, stakeholder capitalism, things like that. Paul Skinner: Yeah, so I guess there's a whole range of ways of currently thinking about purpose. You know, the, the first one was of course, shareholder value maximization. Which you might expect me to be very critical of, and I, I am in many ways.But it was a smart idea. The idea of shareholder value maximization was, you know, businesses were becoming more global. How do you align the interests of investors and the leaders of companies when those groups were no longer visible to each other, or not very visible to each other. So, it was a great idea, but the problem is great ideas have their shadow, and because so many businesses took it on rather than a few businesses taking it on so we could learn from it, we've suffered the consequences of the fact that it overlooks externalities, that it doesn't serve to include everyone in the benefits of capitalism. And so, leads ultimately, You know, dizzying inequalities. And so, in some ways I'm operating in the shadow of shareholder maxim value maximization, looking to repurpose. The other ideas that you mentioned, I think are already doing that, but have fundamental limitations, even if they're important. So E S G, very important that our businesses are sustainable, but that doesn't guarantee we're solving important problems.And you get anomalies like British American Tobacco being ranked as third best ESG stock in the world. CSR important, worthwhile, but it's not changing the fundamental business model. It doesn't change your business model when you have a good corporate social responsibility program. Now, brand purpose is great and can be at the leading edge of social change. Brands have an important voice, but that doesn't mean anything if the organizational purpose is somehow at odds or not reinforcing that brand purpose. Stakeholder capitalism, very important and it's important principles of fairness, but it doesn't actually necessarily give you a sense of what kind of generative purpose to pursue in the first place.So, it can boil down to being a balancing act, like the idea of work life balance, which may be important and may improve the quality of your work and the quality of your life outside of work, but it doesn't necessarily change what you're doing in the office. So similarly, with, I think a lot of these concepts, the problem is they're about purpose.But they don't give you as a lead, a way of deciding what fundamental purpose to pursue in the first place. And we often think that purpose is fixed, something you don't question, something you don't challenge that we already know what our purpose is. But in the purpose upgrade, I argue that, you know, purpose is as susceptible to improvement as innovation or transformation, for example.And so we have to be thinking creatively about purpose in today's environment because the nature of change is so deep that fundamentally questioning and revisiting our purpose and renewing our purpose is often the biggest and most important business opportunity, or indeed just human opportunity available to us.Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting point because as the world changes and that, I think we're seeing it from a business perspective where the job or the business model that a company was doing for 20, 30, 40 years is changing because technology is improving, or access to markets or all these things that are dynamically changing how they serve their customers.This is just almost another layer over top of that. Holistic layer to look at everything from their employees to the environment to things around that. So talk to me a little bit about what the book outlines and some of the methodologies and case studies that you've outlined there. Paul Skinner: So I guess I present purposes, first of all, our most adaptive capacity as a species. And so I do think it's important because human purpose is a, it's a human concept, purpose. You know, we can't say that maths has a purpose. Science cannot tell us, you know, what the meaning of life is, but you know, we have language, and language is the map of meaning that we use to understand our world and to know what better looks like.And it's why, unlike other species, we've been able, not just to evolve, but to develop from generation to generation, really change and build the lifestyles that we've come accustomed to. So, I take a bit of a dive into purpose as an adaptive capacity for humans. Because I think we all need to better understand that if we're not going to fall victim of some of the mistakes that I think that we've made up till now in business.I look at purpose and of course, as the potentially most renewable resource for business, you know, one of the most senior and most inspiring executives that I interviewed for the book, Fica Sebisma, had a background as a biologist, and I remember him telling me he knew from the start of his career, it wasn't the biggest or the most powerful who survived, but the most adaptive.And so fundamentally being able to adapt, not just in innovation and transformation, but at the level of purpose can be key to our ability to renew, to sustains, to survive, and to thrive. And then of course, I introduce the concept of a purpose upgrade. As an always available event for any organization of any size in any sector.And I think just that already, the observation that purpose is something through which we can gain advantage by redefining it and by having a better, more interesting more engaging purpose to pursue is a contribution. But then I look at, you know, how we can achieve a purpose upgrade by finding more valuable problems to solve.By building solutions that enroll our stakeholders in a more meaningful journey of change, or by reaching outcomes that are more inclusive and that better reward our stakeholders for taking those journeys with us, as well as of course remembering that you know, no purpose upgrade is the final word on purpose, and that we always have to leave space and a capacity for renewal because the world around us is not going to stop changing.Brian Ardinger: So, one of the questions I have, you know, a lot of folks, the idea of a purpose upgrade for a whole organization seems to be a top down type of approach, like the CEO has to help drive that or be on board with that. How can individuals within an organization start adopting or thinking about purpose and upgrading the purpose as a means to driving the business?Paul Skinner: That's fundamental and, and I'd say that in, in a sense, you need both top down and bottom up to be right on them. Similarly, for humans, by the way, when we think about purpose, for us as individuals, purpose is a mix of our top-down executive functioning. You know, our thinking, our conscious ability to plan and to decide and to commit to ourselves, but it's also about the bottom-up processing of our sensory systems.You know, when the smoke starts to enter the room and you realize that maybe getting out rather than continuing with what you were doing was the right idea, and say similarly with organizations, you do need leadership because that sets a direction. It enables cooperation, it enables trust. It enables efficiency. It enables focus. But you also need the bottom-up approaches because that's where you cultivate relationships. You have a space for renewal. New ideas can emerge. I mean, the philosopher Hannah Arendt argues that fundamentally the final advantage that democracy has over dictatorship is a greater capacity for renewal, and that's why democracy will ultimately give better results. For individuals at any level of an organization, you can achieve a purpose upgrade in your own activity. I would say by asking yourself three questions. You know what is needed here without your organizational hat. What is the best approach to that need being fulfilled? And then only then put your organizational hat back on and think, okay, well what can I do in this circumstance?And I want to give one example of an organization that is very good at enabling little purpose upgrades at the level of even the, the most junior staff member, which was a sustainability tourist destination called the Eden Project. And when they opened, they knew that there would be unanticipated problems and so the very charismatic founder said to his staff, including the customer facing staff who just arrived and were the most junior in the organization. He said, look, if you're dealing with a customer and a problem comes up that you hadn't anticipated, and you don't have a line manager available to talk to, if you deal with that problem and you actually choose something that with hindsight, we say was probably not the right solution, we will support you all the way.But if you just skip the problem or sideline it or pretend not to notice, then we are not going to support that. And what that means is that it gives people the chance to lean into the context that they're operating in. Not adopt a computer, says no mindset, but think, okay, what is actually needed here and, and how do I respond? So, I think that's an excellent principle for cultivating little purpose upgrades for every single member of staff. Brian Ardinger: What do you think are some of the biggest challenges or roadblocks for companies or individuals to adopt or, or think this way? Paul Skinner: The biggest roadblocks are often psychological. You know, when you have a, it's the prior purpose and its legacy because purpose gives us a lens to which the channel, our actions. But then if the world changes, that valuable lens can become a dangerous set of blinkers. You know, it's why in an emergency, like the Twin Towers for example, there were more excess fatalities from people going too slowly down the stairs rather than panicking and fleeing. And that's not an uncommon phenomenon in a disaster or emergency because people just don't fully process the urgency.And actually, I think this explains how even very successful organizations can actually turn out to be quite fragile in the face of the psychological effects of their sunk costs. The plan, continuation biases of their leaders and the progress traps where it's the very purpose that gave rise to today's success. That is the cause of tomorrow's failure. And I think sadly, this is something that faces us as human civilization. You know, we've seen whole human civilizations fall in the past when faced with a new environmental stressor that sort of comes from left field. And if we look at the world today, you know, the climate emergency for most of us up until relatively recently, the impacts of it were not very visible.It was an abstract thing. You know, if we look at the inequalities in the world, the biggest inequalities are not within our social group. They're between our in groups and our outgroups. And so, we don't pay enough, as much attention to them as if it was visible and tangible to us. So, I think it's really the legacy of prior purpose.If we don't question it or challenge it, holds us back from formulating and adapting at the level of purpose. And some of our analogies, like the analogy of the North Star. A lot of people, I should say, think of their purpose as they're North Star, and there's some good to that, but also North Star is an inanimate object, whereas the nature of our problems is that they're always changing. So North Star can be good for a period, but if you don't have a space for renewal, conscious renewal, then you can get caught in its shadow. Brian Ardinger: Can you give us any examples of companies that are doing this well and or companies that have maybe fallen off the wagon and are ones you definitely don't want to emulate.Paul Skinner: Yeah. And in terms of good examples, by the way, because this is so much about renewal, I never want to cite an example as that's what success is. Because we all have to continue this process all the time. But I want to give one example because it's very easy. You know, you can pick out a social enterprise, a B corp, a Walmart, a Patagonia. What about a coal mining business? So, one of my favorite case studies in the book is a coal mining business that managed to become a sustainable food business. Now that was called DSM or it's originally stood for Dutch State Mines. It was born from digging coal out to the ground and delivering it to people's homes for heating and illumination.The coal mines are now of course closed and in making the transition from what was once a really respectable and needed endeavor, which of course from today's perspective we know is deeply problematic. To becoming a real champion of important sustainable development goals. A champion of solving the problem of the livelihoods of smallholder farmers. Nutrient deficiency, micronutrient deficiency in different parts of the world, obesity, the fragility of the food system to climate change, and the fact that the food system is driving climate change and building solutions to these kinds of problems. I'd say DSM is a powerful metaphor of the kinds of purpose upgrade that we need right across the economy. Where today what we are doing is wrong, which doesn't mean it was wrong in terms of its original intention, but we do now need to put it right. And I think some of the pitfalls, it's often a little bit of success is the enemy of a greater level of success. You know whether it's, you know, Kodak for example, invented digital photography.The problem was that they didn't repurpose around the new opportunity or BrewDog a carbon negative beer, fantastic on the environment, but overlooked the needs of its own workforce and had some real reputational damage when its staff complained that its work environment was aggressive and unfair and was not respectful enough of colleagues in the business.For More Information Brian Ardinger: Paul, it's a fascinating and such an important topic, and if people want to find out more about the book or yourself, what's the best way to do that? Paul Skinner: Well, they can visit purposeupgrade.com. I would absolutely love people to read the book. They can also follow me on LinkedIn. There is an audio book available for people who prefer to listen rather than read. It's just come out in North America, so you can be among the first to read it or to listen. Can also hear a bit more from me, as well as my consulting work at the Agency of the Future. I run a nonprofit called Marketing Kind, where we have some fascinating discussions on adjacent topics that people can find out at marketingkind.org. As well. Brian Ardinger: Well, Paul, thank you for coming back on Inside Outside Innovation. Always a pleasure to hear your insights of what's going on, and like I said, it's a very important topic and so fundamental, the changes that are happening in the world. So appreciate all your insights and, and thank you for coming on the show.Paul Skinner: Thank you so much, Brian. I've loved it. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.   

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 PaydayBrian 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 up in the same market position and you really have to know what you do all this for. So, to answer your question, there's one single thing which is lack of strategy. Lack of end-to-end view. Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing that happen primarily because digital transformation seems to be driven by different parts of their organizations? Or maybe what are you seeing when it comes to how companies are approaching this? Is it from the standpoint of, well, we need a cloud strategy, or we need blockchain, or marketing's driving it because of whatever. What are you seeing in that space? Tim Bottke: That's exactly true. We, as Deloitte, and I strongly believe that this is the reason why it's a CEO topic. And it should be CEO topic. And the CEOs these days, they don't need to understand everything in deep detail in terms of what digital is and what technology's behind.But their task is to get all this complexity under control and have one shared picture of where they're heading. And I've had discussions with clients very often. They say, Tim, I don't want to know what this software can do. Or yeah, I can talk about AI for a minute, but I don't want to know really how natural language processing works and what does it do and machine learning. Yes, I can, I don't know. Then I usually would say, yes, you don't have to know, but you have to know enough that you can get things together in a way that they make your company move. Because very often, as you said, there are silos, there are pilots. Then, I don't know, for robotics process automation, I've seen that there is a pilot. Everyone is excited, and then after a few months they find out that actually the pilot was so great because it was selecting a process in the company, which doesn't scale. But one where it worked nicely. And then they save, I don't know, the equivalent of 10 FTEs. They can put that capacity somewhere else, and then they find out that they have 30,000 employees and that these 10 really don't make any difference for anyone at any point in time. Brian Ardinger: So where do you think companies should start? Maybe even to the standpoint of maybe the CEO's not even convinced yet. Are there things that the average user within a company can start thinking about talking about or, or moving the needle towards, when it comes to digital transformation?Tim Bottke: It's very hard to say. There's no one common theme where you say you should start there. So, these days, very often we see that people believe that the people side of things is crucial. So, you have all these Agile coaching. You start learning how to work Agile. You do agile workshops, and yes, that's a good starting point. But as I said before, it's all about the end-to-end picture.It won't help if you're not able to select the right technologies. If you are not able to find the right vendor. If you don't know how the benefits were really materialized. If you do not simplify your business model, but just replicate what you have. As the framework in the book shows, you can start somewhere at the frontier, as I call it.So, in easy place of the company where everyone is just by definition, wearing jeans and trainers and it's all cool and Agile and design thinking, you know. It's, it's all very, very helpful tools. But I've seen many times that this is working very nicely in this little remote outpost, and it never gets back into the core of the real business.So, if you start somewhere in a certain pocket, then there needs to be a plan, how to make that work at scale and at impact in the core business. If you believe your core business has a reason to exist. There are also some companies where that needs to be restructured and dismantled at some point in time.But even though many books and articles say so that happens less often than you think. There's always a core in the company, which is worth protecting, at least in many businesses. And it's not really like you can just, it's a great idea, that's my favorite quote, disrupt before you are disrupted. Yeah. It's easy to say what does it really mean? You close your company and do something new and that cannot be the answer. Certainly, your shareholders wouldn't allow this because they would wait for the large cash flows, which hopefully were there before to be back before you dismantle the old stuff. Brian Ardinger: So, in your book you talk about how different industries should be looking at maybe different levers to achieve better return and that. Can you talk about the differences in how industries should be approaching digital transformation and which ones are maybe on the leading age versus the lagging edge? Tim Bottke: There was a very interesting learning. So, what the book does, or what your research did was looking into more than 20,000 reports from companies. Then using natural language processing to understand what they're really doing in digital. So, something, it's, there are millions of pages, no human could have done that. We needed some digital transformation in the research to understand what they do. And obviously you can then look into how do different industries behave differently?And the assumption based on experience was they have huge differences, and they are. Obviously, some companies and some industries and sectors are more on the forefront. So, they talk more. They do more digital than others. And others do less. And I think the, you will find more in the book, but the key learning for me was that it's not like you could easily say, look, you are a industry which is lagging. You should speed up. That might be true in some cases, but I have this interesting example where I had a discussion with the executive of an insurance company. And I was saying, look, I look into my data, and you really are nowhere compared to the others. They said, Tim, yeah, we know you're a consultant. You're great in analysis, but partially it's on purpose because we make a lot of money based on in-transparency in our market. And in our home market we still have the beauty of lack of transparency because there's no Insurtech making transparent everything. Putting everything in the open, et cetera. So, we believe we shouldn't disrupt ourselves before we are disrupted. Because we would make good money at this point. But what we did is in a different country, which is not our core market, we've launched an Insurtech. We are learning how to do it, we are training. We are taking the incumbents there. And as soon as we feel that in our home market, there is some disruption coming. We take the people which are ours, we bring them to our market. We use the platforms, and we can be there. But until then, we are actually happy that we are lagging. And you cannot generalize this story, but I think it was very interesting because I think it's arrogant and many other things at the same time to tell someone that in general as a sector, they are lagging because we come back to strategy. There might be some where the lagging is due to a terrible, wrong strategy. But it might also be good strategy, not always to be the first in everything. And you see that for some big IT digital transformations that some companies in my client portfolio, they were better off waiting a bit until the, as we say in German, the children problems of some technologies are taken care. And then start. And they saved a lot of money in the process. Brian Ardinger: A lot of the book you talk about how do you actually measure success and how people are currently measuring digital transformation is not getting the results they want. So, talk through a little bit about either the levers or the ways that you can actually measure if you're making progress.Tim Bottke: So first, I think one thing which was very interesting when researching the topic was that, as I said before, there seems to be a trend that it's not measurable. And you find many quotes saying, no, it cannot be measured. It requires different KPIs, and I strongly believe that that's not true because we do all these things. We still do them for business. Business has some certain rules which end up that at some point in time, It needs to make some profit. At least that's my belief. Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I still believe it's all done for some profit. And that basically means whatever you do, if it has a cost and digital transformation has huge costs, okay?It's not like when you really take things seriously, it's not about just saying agile 10 times and then you're done. You need to invest, revamp your whole systems, find or reeducate new people, or reeducate your current ones. Many things. So, it's a heavy investment for every investment a business case can be done.The only difference is that in digital transformation, sometimes there is less certainty about what the KPIs will lead to, but very often people have shied away from doing that at all. In the book, you will see what I've defined as accelerators. So, it's all about the payday. That's what the book title is all about.So, when do you get your money back? And it's not so difficult to, for everything you do into transformation, find the accelerators, which will lead you quicker to your payday. And the often-underestimated accelerators, so the investments in whatever technology, people, consultants, lawyers, cyber, all these things which people tend to forget.And then you can do a business case for yourself, which will never be correct. We'll always be wrong. But I've learned that it's still better compared to just saying digital cannot be measured because at some point in time when such a high share of transformations fails as you probably, there is this number 70% fail.Funny enough, when you research where this number's coming from, it's very often self-referencing. So, someone at some point in time, some researcher asked, and now it's always 70, 75, 80, 85. But anyway, even if it would be 50, it's too much. So, there will always be a point in time when someone will ask, where's all the money gone? That's what the case is needed for. So that's the first part. The business case. Did they need to be measured?The second part is, what value does it generate for your shareholders? And that's what the book is also about. That the internal business case is not directly correlated to the value the shareholders see in how you digitally transform.It's what you say and what you do. And then in some sectors, for some companies it's appreciated. Depending on their profiles and others it's less. And that's the context every company needs to understand when they work on digital transformation. Brian Ardinger: So last topic I want to talk about is, you know, what are some of the maybe technology trends or that you're seeing that will make it easier for companies to maybe adopt digital transformations in the future?Tim Bottke: I think it will be tougher, quite the opposite. Because the, the one thing which really changed compared to IT transformation is that you almost cannot foresee the upcoming technologies fast enough to understand what really will make the difference. And I think a key capability, which should come out of any digital transformation is the capability of the company to whatever you call it, being able to understand it quickly, understand whether it helps to transform.What the accelerators are. We discussed before what the accelerators are. How does it impact the end-to-end journey? And that's a very rare skill because often you see that then companies, and we come back to CEOs and boards who say, I don't care about all this technology. They should, or at least they should establish a capability in their firm, which very quickly understands what is important, what not. Because you could argue that naming a book, digital transformation today is already old fashioned, because in the end its, but even tech transformation, it's, I don't know, innovation based transformation of whatever form it can be biotech, it can be whatever, and companies need to be ready. So no, it's not going to be easier. And whoever is promising I think either have found the holy grail, then we should congregate them or tries to oversimplify. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Well, Tim, I want to thank you for being on Inside Outside Innovation. It's a fascinating topic and fascinating book. I'd encourage people to pick it up. It's called Digital Transformation Payday. Tim, if people want to find out more about yourself or more about the book, what's the best way to do that? Tim Bottke: I think the easiest is to go to the landing page for the book. It's very easy. Www digital transformationpayday.com. And you will find more information on the book, on me, and you can reach directly, reach out to me over this channel.Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Tim, thanks again for being on the show. Really do appreciate it and looking forward to continuing to see what happens when we transform the future.Tim Bottke: Perfect. Thank you, Brian. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo's first ever Chief Design Officer and author of the new book, The Human Side of Innovation. Mauro and I talk about the human aspects of innovation and the importance of love in the innovation process. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Mauro Porcini, PepsiCo's Chief Design Officer and author of The Human Side of InnovationBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Mauro Porcini. He is PepsiCo's first ever Chief Design Officer, and author of the new book, The Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People. Welcome to the show. Mauro Porcini: Thanks, Brian. Thanks for having me. It's really a pleasure. Brian Ardinger: I am super excited to have you on the show. I'm big fan of PepsiCo and your work prior at 3M, and you've got this new book out and I wanted to have a conversation about some of the things that you've seen in this world of innovation. How do you define innovation? Mauro Porcini: That's a good question. Every time you touch, you start score, every time you take something, anything, it could be a product, it could be an experience, it could be an institution, anything in your life. You try to change. And now this change could be directed in a positive way. It could go in a negative way. It could be a major change. Destructive but true as we call those kind changes in innovation world. It could be very incremental, very minimum, but anything you do, the change, the status quo is innovation by definition. Brian Ardinger: I like that definition because you know, I think a lot of people get hung up on the fact that innovation, they think it has to be the biggest change in the world. It's I've got to come up with the next flying car. But you talk about in your book, innovation is not just about that. It's about incremental improvements. It's just creating value in change. Mauro Porcini: This point we are both making right now, I think is extremely important because often people out there, media, opinion leaders, are looking at companies investing in innovation, and if they don't produce the next iPhone, they're like, well, they're failing. They're not really extracting the value that they should from that innovation team, that design team, whatever is the form shape of that innovation organization. And instead, in many situations that innovation is more in the genetic code of the company. Is happening so many different ways in the way you serve a customer. In the way you build experiences. In the way you promote your brands, or you build new ones. Or eventually also in some small incremental products that make your portfolio more meaningful, more relevant. Or financially more interesting for you and your shareholders or more strategic for your company. So, it's very, very important to make this point. I read a few articles recently. They were attacking and challenging companies that were not producing the next iPhone after these loud investments in the innovation machine. And the reality, many of those companies are actually different companies today than today than what they were in the past. Thanks to that innovation culture that they built. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. I heard you talk about design and that great design comes from this earnest desire to make other people happy. Can you expand on that a little bit?Mauro Porcini: That's how everything started. Thousands of years ago when the first act of innovation or design, because for me, are exactly the same thing happened. When the historic man or woman. Who knows if it was a man or if it was a woman, for the first time, took something that was available in nature, a stone, and modified that to give it a different destination of use. To use the stone as a more effective hunting tool. Or a tool to prepare the food. Or later on to decorate your body. Or later on to celebrate your gods.By the way, just mentioned, three different dimensions of the Maslow Pyramid. You know, the bottom of the pyramid that is about survival and is safety and is your physiological needs. The center is about self-expression, the connection with others. And then the top that is about something that transcend yourself is bigger than you.Yeah. And so already those utensils made out of stones were serving specific needs. They were all about reaching your happiness. Because the Maslow Pyramid, at the end of the day, the needs Pyramid is all about reaching what we call today happiness. If you work in all these dimensions. So already back innovation or design was an of love. This is how I start. Also, the book, innovation is an act of love. An act of love towards yourself. If you were creating this for yourself, but obviously already back then, we were organized in little communities. We have people around us. We wouldn't have the concept of family yet, but you were creating these products also for the people around you. It was an act of love for them as well. And then you started to create more and more product by yourself. At a certain point, there were so many products. You needed help. You needed to start delegating the creation of those products to other people.And then over there, hundreds of years and thousands of years, we started to organize ourselves in different communities. We invented the idea of work. We invented companies. Then later on brands. And so, what happened when that started to happen is that essentially you start to put scale. Literally scale between you innovator and the people that you love and that you are serving.The scale plays the distance between the two of you and the love started to get lost in translation in the scale. And instead of love, you started to change love with profit and financial revenue and other things. And so, in the name of profit, eventually you could create products that eventually were not ideal for the people you wanted to serve.But products that eventually you could extract as much financial value as possible out of. And so, this is what has been happening for hundreds of years, more recently. That we are surrounded by so many mediocre products and services and brands and experiences because they were created in the name of profit instead of the name of love.What is changing today is that we live in a world, where if you don't create the ideal extraordinary, excellent solution for people needs and wants, the solution could be once again, a product, service, a brand, or experience. Somebody else will do it on your behalf. Why this was not happening 20 years ago, 30 years ago was simply because if you were a big company, you could protect your product. With big barrier to entry. Made of scale of production, of distribution, and communication. Today. Instead, anybody out there can come up with an idea, get easy access to funding through kickstarter.com or their proliferation investment funds that are hunting for the next startup. The custom manufacturing is going down driven by new technologies and globalization.You can go straight to your end users through the digital platforms to sell them stuff through e-commerce channels and to promote your products through social media. In these areas, these companies, the big ones, were building their barriers to end. It was impossible for the men and woman in the street to go compete with them Today they can, and therefore the big and the small, they're left with just one possible solution. They need to really focus on people and really create something extraordinary for them. You may have the best product, the best brand. Very bad service. Your competitor will create the best product, the best brand, and eventually something with a better service.Or you may have all of them, but your product is not sustainable enough. Or is not healthy enough. That's exactly where competition will come. Thank God we live in a world where the big and small need to do just one thing to create excellence for people. There is no space for mediocrity anymore. You cannot protect the mediocrity with your old barriers to entry anymore.Brian Ardinger: I love that concept and coming back to the idea of innovation is love, if you think about one of the best acts of love is solving a problem for somebody. And at the end of the day, that's what innovation is. It's finding a problem and solving that problem for yourself or whoever's having that problem. Mauro Porcini: And going maybe a little bit further, you know, many years ago, around 18 years ago, I was working at 3M. And 3M named that year, the year of customer satisfaction. The idea was, let's focus on the customer. Let's really celebrate and please the customer. This year more than ever. So was thinking about customer satisfaction and the etymology of the world satisfaction and the meaning of the word. And at a certain point, I realized that as a designer, as an innovator, I didn't care at all about satisfying the customer.I really didn't care at all about satisfying the customers. I wanted to love the customer. What is the big difference between satisfaction and love? Satisfaction is all about identifying a need and fulfilling the specific need. But if you love somebody could be your children, it could be your wife or husband, or your parents and your friends. You try to do more; you try to do the magic. Then expect to go above and beyond. To really surprise them. And this is what innovators, the real innovators do. They want to surprise. They want to do the magic. And you know that to surprise them, do the magic, you need an extra effort. You need to really change things. You need to do things that people do not expect. Not just the people you serve, but unfortunately, and this is the difficulty of doing innovation also, the people surrounding your boss. Your investors. Your colleague. There is a subtle difference between satisfaction and love, and I think love is really the word synthesized for innovation.Brian Ardinger: That's a great. You talk about in the book how you have to go after and find these, what you define as unicorn employees. The employees that possess a lot of these key talents that you're talking about. Can you expand on what a unicorn employee is and why it's so important to have them in your innovation space?Mauro Porcini: Well, the first definition that is also the subtitle of the book is There are People in Love with People. So, until now, we talked about how important it is to refocus everything on people. That's the second people in the sentence. We briefly talk about love that synthesizes essentially everything. The first people I started to focus on, the first people of the sentence that are innovators, entrepreneurs, the leaders of the world, the designers.Many years ago, for a very practical reason, you know, everything is in the book comes from the practical needs that I faced in my professional journey. Who was this need? Well, I was building design teams in 3M, and I was hiring people, and I had a series of technical skills. They needed to be the best possible designers.They also needed to be business savvy. They needed to have also you know, a series of characteristics that were very clear to me. And then I was giving more, less an idea of the soft skills that these people needed to have. And very soon I realized that it was so difficult to find the kind of talents that I wanted.They had all the technical skills there, the business skills, but they were missing when something was important to move projects forward. Something else happened in part. I was there to introduce design thinking and design driven innovation, or as we call that kind of innovation, human center innovation in 3M.And I was studying every other company, what they were doing, how they were applying innovation, big companies, small companies. And one of the trendy words of the time was Design Thinking. And of course, as a designer, I would introduce that idea inside the company. And they started to introduce the tools, the processes, the ways of working of Design Thinking.This is what you were reading in books, listening, hearing, conferences, and what the, the consultant out there were selling to these companies. And so here I am. I started to run dozens and then hundreds of projects with this methodology. And some of them were succeeding and some of them were miserably failing.And then you start to look at them. You start to analyze them. And then at the beginning I was thinking, okay, maybe the process is not the right one. I need to tweak it and evolve it and I need to change the way of working and some of the tools. And you do all of this and still some succeed in some not. And at that point you try to find what is the root cause of this. What are the common themes? And you're right to want conclusions. That is pretty obvious if you say, but the reality in the companies, people don't talk enough about this when they talk about innovation. The difference was made by the people driving the projects. And there were people with certain kind of characteristics and people with others. Mindset, ability to observe reality and take certain kind of decisions, extract certain kind of insights and learnings, courage to drive things forward to face roadblocks, ability to take orders with you.I mean, there are a series of skills that back then when I was hunting for all these people to join my teams at 3M, I listed literally in the list for my HR department. Because I needed these people to have this kind of characteristic. Then the list became a paper for the Design Management Institute Review. It became something that will share in conferences. And it became something very public for a simple reason because I wanted everybody out there that was interested to join my teams, to know what kind of people I was looking for.And so, in the past 17 years. I've been tweaking and evolving the list. And two-thirds of this book is about characteristics and the way these unicorns think and behave. And some of them are more obvious than others, like the ability to dream and think big when you talk about leaders and innovation, obviously you need to think big.It's not that easy though. You know, we think big, and we dream when we are children and then society try to convince us that is not okay. That that's a childish kind of activity. Because society wants to normalize people. They don't want people to dream too much because people need to be a feature and be stable, you know. Within the society that we have today.Instead, we need to find ways to protect those dreams and we need to understand that when we dream, we'll face people that will push back on us. They, they will stop us from dreaming because that's what they believe in. You shouldn't dream or you need to be practical. You need to be pragmatic. The problem is that then even if you succeed in dreaming, that's not enough.There are many people that dream, there are great visionaries, but are unable to make things happen. They stay up there in the dimension of dreaming. That is also very comfortable dimension because to make things happen is tough. So, you know the balance between dreaming and execution is very important.Now, this is something that you hear about when you talk about innovation. You talk about leadership; you talk about design. But there are other characteristics that are less obvious. For instance, kindness, optimism, curiosity. How many times you heard the CEO or a business leader or a hiring manager asking, is this person a kind person or is this person curious or optimistic and, and there are many others. Again, there are 24 traits of these innovators. And in my, again, journey, I found that these characteristics are what made the difference in my teams. At the beginning, even before I started to create this list, they were kind of intuitive. People love to be surrounded by people that are similar to them, so. I grew up in this family of kind people and optimistic people. I mean, it was just the way we were.I wish all Italians were like this. Actually Italy, we have the opposite. Yeah, kind maybe. I don't know. But is the opposite. I think the problem of Italy today is that we're not optimistic at all today. Unfortunately. At the second point, I realized with full awareness, the power of something like this. For instance, curiosity is what drives you to talk with others. To get out of your comfort zone and embrace people that think differently than you. Curious people usually love diversity because they see diversity, diversity of thinking and background, the precious gift of knowledge.They know that people that are different than them have something to offer to them and they can learn from. And it doesn't mean that the other point of view is better than yours. It means that through dialogue and therefore respect to other characteristics of the unicorns, ability to create a dialogue and respect. To dialogue and respect, you can build a bridge with these other perspectives and your perspective. Perspective number one, combine with perspective number two of the other person. Create a third or regional perspective, that is the novel perspective, is what drives innovation. Curiosity makes you read books and travel from one place to the other without just stopping at the meeting room where you're going because of the business commitment that you have. But going out in the city and getting lost in the city and observe people and falling in love with, you know, the way they talk, they behave, they dress, they eat, they drink, they read anything they do. Curiosity make you grow every single day. Brian Ardinger: So, I'm curious to know, so you talk about these particular traits and that. Do you think they can be trained and taught to folks that are already on your team. Or is this something you have to go out and hire for and is it, is it in fact a unicorn from the standpoint of it's a mythical creature that doesn't always exist and is hard to come by. Mauro Porcini: Yeah, exactly. First of all, as you mention it, the unicorn doesn't exist. The person that embodies, to the extreme, the 24 skills of the unicorn doesn't exist. And this is what the unicorn is about. Plato will place the unicorn in the world of ideas up there.The Unicorn is an idea you strive to for the rest of your life. You want to keep seeing your life as a never-ending opportunity that will end with your death eventually, depending on what you believe in. And opportunity to keep learning. And so that's what the unicorn is about. And therefore, is implicit in the very idea of the unicorn that you need to learn, that you can grow. You can improve, you can become a better unicorn than you were when you were born.So, I think there are two dimensions to the idea of the unicorn. On one side, there are talents you are born with, like you play soccer, and you are Maradona or Tennis, Serena Williams or you run and Usain Bolt. Those are people who are born with those talents, but they need to train also, Maradona, Serena Williams or Usain Bolt need to train that talent. We move people with goals. At the beginning, even just building awareness. Realizing that I am Maradona. You know how many amazing potential baseball player or tennis player are out there. And there are maybe employees in a company or doing other things because they never became aware on an amazing talent because they never happened to play baseball for example. They just, you know, they didn't do sport and they ended up, or they were swimming.And so the first role of education is build awareness about specific characteristics. And again, now we're talking about sports. But understanding the power of curiosity. Understanding the power of optimism. The power of humbleness. You know, a series of traits that can make the difference in your innovation journey.The second goal is that once you're aware, you want to practice so that you can take it to the next level. The third one is that you want to, when you right to a certain level, you know, a professional kind of level, you think that you are done, because you are there. You're up there, you've been successful. You did amazing innovation projects.You are Maradona. Somebody stopped learning, somebody stopped growing. And this is a big mistake driven by the opposite of one of the characteristics of the unicorn that is evidence. And the characteristic is that humbleness combined with confidence. So short answer, partially is natural talent, partially training. You may be born with less of a natural talent as a unicorn than somebody else. But you may become a better unicorn than a natural talent if you practice and if you get that kind of education. Brian Ardinger: You brought up the fact that you got to be a natural learner and continually prime that pump. How do you stay fresh and current and connected to new ideas and that?Mauro Porcini: Look, I practice that idea of curiosity I was describing also earlier. But while in the past was kind of random. Like I was just curious by nature. But it was very in efficient. Sometimes I was more curious, sometimes I was less. Today I force myself to be extra learner. And really, you know, for instance, you may already understand from this conversation between the two of us that I love a lot to talk and you put me in a room, we start to talk and I start, and then I learn over the years, when you are in the room and you meet people, people you know, but especially people you don't know, that if I was talking too much, I was wasting the opportunity to learn from others.So, one of the things I learned to do is to stop and list theme. Listen is so, so important. And also, not doing that just in a casual occasion, but also during a business meeting. During a design or innovation meeting. And this is so important because often people, for lack of confidence are there in those rooms feeling the gap of their, of the silence.We justify their presence there, to build their credibility, even if what they're saying is not really meaningful to the conversation. It's not really adding value. There are so many of these people and to them, almost bothered by that because I feel it in my skin, like a waste of time and lack of efficiency in that kind of conversation.I think we should talk when we add value to bring to the conversation, and we shouldn't when we don't. By the way, this value doesn't need to be just intellectual value. Maybe there is a moment that we need a joke or some irony. You know, to create a different vibe in the conversation. So, I'm talking about that.But this is something important I think, and we need to always keep in mind. And then finally, a little trick, again, very spontaneously for me, I am very, very active in social media. Especially in Instagram, in LinkedIn. And I post every day in Instagram especially. And so, posting every day, you always want to have interesting content to post.And so, this force you to walk the streets of life and be curious and see people around you and always hungry for an interesting thing that happens. So that you can snap that picture, that could become content. And it's not just the picture, but it's the story behind that picture. So, you need to observe, you need to understand what's going on, and then you need to give an angle, a perspective that is your unique, that helps so much being alert and looking around and always observe what's going on around you.Brian Ardinger: What it also allows you to do is to make mistakes. Like you can try things and you get better as you try things. I imagine the first time you posted a picture of your shoes, was maybe not the first best conversation piece, but I know that you do it on a regular basis and having the ability to learn and grow and change as you experience and do things, that's probably important trait as well. Mauro Porcini: Yeah. You, you, you say two things that I think are very important here. One is consistency. You may do things at the beginning, look weird, but if you do it consistently because in a consistent way, then it becomes part of your brand. Or you may do things that people perceive as not authentic because they're like, ah, that's not really him, you know, or her in your social media or at work in, you know, in what you do every day, your company. So, at the beginning, there will be this uncomfortable situation. People want to know, you know, why you're doing certain things. But if you keep doing that sooner or later, they will understand that you really believe in what you're doing. So, consistency is very powerful, but it requires a little bit of courage and getting out of your comfort zone at the beginning. When you disrupt, you do things differently. Brian Ardinger: So obviously you work at a company like PepsiCo that's always doing some amazing things out there in the consumers world and headspace. What are some of the trends that you're seeing or that you're excited about? Mauro Porcini: Well, there are three with an overarching platform that could be codified as an additional fourth trend. In our industry, but they're common also, many other industries. Sustainability, health and wellness, personalization, enabled by technology. Technology could attach itself to all of this dimension and really change the game. Sometimes people ask me, well, you've been 10 years at PepsiCo.You were 20 years earlier in 3M, where do you see yourself in the future? The first part of the answer is that you never know, right? I was not planning to leave 3M and then it happened. But I'm not planning to, to leave PepsiCo anytime soon. And one of the reasons why, since 10 years I'm doing exactly the same job. And I could keep doing a job eventually for 20 more years, is that it's exactly these four challenges that I just made.We're working in a industry that is in evolution. Is changing. And companies like PepsiCo give people like me, the platform to reach everyday billions of people. Billions of people. So even the incremental changes that eventually the media don't notice because they're not the next iPhone, who generate a positive impact, for instance, in sustainability, in health wellness.That is exponentially bigger than anything a small company is, can do, and is doing today. The impact what we're doing today, with a variety of different activities that human center design driven is unbelievable. So, it's so exciting to work on these four dimensions today in an industry like this, with a company to give you this kind of access and resources as well.For More InformationBrian Ardinger: It's exciting times we're living in for sure, and I really do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to kind of share your thoughts. I'm really excited about the book coming out. For folks who want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that?Mauro Porcini: If you follow me, my Instagram, Mauro Porcini and my LinkedIn. Mauro Porcini as well. I'm pretty active there. And then there is the possibility eventually even to communicate directly. So probably are the best two platforms. Brian Ardinger: Well Mauro, thank you again for coming on the program. Very excited to continue the conversation in the years to come and appreciate your time. Mauro Porcini: Thank you. Thank you, Brian. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lorraine Marchand. Lorraine is the author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset. She and I discuss how innovation starts, how you can build your muscle of innovation through exploration and experimentation, and much more. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best in the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Lorraine Marchand, Author of The Innovation MindsetBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Lorraine Marchand. She is executive managing director of Merative, which is formerly IBM Watson Health. And she's author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry. Welcome to the show, Lorraine. Lorraine Marchand: Thank you, Brian. Really happy to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you. You have been in this space for a while. For the past three decades, you have been in product development, working with companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and Covance, and Cognizant. How did you get involved in the realm of innovation?Lorraine Marchand: Well, it started when I was actually pretty young. I was reared by my dad, who was an inventor. And when I was growing up around the house, he would always challenge my brother and me, to find three solutions to every problem, usually problems that he would identify. And one summer morning, he really brought that point close to home. And he took us to a local diner called the Hot Shops Cafeteria in Wheaton, Maryland.And our job was to determine what was slowing down table turnover. So we sat in the big red vinyl booths eating our breakfast of scrambled eggs and orange juice. And after three days of using our stopwatches and writing down notes, and even interviewing waitresses and bus boys, we determined that the culprit was sugar packets. People were spewing them all over the place. True to his tenant that we had to find three solutions we did. And we ended up taking one to an MVP, minimal viable prototype. And that was the sugar cube. And we ended up selling it to the Hot Shops cafeteria that summer, and pretty soon it was distributed throughout the Baltimore Washington area.So early on, I learned that problem solving was fun and lucrative. And fast forward throughout my career, whether it was at the National Institutes of Health or Bristol Myers Squibb, or founding my own startups and the diagnostics and ophthalmology area, I found that I really did love this idea of being able to clearly define a problem, and then as my dad had taught me kind of systematically evaluate and choose solutions. And to me, the heart of the innovation mindset that I write about is an insatiable curiosity, a passion for problem solving, and embracing change. And so I have found myself, whether in large corporations or in startups, desiring to be that agent of change and bringing that problem solving methodology that I learned so early at the age of 13 with me in all of my career endeavors. Brian Ardinger: I love that story and I love, you have this in the book that one of the key mindset essential steps is this innovation starts with at least three ideas. Can you talk a little bit more about why it takes more than one idea to get something going and that process? Lorraine Marchand: You know, I like to say that first of all, your first two ideas, one of them is probably a solution that you've already been mulling over before you even confirmed that you had a problem. Because I find that we, as human beings, love to go into solutioning mode before we've really carefully defined the problem. So, if you are making your way around a problem, you probably have a bias in terms of what one of the solutions is. The second solution is always to do nothing, right? The competition is always the default, the status quo, I'm not going to change.So right there, you already have number one and two. So you have to be true to the problem solving discipline and this idea of brainstorming and coming up with the three solutions, because it could be that third one that is the winner. If you go a little bit beyond the three, I'm okay with that, but I don't allow my students or any of the individuals I coach to cheat and come up with fewer than three. That you can't do Brian Ardinger: That makes perfect sense. Like you said, you've been in this space for a long time and you've, you've helped create products, you've helped create companies and that. What are some of the biggest maybe obstacles or misconceptions that people have about innovation and starting this particular process.Lorraine Marchand: I think a lot of people are intimidated that they think that innovation has to be at the hands of some of the quintessential greats like Edison and Jobs and Musk and Gates, etc. And so, the first thing I like to do is educate and inform individuals that not all forms of innovation are disruptive. They're not all big hunt. And it is absolutely honorable, and it could be your style of innovation to create incremental improvements. To do more renovation, retooling something for another type of use case. To be optimizing, which actually my story about the Hot Shops Cafeteria, truly if I'm honest about it, it's more about optimizing than truly innovating.But I'm okay with that because like you, I'm very passionate about just encouraging more people to access the freedom, the excitement, the job satisfaction that comes from innovating. And I'm okay to use a broader set of terminology in order to attract more people to just find ways to get started. So that's the first thing. I think people are really put off by that. And then I think that a lot of innovators find that it's very difficult to do customer research. Where do I find the customer? How do I talk to them? Do they want to talk to me? How do I really write a question guide that doesn't bias them toward my solution? So that's one that is very difficult to do, and I find that a lot of individuals will gloss over it. You know, I, I say you have to talk to a hundred customers. And my students look at me with their eyes crossed going, I can't possibly do that. I can't even find five. And I say, well, how are you going to sell your product if you can only find five people to talk to about it? Okay. Right there. And then I would say the other area is pivot. I'm a real fan of pivoting you never fail. Some people will argue with me, but I like to say, you don't fail if you're constantly adjusting your strategy based on the data, based on the market dynamics, and you're moving in the direction where you keep learning and improving what you're doing and moving it closer to the customer. We don't fail, we pivot. But a lot of founders, fail to see the warning signs. That maybe things aren't taking off the way they thought. And so pivoting too late can be pretty dangerous. Brian Ardinger: You spent some time both in bigger corporations as well as a startup entrepreneur. Do you see any differences about how those types, either early-stage startups innovate versus bigger companies, and what are the differences and similarities?Lorraine Marchand: I think that one of the big challenges in a corporation is, number one, the corporation exists in order to systematize, routinize, and scale. So, by its very nature, it's not really incented to be an innovative type of organism because innovation is the opposite. Innovation is about experimentation. It's got to create a safe environment for you to try something and fail. The only time I'll use the word fail. You have to be able to experiment and know that it's not gonna move forward. And as we both know, so often corporations living quarter by quarter, they just don't have a lot of patience for investing time, money, and important talent and resources in creating new ideas that might not make it to market.So that's one of the biggest challenges, and I tell my corporate colleagues who wanna innovate or even head up innovation, how important it is to embed it in the culture. And one of the first tips that I give them is you have to create an environment where experimentation is encouraged, and failure feels safe.And failure is also even encouraged and incentivized. And I do like the way Jeff Bezos positioned that within Amazon. So, he had try, fail, learn. And if I had to reiterate a mantra to my friends in the corporate world, it would be you have to create that kind of environment. And if he did it, with a logistics company, surely you can do it too. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. It's interesting to talk a little bit about that. You know, you mentioned earlier about how you define innovation. And I think that's so important in that early-stage process to get people comfortable with the fact that I can be an innovator even though I'm not a Steve Jobs.The idea that just taking an idea and creating value around that idea, that's how I define innovation. You know, being able to take your idea and move it forward to create value from it. That alone gives the individual person on the line permission to see a problem and say, I can fix that. And that is innovation and appreciate that particular type of approach.It also then allows you to start building that muscle. To take on maybe bigger things down the road, bigger, more adjacent or transformational types of innovation. As you kind of learn about the process and learn that anybody can go through the part of taking an idea and creating value from it.Lorraine Marchand: I really love that, Brian. In fact, I love that metaphor of the muscle. I was talking with one of the innovators that I profiled in the book, Sarah Apgar, who invented a piece of fitness equipment called the Fit Fighter. She's just phenomenal. It's a nationally recognized business and brand now, and so we use that metaphor when we were talking about Fit Fighter and innovation that it's like a muscle.I might have a goal of doing a half marathon. And I go out in day one, I've never run before. But I'm going to run half a mile and then the next week I'm going to run another half a mile and I'm going to build up to it. Because building a muscle, practicing is what makes you the half marathon runner. And building the muscle and practicing is what makes you good at innovating.Brian Ardinger: So, you mentioned one of the stories that is in your book, but the book is packed full with a variety of different case studies and and things that you've seen along the lines. Can you tell us some of the success stories that you highlight in the book? Lorraine Marchand: You know, one that I don't often get an opportunity to talk about. So, thank you for letting me choose one of my favorites. I had a fantastic opportunity when I was a professor of entrepreneurship at Princeton, to judge a business pitch contest at a prison in a local New Jersey County. And so that day I drove out to the prison not really knowing what to expect. And it was just the most enlightening and humbling experiences that I had.The inmates had really worked hard over the 12 weeks in the entrepreneurship program. And they had studiously written their business plans down on loose leaf paper with pencils. And so, when I came in, I read the plans and then they had an opportunity to present their ideas and to pitch their ideas to me. And they were so engaged in the feedback. So responsive and receptive to it, and they really just wanted to learn and get better. And you could just feel the energy in the room. But the best part of the story was three of those gentlemen went on to found the businesses that we had discussed in the session that day. And even though I couldn't stay in touch with them because of rules around these sorts of engagements, I was able to get information from the warden later that they had been successful. And really not too many stories have warmed my heart like that one. Brian Ardinger: It's excellent to see that again pretty much anybody from anywhere can find problems to solve, and if you go through a process to make that happen, you can actually create value and change lives, so that's amazing. The other thing I like about your book, you have a section in there talking about women innovators and some of the unique challenges that they face. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Lorraine Marchand: My focus on women is around increasing awareness and raising women up and encouraging them to step up and stand out and give innovation a try. And I just think that for a lot of women, it's not something that they naturally think about being entrepreneurs or innovators.And we do find that the data indicates that even among venture capital firms, there's still only about 2 to 3% of them that have women partners. And when we look at investments in women founded companies, it's also still hovering at around 2 to 3%. And I'm just such a fan of innovation for all the reasons that we've talked about because I think it can be so satisfying to take an idea, to take a problem that you've personally observed and bring it to life, bring it to market as we've been discussing. I think that's tremendously satisfying. And I also think that it can be economically satisfying and help women find economic freedom. And a sustainability of their economic freedom and status. So I want to get the word out. I really encourage women in STEM. I encourage women to figure out ways to access capital. And I have a resource guide to help women with that. And then very importantly, I like to help women think a little differently about their own networking. And the truth of the matter is you have to be comfortable networking with accountants and attorneys and investors, and maybe not those folks that are in your social circles on a day-to-day basis, but you have to get out there and be able to have those conversations and pull those people into your network. So those are some of the tips that I give to women. Brian Ardinger: They're great tips and they apply to everyone as far as that ability to build a network. I think a lot of people think of innovation as this sport that you do in your garage and the tinkerer who figures things out on their own. But like you said, there are so many different components that have to come together to create that value, whether it's the accountants or the lawyers or the other people that can help build the product, whatever the case may be. Collaborative nature of innovation is so important. How do you stay fresh and current and connected with the new things that are going on in your world, and how do you stay on the top of, of your game? Lorraine Marchand: Well, I am always reaching out to new innovators. I get so much inspiration from the students that I teach at a graduate level. Or I'll be going to the Philadelphia Venture Fair later this week. And so, I'll get to talk to the early-stage entrepreneurs there. And share ideas and explore and create with them. So, I need to put myself in an environment where I'm around innovators too and entrepreneurs and I feed off of their energy. So that really is what does it for me, is just staying out there with other people, with ideas that want to create and grow. And by linking arms, we move this whole movement forward and it keeps me fresh too. Brian Ardinger: It's always important to keep in touch with where those new ideas are coming from and that. Do you see any new trends or things that you're excited about? Lorraine Marchand: I think the area of AI is absolutely fascinating. You know, I was recently reading a report that AI innovation about a 1.1 billion cagr, but the fastest growing area, even though it's very much focused on manufacturing, automation, automobiles, for example, the fastest growing sector is in healthcare. And I just think that's incredibly exciting if you think about the ability to use artificial intelligence on information about a patient's cancer tumor, have it diagnosed earlier, precision medicine in terms of knowing how to treat it.Or even being able to develop the sensors that can go into devices and help to measure and monitor pain or someone's activity around the house. So, I definitely love the healthcare applications of AI, one of those areas that I'm particularly passionate about. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to kind of share your insights and that. Look forward to having the conversation again in the future as we talk more about some of the crazy things that are happening in the world. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about your book, what's the best way to do that?Lorraine Marchand: I'm on LinkedIn, so I'd love for you to connect with me, Lorraine Marchand on LinkedIn. And if you would like a copy of the book, it's on Amazon, The Innovation Mindset with my name. You can buy a copy there and you can also go to the Columbia University Press website, and you can also purchase the book through Columbia. Brian Ardinger: Well, Lorraine, thanks again for being on the show. Appreciate the time and looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future. Lorraine Marchand: Thank you, Brian, and continued good luck with all of your fabulous endeavors as well.Brian Ardinger: Thank you. That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kevin Strauss, Author of Innovate The 1%. We talk about Kevin's experiences creating products in the biomedical space, as well as his background as the founder of Uchi, a social app designed to strengthen relationships and behaviors. We also talk about the importance of both mental and physical health in the innovation process. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Kevin Strauss, Author of Innovate The 1%Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Kevin Strauss. He is the author of Innovate The 1%: Seven Areas to Nurture for Success. Welcome to the show, Kevin. Kevin Strauss: Thanks a lot, Brian. I'm glad to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. You are a innovator, an author, emotional health and wellness expert. Founder. How did you get involved and excited about this whole innovation space. Kevin Strauss: I think it's a combination of a few things. And I really have to bring it back to my father. As a kid, and for the first 18 years of my life, I would just follow him around and be his little helper and we would just get into every kind of project around the house possible.And that led to the engineering degree and just problem solving. And not only problem solving, but coming up with other ideas, because my dad would do that a lot. Where he would just want to do something in the house. It wasn't solving a problem, but it was just creating something that he wanted to see, you know, in the home.So, I think that's where it really got started. Brian Ardinger: You have a little bit different career. You're not in the software space per se. And you spent a lot of time in the health tech space. So, give us a little background on how you went from engineering to where you are now. Kevin Strauss: It started with engineering. He always loved the mechanical side of things, but I've always been fascinated with the human body and like how it all works and everything. That's when I went straight to a biomedical engineering degree, and I just love all that. Ended up getting like a dream job out of graduate school designing total hip replacement. So that launched me into medical device. But then there was a time that I was working at a company, where we were doing a lot of grant research. And these grants were funded by NIH. And we would come up with ideas, whatever they happen to be, and propose them. And if we won the grant, we'd do the research with the ultimate hope of bringing it to US society as a product, as a company. And in that time, I was thinking a lot about my dating life, which wasn't working out so well back then. And I was trying to figure out why my dating life wasn't working out. You know, I boil it all down to self-esteem of the people I was dating, but then 15 years later, figuring out it was my own self-esteem issues. That was also part of the problem. And it's putting all of that together and understanding why people do what they do. In 2001, it really boiled to the top where I had an epiphany that it seemed to me that most arguments occurred because people weren't sharing their true thoughts and feelings. Right.And that really took me into this other direction. We were doing some human behavior modification work at that company with the grant research. But I just kept pursuing that on my own. And with the work I was doing at the office. And trying to understand why people do what they do. Why do I do what I do?Where's all this behavior coming from? And that led me down a 20-year rabbit hole, which is understanding human behavior, which I really attributed to emotional health. It sent me down that path of emotional health and relationships and connection, and that's what's really driving behavior, and that's what led to the Uchi App, which is a tool to help strengthen relationships.Brian Ardinger: Your background again, you've been in product development. You have 80 patents to your name, I believe. And peer reviewed in a variety of different areas. And so, you've been at the forefront of taking an early stage idea and creating products around it. It's interesting to see the pivot that you've made into the human side of that. And it's not just about figuring out what feature to build or whatever, but it's about the team and it's about other things. So maybe talk a little bit about the book, Innovate the 1%, and some of those areas that we need to nurture, whether we're developing a product or developing a dating life. Kevin Strauss: The book became this like 20 years, 30 years of my career and everything that I've learned in, solving problems, and bringing products solutions to fruition. But when I actually sat down to finally write the book, I ended up writing the book in 39 days because it was just dumping, like brain dumping everything down. So, when you have an idea and you start executing on it, that actually happens to be chapter seven of the book, which is Strike While the Iron is Hot.If you've got an idea, write it down. Talk it out with people. Play with it. You know, don't let it just, oh, I'll remember that later. I can't tell you how many ideas I've had, you know, in the middle of the night or driving, and I'm like, oh, I'll definitely remember this. This is amazing. And then I completely have no idea what that idea was.But you know, the first chapter is where it gets started, which is identify the problem first. Until you identify the true root problem, you're not going to actually solve it. And so often what we're doing in society is we think we know the problem, but it's actually just the symptom. And that's what behaviors are. Behaviors are only symptoms of a deeper problem. And what I learned in my career is once you identify the true root problem, the solutions are usually shockingly simple. And that's how I've been able to come up with like 80 patents. Brian Ardinger: Can you gimme some examples of how you go through that particular process to pull away the onion and figure out what is that core root problem?Kevin Strauss: So, asking why. And I think there's like different schools of thought, like three whys or seven whys. I probably ask like 50 whys. You know, like I just don't ever stop. Like, is this really what we're trying to get to and talk to the right people about it. You know, I mean, for a lot of these medical devices, it's not just about talking to the surgeon, right? The orthopedic or neurosurgeon when it comes to all these spinal implants and all. It's talking to the scrub tech, the nursing staff. You know, we would have meetings with the central supply at a hospital because central supply is the one who cleans the instruments. And if they can't clean the instrument properly, you know, you could transmit infection and that's terrible.You have to dig into all these different areas and keep asking why and find out what is really the problem that you're dealing with that needs to be overcome. And again, so often we are looking for these shiny, flashy solutions that look really cool like implants. You know, it takes like a hundred instruments to get that one implant into the body. That's a lot of questioning and thinking and experimenting and failing. Oh my God, I mean tons and tons of failing in order to get to the solution. Brian Ardinger: And that's a great point too. I think a lot of times, and it's probably even more so in, in your industry, where this idea of failure, especially in a big corporation and that, people don't like to fail. And that's why a lot of people don't innovate. Talk about the difference of how the perception of failure and the execution of what you do after failure in a, like a medical device type of environment where if you fail, lives are on the line, potentially. Talk about that and the perceptions in that industry around failure. And how do people get over it to actually innovate.Kevin Strauss: We talk about fear of failure, right? Like fear. To me, the fear, well, for one, it's justified like we fear, but what are we actually fearing? Are we fearing failure? Are we fearing an idea that just doesn't work? It's not about the idea. The real fear that I think we're struggling with, especially in the workplace, is shame, judgment, degradation, or neglect.You know, we're afraid that if we come up with a bad idea, and again, like 99% of ideas suck really. We're so afraid that we're going to be judged or shamed. And I do talk about this in the book. If we're going to be judged or shamed, well, you only need a couple of examples of being judged and shamed and it hurts, right?And like, oh, I'm not going near that pain again. That emotional pain. So, I'm just not even going to try. And we just take it out of kids, even in like kindergarten and first grade. We already start to teach them to fear failure because we judge and shame them for their failure. And it's even worse in the workplace because then your job is tied to it and your salary and earning a living and putting a roof over your head and food on the table, and taking care of those that you love. You know, we're fearing these things because we've been trained as little children. That's one of the big things that needs to change in the workplace so that you don't fear the failure because you're going to fail. I can't tell you how many times that we've failed. You don't come up with 80 ideas and get 80 patents. Like that just doesn't happen. And you know, remember I didn't do all these patents by myself, right? It's a team. In the workplace, it needs to be acceptable to fail. Like you're not going to hit a home run every single time you have an idea. And it's through these bad ideas and there are bad ideas. And I hate this idea, they're like, oh, there's no bad idea. Well, that's completely false. Most ideas are bad. But what do you do with that? Where can you go with that? Because there are so many times when a bad idea, I mean an awful idea, gets flipped around from someone else's perspective and they turn it into a rockstar innovation.And the only way that you not having this fear, this emotional pain, the fear of judgment and shame and being degraded or losing your job is by having strong relationships. If you value each other for just the human being that you are and for your skill set. Because your skillset's different than my skillset, but when we bring it together, that's when the magic happens. And it's okay to have a terrible idea, but you're not a terrible person, right? It's just a terrible idea. And that's okay. Brian Ardinger: You mentioned your 80 patents and that. Innovation is a collaborative sport, and nobody can, you know, build everything by themselves. So how do you foster that team environment that is safe for failure and safe for experimentation?Kevin Strauss: Leading by example. Sucking myself. You know, I mean, I remember one time I was driving to work, and I had like a 75 minute commute to the office, you know. So, I had a lot of time in the car. So, I'm thinking and thinking and I'm, there's this one time I was coming to work and I had this amazing idea and I was working it all through. I was like figuring out the details and, oh, and it can be manufactured this way and it, and it'll be no problem with regulatory affairs. You know, the FDA like, oh, this is amazing. This is amazing. So, I got to work and I was so excited to tell one of my team members who, you know, I'm his boss, right? But I was so excited to tell him I didn't even take my coat off. I'm drawn on the white board and I'm diagramming this whole thing out. Beautiful drawing. And my teammate Larry, and he's looking at it and he's thinking, and he, all right, cool, cool. Well, what about this over here? What's going on with that? Because I'm not sure. I don't think that works with this. And I'm like, man, you're right. It totally doesn't work. This is terrible. So, I just erased the whole thing off the board and we just went about our work day. He felt comfortable to tell me his boss, right? That my idea sucks. But he said it nicely, you know? And I didn't take it personally. Because ultimately, we're working on the same mission.We're trying to solve these, you know, whatever the problems happen to be or the goals that we're trying to achieve in the company. Trying to help the surgeons. Trying to help the surgeons treat the patient right, and the pathology. It's okay that as a boss, I come up with terrible ideas too, and it's okay for you to tell me that, and I'm not going to yell at you for it or fire you for it.Brian Ardinger: You spent a lot of your life as a biomedical engineer, and now you're a founder of a software company, a social app, you know dedicated to strengthening relationships and that. Talk a little bit about your journey to Uchi. How did it come about and, and where are you at in that journey? Kevin Strauss: Man, Uchi you know, it is a labor of love. I mean, I, I really do love it, but I love how it's so simple. In fact, it's almost too simple. And I think a lot of people think it won't work because it's so simple. Those are some of the best inventions that I've had are the ones that are so simple and address the exact need that the surgeon has. So back to those days when we were doing the grant research and I had this epiphany about why so many arguments and conflict occur. And I started digging into the research and that's where I learned about high-risk behaviors by teenagers. You know, like drugs, alcohol, eating disorders, depression, suicide, you know, the CDC actually, you know, has a list of these high-risk behaviors. And I was digging in and digging in. And so, what happened was we ended up putting a proposal together. And again, I had to dig into the research to see what's really going on here to submit a proposal to NIH and then it didn't get funded, right? So, there's a failure. It didn't get funded. And I was like, you know, instead of going through the whole process of reapplying, which is going to, you know, the next deadline's like six months later. And then waiting six months to hear if we get the grant. And then doing a phase one feasibility, which is like a, you know, nine month or one year feasibility.And then going on to building a bigger model, you know, a bigger system to do a two-year study. I'm like, this is going to take so long. I can just build a website to do this. Now originally the whole idea was meant for a Palm Pilot. You remember those? Yeah. Because smartphones didn't exist back in 2001, 2003. So, with the permission of the company, I built a website.I hired a consultant, paid my own money. We built a website. It was called Family E Journal, but it was just a matter of, you know, answering questions. And we post questions, you answer them, and you trade the answers with like your family members. And that's really where it got started, out of a failure from NIH. Do it myself. Hire a programmer and get it out into the world.And it went live January of 2003, which is before Facebook and before My Space actually. And of course, it didn't take off because most people had never heard of Family E Journal. But that's how it got started. And then just, you know, inch by inch, little by little. Growing it and you know, I always had a day job, so it wasn't until like 2012 when I really put more effort into it, and then it wasn't until. 2018 that I actually started to transition from a web-based platform to a dedicated app, which is what, and I rebranded as Uchi and it just so happens Uchi in Japanese means in group or inner circle is exactly the point of the whole platform ever since 2001. It's all about connecting with the people who matter most to you.And those are the relationships that have the greatest influence on us. So, if we can help people feel heard and understood and not feel shamed or judged, then we can strengthen relationships, which strengthens emotional health, which drives behaviors Brian Ardinger: Are you finding teams and that are using the app. Tell me a little bit about the users and the experience they have.Kevin Strauss: I'll be honest, you know, it's still a challenge. Because It's not a quick fix and it's not flashy. It's not like Instagram. It's not like TikTok, you know. It's not this candy that those platforms are. We've worked with schools, we've worked with universities, we've worked with public high schools, and they notice behavioral changes in less than two weeks' time.Tell me a platform that is so scalable, right? Because it's an app, so you know, thousands of people can instantly download it and use it. And within less than two weeks' time, begin to see positive constructive behavior changes. So that's what can happen when you address the emotional health. When you address the root pain, the root problem, then behaviors change fast.Brian Ardinger: It's very interesting. We just talked a little bit about the emotional side of innovation and that, but I also know that you're an award-winning ballroom dancer, an Ironman triathlete and that. So, I'm curious to understand your thoughts on how the physical side of the world and physical health plays into innovation as well.Kevin Strauss: I've been a triathlete for 21 years now. You know, from Sprint Triathlon all the way up to Ironman triathlon, and I also coach Triathletes. And in that whole process, it's all about learning and problem solving. Like why am I bonking right or hitting the wall? Why is that happening? How do I prevent injury? Because that's one of the most important things. What kind of nutrition works for me? How does my body react to heat or humidity or dehydration? And I'm proud to say that I'm a 21-year injury free ironman triathlete. I've never missed a season or even a race that I signed up for because of injury. That doesn't happen by chance.I mean, my dad's been using a walker for 20 years. It's not because I have some incredible genetics. It's because I figured out the root problem to like joint pain and to most injuries, like plantar fasciitis, Achilles tendonitis, knee pain, hip pain. I figured out the root cause or what I truly believe is the root cause. I've put it into action, and I'm 21 years injury free. So, when you solve the root problem, you don't have these ailments that plague so many athletes. You know, I've helped so many of my athletes and so many friends. Just this weekend I was helping a couple friends learn how to foam roll properly because of injuries that they've had. If I can just help make your life a little easier so you can be a little happier, that's what I want to do. And whether it's with physical health or emotional health, whatever it is, if I figured something out that works for me and it seems to apply to most all humans, I just want to share it. For More Information Brian Ardinger: I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your insights and that. And if people want to find out more about the book or Uchi what's the best way to do that? Kevin Strauss: Yeah, well Innovate The 1% is on Amazon, you know, in the eBook or paperback. To find me, LinkedIn is a great place. You can find me, Kevin Strauss or Kevinrstrauss.com is my personal website, and uchiconnection.com is the Uchi App website.Brian Ardinger: Kevin, thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation as the world of innovation continues to move forward. Kevin Strauss: Thank you so much, Brian. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Hussain Almossawi, author of the Innovator's Handbook. Hussain and I talk about the common misconceptions about innovation and how some of the best brands in the world approach design and the creative process let's get started.  Don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated Sept 19-20, 2022 - Lincoln, NEInside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Hussain Almossawi, Author of the Innovator's HandbookBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Hussain Almossawi. He is the author of a new book called The Innovator's Handbook: A Short Guide to Unleashing your Creative mindset. Welcome Hussain. Hussain Almossawi: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: You are an award-winning designer, creative director, consultant. You work with companies like Nike and Apple and Google and, and many other well-known brands. I think I'd love to start the conversation with are these companies that you've worked with, that we know as creative and innovative as we think they are. Or do they struggle with innovation, like the rest of us? Hussain Almossawi: Innovation is a process. And it's all about the mindset. What I really saw in these companies was we do see this big and huge brands with maybe like thousands of employees that work for them. The reality is that it's all made up of small teams. And these small teams are made up of five or six people.And that's where like innovation happens at the core of those companies. What I really saw in these companies was failure after failure, after failure. Trying to reach to a vision that was set. And then throughout that process and throughout that journey being flexible and going from point A to B to C. And having that flexibility to move forward and push things forward. And that's really where innovation happens. Brian Ardinger: It's pretty interesting. And we'll maybe dig into some of the examples and that, from what you've seen, that works and that. But you've got a new book out. Same time as my book, it's called the Innovator's Handbook. I love the design of it. It's a square book. Which is kind of unique to the marketplace and that. So, you spent a lot of time and care in the design and creativity of the book. So, I really appreciate that. But I wanted to dig into the content. Talk us through why somebody should pick up a book on innovation when there's so many out there. What makes this one different? Hussain Almossawi: Sure. So, so for me as a designer and like growing up as an aspiring designer, I always looked at innovation as just like everybody else as something that really wows you. And is something that's amazing.And you want to take parts in it and you want to innovate and become an innovator. But at the same time, you kind of feel lost and don't know how to do it. So, it just feels very overwhelming, especially when you're first starting out. Throughout my career, working with these different companies, working with amazing teams and brilliant minds.What I wanted to do was to kind of break it down into simple insights that help shift your mindset when you're innovating. And innovation isn't supposed to be complex or difficult or hard. There are small things that you can do or understand that will allow you to, to think outside the box. For example, I'm speaking about myself, from my perspective. When I was designing and trying to innovate growing up, I always wanted to reinvent the wheel.I always wanted to do things very different, but that's not the case with innovation. With innovation, you can take things that already exist, see how you can evolve them. Take two different products that exist in the market. See how you can bring them together. There's always room for improvement. So this idea and concept of doing something that is groundbreaking and never done before, that's not really true with innovation. But it seems that way, especially for young designers.I mean, my book is geared towards young designers and aspiring designers, fresh out of college. And I want to share those perspectives and things that I saw that I wish I knew like 15 years ago. So that's like one thing. Do you evolve a product? Do you act or do you react. Do I come up with a groundbreaking product or do I create something that I'm building on something that's out there? That's like one point. Brian Ardinger: I think that's one of the, the most important points that when I talk to folks, when it comes to innovation is getting a clear definition of what innovation means. I think a lot of us immediately jump to, I've got to come up with the, the new flying car kind of concept. When you're saying that innovation starts a lot of times at just incremental improvements and optimizing and looking at things slightly differently.And I, I think that's such a great way to approach innovation because it does open it up to anybody who has opportunity to make those types of changes. You don't have to be, you know, the Steve Jobs or the Elon Musk of the world to actually innovate. Hussain Almossawi: Absolutely. I mean, even like with successful brands, like Apple and automotive companies and all those, if you look at the products that they've done the past 10, 20 years, it's always incremental changes and it's always improving one thing after the other.And I saw that a lot, like being in the footwear industry, with the different brands. It was year after year, we had the same story. Like for example, it was a shoe about lightweight. In 2020, what does lightweight look like? 2021, it looks a bit different because the technology is different. We failed a bit. We've learned a bit from the past, from the things we did in 2020So now 2021, we have a better shoe. 2022 is a better shoe and so on. So, there's always room for improvement and technology's always growing. There are new materials. There's new process. Collaboration. The idea of collaboration is huge in innovation. You meet new people, you get different perspectives, you learn new stuff. And you bring all those back into the process and into the design of the product.One interesting thing that we did like in the footwear industry, and it's done in different industries. For example, in footwear, let's say we were talking about a good shoe. What we would do is like, look at the, how are seat belts made? Look at the automotive industry. Look at the aerospace industry. Then look at things that really have nothing to do with footwear, but bring those ideas back into footwear and build something out of it. And that really leads to us asking better questions, understanding the process better, and coming up with innovative and groundbreaking ideas. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting topic because I think a lot of times, we do get stuck in our own bubble, whether it's our own industry or own competitors. And we're constantly looking at those folks to find inspiration when you're saying a lot of times that core inspiration can come from outside. From different places that you wouldn't necessarily put two and two together. Can you talk a little bit about the biggest misconceptions that you've seen when it comes to innovation? What are some of the mistakes or barriers that hold people back from innovating? Hussain Almossawi: I think the first one that we already discussed that feels overwhelming. The thing is that we see the end result. We don't really see the process of what happens behind closed doors and companies. And we're all wowed by the amazing final product. But in reality, it really started with a small idea and many times, if not all the times there is an idea, but like you want to get from point A to B. But you really land on point C and that's where innovation happens.Right? So that flexibility it's huge. And that flexibility also has to do with learning to fail. And being open to failing. And the idea of failing actually is a really good idea because actually now, you know what not to do versus like getting stuck into the same trap again. And again. And it's just lessons like one after the other, where you can grow and improve and improve. So that idea, I think, of, of being overwhelmed and thinking that you can't innovate. I don't think it's really true. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about, you mentioned failure. And I think that's where a lot of people get hung up when it comes to innovating. They don't want to fail. But yet failure's an inherent process or part of the process of innovating. You know, are there things that you've seen in your work that can help people mitigate that self-talk of failures bad and be able to make mistakes. You know, positive mistakes to move forward?Hussain Almossawi: Well, we see it all around us, not just in innovation. I mean, if you look at Thomas Edison's story, if you look at Einstein, if you look at all the great innovators. They failed hundreds and thousands of times, and it was always the willingness to try and get back up that allowed them to reach the end goal.And we see that in sports as well. Like I'm really into sports and I work with different sports companies. If you look at Michael Jordan, if you look at LeBron James, you look at all these superstars, they failed over and over and over. They missed shot after shot, after shot. And that's really what built these superstars and these names that we know today.I mean, it's all about understanding that failure. It's just bringing you one step closer to the end result and having that mindset. At least what I saw from the inside and also working with different students. That's really what always pushes to bring you closer to success. Let's say. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, you've been successful and had a lot of work working with creative teams and that. I'd love your insight and your perspective on how do you go about finding and hiring innovative talent.Hussain Almossawi: So, talent is one thing. Like as a designer, how good of a designer are they? What are their skills like? What's their craft? Like what programs do they use? So that's, I mean, that's one part of it. The second part of it is really how diverse of a team I can build and put together. The more different mine is, the more diverse my team is. The more I have different perspectives that surround me. That really leads and pushes to, to a stronger team that outputs innovative ideas. So, and when I'm talking about diversity, I'm talking about culture. I'm talking about religion. I'm talking about language. I'm talking about geographical location and there's lots of different things. And the bigger, my combination can be, the more interesting my results could be because they push me and allow me to think in a different way that I would never have thought by myself. So, so that's one, that's a second part of it. And then positivity would definitely be a third one. One thing that I saw, I mean, especially when I started out interning at Nike, it was just this positive energy.Again, it goes back to the team that you work with. But if I'm working with someone, collaborating with someone that shoots down every idea in a negative way, I don't think you're going to see success at the end of the tunnel. But having a positive vibe, even if somebody shoots down an idea, I mean, there's something called the power of and. I could hate your idea, but I could build your idea.Yeah, and we could do this, and we could do that. Rather than let's not do this. Let's do that. So, I actually, I've seen both. I've seen the negative side of things in the industry and the positive sides and definitely the teams that were positive. That's where I saw the most innovation happen. Brian Ardinger: Having the ability to ask the what if questions rather than, you know, the negative side of, well, that's never going to work or, or whatever, being able to at least push through that seems to be one of the traits that I've seen as well.I guess the last kind of core topic I want to talk about is this idea of how do you rep a team that maybe wants to have a more of a creative spark and that? Are there particular things that you can do to get folks more engaged in innovation. Start thinking about it and spark their creative juices.Hussain Almossawi: There were cool workshops that we did. And I also give, like, when I give talks and different creativity conferences, I do also like different kind of workshops for people in different industries. One really cool thing that we do is let's say we're designing a footwear. So, I'd go to Home Depot. Any DIY store. I'd buy random stuff, stuff that has nothing to do with footwear.I'd go to the dollar store, buy random stuff and put them all on the table. And then I'd give the team a brief, a task. All right let's do a shoe that is super comfortable. Let's do a shoe that flies. Let's do a shoe that is this or that. And that really pushes your imagination to take these things that have nothing to do with a shoe or with each other, and then start to think outside the box.Okay. What if, if I use these ping pong balls and use them as the cushion of the shoe because of the shape, because of the lightweight. It could do this or that. So, first of all, opening room for imagination. And then second of all there's no right or wrong. I think that's really important in innovation. At least in the process, there's no right or wrong. There are no stupid questions. Everything is possible. And then as we like an idea, as we get excited about an idea, we can start to look at reality how things can be done. How things can be manufactured processed. And then bring it closer to reality and start to tweak it and adjust it and refine it. So, so that's definitely I'd say the best exercise I've seen working with different people and teams. Brian Ardinger: That's a great little exercise. I'll put in my bag of tools as well. So, appreciate that. Last question I have is where do you go for inspiration? What are the, the resources or the things that you look at that keep you on top of this game?Hussain Almossawi: One of the things that's actually mentioned in the book, it's being a curious sponge. So just being open to everything and accepting everything. And you know, when you see things around, you look at the colors, look at the texture. When you hear conversations, get interested in things that don't really interest you.So just being a sponge and that's something that Tinker Hatfield at Nike told me. Just be a curious sponge. And that really allows you to soak things in. Then another thing is just being inspired by greatness. You know, by excellent around you. Whether it's through other artists, whether it's through sports, through books.I love reading. And reading is the number one source of being inspired. You know, it's just different kinds of information from different kinds of people. So that's another thing. And it all gets back to being a curious sponge. Whether I'm reading. Whether I'm looking at art. Whether I'm talking to people. Just being curious and interested at all times.And as kids, we were always curious, asking questions. Asking lots of amazing questions. And we saw that with Leonard de DaVinci. He always asked lots of questions in his notebooks. Why is the sky blue? What does a Woodpecker's tongue look like? But as we grow up, we kind of are taught to not ask any stupid questions and to just play it safe. And that really leads to, I'd say, taking a step back from innovation, which is unfortunate. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: It's an amazing topic. I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your insights and that. And if people are curious about where to find out more about your book and more about yourself, what's the best way to do that.Hussain Almossawi: So, the Innovator's Handbook comes out September 6th. The best way is through Instagram, through my website, LinkedIn. Yeah. Just type my name in you'll find me. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Husain, thanks again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation and appreciate your time.Hussain Almossawi: Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Doug Shapiro, VP of Research and Insights at OFS. Doug and I talk about some of the trends in office design, the importance of developing workspaces that foster creativity, and some resources that you can use to plan both your work and your home environment. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Doug Shapiro, VP of Research and Insights at OFSBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. And I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. We have another amazing guest was always. Today we have Doug Shapiro. He is the VP of Research and Insights at OFS, which is a sustainable office furniture manufacturer. And also, the host of a podcast called Imagine a Place. So welcome to the show, Doug. Doug Shapiro: Hey, thanks. Super excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you, because you know oftentimes on our show, we talk a lot about innovation and talk about product design. And I'm fascinated by your background in this idea of place design. And designing environments that can be innovative or creative and spur that. So, I wanted to have you on the show on that. I think I wanted to start with the first question, how has the idea of place and especially the workplace changed over the years that you've worked in this space? Doug Shapiro: Well, the idea of place has evolved as we've kind of taken in also new data around not just an understanding of what place does first. But even new data around how place affects us from a health standpoint. From a mental standpoint, we understand the impact of biophilia on our brains and things like that, that we really haven't understood as deeply in the past. So, there's some scientific evolution and then there's also cultural evolution of really understanding the purpose of place and what it means for our workforce. I mean, we've all kind of gone through that here recently, where it just used to be this thing you had to go to every day to get your work done.And of course, that's evolved into being much more of a, of a center for collaboration and creativity. That's the part that I'm super passionate about is how does place support creativity. So, I'd love to get into that today with you. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that. So, you know, in the past, you hear a lot about open office complex and, and this idea of collaboration and that. And you seem to have folks that really enjoy that particular way of working. And now you are seeing people, you know, working at their homes and that. What are some of the things that really make a place work for somebody? Doug Shapiro: The most important word I would say is choice. Because, you know, if you track your activities throughout a day, it's rare that you're gonna spend an entire day engaged in one part of your brain doing that same activity over and over again, right.If that's the case, you don't really need a lot of choices, but the reality is there's moments where you need peace and quiet. There are moments where you need energy. There are moments where you need to be with others. And then we also have our own neurodiversity about us. I mean, some people are very hyposensitive. And they need high energy environments. And other people are hypersensitive, and they need to be in places that are more relaxed to do their best work.So, the key is choice. I think that's the way you make environments work for people today. I'm really drawn to this evolution away from knowledge work into creative work. And I think that's a major change we're seeing in workplace today. I think it's really heavily driven by AI and the impact of AI on our jobs. So that's something I'd love to kind of get in with you and explore and see how we're moving from knowledge work to creative work. Brian Ardinger: So, tell me a little bit about what you're seeing with the clients that you're working with. And the things that you design to make it effective in that particular environment.Doug Shapiro: I think it's really, almost like a, a major cultural change to embrace maybe how far we have to go to be great at creative work. I actually, I've thought about this. Knowledge work. That phrase has been around since the fifties. Peter Drucker coined it. And what we're going through today, in fact, I heard this really cool statistic from Workplace Economic Forum, that 40% of people, office workers, feel that their jobs will become irrelevant in the next five years.That's a huge number. And so, the way I thought about looking at it is it's really not that 40% of jobs will be irrelevant, but 40% of the way you do your job right now will become irrelevant in five years. Meaning, so in, in 10 years, we're probably not going to do the jobs that we do now, the same way we do them. Right. It'll evolve. And I think AI is at the, is the undercurrent kind of shifting that. Brian Ardinger: Obviously the pandemic and, and COVID and the move to work at home has currently changed that. And I think if you would've had that question posed, you know, three years ago, how much your work would've changed. You know, most people are now very comfortable on zoom and, and all this kind of stuff. And all of that is accelerated and changed the way we work. I hear what you're saying when it comes to that, and I can see it even evolving faster over the years to come.Doug Shapiro: I agree. I think the pace will increase. So, you know, how does an environment respond to that sort of pace? Agility is, is that the key of that, you know. Investing less in physical structures that are anchored and permanent. But more in tools and structures that have the ability to keep pace with change. So, we're seeing that. We're seeing this sort of phrase soft architecture kind of emerge where people are investing in forms of separation and space creation that are more mobile and easier to manipulate. Really even from a day-to-day standpoint. So that's one way space is, is evolving. I feel like our biggest challenge is how do we get as good at creative work as we've become at knowledge work? That's the big, big shift I'm thinking about. Because I feel like our whole office system, our culture, it was based on efficiency, recording, passing, storing information. Using logic to make decisions like that was what the office culture was built on. And that is key to being great at knowledge work being great at creative work is a whole different animal and requires, I mean, it's really a sea change we're looking at. Brian Ardinger: It's interesting you phrase it that way because it very much maps to why corporates are typically not very good at innovation. You know, they've developed systems and that in place for exploitation. You know, they figured out a business model that works. They optimize for it. They hire for it. They do all that. And innovation is very much the opposite.Very much like you said, the creative side of things where you're in this exploration mode. Where you don't all have all the answers and you have to try things and experiment and fail and do things differently than you have done in the past. Are you seeing particular industries or clients or, or folks that you work with that are approaching this way and see the sea change, or what are you seeing from the, the marketplace?Doug Shapiro: What I've seen generally is an understanding that we have to be more casual in our interactions. And that's showing up in the way we're designing place too. We're bringing more humor even into the way we physically represent our company in an office. Right. And I think that casualization, that humor, has been a key evolution I've seen in, in, in some of my clients. Even the formalities of choosing workplace and the process we go through for that I think has involved HR. Where in the past HR was, you know, it was maybe more of a function of the CFO and, and the real estate. And those two parts of a company. But now they're bringing in HR. Right. And I think I've seen that evolution in clients. And I think that's really encouraging because they are understanding that this is really for people.So that's a great first step. I do think that this idea, just, we'll latch onto humor just for a second here. Yeah. I think humor is one of those elements of creativity. I mean, humor surprises and delights. Right. You know, when you laugh, it's a show of vulnerability. So, it's encouraging those around you to share ideas and open up. And I'm thinking, okay, you know, my apple watch tracks my steps. I really wish it would track laughter. Because I actually think laughter I mean, what a key indicator that would be in the workplace. If you could say how often your employees are laughing. Right. And that's a good show of health. It's a good show of culture. And I think it's a good show of a creative climate.I'm kind of looking like, all right, well, if you're tracking laughter as a key metric. Which I think is, is not just for fun sake, like that's a, I think a key indicator. How would that change the decision-making process around the office? How would it change the environment, the physical environment you. If laughter was an important metric, which I believe it is.I think it also indicates employee retention. I mean, you're 10 times more likely to stay in a job if you have friends. You're 10 times more likely to have friends if you're laughing together. I mean, it's, it's a totally different thing. I'm interested in that just as one little idea of how we have to revolutionize our thinking of what work is. And how do we make it more human.Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing examples in what you're developing or what you've seen out there in the marketplace for how to either track that, or encourage that, or infuse that level of play or creativity into a workspace.Doug Shapiro: I will say that the idea of a formal boardroom. You know, of some of the more formal spaces, even a formal reception area, right. Those are changing. In fact, you know, an idea of how we. Humanize work and workplace interactions. One representation of it is even the Green Wall. You know that the entry lobby was to create a big, open, beautiful space for people to walk in. And there was always that big green wall right behind the reception desk, and then all the work was happening behind it.And none, none of that good stuff was there. And so now, I mean, we've moved the green wall into how do we bring green into just the everyday interactions of people in the office so that's just one example of, I think how we've created more casual nature inspired environments. Which should there in turn support more creative energy and human interaction.Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into the fact, obviously corporations are now reevaluating a lot of this. How much office space they should have. This flow between work at office work at home. What are you seeing when it comes to that trend? And you know, people going back to the office what's changed. What's not going to change. And what do you see the, the future from that perspective? Doug Shapiro: Well, I think it's very personalized and nuanced based on each company. The nature of their work. You know, a lot of people were already working hybrid. It's hard to draw a conclusion that's general, right. And I think most people are feeling that right now. There was a great quote I heard on a recent workplace round table where a company was describing their policy. Which was we care, you decide. You're empowered as an employee to make the decision to do the best work. You know, to be in the place that you need to do to do the best work. But we care that that place is supporting your physical health, your mental health, and helping you be the most productive. You know, and I think that's the key is there's a lot of boxes to check, right? And to think that one place all the time is going to check all those boxes is probably unrealistic. You know, if you think you're super productive in your basement every day, you know, with no windows, you know, maybe you're going to get some work done, but eventually that's going to be draining. Right. I mean, you're going to have to go somewhere else and get some sunlight and some human interaction to be healthy. You know, just for your own sustainability as a person.So, I do think that there's a lot of variety and it's incredibly nuanced per person. I do think the culture around change is increasing dramatically though. I think companies are positioning themselves to adapt. So, we're seeing investments in technologies that allow that to happen. Investments in furniture and space that allow that to happen. Shorter leases. Things like that. Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing that, that carry over to helping employees develop and design their at home workspaces as well? Doug Shapiro: Yeah. There's been a variety of ideas around that too. You know, allowances, things like that. Again, we haven't really seen a, a whole one thing repeat itself over and over again there. The key is if you are working from home, you have to, it's not selfish of you to take ample time. And create a place that's great for you. You need to have a plant, you know, even if it's a little plant, you need to have something green in your homework space. You need to have some sunlight. If you don't have it, you got to find ways to create it. Pay attention to your lighting. You know, I think that's really key. And you got to have ergonomically correct workplaces.These aren't things that are just like, oh, well, I'll get around to it. Take an entire day, if you have to and do it. Your investment in yourself will pay it forward to your work. Brian Ardinger: So, you host a podcast called Imagine A Place where you talk to designers and developers and, and all sorts of folks in that space. What are you talking to them about? What are some of the cool trends or topics that are popping up in the podcast that you'd like to share with us? Doug Shapiro: Sure. Well, I have a personal interest around creativity. And so, I always ask for creative advice. I ask about being creative. And so, I've collected little tidbits of insights from my guests around that because they are in the design field. And creativity is a huge part of their work.And so, it's been kind of fun. And I think one of the things that consistently comes up is judgment. And how judgment is the ultimate killer of creativity. And so even when we design spaces. Is this a space that will create a sense of judgment? You know, if you, if you picture your old boardroom, it's just dripping with judgment.I was most creative when I would tell stories to my kids at night. I'd sit at the end of their bed and there was no, there was no advantage to playing it safe. You know, you were supposed to be outlandish, right? With the stories you would tell. Well, it's hard to have that same attitude in a workplace, but how do we, how do we do that?How do we get there? And so that's been a fun conversation to explore with guests. And then even like this idea of steppingstones has been a good one where I had a guest share with me that some of the, the best ideas happen when people share their bad ideas. Because it's a steppingstone to the next good idea.And so, the workplace culture that I think we try to create in the design field is one where people are psychologically safe. Where they really feel like they can share anything. And it'll maybe lead to the next big idea. Brian Ardinger: You mentioned your kids. And I was going to ask a question about how do you stay creative? I understand you wrote a children's book called The Frocks. Yes. Can you talk a little bit about that and how, how that played out in your own development of your own creativity? Doug Shapiro: Yeah, sure. I would tell these stories to my kids at night, and it was almost like a practice for me. Because you go through the day as an adult and you have so many decisions to make. You're almost forced to stay kind of left-brained through most of that day. Right. Right. And then at the end of the day, you get to sit down, and you're exhausted, and the kids ask for a story and it's like, oh gosh, you know, you're too tired. But I started to embrace it like, oh, this is like doing pushups.You know, like I'm going to do this to, to work on my creativity. And so, I would find something in the room that would inspire an idea, but then I started preparing myself. I knew I was going to have to tell this story at night. So, I would look for things during the day and thought, you know, like, well, what if that was a little more interesting or a little more magical?You know, like if I found a Firefly, how could I tell a story about a Firefly, right. And that would lead to something crazy. So that's just one example which eventually led to this book that I wrote about a kid who has got a hole in a sock, end up that there's a little animal in his sock drawer that's been eating holes in his socks, right.Right. It's cute and fun. I think one of the big things I took away as I started to understand why was I more creative at night? It wasn't just the setting. The setting was important. This idea that there's no judgment there, right? So, you can be yourself and you can say silly things, but also the time of day.So, this leads to something. If you think about like, there's that matrix of urgency and importance. And so often we're always in the urgent and important space. And then after the urgent and important space, we usually go down to things that are urgent and not important. And we don't spend enough time in the important non-urgent world.And at the end of the day, I was kind of done with my emails. You know, I kind of checked all the urgent boxes and it allowed me to be more creative. And I was thinking, you know, we don't have to wait till the end of the day when our work is done to think creatively. We just need to figure out how to shift into that non-urgent important world, on demand. And so that's what I'm trying to train my brain to do differently now is how do I get to that mindset, but do it during the day? Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Hopefully we can all find those little moments in time, whether it's running or in the shower or whatever, to prime or help us stay creative and that when it's such a changing, accelerating world that we're living in. Doug Shapiro: What is it for you? Where's your place? Brian Ardinger: I go for a walk every day with my wife, and before that was running. You know, I find different moments. It's changed over the years, obviously with COVID and that when we were kind of locked in the house that was different than, you know, the, the commute to work, where I listen to podcasts.But like you said, it's almost like you have to schedule some time to let the, the imagination go or be open to that creativity. So literally scheduling your senses. Saying, okay, this week I'm going to be focused on this. And want to, you know, explore creativity around that. Those are some things that I do. Doug Shapiro: I heard this funny quote speaking of like scheduling time, which is design and innovation is easy. You just stare at a computer screen until little drops of blood form on your forehead. Right? Exactly. And so, it is one of those things where it's like, it can't be forced. It's like a, I related it to a Chinese finger trap. You know, if you try to pull creativity out of you, right. You're just going to be stuck.So, you kind of have to find those moments where you can relax yourself into it. If you're good enough to schedule time to do it. And you're disciplined enough to say, you know, I'm going to get into that head space. I think it's very doable. Brian Ardinger: So, the last question I want to ask is for all the audience out there that maybe wants to dig into this topic a little bit more, learn a bit more about how they can develop their own office space or their home space and that. What resources, should they be following or, or places where they can go to find out more? Doug Shapiro: Well, it depends on the scale that you're looking for. You know, if you're really looking to reinvent your office, the interior design community at large is deep into this space. They're following, you know, not only the things that you might kind of classically relate to interior design, but they're also understanding the psychology of the workforce today. Some of the greatest challenges ahead, they're understanding the importance of creating agile environments and meeting business objectives. And so, I would say starting with the interior design community as, as kind of a general consultant through that process of reinventing your office is a great place to start. When it comes to the home office what I would say is that you want to build in some mobility, whether you like to stand or not having a height adjustable desk, right, is important because not all desks are the right height for you either. So it's not always just about sitting and standing. It's about finding the perfect level for you. So I would say, you know, you want to build in mobility, you want to bring in plant life, you want to bring in sunlight.And in terms of resources for you, you know, I would encourage you to stay away from the cheap stuff on Amazon or whatever it might be. Because also you want to make a decision where it's not doing harm to the environment. I think that's what's key too. This stuff will eventually, if you buy junk, it's going to end up in the landfill in five years. And it's the incredible how much furniture ends up in the landfill. And that's a big area of work for our industry is to say, how do we create things that are meaningful for decades and don't end up in the landfill. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: That's great stuff. And Doug, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation to kind of share your thoughts on this particular topic. It's fascinating and, and I think so important for folks to have in their back pocket, some of these core concepts and that. So, thank you for coming on and sharing. If people want to find out more about yourself or about OFS, what are some ways to do that? Doug Shapiro: Well, you can check out our podcast, Imagine A Place. It's on anywhere you'd find a podcast. And then we're on ofs.com, is where you can see and understand furniture. And we have a great new platform called U plus on there. So, if you look up OFS U plus, you'll find great resources on how you might think about your workplace differently. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. I'll check that out. Thanks, Doug, for coming on the show. And look forward to a continuing the conversation in the years to come. Doug Shapiro: Real honor, Brian. Thank you so much.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maddy Grant, Cofounder of Propel. Maddie and I talk about the changing dynamics of workplace culture and what companies need to be doing to navigate the new future of 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 Maddy Grant. Co-founder of PropelBrian 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 Maddie Grant. She is the Co-founder of Propel, which focuses on helping organizations prosper through cultural change. Welcome to the show Maddie. Maddie Grant: Thank you so much for having me.Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. There's a lot going on when it comes to workplace culture and the future of work. For those in our audience who may not have run into your work yet, you're also in addition to working at Propel, you're an author of several books, including Humanize, When Millennials Take Over, and I think your most recent book is The Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement. You know, this whole concept of work culture, work culture is being disrupted. You know, we hear about the great resignation or the great reassessment or the great return to work. Whatever the next great thing seems to be out there. You know, what are the biggest challenges and changes that you're seeing when it comes to the world of work? Maddie Grant: What's interesting is I've been kind of researching culture change in the workplace for quite a long time. For a couple of decades. So long before the pandemic, the workplace was changing in terms of needing to be more digital. You know, advent of social media changed a lot of stuff about managing and leading in the workplace, not just, you know, marketing and communicating with your customers.So, it all started with basically the digital age. And my particular interest is actually on organizations that need to transition from the old way to the new way. Right. So, I'm not so much about startups who could basically create their own culture from the get-go. What I'm interested in is how do you take like a hundred-year-old museum and change, you know, and get them like up to the digital age. And then the pandemic happened. Right? So, a lot of the things that I was exploring in my books and my research basically happened really quickly overnight. And the big disruptor beyond of course the pandemic itself was to me, the idea that all of a sudden there was a really good reason to change how we work. Right. Right. Because if you didn't, people might lose their lives, literally. So in that respect, you're going to go remote. Like, even if you said that you couldn't or only, you know, very special VIP people could take like one half afternoon off of work on a Friday. Well, all of a sudden everybody's working from home and oh, guess what? It's actually working pretty well. It's actually, you know, people are doing their jobs and they're, they're managing, you know, what they need to manage. And they've got kids, dogs, all the rest of it at home. So, there's all these new external factors coming into it. But the work is still getting done.Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about we're in a weird space now, because for lack of a better term, a lot of the pandemic's talk has, has gone by the wayside and people are returning to work. And you're seeing this push again to trying to go back to the old normal. What are you seeing when it comes to that push and pull and, and that desire to go back to the way things were and what's working, or what's not working when it comes to that?Maddie Grant: What we're seeing is that the people who want things to go back to the way they were, are almost always senior level people. So those are the people who got to where they are in the old system. And those are the ones who are very, very keen to go back to how it was. But like my partner Jamie Nadder likes to say the toothpaste is out of the tube now. So, there's some things that just cannot go back.So for example, saying that people can't do their work, can't achieve their goals or their project targets or whatever from home, you can't say that anymore because there's so much data that people were completely able to do that, you know, for the past two years. However, what I think is really interesting is there is actually value to coming back to the workplace. But that value, you know, everybody talks about, you know, the water cooler conversations and, and building relationships.And, you know, seeing people in person is better than online. You know, all of these kinds of things. But they're not defining why those things are important. Like why do we care about water cooler conversations? And in fact, water cooler conversations are actually not an equitable way of building relationships or coming up with random ideas that turn into that next multimillion dollar revenue source, because not everybody has access to the water cooler, right? Some people are not supposed to get up out of their desks for X number of hours. So that's just one example, but I think some of the most interesting work that we're doing right now is actually around the hybrid workplace. And so we wrote this eBook that was basically the four culture decisions that you need to consider when returning to the workplace.And the four are Customizing the Employee Experience. Like how much are you willing to customize? Second one is What is the Value of the Workplace, the physical workplace. Third one is Defining Collaboration and the fourth one is Supervision and Accountability. Like, so you know, that people have been able to achieve their work from home. So how does that change, how you supervise and hold them accountable in the future? And these four things are all very interrelated. But the idea is that really smart organizations will take this opportunity to rethink actually what's important about bringing people together. And they will redesign their workplace, for that purpose. And it could be multiple purposes. But you might have a group of people inside your organization who really need the workplace for quiet time. So, it's actually not about collaborating. It's about having time away from the dog and the three-year-old. For other people, it's about collaborating, but in larger brainstorming teams. So, you know, collaborating with people outside of your department. So not your regular work with your team but getting together with others that you don't normally get together with. Sometimes it might be actually very social. Like what if the workplace was now like the big cafeteria where people came in literally to eat and have coffee, and that's where you start to, you know, run into people randomly, that kind of thing.For all of those things, the reason it works or doesn't work is that you've defined that that is the reason you want people to be interacting in person. You know, so just having that thoughtfulness about why you care about getting people back to the workplace. It's not just to sit in a cubicle and be on your laptop on Zoom. Right. But now possibly with a mask on depending where you live. That doesn't make sense to anybody. And it doesn't make sense, and a lot of C-suite people will see this very quickly if they don't already, to drive like an hour into town for your meeting and then lose another hour, getting back home to get back on Zoom for your other meetings. It's so inefficient compared to what it used to be. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about, I've had a conversation with a lot of companies and some of the challenges revolve around existing managers, not having the tools, resources, or training to really know how to interact or deal with remote employees. Again, a lot of people were just dumped into this and were never given an opportunity to learn new ways of connecting and communicating and collaborating in a remote kind of environment. Do you have any tips or tricks or things that you've seen that can help manage that transition better? Maddie Grant: There's technologies available for all of the above. Two minutes on Google and you can find tools and platforms for online meetings and for all kinds of different whiteboards and you know, whatever your needs might be. So it's not the technology, that's the issue. I think it literally just goes back to really defining why are you meeting. For what purpose is each meeting. And what are the different formats that they need to be. And how do you build relationships throughout the year through these different kind of connection points. And when is it better for it to be a one-on-one meeting versus a group? And when do you have your camera on or your camera off? Right? These are all very nuanced things and they're all culture things. But once you sit down to really just audit all of the meetings that you do and really define which kinds of meetings are for what purpose that enables all kinds of people, both on the management side and, you know, the individual practitioner side, contributor side, to really, you know, be on the same page about what these meetings are for.Brian Ardinger: Have you seen any examples of companies doing this well and, or different ways that if I'm thinking about this, should this be top ground driven, thinking about like how do we actually calculate the meetings and figure this out. Should be done from the bottom-up team by team? What are some of the best practices you've seen out there?Maddie Grant: I don't believe in best practices. I am a culture person who believes that every organization has the right culture for them. And that may be very different than for your competitor who does exactly the same work in the same market. But it's just a different company. So, for me, it's about that blueprint that works for you as an organization. The ability to define what the guidelines are for you.And this is going back to what I was saying about defining collaboration, for example. You know, if you really understand as a company, why you want people to get together and have kind of a guiding principle that literally writes out, you know, we value collaboration because X, Y, Z, then those kinds of statements, which is similar to core values, right, but they're just a bit more granular. But the point of them is that anybody in the company should be able to get behind that and to understand it, no matter where sit. So, yes, it's top down. And yes, it's bottom up. Like it's got to go both ways. I will say it will not work if it's only bottom up. Like the power of the CEO, you know, no matter what the CEO might say, the core values are, or the culture is if their actions don't match with other words, they can destroy a culture really easily. But they can also really set the tone. And they have a lot of power to model the behavior that they're looking for. And I think the really fascinating thing about this whole great reshuffling is that there are people out there who fit every kind of culture. So, for example, we were talking to a lobbying firm. They need people, their lobbyists to be in person, because they go and meet with politicians. And if there's three people on zoom and three people in the room with the politician, you know, guess who's going to get the most attention. They just cannot do their jobs equally well on Zoom versus not.So, for a company like that, then yes, they have a really good reason for wanting everybody to be in the office. I don't at all believe that everybody should be remote or anything like that. But the idea is just to really kind of understand and specifically define what those guiding principles are. You know, we do our work better because X. Brian Ardinger: Tactically, how do you start breaking that apart? Is this something that the C-suite should sit down and think through this. Should every team be thinking through and mapping this out on a board saying here's how we work best together. And here are the rules of engagement. And talk to me, tactically, how that can be done. Maddie Grant: The simplest way to start is with a culture assessment. It'll just help you break down into categories the, the different topics for discussion. And any culture assessment will do. Obviously, we created one that I like the best, but whatever. The point is just starting the conversation. But just as an example, our assessment measures things like agility and innovation and inclusion, transparency, collaboration, solutions which is like employee focus versus customer focus. And a couple more. So, there's eight markers and they're pretty legit from the standpoint of eight big topic areas that you can talk about. And when you start having those conversations and it is literally what you just said, like, how do we do innovation here, for example. What we've seen in our data is some really, really fascinating results. So, for innovation, I have to tell you this one, because of this podcast topic. For innovation, there's what we call a culture pattern, which appears across many, many different companies. It is where the scores for the concepts of innovation, so things like creativity, passion, and purpose, like learning, you know, ability to bring in resources for learning.All these kinds of things tend to score high. But the structural pieces of innovation tend to score low. So, these are things like risk taking, experimentation, right? So, it's like, we like to talk about innovation, right. But we don't necessarily have the structures in place in our company where it's okay to innovate. And to take risks. And to measure.We're not measuring the experiments that we're trying. So that's a pattern that comes out in this kind of data that you can immediately start to fix. If your goal is to be much more innovative as an organization, literally the data tells you every single department needs to have a way to measure how many experiments per month you're doing. And not just the results, but how many you tried. Like the failures are as important as the ones that worked, because if you're not failing enough, with trying things then you're not trying enough things. Brian Ardinger: Yes. Great insight there. And I think that's very true. I think a lot of companies have a lot of innovation theater where they like to think they're innovative, but when it comes down to like you said, the actions don't necessarily match up with the reality of that.All these changes are obviously affecting every company out there. And this war for talent is becoming now global. Used to be where you could find your talent in your backyard. And now everybody's competing for every job around the world. What can companies do to better position themselves for attracting and finding the best talent today?Maddie Grant: Yeah. So, I think that your differentiator is your culture. And of course, I'm a culture consultant. So, culture hammer, everything is a culture nail, right. But I do think there's a great lack of good description of what your culture is. Like good authentic description. And for every company that is losing people because of whatever their culture is, there are other people leaving cultures that are the opposite because there's so many different companies with different cultures. Being able to really accurately describe what it is, what it feels like to work there. You know, how people collaborate there. How much people are expected to integrate their external life into the workplace. You're a startup and you want people to live and breathe the startup life. Cool. If, if I'm, you know, 25 and my parents pay my rent. Like, yay, I'll go do that. But I'm 50. Can't do that anymore. But the point is there are people out there that will actually gravitate to your culture no matter what it is. So being able to really understand it and describe it to me is the key. Absolute key. And all the rest of it falls to the wayside. The salaries, benefits, all that stuff is almost irrelevant to me. Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about how you customize the employee experience for employees to do their best work. Can you talk a little bit more about how do you customize an employee experience? Maddie Grant: Yeah. So just an example, based on what we've been talking about, the whole, you know, remote working. So, we worked with a group that owns their own building, a beautiful building. So of course, they were very insistent on trying to get everybody back in. And what they did was they said, okay, everybody needs to come in twice a week. And then each department gets to pick which two days. Like that sounds fabulous.Okay, cool. But in actual fact, within every department, there are people who want to come in five days to get the quiet or to, you know, because they miss everybody. There are people who want to come in, never like you couldn't pay me enough to come back in because I do my work really well from home.And then there's a lot of people somewhere in the middle, like, I'll come in two days, if you want, but I really don't want to come in Mondays or Fridays. Right. But now everybody comes in Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays. So the traffic is absolutely horrible. So, you know what, actually I'd rather work from home.So, you know, if you get down to like the people's real lives, it's about the ability to really kind of gather everybody together. And balance a collective need or an organizational need for, in person collaboration with individual needs. People who want to be in all the time are out all the time or somewhere in the middle. You know, some people moved away and so they can't actually come in. Right. That's definitely happened a lot. The idea of customizing, it's all about the best way to do your best work. And so literally just asking the question of everybody, of how they best prefer to work. But it's also not just, we're trying to appeal to everybody's individual needs. There's also an organizational piece to it.And if we've defined, you know, that collaboration is important to this organization because it helps us build relationships long term, which helps us do better work you know, in these other ways, you have to get all those inputs and then design the experience of your employees in a way that balances both. Like you'll never please, everybody. That's not what you're trying to do.Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It's very much mosaic that you have to put together to make it look good on all fronts. Both for the employee and for the company itself. Maddie Grant: It might also really change your ultimate plan. So, this organization we worked with, they wanted everybody in two days a week, but it turns out that what they really, really wanted was those opportunities to build relationships and to run into people. Brian Ardinger: Right. So, can you do that in other ways? Maddie Grant: Right. Having random people in two days a week was actually not the way to do it. Instead, it was having everybody in for like a social day. Yeah. Like twice a month. And that they would bring in food trucks and they would bring in maybe a speaker or two and have some activities. But also just have some open time where people could just hang out.For More InformationBrian Ardinger: It's definitely a fascinating topic. If people want to find out more about yourself or the books or the company, what's the best way to do that?Maddie Grant: Yeah. So, my company's called Propel. The URL is propelnow.co. And all my books are on Amazon. So, When Millennials Take Over is probably the easiest one to Google for.Brian Ardinger: Well, Maddie, I really do appreciate your time coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your insights on the world of work. I'm sure we'll have you back on because the world is changing quite fast. Maddie Grant: Thank you so much for having me. Brian Ardinger: Thank you very much.That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Clive Chang, Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center. Clive and I talk about the intersection of arts and innovation and how people in organizations can embrace new ideas, experiments, and new audiences to create new opportunities and experiences. 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 Clive Chang, Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln CenterBrian 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 Clive Chang. Clive is the Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center, which is the world's largest and best-known cultural venue in the world. Housing things like the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, American ballet Theater, and the list goes on and on and on. So, Clive thank you for coming on the show. Clive Chang: Thanks so much for having me great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm so excited to have you on this show because the arts and innovation are not a topic that's often covered. And you've got such an interesting background and, and role when it comes to this space. From my understanding your background, you're a musician, you're a composer, you're a businessperson. You used to work at Disney, and now you lead Lincoln Center's innovation efforts. How did you get interested in this innovation space and helping companies and organizations innovate better? Clive Chang: Thanks for asking. You know, I am a classically trained musician. I come from a long history of being an artist. And I also come from sort of a multitude of different forces and influences in my life. One of them being strict Asian parents, who forbade me from studying music in college for fear that it would never lead me to a fruitful career. And so, I was also rooted in very practical sort of traditions growing up.And really serendipitously found this intersection of business and art through pursuing studies in both fields. I will say also that as I was in my formative years and college and shortly thereafter, I was also seeing a lot of arts institutions financially flailing, right? Orchestras going bankrupt, et cetera. So that really piqued my interest. And I saw this opportunity that somebody who was trained from the ground up both on the creative side and on the business side could really fill for the world. And that was really helping creative and artistic organizations thrive. And I sort of found that niche quite early on and fueled my further training onward to really pursue that.And innovation, I think really is something opportunistic that I ran into. Right. And you don't get very many nonprofit art CEOs that say outwardly that innovation is their top priority. Right. And so, coming across Henry Timms, his appointment and his not only external commitment to innovation, but also his track record of having done it in the sector prior to coming to Lincoln Center was just too good to be true. And so, I very happily came on and have been really enjoying working with him to really reimagine some things in the sector. Brian Ardinger: It is pretty interesting when you think about artists and creatives, you automatically think of them as innovative type of spirits. Where, you know, they're constantly doing new and interesting kind of things, but oftentimes that doesn't seem to apply to the organizations themselves.Most arts organizations have been around for, you know, years or even centuries with similar business models and similar ways of displaying the arts and that. Why is it so important for institutions to level up today and think more about innovation as a core competency? Clive Chang: Yeah, you are so right. It's almost astounding that organizations that house so many brilliant creative outside of the box talents fail to really make full use of them in an institutional and organizational context.I would consider organizations like Lincoln Center legacy institutions. And while Lincoln Center is only about 60 years old, a lot of the art that's presented on this campus is centuries old, right? Very much rooted in tradition. And I think that's probably one keyword that ends up being a bit of a fallback or a crutch, that many arts organizations use, especially ones that present classical art.I always joke that the performing arts are one of the very, very few things in the world that we still as humans experience in the exact same way as we did like 200 years ago. Right. How many things in the world, can you say that about? When you think about it, we still file into a specific venue on a specific date. At a specific time. We sit for two hours, three hours, four hours. I mean, in the case of opera, it could be, you know, eight, 8 million hours. We passively watch other humans perform. We clap. We exit. The only difference today is we turn off our cell phones. Right? Because we have cell phones. So, another force I think that makes it important for us to really lean into the idea of innovating is that we're cyclical.The typical performing arts company operates in this sort of annual seasonal cycle, right? So, you have a typical fall season. You have a spring season. In our case at Lincoln Center, we have a robust summer season, where we take advantage of warm weather and we take advantage of one of our greatest assets, which is outdoor space. Which not everyone in Manhattan has obviously.So, being able to really take advantage of that, but the problem with the tradition and the annual cycles put together is that if we don't execute with the intention of breaking out of the tradition in the cycles, it just leads to same old, same old, same old, right. And that's the kind of, I think unintended inertia that really takes hold in legacy organizations, especially in the performing arts field like ours, if we don't actively push back against it and continuously challenge it. Right.Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things that may have happened, obviously over the last couple years with the pandemic, it's forced a lot of these organizations to rethink not only in the arts, but everywhere. But so, talk a little bit about how the pandemic and made Lincoln Center adapt or think differently about what they do.Clive Chang: Right. Sometimes it does take an inciting incident, right? Or like this moment of crisis, like COVID 19 to rattle us and create that urgency to really approach things differently. In our case, I would actually frame it as to encourage us to accelerate the change. And I say that because Henry Timms, who took the reins in 2019, the year before the pandemic, you know, was very clear about innovation and institutional change as key priorities when he set his vision coming in. But you're right. What drew me back to Lincoln Center, I rejoined. I was here a decade ago and came back a month into the lockdown. And like, it's kind of an odd time to jump right back into an institution where theoretically all the venues and the stages have just shuttered. Right. But it was really, to have that opportunity to capitalize on this moment, where we essentially were freed from all the shackles of tradition or the annual cycle you couldn't perform anyway. Nobody knew how things would play out. There were no rules anymore. You could sort of wipe it clean. And so, the opportunity to jump back in to help reimagine is really, really powerful. And when I say reimagine, I think about things like reimagine whose voices we present on our stages. Whether they're physical stages of digital stages, right? What audiences we'd like to reach and on through what channels and what platforms. I do think I would dare say if our sector had to been more innovative and imaginative in the years leading up, we might have found ourselves in a better fortified state for the moment when COVID 19 hit. Right. But for the most part, performing arts organizations kind of shut down, hunkered down and waited out the storm. And one of the things we did was really take advantage of that time and try to build some new things and invest in some experimentation. And I fear that not enough organizations in our sector actually took advantage of that time and space to reflect and reset and reimagine.Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about some of those initiatives that were reimagined coming out of the pandemic. I know you have some interesting things around The Green, and can you talk about that? And some of the other initiatives that came place. Clive Chang: I might even start with one that's sort of less obvious and less sort of visible on our campus. One real marquee initiative that we're very proud of in the pandemic era, is one that you might not immediately think about when you think about arts and innovation, right. I think a lot of people's minds go to technology and how technology helps fuel the arts. But one shared challenge that we all have in the nonprofit arts industry, and maybe not just arts industry, just nonprofits in general is that we are all looking for younger, more diverse board members. And we spend a lot of time bemoaning the fact that very few such people actually ever come our way. And you know, our boards will never be diverse. We'll never get young people.And for us, we just sort of flipped it around and said, okay. So, if they're not coming to us, how do we go out and look for these young diverse people? Right. And that's what led to this wonderful program called Lincoln Center Leadership Fellows. And in that program, we just go out and actively seek out the next generation of civic leaders and philanthropists.Our internal frame for this is they are stars today and they're superstars tomorrow. These are the folks that in three to five years, every board in town will be knocking on their doors. Right? Right. But we went out. We found them first. We brought them in. We created a supercharged two-year program that gives them an accelerated bootcamp of what it means to serve as an active and engaged and contributing board member of a major cultural institution.And at the end of these two years, they quote unquote, graduate onto one of the boards on the Lincoln Center Campus or better yet they go off and they join another cultural and nonprofit board in New York City or beyond. And create impact there. It's so funny because the innovation here, I don't think of as so much of as the program itself or even of the execution of the program, but it's actually the longstanding impact that we hope this program creates right. Over time, if you imagine multiple cycles of this program going on, we're talking about radically changing the critical mass of who serves on the governing bodies. The most significant mission driven organizations of our country. And ultimately hoping that that governing body also trickles down into a way, into how executive leadership manifests and how then staff level will manifest. And then ultimately how everyone who's working on the programs and the delivery of those programs will change over time. And it becomes this wonderful cycle. Brian Ardinger: So as a person in the midst, trying to make these changes within an organization, what are some of the, either roadblocks or challenges that you hit and then what are some of the things that you did to kind of overcome the traditional things that you were talking about?Clive Chang: I've been reflecting on like how we actually do this and how you create the conditions to actually help it thrive. You know, at the risk of overly simplifying it. I actually don't think it's that complicated. I think that in general, most organizations, and leaders I think, would like to think of themselves as very open to the possibility of re-imagination.And that's about where it ends. And the difference I think here is we are actively searching for opportunities and we're actively trying to connect to those opportunities to our existing work. And potentially also newfound work, instead of just passively sitting back and waiting for it to happen.Another challenge I think is really making space and resource and safety for experimentation. Which I do think potentially nonprofit organizations have a bit of an aversion to, because of the way our operating model works. Right. Your in a nonprofit. You work very hard every year to just balance your budget, which means you have to raise enough revenue to cover all of your operating expenses.It's just so much harder to prove out the impact metrics of experiments with unknown outcomes, right than pure program deployment, where you can say, and this will lead to X many more diverse young students being able to learn math or whatever. It's for both organizations and for funders who fund nonprofits. I think it's also about making room for such experiments and embracing the spirit of experimentation. In a smart way. Right? As long as it, these don't have catastrophic implications to the organization, if they require 2, 3 versions of, of iteration. Brian Ardinger: Do you have any experience with having these conversations on the donor side and getting donors more open to this concept of experimentation and not knowing exactly the outcomes of the work that the foundation or the organization is doing? Do you have any examples or ways to bring a donor class, I guess, along this journey? Clive Chang: Absolutely. I have been so pleasantly surprised at how receptive and inspired donors are to the idea of creating R and D capacity in a field like the performing arts. You know, I think you do have to approach it with a level of rigor and research.We scan to the field when the pandemic took hold and really got a lot of data points of validation, right. That one thing that consistently is lacking in the performing arts field is any space for R and D. Like, it just doesn't exist. We're all busy planning the next season. And nobody has time or energy or money to think about creating space for experiments.And so, I think carefully crafting, you know, the case for, for what, what wide ranging and long term impact, not only for the organization, but for the field at large. And that is a role we take very seriously at Lincoln Center, as sort of the self-professed leader in this field, right. It's on us to help create some new models that ultimately can be scaled and can sort of help the sector at large to grow.And so, especially the big foundations out there right now, the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation are really, really supportive and enthusiastic about this kind of work in particular. Especially against the backdrop of the pandemic and what the havoc that it reeked on the performing arts sector. And so, thinking about it as investments in fortifying for the future, you know, funders have more imagination than you would think.Brian Ardinger: And that's great to hear because, you know, again, oftentimes you think about the creative class and, and what's going on from that perspective. And you like to think that the organizations around that could keep up as well. You mentioned technology as one of the things that people think of when they think about innovation. What are some of maybe the resources or tools or technologies that you've seen or used that have changed the game in this space? Clive Chang: Yeah, surprisingly, it's actually not as much technology. I think technology will always be a part of the conversation in some ways I think of it as maybe even less of a tool and more of a lubricant, right.The innovation comes in the conceptual ideas. And then, you know, much like celery is the delivery mechanism for peanut butter, like technology, you know, is that sort of the instrument of delivery. It's always at play, but I think too often we think about arts and innovation and technology always being the answer. Well, that's just the delivery mechanism, right. Like, well, what's the idea. One tool that has proven surprisingly helpful is really convening. And we did a lot of that in, in the couple of years of the pandemic. Not that the pandemic is over or anything, but we invested quite a bit in bringing together creators and perspectives and that otherwise may not have the opportunity to intersect, right.So, this is actually a perfect moment to sort of go to how The Green actually came to be. Right. So, if we rewind to the beginning of 2021. So, this is pre-vaccine. It's like cold and dark out. Everyone's like, oh my god, give us the warm weather again. We took a hard look and said, what does the world really need right now?And then of course you map that against one of our greatest assets, which is 16 acres of space. A lot of which is usable outdoor space. That was the moment where we really doubled down on our role as a civic pillar of New York City and opened up that space to the city and to the community. And that's what gave birth to Restart Stages, which was our huge outdoor performing arts center that we built 10 different venues, performance spaces, rehearsal spaces, studio spaces.We had this wonderful outdoor reading room. We cast a call out across the five boroughs of New York city, asking all community partners who didn't have space to come and perform. Curate a night, present a night, just come use this infrastructure. And one of the key things to solve in that equation was if you know Lincoln Center, you probably know the iconic center piece that is the main plaza. It's called Josie Robertson Plaza with a gorgeous fountain at the center. It is absolutely beautiful, but it's also generally a pretty transient space. You know, you come, you take a selfie with the fountain, then you go off inside to your performance, wherever you're going. So, the exercise here was how do we find a way to create a whole radical welcome, right?Something that's very different. Some mechanism to welcome people to this campus in any way. And that's when we convened and we thought, you know what, let's not try to solve this ourselves. So, we brought together a group of just thinkers, right? Urban planners, architects, community, activists, designers, et cetera, to help us reimagine what the space would be.And one really simple idea that a set designer came up with, ended up being the game changer, right? She literally, she just said, what if we laid grass out. We just laid grass out on Plaza. And from there, this beautiful artistic installation called The Green was born. And of course, this just not just any old designer. This is the genius that is Mimi Lien. She is a MacArthur Genius. She's a Tony award-winning set designer. Right? So, you know, no schmuck, right. So of course, she ended up creating the most beautiful and also sustainable artistic installation that became the centerpiece of our Plaza. It was biodegradable, soy based artificial turf. And she created this just beautiful grassy oasis. And over the summer, a quarter million people came, with their dogs. With their kids. And they experienced Lincoln Center in a brand-new way. Talk about impact metrics. We did exit polling on The Green. Nearly a quarter of the people who visited The Green were first time visitors at the Lincoln Center.And there's the proof is in the pudding, right? Like you talk about attracting new audiences. You create a radically new context for them to do it. And here you go, through that serendipity, you end up getting a beautiful idea, like The Green, that really changed the game. And so that's just one example of how we've used convening, across a variety of context, to help stoke new energy and ideas.If you sort of lift out from that a little bit. Mimi Lien is actually part of a collective. So, talk about R and D. One of the things that we stealth mode did during the pandemic was launch the pilot of a lab, an R and D lab. So, it was premised on this concept of bringing together interdisciplinary minds without real definition of what they were meant to create.It was come and collide with each other. And that's this lab is actually called the Collider. Collide and make some beautiful magic happen. And so, you have in this pilot program, you have a Mimi Lien the set designer colliding with an opera singer, with a science educator, with a disabilities advocate. And the list kind of goes on. And this is a program that we're continuing to refine, but we really actually believe in the power of that R and D infrastructure to ultimately help answer some of the trickiest questions that we're asking ourselves now. Brian Ardinger: Well, I love that concept because it allows for the ability to create these steppingstones to whatever that next thing is. And you don't know exactly. You can't say it, we want to go to this spot out there in the future. We generally want to go in that direction, but we don't know how to get there. So, putting the, like you said, the smart artists, people things to have those conversations and create new stepping stones that could be built off of and, and move forward. Quite interesting and quite fascinating. So, I'm excited to see where it goes. The last question I want to ask you is where do you go for new ideas and inspiration? Clive Chang: Oh, what a great question. I turn to others really. Right. I do think it's one of those misconception that innovation and new ideas sort of come from a little corner of an organization where the people who are supposed to be doing it, come up with brilliant new ideas.The magic actually lies in casting a wide enough radar, right. To be able to have a multiplicity of perspectives and ideas come in. I do think having a little bit of a sorting mechanism and a prioritization mechanism probably is important, especially in organizational context, like this one. But look, many of my greatest inspirations sort of come in the middle of doing something completely unrelated.Right. It's, you know, I'm a composer and pianist. So, I spend a lot of time sitting at my piano and sometimes it's deep in concentration reading a score for a first time. But it's sort of in the periphery that something will strike. Right. A lot of people say they find their best ideas when they run. Right. When they're out for a job, right. You know, I spend a lot of time active and so, having sort of a decompressing time to really not be in full on thinking mode and relaxing oneself of that pressure is often when those greatest inspirations come. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: That's quite helpful. I think a lot of people think that they can manifest innovation or manifest the next thing by thinking harder. And that's not always the. I really want to thank you for coming on the show. It's been fantastic and a fascinating discussion about some of the new things that you're seeing and that. If people want to find out more about yourself or about Lincoln Center, what's the best way to do that? Clive Chang: Yes, please go on LincolnCenter.org. Please follow us on all the socials. And of course, if you have the chance to be in New York City, please come visit us on campus. Especially during the summer. This summer we have over 300 performances events all happening as part of our Summer for the City Initiative. There is a giant 1300-pound disco ball currently suspended above the fountain. It's on a dance floor that we're calling The Oasis. So please, if you are within proximity, we would love to have you dancing and celebrating with us. Brian Ardinger: That's awesome. Well, Clive thank you again for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.Clive Chang: Thank you so much, Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

In honor of our upcoming IO2022 Innovation Accelerated Summit, which is happening September 19th and 20th in Lincoln Nebraska, thought it'd be nice to pull some of the best interviews and sessions from our IO2020 Virtual Event. So, over the next few weeks, check out some of our amazing speakers and grab a ticket for the upcoming event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets and more information can be found IO2022.com. And now back to the show. 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 Karen Holst, Author of Start WithinBrian Ardinger: Karen Holst is the Author of Start Within. Karen and I met a couple months ago. Probably in mid pandemic. She had me on her show. She has a LinkedIn show that she hosts and you're always bringing on some amazing guests. I had a great opportunity to talk to her and talk about what's going on in innovation and entrepreneurship, and this intersection between corporate and startups and such. I'll turn it over to Karen to talk a little bit more. Karen Holst: Great. Thank you. I am coming in from New Zealand. I originally was in San Francisco and then moved to Montreal for a couple years and still had San Francisco based work. So, I never really changed my profile in LinkedIn. It was very confusing. I had these, this double life going on, where I was spending half my year in California and half in Montreal. And then had the opportunity to come to Auckland and, and it's been an adventure, especially given the, the time that we're in right now.So, thank you for joining and I appreciate everyone sharing why they're joining here today. And I, I will tell you what I get excited about when it comes to innovation. It is unlocking people and doing this work and oftentimes that can be myself when I feel blocked up or maybe a little over my head in what I'm trying to do. Or it might be the team members and the people I'm consulting and bringing along and doing this work. So that's what I'm here to talk about today. Quick introduction on myself. My background, I had started a company after acquisition. I joined the California Department of Education and had this moment of what does it mean to innovate in a large organization, a state agency, no matter. And that being very different and that leading to writing the book. I joined IDEO and I also teach through LinkedIn learning. So that's the quick and dirty on me. I want to share a quick story on the importance of being bold and what it means to innovate and be the person that's igniting that in others. And this goes back to my ed tech startup. I was a co-founder in my early twenties and definitely feeling a little over my head.We were going after another round of funding. And I really needed to catalyze teams to think differently and start solving new challenges. And I had reached out to a woman that I, I didn't know, but she was someone I really respected in the corporate world and had grown businesses. She was gracious enough to give me 15 minutes of her time.And I sat down with her in a video call and said, explain where I was coming from and wanting to, you know, ignite passion and innovation in others. And what advice did she have for me in leading those teams? And she shared out of the gate, she said, don't bake goods and bring them into the office. You'll be seen as the mother caretaker, you know, the baker instead of the leader. And I was floored by that response. One, I'm not a baker. I would not put anyone into the, the task of trying to eat something that I make. I, I can do maybe a simple cake with a mix and cookies. But that is not something I would pride and force on my colleagues.But what I took out of that comment was, you know, assimilate. Fit in. And I looked around and I had, you know, an all-male board from our investment. And we were still looking to diversify our team and hadn't quite landed on how to do that. And so, I did slip a bit in my, what I think was my superpowers and being myself.And that is one of the takeaways is, you know, being yourself and acknowledging your strengths is a big part of this work and innovating. And also doing that with others when you're leading others. So, to be yourself with the caveat of, but better. And I think what all of this leads to is whether you're the optimistic yaysayer and that's me, or the kind of cross your arm, realistic, you know, pointing and poking holes at problems. All of those are great perspectives to have. It's trying to find that balance. And it's in yourself, it's in the teams that you lead. It's how your organization culture is built. All very important. And what it boils down to is being hard on the ideas and soft on people. So not focusing in on, you know, the person that's sharing the idea or talking about it, but really about the, the thing that's being said.And I really want to go deeper in that today. We have such a short amount of time. I'm going to go quickly. Please feel free to ask questions throughout. I can't see them. So, Brian, if you can let me know of any come in, I can slow down. I'll just kick off with, Start Within framework. And that's the book that I co-authored.And then we'll talk about the assumptions and mindsets about, around this work and go into two exercises that come from the book that you can use in your own work. Or you can take the teams. And then finish up with questions, of course. Where the book came from was again, when I had gone from my startup, I was hired within the California Department of Education to be entrepreneurial, but what that means within a larger state agency is very different. We obviously had lots of government funds and policies to work through and to be responsible around. But also needed to move quickly. It was all about bringing technology into the classroom. So that has to move quickly, but also responsibly.And it's also bringing in different ways of thinking. I was looking around for tools to do that. And there's so much amazing work out there on the culture of innovation and what leaders can do. But when you're a doer and you're tactically doing this work, I felt that there was an opportunity for Start Within in writing something about how to launch ideas within a big organization.So that's where it was born. It was focusing in on these doers. And I, I think so much about innovation is around this word that can feel very exclusive. But the people that are doing this work they're innovators. They're close to the problems that are plaguing the company, the customers, the employees. They see the problems and want to fix them.So, they're not just sitting back and saying, that's a problem for someone else. They're ready to take, you know, action. And they want to make things happen. In addition to that, the challenges, the tension is between getting them from that idea to actually seeing it through. That the organization that they work within there's often bias towards doing things the same. Even when we say we want to do, you know, innovate and do things differently, we just have this inclination to go back to, you know, status quo.There's also this amount of work outside of, you know, this idea. It's our day job, but we are hired to do our real responsibilities. And so that can feel overwhelming to try to juggle all of that. And then finally the tools and resources, the tactical support in making this happen. So again, this is where the framework for Start With and kind of was born from. The book is written around having models to identify the viable opportunities, the exercises to unlock creative problem solving. So, each chapter has an exercise that you can do solo, or you can take back to a team and do together. Thinking about the process and, you know, launching an idea with an organization and what that means. And then the strategies to come, overcome the, the obstacles and the roadblocks that come along the way.So, the three phases of Start Within starts with getting ready, then goes into getting set, and go. Briefly covering that, getting ready is all about identifying if your idea is ready to pursue. The assumptions and mindsets and the biases that we have around our idea that might get in the way. And then getting yourself and your idea organized so that when you're moving forward, you have the right things in place.The second section has the chapters around evaluating your organizational's readiness. Building your idea around the processes in place and finding opportunities for, for new ways of thinking. And then aligning to the organizational strategies and finding the people, you know, the stakeholder buy-in along the way.Finally, we finish up with go, and that is building your prototypes. Experimenting your way forward. How to turn a no into a yes, which we're going to cover one exercise today. And then forming and supporting, support as you go and launching your idea. Today, we're going to cover something from Chapter Two, Section One, Assumptions and Mindsets. And then something from Section Three, Turning a No into a Yes.I quickly want to talk about an example of the importance of getting past assumptions and biases. So, in 1997, crash test dummy was kind of the official way that in the United States, we were testing the airbags and effectiveness of, you know, safety belts. And these dummies were built in the seventies by an all-male engineering team.And what we are finding today is that crashes are, are more likely to impact women, children, people of different sizes than these dummies that were built. And they were really reflective of the all-male American engineering team that built them. You know, they didn't take into account all the different sizes and body parts that we have as humans.The data today from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, females wearing a seatbelt are 17% more likely to be killed when in a frontal car crash than a male. And then there's also a 2019 study from the University of Virginia that the odds of a female occupant being injured in a frontal car crash is 73% greater than the odds of a male occupant.So, all of this was, you know, the crash test dummies were really built to prevent injuries and make the safest cars on the market. But there were assumptions and biases built in them as, you know, humans and making them reflect what they look like versus what, you know, the variety we have in riding and driving cars.In the book, we talk about the layers of assumptions. I'm not going to go deep in them here, but it does start with ourselves, our background, and then goes out into the world that we are surrounded by. And all of this is part of when you recognize these layers and start to peel them back, you get closer to understanding what's blocking great ideas from becoming truly innovative and just being more of the same and incremental changes.The first exercise we're going to go through is debunk the truth. And again, this is something you can do yourself. So, if you have an idea, a, you know, problem you want to solve, you can do this solo. But I think it's far better when you can find a partner and think about it out loud or better when you're leading teams through this work as well.So, the Debunk the Truth exercise is really about you have an idea you're ready to go forward, or you have a problem that you think you've landed on, and before you move on, just pause and say, is what my assumptions and biases that are built into this idea this problem that I'm trying to solve. Actually, taking an account everything. The steps that you go through, there's five steps and it's deceptively simple. You start by listing out the self-evidence statements. Then you're taking out anything that is irrefutable fact. By the way, we're going to go through an example of this. Next to that you're putting the opposition statements. So, this must be true. Then you're giving the statement an opposition. From that point, you reflect on what activities you can do to test and then you're prioritizing them. So, this will all make sense as we walk through it. To think about this, I just challenge you to think about what problems, what ideas are you trying to solve for right now. And that can be in building your business. That can be in specific to a product or service. But if you think about a specific idea or problem, it could be across the spectrum in this phase that you're trying to solve for. Then as I go through these steps, you can think about the steps and how it relates to your work. Now we're going to go through the Debunk the Truth. So, the first step is listing out self-evidence statements about your idea. And this is really easy to do as a consultant or someone outside of the problem, because you can really poke holes. When you're in it, and you're stuck and saying it the same way over and over. But, you know, on a post-it note, you would capture self-evidence statements. About your idea. And each post-it note would be its own statement. For the purpose of this exercise. The idea that I'm going to focus in on was one that I had done with a, a large software company and it was around automation. You know that they're going to move forward on some innovation that would help automate and change their way of thinking. And way of working within the, the company. That would be the idea. The problem that they're trying to solve for. And thinking about the self-evidence statements, some of the ones that we captured were automation will save time. You know, that's an obvious one. Automation will save money. In other words, automation will improve employee morale. You know, there was a lot of work that was being redundant, and these employees could be better using their time elsewhere. And that cost reduction is a business priority.So, we captured lots and lots and lots. I mean, these are just for examples. We didn't just spend a couple minutes thinking about it. We really started to go deeper. And when people would talk generically, you know, trying to get more specific or if they got very specific, trying to get more generic, we're just pulling at this in different directions so we can get as much self-evident statements about that idea of improving automation.This step that is Remove Irrefutable Facts. Most of what you say will not be removed. I mean, we're trying to debunk the truth. So, if you believe everything to be true, it'd be, it's an urge to say, well, these are all irrefutable. But one that we did, you know, cross off in this example was cost reduction is a business priority.The CEO had clearly articulated that it was within all the KPIs and OKRs, and that is not something that we needed to debunk. It is a business priority. So, cost reduction is a business priority, we can take that off. And the rest of these, we kept up there as things to, you know, statements of opposition. That's the second step. The third step is for each of these truths, creating a statement and opposition. So, the thing that makes the opposite, the self-evidence statement here on the left automation will save time. The opposition statement is automation requires time. Self-evidence statement automation will save money. Opposition statement, it will cost money again. To create is one and to maintain is another. Or automation will improve employee morale. Automation may create fear for employees, job loss. So, we went through each one of these statements in opposition and created truth. And created the opposition statement. And when you present this with the team and explain that we're going to do the Statements of Opposition, as humans we immediately want to jump to this step. So we'll say, well, automation saves time, and then we'll immediately want to say, well, that could be, you know, actually the hope is that you could stay in the positive moment and capture as many of those, and then go to the statements of opposition. Rather than doing them concurrently.There's something about the brain that when you focus on the positive truths and then flip it, you get more creative and more insights. The next step is taking these statements of opposition and saying, okay, this is a new insight. Maybe there's more to learn here. And once you're identifying them, putting the activities that you could do to go after.So again, on the left, you have the opposition statements and on the right, you're seeing what were some of the activities that came from that, that we can find more learning to either prove the truth or disprove it. So, on the left automation requires time to create and maintain. Well, maybe we need to investigate frameworks that make automation more simple. Or automation will cost money to create and maintain. What's the breakeven analysis that we need to do? You know, one of the things that came out of that and the opportunities for learning was the team stepping back and saying, actually, you know, we know we want to save money, but we also know that it's going to be a big overhaul if we want to do it right. How much are we allowed to move forward in automation? And how much is this going to have to be over a period of time? It started to ask other questions. And some of the opportunities for learning was going back to leadership and saying, you know, here are the different scenarios. How do we want to break this down? And then the final one was automation may create fear for employees. The activity was, can we interview employees about how they view the future? About how automation might affect their day to day? And they actually had some, HR had done some surveys already. So, in talking about this out loud, HR was like, oh yeah, we have some of this data. I can share that with you. And so, they were able to then go fine tune and go deeper in doing these interviews.But again, you're going to potentially have multiple activities to one opposition statement. You're going to have a whole board of all of this. And you have to step back and say, all right, if we're going to debunk the truth and start uncovering assumptions and biases, we can't do all of these things. So, the final step is actually identifying what has priority. What has the highest risk if it's not disproven or proven. And the highest impact to the efforts that we're taking on.So, in this example, as we rated it with this company, three of them that came up the, you know, higher impact was conducting the break-even analysis and interviewing employees, and then lower impact, lower risk was investigating frameworks that make automation more simple. They had spent a few years doing some of that research.And so, they had some strong findings that they could rely on for that. But again, it was, this is how they would value, rank the activities. If you're in a different company, doing the exact same exercise on the exact same idea, how you prioritize it might look very different. So that is a very, very quick version of this.If you're using this, I say you could do this in 15 minutes and get some people thinking differently. Spending more time going deeper is where you have the aha moments. The having 15 to 30 minutes per step, at the very least you could extend this over days and have it up there and kind of, you have the opportunity for it to ruminate and think about, but really the big opportunity in an exercise like this is also assigning someone to be the yaysayer and someone to be the naysayer.And you might find people that are typically the optimistic person to say, hey, I want you to poke holes in this idea. Or the person that simply got has their arms crossed and can point out all the problems, asking them to be embracing the yaysayer and being the yes, and. And by putting that on people and the team you're making them use their brain differently. And that is all what, you know, innovation is about, is unlocking people and being bolder and expanding their spectrum of how they think about problems and how they identify ideas. So, the second exercise won't take as long to go through. It's also deceptively simple. I love this one for myself when I do it. I try not to do it by myself. I love to do it over wine with my husband, or I'll find a colleague and do it over coffee. Or when I'm doing it, mentoring companies or executives and people within teams, this is a great tool to use. So, it's called the One Maybe at a Time. And then we'll go into the steps, which is the next slide.Three very simple steps. You're finding out why there's a, about, you know, a barrier to the problem. You're exploring the opportunities and then you're finding the tactical solutions for how to move forward. So again, pausing here. What challenge are you currently, or might you be facing soon? An example that I hear often is cut back in resources. Whether that's funding, the number of people that can work toward a project, these are all great barriers to consider.But what challenge are you seeing right now? Or are you predicting and building for, into the future? If you think about that as we go through these steps, I'll give you an example again, but you can use your challenge, your idea, as you know, we go through the steps as well. When I do this in Mural, you have the three sections, you can do it on a whiteboard. You can do it on a wall. Each thing that you're capturing is going to be on its own post-it note. But the first, very first part of the, the problem that you're thinking about is the, the why behind there's a barrier, the roadblock. The, the no, because, and I'm going to give an example from a different software company. So, I was hired to think about, you know, creating the, the 10 vision and working with the leadership to make their innovation roadmap happen. As I was there and looking around recognized that they had a very big problem in diversity. Something that they recognize as well. There were no women in leadership. The diversity of the people that worked there, they had a lot of work to do.And so, towards the end of my project, raising that to the executive that had brought me on as an issue that I'd like to try to address. I got a big fact, no. Because we just hired someone to lead D and I efforts and they're, they're getting onboarded. They're going to take this on. Other, no, because that I would, you know, captured in doing this exercise was, well, no, you weren't hired to do this at all. This is completely out of the scope. No, we don't have the money to, to help, you know, pay for you to do this work. No, you're not an expert in this besides, you know, just being an experienced human in, in the corporate world. So, there were lots of No Becauses and some of them, I heard. Some of them, I believed to be there. Some of them, I predicted if I tried to take this work on. Capturing each of them on a post-it note, and then I paused and said, where's their room for me to do something like what's the, maybe if what's the reframed approach. And again, when you're thinking about innovation, people can get blocked up and wanting to go towards the big prize.But if you can find these incremental tears and thinking differently. And exercising the muscle of finding new ways forward, this will only lead later on down the line to the radical, big thinking. So, I, I love this example for very tactical specific needs. But it is a sprint towards the innovation marathon.It's just one of the things that's going to continue to tweak you and make you better at doing this work and leading this work. So, the maybe if in this example, recapturing the, you know, reframing the opportunities. Maybe if I talked to hiring managers, actively recruiting, we could evaluate effectiveness of currently posted job openings.This was something I could do without big lift. This is something that could make an immediate impact. And teaching and learning from it. Wasn't going to step on any toes. There were some other ideas that we came up with too. I, I sat down with a team of women that were very passionate about this. And thinking about what we could do that was not going to go against what we're there hired to be doing.Final step is the Then What. Like, what is the action plan? What are you going to actually do to move forward and start testing how to move beyond this moment. And that was creating the volunteer led task force that would review the current job postings. And when we did that, there were ideas of putting the job postings in front of women groups, programmers, engineers, product leaders, and getting their feedback.And the feedback immediately was so helpful. It. It allowed us to rethink how we wrote those job descriptions and what requirements we had. In all of this, again, doesn't necessarily feel like a truly innovative new approach. But just the exercise of doing something where you don't accept, no. You find a new way forward. That kind of re pulled back some of the scar tissue of like, oh, you know how things are around here?No, you know, can't make change without it being slow. People started to see that if they move forward, even if it's slowly, incrementally. That they can make a big impact. So, I really love this exercise for that reason because it's super simple. It's easy to do and can make an impact in the long run. Again, this is a, an overview of how you might want to use this either with yourself or by leading teams, but you can do it in very quickly. Spending more time and reflecting, I think, to get true new, you know, ways of approaching it's coming back to it and continuing to say, where are their new opportunities to experiment our way forward?So that is the very, very fast version. If you want to reach out. Just to highlight what we covered, two exercises, this is a way to reach me. I teach an innovation product innovation course on LinkedIn. That's the Bitly. You can find the book on the Link, or you can email me directly. And of course, I'm on LinkedIn. So, you can find me there as well.Brian Ardinger: I love that very much, Karen. You know, the book is great because it's, it's so tactical. You know, it forces you to, you know, here's the questions I need to ask myself or my team. And it gives you that kind of playbook in a variety of different circumstances. So, I encourage people to check that out for sure.Thank you for coming out and being part of this. I know you've got a whole day ahead of you. It's early morning there in, in New Zealand. So, I appreciate you coming out for IO2020 and being a part of it. I want to thank all the attendees for jumping in here. Thanks again.That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

In honor of our upcoming IO2022 Innovation Accelerated Summit, which is happening September 19th and 20th in Lincoln Nebraska. Thought it'd be nice to pull some of the best interviews and sessions from our IO2020 virtual event. So, over the next few weeks, check out some of our amazing speakers and grab a ticket for the upcoming event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets and more information can be found at io2022.com. And now back to the show. 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 Vaughn Tan, Author of The Uncertainty MindsetSusan Stibal: Today Vaughn Tan will share learnings from internationally renowned cutting-edge restaurant, R and D teams on how to prepare for uncertainty and respond to it with grace and innovation. Vaughn is a London based strategy consultant, author, and professor. Vaughn's book, The Uncertainty Mindset, is about how uncertainty can be used to drive innovation and adaptability. Vaughn is also an Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at University College London, School of Management. So Vaughn, I'll turn it over to you. Vaughn Tan: Thanks very much for having me and thanks also for everyone who's here. Thanks for joining me today. I just want to say a few things about myself, just as context.I was born and raised in Singapore, but these days, as Susan said, I'm a strategy professor at UCL school of management. I teach courses in how design thinking can update and. Conventional approaches to strategy and management. So I used to live in London, but at this very moment in Corona time, I'm physically located in a very rural part of France in a mountainous and volcanic region called the of van.And this is basically my apology in advance. If there are any internet connectivity problems that develop along the way. So, in any case, my focus as a consultant or researcher, and as an author is I try and understand how to design organizations that are more innovative. And more resilient to uncertainty.And these organizations include businesses, nonprofits, teams, communities. I'm particularly interested as I think the book's title and what I've just said may suggest in the role that uncertainty plays in making businesses better at doing innovation work. And I think that's maybe a little bit counterintuitive. And I'm going to unpack that a little bit more in the rest of this talk.I got here by quite a circuitous path. Quite literally a decade ago, late in 2010, I found myself in a basement kitchen of a restaurant in Washington, DC. And I was just dodging kitchen porters while watching a team of R and D chefs come up with a menu of new dishes for a restaurant. And the owner and the head chef of that restaurant group is the Spanish chef Jose Andres, who you may know because of his philanthropic disaster relief activities.There's an arrow pointing at Jose, right there. This is Jose's philanthropic side project, you know, which eventually turned into a huge one. If you're in the US, I think he's quite famous there. People know about him. It's called World Central Kitchen. And what they do is they create field kitchens for emergency food relief during natural and, and other disasters.The thing that many people don't know is that World Central Kitchen is able to spin up these field kitchens to produce hundreds of thousands of meals a day very quickly because, it's how they organized. Right. So they use a very unusual way of thinking about how to design their teams, to be able to go from a very small, permanent team, to a large operation in any particular disaster setting that they choose to go into because of how they're organized. And how they're organized is actually about what I call The Uncertainty Mindset. Because Jose's way of thinking about how his teams get organized for his for-profit organization. Think food group is actually the same way that he infused into what World Central Kitchen does, So, I'm going to come back to this in a little bit. I wanted to say also a little bit about how I came to study culinary innovation. It was all by accident. I did my PhD at Harvard Business School. And when I went in, I was interested in understanding how to organize innovation teams. And this focus for me was because of my experiences before starting the PhD. I'd just come from working at Google in California. And while I was there, I worked on some really unusual teams doing quite interesting innovation work.We were basically trying to develop parameters for new problems to solve. So, the first team I was on at Google back in 2005 at the very dawn of ad tech, as we know it today was trying to create an automated ad unit targeting engine. It didn't work then, although some of the machine learning foundations have been baked into the rest of Google AdWords and Ad Sense. But I was also on the launch team for street view, which is one of the rare hardware business units at Google while working at earth and maps. And I also worked on Google's Space flight program, which was actually in partnership with the XPRISE foundation, where we tried to put a Lunar Lander on the moon, an unmanned Lander. And I also worked on structured data. I worked with the Pure Research Group on a new structured data storage and management product, which while it was still externally available was called Fusion Tables. And it's now used exclusively internally to run the data layers for earth and map. I sort of burned out a little bit at Google and I left just before the 2008 global financial crisis to make furniture. I went to work at a wood studio in an art foundation in Colorado. And the strange thing is when I got there, I found again, something that felt a lot, like all the really interesting teams I worked with at Google.It was an interesting network of people who came together to try and develop new techniques for working with materials. I guess the thread that connected all those bits of my former life before academia was that I was exposed to this wide range of teams and businesses that were all pretty good at coming up with new problems to solve and solving them well.And so, when I decided to do a PhD about organization, my main question was something I think you all are interested in too, right? How do you organize companies and teams, so that they're good at coming up with new ideas so that they're innovative companies. So, it was pretty early in my doctoral research and I was casting around for a research project to like really work on, to write a dissertation about.And if you know anything about Singaporeans, you know, that we're really interested in food. So, this is one of my favorite dishes from Singapore. It's called Bak Chor Mee which basically means pork mince noodle. And it is a kind of innovation in itself. Like every stall that makes this, usually the people who make this dish only make one thing. And everyone develops their own kind of interesting take on what this dish should be.And the ones who are really good have made it very distinctive. But anyway, we're very interested in food. And so, Jose who I didn't know at the time was giving a lecture at Harvard during which he mentioned, how his innovation team, the Think Food Tank was not only how he made his restaurants innovative, but also how he made them really effective.And so, I went to his office hours and more or less as a joke, I asked him if he would let me come observe the Think Food Tank for my PhD research. And he said, yes. So. I'm just saying, be careful what you wish for. This is how I fell into studying this really strange world of high-end cutting edge culinary innovation teams.I eventually spent a lot of time at some of the best known of them. And what I realized along the way after having come away from tech was that innovation work is more or less the same work across industries. Even if the output and the input look very different. So having worked in both hardware and software tech and with startups after Google, I knew from the inside how tech innovation feels.And I quickly saw that while the type of new product may be different. The process of coming up with good new ideas and executing them well is really similar even in food. So, innovation work, I think has enough similarities across industries that we can learn from looking at how innovation work is done at the frontiers of food.And then apply those learnings more generally to other businesses in other kinds of industries. So, while I was at these R and D teams in high end cuisine, what I was doing was I was watching really good innovation organizations doing high level innovation work. Whether the innovation was creating a new experience of dining by adding cross modal sensory stimuli.So, what you see on the screen now is a dish at the Fat Duck called the Sound of the Sea. Where the seafood that you eat is made more intensely marine by hearing the sound of waves lapping at the shore that come out of the iPod that you're plugged into at the same time. Another kind of innovation that people work on is Material Innovation. In this case, they're discovering how to cook a new type of material, incredibly old clams, 200 years old at a restaurant that I will call Amaya. And these require developing a new cooking protocol that are unlike the cooking protocols used for other types of shellfish. Other kinds of innovation are developing new media products. And this is Nathan Myhrvold's most expensive cookbook in the world. He was only able to do this by developing a novel vertically integrated business model for content creation and publication. And he has then used that same business model to produce series of books after that, that would not be publishable, and they are very successful. But they wouldn't be publishable under conventional business models in publishing.Other innovations that I see in there that have analogies to other industries are new approaches to narrative storytelling. Instead of telling it in the form of a movie or play. Restaurants like the Fat Duck, when it reopened in 2016, use individual dishes in a meal, as the elements of story, they have to figure out how to do that.And some of them are like IO2020 right. Developing an influential conference and a global multidisciplinary network, like a restaurant called Noma in Copenhagen did with a Mad Symposium, at this point almost 10 years ago. Or as we began creating a novel operational model for field kitchens that are meant to serve disaster relief situations like Jose did at World Central Kitchen.Anyway, I ended up spending almost a decade and embedded in these world-renowned R and D teams, in an industry where basically the state of the art is changing frequently and unpredictably. It sounds a lot like high tech. It sounds a lot like media today as well. And these are the connections that I'm hoping that you all will see that I try and draw from outside of this domain of high cuisine into other industries that I also feel like I know and have worked in before. So, some of the places that I was at the Fat Duck in the UK, one of the first pioneering culinary innovation restaurants in the world. A restaurant that I call Amaya that I claim is in South America. I'm under NDA, so I can't say where they are. A restaurant that at this point is quite famous called Noma, which is in Copenhagen and Denmark, and the mad organization, which is the conference and thought leadership organization that they set up in Copenhagen. The Cooking Lab, which is Nathan Myhrvold, he's the ex-CTO of Microsoft. His organization, which is in Bellevue, Washington, which produce really interesting media around food and cooking and technology.And of course, Jose Andres's Think Food Group of restaurants. Ultimately, I just want to leave you with a few key takeaways from the research that I did. And the first and most foundational piece of insight is that all of these teams were innovative and resilient and adaptable. Not because they managed away the uncertainty that they faced or pretended that the uncertainty didn't exist, but because they had a different way of thinking about uncertainty. What I call the uncertainty mindset is simply explicitly treating the future as something unknown and unknowable, not as something risky.I know this sounds like a trivial distinction, but I think it really isn't. Risk is not the same as uncertainty, even though most people confuse the two. Risk is when you don't know exactly what will happen, but you know, all the possible outcomes and how likely each possible outcome is. So if that's the case, you can do risk management through cost benefit analysis.Real uncertainty on the other hand is when you don't know what exactly will happen and you don't know all the possible outcomes. Or you don't know how likely these known or unknown outcomes are. So just to illustrate the difference, flipping a fair coin, is truly a situation of risk. There's a 50 50 chance that you get heads or tails. And you can bet on that outcome. Real businesses like the ones that we all are in, rarely face this kind of risk in the real world. What they face instead is true uncertainty. And now it's actually really undeniable. The current business environment is filled with true uncertainty where we have no idea what many of the possible outcomes in the next 6 months might be, or even 12 months. And we don't know how likely each one of those outcomes are. So, the problem that I also, this was another insight from looking at these R and D teams, is that even though risk is not the same as true uncertainty, we've all been trained to think of not knowing only in terms of risk. And so, because of that, we think of every unknown situation as being risky.And this is in its own way, it's kind of comforting, right? Because risk can be managed away. We can do cost benefit analysis. We can risk manage the situation. This kind of thinking is an unmistakable hallmark of the risk mindset. And it can be fatal, right? So just look for instance, at the UK and the US government responses to coronavirus this year, or thinking back to 2008 and before the Fed's reaction to complex derivatives in 2008, just to see what happens when we use risk management and a risk mindset to think about and react to situations that are truly uncertain.The problem for businesses is that the risk mindset all starts with an organization's ability to innovate. Because innovation is by definition about not knowing exactly where you end up. When businesses over invest in managing the risk of known outcomes, they under invest in building flexible, adaptable organizations that let them change to be whatever they need. As the situation changes. The risk mindset also leads businesses to over optimize and try and be too efficient and profitable. And it leaves insufficient slack in the system to permit real innovative thinking. And maybe the biggest problem is that they create organizations in which all the incentives are to do what's well understood. And not to learn by failing, which is inevitable, if you're trying to do something, which is really, really innovative. I think the uncertainty mindset, as I said before, is simply acknowledging that you don't know enough about the future to optimize for it. And simply making this acknowledgement explicitly as a leader and as an organization changes how a business acts and how people and teams in those businesses act.The nice thing is that it makes these people and these teams inside businesses, more flexible and more able to learn and change when they need to. I'll talk about three things after this, just to finish off, but injecting uncertainty into organizations I've found is the best way to make them resilient to uncertainty and innovative at the same time.So, this is really the biggest, most counterintuitive thing. When I talk about this book to other people. They don't just try and say that, yes, we see that the world is uncertain. The organizations that I looked at that have been most successful, and this is not only in food, but outside of it, the ones that are most successful at dealing with uncertainty and being innovative. They actively create uncertainty inside of themselves. And it's this intentional creation of uncertainty inside the organization that makes them continually able to come up with new ideas that are good ideas. So how do they do it? They do it in three ways. They do it by making the roles that their employees have open ended. They do it by having open ended goals. And then they also do it by stimulating a sense of really carefully designed and calibrated desperation among their teams. And I'll say more about each one of these things in turn very quickly. So open ended roles are simply roles where your definition of what you do as an employee is not fully defined at the beginning. What this means is a large part of your role is quite clear and it's quite stable, but a part of your role is not. So, if you think about Google's 20% time or 3Ms 15% time, this is something like an open-ended role. It makes the role malleable and it also encourages people to, in a sense, negotiate what role they're going to play by testing things out with their colleagues.Right? So, to try something that they think is worth doing that they're good at doing to show the results of that test to their colleagues, and if that test is shown to be useful, then that becomes part of role. The result of this is more innovative, higher performing teams where all that testing also helps team members learn what other team members are good at doing and what they like to do.And what this leads to in the end, not only are the roles adaptable because they're constantly changing along the way, this also creates teams that are incredibly high functioning, where everyone knows what everyone else is good at doing. And also, is interested in doing. These teams, barely need management of the conventional sort.So open-ended goals, I think are very similar to open-ended roles except in the context of goals. So we often think about goals as being very concrete. Want to achieve this micro growth in profits. By the end of next year. Open-ended goals for innovation are about saying how you think about abstractly, what success looks like.So that there's lots of possible things inside success that could be successful. So open endedness just means defining goals, more abstractly and less concretely. But being very clear about what tradeoffs you are willing to make to achieve those goals so that you give the people in your organization, more freedom to come up with unanticipated, but valuable problem definitions.And finally, uncertainty can also be injected into how you motivate teams and individuals in your organization. The conventional approach to motivation is to give people something that they want, like more money or promotion to encourage them to work better. This only really works when the things that they need to do to be successful are very clearly defined and very stable, but this doesn't work for innovation, right?Because these incentives are usually not enough to overcome the inherent fear of failure that everyone has. And failure is necessary to do any kind of real innovation work. So, what these teams did was that they publicly and irrevocably committed to projects that were just beyond what they knew they could deliver.And what this does is it creates desperation, right. It creates the sense that we can't simply keep doing what we're doing, that we're good at doing, in order to be able to deliver on this product. And what that does in turn is it drives the teams to abandon these comfortable, old ways of doing things.And try new ways of doing things and generally learn new stuff. So, it creates a situation like in the gym with resistance training, where the teams and the people inside the organization gradually become better at taking on things that they don't already know to do very well. There's much more to be said about all of those things, but it's mostly in the book, which I encourage you to read. There wasn't space in the book for everything, so I'm continuing to think through some of the implications of not knowing every week in an email newsletter, which I also encourage you to sign up for. It is completely free. I want to open up now to a very casual conversation. So, Austin is curious about injecting uncertainty. Austin, do you want to say a little bit more about what you're curious about in terms of injecting uncertainty? Austin's question is structurally what programs might help inject uncertainty in a careful calibrated way into the organization? I, I think it's a really good question. So, I often make the distinction between having a program that is about injecting uncertainty and simply changing how people work. So that the way they work naturally encompasses more things that are not fully defined upfront. So, we can talk about injecting uncertainty into roles. For instance, by saying, let's say you're trying to hire someone new. At the moment, the default position for most hiring is to say, I'm going to define a, a job description. And then I'm going to put that out to a recruiter to find people who might be good fits.And one way that you can simply inject uncertainty into that is to say, here is the job description. That is 80% of the job that we're hiring for the other 20%, for instance, it can be any percentage, but I think 20% is a good starting point. The other 20%, we don't know. The 80% that we do know is clearly defined. You got to do these things and we're going to hire to make sure that you can do those things. The other 20%, on the other hand, we want you to come in, and spend one day a week or two days, every two weeks or whatever you choose to do telling us and showing us what that other 20% should be and why it's important to us. Simply that's one program that will inject uncertainty into who you hire and what they do for you.Right. And then along the way, if you make this explicit, it will force people to say, okay, what is this person doing in his or her 20% time, that is so valuable. Is it actually valuable? Can we help this person do something which is more valuable that we don't expect to need yet, but we actually realize that we do need now? I think programs like that inject uncertainty to how organizations work.So, Ron Thomson asks great insight on what's needed for organizations to innovate for impact. Over the years, what are the most valuable lessons you've learned? It's a great question again, Ron. I think the biggest thing is uncertainty in an organization has this effect on organizations of making them innovative and adaptable. All the way through the organization, but for it to actually begin the most senior leaders need to be able to show one thing and they need to be talking about it constantly. And that one thing is being able to constantly talk about how they have themselves failed in the past, not hypotheticals. They have to actually say how they did fail in the past and how that failure led to their success today.So, I want to reemphasize this point. It's that we talk a lot about success and why it's good. We don't need to talk more about that. We all know why success is a good thing. What we don't talk about is how, when you design failure correctly, you can learn from it. So not all failure is good. You can fail in ways that don't teach you anything, but you can also design work. You can design projects so that if you fail, you learn as much as if you succeed. The Uncertainty Mindset is partly about being comfortable with failure because you know that failure teaches you stuff. And this, I think almost has to come from the top down, right? So, the most senior people will mean if the most senior people say that failure is okay, they will make the people underneath them say that failure is okay, and that will percolate all the way down.And then at that point, it'll become possible for someone who is very junior to say, I can now take a risk at doing something, which I don't know how to do yet, because the failure might teach me something if I design it correctly. So I, I think the biggest lesson is if you're a leader, your most important job, other than setting the direction of, of the organization is to constantly not shut up about how you failed in the past and how it helped you to learn.Okay. So, Jason also asks having too much stock on hand can hide a lot of problems. Absolutely. So, I think one key thing to say about what I've been saying, in this presentation is that I don't think that uncertainty injection is good for all kinds of businesses. It's only good for businesses that really want to innovate.So, if you are in manufacturing and the manufacturing is well understood, you've got a proper well developed stable protocol for manufacturing a thing, you should be in a situation where you're trying to maximize efficiency and reduce waste. This is not the same thing as trying to be an innovation organization that is trying to find new ways of doing things.I absolutely agree that if you're trying to exploit, if you're trying to be efficient, having a lot of organizational slack is not necessarily a good thing, because as you point out having too much stock on hand, having too much slack can hide a lot of problems, especially problems associated with people who are simply coasting, instead of doing what they know they need to do. How they know they need to do it.But if you are trying to build an innovation organization that is trying to do new things that have never been done before, you must have slack. Because if you don't have slack, you cannot fail. And if you don't fail, you can't learn how to do something new. Yes. And Austin makes a great point, which is failure in certain environments, which are efficiency operation environments should be mitigated as quickly as possible with a known solution. A hundred percent agree. And failure in uncertain environments should be designed to encourage learning and should be encouraged as well. Right? So, it's two things you should encourage failure that is designed so that when you fail, you learn something interesting and useful.You should encourage that kind of failure, not the kind of stupid failure where you fail for no good reason. And you don't know why you failed. Let's see. So, Ron has another question, I guess, with the uncertainty mindset, like the fear of failure being foreign in most enterprises, any insight on the lessons learned from Trump maintaining the status quo?Well, so I think one thing that I, I want to say wrapping up, which is actually relevant to Ron's question. I'm not sure that especially now any business anywhere can think of itself as being in a certain business environment. So, I wouldn't say to embrace the uncertainty mindset 100%, but at least if you are a business that is exposed to any kind of external environment, like if you are operating any kind of business where you have customers or suppliers, you need to be thinking about how to build your employees up. Your team organization up so that they're able to adapt if things suddenly change.The organizations and the businesses that were able to pivot really fast, when the last wave of the pandemic hit us, were the ones who had people who were able to change what jobs they did at a moment's notice because they were used to developing new jobs.Right. So, if they had open ended roles along the way, they were used to changing what they. And I think what every business needs to do is to encourage people who are employed by them, their suppliers, everyone who they work with needs to expect that things are going to be changing unpredictably in the future and to be ready for that to happen.And a large part of that is simply not expecting that things will stay the same or that you can predict what they are and that at the very base level, Is the Uncertainty Mindset, in a nutshell. Just the moment you start to think and plan as if the future is not known and not knowable, you instantly have a leg up on everyone else who thinks, oh, I'm going to optimize. Because I can expect what the future will be. And I can predict it with some certainty, if you just don't even think that everything you do will be slightly different and then very different as a result. And you'll be much more adaptable. Back to you, Susan. Susan Stibal: Vaughn thank you very much. Those were great things to think about. Really, we appreciate you being here from France. And we want to thank our sponsors of the Inside Outside Innovation Summit. So Vaughn, hope to see you soon. Vaughn Tan: Thanks for having me. Hope to see you all sometime.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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In honor of our upcoming IO2022 Innovation Accelerated Summit, which is happening September 19th and 20th in Lincoln Nebraska. Thought it'd be nice to pull some of the best interviews and sessions from our IO2020 virtual event. So, over the next few weeks, check out some of our amazing speakers and grab a ticket for the upcoming event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets and more information can be found at io2022.com. And now back to the show. Brian Ardinger: 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 in experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Doc Williams, Brand Developer, Founder of Brand Factory and Maker of Build With MeSusan Stibal: Doc Williams is here to show you how to best utilize this new field of building without code and what concepts, tools, and plans you need to begin creating. Doc Williams is a brand developer, founder of Brand Factory and maker of Build With Me. Doc is also an entrepreneur who has worked with everyone from ESPN to App Sumo. So, Doc, I will let you take it away. Thanks for coming. And I can't wait to hear your presentation. Doc Williams: Well, thank you so much for having me. I really do appreciate it. I'm so excited. Saw the other presenters earlier today. I'm just so excited to be here. So, I'm gonna get right into it because I'm excited about No Code. I'm gonna be talking about how I can help you. And I have a small presentation, but again, this is about how I can help you. And if you're new to No Code, if you do not know what it is or you've heard the term and you're not so familiar, we gotcha. Don't worry. We got you in this Presentation and we're going to go through this a little bit. We're going to go through this. Okay.This discussion today, we're going to be talking about an Introduction to No Code. Okay. And again, I don't want to talk about myself that much. So, I'm going to go through this very quickly. Just wanted to tell you a little bit about myself. So again, I run a six-figure consulting business and strategy. I also help startups integrate tech, so everything from telling their story to actually building that tech stack. So, I've worked from copywriter front end dev. I've been a CTO a few times. A CIO, blah, blah, blah, blah. All that kind of stuff. So more importantly, I just get to work with some great people. That's what I like doing. So, we're going to have to stop looking at my picture as I'm looking off into the sunset for a moment. We're going to be talking about the world is changing really quick. And Brian was talking about this in the intro to the Summit, and I cannot agree with that more. Right now, we see a huge shift of technology and what's going on in the world. 83.5% of small businesses experienced a negative effect with the COVID pandemic. 72% of the world startups saw that their revenue fell and 56% of the US workforce holds a job that is compatible at least partially with remote work. So, there's a lot of things happening all at the same time. And people are scrambling to come up with new ideas or to test new ideas, lean out their business, and you can be doing all of that by using the power of No Code. And so, we're going to be talking about why you need to be ready for this new age and using No Code as an innovation. So, the first question is before we even get started and how you can be using no code, it's important to understand what No Code is. So, what is it? Let's go with a definition real quick. No Code is a development platform that allows programmers and non-programmers to create apps and programs, using visual tools instead of traditional computer programming languages.Oh, that was a lot. So, the TLDR, what is it? Building visually. So, a lot of times some people are already using no code tools and they did not know that but basically allows you to do things that usually took what programmers were doing, writing code. So here are a few no code services. Now there's a whole other discussion. If you want to know the difference between no code and low code. But here are a few no code services that I use almost daily. So, there's Bubble, Air Table, IFTTT, Elementor, Zapier, Hopin, Repurpose.io. Okay. Those are a lot of different tools. Now what we're going to be talking about, this is the Intro to No Code. So instead of delving into very specific platforms, we can talk about it in the Q and A, and that's not a problem, but instead of just talking about all of these different services, what's really important is looking at areas to disrupt the industry and how it can help you figure out what you want to get done in your business. So, in the chat, please let me know.Yep. Has anyone tried Amazon's HoneyCode? Yes. I did a whole breakdown video on that about three weeks ago as well. Yes. We're going to be talking about a lot of these things. If you're thinking about like seeing the handle, not the tool. Tons of times, if you only think about the tool you're going to see, like, only if it's a hammer, you're just going to see about how you can hit nails. Right? If you've got a Catana, it's the same thing. You're just going to be slicing things up. So, instead of thinking about just the platform, think about the handle. What are you trying to accomplish? And then we can go into the right kind of platform. Now also too, just to let you know, I have a YouTube show called Build With Me.And so, I build three different businesses with one No Code tool every single Wednesday night. And also, I do tech reviews for App Sumo. So right now, I'm up to 453 tech reviews for them. And then, for the show we've done like a hundred episodes. So, we just passed 300 businesses with No Code tools. So, let's get right into it.If you are trying to use no code and you're trying to speed up your design process, no code can be perfect for this. Designing complex websites and applications, it takes a lot of time, but with no code, you can do this really quickly. So again, if you are having a problem and I want it in the chat, if you're dealing with a design problem, you need to mockup things very quickly. We got you. What about another one. Automation. Perhaps you're doing a lot of manual tasks. For example, one of our, one of the clients that we were working with, they were working with a big manufacturer, and they were manually still filling in invoices and filling in all of these different things. Well, we had a No Code tool that automatically you set up the boundaries of reading different boxes. So, when people scan their order and instead of retyping it, taking all that manual work, it just looks at the numbers, looks at the letters, and then it just automatically does everything for you. So, and it already puts it into the system. So again, what tasks are you looking to solve as well?The other one too, is architecture. So, system frameworks. If you're thinking about email marketing, SOPs, lead generation, complex, the complex tasks, we can talk about architecting a way for you to be able to solve those problems as well. That is the three main ways. And really the reason we went through the three ways, and we looked at it this way is actually even older.We talk about, a lot on the program, Leonard DaVinci, and how he broke his style up was he was an artist. He was an engineer. An architect. And that actually forms a really clear line, especially with a lot of no code tools, which bucket you want to be into. We're going to talk about those three. And before we go into it and talk from the chat. Why start now? Because you need to be saving time. You need to make sure that you are getting to your goals. You're being able to adapt and pivot in this time. So, this is the time to start. Now, how can I help? I do courses, consulting, workshops, whatever. I work with all different types of companies. I'm going to be helping you today in answering your questions, but keep in mind if you need help from me later on, go see me on YouTube. Go email me. I'll bring this up. And all of that kind of stuff from building a marketplace in less than 60 minutes, was it two months ago, we built Netflix in an hour and a half. Creating Roku channels for your companies. We just do a lot of different random stuff. Oh, building SOPs for crime scene cleaners, you know, we go on and on.So, let's get right into it. What people are trying to build. Now, let's go through a question. How do I say that first name? Petro Petro. Maybe, maybe if I butchered it, I'm sorry. I want to build a product development and project management system, basically from cradle to grave life cycle management system and seeking a platform to get started.Okay. So that's a really good question. And what I would do with that one before even answering which one to go with, I would say, are you using it for your own team first or are you trying to build it as a Micro SAAS and get other people involved? So, if you're trying to build it internally, I would first talk about, okay, do you already have your SOPs broken out and how you want your workflow before deciding on a platform?And do you want to be building on top of a platform or actually just build it from the bottom up? So, I know that's a lot of different things, but I would go with that detailed first. But I can go through a couple different platforms, how to do that. Once I get the answer or more details, I will swing back around.Lindsay brings out, build a dashboard to show business metrics. So, I've got that one. All right. So let me break out of this. Actually, I was building a dashboard yesterday. So, if you're trying to build a dashboard, let's go through a couple different options. We were doing this with a client with the NBA about three weeks ago. And people were saying, well, where is this fancy system he's going through? It's just all my Twitter thread. So, we could use DataBox or we could use GeckoBoard. Okay. So, let's bring this up. I'm going to bring up Gecko Board. So, who asked this, Lindsay asked talking about, which one, if you're trying to display your data? Even if you're using like Google sheets or whatever, you can be using that. So, DataBox or Gecko. Yeah, depending on exactly the features that you want or how often you want it to be updated or what you want it to be integrated with. But I would go with yeah. Data Box. Gecko Board. Don, I think you're asking rapid prototyping. Own team then Microsoft. Okay. Petro again, let's see my own team and Micro SAAS. Okay. So, you're trying to build out your own team and Micro SAAS. Okay. So, if I was going to do that, it depends if you want to first white label or just pull the API or something like that. But Jumple would probably do that because they're already built to be similar to like Asana or, or a Slack. It's kind of like a mixture of the two it's really focused on agencies, but they do offer you to basically just white label it. And to do custom build outs too.So, they are a marketing team and they're developers. So, they're all in house and a couple months ago, they were talking about having solutions if certain companies want to have their own platform to build it out. That's another option and you can make a Micro SAAS platform pretty easy off them. Their team is in Australia. They're really cool. So, that might be something Jen's asking Twilio. Twilio integration with no code. Yeah. So, tell me more. Yeah, I definitely agree. We've had Twilio integrations. We've had someone build out their, it's for fancy football, but they're adding Twilio with it. So, they're adding actually another filter basically, so they can run their draft on Zoom and then they're using Twilio with it.And then they're transitioning from that to build their own platform for video conferencing. But they're modeling it using Zoom. They're using all the filters and then they're building it totally out with Trello and they're doing it with 70% no code. So let me know if you are what you're looking for with that one.Carlos is talking about what are the risks and downside of using No Code? It kind of depends Carlos of what you're trying to accomplish. A lot of people, sometimes there's a feeling like, oh no codes can do everything. Well, you know, it has limitations, but it depends on what you're trying to do, Carlos. If you're trying to validate, you're going to scale to a certain point, but as long as you know, your limits and where you're trying to go, it can go pretty far.If you're either bootstrapping or if you're VC funded, but you're making it really lean before you get to the next version. I can say that there are very successful apps and very successful businesses, all built on Bubble and No Code. Most people wouldn't know unless you asked them. So, it kind of depends on the capabilities of what you're trying to do.Now on the flip side, someone asked me the other day when we did this breakdown, they're like, well, you showed me how to create Netflix, but I can't add, like, I think they wanted to add like 3000 films. And they didn't want to pay for like a server. I mean we got to be reasonable here, guys. So it depends on what you're trying to create or what you're trying to do. And hopefully that answers. Rebecca says best one that includes document generation. Hmm. I would need to know a little bit more about document generation. What do you mean by that? Good question. Legal documents. Oh, okay. So you're saying creating templates for legal documents or you're doing oh, in Word. So let me ask you this, Rebecca. So, you are a business and you're trying to either sell legal documents, like templates or to interact. I need a little bit more details. I'll, I'll find it in a second. Jason, from Fire Spring is bringing up something. Let me know what's going on with the details. Streamlining the process of creating documents. There are a couple different ones, depending, again, there's a lot. I like Taskly. I see what the logo is, but I don't know how to spell it. There are a couple different ones. I mean, if I'm looking at that, I might even go with Nucey possibly. Streamlining the process of creating a document. That's tough for me because I would want to know, do you have to have input from other people on your team? Is it just for your own workflow? If I was doing something where I'm trying to create documents, I would probably Nucey and again, this is just if I'm trying to go with clients and everything like that, and I want everything where I can have a plug and play, I build out the templates and then everyone on my team can just access and build it out afterwards.Better proposals or Nucey. I would think. Oh, other teammates and or for clients. So, if I'm doing really advanced ones, I'd probably do Better Proposal. I use both. I have more contracts with Nucey. Because it's more based on a one pager. But every single time I use Better Proposal, I always get compliment. How well it looks. I mean, this Better Proposal probably is my bet. Not only that, because you can build your own branding kit too, so everything's on point. And your team can work with it. And then your clients go right with it. Good question. Three must have no code tools. Okay, Susan. I'm glad you asked that question. It really depends. Okay. So, so if I'm trying to build out automation. I'm probably going to go with Zapier. Yeah. We could go with Integromat. And all the other ones, but like, if I'm just going to go with like general automations to save you time, I'm probably going to build out Zapier, probably going to go with that one.And that's if I'm business related. If I'm trying to figure out, just automating my life. And just things that I have to do around the house. I probably go with IFTTT because then it's allowing you to basically create different automations, like a recipe. And it's all based, it's really just really easy stuff. But I feel that Zapier is more leaning towards business.If I'm doing something where I'm just trying to automate my life as much as possible. I'm going to go with IFTTT. If, so yeah, that's where I would start. If for me personally, for my business, the one thing that I use is probably repurposed.io. They don't get talked about enough. Basically, this is when I was working with Vayner Media in the Sasha Group.So, this was broken down where we did a challenge where Gary has about 25 people working for him in building content. So, we built the Gary V Content Model 2.0 using Repurpose. So, with one person and using repurpose.io, we replace 25 people. And the way that you do this is you're plugging this in. You're live streaming. And then you're dropping timestamps and it does it automatically.Or you can set it up and you can distribute your content and it makes all of those pieces for you. So, say for instance, you make a 30-piece, 30-minute live stream. Well, I can make 37 pieces of content with automation right off the bat. So, this pretty much changed my entire workflow. And what used to take like four full-time VAs. Now it takes 20 minutes a week to do all this. And we have a podcast. We have a YouTube channel. We have all of these different outlets, and I don't think repurpose. And he's awesome. That's his company. And they just kill it. They just kill it. So again, I probably, I would spend tons of time if I did not have this.So, Repurpose is definitely up there on it. Let's see. What else do I use a lot? Again, it depends on what you're trying to do with your business, and if you're using it more for content creation or just saving time or money in your business. The other one that I really like, and although you could do it similar to like Typeform or anything like that, you can go with, my favorite is probably Paper Form.And that's because not only does Paper Form have tons of integrations, the automations are just like second to none. So, we actually built a marketplace using Paper Form and a Google Sheet and yeah. Oh it, now, if I was going to build a full, like a full marketplace, which we're getting contracted a lot to do now, I probably use ShareTribe though.I probably use ShareTribe. I pretty much use ShareTribe, maybe, seven times a week, at least. But we've spun up, built out niche marketplaces so quickly. We've built a Ikea marketplace. We've built a marketplace for App Sumo. So yeah, a lot of good stuff. That was a good question, Susan. So, I hate to be that vague, but it kind of depends on what your business strategy is or what you want.If you're trying to go for automation mockups. Oh, now if I'm trying to go up for mockups. And I'm trying to look at the most robust, No Code tool. If I'm using a mock-up, I'd probably use Sketch.com. The reason behind it is it integrates with so many other systems. I can be mapping things out, giving it to my devs.It's not a big deal at all. If I don't have that kind of team and I need to do the animation. And I need it to code in the background, Supernova. People don't talk about enough Supernova. You can build out all your animations. It writes the code. You can send it out. You'll be good to go. Are large corporations using no code or just startups? No large corporations are using it. Depends on how they're using it. Again, I don't want to generalize. I'm sure some don't if you're using Windows, we're going to have to go a different way. Y'all if you use a Mac, keep on going. Yeah. So, Susan was talking about bigger companies. I've seen bigger companies use no code sometimes to use it with smaller teams to build out ideas or build out MVPs very quickly. And then again, bring it back in house and then they'll code. Either way, but I mean, if you look at some of the bigger companies. Again, it depends on what people call no code, because some people call Shopify no code. Some of the biggest e-commerce stores online are Shopify, which would be no code. So, yeah. Good question. Really good session. Again, no code this is really just the introduction to it. There's tons and tons and tons of apps and platforms being made with no code. What I would encourage you to do is write down the functionality in what you're trying to get out of no code, and then decide to use those platforms. Because there's just, it's endless. It really is endless. Susan Stibal: Do you have any final remarks? Doc Williams: Start and just begin and start experimenting and start working on it. And if you don't know how to do it, no code community on Twitter is so vast and there's so many people trying to help. So, reach out to me, reach out to anyone that's an expert in that type of no code platform. They'll be happy to help you. And yeah, just keep building. It will be good times. For More InformationSusan Stibal: Doc, that was terrific. And if you want to see more of Doc, check out his build with me on YouTube. It's very similar to this session. So powerful, so much information that can really change the course of a startup or even intrepreneurs. So, thanks so much, Doc. Doc Williams: Definitely. Thank you so much. Bye bye.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

In honor of our upcoming IO2022 innovation Accelerated Summit, which is happening September 19th and 20th in Lincoln Nebraska. Thought it'd be nice to pull some of the best interviews and sessions from our IO2020 virtual event. So, over the next few weeks, check out some of our amazing speakers and grab a ticket for the upcoming event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets and more information can be found at io2022.com. And now back to the show. 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 Steph Smith, Trends.co / The Hustle / HubspotBrian Ardinger: We are excited to have Steph Smith here with the Hustle and Trends to talk about one of these amazing new trends that we're seeing. It's the whole move to remote work. Steph is the Head of Trends and Product Manager at the Hustle, which is a great newsletter, if you don't subscribe to that. Trends is their exclusive group. And I I've got to say it's, it's one of the best groups out there to talk about new things that are happening out there, new business leaders, things along those lines. She's got a new book out called Standing Out in 2020. Doing Content Right. And I know she's been doing a series of sessions on that. It's an eBook. You can check it out at stephsmith.io. She's been blogging for a ton of time. And she's also been in this world of remote work. Been a digital nomad for a while. So, with that, I'm going to just turn over to Steph. And we'll talk the trend of remote working. Steph Smith: Sweet. Thanks so much. That was a great intro, Brian. Today, I'm going to be talking about something that I care a lot about. I saw some other people in the chat mention that they've been working remotely for a long time. Two, I'm going to be talking about thinking past the office and designing what I call resilient, remote teams. And I do this in a little bit of a different way than I think most presentations on this topic are, which give you a lot of super, super concrete, like you must do this. I like to think of this more so as how do we think about what has changed? What does that mean? And what can we learn from this? So, I use three books and I'll get into that in a second to actually convey some of these points. But just quickly, I don't want to talk about myself very much. Brian gave me a great intro. All you need to know is that I have been working remotely for the last four or five years now. And I did that originally at a company called Top Tell, which was one of those kind of remote first companies built from the ground up to be remote. Now I work at a company called The Hustle and I've done some remote training for different companies. And in general, have been nomadding around for the last couple years as I work remotely. So that's enough about me. Let's talk about where we are in this world. As I mentioned before COVID there was a series of companies I'd say only a couple dozen of scale that were built up to be remote. From the ground up, they said, you know what, we're never going to have any offices. Or if we do, we're going to be remote first. Companies like Zapier Basecamp, Web Flow. All these companies were built from the ground up to facilitate positive remote working environment. Now, as we all know, you saw this kind of trend, the slow trickle of people that were searching for remote work overtime. This is Google trends from 2004 to present. Then as we all know, 2020. crazy year. We see this big spike and we're all remote, whether we want to be or not. And this includes huge companies like Google, Cora, Coinbase. Shopify that at least are either going to be remote for several, several years or in some cases like Shopify have just claimed that they are now remote first from here forward. The question then becomes with all of these companies with now millions, if not billions of people that are kind of thrown into this new environment, what happens. What happens to these organizations that weren't built from the ground up? Like Zapier, Base Camp, or Buffer. Some of the questions that I have here, allude to what I'll be talking about in this presentation. So how does remote work or the shift influence how people interact with one another? How does it influence the social fabric or culture of the company? How does this change how potentially leaders should or can operate at these organizations?And in general, this all brings me back to the title of this presentation. How do we build resilient teams? And resiliency in this case means teams that thrive in the environment that they're put in, right. It doesn't feel like they're kind of pushing against walls. It doesn't feel like there's friction to achieve certain things.It feels like they're put in an environment where they're put in a place to succeed by nature, by the nature of the environment that they're in. So, as I said, this presentation is really based on three books that I've read and, and I think are excellent. It's Give and Take, Algorithms to Live By and The Four Tendencies.And I like using books like this to really frame these conversations because these books are actually not based on remote work at all. They're based on human psychology. They're based on how people interact in given situations or environments. And then I just layer on a question. Is this still true with remote work or how does this change as people go from an in-person environment to remote. And so, we'll talk specifically about how giving and taking behavior may change with remote work. We'll talk about how we can design systems. So, using something From Algorithms to Live By, Game Theory. How do we incentivize people to actually act in their best interest? Because they don't always do that on their own. And how do we in general make remote work sustainable. And then I'll talk about the potential archetype of remote worker using this four tendencies framework. To preface the three books and the three things that we'll talk about, I want to jump back to summarize where we are.So, we as a society had a majority of people working in offices. And now we have a majority of people working remotely. And I like to kind of facetiously say that when you work in an office, you work in a box. And that box is predefined for you. And even though it's a little facetious in terms of the analogy, a lot of that is true in the sense that you have a lot of things, whether it's, you know, where you're physically working, how you're working exactly, when you're working. A lot of that is super predefined for you. And for some people that's actually better. Some people that's worse. I'm not trying to ascertain whether one is better or worse, but the idea is that before you had a lot of things mapped out for you, right? And now when you're working remotely, the way, the analogy that I like to give is that box is kind of like stripped clean.So, you get rid of the walls, you get rid of exactly when, how you work. And now a lot of people are left to figure out how to build their own box. And what I see a lot of people doing, whether it's individuals or companies is they basically do this Control C Control V where they basically say, you know, we had all these things, these processes, these systems, these frameworks that worked in our office. So, let's just take all those and let's paste them into our new environment. And that can work. But what I think we have a unique opportunity to do is in fact, rethink the box. So, build our new box from the ground up. So instead of just copying everything and saying, oh, this worked there. It should work here. Let's just rethink what are the things that we should operate by in this new environment? How do we rebuild our box? And something more important than that is instead of giving our employees a new box saying, hey, this is your box. Please take it. And again, abide by these rules or operations or logistics. Let's actually just give them the tools to build their own box. And this kind of summarizes part of what I'm, I'm getting to at least to preface three examples is, is a quote from Amir. Who's a CEO of Doist one of those kind of remote first and companies. And he says, basically, remote. Isn't just a different way to work. It's a different way to live. We have to acknowledge that we're kind of blurring these lines and people, you know, experience isolation, anxiety, depression. And in general, we need to figure out ways in systems to resolve this new, almost more complex issue where you have people, people's work and their lives just meshing into this continuous system.All right. So, what are the cornerstones of remote work? I mentioned this because this bleeds into some of the examples. So remote work overall, at least prior to COVID, when people weren't forced into it, really prioritized three things over three other things. Meaning output trumped input, which meant that didn't matter exactly how many hours you were working or exactly what you did to get to the impact that you're driving for a company.What mattered was the impact, the output. Similarly, remote work tended to favor autonomy over administration. Again, this idea that didn't matter exactly how you got from Point A to Point B. You had the autonomy to figure that out. And similarly, flexibility over rigidity. So, let's keep these cornerstones in mind throughout the presentation. And consider that even those cornerstones sound kind of resoundingly positive, all of us at face value are like, yes, I love being graded on my output. I love being graded or given the autonomy to figure out how I deliver that output. And I love being given flexibility. But let's just keep those in mind and consider that they're not always strictly positive. All right, so let's dive into the first example in the book, Give and Take. Obviously, these books are very in depth and I only covered one small sliver of them in this presentation. But the key takeaway from Give and Take is that Adam Grant, he's a professor at Wharton, amazing writer as well. He talks about three different types of individuals. So, Givers, Takers, and Matchers. All you need to know about them for the purpose of this presentation is that givers basically believe in this world as a positive sum game. Meaning they believe in mutually beneficial situations. They're willing to give without expecting anything in return. Takers are kind of the opposite of that. They think zero sum game. I'm sure you can imagine or conceptualize people in your life that you've encountered that really are trying to get ahead at the expense of other people.Now matchers fall somewhere in the middle. They basically believe, or kind of function off of this idea of reciprocity and fairness. All right. So with that in mind, the question or sorry, before I even get to the question, something I want to mention is that the whole premise of Adam Grant's book is a little surprising in that most people would expect that given Takers and Matchers and Takers in particular, their approach to life in terms of kind of utilizing other people to get ahead or prioritizing their own growth over other people, you would expect those people to be the most successful.Now, interestingly enough, he found that Givers were both at the very top of the spectrum of success, and the very bottom. You can notice two different types of Givers here. One is selfless. One is, is otherish. All you need to know here is that Otherish Givers are Givers but have found a way to prioritize their own needs.So really interesting that Givers not only elevate other people, but they are actually the most successful on their own. So, this is kind of a summary or a quote from Adams, which basically says they succeed in a way that creates a ripple effect, enhancing the success of others around them. You'll see that the difference lies in how Giver success creates value instead of just claiming it.So, in general, I think the obvious takeaway here is that we want more Givers at our organizations. Now the question becomes, and this will be a repetitive question throughout, is this the same with remote work. Or how does this change with remote work? Some of the sections here are based on actual data sources.This one, not so much. This is me more hypothesizing. And what I've come to in terms of my many years leading teams, interacting with teams, being individual contributors on teams is that because if we remember the cornerstones of remote work, we prioritize output. We prioritize impact. That which in remote, all that matters is that impact, right?Are you delivering value? Are you worth your salary? Are you hitting your KPIs. In person when you're in an office? All that stuff matters. But it's also weighed against certain unspoken things, unspoken rules, like the amount of time you're spending in the office. Whether you're on time for things, whether you stay late to help another employee in general, everyone knows who the team players are in an office.That's not always true when you work remotely. I think if you've worked remotely over the last couple months, especially if you were in an office before, you can probably resonate with this idea. In remote, there's a couple thing, other things that I want to know. This idea of staying on longer to, you know, as a Giver, let's say you're helping other people.That's super difficult to quantify because when you're working remotely again, our work life and our lifeline blend together. So, it's actually hard, if I were to ask anyone on this call, how many hours did you spend this week working remotely? I think a lot of people would struggle to actually quantify that.So then layering on, am I working extra? Am I not working enough? It's really hard to kind of parse that out. Additionally, if you support someone. Let's say I have a friend and her name is Sally at work. And she says, Hey Steph, can you help me with this project? And it actually takes like, you know, five hours out of my day.I end up helping her. All of that work for better or for worse is hidden online. Sally knows about it. But everyone else at work, didn't see me stay late to help Sally. They didn't see the output of that work. They didn't see the Giving behavior. And so, in addition to this, KPIs in general, when you work remotely by nature of trying to ascertain that output of people, tends to be more individual. You even hear people use terms like manager of one when they're working remotely.And in general, the idea that I'm trying to get across here is that by nature, when you're working remotely, because there are so much emphasis on output and impact, which has many positives, basically takes away the recognition that you typically get in an in-person environment of these Givers, and what happens is these Givers end up burning out, they become more of those selfless givers that you saw at the tail end. Instead of the Otherish givers that were the most successful individual. And something I want to call out here is that regardless of intentions, morals, or values, and what I'm saying here is it doesn't matter if someone's a good person or bad person. That's not what I'm trying to ascertain. Bad incentive structures result in bad behavior, no matter how good of a person you think you are. So, what's the takeaway here? Again, I'm trying to go through this quickly, so I won't go through everything. But the idea here is that you still won't have a water cooler. In the office, which almost acted like, you know, animals in the wild. There's like a certain hierarchy and there's a kingdom and, and it kind of regulates things, right. You just subtly, but it does. You don't have that anymore with remote, or at least it's not created without intentionality. And so, there are a couple quick things that you can do. The first thing is just ask your team very simply who helped you this week? Who did you work with? Where did you put in extra hours? Where did someone else put in extra hours for you? You must ask this because it will not be surfaced as naturally as in the office. The second thing is build KPIs to incentivize teamwork. This is a little harder to do because again, when you work remotely, you're trying to ascertain output. But think about how you can do this to incentivize teamwork. So, you're not kind of encouraging people to act more as Takers versus Givers. And then finally create an environment where you're not just recognizing good behavior or giving behavior, but you're actually rewarding it.So, some companies like GitLab have actually started things like micro bonuses, where in addition to the bonus structures or the compensation structures that you get from your boss, other people around you can actually reward you based on your giving behavior. Because that's really important. You're not just recognizing it in like kind of shout outs or things like that, but you're actually rewarding this behavior. So, you're incentivizing people to continue doing it. The final thing I want to call out is that you can do as much as you can once you have people at an organization to incentivize giving behavior. But you can also kind of integrate this into your hiring process. Which means bringing in people who are more naturally Givers.So, Adam Grant mentions in his book. This is directly from Give and Take where he, during the hiring process asks this question, can you give me the names of four people whose careers you have fundamentally improved? And the idea here is that people who are Givers tend to mention either people at the same level as them or below them in terms of the people that they've helped.And it's a natural response. Of course, this is again, not quite scientific versus Takers, tend to mention people that are above them. That they've helped, because again, there's this nature of people who are Takers, trying to get ahead and using things like status to get ahead. So, something to keep in mind as well as you're hiring.So, the second example that I want to go through is from Algorithms to Live By. Again, excellent book. This is a book where basically they take principles from software development or software engineering and use it to help us think through problems that are outside of that scope. So, things like Cashing Theory or Kneeling or making intractable problems tractable.The one that I want to talk about today is Game Theory. So, in Game Theory, I'm not going to go into depth, but it's this idea that within a game, there are certain rules. And within those rules, they incentivize people to act a certain way. And once a game is predefined, you tend to get to this equilibrium where all the players individually are acting their own best interest.But sometimes the kind of aggregate of those actions actually may result in outcomes that are worse for everyone. Again, depending on the rules that were set for that game. And this equilibrium that I'm specifically talking about is called the Nash Equilibrium. And it's this idea again, there's this kind of long definition and talks about a stable state.The idea here is the Nash Equilibrium is within an environment within a game. It's the outcome or the optimal state, where there's no incentive for any individual to deviate. Now, this may not sound super actionable. So let me give you a precise example of what I'm talking about. So, with remote work, a lot of remote first companies tend to go with unlimited vacation.And I think this is something that probably more companies will end up moving towards as well. But something you keep in mind here is the Nash Equilibrium of unlimited vacation approaches, zero days. And the reason for this it's a little counterintuitive because you think unlimited vacation sounds amazing. Sounds like a great perk. Well, what happens with unlimited vacation is that people look to be perceived as more loyal, more committed, more dedicated than their peers. And therefore, they look to take just slightly less vacation than their peers. And what happens is a cascading effect, which approaches zero.This is actual data from Buffer's Data Remote Report from 2019, where you can see in blue, the amount of vacation offered, and then in orange, the amount of vacation that was actually taken. So, you can see around 30, 35% of people had unlimited vacation. And if you look at how that's actually distributed, most of the people who had unlimited vacation took anywhere from no vacation to two weeks' vacation. Versus the people who had, you know, six weeks, five weeks, four weeks were likely to actually take that amount of vacation.So, what is my point here? Well, in Game Theory is this idea where basically you have a game and then those rules are set for the game. And then you just see what behaviors actually emerge from those given set of rules. Well, I think with remote work, we have to be a lot more intentional about not just kind of throwing rules out there, again, kind of redefining our box and, and not just taking a box that already exists. And you can do that through Mechanism Design, which is kind of flipping that script and saying, what are the behaviors that we actually want and what rules do we need to establish to actually generate those behaviors? So kind of again, reversing the question and figuring out what behaviors you want to incentivize. And then figuring out what rules need to be in place to actually achieve that.As I mentioned, the box has changed, the game has changed. So, here's a couple examples of things that people struggle with from the same report, when they're working remotely. It's things like unplugging, loneliness, distractions, culture, and communication. If you were to ask the same question to people who are working in an, in an office, these would not be the case, which shows us the game has changed. The problems have changed. The things that we're solving for have changed and therefore you must come up with rules or incentives so that people act in their own best interest. So again, you're thinking backwards. You're asking the question, what are the KPIs that you need to actively design to encourage people to, for example, have a work life balance outside of just the freedom to define their own. And this is really important because it sounds counterintuitive to say a I'm actually going to define more rules. Because flexibility sounds like a great perk or sounds like a great thing to have. But actually, you can help your employees in certain situations to actually help them again, this idea of building their own box.Something I want to call out here is again, is Wall Street, which is again, the most like capitalist type environment there is, has mandatory off hours. So that brokers don't push themselves to their Nash Equilibrium, which would be the sleepless equilibrium, where they're constantly trading. So, you have to think backwards and figure out how to design an environment that people succeed in.Quick couple examples before we move on to the third example. The third book are things like a minimum vacation policy, mandatory days that they must take off, allowing people to take back their calendars and actually block off significant parts so that they're not encountering what people call Calendar Tetris. I like this example from Keith, I don't know Keith personally, and this was pre COVID.But basically, he decided to close his office on Friday. Simple things like this, where he basically said it's a mandatory weekend. You are not allowed to work, even though it seems strange in a digital environment. And I'm giving you 50 bucks to go eat at your favorite restaurant. So, think about how you are intentionally designing systems for your employees.Finally, third example that I'll breeze through is the Four Tendencies. And I'll caveat this example with this quote directly from Gretchen Rubin, the author that says the happiest, healthiest, most productive people aren't those from a particular tendency, but rather the people who have figured out how to harness the strengths of their tendency, counteract the weaknesses, and build lives that work for them.So, what is the Four Tendencies? It's this idea that there as it sounds like four tendencies. Upholder, Obliger, Questioner, and Rebel. Now these two highlighted in green are not highlighted, because they're the best. As Gretchen said in that quote, it's just that they're they are the most common. Now the Four Tendencies is basically a two-by-two framework, which identifies how people respond to expectations or accountability.So, do they readily meet outer expectations? Do they readily meet inner expectations? Do they resist both of them or do they kind of fluctuate towards or air towards one or the other? So, I personally am a Questioner. I resist outer expectations and I meet inner expectations. To give a quick example, if I wanted to get fit, having a gym buddy as an outer expectation expecting me to show up that actually wouldn't help me. And that actually is something that I've tried to do throughout my life. Hasn't worked. Meanwhile, something like actually understanding the science behind why I should be fit or kind of convincing myself that my identity, or I want to be the type of person who, you know, respects their health. That works for me. So as a Questioner, I meet inner expectations. I resist outer expectations.Now I did a poll on Twitter a while ago, got around 400 votes from people who had been working remotely again, pre COVID. And it was interesting to see that the most popular tendencies among this again, non-scientific poll were Questioners and Rebels, and I thought, huh, that's interesting.If you remember questioners and obligers for the most common in the overall population with remote workers, or at least those who sought out remote work. Where questioners and rebels with the, the familiarity or the common thread here is that they both resist outer expectations. I thought that was really interesting.And I think that relates to this idea that there's a level of self-selection or misalignment with outer expectations of society, of people trying to at least identify their own work norms, identify their own vision or how they can actually build something, build their own box. And this isn't again, mean that they're more successful or less successful.It's just perhaps that they actively sought out this type of environment. Now, what's the takeaway here. This is a brief section compared to the other two, but it's the idea that people actually respond differently to inner and outer accountability. We used to have everyone in an office and that didn't necessarily work with everyone.Now we have everyone remote that doesn't necessarily work for everyone. So, I think the idea here is that leaders need to actually learn past, just the high level this person is good at these skills. This person is good at these skills. This is my top player. This is my, you know, less valuable player. And more so think about how to tailor their leadership stylers to figure out how to motivate their employees. Whether they're in a remote environment or not. But especially if you're in a remote environment, how do you incentivize, if we just quickly go back, how do you incentivize Upholders and Obligers when Questioners and Rebels tend to naturally seek out this environment?And on the flip side, if you're in an office, how do you naturally incentivize Questioners and Rebels so that they're motivated when Upholders and Obligers may more naturally fit into those traditional environments. So just something to consider. Right. This is the final slide I have, and I know we're running out of times, but the idea here is just, again, there are certain things or certain ways that humans tend to interact in, in an person environment.And they don't necessarily act the same ways in a remote environment. And in particular, they may not even act in ways that benefit themselves all the time. So, we must as leaders, if you're leading a team, if you're leading a company, It's good to consider some of these things and figure out A: How do I encourage Giving through discovering, hiring, promoting, and acknowledging and rewarding as I said before Givers. How do I select incentives or develop the right systems so that we're using Mechanism Design and not just throwing people into a game and hoping that they choose the best outcomes that are best for them or best for everyone?And then finally, how do we actually learn about our people past the face value in terms of their skills and figure out how to harness their unique strengths, whether they're in an in-person environment or a remote environment. If you want to find me, or if you have questions, happy to answer them now, but you're also welcome to email me or DM me on Twitter and that is it.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Courtney Powell, COO and Managing Partner at 500 Global. Courtney and I talk about investing in emerging markets, the differences between startup and corporate innovation, and the current market dynamics that startups and corporate should be paying attention to.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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 Courtney Powell, COO and Managing Partner at 500 GlobalBrian 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 Courtney Powell. She is COO and Managing Partner of 500 Global. Welcome to the show. Courtney Powell: Thank you so much for having me. Excited to be here Brian. Brian Ardinger: In a certain way, it's coming back to our original roots of the Inside Outside podcast. Where the original podcast episodes were an inside look at startups outside the valley. And we thought, hey, what better way to have a conversation around that then inviting you to talk about what's going on at 500 Global. Because for those who may not be familiar with 500 Global's $2.7 billion under assets and management. You've invested in probably 2,000 to 3,000 startups around the world. And 45 Unicorns have come out of that, in nine different countries. So, you've definitely been on the forefront of looking at what entrepreneurship is outside the valley. Can you talk about your journey into this innovation space from entrepreneur to corporate innovator to venture capital? Courtney Powell: You kind of mentioned a little bit about 500's history in terms of starting in the Valley, but then pretty quickly deciding to invest worldwide. So, I actually came to know 500 pretty early into my own entrepreneurial journey.So, in 2010, I was based in Austin, Texas. And I had already actually been a part of a really early startup that had done well. But I joined when I was 19. So, one of the first employees with the two other gentlemen who started it. I kind of watched firsthand as that company went from literally being, I remember it so clearly in my mind, it was like a yellow legal pad that they were describing the technology on that they wanted to do. The company was called Boundless Network and they were trying to create automated group buying software for corporations who wanted to buy pens and koozies. And drive down the cost by having this kind of group buy system. So I saw really up close what it was like to go from this legal pad to raise what I think amounted to, you know, more than $50 million ultimately.And the company then got acquired down the road by Zazzle's. I saw this journey and right away knew that this was my calling. I wanted to start companies. And so about five years after I started working at Boundless in 2010, I launched my own company, which at the time was really early in marketing automation consulting.So, I was doing Salesforce implementation, also marketing automation consulting. That taught me a lot about what it was like to run my own company and particular consulting firm, which you know, has a lot of challenges. A few years into that, I was struck with an idea for my first tech startup. And that was around helping consumers when they had problems with big companies like Time Warner Cable, or Airlines, or, you know, Telecoms or all these other companies.So long story short, I started the company in Austin. And in Austin, the venture network at that time was very small. It's still relatively small, but very, very small then. And I remember feeling like, okay, I don't really know how to get plugged in to the network here. I am a female, a young mother trying to raise capital. I'm the only woman in the room and, you know, in 99% of the cases. And somebody told me about 500. So, 500 had just started, you know, they were a year, I guess, into existence. And I made my way to the Valley. Applied to the accelerator. Got into one of their early accelerators. And that was really my first introduction to the world of Silicon Valley. And having received investment from 500. After that, I then ran that company for a few years before shutting it down. And then got into building consumer real estate tech.And I eventually became CEO of another company called Agent Pronto. Which is still up and running. Ultimately it got acquired by Fidelity. And then after my time at Agent Pronto, I joined Keller Williams. And I joined Keller Williams, not as a real estate agent or at the brokerage level, but at the parent company level. Where I focused not just on building out consumer tech initially, but eventually got into corporate dev.And began helping them to diligence companies, look at investment opportunities, and long story short decided that, you know, I wanted to move it to venture someday and see the other side of the table and eventually made my way to 500. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. I want to dive into 500 and what you're doing now. And can you talk a little bit about the strategy that 500 has employed to uncover high value opportunities in under-invested markets?Courtney Powell: Yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned, it was really two things that 500, I like to say, got right. One was this idea of diversification. You know, especially when 500 started in 2010, the idea of investing in a 100, 200, 300, 400 companies a year was very, very new and controversial. Diversification was really important.And then as I mentioned, also investing outside of the Valley. Even when 500 was looking for example, to move the office from Mountain View to San Francisco in 2013, that was still odd. Let alone the idea of, you know, investing today in over 80 countries. That really just came from the belief that we knew that there was talent everywhere. And really, it was just a matter of being able to pair that talent and those opportunities with capital. And I would also say the practices that maybe were commonplace in Silicon Valley, that in other countries and other regions, weren't yet as mature as what we were used to in the Valley. So that combination of both the investment practices. The friendliness toward founders. The standardized terms. You know, the combination of really wanting to not just provide capital, but also make sure that we were bringing founder friendliness, standardized terms, to these other regions and just trying to, you know, meet these founders who were creating incredible ideas and definitely had the skillset to be able to take things forward. That was really the spark and the ethos that has built 500 into what it is today. Brian Ardinger: It's interesting. You talked about some of the positive benefits that the Valley brings as far as when it comes to venture, and that. Can you talk to maybe some of the bad habits that venture capital in Silicon Valley, you try to avoid when going into different markets?I think about some of the things of over-indexing, for example, as you have to be a Stanford grad or things along those lines that you typically hear about. How do you avoid some of the habits or bad habits or traps that venture capital in the valley is known for? Courtney Powell: I mean, I think it's definitely well-known that venture capital as a whole has a diversity problem. I think of that problem, not just in terms of the demographic diversity, but also the geographic diversity as well. So, I think with 500, in particular from the beginning, there was a focus on a couple of different things. Number one, having been built by operators and people who didn't have the Stanford background necessarily. I think made the firm keenly aware that there were many other people out there who maybe had a non-traditional path who wasn't the 20-year-old Stanford male.And so right away was really actively looking to not only invest in founders who were diverse, but hire teams, investment decision makers who were diverse. So today, I mean, I know there are very few funds and firms led by females. I think we have been really open with our own diversity stats and our own commitment with regard to investing in underrepresented founders.And as I said, also, geographically. I think this is a huge opportunity, as well. So, I do think that you see today is still only just a few percentage points of VC actually being invested into women. I think that's such an interesting stat because around the world, even in the Middle East, for example, where people often think that, of course there couldn't be like a huge amount of deal flow of female founders, almost 30% of our portfolio is female founded. In the Middle East. 30%. So, this isn't a pipeline problem. It's not a pipeline problem in the U S. It's not a pipeline problem anywhere else in the world. It is really the intent, and I think the makeup of the teams who are making investment decisions. Brian Ardinger: So how do you go about identifying talent and how is it different across cultures, across languages and that? Are there things that specifically you look for? Courtney Powell: That's an interesting question. And I think it varies a lot. It has varied over time, as our firm has evolved from starting as an accelerator to today investing multiple stages. All the way from pre-seed to pre-IPO. You look for very different skillsets. But at the end of the day, what has been really critical for 500, is a commitment to, you know, the original ethos backing these founders all around the world. All around the various underrepresented communities. And I think also, you know, the belief that we have that's core, is we say that our mission statement is uplifting people and economies around the world through entrepreneurship. And what we mean by that is we want people who believe that investing is actually the best way to advance societies. To advance individuals as well. So, you know, we want to make sure that we're doing that in a way that is contributing to the development of these ecosystems. And it's done in a sustainable way. And I don't mean sustainable in this sense. You know, more of like the ESG mindset. But more like we want to be contributing to communities where we're hiring people who are going to be long-term in a community. Who are going to bring skillsets back to that community, that they are local to? We really try to avoid the fly in fly out model.And in these ecosystems, we say that we are both hyper-local and global. And that's really true. We're building, you know, long-term teams on the ground. And of course, keeping connected back to our kind of home base in Silicon Valley. But we really believe that we can contribute to an ecosystem in that way. Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about the diversity in the companies and the people that you invest in. What are some of the opportunities that you're seeing in emerging markets, whether it's region specific or sector specific? What are you seeing out there?Courtney Powell: This year in particular, I've spent a lot of time in the, in the middle east and Africa and Pakistan, which has been really fascinating. And the key lesson that I've learned at my time at 500 is that founders are the same every where.Like the energy, the creativity, this need to kind of bring to life some value or some product, you know, that is inside of you. That energy is the same whether you're talking to somebody in Cairo or, you know, in Iowa, or in Silicon Valley, it doesn't matter. I think some of the trends that we're seeing definitely a huge boom in FinTech. But I'll qualify that and say that the types of FinTech plays that are exciting in emerging markets are very different in some sense than what you might see today coming from the Valley. So, a huge emphasis on financial inclusion. So, if we just take Pakistan for a moment. 230 million people in Pakistan. Less than 300,000 people have ever made an investment in the stock market. So that tells you, you know, the gap that exists. Or I was in Senegal recently. And Senegal, the population size is escaping me. I think it's about 30 million. But less than 30,000 people have salaried jobs. So, the ability to create really infrastructure level products for financial inclusion, to bring people out from the shadow banking world and into a more traditional and hopefully better system, I think is really incredible.Brian Ardinger: We talked earlier about you had a chance to spend some time in the corporate innovation space as well. I'd love to get your insights on how corporate innovation compares to some of the things that you're seeing in startup innovation. What's similar what's different? Courtney Powell: It's very interesting to me now to reflect back on my time in corporate development and corporate innovation, because today I'm often asked to do that at the government level. Where we'll come in and work, you know, with these governments around the world who are trying to take on actually a very similar mandate, right? How do we incorporate this innovation into our own workforce? But at the same time, you know, there's also some startups that we're looking to back. And, you know, I think what I took away from my time in corporate innovation, there's a lot of room to create misaligned incentives. What I hear and have seen is oftentimes we have corporations who are trying to either buy an innovation and become innovative by osmosis. Or by innovation and quell it immediately and create an exclusive product for themselves. Right. And both of those things I think are very, very difficult to do. But I've also seen it work well where both parties are very upfront about what they can bring to the table. And the guardrails are really set up front. In order to either A: Allow innovation to continue to flourish or B: Know exactly where in the value chain they're expected to build into. You know when they're acquiring these companies. We get asked a lot of time as 500 to help corporations create these programs for themselves, run accelerators, this type of thing. And I've seen some of that be successful as well. But again, it really has to be about understanding what those incentives need to be and, you know, making sure all parties are really aware of what the opportunities are. So, I think it's tricky and I see it now much differently, you know, as the other side of the table, I think. I still think, you know, you've got great examples of companies out there who get it right. And build teams and let them run. And give them the mandate and the support needed to really, you know, find some innovative ways to bring themselves into the digital world. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. I don't know if it's similar type of dynamics in a startup realm around how difficult it is to create a billion-dollar company from scratch. I think it's probably similar odds for corporations oftentimes to think and become an innovative company. Courtney Powell: I think that's a great way to put it. And you know, I actually think one of the best examples of corporate innovation that we've ever seen is probably not one that we think of as corporate innovation, which is Amazon.Amazon building their core business of course their online retailers and platforms but having given teams within Amazon the freedom to experiment with something on like AWS who today is driving like the biggest profit center of the company. But again, that's less of an initiative and more, just a result of a culture that it's okay to fail. That's really, I think the innovative characteristic that a lot of the programs that, you know, I think have evolved maybe could use more of. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Obviously, we're living in very uncertain times. Current market dynamics are changing, especially in the United States where you're hearing a lot of venture capital firms saying, you know, buckle up for downturns and recessions and everything around that. What is your take on the current market dynamics? What are you seeing both inside or outside the Valley? Courtney Powell: You know, I've been asked this question a lot in emerging markets, because I think people are really looking to understand the U S position right now. I think generally speaking from my vantage point, it will be difficult to curb the volatility unless inflation is dealt with much more aggressively than what it has been in recent months and even years. Now, I think in terms of how it's affecting the startup ecosystems around the world I am definitely seeing a slowdown at the later stage and that's across markets. You know, whether it's the US or the Middle East, or I'm hearing less about East Asia, but certainly already in Europe as well. Those later stage rounds, I mean, you had the market, you had Tiger, SoftBank, people kind of flooding these big, late-stage rounds who now are suffering in the public markets. And therefore, they don't have as much cash to cross over with. I think that's a real consideration for later stage investors.We're seeing less of it in the seed stages. However, I think that people are pretty spooked. Founders are spooked. So, I think so many people are telling their own portfolios to really just kind of buckle down. And we're starting to see founders just try and close these rounds as quickly as possible.And you know, it's a great opportunity to focus on, you know, on one side of the table, on your unit economics. And if you have the war chest right now, then it's a great time to deploy it. So, I think there will be people who come out ahead of this downturn. Certainly, it's a great time to deploy capital. And I think we all hope that whatever this is over quickly. But in any case, the arc of history is still heading toward technology just leveling every single industry. So, I think there's still a lot of upside to be had. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: We are definitely living in interesting times, and I really do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to tell us a little bit about what you're seeing out there. Courtney, if people want to find out more about yourself or about 500, what's the best way to do that? Courtney Powell: For myself, you can follow me on Twitter @CourtneyPowell and same on LinkedIn. And with 500, you can check us out at fivehundred.co or follow us @500globalVC on Twitter. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Courtney, thanks again for being on the show. Really appreciate it. And looking forward to continuing the conversation. Courtney Powell: Thanks so much Brian. Take care.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

On this week's Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Susan Golden, Author of the new book Stage (Not Age). Susan and I talk about the $22 trillion market opportunity in the emerging longevity economy from education to workforce to healthcare and housing. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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.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 Susan Golden, author of Stage (Not Age): How to Understand and Serve People Over 60, The Fastest Growing, Most Dynamic Market in the World. Welcome to the show, Susan. Susan Golden: Thank you so much for having me.Brian Ardinger: To give a little background. You've got a lot of experience in this particular space. You teach at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. You're a Mentor at Techstars Future of Longevity Accelerator. And a thought partner with Pivotal Ventures on their Caregiving Innovation Initiatives. I think the first question I'd like to ask is what drew you to this topic and exploring this $22 trillion market opportunity called the longevity economy.Susan Golden: Great question. I have a background in public health and then went into venture capital in life sciences and health services. And I actually took a career break, which is part of what the book is about. That many people are going be taking career breaks if they're living 100 year lives. And went back to school. And Stanford had just started a new program called the Distinguished Careers Institute, for people anywhere from their fifties to their eighties, come back and rethink what they want to do with the next chapters of their life. Because they're living much longer. And nobody should be thinking about retirement in their sixties because they have another 30 or 40 years to go.And I learned about longevity at Stanford. There's a wonderful center on longevity that is thinking about how do you plan for the 100 year life. And it's very dynamic and it's not just about the typical impression that most people have, that all older adults are elderly, declining, frail need a whole variety of services.Some will, and most of us will need something at some point in the end of our lives. But most people are going to be living very vibrant lives well into their eighties. And this has created a whole new economy that most people just don't know about. And particularly investors and innovators don't know about it.Traditionally, if I asked my venture capital friends, why aren't you investing in this? They would say, oh, this is about senior housing and fall prevention and medication management. And that's a piece of it, but there is now, as you said, a $22 trillion worldwide market right here in the United States.Right now, it's estimated to be about $8.6 trillion. As over 10,000 people are turning 65 every day and they're going to be living long lives. And over a third to a half of children being born today can expect to live to their 100s. And this longevity economy now includes all their spending, the stimulating new jobs that are being created for their products and services.And companies are beginning to rethink their longevity strategy. Not just for products and services, and how could they have a multi-generational. But also, how to have a workforce that's multi-generational. And how to take advantage of that. And most people don't realize that people over 50 have most of the wealth. They're responsible for 56% of consumer spending and 83% of wealth in the United States. So this is a gigantic market opportunity, gigantic innovation opportunity, and a great need to support healthy aging as our population is going to grow in this category. Brian Ardinger: So, with the fact that it is growing and there's this massive opportunity, what are the biggest misconceptions out there? Why do you think more people aren't exploring this at this point?Susan Golden: I don't think they fully understand the vibrancy that most older adults are in. And that they're in multiple stages. And they tend to lump all older adults in one category. All people 65 and older, or whatever demarcation one takes 70, 75 when there's great diversity in aging. And I think we should be thinking about ageless people. But more and what I argue for in the book about stage, some companies have done this well. They recognize what stage of life somebody is in. So, they may be in a re-purposing stage or transitioning out of one career to another. They may want continuous learning and educational opportunities as I, and all my colleagues who've done the DCI program at Stanford were in. To refocus what we want to do next and what are our life priorities. But there's other traditional consumer facing industries that people haven't thought how to reinvent them for people with longer lives and how to support their health span. And this includes housing alternatives and home modifications, fashion and accessories, education as we mentioned, entertainment, travel, you can think of that just virtually every consumer opportunity that is going to have a burgeoning longevity customer that needs to be understood. And so, understanding what stage somebody is in, will give you a much broader perspective about their needs. There may be a caregiving stage even. Brian Ardinger: In the book you talk about, you have five kinds of key stages. Can you walk through what those stages are? And what's important about them. Susan Golden: So, I came up with the concept of 18 life stages that could be divided into five quarters of life. And I know that's funky math. But people traditionally think about life in three stages, which is your education, your working stage, and then your retirement stage. And now I think we have to think much more broadly.So, I think about the first stage of life as sort of your growth stage. And when you're launching and you're first and beginning to experiment. And in your second quarter, you have different stages where you're doing continuous learning. You're developing some financial security. You might be caregiving, parenting, optimizing health. And then the third and fourth stages I think are what might be considered new. Which is, I call them the Renaissance Stage where you're reinventing what you're doing. You're repurposing, you're relaunching. You may be transitioning, may have a portfolio of things that you're doing as I do. You might be an entrepreneur or an “olderpreneur” as people often say. And then the later stages are maybe where some people think about more about their legacy planning for end of life. But people are living to 100. So, I put in a fifth quarter because we just don't know what that whole new paradigm is going to look like. And how people are going to be using those extra years. Brian Ardinger: Well, a lot of it has been driven by other parts of the economy as well, whether it's technology or healthcare and that that's literally changing the way we live. What are some of the trends or things that you've seen that are allowing folks to be more productive as they age? Susan Golden: Well, technology is certainly making a great change in the way we age and for the better. Technology services, anywhere from being able to access transportation more easily. It may not be wanting to drive yourself, but there's lots of transportation services and easy ways to get access to it. Uber, Lyft even have special programs to help you get to medical appointments and interface with medical system. We have delivery of virtually everything you can possibly think of. You can do online banking, but interestingly, not all older adults are digitally literate and that's another innovation opportunity. Other countries have national programs to make sure all older adults have active digital literacy training every single year, not just one, but multiple times. That's where we're seeing it. Tech in the home. We're going to see a lot of healthcare, not just during the pandemic, but continue to be telehealth services. People are thinking about remote health in the home going forward. And then working from home is creating all sorts of opportunities for older adults. Giving them enormous flexibility. We see tech really supporting caregivers. This is a whole new need because there are 48 million unpaid caregivers in the United States. And that's some of the work I do as a thought partner to Pivotal Ventures. They're actually supporting an entire accelerator through Techstars, just devoted for innovations to support unpaid caregivers in the United States. So, we're seeing an uptick and definitely more interest in this area. But most people, I would say most innovators and investors have not fully appreciated the enormous opportunities.Brian Ardinger: Well, and that's what I like about this book. It not only lays out in granular details, some of the opportunities that you're talking about, but it really is for entrepreneurs. It outlines a number of different market opportunities. It gives the lay of the land and a call to action for entrepreneurs to start tackling some of these types of problems and that, that are out there. Having said that, what are some of the opportunities that you're seeing startups get into and maybe what opportunities are being missed. Susan Golden: When people are coming into this industry, it's so big and so many different verticals you can focus on. It's better to focus on one and then expand. So sometimes I feel like companies are trying to solve every problem. And that can happen over time if you create a fabulous platform. But definitely focusing on a particular need, don't create a product that you think somebody will want to find out what the needs are.And I really advocate for multi-generational teams. I think as companies have a multi-generation workforce which is going to be inevitable as people are going to have 60-year career spans with caregiving breaks, optimally at different times of their lives. But learning what somebody needs, the mantra and the industry is designed with not for. So don't guess what an older adult will want, bring them into the conversation early on. And then companies that are, and entrepreneurs that have designed a product that's just for older adults and it calls out it's for you older person. And we could say that the stereotype there is big beige and boring is not the way to go. Is to create a product that might have still features that support an older adult's needs, but could potentially be a multi-generational product. And an example of that is OXO Kitchen Utensils. I don't know if you've ever purchased them, but they're very much designed to be easy on the hands. Great dexterity, compatibility. And they're good for young and old. And they're not sold at it's a multi-generational product. It's not sold just for older adults. It's not sold just for younger people. But too often marketers targeted the 18- to 34-year-old category. And if you broaden your perspective and think about older adults in a very vibrant, and different stages of their life, you will have a much larger market to address.Brian Ardinger: And I think you're seeing that in the marketing sense as well. Like you said, seems like most marketers always target that younger demographic. And some of the things that you're talking about, it's not even the age, it's a specific problem set. Which could, like you said, span different ages as the person grows and adapts. Talk a little bit about some of the products or services that you've seen or some of the trends that are most exciting to you. Susan Golden: The ones that are really catching my attention is new housing alternatives. Traditionally people thought everybody wanted to go to a senior retirement community, assisted living facility. And over 90% of adults want to age in what they call age in place. But their current home may not be ideal for them. It may have many steps. It may be too big. They may feel isolated. So, there are some new interesting housing companies, basically housing alternatives. And one is an example that came out of the Techstars Accelerator two years ago called Upside Home.And they rent apartments in buildings that are, multi-generational. Not just for old people. They fully furnish it so that it's compatible for an older adult. And this might be somebody who wants to spend three to six months in Florida or may want to get rid of their larger home. And it's no longer appropriate and have all the concierge type of products and services that come with apartment living, but they also have all the features that an older adult might need, including having access to caregiving as needed, transportation, food delivery. So, it's a really exciting new model that includes a variety of products. So, they started sort of like in one area and expanded to create a platform that provides now health services to those who live in their apartment complexes as well, which is really exciting. Home modification itself is a whole burgeoning industry. If people want to stay in their home. And so that it enables them to live longer and better and in a healthy way. That's one whole industry. And we're also seeing this in clothing and fashion. Whereas people let's say are active bike riders, but their current configuration of pockets and their clothing might not be ideal for their range of motion or if they have a rotator cuff issue. But you know, you could redesign it so that it meets the needs of an older adult. And that's just some of the things we're beginning to see as people look at a whole range of things. But education would be another whole burgeoning industry. I see a lot of great companies starting up as a way to help people find productive ways of staying engaged from a learning, but also contributing their talents.So older adults, teaching older adults. Older adults teaching younger. These are some really vibrant ways of creating community while somebody is aging in place to support them and make them feel very purposeful and connected. Which we know that social isolation, is one of the greatest risks of aging in your own home. And you have to stay connected in a purposeful way. And then helping older adults find work. Most older adults do want to work longer. They may not want to work in the same position for as many hours. They might want flexibility, but so to younger adults we're finding. And so, as a need very much so to help older adults get matched, where they can contribute and benefit society with all their talent and expertise and wisdom.Brian Ardinger: That's a great point. And we briefly talked about the fact that the workforce itself is changing, whether it's remote work or that. How do you see the corporate environment changing because of workforce and an age group that will be in the workforce for much longer? Susan Golden: I think companies that will do well, having a multi-generational workforce, will do so because they will have continuous learning opportunities for their entire workforce. Upskilling will be critical because things are changing so rapidly. There's a lot of companies right now that are offering wonderful “returnship” programs for people who do take care of giving breaks in particular, both men and women who may have been out anywhere from two years and more.And give them an opportunity to come back to the company they worked with. Retool, upskill, and then they're offered an opportunity to decide if they want to take a permanent position. And these are 16-week paid returnships. And this is happening in a lot of progressive forward-thinking companies.Companies are also providing upskilling just in terms of being financially literate. You cannot have successful aging if you've not planned for a longer life. And the financial services companies have done a particularly great job in this area. Not only for their clientele, Merrill Lynch is one company that I've written about that hired a financial gerontologists to help redesign their wealth management products. But also, to support their own employee. And have them planning for a much longer life.So, companies that do it, not just for the customer, but do it for their employees are the ones that are really going to distinguish themselves and utilize their multi-generational workforce to continue to modify products and services going forward that can benefit all sectors of the economy. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. So, if I'm an entrepreneur out here listening to this broadcast, what are some of the resources or places to get more up to speed on this topic and others?Susan Golden: I would say, look at the book. And the book and in the appendix has a long list of accelerators, incubators, articles to read, and to familiarize yourself with all the design challenges, the industry newsletters, podcasts. It's a nascent industry, but it's still, most people don't know about it. So, I put in a long appendix with different resources. And check out the different accelerators like Tech Stars. ARP has an innovation lab, so you can see some of the companies that have been developed through these accelerators and launched. And get a flavor of where some of the needs are. But we don't know all the needs yet. This is new, old age is new. We don't know what everybody is going to need because there's going to be such diversity in aging. But we do know there's just a paucity of products and services to support healthy aging. And so that all people can live long lives with dignity and purpose. Brian Ardinger: We talked a little bit about the U S market and that. But are there other markets, obviously you hear about Japan and their aging population. Are there any insights that we can gain from looking at other countries and what they're doing when it comes to the population? Susan Golden: Yeah, I mean, some of the societies that have aged faster have a delayed retirement ages from mandatory retirement to much later. And I think that's a good practice. There's a lot of up-skilling that's going on in other countries. And the one that I mentioned earlier, digital literacy. Denmark does that. Israel does that. It's part of the fabric of respecting and integrating older adults into society. So, we can learn a lot from other countries. Singapore has a whole incubator around how to develop products and services to support longevity. And we have some very excellent programs happening on a state level. But we do not yet have national policies that fully support healthy aging, including paid family care leave acts because we need that people will need to take breaks for caregiving.There are 48 million unpaid caregivers in the United States. And many of them are women. And many of them have to take time off from their careers and then retool. Integrating that into a national strategy will be key to support healthy aging. Brian Ardinger: Well, Susan, I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share this new opportunity. It's going to be exciting times for sure. A lot of challenges, a lot of opportunities out there for folks to take a stab at. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the book Stage, Not Age, what's the best way to do that?Susan Golden: The website for the book is StageNotage.com and I welcome speaking and learning about any new opportunities that people may have.Brian Ardinger: Well, Susan, thank you again for coming on the podcast here. Super excited to see where this goes and looking forward to continuing the conversation. Susan Golden: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Monica Kang, Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox and Author of Rethink Creativity. Monica and I talk about some of the obstacles and opportunities around creativity. And how individuals and companies can benefit from enhancing their curiosity, creativity, and courage. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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 Monica Kang, Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox and Author of Rethink CreativityBrian 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 Monica Kang. She is Founder and CEO of InnovatorsBox and Author of Rethink Creativity. And also has a children's book called Have You Seen My Friends? So welcome to the show Monica.Monica Kang: Thank you for having me. Brian Ardinger: One of the things that we do in our Inside Outside community is ask our audience out there, who should we be talking to? And what are some of the interesting things that you're seeing out there? And somebody said, hey, you should talk to Monica. I think the first question I want to ask is probably a softball for you, but why does creativity matter. And why does it matter more today than ever before?Monica Kang: I'll start with maybe the notion of, I feel creativity is one of the words that we don't realize how much of a jargon it is. Because we use it so much. We say like, oh, you're creative. You're not creative. Or like, that was creative. That was innovative. We put in our marketing materials. We put in our campaigns. We put it in how we describe things.But if you really break it down, like, do people really understand or live the value that what it is. I think that was part of the reason why when you go back to why it's so important to talk about this is actually because of that. Because we use it all the time, but so many people don't realize the root and the nuances. And hence, don't realize this is jargon, that we're just keep throwing it around without the full intention. And so, I first fell into it because of that very situation. I was originally in nuclear weapons security. Government work. Wanted to be a diplomat all my life. That having grown up in DC and in the States, as well as in Korea and worked in Europe. And, you know, hey, I'm not comfortable with science and math. So, this sounds like the perfect path. And like, I love people and building relations. And so, I was good with a lot of things, but like creativity, wasn't really a thing that I would describe I was good at. Even though now looking back, I realize I had. And only until when I find myself really getting depressed and stuck in a dream job where I realized that I was finding myself literally crying to work, feeling upset, not knowing what to do in a job that I fell in love with. And I'm like, what is wrong with me? Like I'm solving a very important mission. Mission-driven. Preventing bad guys from having nuclear weapons. We're working in the government. It's really hard to get into this industry too. And yet feeling stuck. And what helped me gave the courage of, you know, walking to work instead of taking the bus to work. Getting curious about all these different surroundings. And realizing how one life decision can make a huge difference. Because now I felt so curious in the office got even more energetic. Even though the work description hasn't changed at all. It got me curious about understanding about, well, what happened. And people did ask me like Monica, whatever you're doing, you seem happier. And that's where I realized creativity was one of the key elements.I didn't know back then, but it was the mindset of simply doing something different. Finding the courage to take different things. Try different things. Ask different questions. Even organizing my process of the project differently because as I looked at the traffic in the fourth street every day, I'm like am I creating traffic in the way I do things unconsciously. Just like how there's always traffic here. Like at this time? What do I need to do differently? And getting curious about it. And that's where I learned that comment that I started the beginning. That question of creativity, innovation. There's so much history and research behind it. That I had no idea. And because we throw around the word and use it so much, that I misunderstood what it meant.And I didn't know that it was for everyone. I didn't know that something that we can all do more. And regardless of where we are, it expressed differently. And I think it's even more needed now because of the pandemic. Brian Ardinger: Oftentimes I think the perception of creativity is it's some kind of magic. Or it's something that other people do. Or, you know, some, other people can possess that, but I can't do that. So, this idea of creativity not being magic. That being every day and available to anybody to possess or use, talk about how you identified that little nugget and what are some of the tactical things that you do to bring out that magic. Monica Kang: So, I love that you said it. Because immediately one book that I'm remembering, it's about daily habits. And I was mindful because I'm like, wow. So, all these creative, innovative historical people around the world, like they had to work hard to be a better writer. What, like, they didn't just magically write that book. And like became a best seller. And like, no, they had to write every day. The musicians had to write music every day. And I'm like, wait, if that's how it is.Like I wonder in the traditional non art industry, how they do creative. Of course, same thing. I think of new ideas every day. They had to try new things every day. Get rejected every day. And I'm like, oh my gosh. I mean, even the story of how WD40 product came about. Are you familiar with the WD40 products? So, it's that spray, right. You know why that name is called WD40. Brian Ardinger: I do not. Monica Kang: The reason why they named WD40 for that product was not a coincidence. It means water displacement, right? 40. Which indicates that it took 40 times to perfect that formula. Brian Ardinger: Ah. I hadn't heard that story. Monica Kang: How often are we willing to try 40 times. Hear 40 nos. Before we get to that yes. Not a lot. And I think that brings a weight. Hence to that question of what can we do every day, is that it's building the routine. As I learned about these daily routines of all these famous people of what they've had to do every day. Learning about stories like WD40, that how many attempts that people had to try.And my day-to-day activity, that means that I need to just make it a routine of constant learning and trying new things. And so, one activity I always share as a recommendation is like, what's a five minute time that you can always block to do something different. Or to do something intentionally differently.So maybe it's that, okay, if you always commute somewhere, could you try a different commute, maybe at least two or three times when you're not in a rush hour. Maybe you take a different path. Maybe it's that you take the same commute, but you'll listen to different music. Or maybe you'll listen to different podcasts. Maybe you're going to listen to this one time and then another podcast. Maybe it's that you actually take a silent ride sometimes. Just like Pink. Even though that looks like a naive, like how is that going to make me more creative? By making that simple decision, you're letting your mind wander in different ways. And explore different things. Which gets into the practice of thinking differently. Which is the essence of creativity to get to innovation and all these new ideas.So, to get to that WD40 product, they probably had to do a lot of that, somewhat unorthodox, like somewhat unexpected things that led to that 40th idea and innovation. And so, the key of those different elements is that you have to make it a habit. And it has to also be celebrated and enjoyable, but that's why I shared the tip with like, find a routine in your day.That you can do easily. That it doesn't feel like I don't have time to do that. I don't have time. Think about your exercise. Think about your sleep hours. Hopefully everyone's sleeping well. Sleep routine, like things. When it's built-in routine, it's a little bit easier, but then you can commit and see the change over time.Brian Ardinger: I use a similar technique called Scheduling Your Senses. So, each week you think about what sense do I want to focus on? So, this week I'm going to focus on taste. And I'm going to really focus, you know, a particular time period on what I'm tasting. How does that make me feel? And so, each week you pick a different sense that you want to do, and, you know, it comes down to, like you said, changing your environment. And getting you out of the normal rut that you have. You mentioned one of the obstacles to creativity is this idea of fear. And you know, when you think about WD40, having to try 40 times. You know, I'm sure they didn't go into it saying, hey, we're going to fail 40 times. Or going in with the mindset of I'm scared that I'm going to have to try this 40 different times to get to a solution. Talk about fear and the role of creativity. And how we can overcome that fear. Because I think that's one of the major barriers to creativity. Monica Kang: I think fear is unavoidable. But I think some of the mis-notion we have is that everything always has to be fearful. And I think that's where we miss the chance to celebrate what that growth stage looks like.The act of doing something different, sometimes doesn't always have to be fearful. Me listening to a different podcast, not a fearful thing. But I'm learning new insights. Me focusing on different senses might not be fearful. As it gets to certain decision-making of like, oh, because now I focused on the taste, I realized the way we're cooking right now in this kitchen is actually not good.And I need to tell my boss about it. If the customers are unhappy. That's where the fear encourages decision is. And so, I think when we asked that question, I think we see innovation, creativity in this box of like, okay, we got to think of this new idea, and we have to present it. But actually, even before we get to that stage of fear, there's all these other elements that we built resilience and skills of thinking differently that got us there.And so, the tip that I often share is like first recognize that being creative is you got to pass the fear bridge. But when you're there, remember that, hey actually even the parts to get there, there was a lot of courage into that. And you might not have realized. It might just not have looked as scary as that bridge you're about to cross, that looks really scary. But it wasn't as easy as you thought. And actually, that street that you look back, if you turn around and literally look back at those moments, that became not as scary, because you actually built resilience. There's hemisphere of how much you can experiment has grown so much that it becomes less scary. And in fact, when you cross this bridge, now I'm going to have to tell my chef and my boss about this big, scary decision. Now, the next time you need to do that, it's no longer being as scary. So, our horizon of what we feel we can continue to do will change and evolve, which I think is the part that is so fun to realize that creativity innovation mindset, just like our physical health and muscle is not a static thing. It's going to continue to evolve. Right. Just because I exercise every day, doesn't mean that I'm healthy and I'm done. I can be even healthier. I can be more cautious and same thing with my creative thinking muscle. And think those are the nuances that we miss. Brian Ardinger: I like where you're going. You know, it's almost about how do you reframe the journey from if you think about a particular project and you think about this big project is going to make or break my career. Versus approaching it from the standpoint of like, hey, I'm going to try and experiment. Or I'm going to do this side project. And positioning it in such a way that it frames it differently so that the things that you do learn and that when you do fall down, which are inevitably going to happen. It changes the way you perceive that falling down as part of the journey rather than the journey and the outcome of the journey. Monica Kang: And one thing, Brian, if I can piggyback on that. I share this actually my book Rethink Creativity as well. That, you know, the thousand shades of fear, because one thing that I think is also key is just because I might not be scared of a certain decision, does that mean another person will feel the same way. And I think that's what's actually part of the fear. We need to talk more. And especially as leaders, many of those who's probably listening. You might actually already be here and listening to this episode because you're already pre actually pretty good with it. You're like, no, I've got a good handle of fear. What might be actually harder is actually encouraging your different people. Encouraging your different colleagues. Noticing that like wait, checking ourselves to let when that person says that that's a scary decision, am I actually empathizing and sitting with them. Or coming from the nose up and say, look, yeah, no, don't worry friend. You're going to be fine. That's not scary. And amplifying actually how we feel. And so, fear comes in different shapes, sizes, different times. Actually, the very thing that I might not be scared with one person could be the very thing I'm scared with another person or in another situation. And so it's ever changing.And so, by us having aware. Having fear simply means that we have the alertness. There's a reason why as human beings, we survive, right? We were fearful of the weather conditions. The animals attacking us. Got to protect ourselves. That's actually how we were able to thrive and still exist as an, you know, a being. So, fear isn't just always a bad thing. It's helping try to kick in to protect you. So, look out for these different cues. And I think especially as leaders, it's so key that we don't just simplify. Get rid of your fear. And like stop being fearful. Can we take the time to process it? We need to actually acknowledge all of that and actually ourselves too. Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into that a little bit, you know. How do you design this creative workplace or workplace for all? You know, how does diversity affect creativity and how are you seeing some companies tackling that problem from an organizational perspective versus the individual perspective?Monica Kang: Well, let's first start with diversity. I think I'm really excited about going back to your very first question. Why so timely to be more creative. And I think the time is even better. We are now seeing more research. People are more aware. People want to learn. More honestly, as somebody who's specializing creative workplace building, it is an exciting time because more people are wanting to have those conversations and say help. I do want to do this. I don't know how. And so, I want to know that this is really timely because no matter what stage you are as a leader, wanting to do this. That you making a commitment and taking one step at a time is part of the thing that will help change the company. So even if that simple decision is that we're going to start doing some one-on-ones. Or we're going to start doing some team building activities at the very beginning and check-in. Actually, that might be the change in itself. That might actually be the kind of activity that your people are missing to feel the courage, to speak up. To feel psychological safety. Which is very key to ignite and creativity and opening up people's mind and feeling that what they can bring up. But if I come into the meeting room and I feel like, okay, Brian's going to be a little upset if I bring this up. Then it's one idea that I don't share. It's one problem. And Brian might be like, well, Monica might frown next time I share this, and he doesn't share one thing. Guess what? We're going to actually see, not only business consequences, but a lot of people, of course, who's going to be impacted because we stopped sharing.And so even that simple decision of like opening up could feel simple. Everyone is testing out right now. So, this good time, this is another example of the fear stopping you. Start with what you're comfortable with, which might be that simply, maybe let's read this article and talk about it. Or, hey, I learned this cool thing from this podcast that Brian and Monica were talking about. I'm inspired. Let's try this out. That could be the starting point. It doesn't always have to be like this big, humongous thing. That's going to lead to culture organization changing. So that's actually the very first tip I share with leaders to make it tangible relatable. And then two, as a result to know that this is a marathon. Yes, we want results as soon as possible for order something. I wanted to get the delivery, right. There was time and effort put in to make that process happen. And I love Simon Sinek's video, where he talks about the intensity versus consistency. He talks about the people development in the workplace. And the beautiful analogy he shares about is our brushing our tooth. If you asked me like, you know, what's the perfect formula to brush the tooth in life versus not to like prevent your mouth from having cavities. Like, I will not know the answer because, you know, maybe I skipped one day. Maybe I skipped three days. Like with that impact, is that the cause like, maybe, but we won't know. But it's the consistent that I brush my teeth every day that I keep my teeth healthy. Same thing on organizations. It's the simple moments of like, let's turn off their phones. Hey, Brian, how are you really doing. Like, oh, Monica actually, this is how I feel now that we've connected. We now open up. You know, Brian, I know we're done with the meeting, but I have this really question I want to ask you. Can I bring this up? I feel would really appreciate cause you just shared about, you know, how you feel. Now, okay. Brian, he's already right now, you're listening, but like he already stood up and like, oh, tell me more Monica. Right? The body language already brings up unconsciously. And I think he shares how it's the consistency that's key. And so again, the second tip I recommend for everyone is that no matter what, or the house solution you have for your culture and people development, the key is the consistency. Not just a one-time retreat of hurray and we're done. But what's the everyday routines that you want to embed.And so, when you even do a retreat or innovation workshop, or you invite a speaker, the question that I hope you always ask yourself, if this is what you're really committing to and what to do, because I know what you do, that's why you're listening to this episode. Think of something that you can do consistently.That is low hanging fruit. That is budget friendly, you know, got to be realistic, right? I'm not saying that you have to spend a lot of money, budget friendly. Implementable as well. And you might be surprised even in that five-minute activity in simply having rows of like no phones in the meeting. Log off. Something like that. So those are kind of tangible places I recommend.Brian Ardinger: That makes great sense. The last topic I want to talk about is the world of work is changing. Obviously. You've been in this space for pre pandemic and now through pandemic. What are some of the trends and things that you're seeing? What are some of the best practices, especially as we kind of move into this new hybrid environment that you're seeing when it comes to creativity.Monica Kang: So many, a particular point I want to highlight is actually generational. And I want to say this because when we see us wanting to express more creatively and we feel we can't. We like to figure out the cost. Right. And our consciousness is that, oh, it's because they're young. Oh, it's because they haven't worked in the company long enough.Oh, it's because they don't get my industry. There's always a, because of. I want to give the courage to recognize that instead of channeling that voice of why don't they get it the way I do. I wonder why they feel that way. I wonder why they say they don't want to get back to the office?I wonder why they say that? I feel fine. I can share all my ideas. I wonder why they say they don't feel comfortable sharing ideas? We got this fancy new office. We're doing all these breakout sessions. Instead of saying like, why are they not. Reframe that to I wonder why. And focus on the lens of listening and wanting to understand.Maybe they're going to share some stuff that you realize, whoa, like we were not ready for it. We don't know how to solve it. And that's okay too. It's not about always needed to have immediately all the answers, but let's problem solve this together. Thank you for sharing that. I had no idea that's how you feel.And part of this is them wanting to be acknowledged or appreciated and heard. And hey, ask them what they think is the best idea. They might actually have a really good idea that we completely missed out. And Brian to your question of what's changing is that more people are wanting to now finally try this. Which has always been important before. But not doing the consequence. Great resignation and even more has been greater. I think it's great that we're finally, hopefully seeing more workplaces where we make this the norm. That, of course we should understand what people want. And of course, this is hard because everyone wants something different. And sometimes we say what we want, but we don't really maybe need it.I might say I want ice cream, but maybe I shouldn't have ice cream today. Cause I already had my chocolate earlier. Right. Like we're people. It's going to be messy. But that's part of the beauty of it. Of feeling like we can bring out all our different insights. And sometimes the choice is that because we feel safe sometimes, I don't want to share out. And might just be like, okay, I just want to do work and that's it.And that's okay too. And I think part of it's like, what's the choice that you're going to make each day as a leader. As a creator. And as an innovator in your workplaces. Even if you're not in leadership for those who's listening like Monica, Brian, that's great, but what if I'm not a leader. You start with setting your boundaries. And where you want to start planting the seeds of where you can do this. So, I hope that gives an encouragement of a starting point. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: This has been fantastic. And I appreciate you giving these tactical tips that anybody within the organization can start making progress when it comes to creativity and innovation. So, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. If people want to find out more about yourself or your books or your company, what's the best way to do that?Monica Kang: Find me in any of the platforms. I'm on most of the social media platforms, but you know, connect with me on LinkedIn at Monica H Kang. K A N G. And then also follow us at InnovatorsBox. I also recommend the book as well. I think you'll enjoy it. And if you go actually to my book's website, for both of them, we have a lot of free worksheets and tools. Also because of our mission to make creativity, culture, and leadership accessible, we have a lot of free resources and tools. Including some of these topics. So, if you can't find it just simply email me, let me know. And also in some tools in Korean and other languages as well, because we want to make this globally accessible. So, we also make music as well, because not everyone's a reader or workshop person. You can find us at InnovatorsBox studios, where we create music to inspire creativity. Brian Ardinger: Thanks, Monica. I really do appreciate you coming on the show and look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Abhishek Nayak, Co-founder and CEO of Appsmith. Abhisek and I talk about the rise of no-code tools and some of the misconceptions and opportunities that no-code can bring to startups and enterprises alike. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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 Abhishek Nayak, Co-founder and CEO of AppsmithBrian 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 Abhishek Nayak. He is the CEO and Co-founder of a company called Appsmith. Welcome to the show. Abhishek Nayak: Thanks Brian. Really excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: I heard about Appsmith as we talk more and more about this no-code low-code space, that's developing in the startup and in the enterprise world. And Appsmith is an open-source framework that makes it easy to build and maintain internal custom business tools. No code for the enterprise if I'm correct. Abhishek Nayak: Yeah, exactly. Think of us like WordPress, but for building internal user facing applications. Brian Ardinger: I'd love to dig into how this got started, this rise of no-code technologies and that. Making it easier for the non-traditional technical person to build and create faster and that. So maybe let's take a step back and tell us a little bit of your journey of how you became a founder and specifically around, how did you decide to build a no-code app platform? Abhishek Nayak: Been an entrepreneur for a better part of the previous decade. Appsmith is actually my third startup. My first startup was in the space of offline logistics. We were doing cash and delivery. So, we had around 150 plus people. Lots of custom software built internally to manage them. And to run the business. My second startup was in the space of AI, where we were trying to automate customer support. And we used to have 10 plus customers and use to automate support requests for them. That again, we were building a lot of custom applications to train the data. Look at how a particular board or a particular model is performing. And just run all sorts of experiments and processes. That was my second startup. And all of these startups, I had the same co-founder and CTO Arpit Mohan.  And he actually got sick and tired of building all these tools. Our second startup didn't work that well. Our first one got acquired. Second one didn't work that well, and we had to shut it. But he actually started tinkering with the idea of building UI builder but for backend entrepreneurs. Because he was a backend engineer and he really disliked dealing with HTML/CSS. So, he started working on this side project. And this is why he was working at a different job.And during this period, when he was working on a different job, I was working as an EIR at Excel partners. So, I was an entrepreneur in residence where my job was to meet new startups, talk to them about how to run their business. And just understand if it makes sense for Excel to invest in it. While at the same time, I was also looking at other ideas that I could start out with.Now I couldn't find anything interesting. But I was helping my friend Arpit figure out if his idea for an open-source project had any legs. And during that process of helping him out, I started interviewing some of these startups that I was meeting on everyday basis. And I realized that almost every single startup had this problem. That they need to build a lot of custom business applications, maybe to run customer support or expose some data to the sales team. Have a way for the marketing team to maybe generate coupons. Or maybe look up some customer data.And they never had engineering bandwidth to build what they needed. And that was a problem, right? That's when I started telling Arpit, hey, maybe this can actually be a business. Maybe you just don't need to think of it as a side project. Maybe we should start a business together and do this like a startup.That's how it actually got started. It was my co-founder's idea because he hated HTML CSS. And then we started working together to build this out as a company. We also have a third co-founder Nikhil who heads product. And he again has been an engineer for a really long time. But he's a front-end engineer and he was just sick and tired of doing the same thing over and over again.So even though he has skills in HTML CSS, and he loves working on front end, he just disliked the repetitive nature that these internal apps generally have. And that's why he was excited about this idea. Brian Ardinger: I love the story. Because you often hear entrepreneurs' stories start with a pain or an itch that they have to scratch. And it sounds like that's exactly where you guys started. And it seems like the timing was perfect for this type of new tool. Because it's getting easier and cheaper to use multiple different tools and open APIs, et cetera, to make it easier to build and scale and test and try things than ever before. Talk a little bit about the early traction you got when you started the company and some of the early things you learned.Abhishek Nayak: So, the first six months of app Smith was just building the product out. And we actually started pitching it to users and convincing them to use it. But nobody actually converted. Nobody wanted to use it. And that's when we began to question is the product quality low? Do we not have enough features or what's happening here?When we started digging in deeper, we just realized that the standard style developers have for a product like this is really high. And we just had to go back and improve the quality. And add a lot more features to the product. For it to be ready. So, after our first launch which failed, you know, we had this pivotal moment where we had to decide, should we start building this for a different audience. Because developers don't seem to like this. Or should we just continue to follow our vision and get this right?So, I'm glad that we actually decided to continue following a vision, but just improve the quality and add lot more features. Because when he lost a year later, you know, one and a half years have gone by, since we actually started, it instantly took off. Like within the first week, I remember we had about 30 plus teams using us.And the only thing that we had done was write a blog post announcing that this is live. We did not actually do any sort of sales or any sort of cold outreach to get the users. And we honestly weren't putting in that much effort because we launched, expecting completely failure. Because that's what we had experienced, you know, like a year ago when we had tried to launch. But this time we were pleasantly taken aback by the reaction the market had.And that's when we realized that a product like this just takes a lot longer to build versus a SaaS product. And the quality that developers expect is just a lot higher versus today, we have around 5,000 plus companies that use us every month. And tens of thousands of people who use us every day. That's a different story today.Brian Ardinger: When you were going through the process of determining which features to add, or which ones to improve, how did you work with customers or how did you determine what to build in that environment? Abhishek Nayak: So, most of the early features that was very much decided by my co-founders because they had been engineers for a really long time. And we really just relied on their intuition to decide what should be built. And this is where I think we broke a lot of start-up rules. When a customer asked us to build this feature, if my co-founders disagreed, we would not build it. And what that led to was the product ended up being simple enough for most users. And the base features that my co-founders were sure were important, actually turned out to be quite successful. And the product ended up not being so bloated. Today of course it's a different story because now we do listen to customers a lot more and we actually end up executing it. But in those early days, it was so important to just stay focused on what we were sure they would use. I think the most amount of waste occurs in a startup is when you build something that nobody uses, and nobody wants. So, by just being hyper focused on the vision that my co-founders had said, we actually ended up getting to a product, which a lot of people really like. And it was high quality. Brian Ardinger: Then of course, having co-founders that were in that customer segment and really understood because they were themselves customers. Or trying to scratch that itch. Probably helped immensely. So, let's talk about no code itself and sometimes it gets a bad rap. Especially in the enterprise. You see a lot of startups using it as they're testing or building out new things as a way to grow and scale and meet their own customer demand. What are some of the misconceptions about no-code that you've run in to?Abhishek Nayak: The first one is that no code is only for business users. In my experience, the fastest adopters of tools like Zapier, Bubble, Backflow, were actually developers. They love automating work that they do not like. So I don't think no code as we know, put developers out of jobs. Instead, developers love it. And they'll actually be able to focus on more custom and more complicated tasks. The second misconception about no code is the fact that you cannot build complicated things. I actually don't think that's true. What I believe is 80% of the software that the world needs is actually fairly straightforward. You need a simple, but something that works all the time. So no code is really good for that. But I also see the fact that no code products like Bubble, Zapier, or Indi Nomad. They actually have evolved so much that you can actually build really complicated things on those. It's still very early days for most no-code products. Therefore, when you look at them, you might think, okay, these can only be used for building simple tools.I cannot build something sophisticated on them. But the fact is all of these tools are going to evolve. And they're just going to get much better achieving complicated tasks. And at some point in time, you're not going to have full-time developers or professional developers working on these kind of applications, which can be completed by no code, because it's just going to be a waste of their time.Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about some of the applications that you see are driving no-code today, and maybe some applications you see being on the forefront tomorrow. Abhishek Nayak: With Appsmith, we see that the most common applications are generally applications with dealing with customer date. So it could be, you're looking at customer data or you're trying to do a customer support workflow, or you're trying to do a sales and marketing workflow. Most no code and low code apps that are built today, generally tend to be very close to serving our customer. Because those are the highest priorities for any entrepreneurial, small to medium sized business. But those are the commonest use cases. In case of Appsmith, we see customer support as a huge use case for us. I am personally a big user of Zapier. And what I find is Zapier is great when you have to just do some of these quick and dirty sales and marketing workflows. Maybe I want every time there's a customer, who's signing up from a company with more than a thousand employees, I want to get personally notified on my slack. Or, you know, anytime there's a customer, who's at risk of churning out, I want to be notified on Slack. For some of those things I found it incredibly easy to use Zapier for. And it has an immediate revenue impact because if I go act on those deals or act on those customers that are about to churn out, I can either rescue that revenue or I can generate more revenue. I think those are probably the commonest use cases.Now over time, I do think there'll be more adjusted use cases, which are not linked with revenue to come about where you might be doing something let's say for HR or for internal financial processes. Some of those things. But as of today, I believe anything that's any process that's close to customer will probably be the first one that's used by users.Brian Ardinger: Do you see a big difference between developing no-code internal tools versus no-code consumer-based tools or front facing types of technologies? Abhishek Nayak: Yes, I do. There are quite a few differences when it comes to building customer facing tools, using no code. These generally tend to be less data heavy. And there are a lot more focused on visual design and look and feel and UI. Versus when it comes to internal facing applications, they tend to be more data heavy. And they tend to be more security oriented as well. So, you're going to have rule-based access control, SSO. Some of these features which are necessary when you're building like a internal tool. Versus when you're building something that's customer facing, you're not going to focus that much on security. Because it probably doesn't deal with that much sensitivity. Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about is this role of community. I know that Appsmith's done a really good job of building an active community. You've got a Discord page, and a number of folks that follow that on a regular basis. Can you talk about how you built community as part of your startup? And how important is that to continuing to build a business. Abhishek Nayak: Community has been very essential for the success of Appsmith. But the way the community grew was, they basically first needed support for using Appsmith. So, they started joining our Discord because they needed help using the product. And over time, the number of users and our Discord grew so much that even when we were sleeping and there was a question, another community member would go on and answer it. So, the shared love that people have in our Discord community is the love for the product. And that's what binds people together. And over time we've seen people create like different language communities. As well as there are freelancers and entrepreneurs who build apps for other companies using Appsmith. They've actually started talking to each other and helping each other out. So we are still in the very early days, but I believe like for you to start with the community, there needs to be a shared common interest or a shared love for a product. I think it's really difficult if there is no common interest and all you have a product, which is actually not love. If you focus on the product first, it's possible to get a community going. Brian Ardinger: If people want to get involved in the no-code movement and that, are there particular resources or things they should turn to, to learn a little bit more about what's going on in the space? Abhishek Nayak: The biggest set of resources are really available on YouTube. Because low-code, and no-code tend to be easier to understand and use when you watch a video. So, I would just highly recommend, you know, looking up YouTube tutorials instead of reading an article about it. Some of these tools just sound very complicated when you're reading an article about it. But when you actually see somebody build something using it, it just clicks a lot quicker. That's the way I learned how to use Zapier and Indi Nomad. And that was a lot easier, than this reading of blog posts. Third, just highly recommend just looking at these YouTube tutorials. Brian Ardinger: I highly agree with you on that. And quite frankly, just learning and playing with the tools themselves. A lot of them are not necessarily self-explanatory, but if you get in and you have a use case scenario, a lot of them, you can figure out yourself, even if you're not a developer. Abhishek Nayak: Exactly. And there's always some YouTuber who's addressed that particular use case before. I'm not really found it to be the case that you can't figure it out after seeing what YouTubers were doing.Brian Ardinger: So, Abhishek, if people want to find out more about yourself or more about Appsmith, what's the best way to do that?Abhishek Nayak: So, the best way to find out about Appsmith is go to www.Appsmith.com. And we also have a YouTube channel that gets a lot of hits. So, if you want to just see the product before signing up. You should just check out our YouTube channel. And I'm on Twitter. You can just find me by searching, for Abhishek Nayak. You should be able to find me there. Brian Ardinger: Well, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Really do appreciate your time. And love hearing about all the new things that are going on in the world of innovation. And I'm looking forward to continuing the conversation.Abhishek Nayak: Thank you so much, Brian, for having me. I loved this conversation.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire and Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Andrew, and I talk about his entrepreneurial journey building MicroAcquire, and some of the insights he's seeing when it comes to buying and selling startups.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world. Accelerating change and its certainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses.Interview Transcript with Andrew Gazdecki, Founder of MicroAcquire Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Andrew Gazdecki who is the founder of MicroAcquire. And Author of the new book Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold My SaaS Startup. Welcome Andrew. Andrew Gazdecki: Thanks so much for having me, Brian. I'm excited. Brian Ardinger: I've got my MicroAcquire socks on. So, thank you for that. I'm super excited to have you on to talk about the craziness that is the startup world. And you've had a front row seat for a number of years as a multi-founder. And now with MicroAcquire, let's talk about what MicroAcquire is and how you got into the business of helping startups sell to other folks.Andrew Gazdecki: MicroAcquire, for those who aren't familiar with it, is the largest startup acquisition marketplace in the world today. We have about 150,000 buyers registered. We've helped over six hundred startups to get acquired that combined acquisition total is 400 million at this point. Almost half a billion. We don't charge any fees. So, you can sell your business on MicroAcquire completely free.So, I started that business, candidly, as a side project. I just felt that needed to exist. I'd previously gone through two acquisitions, and it was just a mess. Everything from finding the buyers to, there's so much education today on how to grow your business. How to learn sales. How to recruit. And how to fundraise. But then there's nothing on the exit. Which is arguably the most important part of the founder's journey.And when I sold my first business, which we can talk about, if you'd like, it was a business called Business Apps. Spelled BiznessApps, and kind of the light bulb moment went on when I sold it. I just got a ton of emails and texts from friends that we're also running startups and they were like, how'd you get acquired?Like, how did you find the buyer? What was the process like? It was like hieroglyphics everyone. Including myself when I went through the process. So, what we're really trying to do at MicroAcquire is democratize startup acquisitions and just make the process easier and more transparent for founders. And also, buyers.Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the types of startups that are being bought and sold on the platform. And how has that maybe changed since when you first launched? Andrew Gazdecki: Well, when we first launched, lots of small startups, you know ranging from, we would sell business, and we still do today, but 5k startups, mostly side projects. And since then, we've really expanded, I guess, up market. So, our largest acquisition is just under $10 million. We have buyers on the platform now that can facilitate acquisitions in the hundreds of millions if the value is there. Yeah, just started with humble beginnings just because I felt this was something that was so needed for the startup ecosystem. Because the other routes to sell your business, unless you're most founders think like Google shows up with a check and hey, you did it. Like you won the lottery. There's this saying most startups are bought, not sold and that's just not true. You know, you really need to sell your business. And so, the other routes were expensive, borderline highway robbery, and that's, that was really kind of like the main purpose of me launching MicroAcquire to really give another option for founders of this other business. And if you're curious about the other options, you can hire an investment banker. They're going to charge a big fee. If your startup is too small for an investment bank, because most investment banks will only work with you if your business is of a certain size. And you know, maybe you can get like eight, nine figure exit. And I had previously worked with an investment bank. And their minimum fee was $800,000 for a successful transaction. The short story there, we got a few offers, but the fee was just, I still had gas in the tank, so I kept going. But it showed me, and I remember telling the bankers, I was like, you guys have the coolest job in the world. I do all this work. And then at the end, you come in and get, you know, a nice payday. So that always kind of stuck with me. And then I stumbled on to business brokers. Business brokers, if your business is doing let's say less than you know 5 million in revenue. You can work with a business broker. They will typically charge 10 to 15% commission to sell your business. So, 10% to 15%. So that's like a small angel round. So, I just saw it. Okay. Business brokers don't do too much. You know, what would happen if we removed the middleman? And we let buyers and sellers connect directly. And we help businesses ranging from SaaS companies. That's kind of our sole focus. But we also sell a lot of e-commerce businesses. Communities. Some crypto companies. Direct to consumer. Newsletters. We like to say, we want to be the marketplace for profitable startups. So that's mainly our focus is startups that have traction. So, we don't list startups that are pre revenue. Content websites. Affiliate websites. Again, mostly focusing on businesses that have, you know, a lot of growth upside. Having a blast running it at the same time, too. Brian Ardinger: I'm hearing more and more about people using the platform, startup founders, maybe looking to buy a side project or a side hustle versus building something from scratch. Are you seeing that trend happening? Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah. Like one story that comes to mind is, there's builders and there's scalers. Where a lot of people love to build a business. They love to think of a new idea and bring something to life. And I think fallen, in both those buckets. Builders and scalers. And so people build these wonderful businesses, but they maybe build it to a certain point where they'd like to move on to something else.Maybe they built it to a few million in revenue and now they're, you know, mostly managing. When they'd really like to be building. And so MicroAcquire is a great outlet for them to meet buyers within like hours. Like the fastest acquisition on my group, where I was within, quite literally hours. Those are obviously outliers. Brian Ardinger: What are you seeing when it comes to valuation trends and things along those lines? How's the market changed or what shifts are you seeing? Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah, good question. It really depends on the business. So, a good business will always trade at really good multiples. SaaS trades at high multiples and e-commerce. Newsletters communities also trade lower than, you know, a typical SaaS business.So, there's so much variability. And when I get asked questions like I have a SaaS company, it's doing a million revenue. What's it worth. That's kind of akin to asking what a car is worth. You know, like, is there a 500,000 miles on it? Does it need a new transmission? Do you have a good team in place? What is your churn? What is the quality of your customers? And then other little things like when you go to sell your business, do you have an understanding of kind of what your business is worth? And on MicroAcquire, we have two different things that we do to help with valuations. One is we have a directory within MicroAcquire where you can hire someone to get a real valuation done.I highly recommend that. And then we also have a tool called MicroMRR. And you should go to micromrr.com and you connect your Stripe billing. And we'll actually give you a data-driven valuation based on what we're seeing from acquisitions happening in the market. So, acquisitions are a moving target. I'd say maybe there could be a slowdown coming.I know the public markets for trading believe like 22X, and then they dropped down to 12X and this is April. Those might climb back. But the last year was absolutely borderline bonkers in terms of. It was record numbers in terms of private equity activity. Just MNA activity in general. So, it's a good time to sell your business if you're looking to. Brian Ardinger: I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you came to create MicroAcquire. I mean, I know early on you even did some interesting marketing. Went viral. You had the Russ Hanneman character from Silicon Valley TV show, do a little viral stuff on Twitter. Talking about MicroAquire and that. Can you talk a little bit about your idea of how you got it started and the execution to get MicroAcquire off the ground?Andrew Gazdecki: Honest answer is, so I like to work within a frame. I'm not a big fan of like mental frameworks. That, you know, maybe other people put forth. But so, I'm always thinking of what worked five years ago or what worked 10 years ago does not work today. And so that's why you'll see, I'm always trying to market in a way that doesn't feel like marketing. But it also adds value and maybe even makes you laugh and stuff like that.A lot of startups today think that their main competitor is XYZ company. But it's really the 500,000 startups out there. So, you're competing for consumer attention. I'm a big believer in that. And so, we focus a lot on brand-building. Just sharing MicroAcquire story. Kind of everything. So, when I first launched it, I was working probably like 4:00 AM to like midnight. And the only way, so going back to kind of like how I think about and what I recommend founders think about when they first launch a startup is this won't come as a surprise. But find something you're passionate about. So, and then also find something that you have a unique insight into. So, I made a bet that entrepreneurship through acquisition was going to be a trend. And that was just through me going through two different acquisitions. And I was actually looking to buy a SaaS company. And I couldn't find anything that was specific to SaaS. I didn't like working with brokers. I wanted to speak directly to the founder because it's a very relationship type transaction. And it's not just here's the keys. You know, I want to know about the founder. I want to know why are they looking to sell? And so, I kind of just created what I feel acquisition should be. And I kind of built MicroAcquire in a way that thinking back on Bizness Apps is a 10 million a year revenue company. What would it take for me to list on a marketplace? So, we implemented things like privacy ability to connect. Financial metrics. You give buyer a good, healthy snapshot into the view of your business. To get it off the ground, I mean, a lot of podcasts. A lot of cold emails. Hanging out on live chat, 24 7. And I don't recommend this to founders, but again, going back to my previous point is before I launched MicroAcquire, I wrote down, what customer do I want to serve?And I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. I love startups. And kind of a startup nerd. I love looking at new businesses. And I built this company. And so when I work on it kind of feels like a video game. It's not work. And if you can put yourself in that situation with some unique insights into a market. It's a customer that you love. And then unique insights kind of fall in line with what I describe as founder market fit. So why you. So, I think of why now. Why you. As probably the two most important things. I had a deep conviction that acquisitions are going to be increasing. And that proved to be right. So that was a non-obvious bet to a lot of people, but obvious to me. That became obvious over time. But when you're able to build a startup in a way that you enjoy playing, running, whatever you want to describe it. More than your favorite video game. You kind of want, cause it's really hard to compete against a founder that where it feels like work.My best analogy there is if you, I see a lot of founders creating startups around what I'd call like opportunistic opportunities. Where, you know, it's a good idea, but maybe you build a CRM for dentists. But you hate dentists. And a big part of building a startup is talking to customers all the time. I'm a big believer that your customers have path to product market fit. They have a better roadmap than you do. And so, you need to be able to talk to these customers and enjoy these conversations and really listen to them. Otherwise, there's someone out there who's going to love those conversations and it's just going to be really hard to compete. But it all kind of revolves around happiness. Where the founders that I think go the distance really enjoy what they do day in day out.And that's not to say it's super easy. Like just cause it's fun, it's easy. Like a video game. Just because it's fun doesn't mean it's easy. I think that's kind of the key that a lot of the founders should be thinking about is, is this a business I could run for a decade? If so, why? And kind of dip your toes in the water.Like when I launched my group, I didn't have grandiose visions for it. I just wanted to help other founders get acquired without these huge commissions. And then as the business grew, it became pretty obvious that the market opportunity was fairly large. Yeah, basically kind of grew forth. I knew this was something that the startup community needed, and I just worked.I was doing customer support. Vetting the listings. Writing the newsletters. Managing the product. Going on podcasts like this. Social media content. In a weird way, and now I have a team that helps me with all that stuff, but in a weird way, I kind of look back and I miss those days. Brian Ardinger: Well, it's never really been a better time to be an entrepreneur because you have a lot of these new No-code tools. And ways to spin up experiments. And like you said, dip your toe in the water. And you have access to a lot more information. You know, I think 10 to 15 years ago, the whole VC world was not very transparent. But now, you know, you can read blogs and books and figure out that particular path if you're an entrepreneur. It sounds like you're trying to do the same thing for on the acquisition side. Breathe some life into what that path looks like and that. So, let's talk a little bit about the book you just wrote, Getting Acquired: How I Built and Sold my SaaS Startup. What can people expect to find in it? And why did you write the book? Andrew Gazdecki: I started BiznessApps again, spoke B I Z N E S S apps. My mom, this is kind of a funny footnote, but everyone called it BizApps. So, I ended up chasing down owner of the domain, BizApps. When your mom calls your business BizApp, and you don't have the domain, you got to go get it.But I started that business when I was 21 in college. And also going back to unique insights. I had a previous business that helped mobile developers connect to businesses. So, I saw businesses posting the same job requirement over and over and over. And I thought, whoa, they're paying like 50K to 100K for like a project like this?What if I just built a template and the functionality isn't really changed too much. But we just changed the content. Imagery. Which speeds up mobile app creation. Makes it more affordable. There's do yourself website builders at the time. And I thought, what about a do yourself mobile app builder for small businesses?So, the book is just kind of my story. I just journaled through the whole experience because it was very strange and surreal. I was 21 when I launched it. Just to give you kind of an idea of like the growth of it. And it was a right place, right time business. I got completely lucky. The iPhone had just come out. Android wasn't even there. Blackberry was still in the mix. We almost made a Blackberry app. I'm glad we didn't. But it's just my candid experience building that company, from idea all the way to the invested. So, it's not a book of here's how to build a startup. It's more of a book of here's how I built a startup with mistakes. Everything from when I thought of the idea to when I sold the business and everything in between. Brian Ardinger: Can you highlight some of the best or worst advice that you got on that journey.Andrew Gazdecki: I was so young. So, I was 23, 24, and I personally didn't grow up with too much means if you will. And so, I remember there's a specific situation. We needed a marketing hire. And I was handling most of the marketing. And the salary ranges, now I'm two years out of college and they were in like the 150K, 200K range.And I'm like, what am I going to pay someone that. Like you really need, one of my favorite quotes is, you know, talent wins games, but teamwork when championships. It's a Michael Jordan quote. So, I think, you know, hiring smarter people than me, was probably my biggest mistake. Also, a funny story. This is a true story. We had a period where we were again, because we didn't hire a really good marketer that could track in our paid ad spend and stuff like that. We were spending over a hundred thousand a month on Google ads. The business grew from zero to let's call it 7 million in the first five years. So it was just, everything was just kind of like, don't touch anything. We don't know what's working. But it's working. And it was so profitable. And our customer payback period was like 33 days. And for the first two years, our margins were about 90%. So, it was just extremely profitable. But when we finally hired someone to do analysis on how profitable is this pay-per-click ad campaign, we concluded basically we were burning about 90,000 out of that a hundred thousand. So, we call that era blowing up Ferrari's every month. So, every month we were blowing $90,000 because we weren't properly attributing our marketing spend to customer acquisition. And blowing up a Ferrari every month probably would have been cooler. Maybe not that would have hurt my heart because I'm a big car fan. But and I share all of that. I share the ups and the downs. And I think it's just a candid story of just what it's like to build a startup. Mistakes and wins included. Brian Ardinger: So, looking at the world today, what are some of the resources that you would recommend that startup founders be checking out or paying attention to?Andrew Gazdecki: I get a lot of really good insight just talking to other startup founders. I'm not a big podcast listener. I read a lot. Like this was kind of some books I'm reading and there's my book on top, like Play Bigger. It's a book about brand-building. From Impossible to Inevitable, that's a great book on how to build a SaaS company end to end. It goes over marketing, building a sales team, just written by Jason Lampkin and Aaron Ross from Predictable Revenue.And then a Tuned In, which is basically how to listen to customers. You know, you can talk to customers. But how do you really listen and get the insights you need? So, I always say that customers have a way better roadmap to product market fit than you. You just need to talk to them and listen. So, I could give you a number of different books, but I'm an avid reader. That's kind of where I get a lot, but I will say you definitely learn the most when you launch a startup. When you kind of just, you can read all the books in the world, but when you finally launch a startup, that's when the real learning begins.And also like you kind of get in a situation of, I launched a startup. Okay, now I really need to figure out marketing. And so now you're very motivated to figure out marketing and apply some of the concepts that's right, that you might read in some of these books. Brian Ardinger: That's great advice. And I encourage anybody who's even thinking about it. The tools and the resources are out there to try things nowadays that maybe you couldn't have tried in the past. Even if you fail, you've probably leveled up your skills and game considerably than if you just read about it. So, encourage is that as well. My last question is what are you most excited about working on the next three to six months? Andrew Gazdecki: I'd say just helping startups and founders get acquired. We have a goal to help a thousand startups, get acquired this year. So far, we're on track for that. We average about 100 a month. So, we'll probably beat that goal. And what's interesting about startups and you start something, and it goes really slow, but stick with it. And then kind of takes off because we've done more acquisitions this year alone than we did in the first two years of being in business.So, what gets me excited is just helping founders. And we're building tooling to help acquisitions. To really streamline them and really educate founders on what is due diligence. What are the legal steps? How do I transfer assets? How do I do technical due diligence on code if I'm looking to acquire a business? How does escrow work? What are common deal terms? So, if you go to MicroAcquire, click resources at the top. You can literally learn how to acquire a 100-million-dollar business. We have so much content. And that's just kind of like something I felt was so needed because it's such an opaque topic that not too many people write about. So, I definitely recommend checking that out. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Andrew, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. And sharing these stories and giving us some insights and access to some of these resources. I think it's very valuable. I really do appreciate your time. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about MicroAcquire or the book, what's the best way to do that?Andrew Gazdecki: Definitely check out MicroAcquire.com. It's free to sign up. You can browse the startups. And then as a seller if you're looking to sell your business also completely free. You can list your startup. And instantly meet buyers. Sometimes within hours of going live. We do vet all listings. So, we have a process where we work. And we make sure that you are prepared when you go live on MicroAcquire. But follow me on Twitter, @agazdecki if you can spell that. Or just add me on LinkedIn.Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, thank you again for being on the show. And looking forward to staying connected. Andrew Gazdecki: Yeah. Thanks for having me.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Rachel Kuhr Conn, Founder and CEO of Productable. Rachel and I talk about the pitfalls and challenges facing corporate innovation and some of the processes and practices that companies can use to level up their innovation efforts. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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 Rachel Kuhr Conn, Founder and CEO of ProductableBrian 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 Rachel Kuhr Conn. She's the Founder and CEO of Productable, where she is turning the innovation process into software. Welcome to the show, Rachel. Rachel Kuhr Conn: Thanks so much Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. I'm surprised we haven't had you on earlier. We have a number of mutual friends that have crossed paths. And we just only got introduced to recently. So, I'm glad to have you on the show. You've recently started a company called Productable, focused on the space of innovation and how do you create more repeatable processes and things along those lines. You've just landed a deal with the US Air Force to expediate the innovations process at the national defense area. How did you get involved in this innovation space to begin with? And then we'll talk about how did you develop Productable. Rachel Kuhr Conn: Really excited to finally connect after all of the different people we have in common. So, a little bit of my backstory is I was a bright eyed, bushy tailed engineer, thinking that I was going to change the world with amazing products. And dreaming of all the impact I was going to make. And my research area in school was actually around predictive analytics for innovation success. And so, there's actually a lot of data around personality type, team dynamics, methodologies that you can look at and actually predict what should be used and what the team dynamics should be to drive the best outcome.So, in school, I was like, oh my gosh, industry must be amazing at solving problems. Like I just can't wait. And instead, I went into large corporation after a large corporation and just couldn't believe how politics and silos and just corporate bull crap for lack of better term, ruined every single opportunity I thought I had to ever make something awesome.And so just personally, I got really, really tired of the amazing capacity that all these large organizations have. And I just could never quite create the thing that made it to the finish line. And so got involved in the venture capital world. Saw how things work differently. Got really inspired by it. And essentially started building our platform and what we call the Productable Way, which leverages VC mindset and built it more into a corporate friendly approach, if you will. Brian Ardinger: And you worked with Mark Cuban companies, and some other folks, to build out this philosophy or build out this methodology. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Rachel Kuhr Conn: So, I got so frustrated in the corporate world. I actually cold emailed Mark Cuban while watching a bunch of Shark Tank. Cause I was like, they say yes to a lot of things that I think my boss would have said no to. And so, I just had to figure out, figure out what the difference was. And in the venture world, it's okay to take a lot of bets. You're supposed to build a whole portfolio of bets. And you understand that the outcome of a few is going to be big enough to pay for the losses of the others, and then some. It creates this incredible culture of risk-taking and experimentation. And having the room to do that in corporates really is what's required to help large organizations overcome the disruption curves that are ahead. You know, you always have something that's eating these large organizations. And so, you really have to have a way of managing, how do you actually take a lot of bets on new ways of solving these problems and in overcoming these things to actually be able to succeed. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm curious to talk a little bit more about how you came about creating Productable. So, you know, there are a lot of idea management, idea capture, innovation software platforms out there. So, a lot of people kind of taking a swing at this over the last 20 years. What made you want to try to tackle this marketplace? Rachel Kuhr Conn: For one, it was from the pain point. If one of those had solved the problem, I feel like I would've just run with it. I didn't really necessarily feel the need to be a founder. It was actually the pain that I couldn't go into corporate innovation yet again and face the same problems. And so, something about those tools just wasn't doing it for me. It wasn't solving that problem that you end up with ideas on a shelf.And so, there's a lot of great idea management platforms that start to build that early stage of top of the funnel kind of solutions. But how do you actually move solutions through mid-stage and late stage of the funnel? And that's really where Productable comes of help. Brian Ardinger: Well and that's one of the interesting insights is I think a lot of people think that a tool will solve the problem, but really a tool is just a tool. And what really makes this thing work as far as innovation within big companies, it's a culture of innovation. And its processes and that that are around the intake of an idea. So maybe talk about how does process play a role in the actual software itself? Rachel Kuhr Conn: Yeah, absolutely. And so, it's a hundred percent culture where just a means to help support all of those things. And one of the big things is the company has to be willing to really invest in innovation. And if you're not putting your money where your mouth is, you're not going to get the outcomes. And so Productable is really a three-pronged approach. It's portfolio, progress, and people. And so what those three elements are, Portfolio Management is really about establishing and evangelizing a solid strategy that people understand. Making it so that you invest wisely in innovation, so that you're not throwing good money after bad. And you're making it really easy to expedite decision-making across the whole process. Then I'm going to actually switch to People Management. So that's more of like the top-down strategy if you will. People Empowerment is about honing the innovator skill so that you can actually empower projects to go through the right methodologies and tools and ensure you're involving the right subject matter experts. So, it's a little more of the ideal, if I was building a product, and building a company, these are some of the tools and processes I might. And then you would have to actually sync those together and that's our Progress Management. So, progress management, is like the way that a venture capitalist might get an update from a startup. And actually, here's our barriers. Here's our wins. Here's our asks. Here's how everything's actually going. Rubber meets the road. It's that kind of reporting so that when you're dealing with all the corporate stuff, that's preventing you from doing anything. It's how you actually manage all of those barriers and work through those pieces. So essentially that top down, bottom up and that syncing are those three pieces that we use to leverage in our software to help people innovate. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think it's interesting. A lot of companies struggle first out of the gate, just defining what innovation is. And trying to come up with that innovation thesis. You know, do they focus on core optimization types of innovations. Or do they go for the transformational stuff? And what does that even look like? Some people only think of innovation as one side of that bucket. Which it's not. So, talk about like how your clients and that use Productable or the approaches that you use to understand how to create that innovation thesis. And how to place bets across the different horizons of innovation.Rachel Kuhr Conn: Well, that's a great question. And I would say we're very agnostic. So, we don't care if you're doing a core innovation or a disruptive innovation. But what we're going to do is be able to show you the math. So, if you're doing disruptive innovation and you're wanting to put all of your eggs in one basket or two and you're essentially say, yeah, we're going to do these two really disruptive ideas. You're going to see that whether you invest in two ideas or you decide to invest in 20, the math is still going to be true. That if you're going after a disrupting idea is probably like a 10% chance it's going to work out. And so, as long as you're okay with that, and you're doing two bets, great. That's your expectation. But maybe you should be going after 20 bets if you want disruptive. And in a core, it might be 90% success rate. And so, there's a lot of great data around success rates that corporates really miss. And so, it's being mindful of taking that risk tolerance at the leadership level and setting that standard of this is what a bet looks like. This is the check size. This is essentially what we expect our decision criteria to be. Our traction metrics. The same way a VC would. And then making it really visible essentially, so that when it's time to make a decision, they can decide if something fits in their portfolio or not. And then they can actually get the metrics to see how it's going. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about how people are using it now. So, give me some examples. Or some people or places that are taking advantage of your software. Rachel Kuhr Conn: Sure. So, we're working with the Air Force right now. We work with the Vice Chief's Office, the number two of the air force. And a lot of the DAF, Department of Air Force leadership. And the Air Force is a 700,000-person organization. There are, I mean, just hundreds of people involved in innovation. And it's really interesting at a large corporation, you tend to have a head of innovation and a group that works under them. And the Air Force is much, much more complex than that. I don't have a very straightforward answer of how it's all going. But the short answer is we're starting to look at how can we leverage portfolio management within the Air Force. And how can we build an ecosystem of portfolios to ensure that we actually have the right funds and system to ensure that ideas can go from idea to mid late stage and not fall into the valley of death along the way. Brian Ardinger: What kind of differences are you seeing between like maybe public facing companies or like private companies. Versus like the government sector. Do they treat innovation differently or what are you seeing from the differences? Rachel Kuhr Conn: I never thought corporate seems so simple. A 700,000-person organization turns out, I don't know if you've ever heard the rule of threes and tens. Things tend to get more complicated with three people, 10 people, 300 people, a thousand people, three, you know, so forth. And so, when you think about 700,000 people organizations, it's just what is a single approval at a large corporation is actually takes you to a different business unit that then manages the process that does that approval. That takes you to another business unit that manages. So actually, putting your arms around any sort of portfolio decision is so complicated. And it's so needed to be able to solve that in such a large organization compared to a small corporate, if you will.Brian Ardinger: And I imagine the stakes are different, depending on the specific ideas and that. Like, obviously if you're doing innovation in and around things that could kill people, or, have a significant different effect versus you know, the new color of a new product that you come out with. I'd imagine the stakes are slightly different as well. Rachel Kuhr Conn: Well, the interesting thing about the Air Force is that it's actually, I think it's 94 bases and every single base works like a city. And I didn't realize this until I worked with the Air Force either. So, the Air Force, like the pilots, if you will, are part of the scene, but to support those pilots, you have to have a base where there's hospitals, hotels, restaurants, education, gas, like literally gyms. Everything you can imagine has to be on base.And so, the Air Force is actually in charge of having every single one of those kinds of businesses within the Air Force organization. So actually, the kinds of things that we're helping are everything from childcare, gym apps. Yes, there are some more serious ones too. But I would say there's a surprising amount of comparables to industry of solving those kinds of problems.Brian Ardinger: That's quite interesting. So, talk a little bit about some of the trends that you're seeing in the space of innovation. Or what are you excited about? Rachel Kuhr Conn: I think that people are really starting to see the need for portfolio innovation. Pre COVID there was a lot of, I'm talking about the corporate space. It was a little more okay to spend a lot of money and just see what would happen with it.And so, I had a lot of connections that were in corporate innovation, they would get to try a lot of stuff. And then it was okay not to know what was going to happen next. Then all of a sudden COVID cut those budgets. And people got stuck. And they had to figure out what to do next. And I think we're, you know, everything was really held back.But now I think we're in a really interesting space where people really want to innovate. They want to do something different. And they're saying, how can we make sure that we're going to drive real outcomes? And so I'm actually really excited for this new market that we're in. That I feel like there's a little more responsible. And also, proactive and engaged and really curious to see what they can do.Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing the similar obstacles and problems being faced. Or is it different. Like has the mindset changed? Like when we talk about innovation, you know I think, and disruption specifically pre COVID, a lot of folks kind of understood it intellectually. But didn't really get it until everybody's lives had to change overnight. Are you seeing differences of how people approach innovation based on the world changes and that? Or what's different from that perspective?Rachel Kuhr Conn: I think it's COVID, but I also think it's maturity of innovation in general. We've seen a lot of large corporations that have invested in, ahead of innovation. Where then the outcomes didn't quite reach the executive leadership expectation. And it's funny, I don't know how much people talk about this stuff, but I hear about it all the time. People get the job of head of innovation and then they try to get a certain amount of money to move their idea forward. For a specific idea, let's say. And then leadership says, great show your progress, and then we'll give you more money. And it's a trap. Because you need a lot of bets to succeed at innovation. And so, then there's like this problem that innovation leaders are put in this place where they're getting asked to prove success on something that is really a bet. And it gets really confusing. And all of a sudden, their neck is on the line for success. It generally doesn't end well unless they got lucky. And so, there's been like this two to three year rotation that happens over and over again. People are getting tired of it. Having enough after working at a few large companies, seeing the same thing over and over. Company is seeing that same person go through and not getting what they need, that they know something has to be different.Brian Ardinger: Is there a way to prep management on that particular process from the standpoint, like you understand when you're betting from an LPs perspective, like in a venture fund, that you're not necessarily getting those returns, and you know, for 10 plus years. So that that's a much longer timeframe when you put that money in. Is there a way to prepare management for that more of a venture-based model? Rachel Kuhr Conn: We actually wrote an Ebook on that. So, I can share a link. I'm happy to share the Ebook on that, but yes. That's the biggest problem that we've actually seen. And we wrote all about it because yes, you need to get leadership in the mindset of they're really comfortable with index funds and mutual funds. Look at their retirement portfolios. They play this game all the time. They would never put all of their money in one stock. Why would they do that with their corporate money. So, it's really a mindset shift that we have to help drive. Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing companies get better? Or what are some of the things that seem to be working that people are adopting?Rachel Kuhr Conn: We're seeing companies get better at it. One we're seeing them care more. And being mindful of it. And starting to put all the pieces together. And having more fruitful conversations. What happens after the theater? What happens after the demo day? How do we actually make this into something? Why does it always fail? Because you can't really get away with that stuff much longer. And so, the conversations are getting more real. I don't think people see the solutions yet, but I'm excited to see how Productable can help and really shift the industry of making that much easier for everybody. Brian Ardinger: Curious to get your take on this concept of inside outside innovation. So, a lot of corporates are interested in trying to come up with innovations within their four walls and that. But there's another set of corporates that are looking outside to startups and investing in startups and things along those lines. What's your take when it comes to betting on innovation, either inside or outside of the walls.Rachel Kuhr Conn: Both are so important. You know, it's really interesting. I've worked in internal innovation and external innovation. The funny thing is they both kind of require each other and they don't really talk about it. And so, when you're doing external innovation, it's really easy to get excited about a startup and then go force it on a business unit and tell them that they should go pilot this product. And the business units kind of like, Hey, we didn't even need this. What's going on?And then it's really easy for somebody in a business unit to come up with a cool idea, but then they don't get any of the resources to do it. There's a little bit of this magic of empowering people within the company to act like intrepreneurs if you will. And allowing them to leverage external startups and external technology, and actually allow them to partner together to really be able to build something that's a little bit of a mix of internal and external. And depending on the solution, maybe it's a little more one or the other, but it's kind of a funny thing to me that they often get so separated. Brian Ardinger: One of the things that we've seen that's been helpful is to get our employees actually involved in the startup scene. Just from being part of it, you know, going to demo days, going and mentoring at accelerators and that. If nothing else, it provides them that access to see how other startup folks with brand new ideas with no business models, how they move and interact. Versus how they would do it if they were inside their own walls. And I think exposure to the startup ecosystem, so to speak, can do a lot, not just like in finding actual innovations and that, but in the tool sets, mindset, skillset arena. Rachel Kuhr Conn: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean getting from zero to one, if you will, is, is really important. How do we actually go from what we're used to as everyday business and actually start thinking of more exploratory ways? How do we start thinking about growth and getting that mindset in? And it's a really hard dance to figure out of how long do you let that soak in and then start to create some of those other methods and ways of actually turning that into deeper transactions. And your company has to be ready for those. And so, I feel like it's a little bit of learning to crawl and then walk and run, if you will. Brian Ardinger: Are there particular resources that people should be following in the world of innovation? How do you stay up to date with all the stuff that's going on? Rachel Kuhr Conn: I don't have a great answer for that one. I have a lot of people that I talked to. A lot of consultants and great thinkers that I try to involve in my day to day. But we do have a blog and we do have eBooks and things that we're creating on our end to try and spread that knowledge as much as possible. I like to think that it's helpful and help drives all of that. But it is really hard to figure all of this out. I've been in this space for a long time, really trying to figure out what is expert look like. And it was really, really hard to get to the bottom of finding a lot of these pieces. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: If people want to find out more about yourself or about productive, but what's the best way to do that? Rachel Kuhr Conn: Sure, they can go to beprodable.com. That's B E product able.com and I'm on Twitter. I guess that's probably the easiest way to do it. Design K U H R is my Twitter name and really excited to chat with anybody and see whatever they like to talk about. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Rachel, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Very excited to finally meet you and have a chance to talk more. Love to stay in touch and keep you in mind for further conversations about the world of innovation.Rachel Kuhr Conn: Perfect. This was awesome. Thank you so much for having me. And I can't wait to listen and hear more about what people have to say.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kapil Kane, Director of Innovation at Intel China, and Co-founder of the corporate accelerator GrowthX. Kapil and I talk about his journey from his early product development days at Apple working on the first touchscreen, to today where he runs Intel's award-winning accelerator. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat 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 Kapil Kane, Director of Innovation at Intel ChinaBrian 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 Kapil Kane. He is the Director of Innovation at Intel China, and co-founder of the GrowthX Corporate Innovation Accelerator. Welcome to the show. Kapil Kane: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here. Brian Ardinger: You are calling in from Shanghai right now in the midst of a pandemic lockdown. Let's talk a little bit about your journey into the world of innovation. Kapil Kane: I was doing my PhD at Stanford when I dropped out of the program to join Apple, to build the touchscreen. The very first task, I remember I was an intern at the time. And I was the very first engineer to actually make a drawing of the touch screen. Like a revision 0 0 1.And my journey started from there. Although the touchscreen project failed. We had to hand it over to this other team, that was working on a secret project, which turned out to be the iPhone. But my last project at Apple was iPad. So, I came around full circle. And then I left Apple and joined Intel to actually create a tablet version of Classmate PC, which was inspired by one laptop per child from MIT Media Lab, which is to create an affordable education computing device for the emerging market or for the less fortunate as it was envisioned. And then on, you know, I got into this role of Innovation Director at Intel China. And so that's my journey. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Tell us a little bit about how you got to China. And how you got to cofound this corporate innovation accelerator called GrowthX. Kapil Kane: Coming to China was with Apple. This is when we were developing the very first Mac Book Air. And at the time, if some of you guys remember, it was called a Unibody. That means it was carved out of a solid block of metal. Whereas everything before that was sheet metal, and hundreds of parts joined together.So, it was a completely new way of manufacturing a product. And so, we were designing the product as well as designing the manufacturing process at the same time. So, we thought it would be better to have some of the designers move to China so that we can do both designing product and process at the same time. And so, I volunteered. As a, so I was one of the first three product designers to move from Cupertino to China. And I've been here ever since. Brian Ardinger: Let's fast forward to today, you're running this thing called GrowthX. How did the idea of a corporate innovation accelerator start and then give us some insight into what's going on with GrowthX?Kapil Kane: Intel has this amazing culture of innovation. And it's something that I can think of it like the Google's 15% thing. Where we encourage our employees to spend a percentage of their time on things they believe is important for our future. And so, we have lots of this cool innovation that has been created in the labs.And around 2005, that's when I took over the innovation at Intel China. We saw that there's lots of cool things happening in the labs, but we couldn't find those things being commercialized. Not lending into the market. When I took over this role, this role was created because until that point, there was lots of different efforts of innovation, like very vibrant culture. Even to the date, there's a very vibrant culture of innovation. And we thought we needed some streamlining.And so that's when they created this position to streamline all the different innovation activities at Intel China. And we have around 10,000 people here in China. So, it's by no means small offsite operation. It's a pretty huge operation. Brian Ardinger: Kind of a little bit different than a lot of companies. A lot of companies we hear about the fact that most of the core is not that innovative. And so, they created an accelerator kind of program. Or a lab to kickstart that. But where at Intel, it seems like the reverse it's like you had to kind of harness or extra harness some of the activity. Kapil Kane: Exactly. And also, the concept of accelerator is, is quite different. Like if you look at the other corporates who are building accelerators, they are accelerating outside startups with the hope that they will get to know what they're doing. They may be able to acquire them or partner with them. But for me, I didn't even know what an accelerator was when I took over this role. And in my very first week, I happened to be in a round table conference at American Chamber of Commerce. And the guy sitting next to me happened to be running China's very first startup accelerator, Chinaaccelerator. The guy, William Bao Bean. He's a legend in China.And I just happened to ask him what he does. And he explained to me the concept of accelerator. And I thought, you know, maybe I can replicate this right inside of Intel because we are so much creativity. We just need to give them the tools to turn those cool innovations into viable businesses. And that's where the idea for accelerator came along.And that was the, the birth of GrowthX, where we started up as accelerators. We pick the teams. We make them believe they are actual startups. We have the CEO, CTO, CMO, and we bring them in a batch of cohort. And we have business sprints. We have around eight sprints focusing on different aspects of business. We have mentors.We have entrepreneurs in residence. And we run this outside of Intel from a coworking space. So, it's just like any startup accelerator. Just the thing is that all the startups are internal projects. And we've been running this for six years now. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about some of the differences or similarities that you've seen between entrepreneurs in the outside versus intrepreneurship. And are there key skillsets, mindsets, tool sets that are similar or different.Kapil Kane: I think what we are seeing, and it may be different for different companies. For us, most of those innovators will come to our accelerator. They are techies. You know, they get very excited about the technology. And they have no real background in business. So, we spend a lot of time and effort to make them understand that it's not about, can you build it, but should you build it? That's where we focused on changing their mindset. If we change their mindset, like, you know, typically they're of this mindset that I will build something, then I will show it to the customers. Or they think that customers won't even look at us. If I don't have some finished product to show to them. And this is where we turn it on its head and tell them that you don't need anything. You just need a sketch. You need a questionnaire. And you're not trying to sell something. You're trying to understand the challenges. So, think of it that way as you engage with your potential customers is don't be ashamed or embarrassed, that you're not in the show. You are simply, think of it as if you're co-designing with them. Or trying to collectively solve the challenges.So that's the biggest challenge we have. I think technically they're amazing, is this business mindset that we're trying to cultivate. Not just business mindset. The, the lean startup kind of a methodology, you know, is like build, measure, learn, do an MVP. Test it. Learn, iterate. So that's one big change. I say, because like outside entrepreneurs, founders, I see they're more, I mean, again, you know, there's all flavors of entrepreneurs. But our guys are always very tech focused, and they don't understand about the fundraising and stuff. Although I have seen they're very, very good at tapping into the resources to move their ideas forward.And even to the point that they sometimes feel like getting into our accelerator, and doing all the sprints is like homework, just to get to the seed money, seed funding, to build something. But in their head, they are still, you know, that's what they want. But they have to go through all the motions of the accelerator as something like, you know, they had to do in order to move their idea forward.So, I still believe that's entrepreneurship, but it's in a different way. Because they still want to move their ideas forward. Right. So, I used to really get frustrated in the beginning. But now I think, you know, in the end, their goal is the same. It's just, they have a different idea of how to get to the goal.Brian Ardinger: Can you talk a little bit about how you go about identifying which people or companies, so to speak, to get into the accelerator? What's your evaluation process to identify who might be successful at this? Kapil Kane: So, I think that's a very good question. And it took us some time to figure it out. There are a few things. The ideas, they aligned strategically to where Intel wants to go. That's one thing. Second thing we also realized is we are good at accelerating adjacent innovations. That means building something on top of something that exists, rather than this breakthrough moonshots. There are two reasons. Just because we are in China and our employees, they interact a lot with our customers who are based in China, right? Like all the electronics are made in China. So typically, they come up, their innovation ideas are about how can we empower our customers. They're more customer centric. They're more something that, you know, hey, we have this product. If we tweak it this way, I can open up a completely new market segment, which can bring us millions of dollars. Rather than saying, hey, let's invent a new chip. Or let's invent a completely new manufacturing process. So that's the second thing. The third thing we look at is like a founder accelerator fit is, are these guys coachable? And can we really help them in the short period of time of like four months. And the way we do that is before we do the intake, into the accelerator, we have only five slots per batch. And we do two batches a year. And we get anywhere from 30 to 60 applications. And we'll shortlist of about 15 to 20 and bring those teams into the bootcamp.And during the bootcamp, we help them build their business case. And help pitch their business case in a very short time. And during this bootcamp, we also challenge our founders to go, and actually talk to the customers. Make cold calls. Or do a survey, right. And that tells us if these guys are really willing to get out of the building or not.And we also see if they've incorporated the advice from the coaches into their final pitch or not. So, we also make our evaluation based on that. So, it's like, you know, the kind of innovation. The strategic fit to Intel and the founder accelerator fit as well. Brian Ardinger: Are only teams coming into the accelerator or do they have to have a team, or can an individual founder apply? Kapil Kane: Individuals can come in, but once they get into the accelerator on the very first sprint, their assignment is to resource their team with, you know, CEO, CTO, and CMO at the minimum. Brian Ardinger: And that allows them to have enough people to actually run experiments and create something to move it forward. Kapil Kane: Yeah. And also, the skill, you know, because typically like I said, if a founder is a very bright technologists, he may not really understand everything on the business side. So, we encourage them to get people from the sales and marketing groups to join in.And we also give them enough budget to hire interns and MBA intern for example, to act as a CMO. And also, you know to hire tech talents as well for that short period of time to work on their ideas, so that they can focus on the business side of the things. Brian Ardinger: So, I'd like to talk a little bit about the balance between this inside innovation versus outside innovation. So, companies that come through GrowthX are they expected potentially to spin out into a startup outside of the company? Are they been brought back in these technologies? Talk a little bit about this inside outside balance. Kapil Kane: So, 90% of the companies are inside. We have only been able to spin out one company so far. After activating around 60. Okay. So very, very small ratio. So mostly you can think of them as internal teams coming to the accelerator to de-risk their business plans, to bring back to the business units. Having said that we have accelerated external startups as well. And by that it's not to invest and take an equity in them. But to work with them on identifying a business opportunity for Intel and going to market together.So basically, startups who are building on top of our core technologists, who are working in a field that we are never been to. So, this is a way we could test the market at the same time. We can help the startups as well by providing them with the technology, all our resources and jointly see if we can and like, you know, break new grounds together. So, we have done that, and we had some successes there. But our main focus is accelerating internal innovations and trying to line them into the market. Brian Ardinger: That brings up a great question that is always asked, especially in the corporate environment, is like, how do you measure success? Because a lot of times corporates have a different way to measure outcomes because they're working with existing business models, existing optimization. Versus in a startup environment where a lot of it is unknown. So how do you go about measuring success? Kapil Kane: The two ways we measure success. One is the business impact. That means what's the real revenue created from the projects that we accelerated. So, these are direct like revenue numbers. This is X million dollars created from this project. Second is the revenue potential that those projects create. So that's on the business side of things. The second way we measure it is people impact. Impact on people. How we are helping people grow. And we actually ran a study where we tracked the people who went to our accelerators for two years. And we saw that on an average, we have anywhere from 1.5 to 6 times accelerated career growth for the people who have gone through the accelerator. So, it could mean two things. There is no causation, right? There's a correlation. It could be one thing that are we are attracting good people. Our second could be that we are upscaling people. Which is both good because we know like if we had to do something really cool and innovative, we know who these people to count on. Right. And the second thing is it's good to upskill people. So those are the two ways we measure our success. Brian Ardinger: And I think a lot of corporates have a tough time finding those curious restless entrepreneurs within their own companies. And this might be a great way to help figure that out. Obviously, a lot of startups don't make it. You know, the number of ideas that you think are going to make it, there's a large portion that fall by the wayside. How do you deal with failure? Or what happens to the teams and that, that don't get to where they were hoping to get at the very beginning? Kapil Kane: That's the win-win part of intrepreneurship versus entrepreneurship. When you are an entrepreneur, you have your day job. Your paycheck. No matter what you do, but the payoff is also limited. Right? I think one of the great things about intrepreneurship and especially, let's say for the GrowthX are those who are not successful, they simply go back to what they were doing before. But if they are successful also, they typically go back to a day job. They will hand it over to the business units to take it forward.So, for them, their goal is to come up with new ideas and bring those new ideas to the market. So that's the kind of people we have. We have people who have been through our accelerator three times, four times. And try to bring lots of ideas to the market. Some people have maybe succeeded once in three times. Some people have multiple projects that have been successful. But the trend we have seen is people coming in. Getting their idea to the next level. Going back, coming up with more ideas.Brian Ardinger: Awesome. So, you've been in the trenches in Asia, looking at kind of what's hot. What's next? What are some of the trends that you're seeing that you're excited about? Kapil Kane: Oh, man. I'm not really like a trend kind of a guy. But I see a lot of noise in metaverse. I see, you know, like this digital transformation is also pretty big here because there are lots of SOEs here who are trying to digitalize. Retail, new retail is a huge buzz in China. So, those are kind of the buzz things. There's also like a lot of deep technology initiatives in China, especially zero carbon. Space tech is also picking up. Yeah. So, I'm excited more about like a long-term sustainable things. Rather than the short term, shiny things. The bigger problems.They are the bigger problems. You know, but I think the China is definitely taking the long-term approach, right. With their five-year plans. With the policies, aligning the whole industry in that direction. Some of them may fail. Some of them will succeed. But at least we see like a huge effort going in those directions.Like for example, in the past five-year plan, it was AI, Smart Manufacturing. Right. Also, there's this thing about the Smart Cities was also part of the last five-year plan. There was something called Common Prosperity. So, they want to make the second tier, third tier cities also prosperous. But I think the biggest thing, if you want to just think about China for the long run is the Sustainability, Carbon Zero and Space. Maybe even Quantum Computing. They are really going into this steep tech, rather than cute tech. Brian Ardinger: The great way to explain it. Cute tech. Well, Kapil I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your insights and your expertise. Really do appreciate your time. If people want to find out more about yourself or about GrowthX, what's the best way to do that?Kapil Kane: I think the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn used to be open in China until it was blocked a few months ago. So, if you guys want to reach out, best place is LinkedIn. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, thanks again for coming on the show. Really appreciate the time and looking forward to staying connected and stay safe out there.Kapil Kane: Thanks. And thanks for having me on the show, Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Alex Young founder of Virti. Alex, and I talk about the impact of new technologies like virtual reality and artificial intelligence on the training and human performance space, and some of the challenges and opportunities facing companies in the changing world of work. Let's get, started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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. Alex Young founder of VirtiBrian 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. Alex Young. He is the founder of Virti. Virti helps HR teams and organizations using things like artificial intelligence and augmented reality to improve and measure training. So welcome to the show, Alex. Alex Young: Thanks so much, Brian. It's great to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because you come from a different background. You were a trauma and orthopedic surgeon before you became a entrepreneur founder. So how did you go from being a surgeon to being a founder of a virtual reality training type of company?Alex Young: Yeah, so it's been a really interesting journey. I mean, my interests have always been around how to improve learning and the performance of people really in any sector. And my original degree, as you mentioned, was in medicine. And then I specialized in orthopedic surgery, working in the UK and also in the US for a little while.And I've always, always been a bit of a tech nerd as well. So had a couple of companies when I was actually training to be a doctor. And taught myself how to code. Pretty terrible coding skills but managed to build a few companies around that. And then really with Virti, what I wanted to do was build a deep technology company, which tackled one of the major problems I was seeing. Both in healthcare, but also in every other sector, really on the planet which was how do we democratize and scale soft skills type of training for the workforce of the future. And when I trained as a doctor and a surgeon, often we do communication role-plays and things to train people really how to be more empathetic. How to be better communicators. How to do things in health care, like break bad news to patients, or explain a diagnosis. And in the operating room about how to make decisions under pressure and lead teams. And often those sort of training sessions, were not very scalable. They weren't hugely engaging, and they were quite biased and not that data driven. So, as you mentioned with Virti, what we do is we use AI and tools like virtual reality to put people into these very scalable, very measurable scenarios, where they can fail in a safe environment and run through lots of soft skills trainings senarios whether that's on a sales team training. Whether it's for managers or leaders, to understand how to deliver feedback. Or it's on your hiring or HR side, where we can actually find if people have some innate biases in the questions they ask during interviews. Or how they deliver team performance. So really, really interesting journey and lots and lots of parallels between healthcare and being an entrepreneur. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. The whole concept of this metaverse and some of the new things that are coming in when it comes to augmented reality and virtual reality, what are some of the things that you're seeing in that space? How has it changed and evolved since you've started the company? And what are you seeing? Alex Young: I think the whole VR space has been on a bit of a rollercoaster. Really, you know, going back all the way to the 1980s when NASA first started using VR tech for some of the training that they were doing. And in the healthcare sector there's always been lots of, kind of, sort of use cases of virtual reality for things like surgical training. But it's never really seen mass adoption. And I think now with some of the newer headsets coming out and with companies like Meta, which of course rebranded from Facebook. Putting kind of billions behind the type of technology. We're seeing some of these PR teams like the Metaverse really galvanizing businesses and people behind this idea of a shared space. Where people can go, communicate with others. Practice in safe environment. Or just go and relax. And, you know, play games with each other. And I think on the back of the pandemic where everyone was very isolated and teams still work remotely, it's really, really interesting having that projection in a shared space where you can build rapport a little bit easier than perhaps that of over Zoom, looking at your camera. And you get a bit more inclusivity with team communication.And I think, you know, for us as a training company, we were founded back in 2018. Really under that premise of how can we scale role play or in-person training. And make it more affordable, more scalable and more data driven. And for us, it's just been a great time to sort of execute on that vision and help lots of companies to upskill their people. Brian Ardinger: You mentioned you started the company before COVID and that. But obviously we've seen a massive shift when it comes to this change with COVID. And the fact that everybody's now trying to up-skill cross sell, figure out new ways to do work and that. Are you finding particular industries or jobs settings that are more conducive to this virtual reality environment? Alex Young: I think it's really interesting, just the diverse views of kind of sectors and categories. Kind of find, you know, helpfulness from immersive technology. It can be used throughout absolutely everything. For us specialization, which is obviously soft skills, I think, you know, we're seeing a big uptake by people like sales teams. Particularly in industries like franchises, where they got to upskill new franchisees from a playbook and have a certain way of doing things.The traditional method there obviously was doing in-person meetings or in-person webinars and, you know, live webinars and things like that. And it just wasn't either that engaging or that scalable. We've seen big uptakes there. Other industries outside of healthcare, where we've seen big uptake, things like aviation, which again, anything that kind of has infrequent, but very impactful hazardous outcomes. We found that putting people into virtual reality scenarios to be really, really helpful.So, things like how to communicate with a passenger on an airline who might be rude to the staff. Or, you know, disruptive to other passengers. Being able to deescalate them. It doesn't happen too usually often, but, but it can be incredibly disruptive and cause flights to be landed in places other than their destination. That kind of thing is just great for running people through that talk of repeatable training, Brian Ardinger: The trend of VR, seems to be just on the early stages of that. What's holding this back from companies being more focused on using this type of environment? Alex Young: So, although virtual reality and the concept of virtual reality and the Metaverse has been around for a while. I think the technology now is only really sort of on that precipice of kind of mass adoption. As you mentioned, I think with anything new in the hardware space, whether it's an iPhone, whether it's a new type of computer, in this case, it's the VR headsets. There is going to be a lot of speculation and a lot of blockers and barriers to adoption just because the hardware itself is expensive and people need to understand how it fits naturally into their workplace. I think what we're seeing now is some of the usefulness of the content. And the apps that sit on these pieces of hardware, really the things that are driving adoption. And as they become more and more impactful, the quality of those becomes better. We're seeing people, you know, much more eager to adopt. And, you know, again, the technology as a whole, it's gone through a huge amount of technological change. Even just they've the last sort of two and a half years in terms of what the tech can do. So, we've now got things like eye tracking. The headsets they need wires, that attach headsets to computers. You know, the chips and power of the actual headsets themselves is much faster. What we're now saying is we're still on that adoption curve. It's still very early. But we're seeing real impactful business outcomes being seen by people who are actually using them. Say we've done a lot of research around how the tech works. We've seen people's learning retention increased by upwards of 200%. It's in confidence and employee's ability to action some of the training they've practiced in VR. Outperform in-person training in some cases. And we've seen the time for training reduced when you combine virtual reality with in-person training. So, lots of cost savings. Lots of better impact. Lots of better engagement. Some of the data coming out of it. Brian Ardinger: What are some of the surprises that you've seen over the years of how your original assumptions were about how to build a company, or the features and solutions you were going to build out there? What are some of the assumptions that have changed? Or some of the surprises that you've seen?Alex Young: We've been very lucky in that, you know, we spend a lot of time researching things back in 2018 when the company was founded. And we spoke to E learning development professionals and spoke to people in HR. We spoke to end users (employees) and really got a good understanding of what they were using at the moment in terms of either e-learning or in-person training. And then tried to pull out the critical elements of that into what we built.I think in terms of what we have built at Virti, one of the big complaints that people made, which I've got to say I didn't realize until I sort of truly spoke to a wide variety of HR and learning development professionals was that if you deliver off the shelf content to, we as a company have our own scenarios, soft skills training, and other types of training, and that's great. And people can pick up and plug those, you know, straight into that training workflows. But actually, people want the ability to create their own content and they want a system that's easy to use in order to do that. And for things like virtual reality and soft skills training, where a lot of it is conversational scripts, people aren't that intimidated by doing that themselves. And, you know, they've got their own experiences and their own ways of doing that. The big things that we did quite early on, on the back of that feedback was build out this No Code creation set of tools across both video and computer-generated scenarios so that people can actually create their own.And that then throws out a whole host of, you know, real creativity, back to us as a company. And it's really exciting for me as the founder to look at what people create. Whether it's, you know, very immersive diversity inclusivity scenarios, based on people's previous experiences. Whether it's video training or onboarding training for that company. That's really, really exciting.Brian Ardinger: I'm glad you brought that up because this idea, and we talk a lot about it on the show about no-code and low-code and democratization of some of these tools that makes it easier for people to spin things up, test things, try things. It's interesting to see that you're seeing that evolve in the virtual reality space as well.Alex Young: We talk about soft skills. Or power skills as I like to call them, in terms of leadership training or helping managers deliver feedback. But there are lots of different ways to do that. And there are lots of different learning points. And I think the types of scenarios that you can put people through are almost limitless in some ways, in terms of the demographics of the people that you're communicating with. The actual setting. The types of conversation. People's emotions. And even just from one scenario, you can tweak things behind the scenes and create a whole host of slightly different, slightly more difficult or easier scenarios that you can then run your employees through.And that's where it becomes really interesting because the data of the system can then pick out some subtle changes and improvements. And it can also start to grade who your best performers are in the leadership space. In the sales space. And in the communication space. And actually, give people a gold standard or a ball that they can hit if they're looking to improve their soft skills, which is a really, really cool and really gamified. Brian Ardinger: And that's an interesting point as well. When you talk about soft skills, I think one of the challenges is it's very difficult to measure that. And you're saying with technology and that, and you have an opportunity to collect data that you might not have been able to collect in the past and use that in different ways to really put some metrics or some insight into what's going on.Alex Young: A hundred percent. And I think that the simplest way that I think about things is if I do an in-person role play like I did when I was a doctor or like I did, when I was, you know, practicing my own sales skills as the founder of a technology company. You will do a role play and then a third person, the coach will feed back to you. And they might say something like you started the conversation off well. Or give you some technical feedback on the content of what you're saying. Or they might give you some feedback on your eye contact or your body language.But it's very subjective based on what they're seeing at the time and the assessors own personal experiences and their own abilities. And what the technology can do is it can actually track entire conversations. It can look at people's cadence of that tone. It can look at what conversational items, you know, that they're actually talking about.And with some of the new hardware, you can also look at things like eye tracking. Physiological data. So, you can see if people are getting a little bit scared during parts of the conversation as well. And then you can feed that back to the user who might not know some of these subtle things, especially in the eye contact area. So, there's loads and loads of really interesting things that we can do. And the most important thing is then feeding that back and helping people be able to learn and improve in really kind of objective ways. Brian Ardinger: Any type of technology adoption, there's this focus on innovation. And how do you get folks to adopt new technologies and things like that. So, you've obviously had an opportunity to see how companies take new technologies and the culture that's required. So, I wanted to dig a little bit into what you've seen when it comes to the culture of innovation. And how have you seen better companies adapt to this kind of new innovations. And what are some of the things that you've seen when it comes to the culture of innovation?Alex Young: It's a great question. And I think we, the gamble operating in health care, is our sort of immediate or near target market. And that is something that is quite slow to adopt. Any type of technology because of any kind of patient safety concerns and things like that. And you've got to go through lots of rigorous procurement processes and so forth. But even there, one of the key things that I always look for is who's going to sponsor, you know, the adoption of this technology entirely in the new company. Who is that going to be?Is it someone in the C Suite? Is it a champion in the L & D or HR Department? Who's going to really come on board and align with someone from our team who's typically on the customer successful or learning development side. And look at what the real goals and the outcome of introducing this tech is, both in the near term or say, you know, a year or two years.And I think that's where we, as a company, forget a little bit about the technology and we say, okay, how can we help and align to your business goals? Whether that is just getting to payback of the platform as quickly as possible. You know if we can show we can make you money or we can show you that we are driving things like sales revenues or improving customer satisfaction and things like that through better training. Or just by, you know, retaining your staff because we do a lot of onboarding training and, you know, there's some craziest statistics from places like Gallup or, you know, LinkedIn's workplace Survey, which shows that, you know, that people don't engage with our onboarding or if the onboarding isn't good enough, they will leave your company in like the first 45 days. Which is terrifying us as a business owner myself. And I think it's those things that we really obsessed over. And then I think the next part is making sure everyone within that organization, that's adopting the software is basically understanding what their role is. That the users are incentivized to use it. And it's meaningful and it's going to be helpful to them. Rather than being a hindrance or just another password that they need to remember. And most importantly you know, for us, it's in providing value to our customers and what they're doing. And collecting feedback and iterating on that. So, it's always an interesting journey. Every company is slightly different. Some people love adopting new technology and wants to be at the forefront of any innovation. Some people want to wait until they've seen some use cases come out. And some people are just super cynical. And it's just human nature and different folks you know, different industries. But it's always fun working with lots of different types of companies and people.Brian Ardinger: You have a podcast out called the human performance podcast. So, whenever I have a podcast host, I always like to get your take on what's going on in that particular space. Some of the things you've learned in this space of human performance. What are some of the best guests or some of the insights that you've learned from your podcast and the guests that you've had on it?Alex Young: It's been absolutely fascinating actually. I mean, the podcast began really as a way to provide some stories to our users and our customers that sort of inspired them in their day-to-day lives. And some of the things that I was really, really interested in was how people's mindsets or how their own performance made them do, you know, extraordinary things. On that podcast, some highlights, but for me personally have been, we've had a couple of astronauts who've been on, who've done, you know, multiple space walks and have to fix shuttle antennas, literally in the middle of the space. That for emergency situations, or sports people who've come back from injury and done amazing things.But I think, you know throughout, the thing that fascinates me is always how people deal with some of these just enormous achievements. And by that, I mean a lot of people who do really, really well are actually the most humble and nicest people on the planet. And will bend over backwards to help out folks.And I think a lot of that is about their mindset and it's about them really seeing themselves as a servant to the training and to what they're doing and being very, very coachable. And one great story is that from Scott Parazynski. He's one of the astronauts we've had on the podcast. He not only has done, I think over 40 space walks, but he's someone who is just always learning. And always wanting to challenge himself.And has that in him. Which he's kind of learned over time. And he's also been to the top of Everest. He's been into a volcano in extreme temperatures. And he's just done some crazy, crazy stuff. And the thing that keeps him going is always that want and need to learn new things. To challenge himself. And to really sort of improve himself as an individual. And it's just amazing hearing stories like that every single week. So, I always think, you know, whatever podcast it's not about the host, it's always about the guests. Which really make it for everybody. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. Thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to talk about your learnings and what you're seeing in the world. Both as a founder, as a, as a technology person and as a person who's focused on human performance. So, Alex, thank you for coming on the show. If people want to find out more about yourself or about Virti, what's the best way to do that? Alex Young: You can follow Virti at @Virtilabs on all social media. And the website is Virti.com. And then I'm Alexander F. Young on all social media. And by all means, follow me. I talk about soft skills and human performance across every channel. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Alex, thanks again for coming on the show and appreciate the time. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come.Alex Young: Thank you so much, Brian. Really enjoyed it.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  We use Amazon Affiliate links for books and Descript Affiliate for transcripts.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andy Binns, Coauthor of the new book, Corporate Explorer. Andy and I talk about the innovation imperative facing corporations today. And what they can do to foster an entrepreneurial environment, to create corporate explorers within their companies. 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 Andy Binns, Coauthor of Corporate ExplorerBrian 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 Andy Binns. Andy is the Cofounder of ChangeLogic and coauthor of a new book called Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Game. Welcome to the show, Andy.Andy Binns: Hey Brian, thanks very much for the invitation. I'm delighted to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. You have been in this innovation space for a while with McKinsey and IBM. Now you have a new book called corporate Explorer, which is exploring a lot of topics that I think are near and dear to the heart of a lot of our listeners is how can we, as corporations, become better at this whole innovation stuff? Why is innovation becoming so important for corporations to figure out?Andy Binns: That is really actually the point isn't it. And we try to open the book Corporate Explorer by saying, look, a lot of what we're talking about is really old. And it's been around forever, right? And even the notion of a corporate explorer didn't turn up in the last few years. You know, one of the earliest ones that I know of is the creation of the ATM machine. The ATM machine, Della Ru a UK based currency printer literally has the license to print money. And it's like, well, surely people want to access this differently. And this guy comes up with the notion of the ATM machine somewhere in, Surry in south of London, with Barclays Bank in the 1960s. And this was a 300-year-old corporation. This can be done by corporations, but to your point, it's got more important. And it's got more important because we know that digital is there. And transforming not only a business, but an industry. You cannot safely set within automotive and say, all those guys over in consumer devices no longer have anything to do with us. That's true there, but it's there in a dozen other industries you care to name. And so, this notion of disruption that Clay Christiansen taught us all about. It's kind of like it's present. We don't dispute it. And we certainly don't dispute it after the last two years we've had. This high degree of uncertainty is present.And so, a lot of corporations, even those who are doing really well today, I think see that the dynamics of their industry are changing at such a pace that they can't ignore a bunch of different innovations. Either because they want new revenue streams and or they need new capability. Both of these stories are going on.Brian Ardinger: Yeah, they're being forced to. It's kind of spot on. We've got technology advancements that are coming on. We've got new changes in marketplaces. We've got a pandemic. All these things are colliding at once requiring companies to think and act to move faster than they've ever had before. And yet, we still find example after example of companies that are struggling with this. And overcoming obstacles that you would think that they'd be able to overcome. Because they have quite a few advantages from a corporate perspective.Andy Binns: Absolutely. And that's why corporate innovations beat startups at the innovation game. Now they don't beat them every time. They may not even beat them half the time. But they do. And the point about assets is exactly why they do that. Right. It's when you can leverage brands customer access, technical capabilities, whatever it might be, then that's, what's going to bring you success.Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into that a little bit more. What are the key advantages that corporations maybe aren't recognizing or aren't using to the fullest extent when they are wanting to do more innovation initiatives? Andy Binns: One of the stories we tell in Corporate Explorer is that analog devices, a really strong technology innovation company, electrical engineers. Running around making phenomenal semiconductors. Worrying about the speeds and feeds of that circuits. And then they start to observe a change in the world, particularly the industrial markets where there's this opportunity to connect their sensors, accelerometers, and various other ones to the cloud. And to use analytics, to observe the functioning of the machine.Right. It's a great space, a lot of startups are active in. And they build this product line around condition-based monitoring. They make some acquisitions to build it out so they can do acoustic sensing as well as motion and all the rest of it. But if you're a startup and you go into, tell the same solution. No one's ever heard of you. You go into Analog Devices, you're 60 years old, and your brand is based on never retiring a product and always meeting your supply commitments. But totally different conversation. The market access is a real opportunity in many cases for these corporations. And also, they can access customers in different ways because they matter as a supplier to a bunch of automotive industry clients or whatever it might be. So, I think that's a big area. The other area is sort of some of the permission to play. So, another case that we give in Corporate Explorer is of the insurance company, Unica in Austria, where they move into sort of a digital insurance product. And again, they already have the actuaries. They can already design the insurance product. They already have the licenses from the relevant European authorities to sell insurance. So again, they can just move that a little bit faster when they are using these assets to make things happen. Brian Ardinger: So, having said that corporations still aren't necessarily good at innovation. They stumble on the fact that a lot of times they get focused on executing and optimizing their existing business model. For fear of messing up that apple cart, they don't necessarily take the next steps and that. How do you create that culture of innovation such that they are willing to take risks and leverage those advantages they do have? Andy Binns: We talk in the book about these being the silent killers of exploration. A term we borrowed from Mike Beer and the silent killers is that actually there isn't a deliberate agenda to stop innovators. Right? Sometimes it feels that way, but it's rarely the case. Mostly they're on autopilot. They're on autopilot because they're focused on the short term. They wanted to eliminate risk to the degree that that's possible. They want to preserve the way they think business should be done. Right. Which is that power of sort of professional skills and identity, which has such an influence on corporations.And so, I think what they need to do is to learn. It's a learning agenda for them. And I think we are those teachers. You are that teacher, the listeners on the podcast are their teachers. And what they've got to learn about is experimentation. Moving into small increments. Rather than spending a lot that needs to spend little amounts. So that they are in a position to find out where the markets are and where the opportunities lie.I think that they need to trust their Corporate Explorers. Get off this notion that importing people who've been in a series of failed startups, that they're going to know how to get this done. It's very disrespectful for all the many people who've done fabulous work in startups, and then moved to corporations. Done spectacularly well. But why would you trust them? They failed, right? The point is that inside the company, there are Explorers, and you need to give them the space, the license. We need to talk about what license means to make that happen. And then finally, the Corporate Explorers themselves need to see themselves not simply as innovators, but also as leaders of change. Too many innovators or potential Corporate Explorers in corporations go hide their project and try to get on with it without getting too much interference. And what they need to do is build a movement behind what they're doing. They need to win allies. They need to win advocates. They need to figure out how to get that movement going behind what they're doing, so that when they hit roadblocks, which we know they always will. They have people who are willing to support them and explain what it means, why this is learning. Not failure. If I had a criticism of our colleagues in that function in organizations is that sometimes they miss that change, that human social building this network inside the company toolkit. Which is actually one of those big things that's critical to success. Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into the book a little bit. This idea of a Corporate Explorer. Can an average person within a company become a Corporate Explorer? Is there a certain skillset or knowledge or our mindset that's required? Talk a little bit about what it means to be a Corporate Explorer and tasks behind that. Andy Binns: To a large degree, the Corporate Explorer is exactly the Samsung Entrepreneur. They see a problem in the world. They want to solve. They're dissatisfied with something that's happening. We tell the story of Sara Carvalho at Bosch. That Sara is out hiking through the Andes, the lovely sounding image, right. And she gets home to the home of the people who are hosting her. And she says, I want to take a hot shower. Well, they don't have hot water in Peru. That's not something. Essentially then sets about how do we use Bosch's technology to create a solution to providing hot water.It could be Sara and these other examples I gave the same. We've told the story of Balaji Bondili at Deloitte. He gets involved in the tsunami relief in Asia. And he sees the power of the crowd. He's ah, the power of the crowd. This is something that could transform consulting. And like 10 years later, he gets into it right. So there's this passion behind something in the world you think you can fix. And some way you think you might be able to do something about. And that's true in entrepreneurs and in Corporate Explorers, the same. What's different is this social ability. The corporate explorers that succeed, are those that firstly can articulate a case in wagon gets attention. They're really good storytellers. They can bring the possibility and opportunity of what they're proposing to attention. And they do so not because they say, oh, we can just get a little bit better. Yeah. If you back me, it will be, yeah. There's a small piece of revenue that I can build. Know they've got ambition. They said this is transformative. And the thing is that that actually gets more senior attention than the safe I can do a little bit better. Because it starts to hit the scale of what a senior manager is interested in. So, they do that really well. And then they build out this network of support around that idea so that they're able to then execute it and sustain it.That's the piece of differences, is this great ambition and storytelling, combined with the social network. So that their building. And I'll tell you, there's another thing, Brian, I've learned as I've met these people. I hope it comes out in the book as we tell the stories, is that they're humble. They don't mind if other people make them successful.You go around Vienna, and my great friends at UNIQA Insurance. And there are a dozen people who think they help make Krisztian Kurtisz successful at building this digital community insurance product Cherrisk. And he just has a way of making other people feel they played a role that also is something, again, I think different from an Elon Musk that defines the great Corporate Explorer. It sort of takes a community of leaders around it, not just those involved in the project, or the venture themselves. But also, the people who are going to be actively engaged in supporting Brian Ardinger: If I'm in a corporation and I'm trying to understand, and maybe even find the Corporate Explorers within my own walls and that I can nurture and build that. Are there particular techniques or things that you've seen to help identify those Corporate Explorers within your company? And then what number of Corporate Explorers do you really need to have an impact? Andy Binns: I think this is sort of the proactive and reactive if you will. Right. And the reactive model is simply, are you listening? Are you actually looking out for them? I'll tell you one of the most successful Corporate Explorers we talk about in the book is Jim Peck at LexisNexis, right?He built a multibillion-dollar business in 10 years, inside and existing corporation, which does legal and news information. He builds this big data risk analytics business. And Jim saw the insight. He had the idea. He proposed, nobody gave him the responsibility. That this incidentally is true of Krisztian and UNIQA Insurance.Nobody gave him, here go build me a billion-dollar business. He proposed it. So, there's a reactive side. Now are you listening. Are you ready to cope with that? Ideally, do you have an ambition. A sort of strategic ambition that says, this is what we want to do, so that if I'm Jim or Krisztian in the business, I feel I have a license to propose those ideas.One of the great examples is MasterCard. And they had this ambition to wage a war on cash. That's actually a really empowering thing. That tells me I've got to find ways of converting this big number, like that point 85% of transactions on cash to digital. I know wow, those are the ideas, that's how I evaluate success, right?That reactive piece. And that inspired. The proactive thing is go looking for them. And I think there your best bet is some sort of participative competitive approach where you're focused on solving customer problems. What are the top 10 customer problems you want to solve in the world? And invite people to come up with ideas.And we can talk more about this. I think there's a problem in corporations of too much idea creation. But I think the, hey, how can we solve these customer problems? How can we add more value to different customer groups? What places are there, where there are customer groups we've identified that may have problems we can grow into. That kind of thing is a great place to encourage people to participate and then step forward with their idea.And then don't spend too much on any one idea. Startups run through scarcity and so should corporate ventures. They should be, they should be begging for cash. As corporations, in some cases are, they worried much more, particularly in Europe I find, they worry much more about the size of their office. And how big the team is that they can hire. And all this kind of stuff. Which is complete nonsense in comparison to have you validated the idea. Have you done enough to prove out whether that's a really a market for it or not?Brian Ardinger: Following on the incentives conversation, a lot of times we think, I mean, you mentioned there's a lot of intrinsic incentives that seem to be in play for the Corporate Explorers that actually have success within that. How does a company think about incentivizing folks to raise their hand and say, hey, I want to be an entrepreneur within the walls or, or I want to take my ideas forward? Are there things that seem to work better than others?Andy Binns: It's a pretty complex area for sure. And there's a view out there, I think that what we need to do in corporations is in some way mirror the rewards of the, of a startup. So, Intel had this approach. Potentially ended after we published the book. And they said, okay, go and build a venture. We'll give you what you need.And if it reaches an external valuation of a billion dollars, we'll give you 10 million or a business unit, will buy it out for 10 million. It didn't work. And it didn't work, also if you think about it, it introduces a perverse incentive to spin out the venture outside of the corporation. So, you don't get the value from it because you're going to get far more on the open market than you are in the corporation.That's great for the individual Corporate Explorer or entrepreneurs. It's lousy for the corporation. It's a flawed notion of incentives. And most of the people I've mentioned, who've done this successfully, are ones who actually have received very little additional compensation. Now that doesn't mean that they haven't done very well for themselves. Because this is a great way to prove your career. To prove that you're a CEO.Jim Peck ended up being CEO, not only of LexisNexis Risk, but also of two further corporations. He's now CEO Nielsen IQ Market Research Fund, and Krisztian's career has blossomed. Others have blossomed. There are real opportunities. It's just not the same as an entrepreneur. And so, I think what we need to do is. The issue is less about what we pay them, and it's more about the environment we create. That accepts that explore businesses are different than the core business. That how you evaluate them, how you manage the fact that there are high degrees of uncertainty around how fast they'll generate a return, that's the point. And if you make it so that that's accepted and understood and well-managed, then your corporate explorers will emerge. If you make it, oh, you've got a great idea. I want to see a five-year cash projection on how you're going to deliver the same margin as the core business, then you going to throw them out, right? You're going to eject them over time. That's really the area of incentive that I think we should focus on much more than the individual payment.Brian Ardinger: So, my question I want to ask about is how do you know if you're making progress? How do you know if your corporation is getting more innovative? What are some key measurements or ways to know if you're making progress? Andy Binns: You know, I think that it is for me about how many revenue generating businesses have you created. Again, there are some who would say, this is about how many billion-dollar external valuations. This is nonsense. I know the valuations matter. If I had a billion-dollar corporation and I was selling it, putting in my money in my pocket, I'd be delighted. Many people would. Of course. But that's not what corporate life is about. It's something else. And so, you've got to understand that that you're fulfilling different objectives. So, I want to see that I've got revenue generating businesses that in the markets I define on winning, we talk a lot about how, if you're going down this path of creating new businesses, you want to have a really clear ambition. Like this way to wage a war on cash.And then you want to know what are the hunting zones you're going to play in. In order to achieve it. So, I want to know how many ventures have I got in my hunting zones? And how many of those are on track towards the kind of revenue goals that I have for them or the kind of milestones that I need in order to get that? Because it's all about ideating, incubating, and scaling ventures. That's success, you know, activity is not success. And so, I want to ultimately see that happen. Brian Ardinger: And knowing that you can't bet on the winners at the very beginning. You have to have a portfolio of ideas that are coming through at all times. So that you can see the progress with evidence and, and, bet on the ones that are moving forward. Andy Binns: Absolutely. And this whole area of portfolio managing your innovation is something that I think is critical. One of my colleagues Noel Sobleman talks a lot about this. And I think he's on the money. Brian Ardinger: So last topic I want to talk about is we are in this great resignation. And this area where people are moving around and trying different things, and the world has completely changed. What are your thoughts when it comes to retention or hiring of innovators? And these corporate explorers? Andy Binns: I think it's a tough moment for corporations. One where they should be fairly concerned that they're going to lose their best talent. Because if you look at the stats, what goes side by side with great resignation is a record number of new business formations in the U.S. Some of those are going to set up coffee shops, coffee roasters, breweries, distilleries. People who are enjoying themselves, doing something different from corporate life.But there's a large number which are people seeking to realize their entrepreneurial ambition. And so, if I'm a manager in a corporate business or senior executive, and I'm seeing this happen, I should be asking myself, why am I losing my most entrepreneurial talent when I could be using that to sponsor growth in my business.That's where I think that needs it. So, all of the stuff we've talked about, about creating the license to explore. Giving them customer problems, to solve. Investing small amounts and making things happen, and then scaling the ones that work. I think that actually is a key part. It's not the whole answer to this story of, of the great resignation, but it's a piece of it.And it also is about, you know, people want a future. They want to believe in something. They want a why. And doing new stuff, demonstrating like in sustainability. Is one of the interesting things is that most of the ideas, you know, we do a little bit work with Wazoku is one of the idea management platforms. And Simon Hill told me that more than half of the ideas on the Wazoku platform across all of their client base has to do with sustainability right now.And people want to see you're making progress on something like. And that's a story of innovation. How can you scale that to a level that actually has business impact? And I think again, that creates purpose, commitment, a sense of being a part of something that matters. Again, a key level of the innovation component.Brian Ardinger: Like you said, it's really never been a better time to tap into new and exciting projects. There are far more problems out there that people need solved. And they're constantly changing. So, you're in a good spot, if you, again, encourage folks to raise their hand and find those problems and have the ability to solve them. Andy Binns: Yeah. I think that's exactly right, Brian. Yeah. Very well said. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: So, Andy, I want to thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the book Corporate Explorer, what's the best way to do that? Andy Binns: Yeah, you could go to thecorporateexplorer.com or changelogic.com and learn about us. Learn about our research. I've written this book with two professors. Mike Tushman from Harvard. Charles O'Reilly from Stanford. They've also written some other books on the topic. Lead and Disrupt in its second edition, is another excellent text to dig into this whole area of how corporations can win and do win at innovation. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Andy, thanks again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Really appreciate your time. Really appreciate your insights and look forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come. Andy Binns: Likewise. Thanks Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  We use Amazon Affiliate links for books and Descript Affiliate for transcripts.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Harini Gokul, Head of Customer Success at AWS. Harini and I talk about the importance of working backwards to define customer success. And how companies can better understand customer needs to create better products and services. 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 Harini Gokul, Head of Customer Success at AWSBrian 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 Harini Gokul. She is the Head of Customer Success at Amazon Web Services. Welcome to the show. Harini Gokul: Thank you. It is such a pleasure to be here. I've heard many episodes of your show and I'm so excited to have this conversation. Brian Ardinger: Obviously, Amazon Web Services is one of those companies that we think of when we think of innovation. I first want to just start with, what is your role at Amazon Web Services and what is the Head of Customer Success actually do? Harini Gokul: Yes, it's a great question. So, AWS is all about customer obsession. It is baked into the DNA of how we build products and go to market and take care of our customers. I lead what we call as the customer solutions function. What they industry sometimes also calls to as customer success for our next generation of customers. What that means is we want to make sure that we are investing in our highly innovative hyper-growth customers to make sure that we are supporting them in their transformation. In their digital transformation and their business transformation. At the end of the day, my job is making sure my customers can take care of their customers. Brian Ardinger: Let's dig into that a little bit. So obviously you, by working with a lot of different companies, you've seen both the good and the bad of how people focus on customers. And what are some of the insights or maybe biggest mistakes that you've seen from customers when it comes to interacting with customers.Harini Gokul: There's certainly a lot of good and a lot of opportunities for us. Our starting point is how we define value and good with the customer. Right. And the one challenge I see is we start with our definition of what good looks like. And we are nodding. We are in customer conversations and nodding sometimes. But not really actively listening or absorbing what the customer's articulating their problems. Because we so badly want our solution to fit their problem statement. So, I think the biggest hurdle is starting with what we think is good. And thinking versus truly actively listening to the customer and focusing on a customer defined value. Brian Ardinger: So, are there particular tactics that you use when you start that first conversation with a potential customer to understand their needs and then subsequently what to with that?Harini Gokul: Absolutely. So, my, my favorite, I've many tools in my toolkit, but one of my favorite tools is actually an Amazon methodology called Working Backwards. Many of our listeners, and probably you have heard about it, Brian. Working backwards as an approach of creating a press release before you build a new product or a service, or you create a new program and what that does is it starts from the customer. And it says, when we do this, this is the problem we are solving for. This is the challenge we've addressed. This is the benefit we've provided the customer. And it's an articulation of value. And what good looks like when the job is done. So, you work backwards and place the customer squarely in the center of what you do. And then work backwards from that to say, what do we build, create, stand up, create as an organization to deliver on that value?Brian Ardinger: And through that process, I imagine you're not always right. Those assumptions that you make at the very beginning of what you think the customer needs and that. So, you need to, I would imagine to be agile or adaptable to how that works. So how does that initial, I guess, take on the customer and that, how does that play out in real life when you're actually then executing and finding out that some of the things that you thought were correct. Some of the assumptions you had are now incorrect. Harini Gokul: And, you know, it's two ways. It's one be, make flawed assumptions. Or we, like I said, we truly want to believe that some of our beliefs are true. So it's important to dis-confirm our beliefs. Also, especially in the past two years with the rapid growth and innovation we've seen, customer needs are constantly evolving, right? So, we need a muscle to continuously listen.  You listen first and then you create what you believe, what you've heard and have that document from working backwards. And then be constantly check in. You know, as we do the work with the customer, to dis-confirm our beliefs and understand if customer needs have changed. If what they are looking for has changed. If their customer needs have changed. So, there is a process to constantly check in and iterate.It's about actively continuing to get customer perspective. And as we do our work, and also being open to going back on positions, we've made. Always sort of examining decisions that are being made. Commitments that have been made. And say, is this the right thing for the customer. Brian Ardinger: I imagine you work with a wide variety of types of companies. So, startups to more established ones. And all kind of growing fast. Is there a different mindset from a brand-new startup, that's trying to spin up some new things in the marketplace? Versus an existing customer that's trying to grow and expand their existing business model?Harini Gokul: It's such a great question, by the way, because I do work with the diversity of customers. And the more I see at the spectrum of customers. All from sort of more mature companies to born in the cloud companies, there are certain common foundational things that go across them that help them succeed. One is this focus on customer defined value. And putting the customer at the center of everything they do. The second is making sure that there's a culture of innovation that is built into how you solve those problems, right?And that goes back to creating an environment where your talent feels fearless. They feel like they can take risks. They feel that are two-way doors here, where they can make decisions, experiment, and fail fast. Those are the things that are common across these companies. What is different, of course is the approach and the execution, right? So more mature companies have more legacy assets as an example. Or a mindset that needs to evolve. And born in the cloud companies have seen growth, but they're struggling with how do I sustain this growth.Now that my product, is such a great fit. Now that I've seen such early traction, how do I build the foundations? How do I build the culture, the people, the scale that's required for me to sustain this growth? So, the leavers are slightly different depending on where you are, but there are a number of things that span across this range of companies. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about some other tools or tactics that you use to remain competitive and innovative. What are some of the things that you're looking at that are changing the game out there? Harini Gokul: Absolutely. I think we've been in a period of hyper growth, hyper innovation. And companies and customers are all thinking about a couple of things. They're thinking about how do I serve my customers better? It's becoming competitive. So, they want to differentiate themselves. So, a number of our customers are thinking about what do I need to do in terms of product, in terms of experience that can help differentiate. And my role is to help them figure it out. A lot of the conversations we're having right now is working backwards from what they want to differentiate themselves in the marketplace, what they want to serve to their customers, and saying what are some decisions they have to make?And that's really, to me, one of the most important things about what I do is helping companies place their bets. How do I determine where do I put my talent? Am I going to put them in sort of this technical, heavy lifting in the back? You know, this undifferentiated heavy lifting. Do I put them to build a product? What am I going to focus on? Is there a go to market I focused on versus building a product? And so, a lot of my work is bringing in my product teams to sit with the customer to think about what good looks like for them and help make them the right decisions. So, if I step back, I think the element of helping customers place bets. Talent is hard to find. Resources are not finite. Infinite. So, helping them place their bets and prioritize best to serve their customers is probably the most important thing we do. And that includes working closely with our product teams, working closely with our sales teams. And really up and down the stack to make sure our customers get what they need.Brian Ardinger: You bring up an interesting point when it comes to technology and data and the fast paced that the world is moving. Such that companies have to be much more adaptable at understanding where their talent is and where they should be leveraging and that. So, can you talk about some of the things that you're seeing when it comes to data and technology of where customers can get the most out of the new trends and the new things that are popping up there, and still remain relevant?Harini Gokul: I think it's important to think about innovation. But innovation that is truly important to the customer. So, I would say start with what makes a difference to your customer. What problem you're solving. Then prioritize. And as you translate that internally create a culture that rewards making the news versus just reporting the news.And to me, that's one of the biggest signs of a company that sustains this hyper-growth that hyper innovation, is creating a culture that scales beyond initial innovation. Culture that rewards its people for always looking around the corner. Picking up those signals. Knowing what's coming down the pipe. Knowing what's important to the customer even if it's just an anecdote they've heard. And then bringing it back in and translating that into a product feature into a go to market, into a sales play, that helps the customer meet their needs. So, I think companies that create a culture of innovation that reward making the news versus just sort of delivering on what you've promised, are the ones that will truly be successful as you go forward. Brian Ardinger: You mentioned having a constant customer contact and that. And I think it's easy at the beginning when you're a startup, because one, you don't have as many customers. So, you can stay in touch and you're trying to figure out what they really need.But as you grow, as you have customers, you have delivered a solution over and over again to them. I think sometimes get complacent, from the standpoint of you think, you know, what the customer wants, or you rely on the salespeople telling you what they've heard in their field rather than having that direct relationship with the customer. Are there tactics or things that you've seen to continue that hunger of customer centricity, that you've experienced or that you've seen from your customers?Harini Gokul: Hunger is such a great word for that, because you truly do need to be hungry to know what your customers are thinking. And really helping them, you know, thinking around the corner with them. And the one tactic that I've used in many, many roles that's really worked for me is called a customer advisory board. And you can do this, but if you are a startup with five customers, or if you are a much more mature company with thousands and hundreds and thousands of customers. It's the importance of getting together a representative sample of your customers around the table, literally around a virtual table.Or a physical forum and having a conversation that lets them do two things. One it lets each of the customers have a peer-to-peer connection. Because that's really the value add to bringing customers together is having them connect with each other and share insights and perspectives. And second, having them share with you what they think is working and what they think could be better and what signals they are seeing. And to me, these forums, these customer advisory board forums are so critical to making sure that even when an organization matures, as it grows up, that we are keeping closely connected to customer signals. Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about is trends that you're seeing in the space. Obviously, the world is changing very quickly, whether it's technology or data and that. What are some of the things that you're excited about that you're seeing in the marketplace that are changing the way companies can work with customers?Harini Gokul: I think there are multiple things any given day, I often say that since the great industrial revolution, this has been the decade of unprecedented change. Data is king right now, or queen. And I see a lot of focus on getting data. Understanding data. But what I've really liked is now that we are leveraging that data to pattern match. And draw inferences. And be proactive and predictive in how we can take care of our customers.So, while data is great and I love the focus on it. What I love seeing is the step up. Is the transformation of using data as means to a better customer journey. I think that's important. I love that praise. What that is driving and what that has also complimented is sort of the consumerization of technology anywhere, right?Our experiences are so driven by what we see around us in the consumer technology, that even enterprise more traditional mature spaces are starting to understand what good looks like from the consumerization of technology and where we can adopt it. So, I think that syndrome has become more spread. The third piece I'll say is I've always been very intentional about privacy, security, data sovereignty. I worked in Europe for a while, and I was there when GDPR happened. And I could see that in order for this incredible growth in the Cloud to continue, we would need people to trust the Cloud. To trust that they knew our organizations had their best interest at heart. And I see that anxiety and I see that importance, come back again in a very significant way. Especially given the geopolitical environment we are in right now. For More Information Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. Things are changing so fast. It's both exciting to be in this, but it's also one of the scariest times, I think, for a lot of customers and companies out there trying to figure this out. I really appreciate you coming on the show and sharing your insights. If people want to find out more about yourself or about AWS, what's the best way to do that. Harini Gokul: LinkedIn, please. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Harini, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation. And I thank you very much for sharing your thoughts. Harini Gokul: Of course. Thank you.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  We use Amazon Affiliate links for books and Descript Affiliate for transcripts.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Liam Martin, author of the new book Running Remote: Running Remote: Master the Lessons from the World's Most Successful Remote-Work Pioneers. Liam and I discuss the challenges and opportunities of the new world of asynchronous and remote work. And what employees, managers, and leaders can do to be more productive and thrive in the new and changing 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 Liam Martin, Author of Running RemoteBrian 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 Liam Martin. He's the author of Running Remote, which is a new book. He's also a serial entrepreneur. Runs Time Doctor and Staff.com. And he's also a co-founder and co-organizer of the world's largest remote work conference called Running Remote, which is coming up here soon. So welcome to the show, Liam. Liam Martin: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to get into this. Brian Ardinger: As everyone has found out, it's a topic that's become a lot more on people's radar. In 2020, I think if you started before that talking remote work, you're talking about nomad life and they were the folks that were doing it, but it wasn't necessarily mainstream.Now we're in this world where everybody's had some taste of remote work. You know, they've been working from their basement or someplace along the line. What are people getting, right. And what are people getting wrong when it comes to remote work? Now that everybody's been plunged into this deep end. Liam Martin: Oh, that's a great question. January of 2020, 4.5% of the U S workforce was working remotely. March of 2020, 45 % of the US workforce was working remotely. And we're projected to effectively, as we moved from pandemic to endemic, be at about 30% of the US workforce working remotely. And if you make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year, that number is 75% of the workforce.So, we're talking about a transition that is probably the most influential transition towards work since the industrial revolution. But the industrial revolution took about 80 years, and we did it in March. So, a complete change of the way that people work. And when people made that transition, I was getting crazy calls because I've been doing remote for almost 20 years.I was getting all these calls from governments and from multinational corporations. And I lovingly call these people Pandemic Panicers. The people that were just like, okay, we're going to go remote at gunpoint. Right. We have no choice other than to go remote. And the biggest thing that people really get right, is number one, just allowing people to make that transition and putting away the fears that they classically had before that occurred.And that was a really interesting opportunity for the market, because for me, I mean, I think I call myself like a fundamentalist remote worker. I'm really committed towards remote work because I think it actually makes everyone's lives significantly easier. Not only the employee, but the employer. But when you saw this transition, people just said, okay, you know, we're going to try this out. We're going to see if it happens. I think a lot of people said, this is probably only going to be two months, it ended up being two and a half years. But the reality is that when everyone made that switch, it was putting away those fears. That was probably one of the best things that people could have done. People did almost everything else wrong, unfortunately. And that's actually the goal of the book is to be able to, to make that shift. But the core piece that I would probably touch on. The most important thing that people don't recognize is there is an entire industry of people called Remote First Organizations. I was one of them. We have people in 43 different countries all over the world.We do not have an office. And these people work all over planet earth, different cultures, different identities, and we all seem to get along together. The reason why we do that is because something that I researched or I came across basically during the book, which we call asynchronous management. Which is basically the capability to be able to run a business without speaking to anyone face-to-face. So think about it in this context. You've got a company you want to be able to build out a massive company like Coinbase, as an example. Coinbase IPO'd at $141 billion. They entered number 89 on the S & P 500. And for the first time in the history of the SEC, they stated that their headquarters was nowhere because they said everything else would be a lie. And the vast majority of the communication is asynchronous. Meaning they don't do Zoom calls. They don't meet in person. The company basically just evolves on its own. And there's a bunch of mechanics that kind of connect to that, which I talk about at length in the book.Brian Ardinger: What's the first topic that people ask you about or pick your brain about when it comes to remote working. Like where do people naturally go to that they need help with? Liam Martin: You're hitting all my buttons, Brian. All right. So, the first question that people ask me is, should we be using Zoom or Google Meet, or should we be using Asana or should we be using Monday.com. Or Trello or whatever it might be. And my response at this point, Is, if you're asking those questions, you don't actually know what your problem is.So fundamentally, the tools that we're going to use are not actually the way to be able to manage remote workers. That's an excellent way to be able to recreate the office. But when everyone's working from home and working remotely, it's actually a completely different way of managing people. So, I say as an example, just to kind of give you facts on the ground.I meet with my direct reports about two hours a week. I literally have synchronous conversations with my company, two hours per week. The other, you know, I probably work about 50 hours a week. The other 48 hours of that workweek, I work asynchronously. And so does everyone else inside of the organization. The actual systems, the platform, the process documents, those things are the manager. And we really focus on leadership, instead of management inside of these teams. Brian Ardinger: That's an excellent point because I think a lot of people, again, like you say, they gravitate towards the tools. And the tools will obviously are getting quite good and much better than they were 8, 10 years ago when you probably started this. And things like even Google Docs were a little bit janky at the time. But when it comes to leadership. When it comes to putting the culture in place, what are some of the pitfalls that most people fall into when it comes to remote culture?Liam Martin: So, this is the Friday at 4:00 PM. Everyone must report to Zoom, and we're all going to drink beers and playing Cards Against Humanity, not the fun version, however. The HR approved version, right. That no one really wants to be at. And maybe, you know, a pizza's delivered to you at the end of the week. Poll your people. Make that survey anonymous. Ask them if they like it. They do not like it. No one likes it. So, culture can't be built. Culture is something that happens naturally. And what you can only monitor is the dividends from that culture. You can't actually measure the inputs. You can only measure the outputs of culture in my opinion. So as an example, we bought everyone Oculus Rift headsets, just recently. Virtual reality headsets.And we said, okay, you guys have these virtual headset. Would you like to meet in the metaverse? Would you like to play video games together? We don't care which video games you play. If you want to play the most HR inappropriate video game, the one that you kill zombies with, go ahead. Up to you. And then what we measure is the dividend of that activity.So how many people actually do it? How much time do they spend doing it? That's what you need to do when you build culture inside of an asynchronous remote organization. Because this forced version of culture building is again the same mindset that people have inside an office model. The big premise is that when you think about collaboration as a core component of remote work, it's actually an incorrect premise, the remote pioneers, and the ones that I studied throughout the book, they actually recognized that instead of everyone paying this last cost of an hour and a half commute to a single place every single day in which you could have a collaboration buffet. Remote First organizations have recognized, well, every time we meet is a cost that we have to inject, right? So, we can have a more of an a la cart method to be able to make sure that we can collaborate when we need to. The minimum viable dose to be able to move the business forward. And this all, once you understand that core premise, everything else that applies to work and how work should be done changes. Brian Ardinger: So, as we're coming, hopefully out of the pandemic a little bit, you know, we're getting people back into more of a traditional office environment. Where are you seeing the challenges when it comes to that hybrid approach. And this back and forth of, we need to go back to normal, so to speak. Or we've got half the people now in office and half the people are remote. What are you seeing from that person? Liam Martin: I will be again a little bit, I guess, outspoken in this context. Which is, I think that hybrid is actually the worst decision out of the three. So, I'd rather have people go back to the office, than be hybrid. And for many reasons, but the biggest one is something that in remote work, we call distance bias.If you have an individual that is close to the decision maker or the manager. So, let's say someone that is in the office versus someone being remote. Inevitably the person that is in the office. If the manager does not actually have the discipline to be able to treat both of those employees equally, the employee that's closer to the manager will have more of their decisions moved forward than the remote worker. So effectively the remote worker become second-class workers. And it's not within the interest of a remote worker, if they want to actually move forward in the organization to be remote. So, they're going to have to come into the office in order to be able to actually have that work done.I mean, there's been actually a couple of studies done on this already. It's incredibly destructive. It completely destroys company culture. It destroys your EMPS. It is something that I think is a ticking time bomb as we move back to, the majority being a hybrid environment, because that's the way that it's currently happening, at least in the United States.Brian Ardinger: I think a lot of folks resist going to the fully remote because of one of the main advantages of being in person is that ability to have those serendipitous collisions of people and that. And so how do you plan for that? How do you build for that? To get the advantages of that bumping into power that you don't in a remote environment. Liam Martin: You're going through my greatest hits of things that we may or may not agree on. Asynchronous work is the polar opposite of serendipitous collaboration. We try to, as an organization, remove serendipitous collaboration because serendipitous collaboration is a word for feeling busy, but not necessarily getting anything done.So, there's a fantastic book by Cal Newport called Deep Work. And it is the ability for every single individual inside of an organization, to be able to have everything that they need at their disposal in order to solve difficult problems. And that actually is the core premise of what actually makes a company move quickly or slowly. It's their speed of innovation. It's their ability to be able to solve problems. And we found through research. Again, this is because we've just had such a difficult mind shift where if you look at, open up any other MBA book, it's like collaboration is the most important thing that you can possibly do that serendipitous interaction effect.But in reality, actually, the best work is done when everyone has everything that they need to do. Everyone has the tools in front of them to solve a problem. And then they can solve that problem. And the vast majority of that work is done by the individual. So, the more people that you can optimize towards deep work, and the more time that you can minimize towards the meeting and collaborative effects that basically happen inside of organizations, the faster that companies move forward.I'll give you one example connected to this. One, someone in the book, his name's Amir. He runs a company called Doist, which is the company that builds the task management app ToDoist. Millions and millions of people use this application all over planet earth. He has people in his company he has never spoken to them face to face.He's never done a Zoom call with them. He's never done an audio call with them. The most he's done is a little bit of instant messaging and the vast majority is project management. Like task management. Setting a task back and forth. Commenting on it. And those team members are incredibly effective. And companies like ToDoist as very wealthy, profitable organizations.And they're done in a way that is completely asynchronous. And I actually think that this idea is going to proliferate throughout the rest of corporate America. As we move from this pandemic to endemic stage. Brian Ardinger: It's fascinating stuff. I often think about, like, from the individual's perspective, we've not been trained in this. And you know, so it's a lot of new learning of what to do in new environments. Are there particular skillsets or toolsets or mindsets that people should be thinking about as they want to embrace more of this remote asynchronous type of working? Liam Martin: Not many, to be honest with you. There are no books on asynchronous work, which is why I wrote one. The big thing that I can really point people out to. The ability to be able to work is really focused on, as I said, people solving difficult problems. And when you actually look at like, how do I actually solve a difficult problem? A lot of the times managers facilitate work, but they don't actually do any of that work. So inside of asynchronous organizations, another thing that we discovered, or I discovered in my research for this book is the managerial layer in async orgs are about 50% thinner than they are in synchronous organizations. So, there are more people, there are more dollars focusing on doing work, then managing that work because fundamentally the platform, the project management system, the process document is the manager. It's not necessarily the individual. And that's a real shift that again. It's very difficult for people to be able to recognize. I mean, I could point you towards a whole bunch of tools to be able to work that out. But if you're just simply recreating the office and saying, I have to tell you what my numbers are, Brian. Brian, you tell your manager what Liam's numbers are. And then that manager tells the boss what Liam's numbers are. No, all of those numbers should just be available to the CEO of the company and to Liam, actually. Another big thing is asynchronous organizations have a concept that we've kind of coined as radical transparency, where everyone has the same informational advantage as the CEO. Very difficult for a lot of old-school organizations to be able to overcome. But then if everyone has the same informational advantage as the CEO, then everyone can actually make much better-informed decisions throughout the entire organization. Brian Ardinger: One of the things that is often brought up in our podcast is this idea of talent. And how do you get the best out of the talent? And one of the things that I think is, again, different potentially in this new environment is how do you go about hiring for talent and specifically hiring for folks that may be better at this type of work?Liam Martin: So, one of the biggest indicators of success in remote work, and more specifically in asynchronous remote work organizations is introversion. I call asynchronous work really the rise of the introverted leader. Because when you go into a room of, let's say eight, incredibly intelligent people. Who's generally the person whose ideas are adopted?It's usually the six foot two, all American guy, with washboard abs that's incredibly charismatic. And those are the ideas that we usually adopt. If you look at a bunch of corporate boardrooms and we analyze a thousand of them. I could bet you without even knowing what the ideas are, is the guy over six feet tall. Is he a guy? Is he good looking right? And is he in shape?If you told me those variables, I could probably tell you whose ideas are getting adopted. And do those people have the best ideas? No, they don't. So asynchronous work actually provides for the ideas to be the most important variable as it applies to asynchronous work, because the bias of that charismatic individual doesn't permeate the organization in the same way.When you are just simply debating an idea as an example, on Asana or on Trello, in the comments. The best ideas, actually permeate organizations. And there's a lot of data to be able to show that women and minorities rise throughout remote and asynchronous organizations, way faster because of that lack of bias.Brian Ardinger: So, if people want to pick up the book, what are some of the topics that you'd cover in that? And what can people expect from it? Liam Martin: So, the biggest things are, what can you actually do to be able to experiment an asynchronous communication? And again, you can do this inside of an office or outside of an office. There are plenty of asynchronous organizations where people attend the office every single day, and then they recognize they don't necessarily have to be in meetings eight hours a day.They can actually just choose when they want to have a meeting and recognize that meetings are actually a distraction. They're not something that move you forward. They're actually something that slow you down, inside of organizations. And talk about what actionable steps you can take to actually move your organization over to, as we call it the asynchronous mindset. Which has a bunch of variables connected to the process documentation that you have to put inside of your business. The ability for your project management system to actually take over the vast majority of your management. And then the documentation of all of those metrics. So that metrics are just automatic, and you don't necessarily need to extract them manually.There's no more game of telephone, figuring out what the heck is going on in your business. And what this produces as a result, is a company that is number one, a lot less stressful for the business owner to be able to operate. But it's also scalable and can grow way faster than any of your competitors in this space.Brian Ardinger: It's a fantastic topic. What's the best way to connect with you and more information about the book? Liam Martin: So best place for you to just go to runningremote.com. You'll be able to check out the conference that we're doing in May. And then also the book that comes out right after the conference. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Liam, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share a little bit about what everybody's going to have to be dealing with in the near future. So, I appreciate your time. Looking forward to staying connected. Thanks very much for coming on. Liam Martin: Thanks for having me.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  We use Amazon Affiliate links for books.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Cutler, author of the new book, The Game of Innovation. David and I talk about how companies can integrate creativity and gaming into their innovation practices. And we'll discuss some of the best practices, tactics, and techniques that you can use in the process. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world 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 Cutler, Author of The Game of InnovationBrian 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 Cutler. He is the founder and CEO of the Puzzler Company. He's a Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of South Carolina. And I have him on the show because he's the author of a new book called The Game of Innovation. Welcome, David. David Cutler: Thank you. It's so great to have the opportunity to chat with you. Brian Ardinger: The book is very visual. And I would love to be able to show pictures of that. Maybe we'll put some of that in the show notes. Let's start about your background and how did you get into this game of innovation? David Cutler: You know, so much of the work that I do is with different kinds of organizations, focused on all kinds of problems. Sometimes it's around culture. Or it's around trying to achieve certain results. But they're not sure exactly what to do. And so, we worked together to design some kind of a process or a game. And then often we'll work on multiple teams. Where they'll come up with these great ideas and figure out how to design it. Often it is run as a tournament, so the teams will compete. But sometimes we do fusion rounds where parts of this idea are combined with parts of another idea or have all different kinds of formats. Brian Ardinger: So, you've been working with a lot of different types of companies out there. What are some of the biggest obstacles that organizations face when it comes to innovation?David Cutler: So, I think when it comes to innovation or when it comes to change, most leaders that I know have one of two fundamental beliefs. Or one of two fundamental leadership styles. And unfortunately, as well-intentioned as they may be, they often do not work. The first is top-down leadership. This idea that, you know, I have the big ideas as the leader. That's my responsibility or maybe my inner circle. And over time, I'm going to impose any number of these big ideas upon the community. And look you or I, we might love those ideas as outsiders, but it turns out that most people do not like being told what to do. Especially if it's different from what they've always done before.So as a result, people digging their heels. They push back or maybe they retreat. Morale plummets and the likes. And usually even if the change is implemented, it's probably not going to stay. And you know, most of those top-down leaders suffer one of two fates. Either they're fired or maybe they're promoted to a place where they can torment more people. Brian Ardinger: Do less damage.David Cutler: The other, the other perspective is this idea of bottom-up leadership. If we want change that. But if we want innovation to happen, it's got to come from the grass roots. Come from the trenches. And the problem with that is that most people have no idea that they are responsible for innovating the future. I think most of us believe my job is to do my job well. The thing that was outlined in the contract. So, if I'm supposed to serve French fries where I'm supposed to be the accountant, it's not immediately apparent that I'm also responsible for re-imagining the future. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about why games are so important and, you know, that's obviously the topic of your book and it goes into great detail. And again, I love the book because it's very visual and it gives you a lot of tactical things that people can do. But why games? Why is that so important in this innovation space? David Cutler: You know, I consider any well-designed process to be a game. Whether or not it's particularly gamey. You don't need dice and concept cards in order to effectively solve problems. And yet there are many, many benefits of unapologetic gamification. Games unify communities behind a common and shared sense of purpose. There's accountability to rules and results. Puzzlers, as I call them, problem solvers are often much more open to thinking creatively and strategically in the context of a game. Finally, though, the problems we may be solving are really, really serious often. People are more likely to bring their best selves if they're really enjoying the process. So, games can be really fun. Even though they're hard, hard work. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about how you go about crafting a game. And the importance of the different functions and that, of how you should do this in real life. David Cutler: So, game is actually an acronym for a very, very loose and flexible system. So, game stands for G guidelines, an arena, M materials and E experience. It's not always the same. In fact, every time I design a game, or I encourage other people to do, I often want to mix things up, especially if you're working with the same community, but there are constant tools.So, it just very, very quick. Guidelines G guidelines is about the parameters of your game. So, what's the most important challenge you're trying to solve. What's the problem at the core of things? What are the constraints? The non-negotiables that may not be challenged under any circumstances. Constraints are necessary to innovation. And criteria, what constitutes success.So those are the guidelines. Usually those are written before the game has started. So, we really know what this game is all about. Arena is the conditions of play. It's about your puzzlers, period, and place. So, the puzzlers. Who is playing this game, what kind of people, what kind of experts do you need to best solve this problem?Period. How long do you have to solve the problem and place? Where are you going to do this? And sometimes, you know, the arena before you start, and then you have to build a game that works within those conditions. As sometimes you know, this is the problem we have to solve. So, then you build the arena that will work with it.And then materials are the tools of your game. Maybe you're in the physical world. Flip charts and crayons and prototyping materials. There are a whole bunch of things you can use online, in virtual games. And the experiences. What happens. What is the order of activities, in which order, for how long? Brian Ardinger: I think a lot of people when they have gone through these types of exercises and different creativity events, and that, it's oftentimes boxed as like a training thing. Rather than something that you can do on a regular basis. So can you talk through how some of these techniques can be applied on everyday decisions. What's the everyday process that person can use with this type of technique? David Cutler: To the point that you just made. I find sometimes that the people who use the word innovation the most, have never actually seen it happen in real life. It's a buzzword. They're not really sure what that means or what that feels like. When you are working with a team for the first time you mentioned about this being training. Sometimes it's actually a good idea to have them focus on the problem that is not the most important problem facing the organization.It's a skill like any other that can and must be cultivated. And if the first time you're ever working in this kind of format, you're also focused on something that you've been developing for 15 years and it feels very, very personal. It's hard to be open about it. So oftentimes the first time when working with an organization, the first game that they're playing is a good idea to identify something that resonates. But is not the biggest elephant in their particular room.Hopefully, you know, through a great game, there is a focus on both process and product. So, we want them to come up with exquisite solutions. But also to be developing transferable skills that they can apply each and every day. So, we always try and find a balance of those two things. And in the game of innovation offer many, many tools that can be applied under a variety of circumstance.Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit more about the book. It's a very collaborative effort. There's a lot of folks, it looks like from illustrators and that. So can you talk about the team and then talk about how the book came about. David Cutler: So, there are four of us who worked on this book. I'm the primary author. And then I had a partner that we always bat things back and forth. And illustrator and a graphic designer. There's a saying that teams are better than solace. At least when it comes to creative efforts. When you work collaboratively, you'll just come up with bigger ideas, then if you're working alone. Because it's not just, what's in your brain plus what's in my brain, but also the parts of our imagination. That could only be even touched because our thinking intersected. I've been running events for a long time where we bring in a graphic facilitator. Or someone, the woman who worked on book, her name is Patti Dobrowolski. And so, what she will do often when we're working with communities is instead of typing minutes on a computer, she will doodle things. She will draw things in real time. So, by the end of an hour or a day or a week, you have a visual representation of what happened.It is true that a picture paints a thousand words. That an image can say so much more, than words alone. We live in a very visual society. So many people, I hear what you're saying, but I just, I just need to see it. So, we got this idea of if we're going to put this in a book, why not just talk about innovation, but make it look like innovation.And hopefully the pictures help emphasize the message of the words and vice versa. When we started working, cause my other books are word books. And for this one decided that I wanted it to be visual. But it turns out that when you were working in a visual context, you may have a profound word or a word of historic significance. Or word with a great sense of humor, or wonderful relatives. Or whatever it is.It turns out too many words just looks ugly. In a visual context. So, I made a rule at the beginning of this that I was going to use short sentences, short paragraphs, short amount per page. And made Google docs, look, you know, one page on a Google doc would be like one page in a book. I'll never forget, I showed my work of concise poetry when I was starting this off to the illustrator. And she looked at it, and Patty said, oh, my God, David, you just go on and on.And I'm like what do you mean? There are no words that here. What are you talking about? As she went through and slash slash slash. And so that was the challenge. I mean, it really changed my life. And the opportunity. How do you still tell stories? Still have clarity, still be specific. But with no words. Or with very, very, very words. It was an amazing process. Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into some examples of some of the experiences that you've had working with companies using these particular techniques. First talk through how do people get on board or how do you get people on board with this particular concept? Because it is different than I would say the typical way folks approach innovation sometimes. David Cutler: I think it's pretty easy to get folks on board once they just warm to it. You know, the notion of a game which just feels playful is appealing. But also, a little bit scary for a lot of companies that were pretty seriously and have their own traditions of collaboration. In fact, what I hear from, you know, so many organizations is that they are focused on problems. But usually what happens is they'll say, here's the problem. What should we do? Of course, conversation jumps from topic to topic on the back of a frog. You know, someone has an idea. Someone hates that idea. Someone else loves it. We tried that 10 years ago. Someone else says, yeah, we should do that tomorrow. And of course, all of those ways of approaching problems are essential to the process, but not at the same time.And so, one of the tools that we use, we call them Great Gaming Goggles. And the idea is that there are five lenses of problem solving. Each one is a different color. And it's paired with a word that describes the activity that starts with the same letter. And the idea is that when you're working with a team, and you design a game to make sure that you're using just one lens at a time. So, they're all important. But not at the same moment. So, you can figure out are we wearing in this specific task or question or activity. Are we wearing the purple lens, which stands for propose, which is about creative idea generation. Are we wearing the green lens, which is about gathering it's about detective work. About learning the way that the world is and that it has been. Are we focused on feedback wearing a blue lens? Which means boost is about positive praise for an idea. Or a red lens, which is ripping. Is about constructive feedback. Or are we wearing the orange lens, which stands for own. Are we here to make a decision? Almost every organization I've ever seen is really good at some of those steps. And this goes for individuals too. And has a tricky time with other parts of it. So, there are some communities where they have so many ideas, but they can never decide on anything. So, they have all these half-started projects. They haven't actually gotten that much done. And then you see the flip side where they're very, very decisive. But they keep doing the same thing over and over.And so the process often starts by just exploring. You know, where have you been and what do you need to do. And then trying to figure out what format would work the best for. Brian Ardinger: Do you find it beneficial for this type of process to start from a team level? Or can anybody create a game? What are some of the best-case scenarios that you've seen of how to actually start using some of these techniques with an organization? David Cutler: You know it's a skill like anything else that gets better with practice. So not only solving problems but designing problem solving games. I think it could be a good idea to start with writing shorter games. We call them sprints. Two hours or less. And to figure out, you know, in a standard meeting, most meetings are what, an hour, 35 minutes, 15 minutes, something like that?I see meetings as a huge, overlooked opportunity. I think so many of us look at meetings as this necessary, but unfortunate evil. The bane of our existence. The low point of our week. And I think that a meeting should be the high point of your week. Because that's when you convene your talent, and you have the opportunity to work on teams and solve actual problems.So, I think a good place to start, if you are leading a meeting, Instead of doing the normal information dump at worst. Or at best maybe question and answer. To really think through, okay, we've got a 60-minute framework. What could we do? What are the steps that we would go through? So that by the end of 60 minutes, we're not going to have a detailed prototype. But could we actually solve some small part of some problem in 60 minutes. And feel like we have achieved something. Brian Ardinger: Well, and going through that particular exercise, I would imagine if nothing else, it gives people a different sense of time. And when you start seeing progress in a short amount of time, it makes other things possible for the next 60 minutes that you sit down. Things along those lines. David Cutler: Nothing ever gets done without brilliant people, but not quite enough time. I can give you an example of a game that I love to do that's maybe you can do in 25 minutes. Something I call Disaster Storm. And it has four steps. So, remember, you're asking one question at a time. So, we start off Disaster Storming by asking a group, maybe we're talking about podcasts. Maybe you're saying, you know, I have a good podcast. You have a great podcast, by the way. We want to make it even better. Right. Maybe that's the thing. I want to do something that's really going to catch fire and generate a lot of buzz. So normally what happens is you say, well, what should we do? Well with Disaster Storming the first step, you know, we often say in brainstorming, there are no bad ideas. But what about terrible ideas?You know, there's something about an idea that just puts a pit in your stomach, where you have an emotional reaction to it. Whereas good ideas or bad ideas, you can be more neutral too. But awful ideas, borderline illegal ideas. They really get a reaction. So, what I'll often do, let's say we're working with a group of 20 people or 50 people, is to position different teams. You know flip charts around the room. And the first question would be to brainstorm. Maybe we say, I want you to brainstorm the worst possible ideas you can imagine for Brian's next podcast. Right. Maybe to do it, you know, while sitting on top of a landmine. Or a while streaking through the halls or right. You know, face-to-face right after you eat some garlic. You know, whatever it is, what are the worst possible ideas that you can come up with? That's the first phase.So, they're only doing one. Then I have them flip places in the room. So, they rotate, and they inherit a list of terrible ideas. The next task that could take place at maybe 90 seconds is to find the most offensive, most terrible one and put an X by it.The next step is to start, and then we go through a process of transforming that terrible idea into an extraordinary idea. How do you go from something? And often they're very, very close. It takes something that has that emotional pull to get you to think of other kinds of extraordinary things. And then we go through a process where they design that idea. They figure out what's the big idea on top. What are some of the wow-ables that happen underneath? And then they share their idea. And in 30 minutes or less, often we will get more incredible ideas that most companies have gotten after weeks of struggling with a problem and maybe coming up with kind of variations of what they've always done. And it's really exciting. Brian Ardinger: Very interesting. One of the things that I always talk to our guests about is, and I get asked about when it comes to innovation, is they totally understand that the creativity portion of innovation and thinking differently and that, but a lot of it comes back to, well, how do we measure if we're on the right track or how do we measure these outcomes that we're actually making progress and that. I would imagine you have this objection to overcome when you talk about games. It's like, well, it's fun and that. So, it can't be worthwhile. So how do you talk about measuring outcomes in this particular environment? David Cutler: In fact, that would be a great topic for a game. Like to figure out how do we measure success as we move towards this goal. Those kinds of benchmarks are actually marked in the game. So, we often use criteria. I was talking about guidelines and how we designed the guidelines because the challenge, constraints, and criteria. Criteria is by clearly articulating what constitutes success. We don't know what the solution is, but we know what the desirable outcomes would be. I would argue the opposite that so much of the time outside of a game context we haven't articulated what we need to be doing. Yeah. We want to make more money or have more customers or get more hits on social media. But how do you know when you reach more? A great game will be very clear about what constitutes success on the front end without prescribing the solution. And there are actually two ways to write up criteria. One is with a shortlist and the other is with a long list. So, the idea of a short list is to say, you must keep all the constraints in mind. You must solve this problem. But to be really successful, you achieve this criteria? And so, you'll have some way to measure it. A long list, the idea is sometimes what usually will have in a short list. It'd be like three or four or five at the most criteria items. Like bullet points that are very easy to understand. And a long list you might have 10 or 20. Or 30 different criteria. And the idea is to hit as many of them as possible. So, in a well-designed game, you actually know how successful you've been at the end, because you've already defined that before playing it. Brian Ardinger: That's very good. We're living in a hybrid world now. Obviously with, folks going back into the office and that. But a lot of these types of techniques and that, there's an advantage to doing them face-to-face and that. What's been your experience and how to use these techniques in a more of a hybrid world. Or in a world where we can't be face to face.David Cutler: You know I'm an innovator to my core. I am nowhere nearly as creative as COVID 19. You know, I never imagined a world in which we had to be 6 to 12 feet apart. We'd be wearing these masks and the likes. And I view it, of course, it's been hard on all of us. And had very, very serious consequences. But I view it as a worthy adversary.I have this viewpoint that when you hit a wall, when something goes wrong, how can you have it help you come up with even better solutions right then if you didn't have that obstacle that was there. And so that's been my whole perspective throughout COVID. How can this make us better? Obviously, there are benefits to be online as well as deficits, but that's tricky because so much of what we do is, you know, very tactile and the likes. So, we started really leaning into, especially Zoom is the platform that we've used the most. And it doesn't do anything. We played a game, and it was for about 50 people. We had six teams that were on there and of course, one of the things that's great about Zoom is when you're in breakout rooms, everyone can come back and at the same moment everyone's back.So, it takes them a little longer to go into their own room than if they were just sitting at a table. But if you're in a physical space at the end, you have to get people's attention two or three times. But on Zoom, it's just like, boom. They're back. So, I remember hearing afterwards from people who went there. And it was just amazing.We wanted to show them, how do you make Zoom exciting? How do you make it work? Cause it's just, it's not inherently good or bad. It's just different. It's just a tool. And I think what happened when we went online, unfortunately, is that so many organizations, what they did was they took the worst parts of in-person, like the lecture, and brought it online. While losing some of the best parts, like the ability to interact and have side conversations. And the likes instead of, you know, saying what can this tool uniquely do? So afterwards, some of the people on this game would call us up and they would say, yeah, so I was talking to some friends, and I said, what did you do this weekend? And yeah, I just got off an innovation game. We played; it was six hours long on Zoom. People like what six hours. That's crazy. That's ridiculous. How was that? Like, it was amazing. You know, we got so much achieved. More than I did all of six months before that. But we spent a lot of time. We didn't have any solutions, you know, with a good game, you don't know what the actual solutions will be. You just designed in such a way that great solutions are almost guaranteed because of the kinds of questions that are. But we had to think about, you know, in a room when there's a question, someone can raise their hand and you can go over, and you can clarify that's trickier on breakout rooms in Zoom.So, we had to figure out a system so that we would type up documents ahead of time. So, they always knew what the task was and how many minutes they had. Had that kind of clarity because there's no, you know, front white board, it was amazing though. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: David, I really appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to kind of share some of this stuff. I encourage people to pick up the book if they are at all interested in innovation and some really tactical ways to make some progress. So, the book is called The Game of Innovation. I encourage people to pick it up. If people want to find out more about yourself, David, or about the book, what's the best way to do that.David Cutler: The easiest address I can give is www.Puzzlercompany.com/book. And that way you'll find out information. There's a trailer for the book and some sample pages and a whole bunch of other information about solving problems with your team. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, David, again, thanks for being on the show. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future. David Cutler: Thanks so much Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Grant Botma. Grant is the Author of the new book, Work-life Harmony. Grant and I talk about the common problems with work-life balance. And some tactical tips for how to create harmony through the inevitable changes and opportunities that people face each year. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and that certainty. 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 Grant Botma, Author of Work-Life HarmonyBrian 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 Grant Botma. He is an entrepreneur and author of the new book called Work Life Harmony. Welcome to the show Grant. Grant Botma: Hey, thanks for having me on Brian. This is cool. Brian Ardinger: Grant with all the changes in technology and markets and environmental disruption that's going on in the world. We're trying to talk about what individuals can do to navigate and manage accelerated change. And I thought your book would fit in perfectly. This concept of work-life harmony. Grant Botma: Yeah, I think balance is great. It's something that all of us need to have in various areas of our life. The problem is somehow our society has made balance the goal. And that's the wrong target. Even the best balancer in the world who holds the Guinness Book of World Records. He fell out of balance. There are times where we fall out of balance. And the biggest travesty I think with that is when we do fall out of balance, because it isn't inevitable. We feel like a failure. We feel shame. We feel alone. And sometimes it prevents us from continuing to pursue the real goal, which is work-life harmony. Where we don't have a work life and a home life warring against each other all the time. But they're in harmony moving in one direction. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think a lot of folks are having to reevaluate that in their lives. You know, with COVID and all the changes when it comes to hybrid work. People are now both for good and bad trying to restart. Or we think about how they approach this particular topic. Why don't we talk a little bit about the book? And how you've outlined a number of different tactical concepts that people can go through to create this work-life harmony. Grant Botma: The biggest concept within the book, is to try to invite your family and your work into this purpose that you are on. What I espouse is that no matter who you are, no matter what you're doing with your work, a business does not exist unless you're serving somebody somewhere with a product or service, right?So, you are making an impact on somebody's life at somewhere down the line, through your business. And although profit is a great goal and a great thing to have with business, it's not the primary goal. You can still have profit, but not meet your purpose of genuinely serving people. And what we want to do is determine, okay, what does that impact we're making on folks?Let's put that in something that's simple that everybody in my life that's important can understand. Including but not limited to my coworkers and my team at home. And then you want to create intentional systems and processes. And also have some very tactical things that you can do throughout your week, month and year. To make sure everybody's invited in this mission together. And you're all going in the same direction, and everybody has good expectations managed. That's kind of the big thing.Brian Ardinger: I had a chance to skim through the book a little bit. And you do break it down for folks how to think about this, because I think it's very easy to struggle with. I know I have to manage my household. I know I have to manage all the work-related things that are happening. But how do I go about doing that? And one of the particular topics is you have what you call is like creating your ideal year calendar. Grant Botma: Yeah, this has been a huge thing for me and my wife. But then also it's something I make sure all of my employees do as well. That's where you look at the year to come. And instead of putting things specific on this day, at this time. I'm going to go to go here. It's understanding what are my priorities for this year, both in work and at home. And making sure that you say, okay, during this time of year, I'm going to focus in on this priority and make sure I do that.But then in this time of year, I'm going to focus in on this other priority and make sure I do that. So, an example is I take my kids out on a birthday trip every year around their birthday. And again, this ideal year calendar I'm not putting the exact date of when I'm going to go on the trip with them, but I know it's around their birthday.I'm going to say with my son Parker, his birthday, September 15th. Sometime in or around September 15th, I'm going to go on a trip with him. And it's not going to be something that lasts a week. It's just something where I spend one or two nights with him and maybe we go out of town. Maybe we stay here locally. Where I just focused on him. And I ask him some intentional questions about how I'm doing as a father. I might have some intentional questions about him based on where things are going in his life. But really, it's just, I'm pausing and I'm focusing on him. And I have that priority for each of my three children, but then also my wife during our anniversary.But I also have some priorities that work to where I get together with my other business partners and founders. And we do a trip. And we ask some intentional questions, and we focus in on what we want our business year to look like. I'd say the biggest thing with the Ideal Year Brian is understanding that I have busy seasons. Communicating to my family ahead of time. These are my busy seasons. So that I can get the support needed before, during, and after those busy seasons as well. Those are just a few of the things that are in that. Ideally your calendar, Brian Ardinger: And so, the idea of zooming out and getting the big picture at the beginning of the year, so to speak. And blocking time from that. Is it blocking time? Or is it more along the lines of here's the ebbs and flows and things that are going to be part of the year that we know coming up. And then a plan from that? Grant Botma: Yeah, it's expectation management. Brian, think of it this way. So, harmony, we're going to talk about music for a second. If I asked my wife and kids to sing a note, they'll do it because they love me, and they'll sing. And they'll keep singing and they'll keep singing. But eventually they'll stop. And when they stop singing, I'll look at them like, why did you guys stop?And they'll say, well, I got tired. And you didn't tell me how long to sing for. But if I tell them ahead of time, hey guys, I need you to sing a note. I need you to just sing it at this tune. I need you just sing it for this long. Chances are there'll be able to sing it longer because their expectations were managed. But they'll perform a whole lot better. And I won't get upset if they stop singing because we have expectations managed. That's what the Ideal Year Calendar is. It's saying, hey, during this time year, I'm going to focus here. And afterwards we're going to celebrate together because of that purpose that I'm on. We're going to talk about all the impact that was made during that busy season. And then at this time, I'm going to be focusing on over here with you guys doing our birthday trips and that. It's expectation management. Telling them how long we're going to sing notes for and what those notes are going to be. Brian Ardinger: So in situations, obviously you're an entrepreneur, you know, very well a lot of this stuff can't be planned. And what happens beginning of the year, what is not necessarily what's going to happen at the end of the year from your expectations or otherwise. How do you go about managing the expectations of the fact that they're going to change? That these things are going to have to change. Grant Botma: I love that. This is the reason why I actually rarely create goals outside of 90 days. Because the world changes so much that the likelihood that I will be able to make every single one of those goals happen over the next 12 months is very, very low. In the book, I repeat over and over and over again. Your goal is to do this at 70%. If you can live out 70% of your Ideal Year, that's way better than zero intentions on nothing planned and you're just drifting throughout your year. So, you do expectation management and hey, this is what we would ideally, the Ideal Year, would like to live out. This is not the exact year. It doesn't have the dates in there. And we're going to do our best to live by this. But obviously life happens. And when that does happen, we'll make adjustments together. Brian Ardinger: Do you see different tactics coming to bear? Let's say the beginning of a journey, for example, you know, you're just starting out with your startup or launching a new product or something along those lines. Versus maybe you have an established career. There are more knowns versus at an early starting stage. Are the tactics different? Grant Botma: Oh, for sure. So, part of the reason why I went on this work-life harmony journey is my wife, her brother, is handicap. He's disabled. And he was injured in a medical accident when he was 11 years old. So, when I went to go ask for permission to marry her. When I went to talk with her parents, I also asked if I could be his caretaker when the time came.So, my wife and I, we didn't have any choice to get good at work-life harmony. This was something that we've decided that we wanted to do. And we had to get better at it each and every year. And when you're a business owner, you know, especially at the beginning, you've got to grind, and you've got to go. And there's a lot more busy seasons than there aren't. But we knew that we needed to be in a place where I could have as much flexibility as possible when the time came to be able to care for, his name's Daniel. When the time came. Yes, it's a journey. This is a journey that my wife and I have been on for basically 17 years now. And every year we do our best to get better at it. And in the book, there's a chapter called evaluations. And with those evaluations, I say that there's four questions that you should be asking.What can I do more of? What can I do less of? What can I add? And what can I remove? And if you look at your last Ideal Year and how it got lived out. You then before creating the next Ideal Year, can you use those four questions to evaluate on how you want to grow. And how you want to adjust. Based on that season of life or the season that your business is in.I couldn't take a month off in the spring and a month off in the fall, like I do now, when I first started my business. These are things that have evolved and changed. And it wasn't like, oh, I just arrived and started taking a month off. It was okay, let's take a full week, unplug. One time during the year and see how that goes.Right. And then we evaluate and adjust it and then we add it to that. And then, oh yeah, let's get to a point where I'm taking a full month off, at one point. I did that. And we adjusted it, added to it. Then we went from a month to a month. And then two weeks later on in September. The last several years has been two months off. And again, I've been a 17-year process to grow and get to that point based on seasons and proper evaluation. Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk about the business side of this. So, you talked a lot about how this can be played out in your family side for the work-life harmony side. But obviously work-life, work is a portion of that as well. How do these tactics change? And how do you execute on this in the work environment? Grant Botma: Yeah. One of my frustrations with work-life balance type topics is they all basically equate to this. Hey, stop working so much. And I don't want to do that. I like working. And I'm good at it. And I enjoy it. I believe I was created to contribute.And again, I believe that business is something that allows me to make a really great impact on people's lives. I find lots of joy in that. That's my purpose. I don't want to stop working. I just want to be as intentional and as efficient and as biggest impact I can possibly make. And just like I do evaluations, and focus with my family, birthdays and anniversaries.I also do evaluations and focus, like I said, with my leadership and with my team. Every year, we're still asking those same questions. What can we do more of, what can we do less of, what can we add, and what can we remove? And as we evaluate our business over the past year and think about what we want our business to look like in the next year. We're taking that same intention and same focus that I do on my home life, that I'm also doing in my work life.And the cool part is with the tool of the Ideal Year Calendar. It's not just something I share with my family. It's also something I share with my business partners, my employees. And it's something that we all do as a team. All of my employees do. So much so that we get to celebrate each other as they take trips with their family. Or they do take focus time with their family. But also, we all know when to support each other, when we are in our busy seasons. Or in that really grinding time to try to finish out a project or whatever it may be. Brian Ardinger: How do you work in clients and customers to that particular thing? Because obviously they're not going to have necessarily access to understanding that. Sometimes their needs conflict with what you want to do. Or what the business wants to do. How do you involve the customer with this? Grant Botma: The first thing, I make sure I do is I don't hide from the customer that I'm a real human, like they are. I want to connect with my customers as often as I possibly can. And sometimes that is as simple as, like I mentioned in the book, is if I'm on a phone call or if I'm in an interview or whatever else, if I get interrupted by my children or something, I'm not going to yell at them.I'm going to ask for some grace from the client. And then I'm going to talk to my son who might've interrupted me and say, hey, I'm on the phone with Mr. Doe. And actually, we're talking about something that's really important. We to try to change his life through this advice. And through that thing. I'm going to finish this phone call with him and then I'll get back to you. Okay, buddy. You know, I'm going to be intentional with how I communicate to my family when I'm on the phone with the client and let the client hear that. And I'm not going to apologize for it to the client either. Like this is life, right. But then also, for my role in my business and the ambassador of our brand, and I'm doing podcasts interviews like this, and I'm writing books and writing blogs and creating videos and YouTube and being very vocal on social media.I don't have a delineation between my business and my home. It's one life that I live. And whenever I'm communicating in the public about this mission and this purpose that I'm on. Not like a different mission over here and a different focus over there. It's one thing, one focus. I don't have a bunch of different masks that I wear as I'm engaging with clients or when I'm engaging with my friends on the golf course. Or when I'm engaging with my family at home. I might use a little bit different language here or there. Right. But I'm not going to be a different person. I'm the same guy everywhere. And that's super important too. Brian Ardinger: So, obviously this is something very personal and passionate to you. And obviously you came up with some ways that could help you as an individual and as a family and a company live these values and live these tactics. So, talking to a company out there, or maybe some of our audience members who haven't thought about work-life harmony in this particular way and that. How do you start building that initial company culture or family culture around these particular initiatives? Grant Botma: The biggest thing is you let them know you care. And the way that you do that is start small. So, an example that I give in the book. So, in every chapter I give what's called a quick win. One of those quick wins is something that I call One Kid Up. And this is awesome. It's a ton of fun. It takes next to no extra time and energy from you. So, I'm not going to tell you to work less remember. But it's something that allows you to let your kids know that you care.So, we have three children and once a week we do something called One Kid Up. Where we put the other two kids to bed a little bit earlier. We don't tell them they have to go to sleep. They're a little bit older now, but we do tell them that stay in the room. But one of the kids gets to stay up with mom and dad.And during that time, we might have intentional conversations with them. Or we're going to talk to them about drugs, alcohol, sex, all the things. But we also might just take the time to just watch their favorite YouTube channel. Or play a board game. Or make a fun dessert after dinner. Either way, it's just focused time with them.And rather than putting everybody to bed, say at nine o'clock, I just tell two of them to go to their room at 8:30 and then there's 30 minutes that me and mom have with the kid and its focused time. And when we put them to bed after that focus time, the big thing that we want them to hear and know from us is we love you. We care about you and you're important. I think that's a great place to start. And weaving those little intentional actions in to your rhythms, another chapter in the book that you do every single week, every single quarter, and every single year. You can build on those every year. As you continue to try to get better at work-life harmony, this journey that we're all on.Brian Ardinger: So, let's pivot a little bit and talk about your company, Stewardship. It's included a couple of times on the Inc 500 fastest growing company list. You have innovated in a lot of different areas. Why don't you tell the folks a little bit about what Stewardship is and some of the innovations that you're focusing on right now. Grant Botma: Yeah. So, Stewardship is a group of several different companies. It's a independent mortgage brokerage. An insurance Agency. And investment advisory. They're all independent for purpose so that we can be true fiduciary to our clients and give them the best advice, products and service possible without any bias to us financially. We like to tell our community, we do home loans, insurance, and investments with wisdom and love.And one of the new initiatives that we're working on right now is starting a real estate company. And the reason why we're starting this is because we saw a problem in our community. There was a need. And now we're going to fill that need. And it's not necessarily more real estate agents or competition with real estate agents.It's actually a new program that helps people be able to buy their next home while still living in their current home. They'll get early access to the equity from their current home, for the down payment on the new home. For upgrades to the new home. And they can have those upgrades done while they're still living in their current home. And they don't have to worry about trying to move twice or self first and then live with in-laws or storage and all the things that are associated with that. And then they don't have to try to sell their home while they're living in it and be ready to show it on a moment's notice because somebody coming by to check it out and you have to make sure it's clean. And now my kid's napping. And then what I do with the dog. It's a way of selling your current home and buying the next one in the most seamless way possible. It's been several years in the making. A lot of that has come through some of those annual founders' events that I do with my business partners and asking the four questions that I mentioned before. And we're excited to be launching that here in a few weeks. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Well, it's exciting to hear again, that you're continuing to innovate and living the stuff that you're producing out there in the world. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that.Grant Botma: You know, I'm very active on social media. You can find me on Instagram or Twitter @GrantBotma. Thank you for pronouncing my name correctly at the beginning of the podcast. Yeah. So, you can follow me there or on Facebook. And I'm very active in my direct messages. So, if anybody has questions, you can do that. Brian Ardinger: We'll Grant, thank you very much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Sharing your thoughts and wisdom. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future. Grant Botma: Yeah. Thank you, Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Shameen Prashantham, Author of Gorillas Can Dance. We talk about the benefits, opportunities, and challenges, corporates and startups face when trying to partner, grow, and innovate together. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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. Shameen Prashantham, Author of Gorillas Can DanceBrian 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. Shameen Prashantham. He's the author of a new book called Gorillas Can Dance: Lessons from Microsoft and other Corporations on Partnering with Startups. Welcome to the show.Shameen Prashantham: Thanks so much, Brian. Great to be on your show. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show for a lot of different reasons. One is your book of course. But also, you've been doing a lot of research into the area of startup corporate collaboration as your role as a professor of international business and strategy and Associate Dean at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai. So, I wanted to start off the conversation with what got you interested in researching this intersection between startups and corporates and innovation. Shameen Prashantham: You know, Brian, I decided to go down the path of academia when I was in my late twenties. And then I did a PhD in Scotland. About how startups went international. And this was a topic that was gaining traction at the time. But I did my research in an international business unit that had made its names by studying large companies. Particularly large us multinationals that had established a presence in Scotland. It appeared to me as I was completing my doctoral work, that we were making an artificial distinction between these two sets of companies. Certainly, they occupied very different worlds in a way and had very different realities, but I was beginning to see some weak signals of the prospect of collaboration. And so, by about 2005, which is when I graduated with my PhD. I began to ask why are we studying these different companies separately. And in Scotland, there was a recognition by policy makers even, that for example, IBM, which had been around for a few decades or Sun Microsystems, they too were trying to actually do more innovation in their far-flung subsidiaries.And one way to do that would be to connect with local innovative startup, that we're quite keen to gain some access to the commercial muscle of these large companies. And so that was when I began to observe this possibility, this potential. And I found it fascinating and just sort of stuck with it. Brian Ardinger: One of the core premises of your book and your research is how do large companies stay innovative? And you're saying that more and more companies are looking at startups as a way to inject innovation into their core. Talk more about what you've learned through your research. Shameen Prashantham: Initially when I started looking for examples. I think they were really happy accidents. You know, you had unusually entrepreneurial manager in a subsidiary of a multinational thinking, gosh, we've surely gotta be able to do more than we can in terms of innovation, but there's a chicken and egg problem.Headquarters isn't going to give us the mandate to do more innovation unless we have the capabilities. But we are not going to be able to build the capabilities unless we have a mandate. Some of these guys were saying, well, let's just fly under the radar a little bit and try and dabble with some innovation by our collaboration with local startups.And they were able to do that, fairly inexpensively. The local startups were interested to do this. And I published an article called Dancing with Gorillas in 2008. Mainly from the point of view of the startups. But from that point onwards, what I began to notice, interestingly was the big company is gradually started saying, well, actually, why don't we do this more systematically?And the company that I have studied the longest is Microsoft. So coincidentally, 2008 was the year they introduced BizSpark which was their first major programmatic initiative for startups. Partly driven by a concern that the open software movement was going to cause problems. Give startups and alternative in terms of software tools. So, they were giving away software tools for free. But I think that became an important start. This was managed out of Silicon Valley under the leadership of Dan'l Lewin who was a Silicon Valley insider brought into Microsoft to engage with startups. And then what I observed over time is companies like Microsoft, which were, I think pioneers in this area, had a combination of top-down initiatives run by people like Dan'l out of Silicon Valley and bottom-up initiatives championed, for example, by managers in Israel who felt they really ought to tap into the fantastic potential for entrepreneurship in their region. And then things developed. And then I came across SAP doing something for startups out of Silicon Valley and so on. But the other thing that became interesting more in the last sort of five to seven years is that companies in traditional industries, automotive, banking, fast moving consumer goods.Especially around 2015, I began to notice startup programs, being initiated by them too. Partly as a response to the digital disruption. And they too felt, you know, they recognize the need to be much more innovative, agile, and entrepreneurial while they were introducing intrapreneurship programs. There was no reason not to also tap into the entrepreneurial energy in startups on the outside. Brian Ardinger: Well, you definitely seem to have this change, this rise of startups, and the rise of startup ecosystems I think helped bring this to the forefront of companies as well, where you saw more and more companies getting up and going faster than ever before. And the ability to start things, create things, build things, I think put a spotlight on startups in a way that hasn't been in the past. You mentioned it started, you know, a lot with the technology companies looking at startups as a core opportunity and that. Now it's been moving on to other realms. Other industries and that. What are you seeing when it comes to what's working and what's not working when it comes to partnering with startups?Shameen Prashantham: Great question. And just to briefly comment on what you said. I think I absolutely, right. My comments earlier, maybe emphasize more the demand side of things. You know, the big companies recognizing the need to be more entrepreneurial. But on the supply side, definitely we've seen more startups coming to the floor.And I think cloud computing is one of the game changers, and I think that's how Microsoft became more and more interested as well. And you know, the fact that Satya Nadella ran the cloud business, when it wasn't a thing in Microsoft, and then later became CEO also made this much more central to what they were doing. But in terms of what works and what doesn't work, I think in companies like Microsoft, but the other ones as well, BMW, Unilever, Walmart. So whole bunch of industries. I think what I've noticed is this. There is a Paradox of Asymmetry. That these big companies that have encountered at one point or another. And the Paradox of Asymmetry is that the very differences that make it attractive to work together. For example, the startups of agility and the large companies of scale, those very differences actually make it difficult, or at least not straightforward for these very different types of entities to work together. For this to work companies have to overcome these asymmetries. And so, what works. It's basically the efforts to overcome the symmetries. And I've identified three. An Asymmetry of Goals. These different companies want different things. And importantly, at different timescales. There's an Asymmetry of Structure. Is very difficult to find role counterparts. And what I call an Asymmetry of Attention, which is the big companies, the notion of startups out there. They aren't sure which ones are worthy of their managerial attention. The startups have a different problem, which is how do I get the attention of the people who matter within the company? And so, the companies that have clarified the synergy, the so-called, win-win very clearly. The companies that have put in place partner interfaces, so that startups know who the first port of call is. And the companies that have very deliberately intentionally cultivated success stories. Exemplars fairly early on. Are the ones I think that have met with more success. Because the synergy helps to address the Asymmetry of Goals. The interface helps to address the Asymmetry of Structure and having these exemplars, showing what success can look like to both parties help to address the Asymmetry of Attention.Brian Ardinger: I think that's so important. When I work with startups oftentimes earlier on, I would say, don't even think about working with a corporation until you understand who you should be talking to. And because it can very easily take you off track. The timelines of how a startup executes versus a timeline of a multinational corporation are significantly different and can take a startup in the wrong direction if they're not prepared for that. You mentioned that the companies that you saw that were doing the best work, had identified someone in the corporation or a group within the corporation to help be that Sherpa for a startup to help navigate that. Is that being driven by the locality of the locations? Is it being driven by business units? Is it being driven by the top down saying here's how we want to interface? Or talk a little bit about how companies have actually structured that Sherpa role. Shameen Prashantham: I love that metaphor. I've seen both. For example, a BMW. It was sort of top-down because an initiative driven out of Munich in Germany. Where it was very interesting in terms of the people who are driving this. And there was a pair. So, there's this guy called Gregor Gimmy, who was really the public face of the initiative.A BMW Startup Garage was created in 2015. In fact, I just sent an email, I think, to info@BMWStartupGarage and said I'm doing a lot of work on this. I've notice that you've started this. Can we talk? And Gregor replied immediately. And I would see him on the videos. But only when I got to Munich and met him in person, did I realize there was this other guy in the background, Mathias Mayer. And they were such different personalities, but I think you needed both. Gregor had worked for IDEO in Silicon Valley. He was very gregarious. He was the guy that startups could identify with. Mathias on the other hand, Dr Mathias Mayer. As you know, many German managers have PhDs. He was the BMW insider. I think who was the Sherpa for the interface in the company. To navigate the internal politics and so on. And I think that's why it works in that case. So, that's an example of top down. But there's also been bottom up. I mentioned Israel in the case of Microsoft, but also here in China, Walmart came up with an interesting program called Omega Eight. To deal with Chinese startups to help improve the customer experience in the stores, for example.But one of the things they were very clear was we have to do things differently in China. Speed, for example, is of the essence. And so they would put in place practices, like we will work with startups who can do only one pilot for us at a given point in time. And need to do it in 60 days. And that was actually very reassuring for the startups who were always worried that these big multinationals would be soon moving.And I think the last visit that Doug McMillan, the Walmart CEO made to China pre pandemic, was in 2019. And they showcase some of the startups working with Walmart. And so really, I think both are possible. But I think the key is having people who can on the one hand show empathy and connect with the startups on the outside. But also have the ability to deal with the internal piece and the politics and the communication and getting buy-in from people.Brian Ardinger: Yeah, it's interesting that you're seeing different examples having success, but, but taking a slightly different take on it. For example, like, you know, the BMW Garage, my understanding with that program is when they came out, it was unlike your traditional corporate accelerator or corporate venture, where they would invest in a startup.They would look for companies and then would help them become partners and basically get through the red tape of becoming a preferred vendor, for example. And helping that particular part of it versus just capital thrown at the startup. And then you have other examples, like you said Microsoft, that are offering tools and services at a discount to start that communication and start that partnership with startups. What role are you seeing corporate venture playing in this? Shameen Prashantham: It's a great question. And the honest truth is the vast majority of my work has been on non-equity partnering. So, offering that doesn't involve equity. And the distinction between what Microsoft is doing and BMW is doing can be thought of as a distinction between cohorts and.And the way I explained this to my classes, a cohort is like an MBA class. You know, getting in is difficult, but once you get in, it's a time bound program where the curriculum, pretty much everybody who starts the program ends the program and peer interaction is a key part of this. And I think that's the way Microsoft went about their accelerators, for example. But BMW's is more like a funnel, which is like the job search process. After an MBA, many fewer complete the process than begin. You get screened out along the way, and you may not know who else is part of the process. And each has its advantages and disadvantages. I think with the cohort type program, you're more likely to have serendipity. So, you may have two startups that didn't know each other from before forming a three-way partnership in the course of the accelerator program. But I think with the funnel, you have more predictability and I think that's what BMW went for. And you're absolutely right. They pioneered this idea of being a venture client. And so one of the key things they were doing was connecting startups with business units or innovation teams within BMW, who actually would be interested to work with them, but also made sure that they got a supplier number. Which most startups would not be able to do.Corporate Venture Capital traditionally has tended to come into play at a slightly later stage. BMW had i ventures, even before BMW Startup Garage, but the impression I got was the BMW Startup Garage were talking to people, startups with say a series A round of funding. i Ventures was coming in at B or later. That being said, particularly over the past year. I've seen corporate venturing now growing around the world. And I'm seeing the non-equity partnering guys working with more and more mature startups and some of these corporate venture capital guys working with younger startups than before. And so perhaps going forward, we'll see a little bit of a blurring of distinctions, but just one last comment on this. I asked a guy at Silicon Valley Bank who knows a lot about corporate venture capital at one point, what do you think about the role of CBC? And should I be involving that much more in my work? And his answer to me was you can partner without investing, but you can't invest without partnering. And so that's the important thing to focus on. And so, I guess whether you're investing or not, the key is to have this collaborative mindset when engaging with startups.Brian Ardinger: When I talk to a lot of companies, they are interested in trying to figure out, like, how do we start this process? They know that they should be looking outside their own organization to start maybe partnering with startups and that. Or, or even just to keep their own workforce more in line with the entrepreneurial mindset and that. What are some of the early things that a company can be doing to start the process of becoming more adept at navigating the startup landscape? Shameen Prashantham: I think it's a little bit like what Simon Sinek says. You know, think big, start small, but start. One of the things to do, whether it's bottom up or top down is to, especially for people who are relatively new to this scheme, which has now been going on for a while, is to look for shortcuts.So back when Walmart decided to engage with startups in China, they took a little bit of a shortcut to get going. They made tracks to the Microsoft Accelerator and said, do you guys have startups in your portfolio who might be relevant to us? And of course, from Microsoft's point of view, this was great. Because they want their startups to use more Azure and things like that and do work for big other big companies.So, they identified eight startups from their alumni who did retail tech. And brought them together with Walmart for the weekend. They call it a Hackathon. But I mean, it's basically interaction so that the Walmart people got to know these startups and vice versa. And then from that pool, they identified three startups that would work on a pilot within 60 days.And so, within the span of a quarter, there was something pretty tangible that had been achieved to make a stop. And I think that's the sort of approach that helps to overcome the inertia to go beyond talk and start doing things. Because then you can assess what's working. What doesn't? Does this make sense going forward? And you don't even need the blessing from above to be able to do this in the case of Walmart, this was a subsidiary level initiative. So, either way, I think it makes sense to start small to start specifically. But then if there is genuine intent to do this on a systematic large scale, then it becomes important to get buy-in from the organization as well.Otherwise, these things just stay small and that's where getting buy-in from top managers, as well as other business unit managers, who can provide the meaningful opportunities and even building awareness more generally within the organization. Because you can get mentors into these programs from other departments just to help startups get a better feel for the company. And so I think it's a combination of making sure you make a stop, but then be if you're really serious about it, then building on it to replicate this and even do this in other parts of the company. Brian Ardinger: You're based in Shanghai. And my question is what have you seen coming from different markets? Are the tactics or the strategies different in a newer startup ecosystem that a company is in versus a more established startup ecosystem, like the Valley or other places around the world? What are you seeing from the ecosystem perspective? Shameen Prashantham: Both Thailand and India have actually been very interesting. Ecosystems with a lot of energy over the past decade. Yes, you're quite right. That these newer ecosystems have a slightly different vibe. I say this in a positive way. There's less maturity in the sense that you're more likely to find first time entrepreneurs here than say in Silicon Valley or Israel.But on the other hand, they're also trying new things that populations have leapfrogged the PCE route in many respects. And so sometimes, with payments. For example, you find both in India, some innovations that are interesting and which Western companies find very interesting to be able to address. However, because the ecosystem has the great appetite, but it's still evolving then to some extent there may be a little bit more handholding involved because the startups have less familiarity with working with the corporate. Also, and this is true of China, then most of the places. There might be some distinct local ecosystem players, like in the case of China, Baidu, Alibaba, TenCent.And so, making sure that that is factored in, which is generally not a problem, it's just about recognizing that you have to take that into account. The other thing of course, is that in emerging markets, the rule of non-market players can be very important too. And I mean, by that particularly government and policy makers. And the other thing to note is that distinction between the national policymakers as well, and top policy makers at the local level and the latter are also very important.And so, what that can mean is opportunities that you wouldn't necessarily think would be possible yet are off the beaten track. So, the equivalent of Silicon Valley in China used to be Zhongguancun in Beijing, the soft, well it probably, when you were in Asia, was referred to as the Silicon Valley of China. And now Shenzhen, also claims to this move with a hardware focus. But in a place like Ningbo which is in Zhejiang Province, the same province that has Hanjo the city where Alibaba is headquartered. Ningbo been known for entrepreneurship for a long time for centuries, but it's never been a tech entrepreneurship hub. Yet even there I've seen IBM partner with startups because local policymakers are so entrepreneurial. They leveraged their smart city program and brought these actors together. And that creates opportunities you don't necessarily see in other parts of the world. And so, by being aligned to the differences, but also the novelty in these markets, both in terms of the technologies they're working with, but also the different parts of the region that has talent, I think companies with the global mindset, can actually tap into a lot of these emerging ecosystems. And Africa, I think is another very interesting story as well. And we are going to see more and more interesting examples from there too. Brian Ardinger: You've been spending a lot of time in this space. What are some of the trends that you're looking to see in the coming years?Shameen Prashantham: So, I think digitalization was the big driver of corporate startup partnering in this past decade. I think in the 2020s, sustainability might have a similar effect. And, you know, just before the pandemic hit, the United Nations said the 2020s is the decade of action. We need to accelerate. our efforts to achieve the sustainable development goals and then boom, the pandemic hit, which has made it a more challenging yet more important and urgent in a way.And you know, in November, there was the climate change conference in Glasgow. Which is a reminder that whatever the geopolitical tensions and differences that exists on certain matters, like climate change, it'll be important to set aside differences and work together. And I think climate tech startups working with large companies is going to be very important. A steel company had reached out to me and said, you know, we're desperately trying to engage with startups. Point us to any that you know. So to me, this is going to be actually the key driver and which is why regions all over the world, you know, the Valley, mature ecosystem like that. Or emerging ecosystems in Africa. And everything in between. And I think that's going to come into play and be very important. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: The book Gorillas Can Dance is a fascinating book. Its got some great examples, great tactics. I encourage people to pick that up. If people want to find out more about yourself or about the book, what's the best way to do that?Shameen Prashantham: www.gorillascandance.com and I'm also on LinkedIn.Brian Ardinger: Fantastic, Dr. Prashantham, thank you very much for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Looking forward to continuing the conversation in the years to come and appreciate all your time today. Shameen Prashantham: Thanks so much, Brian. I thoroughly enjoy it.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  We use Amazon Affiliate links for books.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jackie Miller, Program Director of the Corporate Innovation Fellowship at On Deck. She's also a former corporate innovator at Chobani and Chanel. Jackie and I talk about the ups and downs of corporate innovation and the benefits that a community of peers can bring to helping both startups and corporates navigate today's fast-paced world of change. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast, to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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 Jackie Miller, Program Director of the Corporate Innovation Fellowship at On DeckBrian 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 Jackie Miller. She is the Program Director of Corporate Innovation Fellowship at On Deck. Which is an accelerator for startups and careers. Welcome to the show, Jackie.Jackie Miller: Thanks, Brian. Happy to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show to talk about this amazing On Deck Program focused on Corporate Innovation. You've got some heavy chops in corporate innovation yourself. I know a lot of our audience is familiar with the startup scene and what's going on in corporate innovation.And they may have even heard about On Deck. Because I know over the last year on-deck has been putting on a variety of different accelerator types of programs. And now this move into corporate innovation. Maybe start off with telling us a little about what is On Deck? Jackie Miller: Yeah, absolutely. I was really excited to discover it existed. To your point, like working in the corporate innovation space, you're always a few steps away or immersed in like the startup ecosystem and world.But I think that what On Deck is doing is something really unique and special. On Deck was founded by Erik Torenberg. He was early, employee number one at Product Hunt. And later founded Village Global VC firm. So, really immersed in this space. And started On Deck or the vision for On Deck as a series of live dinners for founders, founders in between, people, ambitious people, thinking about their next move. And started with some like in-person IRL dinners that quickly kind of grew outside of San Francisco. And clearly was filling a need. Then in the pandemic, really accelerated this community to become a virtual global one. Right? The idea that there was such demand for this leveling up. Finding your next thing. And connecting with the right people, and ideas. So that really created the On Deck momentum that has brought us to today.It started with founders. A community for founders. And then quickly grew from there. So, we raised our Series A about a year ago, and now we have a startup accelerator. Yes. Which we announced recently. But we see ourselves as, like you said, as a career accelerator. So, there are programs for Chiefs of Staff, Product Managers, Designers, Marketers, Business Development, and now Corporate Innovation. Sort of designed to help people, whether you're starting a company or joining a company or kind of growing an existing company. How do you level up? How do you connect with your peers? And how do you find the safe space for digging into some of those ideas? And this is exactly the kind of thing I think, as you and your listeners probably know, could add a ton of value to corporate innovators.Brian Ardinger: I've followed On Deck from the beginning. Has a lot of different overlap with some of the audience as far as things that we talk about as trends. Whether it's no code or podcasts, or angel investing. And all these types of multitalented types of people that have this intersection of building things.And so, when you came to me and said, hey, we've got this corporate innovation fellowship spinning up, what do you think of it? I'm super excited to be part of it. And why is there a need for a corporate innovation fellowship versus anything else that's out there? Jackie Miller: You know, as you mentioned, I spent some time doing this at Chanel, spent the last few years in this space. And will probably be a surprise to no one that innovation in a corporate context can be really challenging. Right? The idea that every time I talk to people in this space. Both my colleagues at the time and my peers at other orgs. You quickly kind of realized that what people were looking for was moral support. Like this is almost envisioned as a support group, right? Like-minded builders who are navigating the same internal politics. Sometimes it's such a relief to hear. I was talking to someone the other day who described it as like, I feel like a unicorn in a forest. Find the other unicorns. Where they live and what they're doing. It's a really comforting and motivating, energizing feeling. And, you know, you mentioned following obviously the startup space. There sometimes it feels like we're drowning in startups, right? There's so many out there, but finding really good, vetted enterprise ready startups and having mutually beneficial outcomes with them is really hard too. As we all know, there's a big cultural difference there. So, there's a need for a better interface between corporates and startups.We know both sides want to work together. But more often than not, it's hard to integrate those two worlds. Which usually comes down to the very, not so sexy part of innovation. Which is really like internal processes, infrastructure, and governance. I've always found that it comes down to this and none of us are reinventing the wheel with how you strategize and plan around that. But it's really hard to know what works and where the roadblocks are. And to your, you know, No Code mention on some of the other trends, I think all of this is intersecting around emerging tech. And like trends that are impacting brands. And, and why they even have to think about innovation. So, all of this to say, like there's a lot going on here. We're all facing the same challenges. Wanted to take down the innovation theater and buzzwords. And create a space for real talk about what's going on. Brian Ardinger: I think the other trend that this is really hitting on is this whole move to education. You know, this changing trend of education. And like you said, career paths. You know, we talk a lot about this slash career or this portfolio career that people are having to embrace because change is happening so fast. And you used to be able to get a degree and continue your career for 20 years. And that'd be good. But nowadays, everything's changing so fast. You need to have outlets to learn new skills and things along those lines. So that's another thing I really liked about what On Deck's doing is again, it's not focused on one particular thing. Even though you do get the depth, but you'll also have the opportunity to see what else is out there and strengthen your skills in different ways. Let's dive into a little bit about what this particular program is all about. Who's it for? What's entailed. Things like that. Jackie Miller: In terms of who's part of this community and who we're seeking to be part of the community, we're casting a pretty wide net with innovation, right? We're looking at people who are a little bit further along in their career. This is probably Director Level and above. People who have eight years, maybe more, of experience. They've been at this for a while. And the title or duties could include everything from Innovation to Growth Strategy or Corporate Development. Labs, Venture, Transformation, the kind of Future of. You know, I joke that there's so many new titles in this space. My title at Chanel was Head Innovation Catalyst. It's a lot of innovation within innovation. So, we're casting a pretty wide net. But the personas essentially are anyone who is an active practitioner in innovation. Which I think is an important distinction. There's a lot of service providers and other folks that are part of the ecosystem, who are great, and we want to work with, but for starters, we want to focus on those innovators who are actively in these roles at large companies or organizations. And the three personas that we think they fall into are the culture and capabilities, which is that internal building, internal focused approach. And building and incubating new ideas, businesses, and ventures. And then lastly that investing in and acquiring more of your Corp Dev venture kind of side of things.So, it's a pretty big umbrella. Sometimes as you probably know and have seen like one person is all three of those things, depending on like the structure of any given innovation practice. So, we recognize that it's broad. And there's a lot of variety there. We want to have lots of opportunities to bring those people together. But also segment and do some really curated sessions and content for different ones.But I think beyond just those types of folks in those types of roles. What's important to us is, you know, I mentioned that innovation theater and avoiding the innovation theater trap, is people who really have a mandate to build and scale their innovation projects. Especially with startups. And I think that's part of the value of the On Deck community.People who are really tasked with that. They have the budget. And the time and the mandate to do that. That's where we think we can have the most impact. And, you know, Spirit of Service is one of our core values. It's yes. It's about learning, achieving your goals, and growing and making progress, in your own career, but that's only possible in a community like this when you can support. There's a lot of peer-to-peer support, learning, exchange. So that kind of Spirit of Service and bringing things to the community, will be a key filter too. Brian Ardinger: That's pretty exciting, because again, I've looked around and I haven't seen a lot of frameworks out there that really do approach and have that Inside Outside approach. I've seen a lot of people focused on internal innovation. And how do you do design thinking inside of a company, things like that. I've seen that these corporate venture sides where you're talking about investing in startups. But very few really understand that the value of having that cross-politization between the ties and the t-shirts or the tucked and the untucked. How I like to call them. Folks that I think you learn quite a bit by seeing that exploration side of starting something brand new and building it. And then on the reverse side, you know, startups get a lot from understanding what it takes to scale. And exploit and execute on something that they built. So, I'm excited about seeing that overlap. With this, how much do you see the programming being around specifically working with startups versus internal building? Or talk a little bit about the program itself.Jackie Miller: The programming itself is designed around these formats, right? It's very community driven learning. But it's about both group sessions and curated connection. So, we do a lot of facilitating that in the format of deep dives, panels. Something I'm really excited about that. I like to call a template potluck. Where we all ask our fellows to bring to the table, a pitch deck, a project strategy, a budget, even of things that have worked. For you, scrubbed of sensitive details. And a way to kind of just share and see what others are working on. Lots of like social opportunities to connect and access to our platforms. Right? So Slack and the Directory, which is almost like our own internal LinkedIn. As well as access to the sessions for all of our programs. Right? So, if our Chief of Staff program is doing a deep dive on Web Three. That's something we can tap into the expert network of On Deck to take part in. So, there's going to be a lot of different formats. In terms of the topics themselves into your question of, you know, how we take the broad topics and the specific ones. I think that certainly we'll do deep dives on things around like Open Innovation, Internal Culture, and Building. And the kind of specific challenges of Venture Building and certainly Building Corporate Venture Practices. But there will be some broader topics that I think are, they're the things that light up when I have conversations with different folks, at least. Like one of these is that when we touched on of like internal processes and structure of an innovation team. You know, how do you interact with the business units? How do you create good communication between all your stakeholders and get buy-in on what is often a huge challenge in this space? Or even the small bets, right. Brian Ardinger: Like measuring if you're on the right track in the first place. That's a big one. Understanding the metrics around it. Jackie Miller: Figuring out you're solving the right problem. Right. So I think those are things that are going to apply across the board. I think there's things like leadership, talent development, hiring, and when that should look like for the future of an innovation practice. That I think will apply across the board. And there's the founder mindset. I really believe that corporate innovators are at their core, they're founders, right. They're just not pitching to venture capitalists. They're navigating a much more constrained universe of what success looks like. But there's a lot of the same skillset mindset that a founder needs. And one other topic, I think that has been interesting to see across the board is sustainability, diversity, and inclusion are some of these big drivers of innovation right now. These are some of the core pain points or challenges that businesses have to solve. So, there's this intersection with innovation, that's exciting to me that I've heard from different founding fellows from Starbucks and Nike, JP Morgan, Walmart, who have all raised similar challenges. Brian Ardinger: And that's the other interesting part about it is because it's kind of industry agnostic. Like I think a lot of us can learn from what's happening in another industry and apply that to our own industry and vice versa. And so, I think that's a big strength to this type of program that you're pulling together as well.Jackie Miller: I think that's huge. I mean, I really think that in innovation, we already get stuck in a bubble sometimes. In your own echo chamber of the buzzwords. But then we do that in our industries too. When I was at Chanel, I can't tell you how refreshing and inspirational it might be to have a conversation with Pepsi, for example, right. This idea that it doesn't always have to be your exact peer to get really interesting new ideas and new insights. Brian Ardinger: When can people apply? When does it start? Some details around that. Jackie Miller: We just announced this in January. So still excited to see those applications roll in. The program actually kicks off in mid-March. So, applications are open. The deadline to apply is February 27th. You'll be tagged as an Inside Outside applicant, so that we can fast track your application. Once people apply, some will be invited to interview. And then they'll receive an offer to join us when the program kicks off in mid-March. Brian Ardinger: And you and I were talking earlier that you created a special URL for IO listeners. If they go to go.odci.io/podcast, they can apply via this link and get fast-tracked. You've been in corporate innovation. And you were with Chobani, and I think you launched a successful accelerator for early-stage food and tech companies there. And most recently, like you said, you were at Chanel. What's some of the biggest mistakes or biggest learnings, maybe that you've learned by being in corporate innovation. Where have you stubbed your toe and where do you think you can help others not. Jackie Miller: It's a great question. I think that my experience on the spectrum of, you know, different approaches to corporate innovation is one that I come back to time and again, right. This idea that innovators, people in corporate innovation should almost be in the position of making their roles obsolete.Right. Like putting themselves out of a job, in a way. Which is maybe a little provocative. But what I mean by that is, you know, it shouldn't be siloed. And you can see very clearly, early on whether or not a program is going to be a program or a practice or a department. It's going to be successful, if it feels siloed and stuck on to the side, rather than truly a top-down initiative. And then there's top-down buy it. And it doesn't mean, not to get into like the details of the corporate governance or anything than that. It's mostly about like the right stakeholders and the right communication line with the stakeholders, right. This idea that you need to be in between the business units on the ground and the leadership at the kind of strategy and priority and decision-making. And really navigate between those spaces. And it's easier to do that when you have that top down buy in. My experience at Chobani. Hamdi Ulukaya, the founder and CEO of Chobani, really prioritized the incubator program. It was important to him. It was extremely founder friendly. We didn't take equity. It was just something that was part of his personal values and mission. And that, you know, shows in how he got hundreds of employees, internally, to be involved and engaged and really scale up that program.That kind of top-down buy-in makes a huge difference. And yeah, you need that combination of top down and grassroots impact, right? So, I think that not every corporate innovator has an influence over that kind of strategy and structure of that team. But those communication lines with leadership, are just as important as the structure itself.Brian Ardinger: The fact that the practice of spinning up something brand new, or working with a startup, for example, that doesn't have it all figured out. It doesn't have the business model all ready to scale, is significantly different than what most people are typically working in, in an existing business. Where they know the business model. They know what they're supposed to be doing. Their job is to scale and execute and make that better. Fundamentally, there's a lot of knows. Versus the world of startups, the world of innovation, where fundamentally it's all unknown at the start. And so how do you manage those expectations on both sides. Expectations from the people who are building that. Whether it's a startup itself or the internal team that's building up something from scratch. And then communicating that to the upper management, like timelines may be different. The measurements may be different. What you're looking for may be different. It's all very important because they are fundamentally different worlds to some extent. Jackie Miller: I think that's right. When you're pitching something new, it's sort of like, I think that empathy is at the root of all like change. And innovation at its core is about change. You know, it's about problem solving and introducing new kind of ways of doing things. Put yourself in the shoes of that person hearing that pitch. Right. And this idea that, of course there's a preconceived set of KPIs. And how we measure our projects and our initiatives. Really setting the stage and then making the case for exactly what you're saying of, okay. We're entering the unknown here. And introducing upfront the, these are going to be different metrics for success. And really defining. That really primes people to be more receptive to change. It can be a hard thing for them to process Brian Ardinger: So, what do you see are the biggest opportunities for corporates who can do innovation well? Why should they be doubling down on this?Jackie Miller: There's a lot of opportunities here. Right? And like a few things come to mind. Corporate innovation more often than not can be found in a cost center, right. This idea that, you know, how close are you to the business impact. To revenue. To building something new. I think that every corporate innovation team or program should have an eye towards that possibility.I think there are certain things that absolutely should be separate and are about experimentation and are about learning. It's something important for any department within a company thinking about what's the long-term sustainability and scalability of what we're building here. That should be part of the discussion part of the conversation.Another piece is interacting with emerging technology trends and startups. It's very easy for corporates to feel like it's a foreign language or that world is so far away. And I don't know what I could possibly do or how I could add value to that conversation or that exchange. I think corporate innovators really kind of understanding the value they bring to those exchanges. And how meaningful those exchanges with a startup or a founder can be even if we're talking about really big cultural differences. If you really go in knowing, and sometimes the things you wouldn't expect are the things that are super valuable. I can't tell you how many times what a startup really needed from me as a representative of the big company was like an org chart Sherpa, right. Someone would tell me, how are things organized? Who does this? Who owns that? And like, yes, ultimately that may be just who do I sell my thing to, but more often than not, it's about learning. What are the priorities? How are things organized? How are things structured and how do things get done? That is hugely valuable to a startup. And I think we oftentimes undersell the kind of knowledge and insight and support we can bring to startups. That goes beyond just the petting zoo. But is actually like here's some actionable information to help them achieve their goals. Brian Ardinger: What are some of the trends and opportunities that you're seeing out there in the marketplace? Whether it's technology trends or things that people should be paying attention to in this space.Jackie Miller: Part of the reason I was so excited to join the On Deck team, and you mentioned it upfront, about the work we were doing in no code. The fact that we are a fully remote company. Future of work is obviously a big topic when you look at like innovation culture and capabilities. And I think things like No Code, the idea that, and this is very challenging for large enterprises, where there are a lot of IT, data, infrastructure limit to what kind of tools you can use. But there is something fundamentally innovative about cultivating the skillset and the knowledge to use tools like No Code tools. And we're talking about like an Air Table or a Notion, or some of these. And while yes, there are enterprise platform challenges. I really think that the trend here is it's also that like talent wants to learn how to put on their resume and talk about how they were able to build things.They may not be coders. But they were able to build things themselves. Like that's what talent is looking for. That is what truly innovative projects come from, that kind of mindset and that kind of talent. Trying to find ways to create spaces. You can do this with Microsoft. Like when I was at Chanel, we use Microsoft and there are all kinds of interesting analytics and automation tools that you can experiment with. You don't have to be expert level. But I think there's something there. And future of remote working, right. Every corporate is navigating hybrid or remote, and what that looks like. These are new demands in the idea of innovative talent and the war for innovative talent. So, I think there's sort of a must have in terms of exploration, that are not necessarily suited immediately to the corporate environment. But I think it's something that corporate should definitely be thinking about. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Yeah. We've talked about that quite a bit. And how, if nothing else just being exposed to some of these tools gives you a different appreciation for the speed at which disruptors could come on board. Or other ways that you could change the dynamic within your company or outside. Thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation and sharing your experiences and that. If people want to find out more about you or the On Deck Program, what's the best way to do that?Jackie Miller: The best way is to visit us at https://www.beondeck.com/corporate-innovationBrian Ardinger: Well Jackie, thanks again for coming on. I'm excited to be a part of the Fellowship. I encourage people who are listening to check it out. Looking forward to having further conversations. Jackie Miller: Thanks so much Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we host Jennifer Smith, CEO and Cofounder of Scribe. Jennifer and I talk about her journey as an accidental entrepreneur and the trends and opportunity she sees as she grows a software company on a mission to build the first operating system of know-how. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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 of Jennifer Smith, CEO & Co-founder of ScribeBrian 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 Jennifer Smith. She is the CEO and co-founder of Scribe. Which is a startup software company that enables you to automatically generate step-by-step guides for any process or task. Welcome to the show, Jennifer,Jennifer Smith: Pleasure to be here Brian. Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to talk to you. Not only because what you're building. But you've got a pretty interesting background that I think our audience will get into. My understanding is you got into entrepreneurship as a, an accidental entrepreneur. You've spent some time at McKinsey and at Greylock. Degrees from Harvard and Princeton. And now you're developing and building a startup from scratch. So why don't we tell the audience about how you got on your path to becoming an entrepreneur. Jennifer Smith: Yeah, I, I do say I'm a bit of an accidental entrepreneur, cause I, you know, meet so many folks in the valley who say, I knew since the age of 10 that I was going to found a company. And you know, if you had asked me even a few years ago before I started Scribe, I would have said no, unlikely not. To me I fell in love with a problem. So, I'll kind of take you on a quick history tour. Imagine it's 10, 15 years ago, you know, when you're a leading global corporation and you want to figure out how work is getting done. Maybe you're facing a productivity imperative or you're scaling up your company. And so what do you do?You probably hire some fancy consultants, right? And they probably come around. And they interview your people. And they create a bunch of PowerPoints. Maybe they document what some of your best practices are like. Anyone who has seen office space can maybe just think of the Bob. And, you know, I should know, I spent seven years at McKinsey. Doing exactly that. I did mostly work in our Oregon operations practice. Which functionally meant spending about eight hours a day in an operation center, looking over the shoulder of agents, trying to figure out how they were doing things. And I learned really quickly the name of the game, at least as a consultant at the time was you figured out who the best person that ops center was. You sat next to them. And you said, what are you doing differently Judy. And Judy would tell you. Right? Oh, I was trained to do this. And you know, she'd pull out a big manual. I'll date myself. It was a big binder at the time. Right. Here's what I was trained to do. But, you know, I found these 30 shortcuts. And here's what I do. And I would write that down and my team would sell that back to our clients for a whole bunch of money.I always thought like, gosh, if the Judy's of the world had just had a way to share what they know how to do, they could have had really big impact on that ops center. Right. They didn't need me and my team to be saying it for them. And so that always kind of nagged at me, but I figured that was a problem for someone else to solve someday.And then fast forward a decade later, and I'm working at Greylock on Sand Hill Road. And I spent a lot of my time there meeting with CXOs of large enterprises. So CIO, CDOs, Chief Innovation Officers. A lot of folks who would kind of come talk to VCs to try to understand how they could be more innovative.I counted them when I left actually. I talked to over 1200 folks. So pretty broad sample. And what I realized was nothing had changed. The way that you still wanted to understand how work was getting out. You were still getting some version of a 28-year-old Jennifer with a Lenovo ThinkPad running around, interviewing your people, right?Maybe it was an internal person and maybe now you're using a fancy Wiki instead of PowerPoint to capture it. But the idea is still the same. It was still very manual, not very scalable. And that was crazy to me. We'd had so much technological innovation and something that's so core. So fundamental to the way that millions of people, billions of people around the world work, hadn't changed. And so, I just got really obsessed with this problem and Scribe was born. Brian Ardinger: So that's the impotence of the problem. It's like, okay, well, I've got this little nugget and ideas are great, but obviously you have to execute on that idea to make it an innovation or make something of value from that. How did you go from that nugget of information to finding a team or finding somebody who could help build or solve this problem for you?Jennifer Smith: I believe in fast iteration around this. And so what we said was let's try to build the most basic MVP of a company and a product around this idea. And our idea was what if we could watch an expert do work and automatically capture what they know how to do? What if it was just like documentation as digital exhaust? Just a by-product of you doing your normal job.And so, we built what was the very beginnings of Scribe. Wasn't even called Scribe at the time. And what we were focused on was just getting something very basic out there. That was for free. That people could test and use. And we could learn from that. And so, we kept the company very lean. Maybe a topic for another conversation. But I believe in running very, very lean as a team. Probably painfully so.Until you really feel like the market is pulling something out of you. And so, we put our software out in the world. And sort of said, like, let's see how people use this. And what they tell us. And Scribe picked up some legs after a bunch of iterations and grew. And now it's being used by tens of thousands of workers around the world.And that's because we really focused on a type of software that the end user would want. I think a lot of enterprise software today is focused towards a buyer. It's something that your boss tells you to use. And that's why you use it. And we said, let's flip this on its head. Let's try to iterate our way to a product that someone uses because they want to, not because their boss is telling them to. But because it makes their day easier, they're more productive. They get recognized for their contributions. Brian Ardinger: It's an interesting approach because we've seen a couple of different companies that have taken that B2B approach and flipped it on its head. Like a Slack where, you know, again, it's a product team or something that starts to engage and use the product. And then through that word of mouth and through iterations, they start getting to the point where the boss has to take notice because that's the productivity tool that people are using. Was it always the model that you were going to go after? Or what made you think that this is the way to build Scribe.Jennifer Smith: Yeah. It's because what you're trying to do as a startup is learn as fast as possible. We talk all the time about how do we just make our learning loops as short and tight as possible. And the way for us to do that was to try to get Scribe in the hands of as many users as possible. Right. And so there's a few things that we did for that. One was we released a free version of Scribe. We just said, here you go. Go ahead and use it. Create a Scribe. Share a Scribe with anyone else. And we use to track this. We were trying to make it as easy as possible. The atomic unit is short and easy as possible for someone to use Scribe.And so, we would clock it and see from the moment someone landed on our website to the moment, they were able to create a Scribe and share with one with someone else was under four minutes. And we had users who didn't even speak English. Right. And we hadn't translated the product yet. And they were able to do it under four minutes.We said, how do we just keep this as short and tight as possible? And there are these natural growth loops in the product as well. So, whenever I create a Scribe, I send it to someone else. I share it with them. I can invite and collaborate with teammates. So, each user, be gets more users. That enabled us to learn faster and faster.And that's very similar in many ways to what Slack and some of these other product led growth companies have done. Where they're really focused on driving that user value and cultivating user love. Which I think is great. The other thing we're focused on though, is in addition to this being a product that folks are pulling for. That they're telling their bosses, I want to be using. How do you also add value to the organization?And so, what's interesting about Scribe is you've got people across your org who are using it because it just makes their day to day better and easier. But then there's value that accrues to the overall organization. Oftentimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, when you're starting to talk about making each person incrementally more productive.And the knowledge that you're starting to capture from people documenting what they're doing every day. I think Slack has a similar model there. I think where Slack is a bit different and I've actually written a piece about this is their pitch to the enterprise is really just, your people are already using this. You might as well pay for it and get these enterprise security and features and all these things you want. And we try to think about it as like, no, what's actually the value add to the organization. Like, it's great that all of your people are getting this value, but then there's also additional unlock that comes at the organizational level.Brian Ardinger: You talk about Scribe as you're building that first operating system of know-how. How is this different than the way people have tried to solve this problem in the past? Wikis or other ways? There's always that challenge of capturing information and then making it easy and accessible when you need it. How's Scribe a little bit different? Jennifer Smith: The Wiki was born in 95. I remember at the time we're all very excited. You know, everyone contributed, you saw the rise of things like Wikipedia. What's interesting. If you look at the staff even around like a Wikipedia. It's the idea is this, this big democratic open source, everyone contributes to this hive knowledge of the world.Actually, there's a very small percentage of contributors who represent the vast majority of knowledge on Wikipedia. And they tend not to be pretty diverse too. I think you see this same thing within companies. Which is you have the keepers of knowledge. I call it knowledge with a capital K. Like the set of people who contribute to the Wiki or the knowledge base, whatever you're using.And, you know, they spend a bunch of time. They have great intentions. They spend a bunch of time putting information. And that. It's highly manual to do. But there's a bunch of difficulties. One of the main ones is that it's very manual and takes that time. So, unless it's that person's job, if they're just doing it out of the goodness of their heart, it becomes very difficult to maintain.And what you end up with is a downward spiral. I mean, anyone who's been part of a company can recognize this, the documentation goes stale. And then you stop referencing it because you know, it's stale. Then the person who created it forgets about it because no one's ever talking about it. And downward spiral from there and it doesn't become valuable.With Scribe, we were trying to say, hey, how do you make this instead automatic. How do you make this so no one has to do any additional work? Again, this idea of digital exhaust. It's just a by-product of you doing your normal job. So, you hit the record button and you work as usual. You just do the thing you normally would have done anyway.And you're automatically getting the step-by-step documentation that is up-to-date and current and accurate. And reflects the way work is actually being done. Because I think it's changing this model of knowledge is something that you have to go produce. To something you already have. You've already done the hard part of knowing how to do something valuable within a company. Our view is that your knowledge around that should just be automatically captured and shared with other people who shouldn't be taking time away to have to do that. Brian Ardinger: How do you account for the fact that as the world is changing so fast, things are changing such that what you documented two weeks ago may not be what you document or how you do that task today. How do you keep up with the pace of change? Jennifer Smith: I think this is really important, right? Because things are changing even faster within organizations. You now have a great resignation where maybe even the people who are doing the work, its changing even more. They're changing their physical location. Potentially they're remote right now. You have a lot of differences. And I think this is why it becomes more important than ever before to really tap into this collective know-how within an organization. I almost think of it as like popping someone's brain open and pulling out what is it that they know how to do? Which is really the lifeblood of your company, right? We're talking about the knowledge of what are people doing when they show up to work every day. Nine to five, fingers on keyboard, trying to create value for your company. And that knowledge walks out the proverbial elevator these days. Maybe not literally, you know. Every day at five o'clock and you got to hope that it comes back. I think it's more important than ever before that companies actually find ways to capture this knowledge and then be able to share it across the right people at the right time. If you think about it, there's so much kind of reinventing the wheel happening within a company today. You're either when you go to do something, you know, popping your head over the cubicle and asking someone or trying to search on your own, or just kind of figuring it out. And there's so much productivity loss that comes from that. Brian Ardinger: You alluded to a couple of trends that I want to talk to you about. One is this democratization of innovation where anyone can really have an impact in the organization because of the tools that are now there. So, things like no-code and low-code tools and things like Scribe that give power to the individual to create value in different ways. Talk a little bit about how you see that trend evolving and how it's going to have an impact in the business world. Jennifer Smith: Yeah, I love that you bring this up. And as we say democratization. I find with some of our customers, they get very excited. Some of our customers get very scared. And I think it all depends how you think about it and frame it. The best knowledge on how things get done within a company or how to do things better really come from the people who are doing the work day-to-day on the frontline knowledge workers.And so how do you really tap into that, and both understand what those people have figured out, but then be able to share that seamlessly across the org. There are increasing number of tools that make that better. I think it's easy to point to a bunch of the collaboration tools like Zoom and Slack and others that make it easy to communicate. The kind of flip side or downside to that is that ends with collaboration overload. Which I think we've all heard a lot of talk around, especially, you know, post COVID. And it's very real.And it also is usually a disproportionate burden on your best people. Who are the ones that everyone always goes to to ask, hey, can you show me how to do this? And so, we think a lot about how do you scale those kinds of people who really are your best or your most experienced, or sort of have found a better way to do something.In the way like code or media, which are infinitely scalable. We think about Scribe as the atomic unit of just how do you pull that info out of someone's head and make it infinitely scalable across an organization? Brian Ardinger: It's pretty interesting how the world is changing such that again, we have that ability and how that's going to change. Both the speed of change, this layering effect of, as you give more productivity tools to folks, they become more productive. And therefore, changes the dynamics and moves from there. You also talked about this hybrid and remote working. What are some of the good, bad, and ugly that you're seeing and how does Scribe and the tools that you're building play into that. Jennifer Smith: I think it'll be interesting to see how this plays out over time. Obviously, a lot of companies have now moved into hybrid or fully remote. And I think that's worked really well in instances where folks have built in-person relationships. And then they were able to move that on to remote. At least in the first few months and year of the pandemic.What's interesting is you're now seeing a lot more turnover within companies. You have new people who are joining for the first time. And may have never met any of their colleagues in person. Right. And so how do you start to build that knowledge. That sort of informal knowledge of how work actually gets done within a company.And what you find is when folks were in person, they often understood like, oh, Cheryl's the one who knows how to do this. She's the person I go to for that. Right. Or Bob knows how to do this, or Benkit knows that. So that becomes much harder to replicate when you're not all sitting together. We think a lot about how do you similarly try to like tap into this collective knowledge when people are not sitting face to face or next to each other, where you're able to just pop your head over the cubicle and ask someone, you know, a question on how to do something.We talk about it as just drinking our own champagne at Scribe. Because we're hybrid ourselves. Right? We have a team here in San Francisco, but then we have folks distributed around the U S and world too. We use Scribe ourselves to share all of that knowledge around how to. You've got three kinds of knowledge and accompany. You have historical knowledge. What date did we release this product? You have policy knowledge. What days off do we have with our PTO policy? And I think you can even kind of ask HR. And then you have this procedural knowledge, which is the thing that tends to be least documented. And it's all of that knowledge around, how do we actually do work?What is the day-to-day processes and business functions that happen to make this thing go? And that's the part that you see documented the least. And that's the part that we're focused on most with Scribe. Brian Ardinger: Whenever I have a founder on the show. I'll always like to ask do you have any go-to tools or resources or hacks that we can recommend to other fellow founders or products builders?Jennifer Smith: Yeah, I believe in time management. And being really, really thoughtful about how you spend your time. And I'd say even more importantly, your energy. So, I've talked to my team a lot about thinking about where do you get sources of energy. And what drains your energy. And you need to manage that within a given day or week.And so, I always say lean into your strengths. And as you look at the way that you're spending your day, make sure that it's disproportionately focused on the things you are good at. And that give you energy. You should feel like you're pushing a boulder downhill. Building a company is really hard. Don't get me wrong, but it should feel like pushing a boulder downhill because you're doing the things that you love doing.And you've got a bunch of momentum from the market. And your team. And your product behind you. And if it doesn't feel that way, then you need to be changing the way that you structure your day. Brian Ardinger: So last question. What's next for you? And what's next for Scribe? Jennifer Smith: We're building the team and the product really aggressively right now. The next two years for us are just continuing to scale out. As I mentioned, we have a free version of Scribe that tens of thousands of organizations are now using. I think in over a hundred countries. We've offered now a paid version of that as well, for folks who want to upgrade. And we're selling into large enterprises also.And so, we're really focused on how do we just make it as easy as possible for anyone to be able to share how to. For us as a company that's continuing to grow the team. That's investing more in R and D. And then continuing to build out on the distribution. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: If people want to find out more about yourself or about scribe, what's the best way to do that?Jennifer Smith: Yeah, you can check us out on our website, Scribehow.com. Feel free to sign up there directly. We also have a promo code available for listeners, if they're interested. The product's free, as I said. But for the paid version, if you want three months free, it's insideout30 as a promo code. But invite you all to check it out and try it out and drop us a line with some feedback.Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Jennifer, thanks for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Really appreciate the time. And look forward to seeing where everything goes in the future. Jennifer Smith: Yeah. Thanks so much, Brian.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Ben McDougal, Author of You Don't Need This Book: Entrepreneurship in the Connected Era. Ben and I talk about his portfolio-based career in entrepreneurship from founder to 1 Million Cups organizer, to his current role as entrepreneur In residence and ecosystem developer with Techstars Iowa. 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. Let's get started.Interview Transcript with Ben McDougal, Author of You Don't Need This BookBrian 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 Ben McDougal. He is author of the new book, You Don't Need This Book: Entrepreneurship and the Connected Era. Welcome to the show. Ben. Ben McDougal: Thanks, Brian. It's great to catch up with a friend and looking forward to connecting with your audience.Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. You and I have known each other for a number of years in the startup ecosystem building world. You hang out in Iowa. And I hang out here in Nebraska. It's been fun to see your journey. You joined Techstars Iowa as kind of a hybrid role as an entrepreneur residence and ecosystem development person. So how did you get involved in startup ecosystem development? Ben McDougal: Thanks, Brian. Yeah, I've always been an entrepreneur. I came out of school, admittedly, thinking that we got expensive pieces of paper to go build someone else's dream. But startup, wasn't a word back in 2004. I got a computer science degree wanting to develop video games.And so looked at that industry. Which led me to web development. When I look back at it, it was pretty entrepreneurial. I mean, talking with endless different industries on how to build their business online. And so, while I was in somewhat of a traditional kind of business development role. I don't know what spawned the entrepreneurial spirit besides just recognizing an opportunity. So, I created a 3v3 soccer tournament. I had played soccer. I was in a web development shop and could make a nice live event come to life. Ended up having two years of that before selling it to a local soccer club, as we had launched a social network for gamers. It was interesting looking back using entrepreneurship to wedge myself into an industry I was always passionate about. But there's a whole community side that was emerging.And so built Jet Set Studio. It's still a small sliver of my career portfolio. Doing video game events around North America and building community in person and online. That was some of the early interactions of community building. I would stay in web development for eight years and retire out of that and go into another kind of traditional role inside the home building industry. Never really touched a hammer and kind of avoid manual labor, genuine.In that home building world, we found a disconnect between Home Builders and Realtors. So, we built an open house scheduler, knowing that it's not hard, but it's recurring when they're connecting that open house schedule. So that's Open Open. Alongside of that, that intrapreneurial spirit was fed with that parallel entrepreneurial spirit ended up building Flight Bright in the craft beer industry, which was an electronic beer flight paddle.It translated and continues to be that type of electronic serving system. But we added a beer festival app. And so that's Flight Bright and that story continues to be written. And you think about this diversified career portfolio that has a mixture of entrepreneurial and intrapreneurial activities. And the glue that brings it all together, along with myself is the community. Leaning into community and recognizing the energy of accelerating others.And so that's where you see my work in 1 Million Cups long ago. Like I was a part of a 1 Million Cups every Wednesday as an entrepreneur. But when the opportunity to lead emerged, I rose my hand. Got involved. That led to the chance of being a regional rep. So, we built this role to help support all of the different organizing teams across the United States.And so, I've been the Midwest regional rep now for the last four years. And that has been remarkable. Supporting and connecting 45 different 1 MC communities across 12 states, has created an awareness when it comes to entrepreneurial ecosystem building, at a rural, medium, and large size environment.Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. 1 Million Cups. I've mentioned this on the program, a number of different times, and I know a lot of people in the entrepreneurial startup side have maybe heard of 1 Million Cups. But on our corporate innovator side, it's, it's one of those programs that I think that more corporate innovators should become involved and that. Maybe give a little bit of background about 1 Million Cups and why that's so important, not only for the entrepreneurs in your community, but the companies and the other organizations.Ben McDougal: I think intrapreneurship at existing companies, small, medium, and large is a critical component to any entrepreneurial ecosystem. Having employees that are the champions of change for their existing company, plugging into community activities, helps them stay in front of the innovation curve. Fuels like their innovative energy. And creates opportunities to collaborate with entrepreneurs that in a way that helps their companies.And so, whether it's the energy. Kind of the network and human capital that can come from this type of active. All the way over to the financial capital and opportunities for those companies to benefit from their interactions with startups is real. One quick tactic, Brian, that catches my attention is larger companies treating activity within a startup community as volunteer hours.So, removing the barrier of PTO for someone who wants to go to 1 Million Cups on a Wednesday morning. Or to that startup event. Instead of restricting that type of activity by saying they need to take time off. It's celebrating that activity, knowing that while it's a little less time outside of the office, the energy, the activity, the connections, the progress that has made through that activity, benefits the company, perhaps even more. There's some value when you think about giving intrapreneurs, the freedom to explore their curiosity. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. And that's one of the things that we talk about a lot is not only entrepreneurs have to get out of the building, but intrapreneurs as well. And you can't build anything without actually getting out there and trying things and testing things and being a part of the communities.We talk about this concept of a portfolio career and more and more folks I believe are going to have to be transitioning to this concept of, you know, you don't do just one job for 20 years of your life. It's a series of different side hustles and projects and people you work with and that. As an early adopter to this portfolio career type of lifestyle, what are some hints or suggestions you could make for people trying to transition into more of a portfolio type of approach?Ben McDougal: Yeah. The Diversified Career Portfolio is something that allows you to use energies from different activities to maximize the outputs. And sometimes that means it's the full-time job paired with a couple of side hustles. Complemented by some volunteer roles. Knowing that those kind of shapes within that pie chart, that's how I like to visualize it. Are always changing.And the interactions between them are something to be conscious of. And so they don't necessarily need to directly connect because they connect through you. And so, recognizing that even if they're different activities and completely different industries, that passion that you're feeding translates into good things for other areas within that pie chart.Another thing to always keep in mind is your personal bandwidth. I write about this in the book, a complete section for side hustles. And knowing that your personal bandwidth is something, if you can do a lot, then everyone's going to be asking to do a little. You know, and so all of a sudden you can potentially get diluted to mediocrity.And I think there's a good exercise of imagining that you have timed to swinging an ax 100 times. With those hundred swings, are you going to hit 100 trees once? Or perhaps a strategic collection, a few more times to make the impact. Knowing that it doesn't just need to be one tree. You might be able to make a positive impact on a collection of trees with those hundred swings, keeping your eye on that personal bandwidth as you add, or remove things from that career portfolio.And lastly, I think the value of transparency. There are other things to talk about here but being transparent with the way that you spend your time avoids the exhaustion of secrecy. And so, whether that's an entrepreneur sharing that side hustle with their boss and exploring that interest. Or it's easiest from the beginning, right. So, as you bring on a new project or enter a new contract, being very clear with the way that you spend your time, so that there's not tension down the road. Brian Ardinger: So, Ben, let's get into the book a little bit. It's called You Don't Need This Book: Entrepreneurship and The Connected Era. What made you decide to write a book? And give the audience a little bit of background about what they should expect from it?Ben McDougal: There was a time where I started to feel a sense of potential regret. I had enjoyed some fun ventures on my own. But really it was the stories from thousands of entrepreneurs that I had interacted with. Whether that was on my own journeys or within 1 Million Cups. And learning from these different perspectives and the activity of so many remarkable entrepreneurs, it became to the point where if I wasn't able to pass that on to my little one, right. My startup that pays in love that this experiential wisdom would just be lost. And so that was kind of my why. To synthesize everything that I understood about entrepreneurial. But specifically, within our connected era. Driven by community and the ability to do so much more with less, through the network of a global economy.And so, I crafted an outline. It sat on my phone for a while, and I was encouraged by Victor Wang to build into it when it started to keep me up at night. And that's where I had reached. And so crafted the manuscript. Had a beautiful forward by Victor, that explains that moment. But also, a contribution from Brad Feld in the very thick community chapter. Which is number two out of 10. I think it's such an important piece.And so, it's been called a nice guide for first-time founders and entrepreneurial ecosystem builders, exploring that professional field. Whether it's the ideation process right out of the gate, all the way through to what I would consider a wild card. And that is persistence. And so, you know, marketing is in between research, customer discovery, and like I mentioned, community. So, it's really provided a strong sense of peace and I'm so thankful for how it's coming from.Brian Ardinger: What I liked about the book is a lot of startup books are about the tactics of how do you increase your sales or grow XYZ. Yours brought in not only those tactical aspects, but also the bigger picture of it's not just about the entrepreneur. It's about the team they bring together. It's about the community that they have to support. And that are supporting their efforts. And it gave more of a holistic approach to what it means to be an entrepreneur, rather than just the blocking and tackling of the business side of things. Ben McDougal: Yeah. The amount of activities as an entrepreneur is kind of like everything, right. So, I talk about the term Career Nirvana. Which is where, you know, your work feels like play to you, but looks like work to others. It is in balance with your community, with the team that you're working within and with the life that you live. Entrepreneurship is not something that you learn. It's more of a lifestyle. It's more something that you just bring into your daily life. And the practice can be, become something that leads you to maybe the first time that you need to pivot, right. You either succeed or we learn. Not being afraid of failure, knowing that you're continuously optimizing that career portfolio to have the right slivers in that pie chart. And tweaking the size of each sliver along the way. So, I appreciate that, Brian. It's definitely fueled from learnings, from people like you. From remarkable entrepreneurs and community builders that have taught me so much.And it's been neat to hear their responses. Similar to what you shared. There's some heart within it that explores the tactics, but also some of the mindsets. Some of the community aspects, that will give you the resiliency to play longterm games with long-term people. Brian Ardinger: Great advice. You hung out with a ton of entrepreneurs. And you've seen them at the earliest stages and that. What are some of the biggest myths about entrepreneurship that you've uncovered or things that you wish that early-stage entrepreneurs would know earlier? Ben McDougal: You'll see it in the book. I call it the Headline Trap. We see entrepreneurs raising a million here and a kabillion there. Right. We see them in the media and that is a well-deserved and of course, an important recognition of people's own successes. But that can also become paralyzing for someone who feels as though they're not allowed to tinker. The opportunity of a side hustle or a startup, or even a full-time effort, doesn't always need to rely on financial capital or global impact in order to positively impact your life and your career portfolio. And so, giving the permission, that's not required, but sometimes needed in order for people to explore their passions. Without the weight of feeling like this has to have this huge global impact to make it something that really provides purpose and provides a sense of gratitude with someone's career portfolio. The way that they spend the limited time. And so, I think the Headline Trap and avoiding that is one way to get started now, instead of like the dreaded someday. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Trying to line up the perfect plan and then launching the perfect plan is never the perfect way to make it happen. I mean, the plan is never going to be perfect from day one. You've got to go out and stub your toe and figure it out most of the time. You don't seem to have much fear from the standpoint of, you're always willing to try something. Swing a different bat. What gives you the confidence to do that? Or what have you learned that gives you confidence to step out in the unknown and try something different? Ben McDougal: I don't know if there's one thing that would be like, this is how I have become confident. I think it's a mixture of having stepped out and it doesn't hurt. It's exciting. You know, the enthusiasm of building something that you care about. And that can lead to the resiliency we've spoken about. You know, I think there would also be a collection of skills that give me confidence. And I write about that in the marketing chapter of You Don't Need This Book. Because it makes us dangerous as individuals. Linebacker doesn't play wide receiver. Right? So, recognizing your role. What you're good at and filling the gaps so that you're not cloning yourself when you're building as a team. Or working with contractors as lone wolf. But there are six skills that I think have given me a lot of confidence and abilities to build on my own, knowing that adding more fuel to the fire along the way is always possible.I start with writing. I think writing is a powerful skill that you can learn just by doing. I think of photography. Videography, not just taking the videos, but being able to stitch things together so that it's digestible and tells a story that connects to a broader narrative. Graphic design. Right? Bringing all those multimedia things together. Creativity, knowing that everyone can take a photo, but it's that angle or it's that ability to publish, is what separates with that creativity. Organization is another one that comes to mind and knowing that as you collect this mountain of media, being able to keep track of all of it in a good way is another valuable skill set.And then lastly, when it comes to content creation is just bringing it all together and recognizing that there's a practice in staying creative and building the content. So that you can create stories that sell and having the ability to do that on your own allows you to do a lot with a little, even if you don't plan to do all of it hands-on. You'll recognize what needs to be done for whatever the project is next. Brian Ardinger: You've been around in the Midwest Startup Ecosystem since the early days. You know, a lot of stuff that's happened in Iowa has gotten a lot of traction over the last four or five, six years. And now you're involved with Techstars and that. What are some of the trends that you're seeing when it comes to startups in the Midwest? And what are you most looking forward to?Ben McDougal: Yeah, so the Techstars role emerged from that community building that we talked about earlier. And I was already an entrepreneurial ecosystem builder. And so, when there was some room to get involved with the accelerator, I jumped at the opportunity to partner up with Techstars. And leaned into that Entrepreneur in Residence role paired with Ecosystem Development.And so while I'd always admired Techstars, this was a cool kind of side door to sneak into the rocket ship that is Techstars. And so, when you see these founders coming in, wherever they're from, and you start to think about the Midwest entrepreneur, I think that we could talk about things that everyone always talks about.Right. We don't have quite the access to people that are interested in getting risky with their financial capital. We can talk about some of the resources that may or may not be the same as some of the larger hubs like Boston or San Fran or some of the other ecosystems. But one of the things I find liberating is using a framework that we see in the Startup Community Way, by Brad Feld and Ian Hathaway, the Seven Capitals. And releasing ourselves from thinking that we have to have money. Okay. What do you have? Right. It's that abundance mindset and leaning into that holistic kind of positive sum approach to entrepreneurial ecosystem building. Allows us to use what we have to attract more of what we want.And so, I see a lot of entrepreneurs almost being set free. To think big. To build something that can be scalable. Not being afraid to tinker and fail, right. But also knowing that it's going to be a process. And one of the easiest things that I would say we have in the Midwest is almost natural. Give first mindset. Without preconception or without alternative motives.When I talk to someone, I almost have immediate, almost natural, positive, intent. That I want to see you succeed. That type of give first positive sum. If you win, we win approach is prevalent around the Midwest. And it allows us to do more with less through the connected era. And so, while there might be less of certain types of capital, in some cases, there are also more types of capital in the Midwest that allows people in rural, medium communities, and even the larger cities that we have throughout our Midwest region. Knowing that we can connect to the global community and make an impact no matter where we're at. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I think it's so important and we see it every day. And you guys sent a message to some of the folks here in Lincoln saying, hey, we want to come out with Techstars to promote the fact that our applications are open. Can you set up some meetings and that? And you guys came out last week and toured some of our ecosystem. And we've done that back and forth over the years. And it's nice to have an ability and an environment that fosters that type of relationship that it's not just about keeping everything in my own backyard. Ben McDougal: It's still inviting. Cheers to that group that we enjoyed time with there in Omaha and also in Lincoln. And that type of interaction, like you said, is not uncommon. A couple of friends who want to show you around leads to an entire day of inspired activity. In fact, not knowing when you're listening to this, but our applications oddly enough, open today, Brian.And so, if you are building a team. You've got this startup and you're ready to scale. I did not come onto the conversation, planning to promote such a thing, but the applications are open and the Techstars experience is remarkable. It's really geared towards those who are looking to scale up. Maybe looking to raise venture capital in order to support a growing system. And the amount of mentors at a global level. The amount of give first and kind of Techstars for life. That culture is real. And our hybrid program allows folks to participate in Des Moines, Iowa, but also online throughout the hundred-day program. And boy seeing these entrepreneurs and their teams, and their companies emerge and raising serious capital and going on to continue to do big things is another way that I've energized my own career portfolio. Because I'll say it again, folks. The energy of accelerating others is unmatched. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. I appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your enthusiasm and acceleration path. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that?Ben McDougal: It's very easy. Benmcdougal.com. Has my activity throughout the social media landscape, but also has my weekly writings that are called Roasted Reflections. And there's a quick link to take a look at the book, whether that's in the signed soft cover format or the e-book, or most recently released the audio book that I narrated. And so, you can enjoy You Don't Need This Book and I'd love to hear what you think. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Ben, thanks for coming on the show again. Looking forward to continuing the relationship and seeing you out there on the field as well. And I appreciate you coming on the show. Ben McDougal: Hey, may the best of your today's be the worst of your tomorrows and keep building.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  As an Amazon Affiliate, we may earn a small commission from purchases. 

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jim Euchner, author of the new book Lean Startup in Large Organizations. Jim and I talk about the underlying fears companies have when trying to change and implement innovation initiatives. And what they can do to initiate and build Lean Startup methodologies to embrace change and stay competitive. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world accelerating change and 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 Jim Euchner, Author of Lean Startup in Large OrganizationsBrian 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 Jim Euchner. He's an honorary professor at Aston Business School in the UK. Editor in chief of Research Technology Management Journal. Former VP of Global Innovation at Goodyear. And he is author of a new book called Lean Startup in Large Organizations. Welcome to the show, Jim. Jim Euchner: Thank you. Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to dig in. You've been involved in Lean Startup for a long time, specifically around this idea of corporate innovation, which I think when you hear Lean Startup, at least in the early days, you didn't think about it from a corporate perspective.I found, like when I talk to establish enterprises and you bring up the word or the term lean startup, a lot of times it has baggage around it. They dismiss it or think about it as you know that startup term. How do you define or talk about Lean Startup? Jim Euchner: I think about Lean Startup, in its basics the same way that the founders of it did. You know, Eric Ries and Steve Blank and so forth. I think it's a way of taking a high-risk venture from a very high-risk place to a place where it's something that you can bet on. It's a way of iterating your way toward a great customer value proposition and a good business model. The challenge in large corporations is that each of the practices of Lean Startups in its own way, sort of sparks an antibody inside the corporation. So Lean Learning Loops. They are a wonderful way of learning. Business experiments is another term for it. But if you have a lot of experiments and pivots, it can seem very chaotic to people inside the corporate setting. So, you have to do what I would call an impedance match between the corporate setting and the Lean Startup practices. The central Lean Startup practices are still very valid. But the way they're managed, there are some complimentary practices that make them effective inside large organizations. Brian Ardinger: You bring up a great point. It really doesn't matter if you're building something brand new in an uncertain environment as a startup or within a corporate environment. The same principles can be used to navigate that unknown or that uncertainty. In your book you talk a lot about, I guess, the common fears that leaders and organizations have when it comes to change or Lean Startup and that. Can you talk through and outline some of the key fears that you talk about in the book? Jim Euchner: Yeah, sure. So, the first one is this sort of fear of chaos. That the innovation program will just be out of control. And one way that's effective in doing that is to create what I would call an Innovation Stage Gate. So the practices of Lean Startup are still practiced, but they're inside a discovery phase, a business model development phase, and an incubation phase. That gives people inside corporations the chance to learn, to comment, to review at very critical stages. So, review the customer value proposition and the customer value. Review the business model. And very importantly, the effects that the business model will have on the core business. And then before scaling, understand how it works in the real market. The first fear is the fear of chaos. The second fear is a fear that the innovation team will disrupt the operations of the core. Everybody they're working with has a day job. Right. And you're asking them to take exceptions, to move quickly, to do stuff that you know, that really on the financial side, doesn't matter a lot in the near term. But it still has an urgency. And it may be outside the bounds of their usual experience. So, it's risky. Helping people manage that is important as well. Brian Ardinger: This fear of distraction. I hear it all the time. We don't have time to innovate. You know, we don't have time to try these new things and that. What are some of the ways that you can get people to overcome that mindset? Jim Euchner: It's a combination of things. And I really think that each company has to look at their own culture in order to decide. One thing that people do is, and it's the first thing to do, is just try to get corporate air cover. Someone says it's okay to do it. And that gives a permission. And then if they don't do it, it gives us permission also to escalate.The problem with that is escalation wears thin very quickly. And you make more enemies than you can afford to make. One of the things that I found most effective in my experience is to bring the functions along as you go, but to have no expectations of them in the early stage, other than that, they'll just provide the support you need to get something done.So, if I'm talking to procurement, I don't want them to do a full RFP. I don't want them to take a risk with their own career on something, but I need their help in putting together a contract that will meet our requirements. And if I have to sign off on that or I have to provide them some resources in order to cover the cost that that will have to them, then I'll do that.The very important one is legal liability. Legal liability is very important to protect the core corporation. But when you're doing experiments, they can seem awfully risky. In that instance, you may need to raise the issues, explore the issues, understand the implications, and then co-sign off. They may still say, I don't like that liability risk, you say, okay. But we'll take it in this one instance. And I'll take that on myself. The core thing is just to not keep people in the dark because you're afraid they'll jump in. And to give them at the stage of incubation, really a chance to rash through all those issues. So, if you're a non-standard IT organization, what are you going to do about the final product? And you can thrash that out in incubation, not during the early experiments. And the same kind of thing happens across the company in sales and procurement and everything. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I find that if you have this almost side project mentality, it's like, oh, we're doing a side project to test or iterate or try something. And then by the time it gets to the point where you need to escalate it, a lot of times you have additional evidence or insights that you can then get that buy in from the higher ups. Jim Euchner: And that's exactly what you're trying to do. You're trying to get the evidence and the learning so that it's worth it for people to do whatever they have to do to support you. But in the early stages, if you don't share where your portfolio is, what you're doing, and then people are just going to get nervous that you're doing something that's going to cause them problems.A specific example is if you're in IT and someone's building something in a non-standard environment, they're afraid you're going to get up to incubation, you're going to launch it. And then they're going to be stuck supporting it. They won't even know what it is. Right. So, they want to control it early so that, that doesn't happen. You have to give them assurance that there will be a time. You have to adhere to it. You'll really address their issues fully when you're in that incubation phase. Brian Ardinger: Let's continue on with some of the other fears that stop or inhibit folks from implementing some of this Lean Startup methodology.Jim Euchner: The next ones really play out more at the executive level. One of them is just a very direct concern. This business will succeed by cannibalizing the core business. So, it'll look like your business is doing great, but your business is actually only succeeding because it's hurting the core business. So, in that instance, there's just a fear of an overall net loss. And to deal with that when you're developing a business model, and when you're incubating, it's very important to sort of keep track of what is happening to the core business as the result of what you're doing, as well as keeping a PNL for the, for the basic business itself. So that's one. Another is a concern that this whole process will lead you into a place that the company can't even recognize. We were in the document management business at Pitney Bowes. We worked to move into document management in healthcare. Eventually once we had a client and we were ready to go forward people saying what are we doing in healthcare? You know, how did we ever get here? And so, there's an identity issue. And the best way to deal with that is for the executives to just be very clear about the opportunity spaces they're willing to bet in.And then go beyond that. If they're interested in health care, for example, spend some time there. Learn about the customers. Learn about the industry. Learn about the other players. There's always the risk that the new business, as it grows, will bleed resources from the core. And they'll have to somehow make it up. The result of that oftentimes is that you under invest in the new business and people implicitly or directly try to smother it.The best solution to that is to separate the growing business from the core business. But to have very clear and negotiated relationships between the two entities. Which is something Govindarajan and Trimble proposed. Those are some of the fears. They're real fears. They have legitimate basis. They're also emotional and that's why I call them fears. But given that you can start to address them. Brian Ardinger: Well, it's interesting also because if you think about an organization and what they've effectively done is figured out a business model that works. And their job is to optimize and execute on that particular business model. So, they hire for that. They measure for that. They do all that. And so, you have what is an effect, a group of people that are not designed or not there to explore and try new things. And so you have that constant tension, I think. Talk a little bit about incremental innovation. And how does that play in with some of the launching of these new, bigger business models or ideas in Lean Startup.Jim Euchner: I actually think of innovation, what I would call type one innovation. Which is innovation inside the core business model. And there's type two innovation, which is creating a new model and new revenue stream. And I make that distinction because you can have really breakthrough innovation of type one.Intel is in the same basic business it's been in for years. But it does some of the most fantastic technological innovation way ahead of the game. Still, if it's successful, it's not challenging the core business. If you do it well, it will move through the pipeline. If you're in the, at Proctor and gamble and you develop a new consumer product that fits within their basic brand, it'll flow through whether it's a radical product or line extension. A new business on the other hand, challenges the assumptions. And this is just what you were pointing out.It challenges basic assumptions about why we're here. What we're doing. What matters. How I get compensated and so forth. That kind of innovation really has to be managed differently. So, I think that the type one innovation can be managed with less executive attention. Much more integrated with the core. The type two innovation oftentimes requires entirely different structures. Brian Ardinger: And I think that's important because I think oftentimes, we hear the word innovation and we immediately jump to one end of the spectrum or the other and having that common definition. And how do you look at this particular innovation? Is it type one innovation? Or is it something that we're trying to build a brand-new business around? You know, I think having those conversations early and often probably help set the groundwork for executing on it as well. Jim Euchner: Absolutely. And I think there are multiple stages where you do that. So, you do it at the beginning and you know where you're trying to understand what am I about? When you get to the stage of incubation, you have to make a decision. Do I incubate this as part of a business or independently? There are techniques for deciding what you need to do and engaging the stakeholders in doing that. And then when you want to scale it. It's a decision again. Am I going to integrate this with one of my businesses? Am I going to take parts of existing businesses and combine them with the new to create a new venture?Am I going to acquire something to grow the business? Or am I just going to grow it organically? These are big decisions. So, you need to ask those questions repeatedly. And I've seen all three, even at Goodyear, all three types of scaling methods. Brian Ardinger: So, a lot of this comes down to culture, it seems. How do you start building that culture of innovation inside established companies?Jim Euchner: It depends on what you're trying to do. And of course, as it always does. Sometimes people are already in the midst of an innovation program, and they're not satisfied with how fast it's moving. Right. And it may be an incremental or an employee innovation. They're maybe not satisfied with the scale of the ideas that are coming out.Then I would say, you'll look back. You try to say, why. Why are people not collaborating? Why are people not proposing good idea? Why are people turning away ideas that are good ideas, but maybe outside the norm? And you just keep asking why until you get to that cultural reality which is what we believe about what should happen or shouldn't happen.Edgar Schein, who's really the father of corporate culture, he made people aware that it exists and that it matters. He would say that at the core, there are a set of beliefs about who we are, what we do, what's acceptable. And even if we were trying to change and we articulate a whole different way of operating, those beliefs won't change just because we've articulated different view. They're like the compiled wisdom about what works for a career inside a company. If you want to change those, you have to do it very deliberately. First, you have to identify the ones that have leveraged. And then you have to deliberately put in place counter behaviors and supports that help people and remind people to exercise those behaviors.If you do that and it succeeds, eventually the culture will change. But you won't change the culture by telling people, by training people that this is now the culture. By espousing a different set of values. It just, it happens over time, in a very deliberate way, I think.Brian Ardinger: Yeah, you got to walk the walk. Another big topic that I always run into and people in the audience ask us about all the time is how do you incentivize corporate innovation efforts. And how do you measure them? How do you know if you're on the right track? Jim Euchner: I have maybe a different view than a lot of people do about the incentives part of the question. I think people who are in the field of innovation want to innovate. And the biggest incentive you can give them is a place where that can happen.If you don't give them the elements that are necessary for that, they're going to be gone. Or they're going to be frustrated and they're not going to be productive. If they feel like I'm working someplace where I can make a difference. I can make something happen. That's more important than, you know the bonus structure or something like that.The metrics I think, need to be there for metrics, both of how the project's going and how the organization's supporting it. I think the best metrics for big innovation is at a portfolio level. You look at a lot of ideas. You test them. Only a few may come to the value proposition stage. Fewer go into incubation. And you measure on aggregate are we moving stuff through the pipeline. Are some things getting into incubation? Are we launching any of those businesses? Are they hitting profitability targets? But it's over a period of years, not a particular year. You get rewarded in year eight for work you did three years ago, oftentimes. Right. And they're at a portfolio level. So you're not saying this team got an award and that didn't because it's the overall portfolio that's driving success. And we use something called 10- 3 -1 at Goodyear. Over a period of five years, we wanted to put 10 businesses into incubation. We wanted to decide to scale three of them. And then we had a revenue target for what we wanted to get out of the aggregate.Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It's very similar to, I guess, venture capital-based model. Betting on a portfolio. Knowing that some are probably going to fail. Others may return some capital, but you'll have those outliers that eventually returned the fund and then some. Jim Euchner: Yeah, exactly. And I think that's the way executives have to think. A difference between inside a corporation and outside is, a venture capitalist is playing with his or her own money and they can make a bet to win inside a corporation. There's often a reluctance to make a big bet to win. Because you got to explain it to the street and it might not succeed, or it might take longer than you expect to succeed.And so, there's this asymmetry between those two worlds, even if they're about the same objective. Amazon doesn't worry about that. Tesla doesn't worry about that. They've got credibility and cash and they can make it happen. If you're a company that's been around a hundred years and people are watching quarterly earnings growth, and they're worried about dividends, it's a harder play. But I think in the new world, executives are going to have to get good at betting to win, not betting to minimize the, the downside loss. Brian Ardinger: You've been in this space for a number of years. Have led it in corporations. And now on the outside as well. What are some of the biggest changes that you've seen over the years?Jim Euchner: The first big change I saw was really you would call it design. That's really part now of the practice is a part of the lean startup. But it's being customer centered in the way you're doing innovation. So, identifying a space that you're interested in. And then spending real time. So, some places borrow tools. I have in my career from the field of anthropology to really understand customers from the world that they're in. And to innovate into their needs instead of from your technologies or from your idea of what customers want.I think that's been a pretty profound change. I think a lot of companies do customer centered approaches without trying to short circuit the deep anthropology or the deep ethnography. And I think they miss a lot. They'll get good stuff to make a better product, but not necessarily the kind of insight that will let them create a new business.So that's a big one. Another is Agile. And iterative and business experiments. The idea that you don't need to do this stuff in the lab. You need to do the stuff in the world, right. You need to get out of the building. And that's difficult for a lot of R and D people especially. Getting out in the world and framing business experiments the same way you might frame a technical experiment and learning from them. And pivoting from there.I think that's a big shift. And then I think people are now thinking more about business models and about the difficulty of them than they ever have before. That's a still, I think, a very difficult subject. I think there are systematic ways of developing business models. But it's dicier. But I think those three things focusing on the customer. Focusing on an iterative experimental prototyping way. And worrying fairly early about well what's the right business model. Not just what's the easy business model. Brian Ardinger: That makes sense. Are there any trends or anything in the future that you're excited about? Jim Euchner: I'm very bullish on innovation right now. And part of the reason for that is there are so many technologies that are growing so fast. Every time you have a new technology, it opens up the design space. It opens up the way you can address customer needs. And sometimes in a really fundamental way. AI is particularly interesting to me. I think there are some archetypes of companies that are born with that perspective in mind. And they're productive and efficient and fast and customer centered. And I think they're a new model. I really think there is a new template for what the corporation of the future are going to look like. And innovation is much more at the center of it. Amazon is a wonderful... there are a lot of detractors of the way it optimizes the workforce, and so forth. But I think the way it focuses on customers and what you experience every day, if you use it. The way it experiments to create new businesses. In particular, the way it uses its assets to enter a new realm and just pivots all over the place. So, who would have thought, you know, a book seller is going to be a movie producer and a cloud services producer, a logistics provider on the scale as FedEx and UPS. It's amazing. I think companies are going to need to really learn from that example. And it's a, I don't know they'll all be grown from the ground up or whether some companies will be able to adapt. But I'm excited to see which, what the innovation companies of the future look like. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: Absolutely. We are living in accelerated times, and it'll be interesting to see where it all ends up. I really do appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation to share your knowledge and that. The book is called Lean Startup in Large Organizations. If people want to connect with you and or find out more about the book, what's the best way to do that?Jim Euchner: They can go to Leanstartup.biz. So that's a website and, or they can connect with me on LinkedIn.Brian Ardinger: Well, Jim Euchner, I really appreciate you coming on Inside Outside Innovation today. We're looking forward to continuing the conversation in the future and then have a great day. Jim Euchner: Thank you. Very nice to talk with you.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  As an Amazon Affiliate, we may earn a small commission from purchases. 

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Melissa Vincent, Executive Director of Pipeline Entrepreneurial Fellowship. This recording was part of our IO Live series and Melissa and I sit down and talk about the people, the resources, and the companies making the Midwest a great place for startups to grow and prosper. 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 Melissa Vincent, Executive Director of Pipeline Entrepreneurial FellowshipBrian Ardinger: Welcome to Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest with us today. This is part of our IO Live series, which is our virtual conversation series to talk innovation and entrepreneurship. Part of our Inside Outside platform, where we have our podcast and newsletter and ongoing events like this. So I'm super excited to host Melissa today. Melissa is a good friend. She's the Executive Director of Pipeline. So welcome to the show, Melissa. Melissa Vincent: Brian, thank you so much. I love it when I get to chat with you. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited about this conversation. Before we get too far. I always like to thank our sponsors. Today our sponsor is the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. They are a private nonpartisan foundation based in the Kansas City, Missouri. They seek to build inclusive prosperity through entrepreneur focused economic development. They've been a huge help to a lot of things going on, including Pipeline. I believe they're a sponsor for. If people are interested in finding out more about Kauffman, go to kauffman.org or check them out @KauffmanFDN on Facebook and Twitter.And so huge shout out to our sponsors for making things like this happen. And having conversations that make Midwest Entrepreneurs even better. I was gonna say, you're new to Pipeline, but you were new from the standpoint of you started working at Pipeline right before the pandemic. It seems like that's a short time ago, but it seems now we're what, almost two years into this thing. So it's exactly, exactly the pandemic years. But I wanted to have you on, because I think Pipeline has been one of those proven things in the ecosystem that has helped entrepreneurs across the Midwest here. And I wanted to get you on to talk about, you know, what have you seen? What's different and, and more importantly, what's going to happen moving forward. So maybe let's start the conversation with, tell us a little bit about what Pipeline is. For those who may not know that and where we're at right now. Melissa Vincent: I would love to. Yes. So I have been there for, as you mentioned, it'll be two years next month. So it's kind of crazy because it feels sometimes like six months and other times it feels like 10 years because of the pandemic. So you never know. So Pipeline is a fellowship for high- growth entrepreneurs in the Midwest. We are industry agnostic. So we do everything from Bio to Ag. You name it, everything in between. And do not take equity in the organizations that we work with. And so we're different in that way as well. And we focus on serial entrepreneurs because they have the greatest economic impact on the region, when you focus on someone who's going to get right back up, if they have a failure. And if they succeed, they're going to get back up, start another company and invest in the community. Brian Ardinger: Pipeline's been around for a number of years. It was actually started even prior to me starting Nmotion and that. I think you have over 140 or a 150 entrepreneurs that have gone through the program. Had had an economic benefit. 2,700 employees I think are, are based in Kansas and Missouri and Nebraska because of the founders that have been part of Pipeline. Your founders have raised over $600 million in capital since joining Pipeline. And it's a flywheel approach. So, you know what started 10 or 15 years ago. Now we're seeing some of the fruits of that payoff. So tell us a little bit about how you got involved in Pipeline. Melissa Vincent: Pipeline was started 14 years ago. It was started by Joni Cobb and a number of key people kind of in the Midwest. She was the CEO. And the idea was that there was such, as you mentioned, like 14 years ago, we were in such a different place.There weren't all the entrepreneur support organizations that we have now. And so, you know, when she started the organization, it was around this idea that if you came and you brought resources from the coast to the Midwest. And you focus specifically on serial entrepreneurs to have a massive impact on the region because of what we talked about earlier, they're going to reinvest, they're going to get back up, start another company. And that was really true. So over the last 14 years, our members are not just creating jobs. They're creating really high paying jobs. So average salary for an employee of one of our members is $52,000. So they're creating great jobs. They're creating a lot of them. And they're raising capital and they are staying here in the Midwest.And so really over 14 years, that whole concept that we were seeing, if it could be proved or not, if you bring in these resources, what impact would that have if you focused on serial entrepreneurs is proven. So it's like, okay, successful, we've done that. That's really amazing. But then it becomes the question of 14 years later, how things changed. Like to your point, we've had, with the pandemic and we've had social injustice that's been ongoing that really came to a head last year.So we have all these different things that happened over the past few years. And so I think for us as an organization, we've really looked at well, how do we respond to that? And I think there's a lot of other entrepreneurial support organizations that are doing the same. How do we step in. How do we be a part of that progress and change that really needs to happen? That's where Pipeline is headed. But we couldn't have gotten there without the legacy that was started 14 years ago, by bringing in all these resources and creating some amazing fellowship programs. Brian Ardinger: It's been a very important piece of the puzzle. When I started Nmotion, I think it was 10 years ago, ish. It was the first accelerator in Nebraska at the time that's a equity based accelerator. But we quickly wanted to tie ourselves with Pipeline and get our founders an opportunity to move through the Pipeline. And you find those early stage founders. You get them a little bit of capital. You surround them with mentors and investment capital.We help build that. And then you also then connect them into a wider network. I think that was one of the most important things about like an Nmotion is, you know, we started in Lincoln, Nebraska. But we realized quickly that you can't build a startup ecosystem by yourself. In just the four walls of your own county or city.And so how do we create opportunities for those founders to make network connections that can help them grow their business wherever they end up. And, you know, we've had some great founders that went through Pipeline. Brett Byman who started with Nobl. And now he's with another company, BasicBlock.You mentioned that serial net nature of entrepreneurs. Vishal Singh with Quantified Ag. Liz Whitaker with Pawlytics and that. And now with Brooke Mullen who's with Sapahn and she came through the GBeta Program with Gener8tor that we're now working with. So those are just some of the things, but maybe let's talk about some of the success stories of some of the Pipeline Entrepreneurs that have had success based on having access to your program.Melissa Vincent: Yeah. You know, one of the things that, you know, we're really looking for when we're investing is we're looking at high growth. So they're already at a decent place. And then we're really trying to help them get to that next phase of growth to hopefully, like we said, either exit or re invest in their community.And so some of those are ones that everyone kind of in the Midwest, you know, your Toby Rush with EyeVerify. So everyone kind of always thinks of Pipeline. They're like, oh, that was, you know, Toby went through that. But the thing that I love is that we have so many other organizations. So a couple that people know of that may not have realized that their founders went through Pipeline is ShotTracker Davion Roth.So that's a company that is still ongoing. Doing massive things. In the news. Part of Pipeline program back in the early days. Another one, let's go to Nebraska here. We have Blake Lawrence with Opendorse. Oh my goodness. Since the NIL law changes, like, I mean, he already was killing it. But now it's like, those are just like set him in a whole other trajectory because he can capitalize on college sports now and college athletes.So there've been these really successful founders. And I think that there's a lot of different pieces that in the ecosystem, like what you're doing and what Pipeline's doing. It takes more than just one organization to be able to provide the support. You really need layers to that. So you need some groups that are a little bit earlier stage. And then you have Pipeline which fits in this very unique role of serial entrepreneurs who are high growth, who are looking to exit and give back.It's a very unique spot that we fill. And so really trying to figure out how do we support each other. And I think that's kind of in the Midwest, what everyone's looking at right now. So it's like, we have organizations like yours that have been around for 10 years. Pipeline is fourteen. Like these established organizations that are now looking and saying, okay, we've done this. How do we work better together? Because if we work well together, we can do even more. So I think that's kind of the shift that's starting to happen. And I don't know if it's the pandemic that was part of like, kind of being the catalyst to that. Realizing that we all needed each other. And we needed, our entrepreneurs need more support than one organization could give solo. But when you combine forces, we can do so much more.Brian Ardinger: So let's talk about the program itself. So obviously there are specific things about the program. You go through things over the course of your year, and that. I think most people think of Pipeline and think of the value that's created from the network that's been established and the access to that network. But talk a little bit about the program itself. Melissa Vincent: When you're a Fellow In the program. You go through four modules a year. And those are really intense three day workshops, basically. And they are focused on helping you really scale your company. So the first module that they go through is understanding who your target customer is. Which these are all going to sound very like early stage.They're not. I mean, they're digging in super deep to analyze this information. So finding your target customer. The second one is all about your business model. And making sure that you have the right business model now that you know who your target customer should be. And the third is telling your story through your financials.Which, in all honesty is probably the one that everyone fears the most. Because one understanding your financials is one thing. Telling your story through your financials. Nobody wants to do that. And then when they get through that module, they are just able to easily tell the story through their financials.And then the fourth we just wrapped in St. Louis. Was about telling your story and what's your why? So taking all of the things that you learn throughout the year. Putting that into basically a pitch for an investor or a potential client. And being able to tell the entire story of your company in one single pitch. Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things, because I've been a mentor in Pipeline for a long time, and I've seen the evolution of how these companies kinda go through that. And you mentioned things like just that customer discovery piece, for example, your business model. I think a lot of times we forget that that's not necessarily something that all entrepreneurs understand or know or use.And oftentimes just having that forced function of let's re evaluate, let's make sure that we are in the right business. And we have the right metrics. The right things that are going on can do such a powerful thing to an entrepreneur because it kind of levels the system, especially when you're surrounded with other entrepreneurs and other business models and that. It gets them thinking and doing things differently.Melissa Vincent: And we certainly saw that in the pandemic where I think as entrepreneurs we're hit across the board, just like everyone else, but realizing when you're the one who is out there as an entrepreneur, It comes to you. It's so, it is lonely at the top. It's especially lonely when you're a serial entrepreneur, because we do think a little bit differently.It's that whole like, ah, knock me down. I'll get right back up and start something else. And if I succeed, I'm gonna put myself through this all over again. But I think that in the pandemic, what we really saw was the value of that network and that connection. And really being able to lean on other people who were struggling.But because this isn't a program where you go through, and yes, you've gone through that program, but that's it, you become a member. And you're part of this pipeline family. They were really able to lean in and support each other in a very unique way. And obviously Pipeline provided resources, and we did a lot of stuff around mental health and wellness.However, that support of that network was so powerful. And you could really see it during the pandemic. Cause there was a safe space to be able to talk about things that you were struggling with, that had they not had that network maybe wouldn't have come up or they wouldn't have felt comfortable talking about. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think everybody was in that boat. Reevaluating what they're doing for who they were doing it for, et cetera, et cetera. We've got a number of people in the audience. If anybody has a question from the audience, feel free to type it in the chat, or there's a great feature in this Run the World called Grab the Mic.So you can also click the little microphone button and come on stage with us and ask your question directly. Happy to do that. So, yes, we're excited to make this a little bit more interactive. So we talked a little bit about ecosystems. So talk about the different ecosystems that you support. You know, you're in Kansas, you're in Missouri, you're in Nebraska. And obviously the cities are involved. Talk a little bit about the differences in the ecosystems and where you draw your entrepreneurs from. Melissa Vincent: You nailed it. Thank you for you have exactly right. So we are Kansas, Nebraska, and Missouri. And I think everyone always asks the question, like, are you guys planning to expand further? Yes, we may at some point. However, right now there is so much like attention. Resources that we know we need to provide just on that three state region, that it's super important that we stay there. But those are the areas that we look at. We are actually, we just finished. We've just closed our apps for recruiting. Had in all honesty, the best turnout we've had in years. I mean, it's interesting because at some point you don't know, during the pandemic are people really starting companies. You know, for some, it might be a really difficult time to start a company, but that's such a great, you know, response from that. And we're super excited about that. We see a lot of pockets. So we have Wichita pockets. We have Lincoln Omaha pockets. We have St. Louis pockets. And then obviously Kansas city on both sides. And so we see a lot of people coming from there. I think as far as how the different regions, and the only I can really compare it to, because I feel like I've become entrenched over the last two years here in our three state region.But when I look at like Oklahoma or some areas that aren't part of that really strong network of ESOs or Entrepreneur Support Organizations. You know, Oklahoma is further behind than let's say Kansas or Nebraska, and certainly St. Louis. I think part of that is because they have not brought in outside organizations to come in and help them establish some of the entrepreneurial groups that you need. You need more than just one group within a region. And again, when you've been doing it, as long as you know, we have here and in Nebraska and certainly in Missouri, I think that that's where you're able to, you've been doing it for a while. You realize where you play well, and then you find other people to compliment. And I think when you look at other regions who aren't there yet, they're just trying to figure out who do we even want to bring in? They're not to a place yet where they could even say, oh, here's the part that we do really well. Let's find other organizations to supplement that. So I think that the Midwest, when we're talking about Nebraska and Missouri and Kansas is unique and really amazing, and its ability to work together regionally to create really strong entrepreneur. Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing fundamental differences or different expertise in the different ecosystems? Like how does St. Louis compared to a Lincoln or? Melissa Vincent: So St. Louis has a lot of bio. Obviously there's Bio STL. So we see a lot of bio coming out of St. Louis. And then Nebraska, we see a lot more animal health resources. And obviously healthcare resources as well. And then Kansas City, this conglomeration of bio and, and also Nebraska would be sports tech. I would put that in there too, even the shot trackers here in Kansas. So you have this interesting mixture and I think along the whole corridor, you have a lot of animal health cause we're in that kind of quarter for animal health. And then we have some amazing entrepreneurs who are rural because that's an area that we really have tried to focus on. And so we have rural entrepreneurs who are doing really unique things, you know, in ag and everything else. Brian Ardinger: So talk a little bit about the mentors themselves. What type of mentors did you bring in? And how do they work. Melissa Vincent: We love to bring in a mixture of regional mentors, like yourself, and then national mentors. And we feel like that mix is super important. Because one regionally, you want people who actually understand the ecosystem, understand the issues of raising capital that are still here. And, you know, that we need to address and change if we want to really be able to grow the ecosystem. And then we want people from the coast. So we know that a lot of times what we're seeing is that on the coast, we have PE and VC that are looking to invest here in the Midwest. And so we're able to kind of capitalize on that. And because Pipeline takes our entrepreneurs through such a strong vetting process to even get into Pipeline, it's not the easiest thing to get into, but there is a pretty long process to get in. And then you have a year's long fellowship. And then they know they're going to get that extra support. We get a lot of interest from the coast about what our entrepreneurs are doing, because you're adding those layers of continued support and resource, which should hopefully help their success rates continue to go up. So that's kind of where we are. Brian Ardinger: And the type of people that you bring in, like a Chris Shipley has been on the podcast before. And spoken at our events before. People like that who have been in the industry for a long time and can navigate east, west and in between is really helpful. Melissa Vincent: And even international. I will tell you, I love Chris Shipley. She is so able to help you take and tell your company's pitch. And we just saw this because she leads our fourth module. And you can tell your entire company story in your five minutes. You're in. And she'll be like, so what I think you're saying is, and she'll like completely boil down your company to like a minute.And it's like, oh yeah, that. And it's like, oh my gosh, please tell me I wrote that down. One of my other favorites that I think, it just reminds you of how unique Pipeline is in the mentors that we bring in. So Laura Kilcrease, she leads our module three on financials. If you look her up, she's literally credited with starting the tech scene in Austin.And she's just this ridiculous, amazing leader and ecosystem builder. And now she's in Alberta running the entire Alberta, the province of Alberta, she's running their entire new innovation arm. And so she's just, it doesn't even seem real when you talk to her. I mean, she's just, she can give you stories of companies that you know, she's been on the board for, that had sold for, you know, ridiculous amounts. And she's been through so many different things. So it's that level of just resources and expertise. And just people who really care about entrepreneurs, who understand the entrepreneurial lifestyle. What's it's about. How hard it is. And really care about giving back and supporting our entrepreneurs.Brian Ardinger: I want to shift to COVID. And again, you started right before a lot of this stuff happened. Talk a little bit about how COVID and the remote nature has changed Pipeline and, and change your entrepreneurs. Melissa Vincent: You know, so I would say there were both good and, you know, difficult pieces. So Pipeline for anyone who doesn't know is very, very much an in-person organization. The modules are in person. They're three days. The professional development was always in person. There are all of these pieces that it's like a hundred percent an in-person organization.And then you have a new leader that starts, and then you have a pandemic that doesn't allow anyone to be in person. And so it was really interesting because the downside was. Our Fellows had one module, the very first one, and then everything else was virtual. And for me just research thought was okay, how does that impact, you know, who becomes a member who doesn't, or their engagement with each other. And we started with 13 Fellows, we've finished with thirteen fellows, despite the pandemic.We were very intentional as soon as the pandemic hit to go virtual with resources. So rather than having, you know, a handful of professional development. We went weekly. Everything from, okay, how do I communicate? What is this pandemic? How do I communicate to my customers, my team? I mean like things that now it feels like, oh, that was 10 years ago, but it was just last year.And so we were trying to really figure out and then PPP loans and all of that. So just started doing virtual resources. So in that way, I think it was positive because it allowed us to really beef up, any type of professional development. I mean, it was just weekly. We're coming at you and we're helping you feel connected.And then after that, I would say the downside was not being able to have those in-person connections, but we just finished our last module for this year, which we had the first two, which virtual. The last two modules were in-person. And again, we've finished with thirteen, started with 13, finished with 13.So I think really for us, it allowed us to do a whole lot more because we could do it virtually. The transition for an organization that is so heavy on live in-person events is probably some of the members who have been around for a while. And we're like, whoa. When are we going to get in the person? I heard that a lot. Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. But Hey Bob, I saw you Grab the Mic and I didn't have a chance to click the button. So if you want to grab the mic. There you go. Welcome Bob. Bob: Yeah, there's some other people from the Midwest I'm in Cleveland, Ohio, I'm at Case Western Reserve University. I run something called Launch Net. We used to be a Blackstone Launchpad, which is around the country and now we're at Launch Net, There's five of us, in different universities in the area. Besides that I'm an Entrepreneur in Residence at the economic development called Jumpstart. And also doing some business incubator. Question I had, St. Louis. Is I, I was working with a guy from Kent State. And Melissa, I don't know if you know this guy or not in St. Louis, Brian Stoyfield. Does that ring a bell? Okay. I was just curious. He's a troublemaker, which in a good sort of way. He was trying to put rockets into suborbital space for experiments. And because there's so much aerospace in St. Louis, he ended up moving down there and hung out a lot with, begins with a C the big area where everybody collaborates, connects. No people in the middle, we just have to work harder. But I think it's turned a lot. Got quite a few friends out in SF and they're leaving. Some of them, just the cost of structure. And it used to be that a VC said if I can't have lunch with you, without flying somewhere, I don't want to invest. That has changed dramatically. Austin's picked up, as you know, and Miami has picked up. We picked up a little bit here. Actually rental costs for homes have escalated tremendously. And inventory has dropped. Because people were working from here, but a number of people are staying. Which is good to see.So, but yeah, I just wanted to, you know, say hello. I'm also involved with Techstars a little bit. I just had one in Techstars, Chicago. And then Techstars, Minneapolis. And so we're gaining that. And then I used to work with GSV Global Silicon Valley. GSV.com. If you want to take a look. They just did a $220 million spec and then something called GSVbootcamp.com.We do it now twice a year. And it could be helpful for some of the people in your cohort. It's not just ed tech, it's a broader spectrum. And they kind of did it to help during COVID. And now it kind of stuck. That they said, hey, this is good. You know, while we concentrate on ed tech for our SPAC, GSV invests in other entities, plus this is a good way that people can't, you know, do something in person physical can do this.I've also done a number of, three times now, startupschool.org, which is run by YC. Which has been really helpful. But yeah, the in-person the, the two that went to Techstars. One in Chicago, that was right in the midst of COVID. So there was no in person. The other one went to Minneapolis or Farm to Fork and he was in person. And they've got a delivery robot and it's really, really, really cool. And EcoLab. The company has helped a lot. Melissa Vincent: I've been taking notes as you've been talking Bob:  CarbonOrdinance.com. It's a grad again, getting into aerospace. So a guy who worked on the Mars rover, and some other folks, one who dropped out. That basically you can deliver food in these little carts. And you can observe or be kind of like not the driver, but kind of the driver in virtual reality.So those people who don't own a car. Who maybe don't have the ability to drive a car can be drivers of this. And we already have 300 people signed up. Yeah, to drive these vehicles in virtual reality. And we're getting some restaurant pickup again. Ecolab has been a great partner in Minneapolis. It's not the best place to have a little cart delivery because when the snow flies.Brian Ardinger: Yeah, next time. Spring and Summer time. Bob: Exactly. So, but they're, they're working hard. And the other one that was in Chicago was called undone.com. Yeah. During COVID I did a hell of a lot of stuff online. I'll give you one more. If your MPD is one of the it's called pitch-force.com. They went from being in person only in San Francisco and they were charging $75 to pitch.And I don't like to pay to pitch, but they would then turn around and buy pizza, beer and pop. They went to online. Free. And I've attended almost every week for over a year. And they've got 10 companies and five VCs. These VCs generally were San Francisco based. And now they're all over the place, including Austin, including New York.And there, now that it's virtual, they now have other entities pitching from Argentina, from Australia, from Israel. And it's a good way to learn how to pitch and see how things are going for people and also things, how they're going poorly for people. So it's a good way of see a real entrepreneur. It's your real business.And so friends of mine and I, we would literally watch it and text each other, our votes. And after a while, you get pretty aligned with what the VCs would do. And the downside is you get good. And all of a sudden you see these very, you both understand, you see these very smart people going, okay, you're in love with your technology, but what's it going to do for the customer? How much are you asking for? And then you're going, this is going to burn down. And sure enough, they get a two.Other ones you go, holy crap, did they hit it. I work with a lot of students and you know, they're just learning how to do this. And I sent them there. And they see, you know, the real people putting it all on the line to do it. Max who runs it, he runs a staffing agency and he also helps startups who don't have the finances to maybe pay someone right now, get somebody to work for equity only. And that's how he makes money that you have to pay him like five grand and then a certain percentage after let's say six months, once you put them on a salary and you know, maybe they're going for that Series A or something like that, but they can't get there because they don't have that chief marketing officer. Well, he knows off people who are bad exits and they can do that. Melissa Vincent: That's awesome. I love hearing from other regions on, well, not regions, but just other states that are kind of right next to us. What's going on there and how it's similar or different. And one of the things you brought up about the VC groups out of San Francisco being like the pandemic really did shift.And I think, you know, when you're talking about who you would put capital, that has been, I think one of the best biggest shifts. The ability for us to bring capital in from the coasts. Because to your point, exactly. That was not something. If you could not do lunch or coffee, there was not capital happening here and you'd have to move.And so it's really allowed us to have a lot of people moved back to the Midwest, their roots. And then allow people who would have had to leave previously, get to stay here in the Midwest. Which is just an enormous benefit, that was a by-product of the pandemic. Bob: Absolutely. One of the entities who didn't make it into the top five does a Reg A. He pitched at going public and he didn't make it to the top five and he did a great job. And I reached out to him and his name is Darren Marble. And he has a show that he he's working with Entrepreneur magazine. It's called Goingpublic.com. And so my friend is the board director for Gen Global. Jeff Hoffman.We just went through Global Entrepreneurship Week. And I introduced Jeff to Darren. And now Jeff is one of the advisors and one of the producers on Going Public. But that wouldn't have happened if again, to go to Pitch Force, I would have had to been on San Francisco that week. And I'm going to like do that maybe twice a year.Brian Ardinger: Well, Bob, thanks for coming on stage. Anybody else have any questions? Feel free to put them into the chat. And we have a couple more minutes to keep going. You've changed parts of that program. You're actually creating a new program focused on the diversity inclusion side of things. So maybe talk a little bit about that part of Pipeline and some of the new things that are happening.Melissa Vincent: Yeah, so super excited to be able to, as I mentioned, this is a great kind of success story of what Pipeline was traditionally for the first 14 years. And without that, you know, legacy of success, you can't really add or expand. But because of that legacy of success, and because we were able to successfully say, you bring in resources from the coast to the Midwest, and you focus on these entrepreneurs who are really going to scale.And one of the things that we realized in going through the recruitment process during the pandemic was that, in order to get into Pipeline traditionally, you have to working on your company full time. And so during the application process, what we saw were a lot of really great ideas for high growth companies that the person just wasn't able to yet work on their company. Full-time. And when you looked more closely, we realized that there were a lot of those people were from underserved communities. And for us, that is rural, female, and minority entrepreneurs. And so the only thing that's holding them back is they haven't had an even playing field to get to a place where they are actually ready to be able to get into Pipeline.And so we wanted to do something to address that. And so we created a new program. It's called Pipeline Pathfinder. That is kind of like a starter program to be able to get into the Pipeline traditional fellowship. But our hope is that when you go through the program and it starts next year, we just finished recruiting for it.That it will be something that you're either able to run your company full time at the end of it. Or you get to a place where you're ready for Pipeline traditional and a really scale to the next level. So that is our hope. Next year, will be our first year to pilot it. And then after that, we hope to expand and continue to grow.For More InformationBrian Ardinger: It's exciting to see changes that are happening across the ecosystem. You know, we mentioned one of the benefits of being an entrepreneur in the Midwest is this comradery. And this ability to get access to people that you wouldn't normally have access to necessarily in the big tech hub. Where again, if you find the right person typically are one or two degrees separated from getting to the people that you need. And appreciate everything that you've done to move it forward, and then also take it in new directions. So if people want to find out more about yourself or about Pipeline, what's the best way to do that. Melissa Vincent: So go to pipelineentrepreneurs.com or reach out to me on LinkedIn. Or you can always email me at melissa@pipelineentrepreneurs.com. Could we have any longer of an email? Probably not, but. Brian Ardinger: Melissa, thank you again for coming on Inside Outside Innovation. Thanks for doing this live and thanks for all the audience folks that came and participated. We look forward to having future events and that. If you want to find out more about Inside Outside, go to InsideOutside.IO. Subscribe to our newsletter and watch the podcast every week. So appreciate you coming on Melissa. Look forward to having further conversations and thanks very much. Melissa Vincent: Thanks so much for having me. I appreciate it. Thanks everybody.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Ben Bensaou, Professor at INSEAD and author of the new book Built to Innovate. We talk about some interesting case studies and essential practices that companies can use to make innovation accessible to everyone in the organization. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help the new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world 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 of Dr. Ben Bensaou, Professor at INSEAD and Author of Built to InnovateBrian 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. Ben Bensaou. He is the professor and former Dean of Executive Education at INSEAD and author of the new book, Built to Innovate: Essential Practices to Wire Innovation into your Company's DNA. Welcome to the show, Ben.Ben Bensaou: Good morning, Brian. And thank you for having me. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you. And I understand you're in Japan right now, so we're different sides of the world. You've got a new book out called Built to Innovate. But I wanted to step back and talk about how did you get into the field of innovation research.Ben Bensaou: Well, actually, as a matter of fact, I got into the field of innovation starting where I am right now. I did my PhD looking at Japanese firms. And I had lived in Japan before, but my PhD at MIT Sloan was on the way that Japanese firms were actually developing production systems. And a production system was the quality management movement.So, I was in Japan at the time. And then when I went back and joined INSEAD, I continued my interest in Japanese firms, but this time I want to know what they were doing in the field of innovation. And this is how I got involved with companies in Japan and outside of Japan. Mostly its established firms who are trying to become more innovative.Brian Ardinger: One of the things that we think about is corporations, it's hard for them to innovate. Maybe now it's a little bit more thought of is, you know with all the disruption from everything from COVID to new technologies and that. Companies are a little bit more aware of the fact that they need to be innovating and that the world is changing around them. Can you talk a little bit about how your research and your experience in the field of innovation has changed and evolved over the years? Ben Bensaou: Yes. I would say that one thing that I've noticed over the years, I've been doing my teaching innovation and also helping firms is that I noticed that number one, a lot of people, a lot of organizations equate innovation with launching a new blockbuster product or coming up with a life changing new business model.Many also think that you need to have a genius leader or to be a startup by a matter of fact, to be innovative, to be able to innovate. But I found out that it's not true. I found in my research established even centuries old companies are able to innovate. How did they do this? Well, they don't only focus on industry changing effects, but also for small important changes, very often in unexpected places.And for this, what they do is that they rely on continuous and systematic innovation. Innovation of all kinds. And innovation driven by everyone in the organization. And that's what Built to Innovate is about. It's really about how do you embed continuous innovation inside an organization using a systematic approach.Brian Ardinger: I think that's so important because a lot of corporations that I've talked to want innovation to happen somewhere else. Or like they have their teams and they're executing on their business model and they're optimizing that, but they want innovation to happen somewhere else. So, they create an innovation lab or something and they throw the idea over to someone else to execute. But what I've seen, and I think what it's apparent in your book, and the examples you give is that again, to survive in this changing world, we all have to become innovators. And it doesn't mean, like you said, you have to come up with the next electric car, but you have to find problems and take those early ideas and then innovate them and execute on them so that they become value creation, parts of the business.Ben Bensaou: Absolutely. Absolutely. I find so many people expecting that the innovation is going to come from the leaders. Or, you know, like you say, they create a skunkworks, or they create specialist units that are supposed to do all the innovations for the company. And I think many organizations, and I found this very innovative companies in my research, are able to enlist and leverage the capability of everyone in the organization. For this, what they do is that that they create what I call an innovating engine. Which is a protected, fully legitimized and organized space within the company where everyone can innovate. Not just the specialist. You can innovate in everything you do. I mean, you can innovate of course, in your products and services, but you can innovate in your processes as well, or your internal functions. You can innovate in HR and legal. And you can make innovating a regular habit. Not a sporadic kind of burst of creativity when there's a crisis. And that's what I think I've seen some of these innovative companies do is to create this innovating engine. And leveraging everybody's inate capabilities. Brian Ardinger: So, what do you think are some of the common myths or mistakes that companies make when it comes to executing or putting these innovation initiatives into place.Ben Bensaou: I think it's always the same thing is that many of these organizations, like you were talking earlier about startups, don't have the problem of size. When they start, they're all innovating in a sense innovating mode. Everybody is in contact with customers. But as soon as you grow, you start to be dominated by an execution logic. And the execution, what I call the execution takes over. And the execution engine takes over. And the execution changing is very much about control. It's no surprise that many organizations, established organizations, develop hierarchies and vertical silos focused on supplier side view challenges. And innovating in a sense is less about control. Is more about delegating and is more about collaboration. Is more about teamwork. Horizontal structures that are focused on the customer. Like you said earlier, I think this is a very important word. You said innovation is about problem finding. What kind of new problems do we need to find to solve for the customers. And execution is very much about problem solving. It's a very convergent mindset.And I think this is where a lot of companies fail. Is that they don't realize that when you move into innovating and what I'm saying is that when you create an innovating engine, you allow for every employee to be able to spend time doing some innovating activity in the space of the invading engine. And at that time, they need to switch their mind. They need to switch from a supply side view to a customer side view. Brian Ardinger: That's really interesting because too many folks forego or forget about that exploration side of the business. That a lot of companies don't measure or reward for that type of activity as well. What are your thoughts when it comes to why is it so hard for employees to be innovating?Ben Bensaou: As a matter of fact, I would almost say that it's not very difficult for frontline people to be innovating. We can come back later to the importance of middle management, but I think it's said the dominance, I would almost say the tyranny of the execution mindset stops people from genuinely discovering what the customer really needs.So, for me, when people are switching from an execution mode to an innovating mode, they have to embrace a customer perspective. And there, there are three challenges that I like to think about. One is to listen to what I call the voice of the customer. What are the likes, the pain points, the wishes of the customer? And when you are in innovating mode, you have to switch away from the traditional tell mode or even worse, sometimes people are in complete sell mode and try to be in a listening mode very much with empathy for the customer. The second challenge I think, is about listening to what I call the silence of the customer. The silence of the customer is the things they don't tell you. They don't tell you. And they don't tell you about it either because they don't know or because they know, but they don't think it's your problem to solve. So maybe it could be interesting for the audience. I give you an example about how Phillips, I mean the Dutch appliance and consumer electronics company, develop the first kettle with limescale mouth filter. So, there was a colleague who was a consultant in a consulting firm, and he was part of the team was helping Phillips re-energize their market share for kettles in the UK market. The team leader at some point asked some of the team members to spend a few days and actually live in families in the UK. Observing how customers use their kettles.And after a few days, the members noticed that people were facing a problem they never told them about. I mean, when they were trying to pour the boiling water into the cup of tea. I guess, because the water had a lot of calcium, there was this little coat of limescale floating on top of the tea. And it's very interesting because the customer knew about the problem. It was obvious because they were trying to scoop the limescale with their spoon. But they never told the kettle manufacturer. As a matter of fact, they complain about it, but they complained to the water authorities, not to cattle manufacturer. Brian Ardinger: Interesting. Ben Bensaou: So, this is very interesting because it took only a few months for engineers at Phillips to develop this little filter, which you can find in any kettle these days, that blocks or stops the limescale. So, each time you pour the water, it stops the limescale from getting in your tea. This is what I call the silence of the customer. The customer wouldn't tell you about it. So, you need to find this problem in spite of the customer. Not thanks to the customer in spite of the customer.And then the third challenge is what I call the non-customers. It's very important to learn to listen to non-customers. So here I could give an example, one, for instance, kind of observed Fiskars's for instance, when they, the Finnish company that makes tableware and garden tools. So, for their cutting tools, for instance, they spend time with surgeons in operating rooms, you know. Or they look at first tree workers who cut trees in large scale. They're not like cutting small trees in the garden, but on a large scale and very often. And much more dramatic example is this company called EcoCem. It's in the cement business. They developed a new technology, a substitute for cement based on a technology called GGBS, which has much lower carbon footprint.And it is made out of a byproduct of the steel industry. So, it is very, very good for the environment. It has the same properties of traditional cement. Now, the only problem is that the dominant incumbents, were not looking at it very positively. So, when EcoCem tried to sell it to the customer, the customers we're hearing all this criticism from the dominant players, and they were not very keen on playing with it.It just happens at the cement industry is a very regulated industry. So, what EcoCem did instead of focusing on the customers, they focused their attention on their regulators. And they spent a lot of time engaging the regulators, bringing experts on the new technology to regulators. They managed to have the regulators actually accept and propose the new technology. And then the customers walked in. So, this is again, a very good example where the innovation didn't come by creating value to the customers, the construction companies. But to the regulators who are the people who can influence what the customer do. The Ewing Marion Kauffman FoundationSponsor Voice: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private, nonpartisan foundation based in Kansas City, Missouri, that seeks to build inclusive prosperity through a prepared workforce and entrepreneur-focused economic development. The Foundation uses its $3 billion in assets to change conditions, address root causes, and break down systemic barriers so that all people – regardless of race, gender, or geography – have the opportunity to achieve economic stability, mobility, and prosperity. For more  information, visit www.kauffman.org and connect with us at www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn.Brian Ardinger: And that's a good segue because I think a lot of folks think about innovation as this solo, mad scientist comes up with an idea and executes on it. But you talk a lot about in the book, this importance of collaboration. It is important engaging that idea with others and that. So can talk a little bit more about that process of collaboration. Ben Bensaou: I think this is very important, I would say that innovation is a team sport. And cross-functional teams are very important. And I always am surprised when I observed teams, to realize that it's not always the ones we think who are going to have that critical insights.So, it's very important to bring people with different mindsets. And then it's very important to close the gap. Close the distance between the would be innovators and the customers. Or there would be innovators in the company and the salespeople. For instance, I think these are two spaces and this is part of what I call the innovating engine.So maybe I can give an example of the first situation. This is about Kordsa. This is a Turkish company. They manufacturer fabric that is used to reinforce tires. On a regular basis, they send cross disciplinary team to their customer's plants. And these teams, they literally camp at the plants of the customers.They stay for a few days, and I've seen actually in the early days, they used to have a tent in the plant. And they just roam around, talk to people, observe what is happening in the plant. And these are cross-functional teams. You might have somebody from engineering, somebody from R and D, somebody from marketing, from legal, somebody from procurement.And at one plant, the team saw that the workers and the customer were having trouble to safely handle roles of reinforcing fabric that were loaded onto a truck. Now, again, this is an example of a silence of the customer. The customers knew the problem, they were facing the problem, but they didn't know the supplier could solve it.So, what happened is that this team at Kordsa, they just went back home and remedy the problems by developing a small kind of methodology, some process. They trained the customers into this new process, and they were able to help them reduce the resources from 30 minutes for three people to 12 minutes for one worker.And this was literally because they were able to go as a team and they close the gap between the team and the customer. So, it's very important to not only have multidisciplinary team, but also to bring the inside the firm first to bring the innovators together with the salespeople and then to bring the innovators together with the customer. Brian Ardinger: The last topic I want to talk about, and we talked briefly about it, but so everybody in the organization should be an innovator and should have the capabilities and aptitude to make things happen like that. But oftentimes middle managers and higher end managers either block that or change that. What are the roles of mid managers and upper management when it comes to innovation?Ben Bensaou: Let me talk to this as an example, and then I'll explain the roles. This is about Bayer, the global pharmacology and life science company based in Germany. So, this is a company that has a long history of scientific achievements through R and D and brilliant scientists. Yet in 2014, they decided to create from scratch to create an innovating engine, to leverage the capabilities of the hundred thousand employees in the company.So how did they do this? First, they made the whole board responsible for innovation. Then they selected 80 senior managers across all country groups and global functions. And these ambassadors, they made them as ambassadors. They were supporting these 80 senior managers became ambassadors, supporting the board. They were innovation ambassadors. And as ambassadors they spend most of their time with middle managers.Explaining, training, advocating, sponsoring innovation. And then they did something very important for these middle managers. They created a formidable support structure. Between 2016 and 2020, they trained and certified a thousand innovation coaches, which they activated locally across the whole company.And then for frontline people, they created WeSolve. This is a digital platform where any employee in Bayer can post information about a problem they're struggling with. And invite input and ideas from anyone in the company. So just to give you a sense. I visited the site once at any given time, they have 200 challenges posted on a platform. And then up to now, 40,000 employees at Bayer have participated in this platform. But to tell you the truth, Brian, what really impressed me the most in the statistic they showed me is that out of the best ideas that are proposed for all these challenges that are posted, two third of the best ideas effectively come from a department or unit different from where the person who posted the challenge works. This is to give you an example of what is a formal structure for an innovating engine. You can see that the senior leaders are the ones who have to give permission. They have the ones who have to give to permission to everybody to be able to innovate.They are the ones who create the governance structure, the coaches, and the local coordinators. Then the middle managers have a very important role. I was really surprised in my research to find out that middle managers are actually the key to innovation in corporate settings. Without middle managers, innovation gets lost.I've found it in any organization, senior leaders, they get it. They're facing a tough environment. They understand that without innovation, they can't survive. Frontline people, I mean the facing customers and non-customers on a daily basis. They understand that they have to innovate to solve the pain point and respond to the wishes and desires.But the middle managers are the ones who are caught in between because they don't have that direct pressure for innovation. And on top of it, they are the ones who are incentivized on execution. They're responsible for execution and they don't know if they don't get trained. They don't know how to help their people innovate.So, they need also this support structure to help them any time an individual or a team wants to innovate. They need to have these coaches. So, I would say you need to have senior leaders. You need to have the ones who create what I call the reframing. Allow for the organization to challenge the status quo challenge. Challenge the basic assumptions. The middle managers are the ones who participate in what I call the integration process. The process by which you connect the ideas and the people and the resources. And the process by which you winnow, channel, select, maybe prototype some of the best ideas before they get moved to the execution engine.So, this is a very important role for the middle managers. And they are the ones who support the frontline. And the frontline are the ones who have a huge contribution to make to what I call the creation process. The process by which the organization generates new ideas. New ideas are the raw material of innovation.And I explain how they do this by listening to the voice of the customer, the silence of the customer, and try to learn from non-customers. So, as I say, in this innovating engine, everybody has an important role to play. Senior leaders, middle managers and frontline innovators. For More InformationBrian Ardinger: And I encourage anybody who's listening to this podcast, who's in an innovation to pick up a copy of Built to Innovate. It's got a ton of great case studies, as you said. And it really helps set the framework for how you can start creating more of a culture of innovation within your company. If people want to find out more about yourself or the book, what's the best way to do that? Ben Bensaou: LinkedIn. I have a profile on LinkedIn. I have also my website on the INSEAD and then for the book, they can go to their local Amazon to find the book and to order it. Or they can go to the website for the book, which is BTIthebook.com. BTI for Built to Innovate thebook.com.Brian Ardinger: Well, Dr. Bensaou, thank you very much for being on Inside Outside Innovation. Really enjoyed the conversation and look forward to continuing it as the world changes in the future. Ben Bensaou: Thank you, Brian. It's a lot of fun.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. 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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Karin Hurt, Co-author of the new book, Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates. Karin and I talk about the difficulties and opportunities with creating a culture that values innovation and curiosity, and how companies can develop productive micro innovators. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO. 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 Karin Hurt, Co-Author of Courageous CulturesBrian 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 Karin Hurt. She's co-author of the new book, Courageous Cultures: How to Build Teams of Micro-Innovators, Problem Solvers, and Customer Advocates. Welcome to the show, Karen. Karin Hurt: Thank you so much for having me. Brian Ardinger: Karen, I am excited to have you on the show. I just got a chance to read through a preview copy of the book and excited to dig into that. Tell me a little bit about how you got interested in this particular topic.Karin Hurt: Yeah. So, I run a company called Let's Grow Leaders. And we work with human centered leaders all over the world with practical tools and techniques. So we were noticing a consistent pattern. As we were going into organizations, we'd be working at the very senior levels of organizations. And we would hear things like why don't more people speak up. Why don't people share ideas? Why do I stumble upon a best practice? Why are people sharing them with one another? And then we would go into do leadership training at the supervisor level. And we would hear things like nobody really wants my ideas. Last time I spoke up, I got in trouble. You know, why bother nothing ever happens anyway. We thought, are you all working for the same company? So, you know, most leaders really do want ideas and employees have great ideas to share. So why was there this disconnect? So, we partnered with the university of North Colorado on an extensive research study to answer that question. When people were holding back ideas, what kinds of ideas were they holding back and what was preventing them from speaking up and sharing ideas to improve the customer experience, the employee experience, or productivity in a process. That's a little bit about why we got so excited about this research. Brian Ardinger: So, let's dig into it. What makes a culture courageous? Karin Hurt: You know, our favorite definition of culture comes from Seth Godin, the marketing guru, who just says culture is simply people like us do things like this. And so, when you're talking about a courageous culture, people like us speak up. They share ideas. The default is to contribute. People are coming to work every day saying, huh, how can I make this better. And managers are proactively going out and asking for those ideas and responding well when people share them. Brian Ardinger: So clearly that is not the case in a lot of organizations, at least the ones that I've worked with and have been around. It's not always courageous. What do you think makes it so difficult for people to speak their truth or overcome that particular fear? Karin Hurt: Yeah. So, Dr. Amy Edmondson of Harvard who wrote the Fearless Organization, you know, she's really a pioneer of psychological safety. And she talks about people are more likely to hold onto a negative experience than a positive experience. And that really played out in our research as well. We would ask people; we did a whole qualitative set of interviews in addition to the quantitative study. And we would say, okay, if you're holding back an idea, you know why? And they would say, well, because you know, something bad happened in the past. Was okay, how long ago was that?And you wouldn't believe it. Sometimes people say, well about 10 years ago. And then we would say, well, was it at this company? Oh, no, no, no. I was away at some place completely different. But it was enough to teach them that speaking up is scary. So that's one piece of it. And then, you know, other things that came out in our research, 49% said, I'm not regularly asked for my ideas. Something as simple as that.And when we got underneath that binding, the managers are saying, well, I told them I have an open door. And the problem with an open door is it's passive. And for some people, especially if they've had a bad experience in the past, it still takes some level of courage to walk through that open door. And another thing that people said, which the most surprising finding quite frankly for me was 56% said, they're not sharing ideas because of fear they will not get the credit. And, you know, as fascinating. As I've been sharing that statistic people like aha. Yeah, well that happened to me too. And  so, I think that really resonates with folks. And then another statistic that I thought was really interesting was 50% said nothing will ever happen. So why bother?And sometimes that nothing will ever happen. Isn't actually true. Something has happened, but the loop isn't closed. Right? So, people think their idea went into this black hole, you know, and because we're not circling back. So, whether it's an employee survey, it's a suggestion box. It's in a one-on-one meeting. Are we closing the loop and what we call responding with regard to the ideas that are coming forward? Brian Ardinger: That's a fascinating insight, because I see that a lot when we talk with corporations and what are their innovation efforts. And a lot of them say, well, we're doing these hackathons. Or challenges and asking for employee feedback.And that's great to do that, but what they fail to do is put the process in place and what to do with those ideas after they come through the funnel. And like you said, be able to either close the loop or have a process that moves those particular ideas forward. So, you don't have this environment where people throw things in and, and again, like you say, the black hole of nothingness. And they get discouraged to do it again.In the book, you talk a lot about this loop between clarity and curiosity, kind of back and forth. Can you talk a little bit about that and why that's so important? Karin Hurt: Yes. So, when you're building a courageous culture, it really does start with clarity. And that's clarity around two things. One clarity that you really do want people's ideas. And we found this to be really, really critical as we were testing the different tools and techniques. Clarity about where you need a great idea. So, you know, not just going out and saying, hey, do you have any ideas to improve the business? Or what do you think we could do to improve productivity? That feels intimidating. Yeah. That's like, well, gosh, where do I start? I have so many ideas. So instead, if you say, can you tell me one idea that you have to and then fill in where your strategic initiative is. You know, to improve our diversity, equity, inclusion efforts. One idea to take this new product to market. One idea to go into this new customer space. One idea to improve the customer experience. When you can ask for that, and that constraint actually owns up the creative process. And then it's showing up with curiosity. And proactively going out and asking people for their ideas. And we have a variety of tools to do that. You know, one is simply asking courageous questions. And a courageous question is simply a specific and vulnerable question. So, one of my favorite comes from a client of ours. I've known Don Jaeger for 10 years, and he has been consistently asking this question and he's moved from a couple of companies, and he continues to do this. And it worked so well for him. He's the COO of his contact center company. What is one policy we have that just sucks. Now he's asking his frontline agents. The people answering the phones, who are talking to the customers all day long. He knows if they have a policy that is annoying the customers, those folks, the ones that are hearing it. And it's vulnerable because he's the COO.I mean, he either has made the policy or is endorsing the policy, that's pissing off the customers. And so, he finds that when he asked that specific vulnerable question, Then he's got a conversation going, and then he says, oh, thank you. What else? And now it's created a safe space for people to share what else is on their minds? He's said this he's gotten a lot of really good insights around that. Another example of curiosity is teaching people how to vet their ideas so that they bring you better ideas. And one model that we use, and we teach in our training programs is our idea model, which is okay, when you're thinking through an idea.Tell me why is this idea interesting, meaning strategically aligned with where we're headed as an organization or the project we're working on? D is it doable? Tell me why you think we could actually pull this thing off. E is an engaging meaning who else might we need to include in this? This is where you teach your team to think about stakeholders and then A, what are a couple of key actions recommended next steps to get started?So, you know, if you were an employee and you were sitting here listening to this and saying, yeah, I have ideas, but I'm still a little nervous. If you went to your manager and said, gosh, you know, I really care about this team. I want us to be successful. I have an idea. Here's why it's interesting. Here's why it's doable. Here's who else? I think we need to include. And here are a couple of next steps. They still might not implement your idea, but you are going to show up as a critical thinker, team player, who wants to make an impact. The Ewing Marion Kauffman FoundationSponsor Voice: The Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation is a private, nonpartisan foundation based in Kansas City, Missouri, that seeks to build inclusive prosperity through a prepared workforce and entrepreneur-focused economic development. The Foundation uses its $3 billion in assets to change conditions, address root causes, and break down systemic barriers so that all people – regardless of race, gender, or geography – have the opportunity to achieve economic stability, mobility, and prosperity. For more  information, visit www.kauffman.org and connect with us at www.twitter.com/kauffmanfdn and www.facebook.com/kauffmanfdn.Brian Ardinger: One of the things that I've talked about in our practice is this idea of changing the mindset. Most ideas are quite frankly crap when they first start. You haven't figured everything out. It's new and unknown and that.So, if you come in with more of a side project mindset. It's like, this is my side project, or this is my experiment that I want to run, it changes the framework. And a lot of times it gets rid of that fear of it having to be perfect to launch. Or having to be perfect to have that conversation with your boss and that. What's your take on that? Karin Hurt: I can, I agree with you more. I love that so much. You know, I'm always like, so just do a pilot. And, you know, I was at Verizon for 20 years and I led some really large teams there. And in one of those roles, I had a particularly change resistant boss. Like he just was super corporate. He didn't want to try anything different, you know, he's like, if it didn't come from headquarters, we're not doing it.And that's not me. And I'm not happy leading in a role like that. And I had a big job. So, I was constantly saying, let's just try it in this one market. And let me prove it in. Let's just try it with a couple of our employees. Let's take a couple of our high performers and let them kick the tires on this thing.Yeah. And that made it very, he's like, okay, but don't tell anybody you're doing it. Yeah. But then he was very happy to take it to headquarters when we proved it in. And so, I think that is a way to deal with that. And I'll say that even when we're selling in training programs to folks, I'm like you don't need to say you're going to train all of your leaders, just give me one team. And let me show you the impact and how this will play out in your culture. And that's really much easier for people to say, oh yeah, well, we could try that. Brian Ardinger: So, in your book, you talk about how you're trying to create micro innovators. These small, powerful people that can take action and do things. Is this something that you see courageous cultures being built from the ground up or top down or a combination of both. Karin Hurt: Mostly you need to go from the top down. For our first book, Winning Well was really more practical for the frontline managers to do this. To really truly create a courageous culture, you need to do all the things, right.You need to be having very clear that you do want a culture of innovation. You need to be communicating that consistently five by five. You've got to have strategic priorities that people know where things are headed. Some of that can come from the top, right? With that said either you're a manager listening to this, or you're an individual contributor and saying, I would like to be a micro innovator.You don't need to go out and declare, well, we need to build a courageous culture around here. Everybody should read Karin's book. No, just figure out where is one area of the business that could improve? And come up with a little idea. It doesn't have to be game-changing. It's just a little idea that would make things better.How would you have less stress in your day, if one process was improved. How can you collaborate better and reduce the friction that you've got with this other department that's driving you crazy? You know, that's the micro-Innovation. And when you have a culture where more and more people are coming up with these little incremental ideas, they completely add up to build a more courageous culture.Brian Ardinger: How do you start measuring your progress and success? How do you know if you are on your way to building that courageous culture? What things do you look at and what things can you measure? Karin Hurt: Yeah, so I would say one of the things that you really will see is you getting more ideas when you are in meetings, what is happening? Is it you're coming in with the agenda and everybody's listening to you and taking notes and doing what you say? Or are people saying, you know what, I'm not sure that's going to work. Or what about this? Could we try it this way? Or have an idea. And I think the quality of your ideas, because at first you might get a lot of ideas, then you're like, oh my goodness, why did we even open this can of worms? But over time as you teach people, what a good idea looks like, how to vet their ideas, how to articulate their ideas, how to, to your point pilot and test their ideas, you will see that happening. And then, you know, I think the other thing is the irony about a courageous culture is it takes less daily courage to show up because this is the way we do things around here. So, it doesn't feel courageous to raise my hand because everybody is raising their hand. So, I think that is one of the things. Now, where does it play out in business outcomes? Well, you're going to see ideas that improve productivity. That improve the customer experience. So, you see those metrics improve.And from an employee engagement perspective, it will definitely improve retention because people will feel seen. And, you know, we have this one client we've been working with for two years now. And we have trained pretty much everybody. Every leader from the senior team to the VPs, to the Director in the revenue generating and the revenue enabling side of the business it's become cultural.And one of the interesting things that they've told us is, you know, before we started working with you and really introducing this courageous cultures concept, the number one reason people were leaving was leadership. That's what they said in their exit interviews. Now it's not one of the top reasons people are leaving anymore. The cost savings of better retention is tremendous. Brian Ardinger: We are living in this new world hybrid world, or COVID, everything has literally changed the way every business is working. What are some of the trends or things that you're seeing and how can courageous culture play out as we evolve the workspace in general.Karin Hurt: Yeah. So, a couple things that I'm seeing play out as I'm sure you are too, is one, is there is a deeper need for human connection. People are really craving it. There's been a lot of mental health issues. There are people who've been through a lot. We're all tired. And so, leaders need to be more attuned to that than ever.And part of what we've seen as I've been watching good leadership and bad leadership throughout this time, is good leadership is really correlated to are people willing to show up and be authentic and a little bit more transparent than they have in the past. And I've watched people, managers who've showed up, you know, with their teams and said, I know this isn't easy. It's not easy for me too. Here's why, you know, why I know this is hard for you. Here's a little bit of a, what's been happening to me. But here's what I do believe. Now clarity. I believe in you; I believe in this team. And I know that we'll figure it out. Then curiosity. So, what ideas do you have as we've transitioned to working from home? What do you need? What's one idea that you have that could make you more productive while you're working from home? And so, it's that. It's that human, being, being human. And I think if there's any silver lining out of this whole mess that we've been in, it's that people are paying more attention to leadership. And to developing their leaders and understanding that you can't do it without the deeper human connection.Brian Ardinger: Well and that's so difficult in a remote type of environment. Are there things that you're seeing that have made it easier for some companies to latch onto that? Or create that more intimate relationship even though a lot of them are remote.Karin Hurt: So, the number one thing I would say is getting really great at one-on-one meetings. And not just phoning in the one-on-one meetings, where you show up, you have the same agenda every time, you know, and you just check it off. It's saying what does this person, this human being need most at this time. And so, you know, we talk about there's five different things that you could include in your one-on-ones. Are you having a connection one-on-one where you're just really checking in on a human level? Are you having a clarity one-on-one where you're really reinforcing strategic priorities? So, people understand what's most important right now in the sea of things coming at them. Are you curios? A one-on-one where you're going to ask them for their ideas. And so, thinking about each person on your team. And then how do you mix up the way you're doing the one-on-ones so they feel fresh. That they are serving the team. And I think if every manager could get really good at one-on-ones you're halfway there. Yeah. Brian Ardinger: Well, we have a lot of startup founders who listen to this podcast as well. Do you have any advice for companies that are forming new cultures and how to get it right early and avoid some of the pitfalls that bigger companies have fallen into?Karin Hurt: Absolutely. And that's actually one of our favorites. We work with a lot of clients that are venture based, fast growing startups. And that seems to be a sweet spot because as you're growing fast, you get to that point and you're like, oh, we probably ought to be more intentional about our culture and the values and the behaviors.And so, the things that I would say there is start by really defining what does success look like. And, you know, one way we actually do that with folks is we give people two pieces of paper and say draw the picture of what we're trying to be. Draw the picture of what we look like right now. And, you know, sometimes you'll see, especially with startups, the house is on fire.Usually there's a house on fire somewhere in the room. Right. And we would like not to be that. We would like to be smooth and organized. Or you'll see, gosh, we're in a lot of silos when we were really small, we just got in a room, and we figured it all out. And now as we're growing, we've got unnecessary bureaucracy that is creeping in and we never wanted to be that way.You can start there. And then you'd say, okay, what are the values? And not just, you can do this well, or you can do this in a way that's just not going to work very well. What are the values and don't just paint them on your walls or put it on your internet and call it a day? Then get really tactical about what are the behaviors both internally about how you're going to function and externally how you're interfacing with your clients or customers. And how does that play out?And then you could even say, get, come up with some scenarios of, and we do this a lot with folks. What are these two values are in clash? Like if compassion for your employees, is in tension with a, you know, responsiveness value. How do you play that out in real life scenarios? And so, and just getting people to talk about that and then looking at every element from how are you hiring, how are you onboarding? How are you rewarding and recognizing? And are you building those values and those behaviors consistently. And the final thing I would add there because this happens most of the time, if there is a turkey who is not behaving according to your values, just because they were there with you from the very beginning, if they are destroying your culture and you keep looking the other way, everybody is watching that.And you can say we value integrity, but if they're not operating with integrity, that is a problem. And some of our clients have had to make some really hard decisions of people that they cared about who were there at the beginning, but who could not behave consistently according to the values. And they have not regretted having to make that choice.Brian Ardinger: It's about being courageous, right? Yup. Doing the hard things sometimes. Excellent. Well, Karin, thank you for coming on Inside Outside Innovation, to tell us a little bit about this. I, again, encourage people to grab the book. It's called Courageous Cultures. If people want to find out more about yourself or more about the book, what's the best way to do that? Karin Hurt: So, our website is letsgrowleaders.com and on LinkedIn. Love to connect with people on LinkedIn. Answer any of your questions. It's Karin with an I. Karin Hurt on LinkedInBrian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, Karen, thanks again for coming on to the program and looking forward to continuing the conversation as the years continue on.Karin Hurt: Excellent. Thank you so much. It's been my pleasure.Brian Ardinger: That's it for another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. If you want to learn more about our team, our content, our services, check out InsideOutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. 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