Inside Outside Innovation (Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast, InsideOutside.io, and the Inside Outside Innovation Summit)

If you don’t like disruption, you are going to HATE irrelevance.  Chris Olsen of Drive Capital talks about investing in world-class companies located in the Midwest. Drive Capital, a venture firm based in Columbus, OH, developed a $550 million fund with this aim. Chris believes the Midwest will see more billion-dollar companies in the next five years, and based on GDP, the Midwest is the 4th largest economy in the world. If there are more Venture Firms in the Midwest, we’ll see faster growth with LPs making more money in Midwest Venture funds than in Silicon Valley companies.  Why is today the right time? The Midwest is typically cheaper than the coasts, and with cloud computing, you can rent all the engineering and computing power you need. The access to technical specialty is now unlocking other geographies, like China and Europe. We are melding knowledge and tech and making advances in areas such as car insurance, healthcare, taxi rides, etc. There’s also an imbalance of venture capital invested in the Midwest. Dive Capital is spending time in the Artificial Intelligence, Insurance, Robotics, and Ed-tech markets. When developing the fund, Drive Capital made the mistake of replicating a Silicon Valley approach. You can’t build companies in the Midwest and assume capital is unlimited. They learned to determine when products are working or not. Stop earlier if they aren’t hitting milestones. They also thought they'd have to import talent from the coasts, but have had a much better success rate in using employees from existing businesses, and retraining them in a startup. There is an engine of talent that doesn’t want to go to coasts. E.g., Root Insurance. Taking advantage of Nationwide Insurance experiences to help startups succeed.  Chris hasn’t seen a lot of change in existing businesses. He believes it’s just time before some of these companies will wake up and deal with irrelevance. What should companies do? Stop trying to be venture capitalists. Companies can innovate and work with startups, but should invest in Venture Capital firms. VCs will share their best innovation with the companies. Big companies have different skills than startups.  For more information or to connect, email Chris Olsen at chris@drivecapital.com or see www.drivecapital.com  If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy: Ep 105- Randy Komisar with Kleiner Perkins and Straight Talk for Startups Author; Ep 91- Paul Singh @ I/O Innovation Summit; Ep 65- Jason Calacanis, Angel Investor and Author of “Angel”; and Ep 52- Ann Winblad w/ Hummer Winblad VP FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get 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 HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Allison Weil, Senior Associate at Hyde Park Venture Partners. Allison and I talk about some of the latest trends in venture capital in places outside the Valley. And we dig into some of the tips and insights for new founders.

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

Interview Transcript with Allison Weil, Hyde Park Venture Partners

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. We have Allison Weil; she is a Senior Associate at Hyde Park Venture Partners. Welcome to the show, Allison. 

Allison Weil: Thanks for having me. Really excited to chat today. 

Brian Ardinger: Have you, we've had a chance to work together a little bit. You were panelists at the IO 2020 summit and helped look at a lot of the startups that we had at the startup showcase. And you and I were on an investor panel for the Pipeline Entrepreneurs about a month ago. I realized we hadn't had a chance to sit down and talk more in depth about the life and times of venture capital here in the Midwest. So, I figured I'd have you on the show. How about you tell the audience about Hyde Park Venture Partners and what do you focus on? 

Allison Weil: Yeah, absolutely. So, Hyde Park Venture Partners, we are a seed through Series A, venture capital fund, based in Chicago, that exclusively invests in companies in what we call the mid-continent. And we define that as the traditional Midwest plus Toronto and Atlanta. Most of our investments are in software companies. A lot of it is SaaS, but we're also investors in marketplaces and tech enabled-services and companies that we invest in can be anything from free product, you know, with a great team, all the way through a few million dollars in annual-recurring revenue.

Brian Ardinger: The new world that we're living in, the post COVID world, let's take a step back and over the last year, what have you seen? That's changed the dynamics of venture capital in this now post COVID world. 

Allison Weil: Yeah. Great question. So, I think, you know, the first and most obvious thing is the shift to entirely remote investment. You know, prior to this past year, we really actually emphasize meeting our founders in person.

You know, you learn a lot when you meet someone in person that you can't over Zoom call, you know, or a phone call. And I think that's still true for the record. So, it's not a thing that I think is going to stay permanently. I'm not on a perma-Zoom bandwagon, but you know, obviously that was kind of the first thing is a shift to fully remote investing and investing without meeting our founders in-person at all. 

The thing that, that enabled that's been different particularly in the Midwest, is it means that investors and founders don't have to be in the same city or location, which makes it easier for coastal investors to spend time with interesting companies in the Midwest. And so that's been a trend that we've certainly noticed a little bit.

The other thing that we've noticed, frankly is that investment hasn't slowed down at all. It might've slowed down for a little bit in March and April is everybody, ourselves included, took some time to like orient ourselves to this new world, like personal life, professional. Like what in the world is going on right now? Let's figure it out. What's going on with our portfolio companies, get everything stabilized. 

But past that, investment's been going on rapidly and at high valuations, and the markets are shockingly hot. All of that is what I'm seeing, which is certainly, probably not what I would have anticipated, if you would have asked me, you know, the second or third week of March, like what's this next year going to look like.

Brian Ardinger: A number of questions come to mind after what you just talked about, one being, so you mentioned investing remotely. What have you learned about how you can read a person or what specifically is different about investing remotely versus in person and how have you adapted? 

Allison Weil: What investing remotely requires you to do is spend a little bit more time just on having those conversations with folks over Zoom, right? So typically, you'd invest in person. You might go to lunch with somebody or dinner, you know, in the city, and just build that rapport. Right? Early-stage investment report is actually pretty important because you're building your relationship that can last a really long time. 

And so, you don't want to cut that time short. You still want to spend lots of time with the entrepreneur. You still want to get to know them and you can do that over Zoom. Right? Like you can still learn about like who are you as a person? How do you lead a team? You know, how do you interact with people who are different than you? How do you make decisions and all of these things that are still important, you can pick it up via Zoom.

There is some stuff that you can't. I think some of like the interpersonal chemistry is a little bit different over Zoom versus, you know, in-person, but you still have to spend all of that kind of time getting to know folks. It just might be more sporadic than the concentration that you had, you know, when you traveled to their city.

Brian Ardinger: Have you seen founders address it differently or different ways that they've come across better in that particular environment?

Allison Weil: I rely more on quality decks than perhaps I did in the past. So, in that first conversation, if it was in-person, it's a little bit easier to interject and kind of read the room a little bit more and people over Zoom, the really good founders, are doing that over Zoom effectively. So, they are using a deck, but they're using it as a prop rather than as the center of their conversation. Right. 

They're still reading my facial expressions. They're still figuring out, you know, if I have a question that needs to get asked or where to pause and where to keep going and things like that. And they're effectively guiding the conversation much more so. I prefer those kinds of intro conversations to be more like a conversation than a pitch.

Like I prefer folks to tell me their story, rather than walk me through their pitch deck. And so the best founders are using Zoom and are using their pitch deck to enable them to really tell their story, versus tell the story of their pitch deck. Those are two different things. 

Brian Ardinger: Are you seeing more cold outreach than that? Or are you still seeing the same deal flow from other founders recommending or other venture partners and that recommending? 

Allison Weil: I'm probably seeing marginally more cold outreach right now, but I don't think that that's a function of Zoom. I think that's a function of just some other things that we, as a funder doing and I'm doing.  So, most of our deal fl...

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. 

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 Hussain Almossawi, Author of the Innovator's Handbook

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Hussain Almossawi. He is the author of a new book called The Innovator's Handbook: A Short Guide to Unleashing your Creative mindset. Welcome Hussain. 

Hussain Almossawi: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: You are an award-winning designer, creative director, consultant. You work with companies like Nike and Apple and Google and, and many other well-known brands. I think I'd love to start the conversation with are these companies that you've worked with, that we know as creative and innovative as we think they are. Or do they struggle with innovation, like the rest of us? 

Hussain Almossawi: Innovation is a process. And it's all about the mindset. What I really saw in these companies was we do see this big and huge brands with maybe like thousands of employees that work for them. The reality is that it's all made up of small teams. And these small teams are made up of five or six people.

And that's where like innovation happens at the core of those companies. What I really saw in these companies was failure after failure, after failure. Trying to reach to a vision that was set. And then throughout that process and throughout that journey being flexible and going from point A to B to C. And having that flexibility to move forward and push things forward. And that's really where innovation happens. 

Brian Ardinger: It's pretty interesting. And we'll maybe dig into some of the examples and that, from what you've seen, that works and that. But you've got a new book out. Same time as my book, it's called the Innovator's Handbook. I love the design of it. It's a square book. Which is kind of unique to the marketplace and that. So, you spent a lot of time and care in the design and creativity of the book. So, I really appreciate that. But I wanted to dig into the content. Talk us through why somebody should pick up a book on innovation when there's so many out there. What makes this one different? 

Hussain Almossawi: Sure. So, so for me as a designer and like growing up as an aspiring designer, I always looked at innovation as just like everybody else as something that really wows you. And is something that's amazing.

And you want to take parts in it and you want to innovate and become an innovator. But at the same time, you kind of feel lost and don't know how to do it. So, it just feels very overwhelming, especially when you're first starting out. Throughout my career, working with these different companies, working with amazing teams and brilliant minds.

What I wanted to do was to kind of break it down into simple insights that help shift your mindset when you're innovating. And innovation isn't supposed to be complex or difficult or hard. There are small things that you can do or understand that will allow you to, to think outside the box. For example, I'm speaking about myself, from my perspective. When I was designing and trying to innovate growing up, I always wanted to reinvent the wheel.

I always wanted to do things very different, but that's not the case with innovation. With innovation, you can take things that already exist, see how you can evolve them. Take two different products that exist in the market. See how you can bring them together. There's always room for improvement. So this idea and concept of doing something that is groundbreaking and never done before, that's not really true with innovation. But it seems that way, especially for young designers.

I mean, my book is geared towards young designers and aspiring designers, fresh out of college. And I want to share those perspectives and things that I saw that I wish I knew like 15 years ago. So that's like one thing. Do you evolve a product? Do you act or do you react. Do I come up with a groundbreaking product or do I create something that I'm building on something that's out there? That's like one point. 

Brian Ardinger: I think that's one of the, the most important points that when I talk to folks, when it comes to innovation is getting a clear definition of what innovation means. I think a lot of us immediately jump to, I've got to come up with the, the new flying car kind of concept. When you're saying that innovation starts a lot of times at just incremental improvements and optimizing and looking at things slightly differently.

And I, I think that's such a great way to approach innovation because it does open it up to anybody who has opportunity to make those types of changes. You don't have to be, you know, the Steve Jobs or the Elon Musk of the world to actually innovate. 

Hussain Almossawi: Absolutely. I mean, even like with successful brands, like Apple and automotive companies and all those, if you look at the products that they've done the past 10, 20 years, it's always incremental changes and it's always improving one thing after the other.

And I saw that a lot, like being in the footwear industry, with the different brands. It was year after year, we had the same story. Like for example, it was a shoe about lightweight. In 2020, what does lightweight look like? 2021, it looks a bit different because the technology is different. We failed a bit. We've learned a bit from the past, from the things we did in 2020

So now 2021, we have a better shoe. 2022 is a better shoe and so on. So, there's always room for improvement and technology's always growing. There are new materials. There's new process. Collaboration. The idea of collaboration is huge in innovation. You meet new people, you get different perspectives, you learn new stuff. And you bring all those back into the process and into the design of the product.

One interesting thing that we did like in the footwear industry, and it's done in different industries. For example, in footwear, let's say we were talking about a good shoe. What we would do is like, look at the, how are seat belts made? Look at the automotive industry. Look at the aerospace industry. Then look at things that really have nothing to do with footwear, but bring those ideas back into footwear and build something out of it. And that really leads to us asking better questions, understanding the process better, and coming up with innovative and groundbreaking ideas. 

Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting 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 thos...

This week's podcast features RSM’s Kevin Depew and Matt Wolf talking with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about RSM's unique industry eminence program. They highlight the collision of ideas that brought this program to life and how it has enabled RSM to deliver an enhanced, differentiating client experience.   

For More Information

For more information, check out RSM at RSMUS.com/IO

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io.

This podcast is sponsored by RSM: Audit, Tax and Consulting Services to help Middle Market Leaders Succeed

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER
Get 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 HERE

Tristan Kromer is a lean startup coach with the Global Lean Startup Movement. With years of experience and a broad perspective, Tristan brings a global perspective to ecosystems from Lincoln to Ramallah. With his open source book, Tristan is all about helping innovators find the right tools wherever they are, and especially outside of silicon valley. To contact him about his open source book, you can email (tk@tristankromer.com) or by visiting his blog at grasshopperherder.com or his website trikro.com. You can also download the book on his blog and website.

Today's episode is a conversation with David Bland we recorded live at our Lean Startup Week booth. David has been in the lean startup and corporate innovation space for many years, being involved with Eric Ries and Neo Innovation. Listen in to hear his valuable insights about internal innovation, assumption mapping, and what he thinks the next big thing will be among innovators. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Sean Ammirati really knows both sides of the table. He’s gone from founding multiple companies to being a partner at Birchmere Ventures and a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He’s written numerous books including “The Science of Growth: How Facebook Beat Friendster” and will be speaking at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit happening May 29th-31st. In his conversation with Brian Ardinger, Sean talked about his unique journey, big versus small, and tools that have helped him help others. 

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

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

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sarah Stein Greenberg. She's the Executive Director of Stanford's d. School and author of the new book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Welcome to the show, Sarah. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger has a great conversation with Nicole Rufuku, author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy: Three steps to improve performance and diversity. They discuss how to hire for innovation in a world that’s changing.  In her book, Nicole gives teams a set of innovation principals to use in the hiring process. They are: 1. Collaboration  2. Continuous improvement  3. Focusing on the user    Nicole also provides three specific tools. They are: 1. Star mapping - Determine nine attributes of someone you want to hire. What is going to give you an advantage in the market?  2. Structuring the interview process - Predetermine your questions as a team and ask in the same order. 3. Evaluating candidates needs to be data-driven - Score candidates after every question, bringing bias near zero. Connect with Nicole on Twitter @Nicolerufuku or Nicolerufuku@gmail.com to preorder her book.  Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Scott Kirsner is the CEO and Editor-in-Chief of Innovation Leader. As a journalist, Scott spent his career covering how ideas in companies get commercialized. Five years ago, Scott launched Innovation Leader, a company focused on how innovation happens in big companies. 

Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, spoke with Scott about emerging issues in corporate innovation. 

What innovation issues are tops for companies? 
- Innovation Leader Survey  
- Solving bureaucracy and How to Tap Employee Ideas 
- Highest areas of Internal innovation interest 
- Startup engagement meaningful, but companies have only started their collaboration experiences. 

Why did corporates jump in and now are reassessing? 
- Corporates need results near term. 
- Successful companies focus on white space areas. 

Scout areas where startups can address problems areas. 
- Develop strategies to set up a proof of concept.  
- Jet Ventures 
- Doing corporate VC. 

Need to be in it for 7-10 years  What toolset is being used at startups, that could be used in corporations? 
- Slack, GitHub, 3-D printer, landing tables, quick websites, Airtable, Coda, crowdfunding, etc.  

How can the rise of new tech play out in corporate innovation? 
- Companies are becoming aware of how business can apply new tech. Creating comic books, videos of vision, etc. 
- Have more conversations and lunch and learns in your company to explain emerging tech and how the company can apply. 

Ask for engagement and put dots on the radar screen. 
- Innovation teams shouldn’t be only ones tracking new innovations. Spread far and wide in company. 
- Challenge of Innovation officer 
- change culture and training or build stuff and prototype. 

Execute the ideas.  What are you most excited about? 
- New events, research reports, magazine covering top cities around the world for corporate innovation, and awareness of best practices in big companies.  
- Don’t need to start with a white paper. Lots of innovation resources available 
- Inside Outside Innovation podcast, Harvard podcast, Innovation Answered podcast. 

For more Information 

For more information or to connect with Scott, check out Innovationleader.com, on Twitter see @innolead and listen to Innovation Leader's Innovation Answered podcast.  

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:  
Ep. 128 – Aaron Proietti, Author of Today’s Innovator & Transamerica Innovation Champion 
Ep. 120 – Digital Intent’s Sean Johnson talks Corporate Innovation Strategies 
Ep. 118 – ExxonMobil’s Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock on Corporate Innovation 

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER 
Get 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. 

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 Fellowship

Brian 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...

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

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

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

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Dave Brown. He's the founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration, where he works closely with emerging companies, VCs, and private equities to solve immigration challenges. So welcome to the show, Dave. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Roger, founder of Felix Gray, the e-commerce eyewear company with proprietary blue light filtering technology. David and I talk about the founder's journey of launching a new category of eyewear and the challenges along the way. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with David Roger, Founder of Felix Gray

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:30] 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 Roger. He is the founder of Felix Gray, an e-commerce eyewear company with proprietary blue light filtering technology. And he's got quite an interesting story. So welcome to the show, David. 

David Roger: [00:00:57] Thanks so much for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:58] Our paths have not crossed until today, but a lot of our common network have in the past. You started your company, Felix Gray in 2016. Let's go back to the beginning and let's talk about how you got involved in becoming an entrepreneur. 

David Roger: [00:01:13] In college, I initially thought I wanted to be a lawyer. That's what I went to school for and by sophomore year I realized I did not want to do that. And I kind of loved this idea of starting businesses. And this is the time where TechCrunch was starting to get really popular, and you'd read a lot of different things and different entrepreneurial things. And it was something really exciting. 

I ended up starting my first business in college, which was a secondary school newspaper. And I had to sell print advertising to local stores and shops and businesses. And if you want to learn how tough selling is, try doing that. 

And then when I left Cornell, I went and joined Venture for America, which is basically Teach for America, but applied to startups and entrepreneurship. Founded by Andrew Yang, who is running for democratic nominee couple of years ago and is now running actually for Mayor in the New York Mayor race. And so that's kind of how I got into entrepreneurship.

Brian Ardinger: [00:02:06] I think you started in Vegas, is that correct? Working with Tony Shay and the Downtown Project. And maybe tell us a little bit about that Vegas Tech Fund and some of the stuff that you've done in there. 

David Roger: [00:02:17] Through Venture for America, they are in partnership with Tony's Downtown Project. And so that's how I got connected with them. I interviewed out there, really bought into the mission, really thought it was an amazing thing to fill a walkable livable downtown area, which is, Vegas is not known for that. It's basically all suburbs. And then essentially the strip, which is a transient first population.

And so, I thought that was an amazing mission. I was part of the biggest tech fund, but my primary job was on their operations team. Basically, when I got there, Tony had put in $350 million of his own money into revitalize the area, and we had no idea if projects that we had going on ranging from a million, to twenty-five million dollars, we're going to make money or lose money. It's kind of the wild west.

And they threw me in, and they said, go figure this out. And so, it was really cool. Great job right out of school. I will say it did mean that I was in front of Excel, building financial models, 12 hours a day. That's when my eyes started to absolutely kill me. I was looking around, looking at everyone else, complaining about the same things our eyes being tired at the end of the day, their eyes being dry, headaches, blurry vision. 

And kind of looked and said, okay, why is this a thing. Everyone I know at work and half the people I know in my friend group that are in different jobs all around the country, why are we all complaining about the same thing? 

That's when I started talking to Optometrists Ophthalmologists.  Learned around what screens produced, which is blue light and glare and basically that caused a lot of these issues that get categorized as digital eye strain. So, if you get filtered blue light, you can eliminate glare. You create this more comfortable experience. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:03:50] I love the genesis of that. But not every new idea becomes a company. And so how did you make that jump from, hey, I've got an individual problem from the standpoint of, you know, my eyes are getting strained from all the work I'm doing on screens to, hey, I think there's something here that I can create a company around?

David Roger: [00:04:08] So the first thing was really recognizing that problem. Right? So, recognize the problem myself and then recognize that problem in a lot of other people. Whether it was people complaining about it firsthand, or me saying, hey, do your eyes ever get exhausted at the end of the day? You ever deal with a headache?

And everyone's saying, yes. You're like, okay, there's something here. So, then I start to understand, okay, what is going on? So that's when I started talking to eye professionals for a better understanding what could be these root causes. And so when I'm talking to ophthalmologists and optometrists they are saying look, screens are a large driver behind this, and particularly what screens produce, light and glare.

And so like, look, you can filter blue light, and you can eliminate glare. You can create a more comfortable experience. There are these glasses out there, they're yellow or orange lenses, and basically, they're going to help. So, I look, and they're not only yellow and orange lenses, but they look like hunting goggles.

And if you put them on your face you look like one of the X Men. And I'm like, I can't wear that, and we'll show this to plenty of other people like, hey, this will solve your problems. They're like, I'm not wearing that. Right. So basically, the idea was okay, well, how do you create something that is functional, but also can look good. 

At the flip side, there were a couple other things in the market at the time, and this is still the case today. But these clear lenses, basically the Optometrist, the Ophthalmologist, the real eyecare professional said this stuff is not really filtering real blue light. It's filtering 2 to 3% of blue light where it actually matters, which produces blue light. It is basically placebo. It's not worth buying. So, what I did then was said, okay, well, how can you marry the fashion function?

How can you create something that has a beautiful frame, but a really functional lens? And that's when I started working through a lot of networking with, with different lens suppliers and ended up developing a proprietary way of filtering blue light that can still have a clear lens. But be highly effective, right?

So, Felix Gray's lens, even today, filters 30% of blue light instead of 2% of blue light at the 455-nanometer range, which is where screens produce blue light. Right. So basically, we filter 15 times more blue light where it's important. And that's why 9 out of 10 people who wear Felix Gray report significant improvement, but that was the genesis.

So, it was okay,...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Johnathan Grzybowski, co-founder of Penji and on-demand graphic design service. Johnathan and I talk about the changing face of graphic design and the new trends making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. Let's get started.

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

Interview Transcript with Johnathan Grzybowski, Co-Founder of Penji

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 Johnathan Grzybowski. He is the Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Penji, an on-demand graphic design service. Welcome Johnathan.

Johnathan Grzybowski: Brian, thank you so much for having me appreciate it.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on board. I wanted to have you on as a founder to talk about what it's like to build a startup outside the Valley, but I also want to talk about some of the new tools and trends that we're seeing that's making it easier for folks to build and launch new things. Penji's one of those. And so, what is Penji and what do you do for them? 

Johnathan Grzybowski: Penji is an on demand graphic design service, where our customers can essentially sign up for the service, get immediate access to the top 2% of graphic designers in the world, and be able to receive a completed project in under 48 hours. That's essentially the nuts and bolts of it.

We want to make graphic design more easily accessible and not necessarily this commodity where you have to spend thousands and hundreds and thousands of dollars in order to receive something really good and custom and unique to you. So, we're really trying to just challenge that mindset, that old school mindset of graphic design.

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about the genesis of Penji. How did it start and how did it grow? 

Johnathan Grzybowski: We were a digital marketing agency that necessarily wasn't the best at a lot of things. However, a lot of people kept mentioning about how good our graphic designers were. So, we started interviewing people and we talked to them and we said, well, what are some problems that you have, or it comes to the marketing space.

And we started to see trends and people say that they had an issue with finding reliable talent. And then we realized that that talent translated to somebody who could execute the graphic design. So that's one aspect of it, but more so we also thought about the big picture of who we wanted to be as a company.

We are a digital marketing agency. We only helped, you know, maybe 10, 15 customers a year, new customers a year. People cancel people, come and go and et cetera. And I remember the time when I sat inside of a meeting at Rutgers with like a chancellor of some kind. And they wanted like a website. And I just remember sitting there, and this person's like talking to me and sharing to me about like what they want to do and how they want to promote to get more people.

And I realized that the thing that we were creating was only benefiting like the higher ups. It wasn't necessarily benefiting the actual students or, or anything like that in which we really wanted to change the philosophy and say, who do we want to be when we grow up? And we thought to ourselves, well, we want to make an impact.

Well, how do we make an impact? And then we kind of put the two, all of the pieces of the puzzle together. To basically say we want to make graphic design more easily accessible. So, you know, your company can actually come in and get some really cool graphic design work done. Or what about like Jimmy who decides they have this amazing idea, but they can't necessarily hire somebody full time in order to complete their idea, their app, their whatever it may be.

And then what about the person who is. A marketing manager in a really big corporation. They have all these brilliant ideas. They don't have the time or the technical skill to actually do graphic design themselves, but they don't necessarily have the ability to hire somebody else for their right hand. All of those scenarios are really essential as to why we created Penji. 

Brian Ardinger: It's interesting you mentioned impact. We talk a lot about on the show, we're kind of entering this age of impact, where, you know, access to new tools and new talent has never been easier. You know, quite frankly, if you think about starting a company, you know, 20 years ago, especially a tech company, what you had, they go through and now everything's in your pocket or available in the cloud or other places.

So, talk a little bit about that trend of democratization of tools and things for builders. How are you seeing that affecting your business and what do you see for the future of this trend? 

Johnathan Grzybowski: There's always going to be people out there. They want to do a DIY. There's always going to be people that want to create their own website that do the graphic designs themselves. But I think you have to look at it as like, how much is your time worth? Yeah. 

You can get something to what it is and you could probably get it to be somewhat manageable, but there's always going to come a point in time where it has to go above that. And so that ultimately depends on what you want you to do with your business.

For us in particular, we want to talk to the people who have that need. There's always going to be that sector of people that want to DIY. There's always going to be people that want to be able to, that just need that additional help. And those are the people that we really want to talk to. 

Brian Ardinger: And so that kind of brings to the question, like there are all sorts of new tools for, I guess, that you wouldn't typically think in the past, you'd have to go to creative agency to do it. So now you've got tools like Canva, for example, or even like Photoshop and that are technically getting a little bit easier for the person to hack together things or see templates and utilize that in such a way that makes it more graphically sound or more visually appealing than ever before. What's the difference between something like that hacked together versus going to like a Penji or...

Johnathan Grzybowski: So, I think when it comes to the DIY aspect of this, the company that you mentioned, there are skill sets of graphic designers. Let's just say you want to create a website, that's a technical skill. You might be able to put pieces of a puzzle together to do like a social media meme. Right. You could do that, but can you create a website and then when you create the website, and you send it to a developer, can they actually code what you do?

And the short answer is probably not. So, the benefit of Penji is essentially that you have a pool of hundreds of graphic designers that specialize in very specific things. So, if you could do like the big things, like, let's just say you are a web designer, but you can't ...

Today's show is from the Inside/Outside Innovation summit we hosted last summer. In his talk, Michael Docherty lays out some really great advice and anecdotes about what disruptive innovation looks like in a large enterprise. Michael also emphasizes the importance of a "both/and" approach to startup collaboration. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

In the second episode of Josh's conversation with Arnaud Bonzom, he talked about the different approaches to innovation that he observed among the 500 corporations in their study, especially BMW. Find the full report here: http://698640.hs-sites.com/500corporations This episode also features important clips from Brian's conversation with Gregor Gimmy, founder and head of BMW Startup Garage. Gregor talked about how their Venture Client model works, what makes it different than an accelerator, and how it bridges the gaps between startups and corporations that Arnaud discussed. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jason Birnbaum, Senior Vice President of Digital Technology at United Airlines. Jason and I discuss what it takes to innovate during a crisis and how United continues to adapt to evolving customer, employee, and market changes. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcription of Jason Birnbaum, Senior Vice President of Digital Technology at United Airlines

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 Jason Birnbaum. He is a SVP of Digital Technology at United Airlines. Welcome to the show, Jason, 

Jason Birnbaum: It's a pleasure to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Jason, I am excited to have you on the show. You are in an industry that is in the midst of disruption as we all are. But I think the travel industry is even facing more dilemmas. So, I wanted to get somebody on who's focused on innovation in this trying times, to see what it's like to be in the trenches in this world. So, tell us a little bit about what's your role at United and how it deals with it.

Jason Birnbaum: I really am responsible for all of the technology associated with our employees, but also all the customer experiences that you would have at the airport, on board, really anywhere that you're physically involved with United Airlines. 

So, if you like the kiosks or you don't like the kiosk, that's what we do. All the signage in the airports moving you around. That's all part of my team as well. So wide scope, but lots of fun. 

Brian Ardinger: And when we had a chance to be introduced, one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show is because the United Airlines takes a broad approach to innovation. You know, I think a lot of companies focus on innovation and think about it from a, like a product perspective only, but you seem to focused on more holistic. Talk a little bit about how you perceive innovation and what goes into making those particular types of decisions.

Jason Birnbaum: First of all, when you think about the airlines, our product is the airline. And so our product is the employees. And the product is the experience, and so for us, almost every part of it, including people that actually work and fix the airplanes, people that actually, you know, load the bags and all of those are so intimately connected to the whole experience, that we have to think of innovation in a broad way.

And so, when we started thinking about it, we realized that we needed to enable our employees to deliver great service. And connect that to the way our customers traveled. So, a lot of our innovation was really employee focused so that they could deliver great service. 

And when you start thinking about it in that thread, it really opened the door for a lot of really, really amazing innovation, whether it's freeing up employees, so they can actually spend time with customers. Right. Or it's just giving them information or data to anticipate your need, or if it's making that technician able to get the plane going faster. So, you are not late, like all of that fits together. And the way we think about innovation, 

Brian Ardinger: I imagine you get bombarded with new ideas and challenges and problems that are coming from their employees or from your customer set saying, hey, fix this or make this better. What's the process to go about looking at, across the ideas, and doing something about them. 

Jason Birnbaum: Yeah. Well, it's a, it's a great question. There is a lot and we do get bombarded. You know, I, I think one of the pivots we made as an organization was moving from thinking of more of a traditional information technology organization that really took orders, got prioritization lists, to thinking of the whole group as a really like a product development organization. 

We had a much stronger opinion as to what the next steps were going to be. And really partnered and drove an agenda. And so, for us, the transformation was really about, I have a team of product designers, design thinking experts, people who help us build those roadmaps, whether the product owners are on our team or in some other place, and really lay out, not necessarily a prioritization process, but what's the road map.

And then from there we've moved very quickly to how do we prototype, test the theory, move quickly, move in small pieces, to get to the product. We've tried to get away from two-year projects. Four-year projects. You know, we try to think about how do I solve a problem, get something going, start it and empower.

And I think when a big company, especially companies have been around for a long time, you know, they built a lot of control mechanisms and we've really worked to strip those out and say, hey, if you're the decision maker, if you're in the front, You've got the product. Make the change, see if it works, and let's move forward from there.

Now that's certainly for the customer experience and for efficiency, obviously, you know, when I think about things like safety and those things, obviously all those controls are really important, and we take those very seriously. But there's a lot of places where experimentation can really lead to innovation.

Brian Ardinger: Can you talk about some examples of where you've deployed technology and some of the changes that you've made over the years to make the experience better for employees and customers? 

Jason Birnbaum: Yeah, no, we have so many great examples. I'll hit two things. The first thing we realized, and this was a few years ago is none of our employees sit behind a desk. They, none of them have seats. Yet we built all these applications and all these tools for them on a PC. And so, we started to say, well, how do we un-tether is the word we used, our employees from these desks. 

And so, we rolled out one of the first innovations was creating and building a mobile ecosystem for our employees. Where, whether you're a gate agent, a technician, you're on the ramp, pilot, flight attendant, you had a mobile device and that mobile device, first and foremost, gave you tools to do your job. So, you could board a plane, help a passenger, take an order for a drink. That was like the base case. 

Then we said, well we've got this mobile ecosystem, what else can we do? And the second thing we said was how do we give people data to anticipate what they're going to need to do? So now I've got this delivery mechanism. How do I say all right, this passenger is getting ready to reach a milestone on their mileage. So why don't we thank them? Or this passenger has had a couple of bad flights. Take care when you're on this flight. So, we started giving that information. 

And then lastly, and this is where the real excitement came in. We connected everybody via just communications and chat functionality. We created a product, we call it Easy Chat, that connects everybody involved with the flight. The pilots, flight attendants, the gate agents, the catering company, everybody together i...

In today's episode, Josh and Brian sit down to talk about the most important thing in any innovation project: the team. To help out we pulled clips from conversations with Ken Durand, Daniele Dondi, and Sean Sheppard, who gave some great advice for identifying talent and using that talent effectively in today's market. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Nahia Orduna, Author of Your Digital Reinvention: A Practical Guide for Discovering New Opportunities and Finding Your Place in the Future of Work. Nahia and I talk about the journey of reinvention and her agile sprint framework for how to practically work through the process, from inspiration to execution. Let's get started. 

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

Interview Transcript with Nahia Orduna

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 Nahia Orduna. She's actually calling from Munich. Welcome. 

Nahia Orduna: Happy to be here, Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you. Now, you are the author of a book called Your Digital Reinvention: A Practical Guide for Discovering New Opportunities and Finding Your Place in the Future of Work. You're also a Senior Manager in Analytics and Digital Integration at Vodafone. You're one of the leaders of the women in big data organization. 

I'm so excited to have you to talk a lot about what you're seeing when it comes to digital disruption. As everybody knows, the world has changed quite a bit. And we, I think are all now struggling with that whole idea of what do we have to do to better prepare ourselves for this new world. 

Nahia Orduna: During the last years I've been talking like industry forums about the future of work, which are skills we need to remain competitive. I've been also coaching people to find their place in their digital workplace. And we have higher reputation institutions like the World Economic Forum telling us that by 2022, more than half of us will need to have a significant upskilling and reskilling or that in 2018, they said by 2032 to 35 million jobs will be displaced, but over 150 million jobs will appear. And of course, now it's like 2020, a global pandemic has accelerated all this digital future.

We were talking about...we are forced to builds new ways of interacting of working and learning. And we always hear this thing of like, yeah, every crisis is also an opportunity. How do you put this into practice? This can be a very difficult transition if you're not proficient in this digital environment.

I created a Blueprint to help people get better digital skills. I put it like for free on my website in May, and then a lot of people were downloading it, downloading it. And then I thought, well, I got to do this blueprint. I got to bring it to the next level. So, I actually started meeting some industry experts that I know. I got testimonials from them. That their tricks to get re-mentioned. I edit these and I published the book in September.

So, it's basically the purpose of this book is to help people to remain themselves, given the current environment and crisis. I truly believe that the world will be a better place if we all use our talents and our abilities. So, putting together my expertise, the expertise of industry experts, bring in practical examples. Overall, the book is the blueprint for anybody who wants to thrive in this digital world. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's dig into that a little bit. You have these five sprints that you have to think through as far as you have to first be inspired and then take direction and learning and that. Talk us through a little bit about the methodology.

Nahia Orduna: That's the thing, like, what is remain? Remain cannot be something that I say, okay, tonight, I'm going to remain myself, but tomorrow I met a new expert, right? It's a journey. And a journey is like from the moment you get inspired that you look into a travel catalog and you think. Look, there is a nice place in Maldives or in Nepal or in California, that the more you get inspired to the moment that you are already in your destination and sharing pictures with a wall, Hey, look, I'm here.  Do you want to do this journey as well? 

It's a journey and every journey needs a map, right? So, these sprints are the map. And therefore, the sprints come from my background from Agile. Like we always look at the sprints, but yes sprinting in a time box, for example, like usually two weeks where you're focusing on the area. So, either one that somebody says, okay, I'm going to get inspired tonight. It should be like at least two weeks to make an exercise, to read interviews, and to think how you get inspired. 

And only when you are ready, you can go to the next sprint. That's the idea of the sprints of how the exercise is done.  And there are effective sprints. One is Inspiration, there is Direction, the other is Learning. There is another Networking. Finally, the last one is Share. 

Brian Ardinger: So, you mentioned Inspiration. You've got to obviously recognize the fact that, Hey, I need to reinvent myself. Things are changing. And so that inspiration is partly to figure out what am I good at?  And some of the skill sets that I should be either learning about and that. Or is it more from the standpoint of like, I want to work in this particular area, I want to go down this path. I want to change my life. 

Nahia Orduna: So, Inspiration is the first sprint. And it's how you discover new trends. What is happening?  Your area of interest. This is, for example, as I mentioned with that trip is when you get the travel catalog and you discover new places, new trendy places, you didn't know it exists there. So it is, this two weeks is not yet about thinking about your own strengths yet. It's about researching new trends. 

For example, what is your area of interest. In my mind, you are like a marketing professional. One of the successes is to up your area of interest with words like digital transformation, the future of work. Yes. Google them. If you start looking like Future of Marketing in 2025. If you start like Marketing Big Data. So, you will start looking into new information that you didn't know. 

There's got to be if you're in marketing, if you're in HR, if you're in finance or for example, if you passionate on sports and you want to do something with a sport, or you want to start out with sports, just start looking how big data and digital transformation is effecting the sports, because everything is effective. And then read what is there? 

So, there are different exercises about things you can watch, the lifetime report. And also, in the end, what I also say is that you have to write like a journal, like a journey journal to write everything that resonates with you. Think about the new ideas. Take two weeks to really get inspired and get those ideas in and write down what resonates with you. 

Brian Ardinger: And seem to follow that curiosity. Being OK with going down a particular path that you're not comfortable with, but give you some inspiration to, say yeah I really liked that area and I want to dig into it more. 

Nahia Orduna: Exactly. And then when you are ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Amos Schwartzfarb, Managing Director of Techstars and Co Author of the new book Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business.  Amos and I talk about the framework for going from idea to scalable repeatable company and the challenges startups face in the process. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:00]  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 Amos Swartzfarb.  He is the Managing Director of Techstars Austin, Author of the book Sell More, Faster and Coauthor of a new book and the reason we have him on today's a new book called Levers: The Framework for Building Repeatability into Your Business. Welcome Amos. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:01:01] Hey, thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:01:04] I'm excited to have you here too. You've been in this space of spinning up new ideas and helping companies get off the ground. You've got a new book coming out called Levers. And so, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about that and give some insight into what it takes to build a business. So maybe let's start off with what's this new book about, and we can go from there. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:01:25] What the book is and I should clarify it is, it's a book, but it is more a book that you do versus read. And that gives you a little sense of what it's about and the goal that my coauthors and I had when putting this together was, we're all investors and operators for many, many years.

And as we sort of looked around, and this is the stuff that we teach and profess to the companies we work with, and we realized that there wasn't really a great place, resource to go, accelerators included where the focus is on, what are the fundamental things you need to do to operationalize a business. How do you get it to repeatability? And how do you scale it? 

I like to say this is sort of like a recipe book. Like you open it up and follow the instructions and it doesn't guarantee you're going to get there, but it certainly will help you figure out the right ingredients so that you can have the recipe for the cake you're trying to bake. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:02:18] What I like about the book is the fact that it really does start at the very beginning. And I think a lot of startup founders take the startup journey. They see the big vision of where they want to go and that and they start 25 paces ahead of where they really are. And the book really starts off with who are you really trying to serve. What are you trying to build? And that, so maybe talk through that initial W Three methodology and your belief around that. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:02:42] So I think maybe just for the listeners to give context here, the book is a five-chapter book. Each chapter is dedicated to a piece of the overall framework. It's very intentional in the order that we have everything and the way that we see it makes most sense to think about building the business.

And I should also clarify that the framework absolutely works when you're sitting in the coffee shop and the writing an idea in the back of a napkin. And really where we focus our energy is working with founders that are a little further along than that. Usually there's some customers or some revenue. There's no repeatability in the business. 

And so our thought process is regardless of the business you're building, it all starts with really having a deep understanding of who you're serving. And who you're serving is who your customers ultimately are. And so, the, the W3 framework is a way to answer three fundamental questions, which are, you know, when I say them, everyone's like, yeah, of course these are the questions you need to answer. But getting to the right answer is the hard part. 

So, the three questions are who is your customer and what is the very specific and narrow definition of the customer that, you know will say yes, 100% of the time. That doesn't mean that your prospects will, that's not your entire tam. It's just like, what are the attributes of someone who, you know, will say yes, a hundred percent of the time.

That's the first W. The second W is what are they buying from you. Not what are you selling to them? And that's a really important, often subtle nuance. And you know, I think as you know, the reality is your potential customers. They don't care what you do. They only care what you do   for them.

And so, we just try to really get at that so that when you're talking to them, you can talk in the language that they understand. And then the final W, the third W is why are they buying it? What's the impact on the business? Have a clear understanding of what that is. And more importantly, or equally as important is how are they going to measure that impact? Because if they don't know, they won't know if there's an impact and they won't be a customer for very long. 

In the book, we also get at that there's two different parties that you need to understand the why from. There's the obvious one, which is the business why. But then there's also the individual buyer. What's their motivation and making sure that their motivations are aligned to.

So even if the business looks like the perfect customer for you, they might not be because of the kind of person they have in the role or the exact person they have in the roles. Understanding that deeply as important to getting at, figuring out who your customer is on a deep level. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:05:00] Yeah. Specifically, based on the business model too. Oftentimes you have multiple different stakeholders where you have to figure out what that why is for not only the user of the product, for example, but the buyer or the influencer, whatever the case may be. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:05:12] Yeah, you have to understand why they're going to care. If you're going to get them to understand why, what you're doing matters. Or conversely, to understand why maybe they're not actually the right customer for you right now, even if they look like it from the outside. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:05:23] Right. And then we could grow into it. But those early adopters are sometimes a little bit different than the ones that buy longer term. So you mentioned at Techstars, you tend to have companies that have thought through that a little bit more, and maybe they're in the early stages of developing that customer network and stuff. What's the next step? Where do startup founders typically get tripped up? Once they've started that business and have gotten a little bit of traction. 

Amos Schwartzfarb: [00:05:44] There's sort of two things that I see most often are the    operational trip ups. The first is the notion that they have product market fit literally years before they actually have it. And so, this goes around, figuring out who your W3 is, but saying like, okay, we've got a couple of customers, we've got a bunch of people that have said they would buy, ...

Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Sense and Respond, Lean UX, & Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about building a Culture of Innovation.  Key Ideas - Shifting from outputs to outcomes. - Changing incentives. - Find the person and team with the political capital to prove out the validity and scalability.  - Reward learning in a way that focuses on ideas that are likely to succeed.  - Incentivize learning and being transparent.  - Story telling and marketing of efforts. - Overcoming National Cultural Traits. - Language and ideas are universal, but hard to implement.  - Failure of the Corporate Innovation Lab. Create an innovation path.  For More Information For more information, check out Jeffgothelf.com.  If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 37 – Josh Seiden & Jeff Gothelf, authors of “Sense and Respond” Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres w/ Product Talk Ep. 103 – Andi Plantenberg on Entrepreneurial Capabilities in Teams Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get 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 HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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

Interview Transcript

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 with us on our second IO Live event is James Gill. James is the founder of GoSquared. Welcome to the show, James. 

James Gill: Hi, thanks for having me, Brian pleasure to be here. Looking forward to chatting. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you back on the show and regular listeners will know that we had a chat probably about a year ago when you were on the show. Talking about some of this no code stuff that was just popping up and that. And so, when we decided to go to a live event, I figured, Oh, I want to get James back in to talk about...a lot has happened in the last year or the last week. Exactly. Why don't you give the audience a little bit of background about your journey as a founder, a long time ago when you started GoSquared as a wee lad, as I like to say, and then we'll go from there.

James Gill: Thanks again, Brian, for having me. It’s crazy times. Sure, we've got a lot to dig into. Just as a bit of background on me, I'm one of the founders of a company called GoSquared. We're a software as a service business. We perhaps haven't taken the traditional route of a software business. We started the business, back when I was in school with two of my friends back when we were just wee teenagers.

So over 10 years ago, we'd been together running a company. We used to build websites together and stumbled into building software, and we really love it. And fast forward to today. Continue to be a self-sustaining profitable software business. We got thousands of small businesses that use our software all around the world. GoSquared as a platform is all about helping small businesses grow online. So, we help you with that full customer journey from acquiring leads at the top of the funnel through to engaging with them throughout their journey, and ultimately looking after them and keeping them happy as they continue to be customers of our customers.

We really love running a business. It's been a wild ride. There's so much to get into, but myself I'm pretty much a self-confessed like product geek. I love design. Obviously, there's a lot we can dig into in terms of software. We use GoSquared, and the lessons we've had since becoming an entirely remote team and trying to keep things running smoothly.  Happy to take whatever questions people have.

Brian Ardinger: Let's start there. You're in London right now? Talk a little bit about your team. And did you have an office? Were the people working remotely? How are you hanging in there? 

James Gill: First of all. Yeah, I think were hanging in there okay. Thanks, Brian. I hope you are too, in terms of how we operate. It's a weird one actually. When we were at school, we used to all work from home. We used to work from our family homes, you know, probably coding away in the early hours of the morning or in the night when we should have been doing homework, building things and working from home. And that was how we started building GoSquared back in the day.

And then as time went on, we became more of a proper business and gradually we moved to London and then we sort of centralized there and that's kind of the way we'd been until literally like a month or two ago. And we always had a team in London that was always when we had face to face, lots of benefits of that. But last year, one of the team. Well, he moved up to Scotland with his partner and he really pushed us to think like how do we operate with everyone in one office and one person in Scotland. And so, it started making us rethink quite a few things around how we communicated, how we operated. 

As 2019 went on we found it was working really well. And then we made our first hire from the outset. There was a remote employee and we brought in someone who is based in Costa Rica of all places. By the end of last year, we already had two people full time, remote employees, and he really taught us a lot about how to communicate, how to make sure people are, hopefully not left out of the loop, how to prioritize sort of asynchronous communication because Costa Rica, you've got a time zone issues too.

And so, we've kind of tried a lot of that stuff out and, but the rest of the team remained in the office. And then obviously with this all happening, as soon as things started getting serious, like we insisted on everyone working from home. We didn't want to take any risks. And, you know, all, any of us need really is a laptop to work from home. So as far as I'm concerned, as software businesses and SaaS businesses, like we are in no rush to get back to the office. Like we are very happy to be the last businesses returning to offices. The more we can stay out of public transport and mingling with the rest of the people. Like there's no urgency for us to be back. More than happy to chat more about like some of the stuff we've been doing more recently to make this work.

It's been a whole lot of stuff from tooling. Like we use Slack for team chat, but we also obsessively use great a tool called Notion for like internal documentation. We obviously use GoSquared to understand and communicate with our customers. There's been a bunch of lessons from that and also just process things as well like how we engage with the team. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about this no-code movement. You know, one of the things that how I found GoSquared is I'm not a technical cofounder, but I put a lot of stuff together and I cobble and hack together stuff. And I found GoSquared as a really easy way for me to take a lot of the marketing automation and specifically the chat robot. I put that onto my events and that, so I could have real time interactions with customers. So, talk about how you've seen the no-code movement come to bear. And how's that affecting your customer's ability to actually interact and do more stuff with their customers. 

James Gill:  I think it's an interesting one, I guess, adopting that term "no code" has made it a movement, but from my perspective, I've always viewed it as making stuff easier to do and use. And, and I think just fundamentally, like we're just continuously on this train towards enabling anyone to do what they need to do online and brew software. And so I think a lot of it could be replaced from like from code to no code to just stuff that was hard to do, that's now easy to do. From my perspective, I'm not a coder. I can tinkle around with HTML and CSS, but I'm all about design and how it looks, how it works. Whereas I've always been very fortunate to have co-founders that are now a team that can actually code and engineer and develop real hardcore software. It's always frustrated the hell out of me whenever I hit that block of like, not being able to do it, you know, if you need to write some Java script or whatever, and it makes engineers almost seemed like magi...

Derek Mauk is the senior innovation brand manager at Anheuser-Busch. In part 1 of his interview with Brian, he talked about their new project, Best Damn Brewing Company. Derek laid out how the new line was built using design thinking, lean startup, and startup engagements, all of which we'll hear more about in part 2. Follow @theiosummit for updates on the Inside Outside Innovation Summit in June and get your ticket at theiosummit.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

In this episode, Brian Ardinger talks with Doug Branson about his new book The Future of Tech is Women: How to Achieve Gender Diversity.  Brian and Doug start the conversation by looking at trends in the market. Doug outlines the history of women in senior corporate positions. Of the 70 women that have been CEOs of publicly held companies, 70% have MBAs. Of the 27 women that have held exec positions in IT companies (out of 600), two have STEM backgrounds and 25 have business or law backgrounds. Doug believes the current emphasis on STEM for women produces lopsided experience. It won’t take women higher in the company. They also need business and marketing backgrounds. The IT industry, Doug suggests, is the worst of all industries for representing females. In Silicon Valley, the men they bring in, to fill the middle-level ranks using H1B visas, crowds women and minorities out and prevents them from rising in these environments.  Doug’s book, The Future of Tech is Women, is about how industries can generally improve diversity. There’s been little to no emphasis on what corporations can do and lots of emphasis on how women can change what they are doing. Doug recommends 15 ideas that companies can try. He says individuals can also offer earlier and equal treatment of girls, especially exposure to computers, and suggests there are good arguments for single-sex education. We also need an awareness of the nerd and geek phenomenon that happens as teens to prevent girls from getting involved in computers. When looking from a global perspective, diversity and corporate governance in the US is a back-burner issue. In Asia and Europe, it’s a very front burner issue. Europe has focused on quota laws which has worked in some countries, while women have made no headway in Japan.  Doug disagrees with some of Sheryl Sandberg’s advice in her book Lean In. He says women won’t have 11 different positions climbing the corporate ladder, but rather 3.3 positions on the way to CEO. Also mentoring programs rarely work for women to advance through companies. Australia is now trying mentoring + sponsorship to place women on executive boards there.  What should corporations be implementing? Address work life issues and support women for child birth and rearing without hurting their career. It’s statistically insignificant for a women to take off two years during a working life. Some companies are supporting women this way. Other companies are using a structured search, where they include and have an interview with a minority member. The most important thing for companies is to have this idea of dignity, respect and equality for everyone.  Things are getting better for women. Half of law and medical schools are female, and 40% of MBA programs are women. Sometimes Doug advises women to go where women aren’t, like the Oll and Gas, Ag and Utilies businesses. These industries all have females leaders.  On the other side of the coin, things haven’t changed for women. Those in dominant positions in tech are choosing people that look like them and that excludes women.  If you are interested exploring more of these ideas with Doug, you can contact him at branson@pitt.edu or order his book The Future of Tech Is Female at Amazon or NYU Press. If you are interested in learning more about women in technology and HR trends, check out Inside Outside Innovation Ep. 97 China Gorman on HR trends GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get 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 GLIDR This episode is sponsored by GLIDR. GLIDR software helps you validate that you’re going to market with products and business models that drive real value. Check them out a...

Sean Sheppard is the founder of GrowthX. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Sean discuss the impact of COVID on the startup and investment environment, Silicon Valley, and elsewhere, trends we're seeing in the world of no code, and ways that startups can generate revenue and adapt in this challenging environment. 

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

Interview Transcript

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 Sean Sheppard. He is the founder of GrowthX. And for long time listeners, you may have heard and met Sean before. He was actually on Episode 14, I believe, back in 2016 so welcome back, Sean. 

Sean Sheppard: Hey, thanks Brian. I had no idea. I was so early. 

Brian Ardinger: We're recording this in April, and this is our birthday week for inside Outside, and we're five years into this podcasting scene, so it's been kind of crazy, but it's been fun to do all these shows.

Sean Sheppard: Thanks. I can't believe it's been five years since I came there to do that talk and sat in your studio. Right? 

Brian Ardinger: That's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you back on. Probably a lot has changed with GrowthX and we want to talk about that. Also want to talk about now that we're in the Corona virus disruption, I wanted to get your insights into what's going on in the Valley, what's going on in startups and get some feedback there. Maybe we start by telling the audience more about what GrowthX is and where you are in the scene. 

Sean Sheppard: We started about seven years ago as a group of serial entrepreneurs turned investors, turned frustrated investors, because our companies weren't succeeding, not because they couldn't build products, but because they didn't know how to build markets. And we set about trying to solve that problem for ourselves, and we built a proprietary framework for helping our companies find product market fit. It was exclusive only to the companies that we invested in, but it became quite successful and very popular. And so we started to share it with the rest of the world.

And now we licensed that, and I spend most of my time when I'm not in quarantine, traveling the world, working with governments and companies and countries and incubators and accelerators, on how to incorporate product market fit thinking and programming and execution into their support systems for their startup communities.

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about how the world has changed in the last four, five, six weeks, specifically around what you're seeing in the startup scene. Even what you're seeing from corporate innovators that you work with. What's the general consensus of what's happening? Where the holes that we need to be plugging, that kind of stuff.

Sean Sheppard: Obviously, it's an unprecedented and interesting time for anybody who's in our generation and certainly in our lives. I've been through many economic crashes. I go back to 87'. I remember that one. I remember the dot com boom and bust, 9/11 certainly, and then the 2008 crash. This one feels much more like the 9/11 experience.

And by that, I mean it certainly does feel much more like war time, you know, we do have this enemy that we're, we're dealing with. Obviously, it's not one we can see, but it's there and I think it's going to change behaviors on a global scale. The degree to which those behaviors will change and the permanence of that change and when that change starts to normalize is yet to be determined.

You can watch the news all day long. Watch people predict the future. But like a smart man once told me, if you want to know the relevance of the news, just watch seven-day old news, and you'll find out just how unimportant it is. But the point is that we don't know, but we don't know yet about that. I do believe that there is going to be some measure of behavioral change.

Like the way we have security measures post 9/11 that aren't going away, and over time have been relaxed, but they're there to stay. I think we're going to have similar security measures, for our health, that will be here to stay, and then there will be certain things and behaviors that we will all change, whether it's less people shaking hands and hugging, which to me is very sad because I think the need to connect basic human need that we all want, need, and desire. I think just for our own physical and mental and spiritual health. But other things like working from home. The digital transformation that everybody has been talking about that's been coming for years and years and years. I think it's going to be dramatically accelerated. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think you're right. It's not that it wasn't seen or a lot of it wasn't seen disrupting education, disrupting healthcare, disrupting all these industries that we've talked about, but a lot of us, what we talked about in the past, it's focused on like the technology being that core driver. And I think the virus just expediated that conversation and forced a lot of those folks to change faster than they even were going to have to, given the circumstances going around. So, I'm not sure that necessarily we would have been facing these things in the future, just this virus has accelerated the impact. 

Sean Sheppard: Yeah. So, a big part of GrowthX family of companies is our corporate business, which works on helping corporations commercialize new innovations, bring great startup technology into their environments, invest in the startup community, things like that. And when I'm having conversations with our corporate community, and partners, they're all number one in triage mode right now. Period.  End of story. They're just trying to deal with the current situation.

That's number one and number two is those that are starting to actually see some stabilization around that are starting to recognize that there is more productivity than they thought, in their distributed workforce, than they thought would be there. In fact, two of the world's largest banks. I have very good friends and partners in the community that are at the C suite. Have gone through this triage mode, are trying to manage the mindset and mental wellbeing of their workforce, while creating this distributed work from home environment. And they're seeing that productivity isn't waining. So now they're rethinking their whole footprint. Like, why do I need some super expensive tower in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago or London when most of the people that I'm talking to are out meeting with customers half the time. They're 50% travel anyway.

Do I need all this space? What does that future look like for them? We're already seeing security concerns with Zoom. But they're having those conversations about, all right, now that we've sort of standardized at least sketch a patchwo...

Part one of a two-part interview with Daniele Dondi, the co-founder of the ING Innovation Studio. Daniele wrote an article titled, "Four Controversial Learnings After Setting Up a Corporate Accelerator." He discussed some of the less-talked about issues that arise in corporate innovation, many of which are absolutely vital to address for the accelerator to be successful. Today, Brian and Josh sat down with Daniele to talk about the specific "controversial learnings" regarding the dynamics of external and internal teams and the environment and timing necessary for the teams to succeed. Check back next week (or subscribe!) to listen to part two of this interview which will focus on crucial, but usually ignored, realizations about validation and sponsors in corporate innovation. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Barry O’Reilly is the Author of Unlearn: Let Go of Past Success to Achieve Extraordinary Results and Lean Enterprise: How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale. He and Brian Ardinger discuss creating a culture of experimentation in enterprises and seeing everything as an assumption. 

Barry came to the U.S. originally from Ireland on a student visa and worked at City Search “putting people on the Internet.” He soon joined a mobile games development company and created a popular game called Wireless Pets. Soon large corporations started calling asking the company to build games. This caused Barry to develop an experimental mindset.

Soon Barry moved to Australia to build next-gen content for E-learning in Southeast Asia. Game design and game theory is teaching new skills in safe environment. It allows for rapid experimentation and behavior. Then Barry joined a consultancy in London called ThoughtWorks. They were pioneers in Agile software development where he worked with companies to reinvent portfolio management and how to fund and test ideas. 

Barry’s first book, Lean Enterprise, highlights how to create experimentation in enterprises. Amazon does this well because they have a culture that makes experimentation cheap and fast. They are able to gather better data and are unlearning existing beliefs and learning new ones that can help them break through and innovate.   

In his new book, Unlearn, Barry says people recognize that we always have to be learning, but it’s tough to learn new stuff. The limiting factor is the ability to unlearn behavior especially when it’s made you successful. Letting go and moving away from things that limit us, like outdated info. Barry highlights the most bureaucratic regulated companies in his book and describes how these people are making amazing changes. 

Barry also hosts Exec Camp, where execs leave their businesses for up to 8 weeks to launch new businesses to disrupt their existing companies. It’s like an accelerator for senior leaders. They learn and unlearn new things about themselves. For example, the International Airlines Group came to Exec Camp, to launch six new ideas to disrupt the airline industry. They tested ideas with customers and had to unlearn the behavior of pushing ideas on customers. They soon began to see everything as an assumption. 

We’re conditioned to believe that the way we solve a customer problem is the only way to do it. Tech changes how to solve problems. Startups are able to start with a blank set of assumptions. Individuals get disrupted not companies. If you are adapting your features and behaviors, you won’t be disrupted. May need to shift your tactics or beliefs. 

FOR MORE INFO

To find out more, go to Barryoreilly.com on Twitter @BarryOReilly. You can also find his book on Amazon.

If you liked this podcast, try Ep 99 Ryan Jacoby with Machine, Ep 43 Ash Maurya, Author of Scaling Lean, and Ep. 20 Lisa Kay Solomon with Design a Better Business

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with April Rinne, author of Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change. April and I talk about what it takes to thrive in a world of constant change and uncertainty and explore some of the skills and tactics you can use to better prepare yourself and your organization for a world of flux.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with April Rinne, Author of Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is April Rinne. She is the author of a new book coming out called Flux: Eight Superpowers for Thriving in Change. Welcome April. 

April Rinne: Thank you, Brian. Glad to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm super excited to have you on the show. When I got a preview copy of the book, I started going through it and it's like, ah, this resonates with everything that I've been talking about, and our audience has been talking about. This whole idea that the world is changing. I think we fundamentally or theoretically understood that 18 months ago, but now every individual has felt that we are in flux.

So, this is an amazing book. You start off the book with a gut-wrenching story that gives you immediate insights into what's required to live in a world of flux. And I don't know if you can share that story and maybe its impact on your life and your career and how you got to this place. 

April Rinne: Yeah. Sure. So, it's interesting. Just picking up on what you just said, which is I was actually working on this book for a long time. Long before the pandemic or lockdown. I like to say that the book itself was about three years in the actual writing, but it was more than three decades or close to three decades in the making. And that relates to my earlier story. 

But it is kind of interesting where over the last 12 to 18 months, people are like, oh, world in flux, you know, welcome to my life. But I'm sort of looking at this saying, Hm, there was a lot of flux before and there's going to be a lot more moving forward. 

But my entry into a world in flux or what I, what I sometimes call like my baptism. But my baptism into flux happened more than 25 years ago. I was in college, and I was a junior and I was studying overseas, and I'd had this kind of life expanding mind expanding year.

And just as it was wrapping up, I received a phone call and basically at age 20, both my parents were killed in a car accident. And that was that moment where whatever you think your future is going to be, whatever you think the world has in store for you. However you think the world works, like it just all changed.

You know, I would not have imagined back then that I would write a book about this sense of like, what do you do when you just can't control constant change. But that's when the seed was really planted. 

Brian Ardinger: Whether it's the loss of a parent or a major job change or a pandemic. A lot of folks are in that space right now. Like they're trying to understand what I thought the world was going to be is different. So, I think the book helps outline some of the things you can think about or some different ways to approach it. So, tell me a little bit about the book and why a person should pick it up. 

April Rinne: Yeah, absolutely. And you really nailed it. That sense of like, that was my version, but everyone has today I believe their own version. And what's key is the future is not more certainty. It's not more stability. The future is more uncertainty, more change, more flop, and are we really ready for it? And so the crux of the book is exactly that. 

That's sense of, you know, on the whole humans, we tend to love change that we opt into. You know, exactly. But we tend to really, really struggle with change we don't. The unexpected change. The change that waylays you. The change that is unwelcome. And yet that's the world we live in today. There's more, not less of that. 

And so, the fundamental premise of Flux the book is that in a world in constant change, we need to radically reshape our relationship to change from the inside out. I can add. In order to have a healthy and productive outlook. So, we're good at a slice of change, but we're really, really bad at a big chunk of it. 

This is where I get excited because also individually, this plays out. Organizationally, this plays out. And societally this plays out. So that's the basic punchline of the book, but the eight superpowers are the kind of how to. 

Brian Ardinger: Talk us through, like, how did you come up with those eight and maybe an overview of those. 

April Rinne: Sure. This is one of my favorite framing devices, which is, you know, Flux is both a noun and a verb. As a noun it means constant change. I think we all kinda get that. It's also a verb and as a verb, it means to learn to become fluid. 

So, the way I like to put it as the world is in flux, and we need to learn how to flux. To become fluid in our relating to all kinds of change. And so, I'll be really candid. The Eight Flux Superpowers evolved through a lot of hard work and thinking and post-its and reframing and structuring, you know, all of that.

And I will admit now, you know, the book's been written for some time. It's obviously in the publication process. I haven't yet found the ninth one. So, I feel pretty good about that right now. 

But in short, the eight flux super powers, the first one is run slower. The second is see what's invisible. The third is get lost. The fourth is start with trust. The fifth is know you're enough. The sixth is create your portfolio career. The seventh is be all the more human and the eighth, one of the more provocative, although they're all provocative I think in some way. The eighth is let go of the future. 

Each of those kind of relates to different themes, you know, run slower is a lot about anxiety and burnout and so forth. And start with trust is obviously about trust. And letting go of the future is not about giving up or failing. It's actually about our relationship to control. So there's a lot more packed in each of those, but that's a quick summary. 

Brian Ardinger: Absolutely. The first one you start off with in the book is run slower. And I think a lot of people, when you talk about innovation, and you see what's out there in the press and that everybody talks about acceleration and speed of change and that. And the obvious antidote people think of is well, I've got to run faster. I've got to go, go faster and that. So, it's kind of a contradictory approach to that. So, talk about what you mean by run slower and let's unpack that a little bit. 

April Rinne: Landing on this particular superpower did result from a range of sources. But one of which was my many, many years as an advisor to companies, many of them were startups. But also, governments and think tanks and nonprofits. Organizations ...

In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Gleb Tsipursky, Author of Never Go With Your Gut: How Pioneering Leaders Make the Best Decisions and Avoid Business Disasters (Avoid Terrible Advice, Cognitive Biases, and Poor Decisions). They discuss bad business decisions, why they go wrong, emotions impacting decision making, making best case plans, iterative planning, great leaders, and high-impact shortcuts

Interview Transcript (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io.)

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

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Gleb Tsipursky, he is a cognitive neuroscientist, an expert on behavioral economics and decision making. He runs a company called Disaster Avoidance Experts. He's worked with companies like Aflac and IBM and Honda, Wells Fargo, and many, many others. Welcome to the show Gleb. 

Gleb Tsipursky: Thank you so much for having me on, Brian. It's a pleasure. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on because you've got a brand-new book out called Never go with your gut: How pioneering leaders make the best decisions and avoid business disasters, and it's also very pertinent to our audience. This whole world of innovation and how do you make decisions in a world that's constantly changing. Let's start off with a little bit of background about yourself. 

Gleb Tsipursky: I was fascinated by how my parents made some bad decisions with each other, and it got me fascinated in decision making. You know, my dad, he was a real estate agent, so he had the variable income and he hid some money from my mom and bought a house on the side. And when she found out she was really pissed. And that led to a big blowout fight, which led to them separating for a while and then they got back together. But you can never really rebuild the trust again. And then when I was growing older, I came of age. In 1999 is when I was 18 and all the dotcoms were booming. WebVan, Pets.com and so on. All of these businesses, which. By the time I was 21 they all went bust. And that was really frustrating for me as someone who was observing it and seeing all these people who are supposedly smart, wealthy people, investing ordinary citizens, you know, people whose retirement went down the drains when things went bust. And I'm someone who really cares about people. I have utilitarian values. I want the most good for the most number. And so that's really motivated me to study decision making. What causes people to make bad decisions. What caused them to make good decisions and how we as individuals, leaders, investors, innovators, can make better decisions going forward. Why Decisions Go Wrong

Brian Ardinger: Why do decisions go wrong? 

Gleb Tsipursky: The most important reason why decisions go wrong is that we don't notice how our emotions influence our decisions. The research on this topic and cognitive neuroscience shows that our emotions drive about 80 to 90% of our decision making, and we don't realize how much we're driven by our emotions.  People make their decisions often based on their best reactions. They feel something is right and therefore they do it. They feel this information is true and therefore they believe it. 

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sonja Gittens Ottley.  She's head of diversity and inclusion at Asana, one of the best work management platforms out there.  Recently, Asana has been highlighted in Fortune as the number one best small and medium-sized company to work for in San Francisco. And Sonja and I talk about diversity inclusion within Asana, how they hire, and some of the trends that she's seeing in the world of technology. Let's get started. 

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.io. a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's 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 with me is Sonja Gittens Ottley, she is the head of diversity and inclusion at the company Asana.  Welcome to the show Sonja. 

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Thank you so much, Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm super glad to have you on the show. You're coming from a company called Asana. If you're involved in the startup world, and have seen the growth of what you're doing, it's pretty amazing. It's a work management platform that helps teams collaborate. Asana was highlighted in Fortune as the number one best small and medium-sized company to work for in San Francisco. That's no small feat, so congratulations on that.  Sonja, let's talk a little bit about Asana and what you do at that company. 

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Sure. I've been at Asana for four years. And during that time we've grown from a company just about 150 when I started, to over 700 people across many different countries. And one of the things that really drew me to Asana and has really made me stay at Asana is we've consistently, and from the start, been really intentional about diversity and inclusion. Approaching it in the way that we would any other business strategy. We recognize it as something that not only is the right thing to do, but it's also something that brings value to our business and to our workplace. Meaning our teams, our employees, everyone. We're really focused on creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive.

If you do that, and if you are approaching diversity and inclusion as an aspect of your culture, you're not only able to recruit top-quality employees who come from a variety of backgrounds, you're really ultimately able to retain your employees. That is one of the things that we've always been focused on, and it's something that as we continue to grow, we've really scaled in a way that makes sense for us as a company.

Brian Ardinger: It sounds like Asana has had that DNA or that desire from the beginning. How does a company, that it's leadership is maybe looking at this as a way to improve theirselves? How can they start that process of making diversity and inclusion a more impactful part of the business. 

Sonja Gittens Ottley: Part of it is really recognizing that culture and having a culture that is inclusive, ultimately benefits your company. If you think of culture as just something that's add on or something that just happens. As you build your business, you're not going to be doing this well. If you think about culture in a different way, which is that it allows you to achieve what you're trying to do as a business, your missions and your goals, and you recognize I need to have values that support that mission and that goal. How I want my company and my employees to show up and I think about values in a really intentional way. I don't think about values as something that, hmm, it might be nice to have this as a value. It's also being really intentional about what are the things that we absolutely are going to value as a company.

Then you're able to think about, well, what are the programs and policies that need to be in place to support that? And some of it are really foundational. Thinking about having a policy that creates an inclusive workplace means that you have an anti-harassment  policy. You're thinking about the fact that you could have people of many different agendas, so you need to think about a parental leave policy. You need to be thinking about policies that support all of the work that you're doing and the environment that you're trying to create. And also give signals to your employees, these are things that we stand for as well as these are things that we will not stand for right. So part of it is having that culture built in and having policies that flow from that.

Alongside that is really thinking about how are you training your managers who in addition to trying to figure out how they're having impact and making their teams grow, how are you training them to build and to empower inclusive teams? How will you give them skills that they probably have not picked up before? Managers do not come...As soon as they get appointed manager, they do not then magically get a set of skills. They have to be trained. So you have to really empower them to do that work well. 

And then alongside that is this piece around how are you essentially hiring and building a diverse team? How are you thinking about recruiting? How are you assessing people? How are you interviewing people and what are the policies in place that really look at creating a fair and level playing field? So thinking about it. Alongside the lines of not just recruiting and not just culture and not just policies, but really thinking about it along a really integrated model is ultimately how a company begins to have diversity and inclusion become a core part of their company and their company's DNA.

Brian Ardinger: How can a company get started? Is it first taking a level stock of the diversity that they have within the organization already? Does it start with hiring? Does it start at upper management defining those values in that? What are some of the starting places that companies can look at to start building this?

Sonja Gittens Ottley: It's really a combination of all of those things. To me, it's a Yes and. First off, what does our company even look like? Who's here? Who are the people that exist in our neighborhood, essentially? So it's really taking a stock of what are our numbers. What's our demographics? Some companies have done this through a survey of employees at Asana we did it through our HRIS where people could self-report how they identified, and we gave them a lot of different ways that they can identify in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, citizenship, a number of different ways, and they self report to that information. That's one aspect of it. So you get a sense of who exists. But the other, and just as important part is really understanding, well how do you feel. Do you feel as though you belong? Do you feel as though you have a voice? Do you have a sense of psychological safety. That gets into what's our baseline at our company around that sense of belonging and inclusion?

Those two bits of data really allow you to understand both qualitatively as well as quantitatively, where you are as a company and then decide, well, what are the next steps. The...

Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Ward Sandler, cofounder of MemberSpace, a company that helps turn any part of a website into members-only. They talk about the no-code movement, what it takes to build a remote workforce, and all things entrepreneurship.

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

To read the full transcript of this interview go to insideoutside.io.

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me this week is Ward Sandler. Ward is the co-founder of MemberSpace. Welcome to the show Ward. 

Ward Sandler: Hey Brian, thanks for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the board. I actually got connected with you because I had written a blog post about the whole no-code movement and how there really are no more excuses that people can have about, I can't find developers. I can't find different ways to build my stuff. And I mentioned MemberSpace as one of those no code movement platforms out there that's making this democratization of innovation a little bit easier. I want to have you on the podcast to talk about this whole no-code movement. 

Ward Sandler: We started MemberSpace before “no code” or #nocode was like really a thing. We've been around since 2015 and no code I'd say has come up more in like the last two years really. But that being said, we've always been really focused on non-technical entrepreneurs. Especially for what our software does, we allow you to turn your website, any part of your website into members only in a few clicks. Like that's what we do. And for a lot of folks, that's what they want, but they don't want the headache of having to hire a developer, dig into code or anything like that. So we've been quote unquote no code from the jump. And that's always been an ethos of ours, is we want to make this really easy for anyone to use. 

Brian Ardinger: So tell me a little bit about MemberSpace and how did it get started and your journey as an entrepreneur. 

Ward Sandler: We used to be a consulting company. We did everything from custom software or to eCommerce sites. Then we narrowed in on Squarespace just building, designing, and supporting Squarespace websites. Funnily enough, it was very specific, but it was a huge need. Lot of volume of customers. And from there we found that one of the biggest requested features was membership because Squarespace doesn't have it out of the box. So people wanted to have member only pages on their Squarespace site. We figured that out by visiting the Squarespace forum and sorting the list by most voted. And that was like one of the top features. And we read through the comments and basically realized, you know, there's no real good solution for that. So we built a real quick MVP in like a month or two launch that had great feedback and then kept iterating and adding features. And it's taken off since then and we've expanded outside of Squarespace. Now we're available on basically any website.

To read the full transcript of this interview go to insideoutside.io.

For More Information

• memberspace.com - Link to the podcast in resource section
• @wardsandler or @memberspace

If you want to learn more about the Inside Outside team, content, or services, check out insideoutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

As one of Inside Outside's most listened to podcasts of 2019, enjoy our interview with Jeff Gothelf. It was originally published on July 16, 2019.   Jeff Gothelf, Co-Author of Lean UX, Sense & Respond, and Lean vs Agile vs Design Thinking talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, about building a culture of innovation. 

Key Ideas
- Shifting from outputs to outcomes.
- Changing incentives.
- Find the person and team with the political capital to prove out the validity and scalability. 
- Reward learning in a way that focuses on ideas that are likely to succeed. 
- Incentivize learning and being transparent. 
- Story telling and marketing of efforts.
- Overcoming national cultural traits.
- Language and ideas are universal, but hard to implement. 
- Failure of the Corporate Innovation Lab. Create an innovation path. 

For More Information

For more information, check out Jeffgothelf.com. 

If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy:

Ep. 37 – Josh Seiden & Jeff Gothelf, authors of “Sense and Respond”
Ep. 90 – Teresa Torres w/ Product Talk Ep. 103 – Andi Plantenberg on Entrepreneurial Capabilities in Teams
Ep. 140 – Melissa Perri, Escaping the Build Trap Author and Produx Labs CEO

Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io.   You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get 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 at Insideoutside.io

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Atholl Duncan, author of Leaders in Lockdown: Inside Stories of COVID-19 and the New World of Business. We talk about his interviews with senior executives from around the world during the first 100 days of lockdown and what he learned about crisis management, leadership development, and what's next in the post COVID hybrid world. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with Atholl Duncan, Author of Leaders in Lockdown

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 Atholl Duncan. He is author of Leaders in Lockdown: Inside Stories of COVID-19 and the New World of Business. Welcome to the show. 

Atholl Duncan: Thank you. It's great to be here and great to be a guest of yours. I'm looking forward to chatting about innovation and how we lead out of lock down Brian. Cause that's the question that everyone's trying to get their heads around there.

Brian Ardinger: We have gone through disruption and I think people understand a little bit what that means. You have written this book. You spoke to 28 senior executives around the world in the United States, Europe, Asia, during the first hundred days of lockdown, to understand and get their feedback on what we were going through when it comes to disruption. So maybe we'll start with the book, give us a little hint and insights into what it's all about and what did you learn from it? 

Atholl Duncan: The way the book came about was in March of 2020, I sit on the boards of various businesses. And all of these businesses were in some state of jeopardy and certainly in a state of crisis. And I was pretty stressed by the whole situation. I think as most people were. And I decided that there was what I thought was a crossroads and history. Certainly, a crossroads, probably the defining moments of this century. 

And I wanted to capture them. So, I followed 28 business leaders, people who, whose businesses were spread from Asia to Europe, to UK, and many leaders in the US. And really to answer a couple of questions from them. How were they leading through the pandemic? And how did they think the world would change because of what we've all been through. 

Brian Ardinger: When you reached out to these leaders, what was the initial kind of feedback that you got? Was it nervousness? Was it excitement? What kind of what were the emotions that people were going through and specifically, how did they adapt to that sudden disruption? 

Atholl Duncan: I got remarkable access because these people were locked down in their kitchens. And it was like they'd witnessed some predictably dramatic accident because they just wanted to share with someone. They wanted to talk to someone about what was happening to their businesses, which were getting pretty smashed up at the time.

So, they opened their Zooms to me. And they talked to me. They talked from the heart and they talked about how they hoped the world would change. And that the remarkable thing was that many of these people whose businesses, which they had built themselves over many years, lying, smashed round  about them.

They remained remarkably humble and remarkably steady in their thoughts. But yeah, they knew this was a major moment. So, you know, even a year ago we knew this was a pretty significant moment. And the general message was that even back then, was this is a time to reset. Is a time to reset how we run our businesses and is a time to reset how we run society.

Brian Ardinger: So, in the book and through the conversations you defined, I think seven core themes that came out through that. Can you walk the audience through a little bit about what are those core themes that you uncovered? And let's talk a little bit about each one of them. 

Atholl Duncan: Yeah. So, seven major themes. The first theme was the new age of purpose. And the feeling as one business leader said to me, that purpose was on steroids at the peak of the crisis. And that purpose now was no longer just words that you emblazoned on a website. It was now something that your employees, your customers and your investors would demand was delivered through action. And not just words. 

The second theme was the new world of work. Because we saw this remarkable thing that, you know, most people talk about, regarding Covid, which was the move to homeworking. And you know, one of the business leaders that I've talked to is a very senior executive at Tata, which is based in India. They moved 600,000 people to homeworking. Even 6,000 is big Brian, but this is 600,000 people. And you know, many, many major corporations were doing the same thing all around the world. 

As a crisis went on, people have realized that the new world of work was not just about home or remote or hybrid or flexible. We were really seeing defined probably a new, psychological relationship between the employer and the employee.

Third theme was widening inequality. Because the virus widened inequality in so many ways. Obviously, it raised the Black Lives Matter, raised diversity and inclusion in a way that we hadn't seen before, but also homeschooling raised equality. The people who had access to digital. 

Homeworking raised in equality in terms of it was very comfortable for some people to be working from their homes. But those who had dysfunctional homes are in multi person homes, difficult for them. 

And then the vaccine. You know, we already see that there's 130 countries around the world, which haven't delivered one jab of the vaccine. 95% of the vaccines have been delivered in the richest countries in the world. So, there's this really quite a defining moment. Roundabout, the widening inequality gap. 

Fourth theme was about global cooperation, because at that moment when we hope that our politicians would be cooperating across global boundaries, they were doing, they were falling out. And I think generally, wherever you are in the world, we were pretty well let down by our politicians. Whether you were in Asia, Europe, or the U S it was a pretty, sorry ceiling. 

You actually saw large corporations, doing far better at global cooperation. If you look at the pharmas that developed the vaccines. If you look at the big tech companies who came together to try and work out track and trace. 

Next thing was resilience. Not just personal resilience, but you know, when the crisis comes, cash is king financial resilience is everything. And the resilience of the operations of these large corporations. 

Sixth theme was all about resetting the supply chain. Particularly if we're in manufacturing, we couldn't get stuff anymore. Borders were closed and we still see, you know, big shortages and computer chips, big shortage use in raw materials, and the prices of raw materials going up.

So, this really brought the global supply chain to a shuttering halt. And I think a major cause to rethink 40 years of decisions that were made on productivity an...

In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Gregg Garrett, Managing Director of CGS and co-author of Competing in the Connecting World: The Future of Your Disruptive Industry is Already Here. They discuss innovation both inside and outside, disruptive forces, ecosystem commanders, maturing models, and leadership skills.

Interview Transcript  (to read the transcript go to insideoutside.io)

Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. I want to welcome again, Greg Garrett. He is the MD at CGS advisors. He's a coauthor of a new book called Competing in the Connecting World: The Future of Your Disruptive Industry is Already Here. Welcome back, Greg, to the show. 

Gregg Garrett: Hey Brian. Thanks for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: It's been a couple of years since we talked last. Obviously that's a long time in this world of innovation, so I want to get you back on to talk about some of the things that you've been doing. The new book that you've got out called Competing in the Connecting world. Let's start there. Give the audience a little background, what you were doing and then how you got to this book. 

Gregg Garrett: Yeah, so the book is a culmination of experience over probably decades really, but about six years ago. I started teaching a course at a university here in Michigan called Oakland University, and they asked me to develop this course and we called it competing in the connecting world because I was noisy in an advisory session one time and said, are we really preparing students and future leaders to compete in this connecting world, in this future world? Are we just doing more of the same? They said, well, we probably aren't, or we could do it differently. Could you help us to develop the course? Taught it for a few years. This is an MBA and graduate engineering course and realize there's really very little written. A lot in the media world and article world, but very little written formally around it. So my coauthor, Dr. Warren Ritchie and I grabbed a lot of what we were teaching in the classroom, a little bit while we were speaking a publicly, and also what we've been consulting on, living ourselves around digital and transformation in general, and put it in a book.

Brian Ardinger: So let's unpack that a little bit and give our audience a background about yourself. You've done a lot of time in Fortune 100 world as an executive. You've done a lot of consulting and investing in that. So you've seen a lot from both sides of the puzzle, both inside organizations and outside of organizations. What made you decide that this was a topic that you wanted to dig into and and what have you learned? 

Gregg Garrett: Yeah, so you've got the history right. Bunch of years with large firms, and then the last nine years being a very small firm, 20 person boutique transformation organization, working back with some of those large firms, but then also working with the medium size and scaling. And do a lot of mentoring inside of different accelerators and whatnot. So I've got one foot in each of those camps, the startup, the scale-up world, and then the large entity trying to transform world. 

To read the transcript or for more information, go to insideoutside.io 

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lorraine Marchand. Lorraine is the author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset. She and I discuss how innovation starts, how you can build your muscle of innovation through exploration and experimentation, and much more. Let's get started.

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

Interview Transcript with Lorraine Marchand, Author of The Innovation Mindset

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Lorraine Marchand. She is executive managing director of Merative, which is formerly IBM Watson Health. And she's author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry. Welcome to the show, Lorraine. 

Lorraine Marchand: Thank you, Brian. Really happy to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you. You have been in this space for a while. For the past three decades, you have been in product development, working with companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and Covance, and Cognizant. How did you get involved in the realm of innovation?

Lorraine Marchand: Well, it started when I was actually pretty young. I was reared by my dad, who was an inventor. And when I was growing up around the house, he would always challenge my brother and me, to find three solutions to every problem, usually problems that he would identify. And one summer morning, he really brought that point close to home. And he took us to a local diner called the Hot Shops Cafeteria in Wheaton, Maryland.

And our job was to determine what was slowing down table turnover. So we sat in the big red vinyl booths eating our breakfast of scrambled eggs and orange juice. And after three days of using our stopwatches and writing down notes, and even interviewing waitresses and bus boys, we determined that the culprit was sugar packets. People were spewing them all over the place. 

True to his tenant that we had to find three solutions we did. And we ended up taking one to an MVP, minimal viable prototype. And that was the sugar cube. And we ended up selling it to the Hot Shops cafeteria that summer, and pretty soon it was distributed throughout the Baltimore Washington area.

So early on, I learned that problem solving was fun and lucrative. And fast forward throughout my career, whether it was at the National Institutes of Health or Bristol Myers Squibb, or founding my own startups and the diagnostics and ophthalmology area, I found that I really did love this idea of being able to clearly define a problem, and then as my dad had taught me kind of systematically evaluate and choose solutions. 

And to me, the heart of the innovation mindset that I write about is an insatiable curiosity, a passion for problem solving, and embracing change. And so I have found myself, whether in large corporations or in startups, desiring to be that agent of change and bringing that problem solving methodology that I learned so early at the age of 13 with me in all of my career endeavors. 

Brian Ardinger: I love that story and I love, you have this in the book that one of the key mindset essential steps is this innovation starts with at least three ideas. Can you talk a little bit more about why it takes more than one idea to get something going and that process? 

Lorraine Marchand: You know, I like to say that first of all, your first two ideas, one of them is probably a solution that you've already been mulling over before you even confirmed that you had a problem. Because I find that we, as human beings, love to go into solutioning mode before we've really carefully defined the problem. 

So, if you are making your way around a problem, you probably have a bias in terms of what one of the solutions is. The second solution is always to do nothing, right? The competition is always the default, the status quo, I'm not going to change.

So right there, you already have number one and two. So you have to be true to the problem solving discipline and this idea of brainstorming and coming up with the three solutions, because it could be that third one that is the winner. If you go a little bit beyond the three, I'm okay with that, but I don't allow my students or any of the individuals I coach to cheat and come up with fewer than three. That you can't do 

Brian Ardinger: That makes perfect sense. Like you said, you've been in this space for a long time and you've, you've helped create products, you've helped create companies and that. What are some of the biggest maybe obstacles or misconceptions that people have about innovation and starting this particular process.

Lorraine Marchand: I think a lot of people are intimidated that they think that innovation has to be at the hands of some of the quintessential greats like Edison and Jobs and Musk and Gates, etc. And so, the first thing I like to do is educate and inform individuals that not all forms of innovation are disruptive. They're not all big hunt. 

And it is absolutely honorable, and it could be your style of innovation to create incremental improvements. To do more renovation, retooling something for another type of use case. To be optimizing, which actually my story about the Hot Shops Cafeteria, truly if I'm honest about it, it's more about optimizing than truly innovating.

But I'm okay with that because like you, I'm very passionate about just encouraging more people to access the freedom, the excitement, the job satisfaction that comes from innovating. And I'm okay to use a broader set of terminology in order to attract more people to just find ways to get started. So that's the first thing. I think people are really put off by that. 

And then I think that a lot of innovators find that it's very difficult to do customer research. Where do I find the customer? How do I talk to them? Do they want to talk to me? How do I really write a question guide that doesn't bias them toward my solution? So that's one that is very difficult to do, and I find that a lot of individuals will gloss over it. 

You know, I, I say you have to talk to a hundred customers. And my students look at me with their eyes crossed going, I can't possibly do that. I can't even find five. And I say, well, how are you going to sell your product if you can only find five people to talk to about it? Okay. Right there.

 And then I would say the other area is pivot. I'm a real fan of pivoting you never fail. Some people will argue with me, but I like to say, you don't fail if you're constantly adjusting your strategy based on the data, based on the market dynamics, and you're moving in the direction where you keep learning and improving what you're doing and moving it closer to the customer. We don't fail, we pivot. But a lot of founders, fail to see the warning signs. That maybe things aren't taking off the way they thought. And so pivoting too late can be pretty dangerous. ...

Neil Soni is the author of The Startup Gold Mine: How to Tap the Hidden Innovation Agendas of Large Companies to Fund and Grow Your Business. Neil spent years with startups, focusing on the sales and marketing side, trying to sell into large organizations. He then moved to Estee Lauder, where he specialized in external innovation. After seeing both sides, Neil wanted to create a resource to help startups understand the corporate side and corporations to understand the startup side.

- - Neil Soni will be at the IO2022 Innovation Accelerated, Lincoln, NE - Sept 19-20. - -

Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Cofounder, spoke with Neil about how to succeed through corporate/startup collaboration.

Pitfalls of Corporate and Startup collaboration
 - Different timeframes
 - Size of deals
 
Incentive structures for partnerships
 - How comfortable is the corporate team in innovating? If comfortable, they’ll have a higher tolerance for misses. Look at the entire portfolio.
 - Companies that allow intrapreneurship, give employees new outlets to thrive.

Should you expose corporates to startups?
 - Inside large companies (10,000+) it’s an echo chamber. They only see direct competitors.
 - Need someone looking outside at competition. Expose the corporate team to new ways of startup thinking.
 - Startups also get exposure to see how their tech can apply to different domains.

In The Startup Gold Mine Book
 - Understand what is going on behind the scenes. What is your corporate counterpart doing?
 - How is your colleague rewarded or punished? Are they paid for the home run? Are they new to the company?
 - Corporations have been very interested in the book to shed light on the startup side.
 - Reduce the language barrier between corporates and startups.

To connect with Neil go to neilsoni.com or on Twitter at @therealneils. You can also get his book, The Startup Gold Mine on Amazon.

FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLS

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Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

Originally released April 2019

Tim Campos, former CIO of Facebook, is now founder and CEO of Woven, a startup tackling the world of calendaring. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder had a chance to talk with Tim about the future of innovation, how IT infrastructure has changed, what it's like to work in a high growth startup, and what it's like to rebuild a company from scratch.

Interview Transcript (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io )

Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tim Campos, the former CIO of Facebook and new entrepreneur with a company called Woven that is tackling the whole world of calendaring. We had a chance to talk about the future of innovation, how IT infrastructure has changed, what it's like to work in a high growth startup, and then what it's like to rebuild a company from scratch. Inside Outside innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of InsideOutside.IO. A provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today is Tim Campos. He is the former CIO at Facebook from 2010 to 2016 he was a VP of it at semiconductor company, KLA-Tencor, and he has recently jumped back into the startup scene with his own company called Woven.  Tim, welcome to the show. 

Tim Campos: Thanks for having me. I'm super excited to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on board because I think you can speak to a lot of the things that our audience is interested in hearing about.  Everything from startups to corporate innovation, and you seem to have played a role in a variety of those different types of spaces and are continuing to do so. Let's start in the Facebook world. How you got there and what's it like to work with a high-growth company when you have to double the productivity of employees when they're growing at 20 X growth rate. 

Tim Campos: It gets crazy enough just to double the number of employees.  And to do that time and time again every year. Yeah, so I got to Facebook. It was really a big culmination of a lot of aspects in my career.  When I started, I was an engineer, software engineer, and I've always loved technology and building.  I spent the first half of my career in software engineering and then got exposed to IT at a startup when I was working in a software as a service company. And that really taught me. Two things. One, what you build and what people use those different perspectives and technology as you do that. But also there's a business around technology and that's really what got me interested in information technology and how I became CIO. And ultimately that landed me at Facebook. But my life has very much been defined by building things that help make people more productive, help people get more stuff done and that taken care of steer through what I'm doing today with Woven mind startup as a productivity software company and this is what we exist to do, is help people spend time on what matters most. 

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io 

Lisa Kay Solomon knows that details matter. In this interview with Brian she highlights that much of the necessary skills for innovation aren't taught in typical educations and that top support is crucial for internal innovation to get momentum. Her book "Design a Better Business: New Tools, Skills, and Mindsets for Strategy and Innovation" gives practical advice for corporate innovators and includes dozens of case studies so that you're prepared for even the most finite aspect of your innovation process. Find a preview of her book at designabetterbusiness.com and continue the conversation on Twitter @lisakaysolomon. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Today’s show is the second part of our three part series from our live recorded session at SXSW. Our guests were founders and CEO’s from Target’s Techstars accelerator. Fernando Moncayo is a co-founder of Inspectorio, a service to streamline the process of inspection in a variety of verticals and to make the process more accountable and fair. He also shared insights about what it means to fail as an entrepreneur and how to avoid common pitfalls. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Steve Glaveski, Author of Time Rich: Do your Best Work, Live Your Best Life. Steve and I talk about the power of time management and what individuals and organizations can do to become smarter and more productive. Let's get started.

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

Interview Transcript with Steve Glaveski

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 Steve Glaveski.  He's the author of the new book Time Rich: Do your Best Work, Live Your Best Life. You may have seen and heard of Steve. He's been on the show before. He came out to the IO Summit a couple of years ago. And so we're super excited to have him back. All the way from down under, welcome back. 

Steve Glaveski: It's an absolute pleasure to be back on the program, Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, we're excited to have you back. You have become a prolific writer since last we've spoken. I think you've come out with a couple different books. Today we wanted to highlight the new one that you've got coming out called Time Rich. Before we get started, why don't you give the audience a little bit of background of what you've been doing the last couple of years, from starting Collective Campus and Division Accelerator, and now author of a couple different books.

Steve Glaveski: I think that's been somewhat part of the catalyst for writing this particular book, is that I did establish Collective Campus. That was about five years ago now. And we've gone on to incubate over a 100 startups that collectively raised about $30 million in that time. I've spun off a kid's entrepreneurship program called Lemonade Stand, which was initially a two-day workshop.

It is now a SAAS platform. So we've got clients in Singapore, in Honduras, Australia obviously, all over the world. And during the pandemic actually spun out a company called No Filter Media, which is effectively a podcast network, but also has articles and all that sort of stuff. I keep busy, but despite the fact that I have so many things going on, I tend to work maybe five to six hours a day, tops on average.

Now there are days where you go beyond that, but then there are also days where it might just be two or three hours. And given all the time that I've spent in the corporate world, working with large organizations, as well as entrepreneurs and startups, I did see a disconnect between how they were going about making decisions, how they were going about using their time, and the way I was doing things.

I figured that there was a book in this because the article I wrote for Harvard Business Review called the Case for the Six Hour Workday a couple of years ago, just absolutely blew up. And then my publisher came knocking as well and said, Hey, is there a book in this? 

Brian Ardinger: That's a good place to start. There's plenty of books out there about time management. And why do you think people are still getting tripped up when it comes to managing their time effectively? 

Steve Glaveski: I think a lot of it goes back to evolutionary biases, Brian. As human beings, we've basically evolved to conserve energy. At least our brains have, because tens of thousands of years ago on the African Savannah, you don't know when you're going to eat.

It was all about the three F's, you know, fight, flee, fornication. And you needed to conserve energy and that helped us back then, but now the way it shows up is actually detrimental to our work because we might sit down to our desks in the morning, and it's so much easier for us to do the easiest thing, which is jump onto LinkedIn, check out comments, get onto Twitter, check out email.

Get to inbox zero. Do anything on everything except the hard work, you know, commit to another meeting. What happens is you can fill your entire day, your entire week, your entire month with non-consequential activities, which make you feel quote unquote busy, but come the end of the day, you didn't really have anything to show for it.

So a big part of it is not the fact that people don't have access to tools. It's more so it starts with us and overriding some of that evolutionary programming. And the other side of the coin is really, the organizations that we work for. Because we can control certain things. But then there are certain things that we're bound to that we perhaps can only try and influence, and that can get in the way between us and our best selves.

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's an interesting world we're living in, obviously with COVID and everything else. Overnight organizations had to adapt to the brand new world of remote work and things like that. I'd love to get your take on some of the trends that you're seeing or what you saw maybe six months ago, versus what you're seeing now and how organizations have maybe adapted a new thought process on time and work management.

Steve Glaveski: Yeah, definitely. I think the pandemic, obviously as difficult as it has been for a lot of people has also been a reset switch, and it's forced us to reflect on our personal lives in ways we perhaps didn't previously, as well as our professional lives. When the pandemic hit and organizations of all shapes and sizes went remote, it seemed to be a matter of just taking what we did in the office and trying to replicate that online.

So instead of 50 to 60 physical interruptions a day. It was 50 to 60 interruptions on Slack, if not more, or Microsoft teams. And instead of having back to back meetings all day, it was back-to-back zoom calls. So we were effectively at what Matt Mullenweg call's level two in his five levels of remote work, just recreating the office online.

Whereas now I think the more progressive forward thinking late is out there and starting to actually think about how can we use this medium to our advantage, to get the most out of people and to also help the organization move forward. They're realizing that if we do move away from organizations built around real-time communication, towards more asynchronous communication, well, that has all sorts of benefits. 

Like if our organization is about responding, when it suits us, providing it in a timely basis, that then frees people up to cultivate more time for flow, because they're not constantly whacking moles all day, responding to Microsoft Teams messages in an instant emails within five minutes and all that sorts of stuff.

That also means that because they can cultivate more flow state, they can also design days as it best suits them, which helps them in terms of their work-life balance. Some people might have young kids, some people might have other things they want to commit to during the day, and they can do that with an asynchronous shift.

And the third piece is also that when you run that type of environmen...

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

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

Interview Transcription with Janice Fraser, Co-author of the new book, Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Janice Fraser. She's co-author of Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama: How to Reduce Stress and Make Extraordinary Progress Wherever You Lead. Welcome Janice.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 2018 Inside/Outside Innovation Summit is taking place May 29th-31st in the hub of the Silicon Prairie: Lincoln, Nebraska. With a $50K pitch contest and hundreds of corporate and startup attendees, this summit is the perfect opportunity for you to come together with like-minded individuals and get inspired and connected. As a taste of what's to come, today's show features a clip from Paul Singh's talk at the 2017 Summit where he talks about simultaneously living out of a trailer and transforming the trajectories of dozens of startups and cities across the U.S. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Paul Powers. Paul is the CEO and co-founder of Physna. They talk about innovation in the manufacturing space, 3-D data, trends Paul is seeing from the CES conference, and building a startup outside the Valley in Cincinnati, Ohio.

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

To read the interview transcript, go to insideoutside.io

Interview Transcript

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 Paul Powers. Paul is a Forbes 30 under 30, a graduate of Heidelberg University with a law degree.  He is an astronomy and astrophysics alumni at Harvard. He's a serial entrepreneur, and his most recent startup company is Physna, which he started in 2015. Welcome to the show, Paul. 

Paul Powers: Thank you. 

Brian Ardinger: You've got a pretty extraordinary background.  I wanted to have you on the show for a couple different reasons. One, because you're a young founder out there in the world building some interesting things.  Your company Physna is in the manufacturing space, and we haven't had a lot of folks on the show to talk about manufacturing innovation.  I thought it'd be a really good opportunity to start the conversation with, tell us a little bit about Physna and what does it do. 

Physna and 3-D Data

Paul Powers: So Physna is short for physical DNA. And what we do is we take three-dimensional data and we normalize that down into something that software can actually read. And we help to bridge the gap between software applications that are tech space of two dimensional, and the real world essentially, which is obviously physical and three-dimensional. We do that through a series of proprietary algorithms and we applied machine learning to our technology so that we can actually not only break down and comprehend what we're looking at, but also make predictions about how humans might classify that, that might be used for, how you might make it, what are my costs, how's my performance, certain situations, et cetera. The most common use cases for the technology are to use it to help with engineering, to speed up the process so that you're not redesigning things from scratch and helps you make predictions about what you're trying to design and speed it up.

It helps in procurement by understanding what options you have. What suppliers might be able to provide the components that this thing has inside of it and who might be able to manufacture it, at what costs, et cetera. And then under the manufacturing side, understanding how to manufacture those, how it might turn out qualitatively, predicting quality, and a number of users out there who use it for a couple of other things marked miscellaneous use cases. We do have some work that we do together with the military, for example, to identify parts in the fields that aren't necessarily even a CAD model at that point. They can use AI or an image or even a 3-D scan to figure out what something is and more information about it. 

Journey to Finding Patent Problems

Brian Ardinger:  Tell us a little bit about how you got started in this space. My understanding is you started with a law degree and a law background. How did you get to designing software to attack the patent problems and everything else in the physical world? 

Paul Powers: It's not obviously a very direct line between those two things. What happened was I studied law because I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I thought that might be given me an edge or it might just be a different way of looking at starting a business. I focused on intellectual property. That was the closest thing to technology it felt like. It was cool. You got to see a lot of neat things, but I knew that being in that field bet, it was really easy to find a patent, like, you know violations of people's logos or music, texts written as a book or whatever.  It's easy to find digital copies of that, that are not legally obtained. But as soon as it comes in those 3-D models, it was very difficult. We can never really predict violations that might be about to occur, and that really is because it was hard to even search for a 3-D model with a 3-D model or with other input.

They're hard to identify. They're hard to understand. There's so many file formats out there, and you certainly can't really find it without like a perfect match of a 3 D model, it seemed. We started the company for that because there's so much cost to that problem. It's trillions of dollars annually and global loss for patent violations. And we thought if we can tackle that problem, that a benefit to society, not just because you can make more money off of your ideas, but also because it helps promote research and development by lowering the likelihood of the theft of your IP. We launched the company, we tried out everything in the world we could find that had geometric search or shape search or anything like that that we thought would be relevant.  And we tried out a lot of stuff and everything was extremely disappointing to us.

Everything in the market, we always keep an eye to trying out other tools, but they were very disappointing because they didn't really do what we thought. They weren't actually breaking the stuff down into 3-D. We found a way after a lot of time, but eventually we figured out our own way to break down through the models and to truly break them down so that you could find parts with a subsection. For example, let's say you have a screw and you want to use that to find a machine that it goes into. You can do that, or if you have half of a part, you can use that to find the rest of it. You can identify what's inside of the part even if you don't have data like this is the parent file these with the children's files, but you don't have to have that.  We can figure that out. 

Once we had that, we went out to conventions and started telling people about this technology, and very quickly we started hearing about all these other issues that existed that, frankly, I had no idea existed, right. That engineers, manufacturing, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, anyone who engineers something physical, you know, not a software engineer, their productivity is only 20% of what it should be. If you compare how effective software engineers are compared to engineers of physical goods, that's over a five to one ratio actually. That's because these tools are missing. They redesign things from scratch, etc. We also found issues in quality control and inspection automation, and even in healthcare, and all these other areas. And we got overwhelmed and realized that, wow, the reason that we're finding so many issues and people are coming to u...

In our interview with Dave Knox, the founder of The Brandery, we talked about how geography and history can uniquely influence a place to be innovative and how that tradition has played out in his city of Cincinnati. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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 Dance

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Dr. 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 ...

Doug Durham has over 30 years of experience in software and software related fields. In his talk he shared best practices and lessons learned from working with product development teams with a focus on agile methodology. The last day to get an earlybird discount for the 2018 summit is March 15th. Visit theiosummit.com for more information and to buy your ticket. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi are co-founders of the incubator, Her Product Lab.  Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Monica and Lina about opportunities and barriers for women in the product development space and Her Product Lab's new seven-week incubator program designed to help women launch and grow new product initiatives.  

Interview Transcript

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

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, we have two amazing guests today, Monica Rozenfeld and Lina Bedi. They are cofounders of a new project and a new venture called Her Product Lab. Welcome to the show. 

Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you so much, Brian. We're so excited to be here. 

Lina Bedi: Very exciting.

Brian Ardinger: Monica, you and I met a couple of years ago. I had a chance to come up to Milwaukee for the Fall Xperiment conference last year and do some podcasts there. And I wanted to bring you on the show to talk about this new venture that you spun up. And some of the changes that you've seen over the last several months in spinning up this particular project. I know we actually had this conversation pre COVID, but we wanted to postpone it because a lot of things have changed. So, tell us about what Her Product Lab is, and then we'll go into how it came to be. 

Monica Rozenfeld: Thank you for that intro. In my day job, I was organizing events for product managers. And I was in the New York office, we have a New York office and a Milwaukee office, and in the New York office there's a lot of conversation about how there really isn't a community for women in product. You see a big presence out on the West coast, Advancing Women in Product. They have done a phenomenal job of really elevating women, their career, getting them into the mid-level and leadership roles out there. And we weren't seeing so much of that even in New York City and looking into other cities like Chicago, DC, Atlanta.

Our goal, when we had started out late last year, is let's have these summits. We'll bring women together. We'll have women on the stage talking about their careers. How did they move into the director roles, how to build better products? It was really incredible because only in two or three weeks’ time, after coming up with this concept and connecting with Lina, who's also very interested in this. We had a website, tickets were live. We had something like 20 presenters right off the bat. And it was one of the easiest events I ever put together because there was so much excitement around it. 

So, the date of our first summit, March 26th, New York City, same week as lock down. I actually did this really somber activity where I walked over to where our venue is. I live not too far from there. And everything's just boarded up, no people on the street in another universe, there would be 200 people in this room, and we'd all be super engaged and talking about product development. So, it was a really crazy experience for us.

But I think the other thing that we saw was that nobody was asking for a refund. Everyone wanted to know when the date was going to be changed. We had this really loyal community that wanted to be part of this. And so we were trying to think of, well, how do we keep everyone engaged without being able to have in person events. And so, we started with some of the virtual events and that led us to think of this concept of a virtual incubator, which by the way, I'll just add one thing. We wanted to do an incubator as part of our two-year roadmap. We're thinking like 2022, we'll have an incubator. It will be really cool. And it will be New York based. And now it's just virtual and global, which we're really excited about. 

Brian Ardinger: It seems that coronavirus has definitely accelerated a lot of the disruption that we were already seeing in the marketplace. And this is just a perfect example of that. So, Lina, maybe can tell us about yourself and how you got involved in this project. 

Lina Bedi: I was introduced to Monica through a mutual friend, and we were talking about, you know, women supporting other women. And how far women can get when they're lifted. And when we think about product management, we were looking at the overall job market growth and product management and product management was and is booming.

So, the overall job market in the past two years increased by around 6% and product management is five times that amount. And then when we dug into the data even more, we see that the majority, of women are in entry level positions. And so, our goal was to really create a network community where we can give women access to senior leaders and help mentor them.

You know, these are a lot of the things that help propel my career forward and it’s a way of paying that forward. And, you know, that was the goal. And even though what we're doing now has shifted because of COVID, that goal still remains the same. Those overarching themes of what we're trying to achieve by connecting women to these leadership roles and giving access to training. Those are still the big umbrella that we're operating within. 

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that's interesting about her product lab, slightly different than a lot of the other incubators or accelerators out there. It seems to be focused, not just on starting a company, so to speak, but it's really about launching a product and maybe that early stage that it turns into a startup. Can you talk about why you decided to start with that emphasis? 

Monica Rozenfeld: When we have a community of product managers, they're already thinking about product ideas all of the time. And they're not necessarily looking to be entrepreneurs, start a company, hires a team, go through the whole process of all that it takes to actually launch a company. But maybe they have a concept that they either want to turn into a side hustle that they want to even pitch to their current employer. And that's very common if you're working in, for example, I work in FinTech. Maybe you have a concept that you think would be really great in that space and you can sell it to your own leadership even. So, it's a very different model. We've talked to so many women in our community who have an idea, and I'm sure as you know Brian, a lot of people sit on ideas for a very long time and sometimes you just need that nudge of a next step.

And so, our goal is really to help connect them with mentors. One-on-one. Bring in coaches each week that can help them in each stage of the process. So, by the end, they have the option of what they want to do next. None of them have to quit their day jobs. We've created this to be around their full-time schedule. And after seven weeks they might say, Hey, I really want to pitch this to a VC and turn this into a startup. I really see the vision for it. A...

Savannah Economic Development's Jen Bonnett - VP of Innovation/Entrepreneurship & ED of The Creative Coast talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder about Startup Ecosystem Building. Jen recently moved from Atlanta, where she founded Startup Chicks, led the state of Georgia's technology incubator, and helped the ATL startup community. She ranks ALT in the top startup ecosystems in the country. Highlights from their Conversation: - Savanah has three University assets. Similar to Boulder.  - Why the Creative Coast? Savanah has a thriving arts community. How do you teach artists to thrive online?  - Digital technology a significant focus. Also, healthcare tech and logistics.   - E-commerce - creative meets the port.  - Jen knew community and leaders. Began by building Ecosystem map — missing investor community.  - Savannah is a significant port. - Startups don't know each other or their peer groups.  We are creating peer group and revenue meetups. - "Slowvannah" - Blog post - Savannah has high net-worth individuals, but they don't know how to invest in startups.  ATL has involved ecosystems.   - Jen was active in ATL in recruiting corporations to be involved in the startup ecosystem.  - She's talked with all major Savannah corporations. They want help in how to engage.  - Trends in ecosystems - 20-year game. The corporate tie-in is key, as well as collaborating with other cities. Figure out what you do well and focus on those industries. For More Information For more information about Jen Bonnett or Savannah and the Creative Coast, check out thecreativecoast.org or email jen@thecreativecoast.org. Find her on Twitter @Jen_bonnett For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kaiser Yang, Co-founder of Platypus Labs and Author of the new book Crack the Code. Kaiser and I talk about the mindsets needed to foster creativity and innovation. And some of the pitfalls you can avoid when trying to spin up your innovation initiatives.

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

Interview Transcript of Kaiser Yang, Co-founder of Platypus Labs and Author of Crack the Code

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 Kaiser Yang. He is co-founder of Platypus Labs and author of the book Crack the Code: Eight Surprising Keys to Unlock Innovation. Welcome. 

Kaiser Yang: Hey, thank you so much, Brian. I'm delighted to be here and be a part of your program. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. We got connected through Josh Linkner. I was interviewing him about his new book, Big Little Breakthroughs. And he reached out recently to say, hey, Kaiser's got a new book out in and around this particular subject. You've worked with some great companies out there when it comes to Innovation, Heineken, and ESPN, and Coca-Cola. What are some of the most common problems that companies are trying to solve when it comes to Innovation?

Kaiser Yang: There's a number of challenges that we help organizations focus on and prioritize. But it really starts at the leadership level of prioritizing Innovation, building the right set of rituals and rewards that motivates team members to drive inventive thinking in their day-to-day responsibilities. And so, we do spend a lot of time working from the leadership level first understanding what the desired state is. What some of the desired outcomes are.

And crafting a strategy. And that strategy, it could involve a number of different things from bringing thought leadership to the organization, doing training workshops, running Innovation, bootcamps. Sometimes it even just comes down to creating inspiration and motivation in terms of ideas, like giving them the power to recognize patterns outside of their industry. So, they can innovate their own and challenge the status quo. 

So, for us, I think when we first work with organizations, it has to start at the top. Meaning there needs to be a commitment to driving innovation and making it a priority. And then it makes the rest of the initiatives so much smoother moving forward.

Brian Ardinger: That is so important that context setting. Because I think a lot of times organizations get off the wrong track because they don't necessarily define Innovation the same way. A lot of people think of innovation as I've got to come up with the next electric car or new Uber. 

And as you know, Innovation can be something much simpler as far as, you know, how do you find it and identify a problem and create something of value to solve that problem. And a lot of the book talks about that creative problem-solving area that doesn't have to be transformational, but it can be little breakthroughs that make a difference. 

Kaiser Yang: Absolutely. It's a philosophy that I share with Josh. And his book, Big Little Breakthroughs is all about the fact that we should look for everyday acts of creativity or what he calls micro innovations.

And for us too, when we work with organizations, we obviously want to look at transformational opportunities, high growth opportunities. But sometimes when you look at Innovation, just in that context, it can be paralyzing for most of the team members, right. Unless it's a billion-dollar Elon Musk type idea that it doesn't count.

When in reality, some of the best innovations start with small acts of creativity applied to solving the customer experience or driving improvement in internal processes. And those little innovations can stack up and make a significant difference over time. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, you almost have to build up those muscles and, you know, to jump directly to starting a brand-new business or a brand-new idea is challenging, especially if you've been hired to optimize and execute in a particular business model that you know and have some certainty around. Versus a completely unknown kind of environment. 

Kaiser Yang: For sure. What we see in many organizations is that there's this tremendous creative readiness, this curiosity, this willingness to drive change. But where it falls short is the implementation side. And it's most often these teams and individuals don't have the right tools or the training or critical thinking skills to apply their creativity to innovative outcomes.

And that really is kind of the point of Crack the Code, my new book. It's more of a field guide, a manual to help you unlock your creativity. And add a little bit more structure to the process. So rather than saying, hey, let's solve the sales challenge or this customer experience problem, or this operational inefficiency and just brainstorming in the traditional sense. These are proven tools and techniques that really guide you through that creative process, so you can realize better outcomes in the end. 

Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about the book. You kind of break it up into these four key mindsets that you believe individuals and organizations need to be building and growing on. Talk a little bit about the mindsets and how they came to be and the thought process around it. 

Kaiser Yang: Yeah. I mean, these mindsets are really based on almost like two decades worth of research and real-world experiences, having been a startup entrepreneur and starting my own businesses. Creativity is that one underlying skill set that was applied to drive growth and transformation and performance at pretty much every level.

And so, when we think about some of these mindsets, they may come across to you as common sense, but common sense isn't always common practice. So, for example, the first core mindset that we start out with is this notion that every barrier can be penetrated. It's this inherent belief that no matter how difficult the challenge is, if you apply enough creative energy at it, that obstacle can be overcome.

Right, the most powerful successful innovators out there, when they have a setback or they have a failure, what they don't do is throw up their arms and get discouraged. They're the ones that say not yet. 

So, while it seems obvious that every barrier can be penetrated, if you look at organizations and teams, once you have a couple of failures or a few setbacks, a lot of times it's like, eh, this idea is not going to work. Or maybe we should do something else. Instead, we believe that with the right focus of your creative energy, you can really overcome some of the most difficult challenges out there. 

Brian Ardinger: And ironically, sometimes those constraints are actually the things that open ...

Ted Schilowitz serves as Paramount Pictures' Futurist, as well as an advisor to the University of Nebraska’s Johnny Carson School of Emerging Media Arts. He sees himself as an explorer, with an eye toward storytelling and creativity. His modern lab rat approach, allows him to experiment with all types of technology and determine what makes it valuable for the future. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside founder, and Ted discuss the intersection between storytelling and human behavior. Specifically, they address next-generation screens to create the illusion of reality.  Highlights from the discussion: - VR is an emerging process of teaching people about new ways of using more powerful screens in their lives.  - People want entertainment when they want it and where they want it. Connecting the screen to your eyes and your brain, something that doesn’t exist yet at scale.  - Experiments with VR, AR, and mixed-reality headsets. Logging hours in experimenting, then bringing back experiences to the studio.  - The power is accelerated to create an illusion of things that aren’t real. There are ethical, safety and truth concerns. - Mixed reality or extended reality is the thing to watch.  - VR is a multi-level/multi-year evolution. We’ve seen good progress, investment, and predictive analysis.  - Viable businesses are enterprise and heavy and light industrial markets. Things are getting adopted when people use them differently.  - Read The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christianson. - How can people tap into creativity and adaptability? Read Creativity Inc, about Pixar, where story means everything and technology is used in service to the story.  To find out more or connect, find Ted on Twitter at @virtualtedfor email him at ted_schilowitz@paramount.com. You can also learn more from his augmented mixed-reality discussion on the AR Show or from various articles found online.  If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy: Ep. 107 - Azeem Azhar, Author of “Exponential View”; Ep 106 - Amy Jo Kim, Innovation Consultant and Author of Game Thinking, Ep 80 - Ari Popper w/ SciFutures; and Ep 60 - David Mattin w/ TrendWatching FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get 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 HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jorge Arango. He's an information architect and author of the book, Living in Information. Jorge and Brian Ardinger talk about how Jorge's background and traditional architecture has affected his insights and approach to digital design. They talk about some of the trends in information architecture, and how digital environments are changing the way we work and live.

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

Interview Transcript

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 Jorge Arango. He is the strategic designer and information architect and author of the book called Living in Information: Responsible Design for Digital Places.  Welcome to the show Jorge.

Jorge Arango: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show to talk about your book, but more importantly, to talk about this whole world of information architecture. If my research is correct, you started your career in traditional architecture. And so I'd like to maybe start there and talk about how did you go from the world of physical architecture to the world of digital design?

Jorge Arango: Yeah, that's right. So, I studied architecture as in the design of buildings and it's been a while now. I'm part of a generation of folks who came into the workforce at a very interesting time in history when the worldwide web was coming into focus. It was becoming a thing. And when I saw the web, I essentially left my career in architecture to start a web design studio, because it seemed to me at the time that this was a new medium that would change the world. We didn't know yet, in what ways it would change the world, but it was pretty clear that it was going to be huge.

Brian Ardinger: To give the audience of understanding of what is information architecture and how does that differ then UX design or creative and that? 

Jorge Arango: Yeah, there is some overlap there in that information, architects help create the experiences that people have when they interact with software. But it's in no ways constrained by the design of software. So, information architecture is focused on helping make information easier to find and understand. So, think of something like an online store where you maybe are offering your customers, a large catalog of goods.

There are going to be ways for you to structure that information so that your customers can find what they're looking for. And so that they can do things like compare products to other products or find related products and establishing those relationships, figuring out what distinctions to enable is a big part of what information architects do.

A lot of people who are involved with the design of software-based experiences, think of design as concerned with the way that things look and how they function. And that is certainly an important component of it. But information architects are concerned with the underlying structures that inform those things. That includes things like categories, navigation systems, the way that search engine search functionality, and such a system is structured and organized. Those are all within the area of concern for information architects.

Brian Ardinger: I can see now where traditional architecture can have a major influence in how you develop digital environments. How do you think you're learning in the physical world has influenced your digital design capabilities? 

Jorge Arango: That's one of the reasons that I actually jumped on the web back in the mid-nineties. It was pretty clear to me that there was a direct relationship between the stuff that I'd been studying in architecture school and what was needed for this new medium.

The main things that I often talk about are a concern for structure. A building is not just a collection of forms and spaces. It is also a series of systems that are structural systems, right? Like, and you can think in traditional architecture terms or building architecture terms, you can think of the columns and beams and other physical structural elements that hold the building up and allow it to resist the forces like gravity.

It was pretty clear to me that there were structural aspects to the web experience even fairly early on. And the other one, which I've already touched on, was the fact that these are systems. They're never freestanding elements. And when you're designing the user interface to a software-based product or service, the stuff that you see on the screen, isn't all there is to it. Oftentimes these things form part of and relate to other component. That's very much within the area of concern for building architects as well. You have to be mindful of all of the systems that make up a building when you're designing such a thing. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, I imagine as you're building out more and more digital products and more and more people are becoming used to that, it was different back when you're just developing a website and that was a place people went typically.  But now digital is involved with virtually everything. Your phone's in your pocket and your hand. Smart technologies, IOT, things along those lines are giving you data and giving you access to things that changed the physical world, as well as the digital world. How do you go about approaching a new project to start mapping out how these systems and structures interact? 

Jorge Arango: Again, there's a learning there from design of buildings. So, when you're designing a building, one of the first things that you want to do is understand what is called the program. Let's say that you've been hired to work on the design of something like a dance studio. When designing a building to serve the functions of a dance studio, there are going to be certain functions that that environment is going to have to be able to accommodate. And those functions call for different types of spaces. For example, in a dance studio, you're going to want rooms for people's bodies to be able to make a series of movements. And that dictates the form of those spaces. 

You're also going to want. Other types of rooms that enable people to change in and out of their street clothes so that they can get into clothes that they're more comfortable performing dance moves with. And there's a whole host of other functions that such a building must accommodate. And architects oftentimes start by thinking about the program that a building must accommodate and what types of spaces are going to have to be a part of that and how those spaces relate to each other. 

And the same is true for people who are designing software-based experiences. I find that one of the things most missing in our disciplines these days is taking a step back from how things will look and function and really thinki...

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 China

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 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 cust...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust and Get Results Faster. This is part of our IO Live was recorded in front of the live audience. And Stefano and I talk about what it takes to align teams, build trust, and get better results. 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 Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to our IO Live event. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. As always, we have another amazing guest. This is our first Inside Outside Innovation podcast of 2021, that we're doing live. We're super excited to have a special guest here. Stefano Mastrogiacomo is the author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust, and Get Results Fast. Welcome Stefano to the show. 

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Thank you for inviting me. It's an honor and hello to all of our listeners and viewers. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on here. I think you wanted to show some slides and give the audience a little bit of background on the book and then we'll get into a Q and A session. 

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Yes, of course. Thank you. So, I'm going to share the screen right now. This book, High Impact Tools for Teams, fully integrates with the Strategizer series. And as you know, the Strategizer series proposes amazing tools to help team innovate and deliver creative products and services. In this journey, in delivering innovation, I started working with teams in 2000.

So as a project manager, I've been using many of these tools, starting from delivering a banking application for large teams. We thought that there was a gap to be covered, which is the human side of innovation journeys. And mostly what I'm talking about here is how can we help cross-functional teamwork do better. 

In particular, make us more successful team members, because these are journeys in very difficult conditions. A lot of uncertainty. Things keep changing all the time. And so the idea was how to help us become more successful team members and more successful project managers, knowing that there is real room for improvement. This was a study entitled we waste a lot of time at work. Where they reported that 50% of meetings are considered unproductive and a pure waste of time.

And that was true before the pandemic. I don't know about you, but at least for me, I've participated in numerous Zoom meetings now, where actually I felt that that statistic could be even worse when the meeting isn't structured, unfocused, and on top of that, we have the barrier of distance, and all the constraints of these new communication channels.

So, we published that book. It's been a long journey, been like 15 years in the making. Where we designed, experimented, draw into many various disciplines like psycholinguistics, evolutionary anthropology, things that could help us design tools that help create better alignment in the team. As things keep changing all the time, build more trust and psychological safety. And we know the, I'll come back on that later, the impact of trust, the direct impact of trust, on the capacity to innovate in a team, and in more generally, how to communicate better. 

So, this was prior to the pandemic. You know how important it is for us, that things are visually shared by the team. That's why we designed these canvases. And that's how we used to work prior to the pandemic. And if you allow me and let me share you a workshop that took place last week. Same setting, but this time online having in parallel Zoom and digital whiteboard. 

So, what you see here is 110 agile professionals together. Establishing a team contract. You have 110 agile professionals arguing and exchanging, brainstorming on rules of the game to hold more productive meetings, using one of the templates that is presented in the book, namely the Team Contract. So that tool, called the Team Contract, is a tool designed to help teams very quickly define and agree together on team rules and behaviors.

Why do we believe this is important, but first of all, let me show you an example of how it works. So, the idea is we sit together in front of that poster, whether it's in the same room or on a digital whiteboard. This is a simplified version of a real Team Contract. And that's where every team member, before we enter the journey, especially if we are a newly created team or if the project is very different from what we're used to do. The idea is let's sit together and respond to these two questions.

One. What are the rules and behaviors that we want to abide by in our team during that journey? And as individuals, do we have preferences to work in a certain way. I mean, we all have maybe certain preferences, so let's put it that, all these things out there, and you can see here, some of the examples of what people put on these team contracts. 

It changes a lot the fact that these are said, and shared in the beginning versus not doing it, and keeping all this in our mind. Presupposing that the other think the same thing we do. That actually is a potential source of conflict. As you know, given the pace at which innovation journeys take place. 

So, this is a very simple example. A team contract conversation typically lasts between 20 minutes to one hour, depending on the complexity of the rules the team wants to put in place. And the rules we agree are in the center. And also, we can define things that we don't want to see in the team. For example, here, not apologizing, if not attending, to give a very simple example.

Now that has implications, that very fact of making the rules of the game visible and transparent by everybody in terms of psychological safety. As we know how to position that increases our confidence that we know on which rule we will play. And psychological safety, I'm quoting here at the amazing work of Amy Edmondson is the belief, that the team is a safe place for me, for interpersonal risk-taking, that I will not be punished, humiliated if I speak up.

And that is crucial for innovation journey, because I guess one of our worst enemies in innovation journeys is silence. When we don't feel confident enough to share our ideas with the rest of the team, because that might backfire on us. So very simple poster, but with the domino effect of important consequences, for the later unfolding of the innovation project. 

Another tool, for example, very quickly here presented in the book is called the Team Alignment Map. And this is a co-planning tool. This tool is as information keeps changing all the time. The idea was to have a very simple poster on which we can align frequently whenever we actually needed. But especially in the beginning of a project, where the level of alignment, the need of alignment is the highest because we have all different views.

So that poster, what's new with that poster is that we plan together. It's no longer a ping pong mechanism. We're sitting together and we talk about each other's role and negotiate a few...

It's August and the blogs are ripe for gleaning. In this episode, Josh brought our market analyst, Bill McBride, on to the show to talk about some of the most interesting articles Bill's noticed in his research. These articles include corporate venture capitalists who "tell-all," an inquiry into the slowdown of accelerator launches, and an exclusive report about the status of startup and corporate partnerships. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Arnaud Bonzom is the Directory of Corporate Innovation at 500 Startups. In his conversation with Josh, Arnaud shared some insights from their report on the status of corporate innovation in the world's top 500 corporations, which you can find here: http://698640.hs-sites.com/500corporations Get your ticket for the Inside Outside Innovation Summit at theiosummit.com where you can also learn more about startup partnership opportunities available at the conference for corporate teams. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Today’s episode features special guest, Jason Calacanis, longtime angel investor and author of the book "Angel." He and Brian talked about why he wrote this particular book, what it takes to be an angel investor, and how senior executives in a corporation can harness the power of angel investing for the sake of their personal portfolio and the benefit of their company. Jason’s handle on social media is @Jason, and you can find his book on Amazon.

Smashbox changed the world of lipstick. This week, Jill Tomandl, the VP of product development and innovation, talked with Brian about their new 3-D printed lipstick line. She shared details about the design process, their marketing strategy, and how they took the dynamics of the beauty product world into consideration through all of it. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

In part 2 of our interview with Dave Knox, founder of The Brandery, we talked about melding the cultures between startups and corporations and also between people within just one organization. Dave also gave some tips about how to bridge both gaps. The takeaway? Don’t be a tourist. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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 Global

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 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 a...

In this fast and furious interview, Brian sat down with Amee Mungo who is a product lead with the brand and credit card division of Capital One. She discussed both the challenging and beneficial dynamics of bringing a startup mentality to a corporate worlds. Amee also emphasized the importance of an encouraging leader with a clear goal in motivating innovation within a large organization. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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...

For this week's episode, Josh talked with Aya Zook who is a global marketing director at Microsoft Accelerator. Aya discussed many interesting observations from the first three years of Microsoft's accelerator. A couple of these learnings include why where you're hanging out is more important than the platform you're using and why competitor acquisition of startups doesn't worry him. Connect with Aya and his team at microsoftaccelerator.com and on twitter @msaccel. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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 Cultures

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 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? Tha...

Corporate Innovation, Mid-Level Managers and the New 20% Ralph Welborn has spent over 25 years providing business and technology advisory services to both private and public sector organizations globally. He has held a variety of leadership positions, including CEO of Imaginatik, the market-leading innovation advisory and platform company; leader of IBM's Strategy & Transformation business in the Middle East and Africa; senior vice president at KPMG Consulting; and a cofounder of an e-commerce company.  In this podcast, Brian Ardinger talks with Ralph about his new book Topple: The End of the Firm-Based Strategy and the Rise of New Models for Explosive Growth. The Topple Rate refers to how major companies are failing, and how that is fall is accelerating. Companies are attempting digital transformation efforts, with little success.  Ralph believes we need to avoid running the Red Queen race and learn from the companies having explosive growth. Currently, approx. 20% of a company’s capabilities are driving 70% of value. However, this will not be the new 20% that they will need tomorrow. Companies don’t have to focus on a lot of things to make a big impact. Understand that you should focus your innovation program on the new 20%. We must not look at firm-based strategies anymore. We must engage with emerging business ecosystem to capture new value. Orchestrating capabilities of others.  We must also turn the lens around on the points of friction of our customers. What are the capabilities we need to solve that problem and then, what are the products and services we have that could fit, or what do we need to create? Examine where value is being created and destroyed and where are we going to plant our flag. What are the unique set of capabilities around planting that flag and how are we going to orchestrate our ecosystem to plant the flag. They also discussed why mid-level managers are key to innovation.  To continue the discussion, connect with Ralph at ralph@capimpact.com. or http://www.capimpact.com. or check out his book Topple on Amazon at: https://amzn.to/2Nx4Ylk If you are interested in more discussion on corporate innovation, check out Brian Ardinger’s discussion with Janice Fraser with Bionic at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-84-janice-fraser-w-bionic-solution/ This episode is sponsored by GLIDR. GLIDR software helps you validate that you're going to market with products and business models that drive real value. Check them out at https://www.glidr.io/iopodcast For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maddie 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 Propel

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 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 thought...

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 Me

Susan 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...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Adriana Cisneros Basulto, Founder of Maxwell. Maxwell was the winner of the IO 2020 Get Started Showcase competition and maker of the employee benefit and work-life management software platform. Adriana and I talk about the changing world of work from flexible benefit options, to diversity and inclusion, as well as the impact COVID has had on accelerating these changes. 

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

Interview Transcript with Adriana Cisneros Basulto, Founder of Maxwell

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 with me is Adriana Cisneros Basulto, founder of Maxwell. Welcome to the show. 

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Brian Ardinger:  Adriana I'm excited to have you. Maxwell, you were the winner of the IO2020 Get Started Showcase competition that we had back in October. It seems like a lifetime ago, but we've been trying to figure out a time to get you on the show, to talk about what you're doing, what you're building, and really have a heart to heart with some of the things that you're seeing when it comes to the future of work. So, let's start by telling the Maxwell story. How did you conceive of this company and how did it get started?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yeah, well, first and foremost, I'm still pinching myself from the win and yeah, I cannot believe that that was October, but I suppose in COVID time, everything just kind of flows at its own rate. I'm not going to say it was, you know, like a Eureka moment or something that all of a sudden just came to mind that this is what's going to be. It's really been an evolution.

And it has taken several years from sort of an idea into actually becoming what it is today. And it's probably going to continue to market. A lot of it was just, many founders, personal experience. As my life got just more complex, on the personal side, and by complex, I mean, just a very traditional path and the personal side, you know, like you, you get married, you decide to get a dog, you have a mortgage, that sort of thing. In terms of complexity, kids. At the same time, my career, and that of my spouse was also progressing and getting more complex and had more accountabilities.

And then we happened to both be very similar in terms of wanting to do a really good job in both fronts. So, we were always feeling spread thinly. So that was one aspect. And then the other aspect was the type of work that I did. So, my last corporate job was leading the efforts of inclusion and diversity for the largest private bank in the U S.

And one of the things that I remember vividly sitting down and listening to the results of Gallup, on one of their studies about women at work. And I mean, this is years ago, but the trend was that women were leaving the workplace. And one of the number one competitors was this aspect of how hard it was to manage work and life and keep it all together.

And that, that was the biggest competitor. And I was just like, oh my goodness, we're not coming up with better solutions is the same solutions that we had five years ago or before, like lots of things go through my mind. That was one moment there was like, there's got to be something better. So that was sort of the genesis of it, both from the personal side. And then also from a professional standpoint, me wanting to see more women stay in leadership positions because that's the work that I was doing. 

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about what Maxwell is and how are you tackling that problem? 

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yes. What I'd like to say is we make it easy for employers to support their teams. And to support them with benefits it's slash, support services that make it easy to manage work and life. Sometimes it's easier to understand when using an example. So, I'll try to do that. 

Let's say it's company, ABC company, ABC. They choose which of the services that we have on Maxwell already embedded in our mobile app to offer their employees and to fund. And then we do also something that we're testing right now. I'm curious to see how that evolves, but one of the things we're testing is the ability for employers to also integrate into Maxwell, other things that they're offering today, that don't require an additional subsidy from them. 

So maybe they already paid for an EPA program from an employee assistance program, so they can also show it on Maxwell. And then the employee now decides how much money they want to provide their employees to use on the services of Maxwell. 

Brian Ardinger: Got it. 

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: So then fast forward to now, you know, employees are onboarding into Maxwell. They can use their funds on those benefits, those support services that are going to be the most valuable for them. Maybe Tom, really what he struggles with is spending his weekends doing laundry. Yeah. He could use his, you know, the money that he got from his employer, on tackling laundry. So, he doesn't have to be doing that over the weekends. 

And maybe, you know, you have Kate, which laundry's not really an issue for her, or maybe that's, you know, she doesn't care for other people touching her laundry. She can use her funds on things that matter to her, like maybe healthy meals and getting support that way. So that's in a nutshell how it works. 

Brian Ardinger: I like the idea, and this and this movement that we're seeing towards how do you make things very customized for the employee. You know, it used to be where employee benefits, were you get your health care and, and maybe you get a couple of things else, but for the most part, it was here's your cookie cutter things that were available. But by services like Maxwell that allow the employer and the employee to find that right balance. What are you seeing when it comes to that? 

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yes. No, you're absolutely right. It's been, it's been, talked about for a long time on the HR space. How to really put the employee at the center of that. So providing employee centric experiences. But it really hadn't taken off. And I think we are at a moment in which this is actually going to happen, because now, well, a multitude of things are happening, but one of them is as HR teams are honestly trying to help their employees. One of the barriers that they're facing to do that, is that there is so much variety of needs. 

Like the example I gave was simple. Right. But like, how do you provide enough variety of support that is really going to meet the need of all of your employees? And actually, that is sometimes paralyzing them because they're like, well, you know, I could get this particular solution in house and use it here, but that's going to serve only my, you know, my working parents.

And that's going to inevitably cost these feeling of the haves and have no...

John Bungert is the Director of innovation at MetLife. He talked with Brian about the breadth of Metlife’s approach to innovation by partnering with a large network of venture capital firms as well as using internal campaigns to find and then implement innovative and relevant ideas on horizons 1, 2, and 3. He also talked about how working for small wins can help the most when you’re just getting started with a corporate innovation arm. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at the Kellogg School of Management and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance That Awaits New Ideas. David and I talk about what keeps ideas from gaining traction and what you can do to avoid friction and resistance to new ideas. Let's get started.

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

Interview Transcript with David Schonthal, Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of The Human Element

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have David Schonthal. He is a Clinical Professor and Director of Entrepreneurship Programs at Northwestern University and Coauthor of the new book, The Human Element: Overcoming the Resistance that Awaits New Ideas. Welcome to the show, David. 

David Schonthal: Thanks, Brian. Nice to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you here. You have spent a lot of your career thinking about and watching what it takes to make new ideas happen. You've spent time at IDEO. You were co-founder of Matter, which is that 25,000 square foot innovation center in Chicago. Has some venture capital experience and that. And I thought we could start by telling the audience how you got into the innovation space in the first place. 

David Schonthal: By accident is the answer. It's sort of a long story, but I wound up becoming the COO of a medical device company in San Diego, California based on a radical shift from what I was doing before, which is tax software in London. 

To make a long story short, one of my former bosses called me up when I was just at my lowest point with tax and the UK, no offense to the UK, but it was winter, and it was like dark 18 hours out of the day. And he called me up and all of a sudden, I just, all I remember is him saying, yada, yada, yada San Diego, yada yada, yada. I was like, oh please.

He's like, would you like to know what the business is? I was like, no, not important. So, I wound up going and being the head of operations for an early stage medical device company. And then basically from that point forward was just bit with the bug around bringing new ideas to market either in the startup space, through entrepreneurship or venture capital or in the corporate space through design and innovation.

Brian Ardinger: And you've got a new book called the Human Element. I would imagine it packs a lot about the things that you've learned over that career. Since you've spent a lot of time seeing how early ideas get traction or not, what is the most striking problem that you see most people making when it comes to kicking off an idea?

David Schonthal: I think maybe the best place to start is by most innovators and entrepreneurs’ instinct that the idea is the thing that needs to be addressed. So, if a new product or service or strategy isn't being adopted by the market, most innovators instincts says well, let's make the product a little better. Let's change the way we talk about it. Let's drop the price. Let's promote it differently. 

And they make the thing or the strategy or the movement, the center of their attention. And in the course of my career, I've worked on some really amazing, I mean, some terrible, but also some really amazing innovations and products and services. And I was always surprised by how, even though clearly if these things were adopted into the market, they would make the world a better place, no matter how much we tweaked or change the idea that wasn't always the key to success of getting it introduced.

And so about four years ago, turned my attention to thinking about what is it that stands in the way of change and partnered up with one of my colleagues at Kellogg, who was a behavioral psychologist named Loran Nordgren. And together we've been studying this problem from both the applied side, as well as the theoretical side.

And that was the genesis of the book, which is that our instincts about innovation are too heavily biased on making the thing more appealing and not focused enough on helping the market adopt it by removing the friction that stands in the way. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I love that. You kind of start off the book, this battle between what do you call fuel and friction. The idea that a lot of times, just to make an idea better, all you have to do is add more facts or more features or try to get more folks bought into it. But really, it's a lot about how do you eliminate the frictions around that? So, in the book you talk about four frictions. Let's outline and tell the audience how they can avoid them.

David Schonthal: Sure. So, if you think about a new idea, like an airplane leaving the ground or a projectile flying through the air. Fuel, to your point Brian, are all of the things that propel that idea forward. The need that the customer has, features and benefits, promotional strategies, but like an airplane leaving the ground there are also forces that stand in the way, whether it's wind resistance or sheer or gravity. 

And so, the book is really focused on these forces, these headwinds of innovation and the four that we specify in the book, the four frictions, our number one inertia, which is our desire as human beings to tend to stick with the status quo. Despite the fact that we know the status quo might be imperfect, our habits are surprisingly powerful. And so, recognizing that inertia is a play anytime you're trying to get somebody to change from what they're doing today, to what you'd like them to do tomorrow. 

Effort is the second one. All of the ambiguity, all of the costliness, all of the exertion required to get somebody to make that change. 

The third friction is emotion. All of the anxiety and fear that comes along with changing from something that you do today to something you do tomorrow. And you might not think that emotion comes into play for small things, but emotion comes into play when you're buying a pack of gum or when you're putting on a new shirt.

And then the fourth is what we call reactants, which is people's aversion to being changed by others. And each of them show up in varying degrees, depending on what you're working on in spotting them appropriately forecasting them ideally, so that they can be muted and mitigated is really the key. 

Brian Ardinger: And a lot of those frictions, they're almost not necessarily irrational, but they're definitely not something that you can take an economic model and say, well, clearly there's a cost benefit analysis and everybody should end up on this side of it because of the cost benefit analysis. But there's a lot of underlying things. And it seems a lot of this frictions around ambiguity or being comfortable with failure. How can you get folks more comfortable with that environment of ambiguity? 

David Schonth...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Rita Gunther McGrath, best-selling author of books like The End of Competitive Advantage, Discovery Driven Growth, and her latest book Seeing Around Corners. Rita and I talk about what companies need to do to navigate the pace and intensity of today's changing environments and what needs to happen to foster the skills, the culture, and the metrics around innovation.

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

Interview Transcript with Rita Gunther McGrath, Author of Seeing Around Corners and Professor at Columbia Business School

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me is Rita Gunther McGrath. She's the author of Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen. Welcome Rita. 

Rita Gunther McGrath: It is a pleasure to be here.

Brian Ardinger: I can't tell you how excited I am to have you on the show. I've been a big fan for a long time. You're a best-selling author of a number of books: The End of Competitive Advantage, Discovery Driven Growth. You're a sought-after speaker and consultant and a long-time professor at Columbia Business School. So, thank you very much for coming on and sharing your insights about innovation.

You've written this new book, Seeing Around Corners about how do you navigate and become better prepared for this inevitable change. What made you decide like this is the right time for this particular book and it came out right before COVID. 

Rita Gunther McGrath: For once I got the timing on a book right. Well, the idea of strategic inflection points intrigued me beginning back in the nineties with Andy Grove's work on how Intel had to make this incredible transformation from selling memory devices, to selling microprocessors and what a courageous journey that was for them. 

And there hasn't really been a lot done on that theme since then. Not a lot. As we were looking at inflection points and, you know, before the pandemic, the ones I was watching were certainly digital touching every part of everybody's life. The merging of strategy and innovation as separate fields, we know they've really been separate for and now I really, as competitive advantages, get shorter, I think they're really emerging.

And then perhaps the whole issue around productivity, automation, what's the right kind of social contract. And it seemed to me, these were all the kinds of change which feel really slow moving until they hit some kind of tipping point. And that's when you have the inflection point. And what got me intrigued about the book at this particular time was how far ahead you can pick up the weak signals that something really is brewing.

And if you keep an eye on it, right, it can take your business to new heights. And if you sort of stick your head in the sand and pretend it's not happening, that's where we see the great corporate catastrophes. 

Brian Ardinger: And your book breaks it down really into three core questions. Like how do you see an inflection point coming? How do you decide what to do about it? And then how do you bring the organization along with you to make that happen. To set the stage, how do you define an inflection point. What's out there? And why is it so important to identify an inflection point. 

Rita Gunther McGrath: Yeah. So, I define an inflection point as some external force that exerts a 10X pressure on something about your organization or your business. That would be, that often is technology, but it could be other things. It could be a regulation, it could be social norms, you know, it could be a number of different things. So, for instance, if you're in the energy world today, you know you're staring at dramatic pressure on the fossil fuels business, and that's not a big mystery.

And it's not going to happen overnight, but you know, that's something you're going to have to respond to. So, the reason I think this is an interesting way of thinking is that if you think about it, any business, any organization is born at a certain point in time. And there are things that are possible and things that aren't.

You can almost think of it as like living within an envelope of constraints. So, 30 years ago, if I wanted to get a video message to millions of people. I had to be Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer or Sky News. I mean I had to own satellites and production equipment and camera crews all over the world. Huge investment required to do that. 

Fast forward to today and if I want to get a message that's compelling to 30 million people, you know, I can pick up my device. Hopefully I'm talented enough that I can post it on Instagram or wherever if it goes viral, Voilà. And what have you spent almost nothing. 

And that to me is an example of the kind of inflection point that overtakes businesses sometimes before they're really aware of it. Because we built our assumptions around what's possible at the time those assumptions were formed. And when those assumptions change, it's super easy to miss them. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I mean, the pace of change is absolutely accelerating. We've got technologies, markets, access to capital. Think about we're filming this a couple of weeks into January. If you think about the first three Wednesdays of January, you had a riot on the Capitol, an impeachment, and an inauguration, and that's just the political side of change. 

Is it the inflection points? Are they coming more frequently? Is it the number of inflection points that are happening right now that's making it so dynamic or is it the intensity of these inflection points or both? 

Rita Gunther McGrath: Yeah, I kind of go with intensity, right? If I go back to my media example, to think that in the span of just a couple of decades, you went from something that was literally a multimillion-dollar, tens of million dollar required investment to something where any kid on a scooter can do it for nothing.

You know, that to me is just an intensity level of inflection point that I don't think we've really adjusted to. The other thing I would argue is that these inflection points happen before our institutions catch up. And there's always a lag between what's possible, human and technology wise, and what the regulators are there to provide and what is happening with institutions.

So an example that's playing out right now is the whole conversation about personal privacy, the data mining and advertising business that's made out of money, people's personal data and the whole third party data selling kind of things. And in my book, I talk about this as an issue where, you know, institutions and the public in general, just haven't caught up to practice.

So if I go all the way back in time and look at the previous regime, like, what was privacy, how was ...

In this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger talks with Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock with ExxonMobil. They discuss successes and challenges of innovating in a large corporation. Christopher and Kim will also be speaking at the Back End of Innovation Conference in Phoenix, AZ on Oct 17-19, 2018. Key strategies and lessons they learned include: - Create space for idea creation and tools to process.  - Protect people and their time from their existing roles.  - Train the managers of intrapreneurs on how to treat them differently. - Teach the right senior leadership how to understand innovation.  - Develop a VC board/Accountability model to guide investments in new ideas. Innovation teams return for more funding and identify what they need to learn.  - Try smallest versions of everything and then iterate, but be prepared to kill or park ideas that don’t move. Need clear decision points. Killing ideas was a considerable hurdle to get past.  - Use data to validate every step.  - Create internal education opportunities like a podcast.  At the BEI conference, Christopher and Kim will share more of their journey and stories through a two-hour workshop. They want people to leave with information they can use. Key ideas will include: - Understand healthy tension between intrapreneurs and leadership.   - Employees can’t work differently when they use the same old tools. - New innovation teams can’t be treated as they always have.  If you’d like to connect with Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock and learn more about their Innovation initiative, message them on LinkedIn.  If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy Ep 100 - Tom Bianculli with Zebra and Ep 83 - Navin Kunde with Clorox GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get 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 For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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

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

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

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Lisa Lutoff-Perlo. She is the former CEO of Celebrity Cruises and author of the new book Making Waves: A Woman's Rise to the Top, Using Smarts, Heart, and Courage. Welcome, Lisa. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stephen Taylor: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On this week's episode, we sit down with Jeremy Blaylock, CEO and co-founder of Adalo. Adalo is the no-code tool that allows you to build functioning mobile apps. On our discussion, we talk about the whole no-code movement, what it takes to build a startup in St. Louis, and some of the trends that he's seeing in the world of mobile software development.

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

Interview Transcript

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest coming to us from St. Louis, Missouri is Jeremy Blaylock. Jeremy is the CEO and cofounder of Adalo. Welcome, Jeremy. 

Jeremy Blalock: Thanks for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: How are you doing? 

Jeremy Blalock: Hunkering down but got lots of groceries and ready to stay at home for awhile. 

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Yes. For the audience out there that may not be familiar with you and Adalo, why don't we get them up to speed? As a lot of people know on this podcast, we talk a lot about some of the new innovations that are going on, and Adolfo, I think is one of those innovations in the no code space.  I wanted to bring you on to talk about that. Let's get started by telling us a little bit about what is Adalo. 

Jeremy Blalock: Adalo is, as we put it, the easiest way to build a mobile app without knowing how to code. You can build mobile and now actually web apps, apps that do things from being social networks or marketplaces, you know a variety of other types of things. Things like, there's an app that a university built that students use to check their grades for the classes. You can build those apps without knowing how to code, generally through our web editor and then publish them to the iOS and Android app stores. 

Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started in this.

Jeremy Blalock: I'm a software engineer by training. I started writing code when I was in middle school, you know, back in the mid two thousands. I built a lot of websites and a couple of mobile apps and just always kind of was interested in building things that you could watch and have people use. And it always fascinated me. Before I started Adalo, I went and worked at a couple of other companies. I started one startup that I was the head of product for, and then after that, I worked at a company called Synack that we've met along the way, and I led one of their engineering teams. And it was kind of through that process, that I saw that there was this whole evolution of prototyping tools, tools like Envision, Sigma, Framer, that let you build these extremely high fi prototypes that he looked and felt like real apps, but lacking any actual functionality. That was my inspiration to actually go and try to build something that felt like a prototyping tool and was still easy to use like that, but then lets you build a real app with real functionality, you could actually publish to real users.

And so, I started working on Adalo in 2017. And really just started by, looking at what the prototyping tools were doing and taking those functionalities and then building on top of that. We launched to our first-ever users at the end of 2017. We then open up a beta and had a few more users come in and really walk them through the process, intensely with a lot of input from us. As we kept growing, we opened up signups and some are 2019 and then and in Fall we did our big launch and got a lot more people using the products. Now the numbers are 10 times what they were then, but it's been crazy to see that whole thing grow. 

Brian Ardinger:  Tell us a little bit about some of the types of projects that have been built on Adalo.

Jeremy Blalock: I was looking at a really cool one today. It was a guy who built an app for his son to manage his personal finances. That was like, wow, I never thought this was a thing where he is the bank and his son is the client of the bank. There's a wide variety. Like I mentioned, there's been a couple of schools, universities and high schools. have apps where students can check their grades. That's a big category for some reason. Now there's a lot of two-sided marketplaces, things like the Etsy and eBay type of setups. There are a lot of apps in the personal wellness space. Things from psychological wellness to anything related to that. And then there was a lot of productivity apps within companies, so streamlining various workflows. That's what seems to happen within more of the companies.

Brian Ardinger: I've seen some other startups that are using your platform as well Tovala comes to mind. The smart oven out of Chicago who provides meals and stuff through the platform. Let's talk a little bit about this whole no-code movement. What do you think is changing out there? What are the trends that you're seeing in the space? 

Jeremy Blalock: When I started working on this, there wasn't really the no-code movement there is today. There were definitely people working on this and thinking about these problems, but it really wasn't at the scale that it is now. There were tools like Bubble that had been around for a while, and I think we see as a competitor, but you know, we're friendly with them. We'd like to see everybody succeed. I think that what's really happened is that people started to embrace the idea that you don't need to have a technical cofounder or technical team to build a product and get your first users. And I think that's a big mindset shift that's happened since we started the company. 

Originally it was trying to convince people and now it's just trying to facilitate that. You know, obviously it's necessary for this to get big over time, is that people really embrace this. But it happened first with websites, with Squarespace and WordPress. They became the de facto way of making your startup's website. Tools like Webflow, FirstStudy and Further, but I think now that's starting to happen also with apps. You don't necessarily need to hire an engineer. You can just do it yourself. And then test and iterate.

Brian Ardinger:  You're a developer by trade. There's a lot of controversy in the no-code low code. When do you need developers? When don't you, and that? You're building tools to specifically solve that problem of a nontechnical co-founder, spinning some things up. What are some of the objections or things that you've seen that why you should go no code versus hiring your own development team? What are some of the things that you've seen in that space?

Jeremy Blalock: One thing we're really trying to do is make it possible to leverage code when you need to. One thing that we're working on right now, that's the big focus is our component marketplace. So that will let people build, react and react native components that plug into our platform as plugin and ...

There’s no way to innovate if you only stay in your court Xavi Cortadellas is the Head of Innovation and Design at Gatorade. He focuses on innovating in the newest spaces, like tech and services, rather than incremental innovation. Gatorade invented sports drinks 50 years ago and now has an 80% market share. With little room to expand, they actively look for new spaces to grow. Because Gatorade is a huge part of sports in America, when entering a new market, they are careful to examine what’s the right things to do and to always have patience and perseverance.   Gatorade started their innovation journey in 2010 with the G Series. They wanted to expand their product portfolio for before and after sports occasions, such as energy drinks and recovery shakes. In 2015, they changed their approach to viewing themselves as a sports fuel company, providing solutions for the 24/7 athlete in multiple spaces and with numerous products. Some products worked, while others did not.Today, Gatorade is in the third wave of innovation and is now looking at services. Xavi believes in the future, Gatorade may be able to provide sports nutrition information through tech like wearables and heel implants or offer recovery tips and move from delivering products to providing monetized services. As the quarterback of a small innovation team, Xavi corals different groups that touch innovation, such as a daily relationship with R and D. He also works with external design agencies, external tech agencies, and sports marketing teams, which connect him with professional sports teams. Gatorade must understand what the professional athletes want and need. However, working with them can be challenging. Products and services must work the first time, and there’s no time for incubation. When moving products and services from the pros to consumers, Gatorade will make some changes, but already has received valuable input about the products or services from the pro athletes.  Prioritizing new ideas at Gatorade comes down to a few things. First is money. What is the size of the prize? Second is an equity play. Is it a good niche investment for Gatorade and does it create a story that helps them tap into new spaces? Third is complexity. Do they have the right capabilities to accomplish this idea? Cross-functional teams help vet this question and typically have a reasonable consensus on prioritizing and killing ideas. Applying the proper discipline up front, helps the company stay successful.Xavi believes two pitfalls for innovation teams include the tension between the core and innovation, and the complexity of entering new territories. For more information or to contact Xavi, go to Gatorade.com or email him at Xavi.cortadellas@pepsico.com If you liked this podcast, you might also enjoy Jack Elkins with Orlando Magic, Santhi Ramesh with Hersheys, and Derek Mauk with Anheuser Busch. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation. And we sit down with Jennifer Henderson, CEO and Founder of Tilt, Jennifer and I talk about Tilt's startup journey and helping companies reimagine the HR leave process, as well as the trends, challenges, and opportunities companies are facing in this dynamic new world of work. 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, pioneers, and businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Jennifer Henderson, CEO and Founder of Tilt

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 with me is Jennifer Henderson. She is the CEO and founder of Tilt. Welcome to the show. 

Jennifer Henderson: Thanks for having me. I'm excited to chat today. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show as well. We met through, I think the Rocky Mountain Venture Club and Nebraska Angels and Tilt is an amazing company. I'm very excited to be a part of having this conversation with you. It's in the HR talent tech space. And it's re-imagining leave management to help companies with retention and streamlining their processes, helping with compliance, but to think you called it, bringing the human back to leave.

How about you tell us a little bit about the Tilt story. How did you conceive the company and how did it get started? 

Jennifer Henderson: Yeah, sure. The origin story for Tilt. Not that unique, I'm sure to a lot of the other guests that you have that have founded a company. It was completely born out of personal experience. So, my past life was in corporate America.

I worked for 15 years in Fortune 500 companies and I loved it. I absolutely loved my career. I gave everything I had to it. I got very accustomed to promoting every two years and being the go-to person and being in the top of the nine box. Really just got comfortable sitting at that proverbial table, so to speak.

And then I got pregnant and overnight everything changed. I wasn't that person anymore. And that was devastating to me and frustrating to say the least. So, at the time stage of my career, I really turned the other cheek and kept moving forward, you know, clamoring my way back up the ladder. And then five years later, different company, different stage of my career I became pregnant with my second. 

And this time I actually had a promotion rescinded. So that was enough for me to say this isn't right. I don't quite know yet what the solution is, but I do know that I just can't turn the other cheek again. So, I founded Tilt four years ago. Again, not really knowing what the solution would look like at that time, but we've done all your necessary stages of a startup: iterate, MVP, beta tests, listen to users, see what sticks, and here we are. 

Brian Ardinger: So, moving from that corporate world to the startup space, how did you start adapting to the fact that you were moving from, you know, that exploit stage working in a company that knew its business models were on that certain kind of path. Versus jumping into a startup environment, which is much more in the exploration phase, where pretty much everything is uncertain and unknown. Talk me through how that process went for you. 

Jennifer Henderson: Very humbling is how that process went. I felt pretty competent in my business acumen, my ability to build a team, my financial acumen, kind of everything that comes with to your point of more put together and structured organization. Turns out that doesn't all translate, and the world of entrepreneurship has been a very, yeah, I just I'll use the word again, but humbling experience to know that it's not a translatable and, you know, this worked here, so it's going to work there, type of a scenario. 

I actually used to in interviews say, Oh, dealing with ambiguity is one of my towering strengths. I didn't even know what ambiguity was until I entered this world of entrepreneurship. It is a whole different world. The short answer to the question, it was a very, very jarring transition and I was not ready for it. And I've spent four years adjusting and learning and throwing myself into doing work different as an entrepreneur. 

Brian Ardinger: Are there particular resources or hacks or things that you've learned along the way that you would recommend to those early-stage founders going through the same thing? 

Jennifer Henderson: Yeah, it's a great question. My road to competence in entrepreneurship was just leaning into every free webinar, resource, book, person, who back in the day that we could sit and have coffee would have coffee and teach me. And I really leaned into one of my early leaders, told me to be a sponge. And I love that advice. And I really truly like embodied that and tried to soak up, who's done this before, what lessons have they learned? And how can I learn from that? 

I think structurally I'm a big fan of Brad Felds. So, I love really all of his books, course works, podcast interviews, et cetera. I think he speaks in a very accurate and real translatable way to being an entrepreneur. 

Brian Ardinger: You just went through the Techstars workforce development cohort and congratulations on getting through demo day. What's that journey been like going through Techstars program and more importantly, I think, what do you see the journey is post demo day? 

Jennifer Henderson: Well, I got into this program with Tilt after four applications. So, we tried four times to get into Techstars. It's been an aspiration of us as a company for quite some time for a lot of reasons. Most notably, it is very high on the brand recognition spectrum in terms of validation of coming out of Techstars as a graduate. 

And that was something that we wanted quite honestly to have on our resume. So to speak is a Techstars alum. And, you know, hindsight 2020, everything happens for a reason. This was the first cohort of the workforce development track in the Techstars ecosystem. And it was absolutely meant for us. Right. We had 11 other brilliant companies around us that were either selling to the same customers or fighting the same ecosystem battles. And it was just a lot of great synergy going through that program.

Everything that we would have hoped for and more in terms of plugging into the Techstars network, having the validation of being an alum, as well as the content, I was very firm in that I wanted our organization to have a strong foundation of all of the components of building a scalable and sustainable startup.

And I mean, you really can't look to much more tried and true than Techstars to get that type of a foundational acumen. So that was delivered. And then some. And then to answer your question and where we go from here, we have a lot of great tailwinds, both internally and externally in terms of the problem that we're solving at Tilt. 

And coming out just this week as a grad of Techstars, we plan to continue that momentum through the network connection...

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 Organizations

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 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:...

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 Appsmith

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 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 ...

In this episode, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, talks with Swetha PB, Head of Product at Brilliant Hire, an SAP startup. They discuss hiring screening, SAP support, innovation talent, and building a startup within a large company.

Interview Transcript   (Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io)

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

Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger and we have another amazing guest. Live today from the Fall Experiment conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with us today is Swetha PB from Brilliant hire. Welcome to the show.

Swetha PB: Hi everyone.

Brian Ardinger: Swetha thanks for coming out. You are with a company called Brilliant Hire, Head of Product, and Brilliant Hire is a startup, but it's an interesting startup because it's spun out of SAP, which is a large corporation.  So we want to talk a little bit about that particular process, but before we dig into that, let's talk a little bit about how you got involved in innovation in the first  place.

Swetha PB: Yeah, definitely. So since college days innovation or problem solving and trying to figure out creative ways of doing things with something that interested me a lot and being part of SAP, there are a lot of opportunities being hackathons or a lot of different ways that we could explore that part of us.  And I think that was what brought us together even to start this brilliant hire and what it is today.

Brian Ardinger: Tell the audience a little bit about what Brilliant Hire is all about. 

Swetha PB: Brilliant Hire is a screening as a service. We provide a SaaS based software that helps reduce the time and effort involved in the hiring process in an unbiased manner. We all know that hiring is broken and we hear to solve the first part of it by, you know, what do using your time, effort involved in that.

Brian Ardinger: How did it come about that you wanted to try to solve this particular problem and how did SAP become involved in this? 

Swetha PB: So that's a very interesting part of our journey. It came out of what is called today in actual terminology, as user innovation. So I and my colleagues, the two other co founders of Brilliant Hire, would ask to take part in interviews. We were asked to scale a team from four to 40 all in a month. So that was a challenge for us. So we had to go on weekends. This is all back in India. Go on weekends, take interviews for these roles. And what made us realize, though we were spending so much time interviewing candidates, only 30% were going into the next round of interviews. There's a 70% rejection rate right there. So this kind of shocked us. We started one like, you know, explore, is this a problem just with us, just within our company or is it present over the, you know, all industries. That's what we tried to solve and we started on, we started to explore, we started talking to lot more recruiters. We did a lot of research and understood, yeah, this is a problem all around and hiring is clearly broken. And that got us excited and we're like, okay, let's see how we solve the problem. And inside SAP, there are a lot of hackathons that keep happening. And good for us that one of the hackathons hired smart HR as the topics. So it was a great time for us to like, the problem that we faced, how do we solve it? 

Read the interview transcript at insideoutside.io

Stuart Willson is the CEO and founder of Radicle, a research and advisory company that has worked with great companies like Lego, Diageo, Proctor and Gamble, and more. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside founder talks with Stuart about the new trends in the world of research, how companies are using information and data to make better decisions, and about the new venture model that companies like Prehype are using to create startups from scratch.   

Interview Transcript - To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stuart Willson. Stuart is the CEO and founder of a company called Radicle. It's a research and advisory company that has worked with great companies like Lego, Diageo, Proctor and Gamble, and more. In our interview, you'll hear some insights about the new trends in the world of research, how companies are using information and data to make better decisions, and we talk a lot about what's the new venture model that companies like Prehype are using to create new startups from scratch.  Have a listen.

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

Welcome to another episode of inside, outside innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest with us today is Stuart Willson. He is the cofounder and CEO of Radicle, a new research and advisory business. He's here to talk about some of the changes and trends that he's seeing. Stuart, welcome to the show. 

Stuart Wilson: Thank you for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you back. You were at the IO Summit and you had a great talk about some of the new trends that you're seeing.  Before we jump into that and talking about Radicle, I want to talk about how you got into the innovation space cause it's a little bit different than your traditional entrepreneur. 

Stuart Wilson: I like to say I have a fairly nontraditional background relative to my peers and by which, I mean I had a pretty traditional background for most of my career. I worked and investment banking out of college. I went and got my MBA and then I was looking for a job where I've been learning a lot and be challenged and get paid to be right. And I ended up at a hedge fund and for 11 years. I was an investor investing everything from media to ski resorts and ultimately starting my own fund with a partner.  

But then as is often the case in New York, my circle of friends shifted somewhat and I was introduced to and became friends with a group of people that included folks like Ben Leventhal who just sold Resy to Amex and my friend Josh Abramson, who had started College Humor, friends who were at places like Spark and Union Square, and I was the only person sitting up on Park Avenue, looking at a Bloomberg machine. And the more time I spent with them and the more I listen to what they're doing, the more I felt like I was really wasting my time and that there was this transformation happening as waves of new technologies created opportunities and democratized business building. 

But I wasn't participating in that and I wasn't really doing anything that I felt was driving value or utility for our customer. And so I decided to leave and I was introduced to Henrik Berglin, who started the incubator Prehype. And cofounded Bark, a dog focused startup, formerly Bark box. I told him what I wanted to do, which was to build something like pretty abstract. 

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

Francesca Gino is a professor/affiliated with Harvard’s Business, Law, and Kennedy Schools. She is the author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break All the Rules in Work and in Life. She also recently published an article in Harvard Business Review on Why Curiosity Matters - The Business Case for Curiosity. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, talks with Francesca, about when rule breaking happens and what happens to people that do it successfully. Curiosity Curiosity is an important driver behind the experience of rule breaking.  We are born with lots of curiosity, but it starts declining at five years old.  When people join new jobs, they have high curiosity, but in 9 months, their curiosity has dropped 20%. What can companies do to keep that high? What can organizations do to support curiosity? - Change the mindset about what curiosity can do.  - Good for business and leaders to model behavior. Ask What if we changed … - Hard to know what outcomes of questions are. As How and What questions. Are there different ways to measure curiosity? - Intuit has innovation and failure awards (lessons learned and comes with a party). - Wake for Startups ending - A company gave 1 hr for lunch and 1 hr for culture. Then opened a library in the manufacturing plant.  Rebel Talent - People who challenge rules for positive change - Talents include curiosity, novelty, perspective, diversity, and authenticity. - You can foster each trait. Releasing a sculpture from a block. Don’t have to be born a rebel, but bring those traits out.  Can curiosity be effective in moving an organization forward?  - Thoughtfulness by leaders.  - Develop Performance Goals and Learning Goals.  Obstacles to overcome? - Leadership level. Sense of fear. If you allow for curiosity, you’ll end up in chains. Allowing curiosity says I trust you.  - Employee side - Change starts with each one of us.  How do you hire Rebels? - Pay attention to answers matching skills. E.g. - Hiring people with different perspectives than you. If you want to find out more about Francesca or her book check out rebeltalents.org. There is a FREE test, with no email required, that tells you which type of Rebel you are.  If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 126 – Barry O’Reilly, Author of Unlearn & Lean Enterprise Ep. 117 – Nicole Rufuku, Author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy Ep. 109 – Greg Larkin, Corporate Entrepreneur and Author of “This Might Get Me Fired” Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play.   FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get 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 HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

This is a special bonus podcast episode with RSM's George Casey.  George Casey is the Microsoft Innovation Leader and Leader of RSM's Technology Experience Center.  RSM provides audit, tax, and consulting services to help middle market leaders succeed.  Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, talks with George about RSM's Technology Experience Center, collaborative partners, innovation, and digital transformation.

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

To read the interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io

Brian Ardinger: George, welcome to the show. 

George Casey: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. We had a chance to meet a couple of weeks ago, and I had an opportunity to see firsthand what the RSM Technology Experience Center is all about. George, tell us who you are, what's your role at RSM, and then we can talk a little bit about the Experience Center.

George Casey: I've been with RSM about five years, but been with this kind of organization that joined RSM through acquisition for almost 20, so been doing this type of work for awhile. And my role at RSM, you described, I'm a partner with the firm and I lead this Microsoft innovation function, which is really helping customers understand from the innovation ecosystem or broad capability set what's possible? How can we look at blurring the lines between what we used to think of as systems or functions or technologies into an overall ecosystem or platform approach to solving business problems? And a lot of what we talk about isn't very technology focused. It's more around digital transformation and business transformation. And that's where the Technology Experience Center really comes into play in giving us a platform to host people and to innovate and ideate and think about real world problems and look around the corner. 

• RSM on YouTube - A playlist with 15 different videos that focus on technology highlights like AI, blockchain, and augmented reality.
• RSM Technology Experience Center - Videos and case studies
• RSM Innovation 

To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io    Please subscribe and leave a 5-Star Review to help us connect with more innovators.

Learn More - If you want to learn more about Inside Outside Innovation's team, our content, our services, check out Insideoutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder,  sits down with Zainab Ghadiyali. Zainab is a product lead at Airbnb. She used to work at Facebook, and she's the co-founder of Wogrammer, a nonprofit showcasing amazing women in technology. We talk about the power of curiosity and persistence in building a career in today's environment of change. 

We talk about Zainab's journey from coming to America with $107 in her pocket, to working some of the best and biggest tech companies in the world. And we talk about the power of finding mentors, telling diverse stories and the new trends that you're seeing in the world of technology. Let's get started.

For a full transcript, check out insideoutside.io.

Interview Transcript

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research, events, and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption.  Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's 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 with me is Zainab Ghadiyali.  She is an amazing woman who came out to our IO Summit. She works at Airbnb currently, but has had an extraordinary career and we're excited to have her on the show.  Welcome. 

Zainab Ghadiyali: Hi.Thanks Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you back on the show. You were one of the first persons I thought of to bring out to the IO summit last year. I saw a blog posts written by First Round Capital.  It was basically an interview with you talking about curiosity and the secrets of designing a curiosity-driven career. And after I read that and got in touch with you, I said I had got to have her at the show. You've had a pretty amazing career. You came to America with about a hundred bucks in your pocket and have managed to work at great places like Facebook and now Airbnb. You started great programs like Wogrammer. Why don't we talk through what it's like to come to America and kickstart a career? 

Coming to America and Kickstarting a Career

Zainab Ghadiyali: Yeah, absolutely. You know, one thing that I talk about a lot is the importance of ignorance. For me, for example, I had no idea what living in U.S. Would be like. Of course, I was familiar to some extent, based on media outlets and looking at life, watching Friends or Seinfeld or like, you know, some of the more famous American sitcoms. I'm like, that's America. Cool. Once I landed here in a small town in South Carolina, obviously a very different world, but I could not have been more excited. For me, it was just such an adventure. I had no idea about how anything would be.  No expectations, which meant it would be hard to get let down. On hindsight, had someone told me about the challenges of like, Hey, a hundred bucks doesn't go a long way, which in India, that's a lot of money. So for me, that was like, Oh yeah, that's like one month expenses, and then I'll figure it out. 

Had someone like told me about that and some of the other challenges along the way, I would have probably been apprehensive about, oh my gosh, there is no way I can do this right. When someone tells you this and they're well, meaning, but when you learn about these challenges, about like how they find it hard or they could not do it, you start telling yourself that story, that you can also not do it, or you start validating and saying yes. 

Brian Ardinger: And you have managed to build a career in technology. Maybe tell the audience about how you even got involved in your first hack-a-thon. 

Finding a Path to Facebook

Zainab Ghadiyali: When I thought about my career. I honestly didn't know what I wanted to do, like what role I wanted to do. I knew that I'm someone who is very curious. I like to learn about new things. Like I'll read anything, even like I'll sit and read like something on a cereal box. I'm constantly reading, and I know I'm like very curious. I knew that as long as I was learning new things, I would be happy. And the second thing I knew was that I wanted to have a lot of impact in people's lives. Like I wanted to my world to reach as many people as I possibly could. And do as much impactful work as I possibly could.

I knew these two things, but I didn't know what role I should really do. I signed up as a theater major. Cause I just love arts and I love acting.  It's more of a hobby than thinking of my career. And then I also signed up for the biology program because one idea was just something my parents were really excited about was me becoming a doctor. I started those tracks, realize that really like being in a theater major, like it's quite expensive with like you have to buy the props and the equipment, and I was like, I have no money for this. Doing theater was just not a realistic option at that point and continued along with biology, chemistry. I loved our chemistry department so much. I love the professors there so much that I decided to take on the chemistry courses. 

I did that. I realized that, you know, I wanted to get some more hands on experience and working in a hospital. I learned that to apply to medical schools, you needed to have volunteer experience, have some experience working in hospitals. But I did not have a car or any means to get to a hospital. I was like, well, how will I do this? And I was also working as much as was possible. And I was also taking classes and I was feeling burnt out as well, three years in. So long story short, I found an opportunity to go and work in Germany on research projects with doctors there. And I thought, well, this is cool.  You know, I don't have a car to get to a hospital here.  Maybe I'll just stay in Germany and go work in hospitals there. 

And I found this opportunity and applied. And became one of the few research scientists chosen from North America, and that's where I learned that I don't necessarily enjoy the life of a doctor. Instead of being the one on one with patients, I wanted to do things that would reach more people, and so I thought maybe public health might be a good option then. Because then you're building programs and you're thinking about how you help a wider population. And I started volunteering and working with a nonprofit and after I graduated, worked with them full-time to build business models in some of the remotest parts of the world. Like this was in South America, in the Andes, remote parts of South India. 

I realize two things. One is to make a difference in those communities, felt like there was a need to have power or influence in other words and/or money. And then I didn't have any of the things. I thought, well, if I really want to have an impact and maybe I have to figure it, how can I influence and how can I build something that will reach more people and actually have meaningful impact. And so then again, I started researching. A...

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

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I am your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Chris Shipley. She is the co-author of the new book, The Adaptation Advantage.  Welcome to the show, Chris. 

Chris Shipley: Thank you very much for inviting me on. I appreciate it. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on for a number of different reasons. You and I go back on number of years, mentoring Pipeline Entrepreneurs, and you were one of the first speakers at one of the first IO Summits that we had few years ago. So, I really appreciate you jumping back into the community to talk about your new book and everything that's going on in the world of technology, coronavirus and everything else it's happening. So, thank you very much for coming on. 

Chris Shipley: Is there anything else going on in the world, but coronavirus right now?

Brian Ardinger: I don't know. Probably not. 

Chris Shipley: Well, you know, it certainly contextualizes everything. I didn't plan to release a book in the middle of a pandemic, but it's put the writing and the thinking about future of work really in sharp definitions. Oddly, it's a good time. 

Brian Ardinger: Well, the timing is perfect for this and you and I have been in this space talking about disruption and startups, technology, and all of this. And we've been warning folks for a long time about the coming changes, whether it's new technology like AI or self-driving cars or global climate change, et cetera. And it seems like it's only now hitting folks that, oh yeah, this disruption thing might actually be real. So, I'd like to get your thoughts on that mind shift that a lot of people are going through right now. Like they may have heard about it change and, and talked about this, this rapid pace of change, but only now are beginning to see it. 

Chris Shipley: I think you hit it exactly right. It was easy before January to think about this future is something that's out there. It might be months or years or decades away, but it's, it's something I can deal with then. And very forward-thinking companies and individuals, of course, were doing strategic planning and doing longterm thinking, but again, it was very easy to focus on the immediate thing in front of you. What's been so important now is to see this acceleration that a lot of the things that we write about in the book, a lot of things that people have been concerned or working on strategic plans or longterm planning, it's just been compressed into a very short period of time where we've started to have to activate a lot of those plans or make plans and activate them very, very quickly. 

So, this time, whether it's the virus or our reaction to it, has been an accelerant to get to the kinds of transitions that we know we have to make that are really hard to do when you're very comfortable where you are. It's really difficult. If you're on firm ground to take a step onto something that might be a little uncertain. Now everything's uncertain. So, leaping from the one Lily pad to the next, starting to feel like it's not such a bad thing after all.  

Brian Ardinger: Well, it's also interesting to see which companies are jumping on that and adapting faster. I'm currently at Nelnet. Now we have 6,500 employees in multiple different states and we basically transitioned 6,000 of those employees to remote work in a matter of 10 days. And that's something that I think if you would've gone into the boardroom two weeks earlier and said, Hey, I think this is what we need to do, we just need to go remote. It would have never happened. 

Chris Shipley: Yeah. You would have said, Oh, that's an interesting idea. Think about what that could save us in real estate and HR costs and blah, blah, blah, you know, and let's form a committee. And we'll create a strategic plan and let's make that our goal for 2022. Instead, it was like, we gotta do it right now. So, what right now do we have to do? And I've seen a number of companies looking at that from we've got to make sure that every employee has the best possible bandwidth or one company that has been deploying their ergonomics specialist to FaceTime meetings where they say, well, point your camera at your work situation. Why do you have your laptop on a hamper? And you're sitting on a beach chair that really can't be healthy now, can it. Let's set up a pickup station so you can come by campus and get your office chair. I mean, they're doing things that are, we never think about, even in a very deliberate strategic plan they're making happen in matters of days. If not even faster. 

Brian Ardinger: It's not just the bigger corporations it's you and I both work with smaller startups. And a lot of times they're thought of as nimbler and things along those lines, but they're also struggling with the fact that our business model doesn't work right now, or the business model we are trying to evolve our work on is now totally disrupted for six months. And we don't have six months of runway to figure it out the next step. So, what do we do? 

Chris Shipley: You're telling the story that I'm living right now. I'm working with the company, tremendous potential, and you know, we've been able to make rudimentary progress over the last 18 months. We've made more progress in the last two weeks than we have in the prior, certainly six months in terms of understanding where we need to go focusing, being laser, you know, in our execution, because we know we've gotta be in a place to either extend the runway we have, or really be an attractive investment vehicle by mid summer. That doesn't give us time to, it was my father would say lollygag around, waiting to hope that something good is going to happen or that people are going to get around to figuring out what our brand strategy should be. Whatever. It had to happen like that. And so that's the positive that comes from this that we have become extraordinarily focused on. What's important, both in work and I would say argue in our personal lives as well. 

Brian Ardinger: So let's go back to the book. It's called Adaptation Advantage.  Can you give us a little thesis about it. And maybe how you got to write this book. 

Chris Shipley: On the way back machine a little bit, it was 2015 and I was speaking at a conference in Sydney, Australia, and another speaker, Heather McGowan, who gave a presentation. And afterward I approached, I said, well, you just talked about my life. And it was this presentation about how work is changing, how individual contributors play a different role on the corporation. And, and so we just, I got to talking and discovered that at the time, anyway, we were living about six miles apart, both in the Boston area.and a friendship formed. We spent a lot of time just having conver...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with New York Times bestselling author and founder of Moves The Needle, Brant Cooper. Brant and I talk about his upcoming book, Disruption Proof, and provide a sneak peek into our upcoming IO Live event on September 20. Let's get started

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week we'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with Brant Cooper, CEO of Moves The Needle

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:30] 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 Brant Cooper. He's the founder of Moves The Needle, New York Times bestselling author of the Lean Entrepreneur, and author of an upcoming book, which I'm so excited to talk about called Disruption Proof: Empower People, Create Value and Drive Change. Welcome Brant. 

Brant Cooper: [00:01:07] Thanks Brian. Pleasure as always. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:01:10] I'm excited to have you back. As our audience knows you've been a part of the lean scene for a long time. You had a chance to speak at our IO2020 Summit. And we're going to do a little something different with this podcast episode, because we're having you back on September 29th for a live event. It's part of our IO Live series. Basically, we're going to have an hour to talk about the book and have audience questions and do a little bit more in depth stuff with you. 

So, I wanted to save this episode more as a preview to get folks excited about the book and excited about some of the things we're going to be talking about. So, with that, you got a new book out called Disruption Proof. Tell us how you got to the point of writing a new book and what's it all about? 

Brant Cooper: [00:01:50] Yeah. So, I guess it's been in the works for a couple of years, actually. It seems like so pandemic ready, but that was maybe just fortuitous that I was already embarking on it. And then of course the pandemic itself hit and business kind of dried up. So that gave you the opportunity to really crank it out. 

You know, over the last seven, eight years taking some of that lean stuff into the large enterprise. And it's just, that was an interesting journey in the sense that, you know, all of this lean startup, lean innovation stuff really started in Silicon Valley startups.

I mean, honestly it preceeded all of that, but you know, us tech startup people like to feel like we've invented everything. There was a movement. Right. And so, starting in startups and then we bring it into the big companies. And inevitably we start with the innovation groups. As I'm trying to work through the change that is required inside of these companies, I really realized that there's uncertainty everywhere inside the enterprise.

There's something happening here, way bigger. And this is perhaps obvious to a lot more people. It takes me awhile. I think really this fundamental shift from the industrial age and management practices and even management organization, that's based around the industrial, really this level of complexity and endless disruption that is in the digital age, leads to this uncertainty.

And we continue to try to tackle the uncertainty the way we did in the industrial age. And it just creates more angst, and it creates more doubt and people just really wondering what the heck is going on. Then the pandemic hits. And I think we blame all of that angst and anxiety on the pandemic. And now people are like, ah, man, I can't wait to get back to the old normal. And yet the old normal was still filled with that uncertainty. 

And so that's really what the book ended up addressing. So again, I didn't start out with writing, you know, sort of this post pandemic book, but because I was writing it right in the middle of all of this, there really ends up being these pandemic…and how do you respond to it? And what does this mean in that bigger picture that ends up being what the book is about? 

Brian Ardinger: [00:04:05] It's interesting because I think, you and I have I've been talking about disruption forever. And innovation groups have been talking about it and trying to figure out how to do this. And the pandemic really seems to have taken that theory and made it real for most people.

I mean, everybody on the planet to some extent has been disrupted by various means of, of what happened during the last 18 months. And it really, I think has brought out the conversation where it's no longer theory we're talking about. It's like, yeah, I get it. But now I really get it. But I still don't know what to do about it.

So, you know, I've seen a proof of your book in that you really capture it and talk about the five elements of what you need to be doing to embrace this new world of work. So maybe talk through a little bit about that and some of the things you found out. 

Brant Cooper: [00:04:48] Yeah. So, to me, the key is to all of this, is that it's not really the technology, even though we're in a digital revolution and we're doing digital transformation and we're working in innovation. It just really isn't about the technology because there's not that much uncertainty around the technology.

It's really about the mindset and the way we have to change our thinking and our behavior relative to this massive change in technology. And so, I described the behavior change that we need based upon these five elements. 

And so, empathy, exploration, which is basically admitting what we don't know. And so going out and learning. Leveraging evidence, so data plus insights to help us inform decisions. We don't want just algorithms and AI deciding for us, but certainly what we go and figure out needs to inform our decision. 

This concept of equilibrium, which is building a balance between the execution, everything that we know we have to get done, and this exploration work, meaning that we have to go and learn something first. That's a continuum throughout the organization. Even your core business needs to do some amount of exploration. It's not this bifurcation of one side of the house is execution. And one side is exploration. I think that's industrial age innovation thinking. 

And then the final one is ethics. And with all of the data problems that we have, and with livable wages and all of these other things that have really come to the fore, it's really incumbent upon businesses to figure out how they live up to their own values that they establish and that they broadcast.

And again, that ends up being something that we have to drive down into the human behavior. And so rather than some of the big management theories on how you do change, which is very top down. I wanted to describe the behaviors of what people actually have to do day in, day out inside of their jobs. And it really is a ground up initiative.

It requires obviously leaders to buy in and go, yes, we're going to change. It's kind of a pincer move, but you have to start with developing that behavior on the ground. And I guess the one other point I would make about it is the reason why I'm somewhat optimistic about that is this behavior already exists, right?

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Creating environments where innovation can thrive Aaron Proietti is author of the new book, Today’s Innovator. He’s spent 17 years working in the innovation space, including leading initiatives at Transamerica and Capital One. Aaron believes everyone wants innovation to happen, but the traits that make the company successful are the very things that are standing in the way of innovation.  Today’s Innovator In his new book, Today’s Innovator, Aaron focuses on how to create an environment where innovation can thrive. He focuses on strategy, culture, systems and that YOU are today’s innovator. Who do you need to be to thrive in a complex organization (people, politics and traits). Aaron also examines the stages of Innovation maturity and business models. Can you have core business operations, but push innovation and invent new things? It’s difficult to find the balance.  Innovation should be considered a business competency Systems are not setup to be innovative. You need repeatable, scalable, and sustainable ways to be innovative. Innovation should be considered a business competency. Companies used to bring in consultants to help develop ideas. When the consultants left, the idea generation stopped. They didn’t change the nature of the business. Organizations are now talking about culture and competency. When you build a leadership and more nimble culture, it allows for innovation to last and be sustained. How do you get over the hump?   Companies need a strong champion at the highest levels of the organization. Sometimes innovation becomes important because one aspect is not meeting objectives. The champion needs to call out roadblocks. This process is broken or we need to go around the process here. Agitate organization to create a new awareness or muscle.  Making changes from the middle If companies don’t have a burning platform, how can a person in the middle of the org make changes? Aaron’s book, Today’s Innovator, is designed to help them. They need to build a new skill set which includes: becoming an Innovation leader, building high performing teams, setting expectations, strong innovation network, empathy, and how to lead and promote change.   Where to start? To create quick wins, start with the innovation layer, instead of the core operating business. At Transamerica they started with the data layer, because they had tons of data and a great data science team.  You can Preorder Aaron’s book, Today’s Innovator, on Amazon or contact him on LInkedIn. If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy Ep 95 - Steve Glaveski with Collective Campus and Episode 124 -Amy Radin, Author of The Change Maker’s Playbook. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Product Development to Create Raving Fans Using Game Thinking Amy Jo Kim is a longtime innovation consultant and author of Game Thinking, a step-by-step system for building lasting engagement into product experience and based on design techniques from hit games. With a wealth of knowledge, Amy Jo spoke to Brian about the concept of superfans, mainstream majority and early majority, and why identifying these demographics is crucial for success. Check out her book at https://gamethinking.io If you are interested in product development, check out Brian's interview with Laura Klein at https://insideoutside.io/podcast/ep-34-laura-klein-w-lean-startup-for-product-design/   GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get 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 HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

This week's episode showcases the international perspective of Eric Broekhuizen who is a director and program leader at HighTexhXL in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. HighTechXL is a six-month accelerator that focuses on advanced hardware technology. Eric shared how their campus with 140 startups has catalyzed acquisitions by companies like Intel, Amazon, and Medtronic. HighTechXL is now accepting applications for their 2016-2017 program. The deadline is 2 October. Learn more at hightechxl.com. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Simone Ahuja, Author of Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business---Before the Competition Does, researches barriers that are preventing large companies from innovating internally. Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation talks with Simone about these innovation barriers and what managers and leaders can do to support innovators.  Highlights from the discussion: Why is it so hard to innovate? - Lack of alignment - Disconnect between senior leaders and feet on the street. Lack of knowledge in the middle. Innovation is a relatively new discipline. There's a difference in metrics and incentives. Need to establish new metrics at all levels, creating space for innovation. - Innovation is different in companies that are large and older, where culture is deep. Not specific to the industry. - Need to encourage people to put forward innovative ideas (Value-creation innovation). It’s the pathway to innovation, but not everyone has to be an innovator or intrapreneur. Innovation Principles - Who is innovating inside large organizations or as a side hustle? How do we harness that? Engage people so they feel satisfied and want to stay around. Only 14% of college grads want to work in large corporations e.g., Medtronic. - How do you identify those people? Managers seem to know who they are. Action-oriented and risk-taking. Don’t know how to support them. Need to provide “air cover.” Built on trust, autonomy, and space. Assisting people in transitional innovation.  - Managers need to have the Idea of fluid and agility. How do you manage info and change? How do we create flexibility in our organizations? What’s exciting you about this space? - Optimistic that innovation is becoming more of a discipline. - The human side of innovation. Passion and purpose and why to harness it.  To find out more, you can purchase Simon’s book Disrupt-It-Yourself: Eight Ways to Hack a Better Business---Before the Competition Does or learn more at www.Blood-orange.com or on Twitter @simoneahuja. If you enjoyed this podcast, you might also enjoy: Ep. 124 - Amy Radin, Author of The Change Maker's Playbook & FinTech Guru, Ep. 109 - Greg Larkin, Corporate Entrepreneur and Author of “This Might Get Me Fired, and Ep. 78 - Katherine Manuel w/ Thomson Reuters. Find this episode of Inside Outside Innovation at insideoutside.io. You can also listen on Acast, iTunes, Sticher, Spotify, and Google Play FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get 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 HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Derek Mauk is a senior innovation brand manager for Anheuser-Busch. In part 2 of his interview, he shares more about how the Best Damn Brewing Co. team was able to pull off such a multi-dimensional innovation effort in a relatively short amount of time, and how they dealt with the inevitable problems that arose along the way. We also get to hear about the diverse set of outlets ABI uses to engage with startups and solve problems without having to completely reinvent the wheel--or the beer. Connect with Derek at https://www.linkedin.com/in/derekmauk or on Twitter @AnheuserBusch. Find information and tickets for our innovation summit at theiosummit.com and tell us your story on Twitter @theiopodcast to get on the show. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Robyn Bolton, Founder and Chief Navigator at Mile Zero. Robin and I talk about her experiences in the world of corporate innovation from her days at P&G to Innosight to today. And what are some of the stories and things that she's learned to help companies navigate the world of disruption.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with Robyn Bolton, Chief Navigator at Mile Zero on Corporate Innovation and Disruption

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:30] Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another guest. Today we have Robyn Bolton. She is the founder and chief navigator at Mile Zero. Welcome to the show, Robyn. 

Robyn Bolton: [00:00:53] Thank you, Brian. Thrilled to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:00:55] Well, I'm excited to have you here for a number of different reasons. You've spent your career at the forefront of corporate innovation. So, you worked as an intrapreneur at P & G. I believe you were part of the team that launched the Swiffer and the, and the Swiffer Wet Jet. So, congrats on that. You were a partner at Innosight, Clayton Christensen's growth consulting firm, and now you're the founder of Mile Zero, which is an innovation consulting and coaching firm.

You have been around corporate innovation, both inside corporations, doing it, helping companies grow and innovate. And then outside as a consultant. Where have you seen the most progress from companies when it comes to the concept of innovation? What has happened over the last 10, 15 years that hopefully makes these companies interact and do innovation a little bit better.

Robyn Bolton: [00:01:40] There's actually that, as you can imagine, a tremendous amount of change that's happened over the past decades. So, when I started in innovation at P & G in the late nineties, innovation hadn't yet really become an industry. Entrepreneur was still synonymous with unemployed. I mean, it was just, it was before the first dot com bubble. Innovation was really just a company launching new products.

Now there's a whole industry around innovation. You have admittedly consultants like me. You have venture studios; you have incredible firms that do market research that do prototyping. You have corporate venture capital. There's this entire industry and ecosystem that has been built up to support companies who want to innovate.

The other thing is innovation has just become part of the corporate language. Right. I don't think you can tune into an analyst call. I don't think you can read an annual report without seeing, or hearing innovation over and over. So, it's just become part of the language and the lexicon of business. And what executives think about. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:02:51] Do you think a lot of that is due to the part that the world itself is changing so much and disruption is happening at a faster pace? And then therefore companies have to adapt to this, or is there something? 

Robyn Bolton: [00:03:04] I think it's very much that the world is changing at a faster pace. It is easier to start a company than it's ever been before. So, you're just seeing a lot more traction amongst startups. And you're seeing disruption as Clay Christiansen, coined the phrase. It’s happening more and more.

It used to be that it took decades and generations for disruption to happen. Now you just think about the last 10 years. And all of the industries that we've seen disrupted. So it's become less of, I would say this nice thing to do, and more of a business imperative. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:03:39] One of the things that I'm seeing out there is even though it's becoming much more part of the lexicon and people are thinking about it and trying to do some things around it, it doesn't seem to be actually impacting corporations. There's still a lot of failure when it comes to innovation. Can you talk a little bit about why companies are still having struggles around innovation? 

Robyn Bolton: [00:04:00] That's actually the question that has plagued me, and I think a lot of folks who work in innovation. Innovation has been around, been talked about being worked on for decades, but nothing's really changed when it comes to that success rate. And why is that? 

It's a lot of things. Companies got big by doing the same thing over and over and doing it better and better. And innovation is the opposite of that. It's doing something you probably never done. And making mistakes and learning from them. So, it's just the complete opposite of what a company is.

I think there's also this very human element of companies are filled with human beings. And as human beings, we respond to incentives. And we respond to the things that benefit us. So just any rational human being in their role within a company is going to say, okay, what do I get paid to do? What do I get a bonus for?

Honestly, the tenure enrolls has so reduced it. I think it's now like two years. That why would I spend time and resources and political capital on something that if it works, it will come to fruition maybe in five years when I'm long gone. Versus spending all of those resources and political capital on something that will most likely yield results in six months, when I'll get the rewards for it. So, there's just all of these human elements that are a challenge. 

Brian Ardinger: [00:05:35] I'm curious to hear your insights into what's changed over the last 18 months. COVID radically accelerated virtually everything, and probably you and I have been talking about disruption in that for a long time. 

And now it seems when you go into a boardroom, the executives, get it more than a theory, but they actually understand like, oh yeah, my entire business may have to change overnight. How has that affected people's take on innovation. And what have you seen over the last, maybe 18 months? 

Robyn Bolton: [00:06:03] I've really seen this just enlightenment and this opening up to the realities of innovation, because what makes innovation so hard is it requires change and change is uncomfortable and change is uncertain.

Well, COVID required to change literally overnight for a lot of companies. And suddenly leaders had an experience of change. And they experienced the learning process and they experienced all of these things that go along with innovation, and they realized they could do it. And that it wasn't as scary as they thought and that it was okay to make mistakes and then learn from them.

And so, all of these things that you experience when you're doing innovation that seem very scary and that you want to avoid, they suddenly did them and survived. And are thriving. In that way with every dark cloud has a silver lining. The silver lining of COVID is the companies now have a greater belief in their ability to innovate and to change and a greater openness to try new things.

Brian Ardinger: [00:07:14] Who's doing it well now. And have you seen a shift in how companies are em...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Liam Martin, author of the new book 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 Remote

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 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 ...

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 Book

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 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...

After years of working in startups, Sean Johnson and his team began getting approached by enterprises. These companies needed help moving on ideas, accessing specialists and understanding how to be iterative. Today, Sean's company Digital Intent works with venture-backed startups and Fortune 1000 companies wanting to be tech-enabled businesses. He is also a general partner at Founder Equity. Brian and Sean discuss a variety of corporate innovation strategies. Here are a few highlights: - Companies need to be making lots of little bets, with little bits of funds. Think like investors. Spread the risk.  - Corporations innovation teams can have a similar cadence to a venture fund. Life of 7-10 years and 3 deals a year. Team churn concern. How to preserve knowledge. - Have conversations with corporate teams who are connected with customers early. Act like a startup and get realistic feedback for needs and products.  - Partner with startups. Startups are getting a channel they didn’t have, but are putting in resources and time to appease the corporation. Good strategy for corporations.  - Try an EIR (Entrepreneurs-in-residence). No legacy baggage.  - Arm corporate startup teams with a coach.  - Develop internal VC boards with members that are external and bring domain experience.   - Leverage the data companies collect by understanding how to use the data. This may create opportunities for less disruptive and more incremental improvements.  - Traditional service companies (law, accountancies, and management consultants) will automate significant portions of their work. Reinvent these business models.  - Use more tactical growth accounting. Manage to growth metrics and experiments.  To connect with Sean Johnson, follow him at @intentionally, Digintent.com or founderequity.com If you like this interview, you might also be interested in Ep. 98- Sean Ammirati with Birchmere Ventures & Author of The Science of Growth and Ep. 54- Robert Walcott with Kellogg on Innovation Trends GET THE LATEST RESOURCES Get 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 For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Martin Babinec, Co-founder of TriNet and author of the new book More Good Jobs. Martin and I talk about the importance of community dynamics, and the creation of new businesses and the changing trends, that are affecting building startup communities outside the Valley. 

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

Interview Transcript with Martin Babinec

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger and as always we have another amazing guest. Martin Babinec is the co-founder of TriNet and author of a new book called More Good Jobs: An entrepreneurs action plan to create change in your community. Welcome Martin.

Martin Babinec: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: I wanted to have you on the show. As a lot of our audience knows, part of the stuff we talk about in innovation, it's not just about startup innovation or corporate innovation, it's about community innovation. And your book around how do you create jobs and how do you create new innovations outside of the traditional tech hubs, was quite interesting to me and obviously up my alley, as far as what we've been doing here in the Midwest as well. 

You're an entrepreneurial by nature. A few years ago, you started TriNet back in Silicon Valley and grew that to a, a major company, but you've got some interesting things about how you did that. Not only did you create it in Silicon Valley, but you commuted back and forth from your residence in New York. So, take us back to the early days of starting a company from scratch in Silicon Valley, and then we'll eventually progress to talking more about the book. 

Martin Babinec: I'm a very lucky guy because when I began my entrepreneurial journey in 1988 and living in Silicon Valley at the time, I didn't realize how valuable it would be to be starting a company in what would be considered the most entrepreneur supporting place on the planet.

I had no appreciation for it at the time. It was a struggle. And when Tri-Net began, since in the late eighties, you couldn't say the words HR and outsourcing in the same sentence and have people understand what you were talking about. We're talking pre worldwide web. So, we didn't have the connectivity that we take so for granted today. And like most entrepreneurs, I began with only the vision of trying to create a small business. I was tired of working in a larger organization. I wanted to be more in control of my destiny. And that's a very common thing that prompts people to start companies. But what I did not understand is that the very nature of what we were creating a TriNet would depend on economies of scale.

And so as an entrepreneur, once I began trying to start this business and sell to other small businesses as a business to business kind of approach, we were not successful. And we were on the verge of going out of business, when I kind of made the decision to really do something counterintuitive. 

Even though this is an economies of scale kind of business, it required having lots of scale for it to be successful. It was waning our direction towards saying we're only going to sell to emerging world technology communities. It really changed my life and outlook as an entrepreneur. And then became for TriNet to over the entire 20 years of, as the CEO, that was the focus of our business initially in Silicon Valley and then on, from, as we expanded to other markets, still retaining that very tight focus. 

And by doing that, it brought me into the world of Silicon Valley in ways that made me appreciate how important was to get support from the community. And it wasn't till I moved my family from Silicon Valley to my hometown in upstate New York, which is more like the Midwest in terms of culture. All right. It's 210 miles from New York City and a small community. 

And I spent 10 years commuting from my Mohawk Valley home in Little Falls, New York. Back to Silicon Valley while still running the business. And it wasn't supposed to be that long, but that's how it turned out. And over that 10 years of commuting, I really began to think hard about the difference between my two valleys and Mohawk Valley and Silicon Valley.

And that's what prompted then this journey to, how do we take the assets in a place like upstate New York or in a lot of places in the middle of the country that have a lot of intellectual capital that is underutilized. And how important is it of a supportive community to help entrepreneurs start and grow companies? And that's ultimately what led to the start of our nonprofit Upstate Venture Connect, which in turn led to writing this book More Good Jobs. 

Brian Ardinger: This conversation has started about the rise of the rest and startup communities outside the Valley and that. What do you think started some of that conversation early on to even think about the fact that companies can be created outside the traditional tech hubs and that there was a yearning and a desire to actually create these ecosystems?

Martin Babinec: National recognition through Steve Case's Rise of the Rest was illuminating for some, but for me, it goes back much earlier. As I talk about in the book, in 1995, my good friend, Brad Feld moved from Cambridge, Massachusetts, a hotbed of startup activity in the nineties, he goes to Boulder, Colorado. And at that point in time, Boulder was not a place VCs were flocking to, to find the next big thing. All right. Nice college town, but not a whole lot of action.

And here, even by 1995, TriNet's businesses is a hundred percent focused on emerging tech. Brad Feld moves to Boulder and not much going on there, but I decided to open a TriNet office just because Brad Feld moved there. That's how much confidence I had that this was going to be a game changer. 

And lo and behold, those people that follow Brad Feld and are aware of his book Startup Communities that talks about how did Boulder transform to a community that then rose in the ranks to be second in the country on the metric of venture capital investment per capita, trailing only the San Francisco Bay area. I mean, how did that happen in a period of call it 10, 15 years, which is not a long period of time when we think about major transformation of a local economy. 

So I had a ringside seat and watched that unfold. And meanwhile, still growing the company and it was long before I started the journey of trying to learn from Brad's experience and the experience of TriNet in many markets where there was lots of startup activities since that was the focus of our company. 

I was taking in a lot of what I saw elsewhere and all the times thinking about someday, somehow, you know, if I had the time and more resources, I could put into it, what could I, as one guy do to help bring about some transformational change in an area that I really love? Not just in my hometown, but more broadly, the more difficult challenge of how could we leverage the assets that are dispersed geographically across the broader region? Because that for me is what made ...

Natalie Fratto is Vice President of Early Stage Practice at Silicon Valley Bank. She also was involved with a startup that went through Y Combinator and was eventually acquired by a larger organization in the beauty tech space. She talked with our host Brian about what it’s like to sit on both sides of the table and what sort of intelligence will be the most important for teenagers when they seek jobs in a few years. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

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 Harmony

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 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 ex...

Jack Elkins is the head of innovation at the Orlando Magic. He talked with Brian about how the NBA is not immune to the need to innovate and how to make everyone equal when they come to the table. He also shared the address you can email to get the ten key phrases that he uses with his team to create a culture of innovation: language@persportives.com. For the Making Innovation Count in 2018 conference in Kansas City: https://nvite.com/InnovationCounts/le4e79. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Today’s show is the first part from our live recording at south by southwest where we interview teams from Target’s accelerator techstars. Atif Siddiqi, CEO of Branch Messsenger, and Nevin Shetty and Lizzy Ellingson, founders of Blueprint Registry, joined us on stage to talk about Target's Techstar program, work/life balance, and asking what you can do for a corporation in addition to what they can do for you. For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy

Dr. Victoria Gerstman is the Assistant Director at Canopy Insight, a cultural insight and innovation consultancy. She helps companies and brands understand the cultural significance of different phenomena. Using semiotics, a method to interpret signs and symbols of culture which brands operate in, Victoria helps companies learn what’s important to people.  Canopy Insight works with many large brands around the world, to help them understand culturally specific meanings and the way meanings change over time. These meaning could be different across markets and demographic groups. This recognition is especially important for brands that have sub-brands which need to remain culturally relevant, that have a multi-market presence, and to avoid assuming home markets trends, are dominate in other places.  New Emergent Trends:  - Shift away from individualism towards communal experience.  - Changes in ideas of ownership. E.g. - Do you need to own a vacuum.  - Mainstreaming of sustainability for affordability.  - On-demand everything in the home is something to watch.  - Home space is changing. Home and work barriers are being broken down. Homes are now sites of production, like cottage industries.  - Sexual and gender identities - More understanding of distinct identities and new ways of living.  To find out more, connect with Victoria at canopyinsight.comor Victoria@canopyinsight.com If you liked this episode, you might also enjoy Ep. 60– David Mattin with TrendWatching, Ep. 69– Slava Rubin, co-founder of Indiegogo, and Ep. 80– Ari Popper with SciFutures FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER Get 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 HERE For information regarding your data privacy, visit acast.com/privacy