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محتوای ارائه شده توسط Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast, and The Inside Outside Innovation Summit. تمام محتوای پادکست شامل قسمت‌ها، گرافیک‌ها و توضیحات پادکست مستقیماً توسط Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast, and The Inside Outside Innovation Summit یا شریک پلتفرم پادکست آن‌ها آپلود و ارائه می‌شوند. اگر فکر می‌کنید شخصی بدون اجازه شما از اثر دارای حق نسخه‌برداری شما استفاده می‌کند، می‌توانید روندی که در اینجا شرح داده شده است را دنبال کنید.https://fa.player.fm/legal
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Open Innovation - Kevin Leland, Halo Founder and Baxter's Matt Muller - Replay

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محتوای ارائه شده توسط Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast, and The Inside Outside Innovation Summit. تمام محتوای پادکست شامل قسمت‌ها، گرافیک‌ها و توضیحات پادکست مستقیماً توسط Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast, and The Inside Outside Innovation Summit یا شریک پلتفرم پادکست آن‌ها آپلود و ارائه می‌شوند. اگر فکر می‌کنید شخصی بدون اجازه شما از اثر دارای حق نسخه‌برداری شما استفاده می‌کند، می‌توانید روندی که در اینجا شرح داده شده است را دنبال کنید.https://fa.player.fm/legal

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kevin Leland, CEO and Founder of Halo and Matt Muller, Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter. The three of us talk about the changing world of open innovation and what it takes to connect and collaborate, to solve big industry problems. Let's get started.

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

Interview Transcript with Kevin Leland, CEO and Founder of Halo and Matt Muller, Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing set of guests. Today, we have Kevin Leland, who is the CEO and Founder of Halo. And Matt Muller, who is the Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter. Welcome.

Kevin Leland: Thank you.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you both on the show to talk about a topic that's near and dear to a lot of folks out there. That's the topic of open innovation and how to corporates and startups and new ideas get started in this whole world of collaborative innovation. Kevin you're the CEO and founder of Halo. What is Halo? And how did you get started in this open innovation space?

Kevin Leland: Halo is a marketplace and network where companies connect directly with scientists and startups for research collaborations. It's about as simple to post RFP or a partnering opportunity on Halo as it is to post a job on LinkedIn. And then once it's posted scientists submit their research proposals. We went live in January. Matt and the team of Baxter was our very first customer. So, the earliest of early adopters and they were a really fantastic partner.

I came across the idea of Halo and got into open innovation really kind of by accident. The original concept for Halo was crowd funding for medical research. So, a little bit different, but we would work with technology transfer offices at universities to identify promising technology that just needed a little bit of funding to get to the next level.

And through that experience, I learned that scientists needed more than just funding. They needed the expertise and the resources of industry. Meanwhile, I was learning how industry was actively trying to partner with these scientists and these early-stage startups, because they realized that they were less good at the early-stage discovery process of research. And so to me, it seemed like an obvious marketplace solution. And so that's where the impetus of the business came and how we started.

Brian Ardinger: Let's turn it over to you Matt. From the other side of the table, from a corporation, trying to understand and facilitate and accelerate innovation efforts. What is open innovation mean to you and how did Halo come to play a part in that?

Matt Muller: As you mentioned earlier, I'm Director of Applied Innovation here at Baxter and I am in our Renal Care Business. And so that's the business at Baxter that's focused on treating end stage kidney disease. And that's one of Baxter's largest businesses. As a company, we have over $12 billion in sales annually, and dialysis in the renal care businesses, is our largest business unit.

And it is an area that we've struggled with innovation. And particularly what we excel at, at Baxter is we excel at treating kidney disease in the home. So, this is a particular therapy called peritoneal dialysis. Patients are able to do it in their home while they sleep.

And one of the big challenges that we have today with peritoneal dialysis is that patients need dialysis solution. They use about 12, 15 liters of this sterile medical solution every night to do their therapy. And today the way we do that and the way we've done it ever since this therapy has been around since early seventies is we literally deliver that solution in bags, by trucks. We make it in big plants in the United States and trucks drive all across the country and they deliver it to patients in their home.

And as a company, we, for a long time have said, we really need to change this business model. It's not sustainable for us. It requires our patients store a lot of water in their home or the solution rather in their home. And they have to essentially dedicate a whole room of their houses to storage of their supplies.

So, we have, for the longest time said, we want to change how this is done. And we want to be able to use the patient's own water in their home. And instead of delivering all these bags of solutions deliver concentrates much like if you go on, you buy a soft drink at the movie theater, it comes from a concentrated box of syrup that is, you add water to it and you have your soft drink.

And so that's our vision. And we've struggled for many years of how to bring innovation into the marketplace for making that pure water that we need in the home. We have a lot of very bright scientists at Baxter. The problem is that as Kevin mentioned before, our scientists are really good at solving particular problems in particular getting products to market.

Where we've been struggling is that the science has not or at least we haven't been aware of the science that could really allow us to break this barrier and make the leap to be able to make this pure solution medical grade solution in the home.

And that's why we've reached out to Kevin and his platform as a way to do that is to go out to a really broad community of researchers to bring new ideas into the company, to help us figure out new ways to approach the problem.

Brian Ardinger: The history of open innovation is long. And there's a lot of things that have been tried in the past. Did Baxter try other methods in the past? Or how did you go about trying to determine what things we should innovate internally and try to solve that way versus when and where we go outside for solutions?

Matt Muller: I would say as a company, we probably hadn't been as involved specifically in the university and in the startups space. So, a lot of times as a company, we have a lot of people that come to us with ideas and looking for funding. Most of the time, it's a very common proposition that they give you.

They need a certain amount of funding, and in three years, they'll have a product. Three years is like the magic number. And the reality is that it's frequently the claims and the charity are very oversold, and we haven't been really successful in that type of space. And so, we've been really looking at different ways to engage a larger community.

The other element of it too, is sometimes when you talk open innovation, we're limited by our existing network of people. And so that is the employees and who they work with. Maybe it's the fact we're in Northern Illinois, we're close to Northwestern University and people here have relationships with professors at Northwestern.

So, we develop those relationships and the open innovation opportunities through those connections. We've been looking into how do we expand that? Reach a broader audience and get a global conne...

  continue reading

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Manage episode 304409723 series 1059890
محتوای ارائه شده توسط Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast, and The Inside Outside Innovation Summit. تمام محتوای پادکست شامل قسمت‌ها، گرافیک‌ها و توضیحات پادکست مستقیماً توسط Brian Ardinger, Founder of Inside Outside Innovation podcast, and The Inside Outside Innovation Summit یا شریک پلتفرم پادکست آن‌ها آپلود و ارائه می‌شوند. اگر فکر می‌کنید شخصی بدون اجازه شما از اثر دارای حق نسخه‌برداری شما استفاده می‌کند، می‌توانید روندی که در اینجا شرح داده شده است را دنبال کنید.https://fa.player.fm/legal

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kevin Leland, CEO and Founder of Halo and Matt Muller, Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter. The three of us talk about the changing world of open innovation and what it takes to connect and collaborate, to solve big industry problems. Let's get started.

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

Interview Transcript with Kevin Leland, CEO and Founder of Halo and Matt Muller, Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing set of guests. Today, we have Kevin Leland, who is the CEO and Founder of Halo. And Matt Muller, who is the Director of Applied Innovation at Baxter. Welcome.

Kevin Leland: Thank you.

Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you both on the show to talk about a topic that's near and dear to a lot of folks out there. That's the topic of open innovation and how to corporates and startups and new ideas get started in this whole world of collaborative innovation. Kevin you're the CEO and founder of Halo. What is Halo? And how did you get started in this open innovation space?

Kevin Leland: Halo is a marketplace and network where companies connect directly with scientists and startups for research collaborations. It's about as simple to post RFP or a partnering opportunity on Halo as it is to post a job on LinkedIn. And then once it's posted scientists submit their research proposals. We went live in January. Matt and the team of Baxter was our very first customer. So, the earliest of early adopters and they were a really fantastic partner.

I came across the idea of Halo and got into open innovation really kind of by accident. The original concept for Halo was crowd funding for medical research. So, a little bit different, but we would work with technology transfer offices at universities to identify promising technology that just needed a little bit of funding to get to the next level.

And through that experience, I learned that scientists needed more than just funding. They needed the expertise and the resources of industry. Meanwhile, I was learning how industry was actively trying to partner with these scientists and these early-stage startups, because they realized that they were less good at the early-stage discovery process of research. And so to me, it seemed like an obvious marketplace solution. And so that's where the impetus of the business came and how we started.

Brian Ardinger: Let's turn it over to you Matt. From the other side of the table, from a corporation, trying to understand and facilitate and accelerate innovation efforts. What is open innovation mean to you and how did Halo come to play a part in that?

Matt Muller: As you mentioned earlier, I'm Director of Applied Innovation here at Baxter and I am in our Renal Care Business. And so that's the business at Baxter that's focused on treating end stage kidney disease. And that's one of Baxter's largest businesses. As a company, we have over $12 billion in sales annually, and dialysis in the renal care businesses, is our largest business unit.

And it is an area that we've struggled with innovation. And particularly what we excel at, at Baxter is we excel at treating kidney disease in the home. So, this is a particular therapy called peritoneal dialysis. Patients are able to do it in their home while they sleep.

And one of the big challenges that we have today with peritoneal dialysis is that patients need dialysis solution. They use about 12, 15 liters of this sterile medical solution every night to do their therapy. And today the way we do that and the way we've done it ever since this therapy has been around since early seventies is we literally deliver that solution in bags, by trucks. We make it in big plants in the United States and trucks drive all across the country and they deliver it to patients in their home.

And as a company, we, for a long time have said, we really need to change this business model. It's not sustainable for us. It requires our patients store a lot of water in their home or the solution rather in their home. And they have to essentially dedicate a whole room of their houses to storage of their supplies.

So, we have, for the longest time said, we want to change how this is done. And we want to be able to use the patient's own water in their home. And instead of delivering all these bags of solutions deliver concentrates much like if you go on, you buy a soft drink at the movie theater, it comes from a concentrated box of syrup that is, you add water to it and you have your soft drink.

And so that's our vision. And we've struggled for many years of how to bring innovation into the marketplace for making that pure water that we need in the home. We have a lot of very bright scientists at Baxter. The problem is that as Kevin mentioned before, our scientists are really good at solving particular problems in particular getting products to market.

Where we've been struggling is that the science has not or at least we haven't been aware of the science that could really allow us to break this barrier and make the leap to be able to make this pure solution medical grade solution in the home.

And that's why we've reached out to Kevin and his platform as a way to do that is to go out to a really broad community of researchers to bring new ideas into the company, to help us figure out new ways to approach the problem.

Brian Ardinger: The history of open innovation is long. And there's a lot of things that have been tried in the past. Did Baxter try other methods in the past? Or how did you go about trying to determine what things we should innovate internally and try to solve that way versus when and where we go outside for solutions?

Matt Muller: I would say as a company, we probably hadn't been as involved specifically in the university and in the startups space. So, a lot of times as a company, we have a lot of people that come to us with ideas and looking for funding. Most of the time, it's a very common proposition that they give you.

They need a certain amount of funding, and in three years, they'll have a product. Three years is like the magic number. And the reality is that it's frequently the claims and the charity are very oversold, and we haven't been really successful in that type of space. And so, we've been really looking at different ways to engage a larger community.

The other element of it too, is sometimes when you talk open innovation, we're limited by our existing network of people. And so that is the employees and who they work with. Maybe it's the fact we're in Northern Illinois, we're close to Northwestern University and people here have relationships with professors at Northwestern.

So, we develop those relationships and the open innovation opportunities through those connections. We've been looking into how do we expand that? Reach a broader audience and get a global conne...

  continue reading

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On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Robyn Bolton, author of the new book, Unlocking Innovation. Robyn and I talk about the Innovator's journey for unlocking architecture behaviors and culture of innovation and ways you can measure and map your progress. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive. In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Robyn Bolton, Author of Unlocking Innovation Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Robyn Bolton. She's the founder of Mile Zero and author of the new book, Unlocking Innovation: A Leader's guide for Turning Bold Ideas into tangible results. Welcome, Robyn. Robyn Bolton: I am so glad to be here. Thank you. Brian. Brian Ardinger: Thank you for coming on the podcast. We've been friends, and long-time listeners of the podcast and newsletter from Inside Outside should be familiar with some of your work. You came out and spoke at our Inside Outside Innovation Summit in 2022, but since then you've got a lot of stuff that's happened. So, I wanted to have you on the show to talk about your new book that's coming up today. Yeah. And talk about innovation. And maybe a little bit of background on how you began your innovation journey. Robyn Bolton: So, I began my innovation journey purely by luck straight out of undergrad. After graduating from undergrad, went to work at P&G in brand management and was put on the team that was developing some new cleaning products. And a year after joining the team, we launched Swiffer. So, I was part of that kind of amazing journey of corporate innovation. And all the experiences and the scars and, and all of that. And then kind of fast forward a bit, moved up to Boston, got my MBA, did some consulting work in one of the big firms, but then spent almost a decade at the firm that was founded by Clayton Christensen. Nearly a decade immersed in not just disruptive innovation, but all the different types of innovations that companies do and the challenges that companies face. And then since 2018, have been running my own firm. Mile Zero, which has continued to focus on corporate innovation and really supporting the leaders and the teams who are doing that hard work. Brian Ardinger: You do some great writing and that. If you've followed our newsletter, I try to find the best articles every week to disseminate to our audience, and you come up there fairly regularly. Stuff that I want to... Robyn Bolton: I am always quite honored. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about writing. So, you have a new book out called Unlocking Innovation. What made you decide to write another book on innovation and what is the secret nugget that you wanted to talk to your audience about? Robyn Bolton: So, I resisted writing a book for a long time because it's like the last thing this world needs is another book on innovation. But eventually I broke through my own resistance 'cause you know, in reflecting on my career in innovation, I realized that like, hey, the Innovator's Dilemma came out in the late nineties and in the 30 years since that happened, the results, the success rate of corporate innovation has not changed. And all that's changed in 30 years is we've kind of had this innovation industrial complex get created of consultants, guilty books now guilty, articles, all this stuff that's grown up, but it hasn't changed the success rate. And I got curious as to why that is. And I think it is because, and this is what the book focuses on. Is that we've tend to take a really siloed approach to innovation. You know, we come in like, you need this team structure, or you need this process, or this governance, or on the other end of things, you know, we need to build a culture of innovation. And the reality is, is you have to take a much more holistic approach, which I call the ABCs, that you need to have the architecture of innovation to the process structure strategies. It's necessary, but not sufficient for success. You also need to be really focused on leadership behaviors and how leaders are interacting with innovation teams, how they're supporting innovation. And you need a culture that, at least at the very beginning, isn't resistant to innovation. So, you need to be working on all three of these things, all of the ABCs all at the same time, but in different ways as the team progresses. Brian Ardinger: I think one of the challenges you find with that is oftentimes if one or two people have been given the mantle of the person who has to figure that out. And this is very difficult as a director of innovation or whatever you want to call those folks to be able to move that battleship in in the right direction a lot of times. Robyn Bolton: Yes, absolutely. And it gets even harder when, you know, you look at the research and I think it's something like 90% of innovation teams get shut down within three years. Yeah. So, you're tasked with moving a battleship or an aircraft in three years, and you know, we all know that three years doesn't mean you actually have three years to produce results. You have to produce results really in two years so that you're able to keep working in year three before you get shut down. So, it's this crazy short period of time that you have to produce results and you're working on something that is really a long-term investment. So you have all of these contradictions that as someone who's in charge of innovation, you've gotta grapple with. Brian Ardinger: Well, and I think the biggest challenge is the fact a lot of folks don't really understand how difficult that exploration process is to find a winner, quote unquote. In your book, you mentioned a stat, something like one in 50,000 incubated ideas ever reach a million dollars in sales. And so, you think about those types of odds and the types of shots on goal you have to consistently make to explore through that maze of crazy new, bad ideas, to find one or two that actually starts getting traction and making it Robyn Bolton: Yeah, exactly It, you know, when you think of, okay, I need incubate 50,000 ideas to get one that makes a million dollars, and oh by the way, the resources allocated to innovation are usually like two people and $10. Yeah. So, the odds are very much stacked against you. But I also know, I mean, you and I both know as innovators, like that doesn't deter you. You see the potential and you're like, no, we can figure this out. We can do this. And so, this book is very much written for those folks who are the rebels, the realists, and the fixers who are like, no, no, no. We see the potential. We could do this. We're going to give it a shot. Brian Ardinger: We talk a lot about finding the curious and the restless within your organization that have more of the tool set skill sets, mindsets around innovation. Knowi...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Duncan Wardle, former head of Innovation and creativity at Disney, and author of the new book The Imagination Emporium. Duncan and I talk about his recipes for innovation and common tactics you can use to make your life and work more creative and inventive. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, it's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Duncan Wardle, Former head of Innovation and creativity at Disney and author of The Imagination Emporium Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Duncan Wardle. He has spent 30 years as the head of innovation and creativity at Disney and is releasing a new book on December 10th called The Imagination Emporium: Creative Recipes for Innovation . Welcome Duncan. Duncan Wardle: Thank you very much for having me actually straight, I wasn't head of innovation and creativity for 30 years, but I actually started as a coffee boy in the London office. Brian Ardinger: Let's start there. Obviously, you spent a lot of time at Disney and that. Let's talk a little bit about the journey of how you learned everything about innovation and creativity. Duncan Wardle: Very first assignment. Basically, I, I was taught persistence. I called that office every day for 27 days to a lovely lady by the name of Julie who was on the reception desk. There were only 16 people at Disney in, back in 1986, and now there's 3000. She got so fed up with taking my phone calls, they made me coffee boy. So, I used to go get cappuccinos from my boss down the road. About three weeks into the role, I was told I would be the character coordinator. That's the person that looks after the walk around characters at the Royal Premier of Who Framed Roger Rabbit at the Odeon Leicester Square, in the presence of the Princess of Wales, Diana. I was like, oh, what do I do? They said, well, you just down at the bottom of the stairs, Roger Rabbit will come down the staircase. The princess will come in along the receiving line. You either greet him, or she'll blow him off and move into the auditorium. How could you possibly screw that up? Well, that's the day I found out what a contingency plan was because I did not have one. A contingency plan would tell you if you're going to bring a very tall rabbit with spectacularly long feet down a giant staircase towards the Princess Wales, one might want to measure the width of the steps, before the rabbit trips on the top step, it's now hurtling like a bullet at torpedo speed, head over feet, directly down the stairs towards Diana's head, where upon he was taken out in midair by two Royal Protection officers who just flattened him. This very famous picture on Reuters of Roger going back like this. Two secret service heavies, dude's diving towards him in a suit and a 21-year-old PR guy in Disney at the back. Going, ah, shit, I'm fired. So, I got a call the next day from a person called a CMO from LA. I didn't even, you know, I was like, well, what's a CMO? I thought he was going to tell me I'm fired. And all I heard was that was great publicity. I was like, wow, who knew? And so, I built a career on having mad audacious, outrageous ideas. But I got 'em done. So, I convinced NASA to take my son's Buzz Lightyear doll into space for the opening of Toy Story. He served 18 months on the International Space Station, the longest consecutive astronaut in space. I'll have, you know. I stole a Turkey from the White House on Thanksgiving Day, took it to Disneyland, happiest Turkey on Earth. So I got to do some of the crazy, just mad ideas with Pixar for new storylines and Lucas films and, and Marvel and. One of the biggest challenges is when you are on the outside looking in, oh, they're so creative, it's still a corporation, right? It still has processes and everything else. So I was tapped 10 years ago, and the boss said, right, you are going to be in charge of innovation and creativity. To which my exact response was, what the hell is that? He said, well, I don't know exactly. We just want to embed a culture of innovation and creativity. Everybody's DNA. So, I tried three models. Number one, I hired somebody who knew what they were doing and said, make me look good. Number two, I thought I'll create an innovation team. What could possibly go wrong? I'll be in charge of it. Well, no. Nobody outside of legal does legal work. Nobody outside of sales does sales work. So, if you have an innovation team, you've subliminally said to the rest of the organization, Hey, you're off the hook. These people have it. Number three, we did an accelerator program, which worked to a certain extent, but we only were touching 0.02% of our population. So, I said, right. What if I create a toolkit that has three principles, takes the BS out of innovation and makes it less intimidating for normal, hardworking, busy people. Makes creativity tangible, for 50% of the people who don't like ambiguity or gray, but far more input, make it fun. Give people tools they enjoy using, then they'll use and when we're not around. So yeah, Brian Ardinger: Love the stories. One of the things that. You think of Disney, and most people out in the real world think of Disney as one of the most creative, innovative companies out there, and yet even they said, we need somebody to take care and help us figure out creativity and innovation within our rank-and-file folks that are at Disney. How did that process come about? Why did Disney think, well, we need to be more creative or innovative when everybody looks at them as one of the key people that does it well. Duncan Wardle: Think about the theme park division, right? I was with theme parks for a relative, some of my career. And you've got third generation cast members. Their moms and dads work there, the grandparents work there, and this is the way we do it here. And trying to change that culture was like trying to move the Titanic. So, we did, we created this toolkit. Eventually we were training it. We made it so impactful. We had a three and a half year wait list for a voluntary two-day training course. So, I thought, and then they gave me the Jiminy Cricket, bronze, thank you for 30 magical years of service statue. And I looked at it, I thought, shit, I'm nearly dead. So, I thought I better go do something else. So I left. I wasn't quite sure what I was going to do. I went home to Colmore and sat in the pub for six months and felt sorry for myself and thought, what the hell have I just done? I thought, you know what? I got to write a book. And the reason I love doing things I don't know how to do. And I thought, okay. And I said to the publisher, I said, it's not a book. He said, well, why is it not a book? And I said, well, because nobody reads books. They're always on the bookshelf. We don't have time. We are busy people. So, I thought, okay, how do I create an innovation toolkit, but make it accessible to normal, hardworking, busy people who have deadlines and everything else? Wel...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dave Brown, founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration. Dave and I talk about the innovation economy and the importance of immigration, and the impact immigration policy has on its success. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators. entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses. Podcast Transcript with Dave Brown, founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Dave Brown. He's the founder and managing partner at Brown Immigration, where he works closely with emerging companies, VCs, and private equities to solve immigration challenges. So welcome to the show, Dave. Dave Brown: Thanks for having me, Brian. Great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Dave, we've known each other as friends and poker players for a while, but I wanted to have you on the show, because we've occasionally had these conversations about how does the law fit into innovation and specifically the law that you focus on, which is the immigration law. Let's start by giving a little bit of background of the things that you work on. Dave Brown: Of course I'm happy to share. You know, the interesting thing about me, I think that draws a lot of the clients we work with is I'm originally from Canada. I was actually a lawyer sitting in Toronto doing a lot of inbound US immigration for startups, companies, founders, and found a special someone who's a US citizen. She was getting a PhD at Stanford. So, I made a decision since I was supporting all these clients and companies in the Bay Area. That I'd actually moved to the US and so I came here at the end of 2000 and spent about five years in the Bay Area supporting a lot of founders’ companies there before finding myself moving to the Midwest here where my wife originally came from. But the through point in all of this is that I've been dealing with a lot of individuals over the years who have started companies in a wide variety of tech spaces, and there are a lot of interesting people I've worked with over the years. Brian Ardinger: Obviously immigration, you hear it in the news, and I think there's a lot of misconceptions and misunderstandings what, what immigration is and how does it play into the tech space and that. So, tell us a little bit about the messaging that is out there in the media about immigration and what are the different nuances around that? Dave Brown: Yeah, I guess I would say that the messaging is just wrong to start with. It's unfortunate, and I think that this narrative has been kind of fostered as immigrants or the other, that they're bad, that there's some negative element associated with bringing people into this country. Which is amazing to me because this country is completely founded on immigration and this country, quite frankly, wouldn't exist without immigration in the way it does today. So, the, the current media blitz is bad, and the thing quite frankly, I'm concerned about is it impacts a lot of what we do. You know, when I run into someone, people always seem to think that I'm dealing with someone at the border. That's someone who's trying to sneak in and take someone's job. And the reality is, is we're all about innovation, right? You know, the people you talk to in this space, they're all about creating something new, creating something that didn't exist before. When I think about my own journey, I've got a firm with about 50 employees that wouldn't otherwise potentially be employed in this space if I didn't immigrate to this country and decide I wanted to start the firm. And every day I deal with people who have decided to come to the US to make that choice. And they're kind of fearless. You know, they've already made that choice. They're just going to uproot their family and come to the US. They're comfortable with the idea that they're going to start a company that may never make any money, that may never go the direction they hope it will go. But they're kind of fearless and they're willing to do that. And that's really what we need. And if you look at the history of this country, this country's been founded by immigrants who have made that step and, and really pushed in that direction. Brian Ardinger: If you think about in a lot of the big companies that we think about, Google and others, were founded by those who immigrated here to the United States. Let's talk and unpack a little bit about the visa policies. I think we hear, you know, words like green cards and H1B visas and that. Maybe tell us a little bit about what's the visa policy in the United States now, and how do people get here? Dave Brown: The first thing I would say is the visa policy is woefully inadequate for the size of our economy right now. Most of the laws that we deal with and interpret and use to support our clients have been in existence for four or five decades, some even longer than that. And, and at that point, our economy was less than a fifth of the size of our current economy. Our population was about a hundred million less. And so, we really need to revamp our immigration rules. Really, the legislation itself. But obviously what my job is, is to try and get the best result for someone despite what the challenges may be. And so, there's still tools in the toolbox. We still find a way to make things work. And definitely if we're dealing with someone who's very highly regarded in their particular field, very highly educated, that does open up options for things like the O1 visa, that's a visa for someone who's an alien of extraordinary ability. And I will say that the thing that we've seen more recently, because it, you can look at what happened under the four years under the prior administration and kind of juxtapose it against this current administration. There were a lot of kind of things that were put in the system four years ago that didn't really make any sense. That made things harder for people to come in and to maintain status. And we, we had people, quite frankly, who we filed to extend their status. And they were denied on the extension when there was a longstanding policy that if there's no material change and the government had already made a decision that this visa is appropriate, that they shouldn't suddenly say no to an extension of that same visa. And so, when Biden came back into office, he reinitiated that policy. So, we don't have those kind of weird disconnects when we extend. That's just one example of the changes. Brian Ardinger: In a case like that, so, so let's say a person comes to the United States to get a degree, wants to stay on as working in AI or working in the tech sector and such, what does that process look like? Dave Brown: So, most people who come and get a degree, they have an ability to get a work permit immediately following their degree program. And if they're in a recognized STEM program, science, technology, engineering, or math, they're el...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with John Winsor co-author of the new book, Open Talent . John and I talk about the shifting landscape of talent and tools and dive into what companies need to do to adapt and thrive in a new global marketplace for talent. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. Transcript of Interview with John Winsor, CEO and founder of Open Assembly and Co-author of Open Talent Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another Inside, outside episode. We are here today with another amazing guest. Today we have John Winsor. He is the CEO and founder of Open Assembly and Co-author of the new book, Open Talent: Leveraging the Global Workforce to Solve the Biggest Challenges . Welcome to the show, John. John Winsor: Hey, thanks, Brian. Psyched to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on for a couple different reasons. One, you've been at the early days of experimenting in this whole world of talent, you know, before covid, before people knew what remote work was and that you've been an advocate for that. I think you started your career in the creative space. You built Victors and Spoils, which was the first creative agency that was built on crowdsourcing principles. You've started Open Assembly and that, so what's this term, open talent, and what does it mean to you? John Winsor: You know, I think people got confused and when we were doing research on it, you know, I started using kind of what I would call alternative, you know, talent models way back in the eighties. Because I owned a magazine, I couldn't afford to I have a bunch of editors and writers, so I had the readers write a lot of the stuff, and so it worked out really, really well. I sold one of the magazines, Women's Sports and Fitness to Conde Nast, and it was a, you know, pretty a great win. But what we're talking about is we're talking about really the digital transformation of talent writ large. And so, we believe that there's this kind of seismic shift between companies that set the terms of employment because there's more supply than there is demand. Today, there's more demand than there is supply. And so that's just kind of basic economics that, you know, especially in tech these days. I mean, Korn Ferry says there's 85 million jobs that will go unfilled by 2030. In the tech world, it's going to cost companies $8.5 trillion. I suspect that's going to be reduced a bit just because of, you know, generative AI and things like that. But my sense is that's still a big deal. We're excited about that. So, one of the things we started talking about, I kind of used the term back in the day, co-creation. And that was an idea that came out of the magazine work where the customers were actually co-creating, and I coined that word in a book called Beyond the Brand 2002. But as things got going, you know, we started using the word crowdsourcing and then obviously gig got big. But I think gig is a misnomer in that gig to me is all about having somebody be told by, usually by an algorithm of where to work and when to work. You know, I need to pick up, you know, Brian at the airport at this time. Whereas, you know, open talent is really a mixture of freelance. We kind have three legs to the stool in this kind of digital transformation of talent at the higher end. It's building external talent clouds, building internal talent, marketplaces, and then open innovation capabilities. Brian Ardinger: Very interesting. Let's talk about, you've written a new book called Open Talent. Yeah. And it's leveraging some of these new things that we're seeing out there. What made you decide that now's the time to kind of summarize this and help people figure this out? John Winsor: Because Harvard Business Review asked me to write a book. We started this journey, you know, I was at Harvard, but we had a thing called the Crowd Academy. We were about to gather the hundred, you know, top thinkers about these kinds of alternative, you know, hiring practices. And essentially what happened was that we started a conversation, Balaji Bondili, Dyan Finkhousen, Balaji's from Deloitte, Dyan Finkhousen from GE, and Steve Rader from NASA just on a regular basis. And then as Covid hit, you know, John Healy had joined the group from Kelly and said, hey, instead of making these kind of monthly and private, let's make these open to the world. And about 4,000 people came to the calls. So. There seemed to be a really a need for figuring this stuff out. And then obviously trying to frame that up and that group was really, really, our community is really, really important to figure out what the idea of a networked organization should be. What's the framework? All those things. And, and we felt like one of the things that wasn't happening in the market is that there are thousand platforms out there that are doing this great work. But the problem is, is like if you look at adoption of other things, let's say cloud computing, for an example, cloud computing, you know, the big guys got together, and they decided on common language and common process. And you know, all of a sudden it was cloud computing. The name was the same across companies and across platforms. And adoption was easy. So for customers, it was really easy to say, okay, I can kind of get what it is, I can start exploring it. Whereas in this kind of freelance open talent space, everybody says it's something different. Gig, freelance, open talent, everybody uses a different process. There's always compliance and security stuff. Some companies do it, some companies don't. And we really wanted to kind of build that framework for the industry to just to create, you know, a higher amount of adoption from enterprises. Brian Ardinger: Obviously with Covid and that there's been a rapid shift for people paying attention to this. So, you know, I, I've been in this innovation space talking a long time, and you talk about disruption and five years ago, 10 years ago, it was like, yeah, yeah, I get it. Disruption may happen. But then you have something like covid and literally everybody's life is somewhat changed or altered. So, it, it becomes more in the forefront. And now we're coming out of it to a certain extent and folks are now trying to figure out, do we go back? How do we move forward? What are you seeing from your corporations out there? It's like, how are they trying to navigate the the new way? John Winsor: Yeah. It's really hard, right? It's a generational change. I mean, I think that if you put the hat on of a guy my age, 64, and you've been running a company for a long time, you know your cultures is having your people around you and seeing face to face. Yeah. And having meetings. If you're a millennial that grew up on your phone, you know, and you've been in the job market for a couple years, you don't really care. You know, you're going to like work where you want and how you want. And so I think there's this big dynamic going on, you...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maria Flynn, author of the new book, Make Opportunity Happen. Maria and I talk about the entrepreneurial journey and some of the hands-on things you can do as an entrepreneur to make the journey more effective and rewarding. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty, join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses. Interview Transcript with Maria Flynn, Author of Make Opportunity Happen and Co-founder of the Digital Health KC Initiative Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Maria Flynn. She's an entrepreneur, co-founder of the Digital Health KC Initiative, and author of the new book Make Opportunity Happen: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Align Your Own Stars . Welcome, Maria. Maria Flynn: Thank you for having me. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm super excited to have you on the show. Our good friend Melissa Vincent, who runs the Pipeline organization down in, in Kansas City, connected us and said, hey, you need to talk to Maria and get her opinions and insights on what's going on in the entrepreneurship space. And with your new book coming out, we figured it'd be perfect time to have you on the show. Let's give a little background of how you became an entrepreneur and, and maybe a little bit about your journey. Maria Flynn: So, I grew up with entrepreneurial parents, so it was kind of in me from a early age. I went on into engineering and that was a great foundation to launch as an entrepreneur. And then I found myself as an intrepreneur inside a larger company, Cerner Corporation, so healthcare IT. And that was a great training ground to go on in my own entrepreneurial endeavor later, but I had that real urge to go find what that was. When I left Cerner, I went looking for what it was. Kind of just out there, leap of faith, not knowing what I was going to find. And I found my co-founders in Orbis Biosciences. It's a pharmaceutical manufacturing technology company. We started in 2008. And we sold it in 2020. And since then, I've been working with entrepreneurs, which is how the book came about, is I was repeating the same stories in a book as a way to scale yourself so that I could help more people. So, I'm excited that it's out in the world now. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, let's dive right into it. It's called Make Opportunity Happen. And so, I would imagine that through your journeys, it wasn't just you figuring out how to do all this kind of stuff. What were some of the biggest inflection points in your career that you write about in the book or otherwise that helped you figure out the entrepreneur journey? Maria Flynn: Yeah, so after you sell a company, you go into a period of reflection. And when I really thought, you know what is my value and what do I do uniquely well. It was around, you know, getting things done and ironically when I started to jot a few notes down, there was a book that came out that was about getting it done. I was like, oh no, somebody came out in the world with the book. And then when I looked at it, I was like, no, my book is very different. You need to know many things as an entrepreneur, and you don't have enough time. To read all these books. So, this book is kind of a guide to get fast track on certain things from hiring to firing, to building your board, to raising funding to strategy. And it's kind of a compilation of all the things I learned from getting things done as a kid, working in my parents' business, to tools that I learned when I was at Cerner, to what made Orbis successful. And it goes through different pillars. It's about execution, perseverance, adapting. And your support system and then your mindset is entwined in all that. Brian Ardinger: What I liked about the book, and I, and I got an advanced copy of it, it's almost like a textbook or a guidebook that you can kind of pick up at different times during your entrepreneurial journey. You really do a good job of providing kind of templated pieces. Let's say I'm trying to hire, or I'm trying to, you know, understand how to figure out the mentors that I should be working with, and you have little guidebooks or little templates that the entrepreneur can follow to help if nothing else just put some structure around what is oftentimes an unstructured practice of entrepreneurship. Maria Flynn: Yes. And so, you can think of it as a series of frameworks that, as you've been through the journey, a lot of this stuff seems like common sense. But when you're starting, like how do you start to think about some of these things? So that's what these little mini sections are meant to do, to give you a story, to give you some lessons learned that either I learned myself or other people helped me learn. And then a way to go forward and think about it for you. So, it's not just about theory, but it's how do you put something into practice. Brian Ardinger: You've had a chance to work with entrepreneurs in addition to being one yourself. What are some of the biggest pitfalls or misconceptions about entrepreneurship that you've seen out there? Maria Flynn: I think a lot of times people think it's super easy, particularly sometimes, with scientists and they think the hard part is the science and then all the business commercialization is the easy part. And so, I work with them to help them see people bring different strengths. And sometimes when you pair different magical people, you get something even more magical. And then sometimes you're so ingrained in the entrepreneurial learning that once you start to do something, we've made it sound so hard. So, kind of a fine balance of like, yes, you can do this, but know that nothing is as easy as you think it's going to be, or as quick as you think it's going to be. So just having the right tools and support system around you that you're going to be successful. And then knowing how to make adjustments. So a lot of times when we start on something, no idea is perfect from the beginning and how do you adjust with market data so that you are getting into something that's viable. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, I think that's one of the key points, especially early times with maybe a scientist or entrepreneur that kind of, I, I find this a lot with like software developers who become entrepreneurs. They know how to build things. They build things regardless of its, you know, wanted by the marketplace or how you sell that to the marketplace, and they kind of fall into that particular trap versus listening to customers and, and that discovery process that oftentimes you have to go through to actually figure out what business you are creating and why. You know, in your book you talk a lot about aligning stars and this metaphor of constellations. Talk about how you came up with that and, and how does that play out in what you've written? Maria Flynn:<...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Thomas Thurston, Chief Technologist at Ducera Partners. Thomas and I talk about AI, venture capital, and some interesting data insights into what makes corporate innovation work or not work. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators. entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses. Interview Transcript with Thomas Thurston, Chief Technologist at Ducera Partners Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Thomas Thurston . He's the chief technologist at Ducera Partners . He was introduced to us from a mutual friend at Amazon, Kate Niedermeyer, who said you have a driving interest in helping corporate innovators and investors be more successful by unlocking insights from data. So welcome to the show Thomas. Thomas Thurston: Hey, thanks. Great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you. As I've alluded to in the intro, you're a data scientist, a venture capitalist, focused on this particular space for a long time and a pretty varied background. So, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you do. Thomas Thurston: I like to think of myself as a data scientist who's been in the venture capital industry for almost 20 years now. The idea has always been how can you use. Data, AI, any, any quantitative tools to get insights into what's happening in private markets. So, what's happening with companies that aren't disposing a lot of data that are early stage or otherwise librarial shape environment. Today at Ducera Partners, it's an investment bank, where I'm Chief Technologist, as you mentioned. The way I would explain to Ducera which may be a little different in that it's kind of a startup investment bank. And the idea is we want to be disruptive in investment banking and really use technology as a backbone to do that. So, through AI, through analytics we build in-house, can we do that? Can we really be disruptive in industry that hasn't seen that much change in its business model for a hundred years? And since the bank was launched about six, seven years ago, we've done over $750 billion in transactions. We're averaging around a $100 billion a year in deals, and we've done that all with you know, somewhere around 50 people or so, although it's growing quickly. I really do think it's been the technology that's been able to enable us to really change the way we do things. So, I'm proud of that. My story really started a long time ago when I was at Intel in an incubation group just like everyone else. They had a new business incubator, about a dozen or so projects. We were one of those projects and we were starry-eyed, hoping to build a billion-dollar business for Intel. We got our blue badges ready to go every morning. And it's kind of what you might expect the first year or, so it was amazing. We were doing great, and then one year we were super strategic. We got this funding a few years later, we were no longer strategic, and it got shut down instead. Those decisions had nothing to do with us. So, one day someone up in top of the ivory tower thought it was optics for strategic, the next time it wasn't. And I'm pretty sure nobody was thinking about our project when that decision was made to shut it down and everything related to what we were doing. So, I think it just was demoralizing. You give your blood, sweat, and tears to a project. At end of the day, it didn't matter, right? Something completely random blew up your project. And I just remember looking at all these cubicles at Intel and just seeing all these projects just like ours, everyone's smart, everyone's doing their best, everyone's working hard to be innovative and just wondering, does this ever work? I mean, what? Because you know, at the beginning I thought we couldn't possibly fail. We've got this big, you know, like the best of both worlds. Big company, excitement with a startup. Couple years later, you're so grizzled and battle scarred. You're like, can this, this even possible? Because any of these projects ever work. And I wanted to know what percentage of the time projects like this succeed or fail at Intel. And of course, I realized that nobody actually knew. Because like every big company, things get started when shut down all over the place. And it's nobody's job to run around and track it and, and kind of make a database out of it. And if you think about the contrast at Intel, you can measure latency in picoseconds, right? They measure absolutely everything. But when it comes to all the money, I was finding in venture capital and M&A, and new product launches, kind of all this growth, money going to work, there just wasn't much in the way of quantitative metric. It was like every other company; people do their best deal by deal. You win some, you lose some and hey, and no one could say what percentage of the time it worked. So, I just decided to start studying it myself. Spent over a year collecting data on all the product launches, all the deals I could find, to see were any of the variable’s decision makers had in the beginning correlated at all with how those deals performed 5, 7, or even 10 years later. Brian Ardinger: Well, that's the first question I want to ask, because I think you're correct that most people don't track it or, or don't track it well. Why is it so hard to track new innovation and especially, you know, at the earliest stages? Is it because they're used to tracking different types of metrics or talk to me about that. Thomas Thurston: It's something they're all capable of doing. But also, yet I have yet to find a big company that's actually tracking this. Usually as you know, different groups are launching new innovations or products around the company. It's not centralized, so these projects kind of get funded. They come and go. Usually when they go, they go very quietly or they, the team gets reshuffled or something. So, there's no big announcement, and again, it's just no one's job to try to add them all up and track them. Everyone's doing it off in silos, and as you probably have experienced, there's a venture capital group. They're off doing God knows what in their thing and they're kind of behind some kind of closed door. The M&A group is behind another closed door doing something else. They have different stakeholders, constituency. It's not centralized. But if somebody can kind of put their arms and call it data and actually start to mine it. That's the downside. Brian Ardinger: And no one wants to talk about failure, especially with an existing company that's making money, et cetera. You know, the last thing you want to do is say, hey, my great idea was a bomb and now what do I do? Versus like in a startup world where it seems to be, if you fail, that's part of the natural process because there are things that fail when you start new things. Thomas Thurston: Yeah. In big companies, especially. We've...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Elliott Parker, CEO of the Corporate Venture Studio High Alpha Innovation. Elliott is back on the podcast to talk about his new book, The Illusion of Innovation, where we talk about the pitfalls and practicalities of launching innovations in a corporate environment. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Elliott Parker, Corporate Venture Studio High Alpha Innovation CEO Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Elliott Parker. He is the CEO of the Corporate Venture Studio High Alpha Innovation, and author of the new book, The Illusion of Innovation: Escape Efficiency and Unleash Radical Progress . Hey, welcome back, Elliott. Elliott Parker: Brian, good to see you. Happy to be here. Thanks. Brian Ardinger: It's good to have you back. I think it's been almost two years, 90 episodes since you were back on. So, let's refresh the new listeners about who you are and what is High Alpha Innovation, and then we'll get into the book. Elliott Parker: Yeah. So, I'm CEO and founder of High Alpha Innovation. We're a venture builder that works with corporations, universities, and world class entrepreneurs to build amazing what we call advantaged startups that go solve really important problems. Brian Ardinger: It's a fascinating model. There's a lot of things that have popped up since our last conversation. We can dig into all of that stuff, but the reason I wanted to have you on is you've got this new book out called the Illusion of Innovation. And I think you've distilled probably a lot of your learnings over the years into this book. The title itself, the Illusion of Innovation, what does that mean to you and why did you title it that? Elliott Parker: The book is an act of love and frustration. It's the idea that, the frustration piece is that so much of what large corporations are doing under the guise of innovation doesn't work. Doesn't produce the meaningful change they seek, and often leads to disappointment and we need to fix that. The love part is that I want corporations to be successful. We all should want corporations to be successful. There are certain things, certain problems that only corporations can solve that people collaborating through the form of corporation can address. And so, the problem is that corporations over the last 50 years have actually become worse at confronting opportunities and challenges. There's more capital on corporate balance sheets than ever before. And at the same time, they've become less capable of meaningful innovation. And what I wanted to figure out is why is that and what do we do about it? And that's what the book focuses on. Brian Ardinger: Well, I mean, you, you think about it maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago, the bigger companies had the bigger R&D budgets, and they were, seem to be exploring and building in different ways. And now you see a lot of this company kind of pulling back on that and like you said, kind of doing innovation theater. Do you think companies can create innovations by themselves today, or you know, what's been broken in the model? Elliott Parker: Yeah. I think the way that companies go about it needs to change, actually. That we're in a fundamentally different point in the economy than where we were 50 years ago. And the old model, the corporations could centralize assets and resources inside the wall of the company, control those resources and the transactions between them and generate profit. The new model in the economy of today, it's much more decentralized. Meaning small teams and individuals have a lot more power. And can do things that previously only corporations could do. The challenges that corporations in many cases haven't changed how they go about innovation, R&D, M&A, primary levers for innovation have become less effective than they once were. Still very good options, but less effective than they once were. It's a big problem. The irony of it is, is that they're better managed than ever before. They're just optimized for the wrong thing. We've gotten really good at managing our corporations to make them safe and predictable. We've gotten a lot better. There's a lot less variance in the system, and it turns out it's that variance that produces learning and produces meaningful innovation. And so, as a result, we're seeing less of it. Companies are better managed. Ironically, it's a problem. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I think you have a quote in the book, growth results from actively seeking surprises, not from predictability. They are two different, I guess, muscles almost. You know, working in a predictable business model, executing on that, optimizing for that is different than I'm in the wilderness. I sense or I have a hunch of a problem here. How do I figure out how to create value from solving that problem or whatever? Elliott Parker: You've got to seek deliberate inefficiency, which is a hard thing to do. Our organizations are optimized in every way for capital efficiency, meaning cutting out costs, avoiding problems, making things as predictable and safe as we can. That does not produce innovation. In fact, that produces sterility over time and produces death. We don't live in systems like that. We don't thrive in systems like that. You've got to find ways to invite some degree of purposeful inefficiency that creates learning by discovering anomalies and things that challenge the status quo. Brian Ardinger: So, you talk a little bit about how do you embrace that chaos instead of the predictability. Can you talk about maybe some examples or ways that companies can start thinking about surviving or thriving in a chaotic environment versus a static environment? Elliott Parker: Yeah. In the end, the CEO of Netflix said it really well. Reed Hastings, he said, chaotic and messy will beat sterility every time as long as that chaos is productive. And that's the trick. It's making that chaos productive. I think the best analogy way that I think about it is what we see in natural ecosystems where there's a tremendous amount of resiliency. Think about the Amazon jungle and the way the Amazon jungle innovates. Incredibly resilient, and yet none of the innovation is done in a hierarchical way. It's not objectives driven. It's not broadly communicated in the system. It's not centralized. And it's not expensive. Innovation in the Amazon happens in a very decentralized way. It's a random walk. It's not objectives driven. It is constrained by available resources, but there isn't some master plan. It's not communicated, and it, it happens at the level of individual organisms or cells in that ecosystem. Where if the innovation of mutation fails too bad for that organism, but the ecosystem's fine.<...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Louis Gump, author of the new book, The Inside Innovator. Louis and I talk about his experiences at The Weather Channel and CNN Mobile, as well as a myriad of topics for helping companies better identify and support inside innovators. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Louis Gump, Author of The Inside Innovator Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Louis Gump. He's the author of the new book, The Inside Innovator: A Practical Guide to Intrapreneurship . Welcome to the show, Louis. Louis Gump: Thanks, Brian. It's great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Super excited to have you on the show. Another inside innovator to talk more about what it takes to move the ball forward in today's corporate climate. Before we get to the book, I want to start a little bit about your background and that. I understand you worked in bigger corporations, Weather Channel, for example, and CNN Mobile, and you earn your chops trying to launch new products and services inside big companies. So, let's give the audience a little bit of background about how you got here. Louis Gump: Thanks for asking. I did have the opportunity to work with the mobile team at the Weather Channel. I led the team that launched the Weather Channel's iPhone app and Android app. And then along the way there was an opportunity to work with CNN. And so once again, our really talented and hardworking team launched CNN's iPhone app and Android app and we kind of took it from there and built the business. There are many other parts to those stories. And then along the way, I've also had a chance to be CEO of two smaller companies. And those experiences gave me an awesome vantage point to understand some of the differences between being an intrapreneur inside a larger company or an inside innovator versus an entrepreneur and leading a small one. And it led to some insights and some observations that, Hey, you know, there are a few things I wish somebody had told me along the way, and so I wanted to write the book. Brian Ardinger: Intrapreneurship and entrepreneurship are oftentimes misunderstood or even mis defined, or people have different pictures of what innovation is, and that, let's start there. How would you define intrapreneurship versus entrepreneurship and how does that compare to innovation? Louis Gump: Sure. So just to start with a definition. Intrapreneurship is the practice of creating value through innovation and growth inside a larger organization. And on the other hand, entrepreneurship, at least in general, and you can find different ways to define it, but it involves either owning a company or starting a company and being in a role where you can call a lot of the shots. And so, when you look at some of the distinctions, here are a few. One is the size and complexity of the organizations. Another one is the span of control and influence of the leader of an organization, and I suspect from some of the things I've listened to in your podcast, there are many people who could go on about that for a long time. The third one is access to resources within a larger organization, sometimes we look at entrepreneurship versus intrapreneurship, and we have a value judgment. Some people may be better, some people may be worse. I tend to toss the value judgments in the trash bin. I don't think they belong really in the center of the conversation, it's really rather what's most appropriate for a situation. And one of the really wonderful things about working in a large organization is you tend to have some resources and use, well, they can accelerate progress and help you go farther. Also, the structure and the approval processes or something that goodness knows, you could write many books on the ups and downs of this. And then lastly, the risk profile for the person who takes these sorts of things on. Not just as a generic topic, but also at a point in time. Brian Ardinger: Some of the things that we talk about, and I like in your book, you kind of have a broader definition or scope when it comes to intrapreneurship or innovation. I think a lot of people, when they hear the word innovation or entrepreneurship, they think they have to come up with the next flying car, transformational type of outcome. But it sounds like you have the agreement where it can be anything. It can be optimizing your existing business process. It's creating something new, but it doesn't, doesn't have to be transformational from what we've seen in the past. Is that kind of the way you see it? Louis Gump: A hundred percent. It's about creating value and it's about contribution. It's less about necessarily how transformative the change is. In the book, there's a story of someone who became really good at repairing diesel locomotives, you know, trains. And you think about that at some level, that is so important to the organization that cares about that. But it doesn't exactly land somebody on the front page of a magazine on the other hand, typically anyway. On the other hand, you can look at, you know, massive digital transformation. AI is a huge wave right now, it gets talked about. . And so you end up sometimes getting caught up in the technology as opposed to the benefit. And I would say, you know, a true intrapreneur, someone who I refer to as a successful serial intrapreneur, they're always focusing on contribution and creating value. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about why it's important. Obviously, you mentioned AI and transformational things that are happening out there in the marketplace. Technology's changing. Markets are changing and that. Why is it important for companies to even foster or think about creating an environment where entrepreneurship can be possible? Louis Gump: You know, I think this topic is sometimes underappreciated, especially in organizations that are very strong. They have good cash flow. They have good products. They're kind of moving along at a modest rate of growth a year, but it's healthy and that sort of thing. And it's really about the future. When you think about the future of a company, it's essential, at least over a, you know, sizable period of time. There are four findings that I have included in the book, and it ended up being in the conclusion. What happened was I wrote the book, had a fairly distinct chapter sequence that I wanted to follow through on, and then I was reading what emerged from the writing process and I was like, oh my gosh, there are some really clear answers to the question you just posed. The first one is that intrapreneurs inside innovators, they push organizations to adapt. Sometimes they're not always smiled on. Right. Sometimes they're the disruptor, the squeaky wheel, the distraction, or whatever else you might point to. But a lot of the times, especially when someone...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Paul Jarrett, co-founder of Bulu and one of the original co-hosts of this very podcast. Paul and I talk about Bulu's journey, as well as the future of e-commerce, supply chain, and logistics, and many more things. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Paul Jarrett, Co-Founder of Bulu Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, I have another amazing guest. Today, if you've been around Inside Outside for a while, nine years ago, this gentleman and I started the podcast, Paul Jarrett. Welcome to show. Paul Jarrett: Oh no. What's up man? You're doing it, man. It's so friggin’ awesome to see…and every email…every, everyday I'm just cheering you on. And this is a little bit surreal, right? Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It's kind of full circle. Paul Jarrett: It's a long time, man. Brian Ardinger: The first podcast was called Inside Outside, and it was an inside look at startups outside the valley. You and me and Matt Boyd tried to have some conversations about what was going on in the startup ecosystem here in the Midwest, and since then I started Inside Outside Innovation to focus on you know, larger innovation projects, as you went on and, and did some other stuff. So, you were the co-founder of Bulu. This was a supply and logistic company based here in Lincoln, Nebraska. You started out in the subscription box space and have, you know, gone through a variety of journeys over the last 9, 10 years. And so maybe let's start there. How did you get started and, and where are you now? Paul Jarrett: Actually, probably another way of looking at it is like, oh, you're on your third company or fourth company. Call it pivot. Call it evolve, call it new company. The way I look at it is finding a better problem to solve or a harder problem to solve. My co-founder, Stephanie Jarrett, and I, who I happen to be married to. We started way back April 12th, 2012, because the first failure was trying to get it on April Fool's Day. And you know, just because you submit it doesn't mean that's the day. So, but yeah, we raised capital. I tell people way too early. We raised like a million and a half dollars before we ever sold a thing. God bless the people that believed in us. We were In San Francisco, came back to Nebraska, gave a presentation. I think we had all of the mechanics and people were like, yeah, they'll figure out the product later. And we launched a consumer-packaged goods, CPG, direct to consumer brand. It was one of the very early subscription boxes. We actually call them sample boxes because that was the first iteration. And I would say we were kind of the first non-makeup, non-beauty focused on vitamin supplements, healthy snacks. So, the idea is pay 10 bucks, get a Bulu box, come back to the website, buy full-sized version of the product, stack up your rewards points. And actually, we were taking the data and we were manufacturing our own products, right? That went amazing. As CEO I take 100% responsibility for probably, I was talking to the wrong sort of investor. Like a software investor for a consumer-packaged goods company. And kind of like subscription was the thing that was common, but it was just different. We have physical, we have a warehouse, right? I'm in a warehouse right now. But that worked. We grew a really small stint where we built a software based on the data for retail big box buyers to find products that we sampled and put them on the shelf. That's called Bulu Marketplace. It's now called rangeme.com. Super proud of that. That is, I think, what it feels like to have a billion-dollar tiger by the tail and painful to look back and go, man, we had to get rid of that, but we had to sell it as an asset in order to continue to fund our company to grow. And so then we're kind of sitting there with this Bulu Box thing that's not very appetizing to investors. A small chunk of cash from the sale of Bulu Marketplace and RangeMe. And we said, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? And it was all the marketing costs for the subscription Bulu Box that was the issue. So, we went to big brands and we said, we know how to do this thing. If you give us these metrics, we'll cook up what a projection looks like for you. And man, it was just one after the other GNC, Disney, like that's when you really actually go like I tell people when your questions go from how are we going to do this to things like, how do we find people. Like how do you ship something to, oh, we need to hire people. We need to, that's the moment when you're scaling, and I think the moment when you've kind of locked in the model and you're optimizing is when people are like. What do you do with this extra money? Right? And so I tell people, we got to live that life for probably a couple of years where you're like, we have a surplus. Like this is wild. What do we do? Better benefits for people. This is amazing, right? Pandemic strikes like everybody, world in one way or another got flipped upside down. I would say that with our investors who are awesome and behind us for well over a decade, which is crazy, VCs with a brand for over a decade, the time was up to do their thing. We needed to do ours, you know, is a mutual kind of situation where thank God and everything else involved that we were able to make an offer on the company. We acquired it a hundred percent. Stephanie Jarrett got that deal done. Hats off to her. My co-founder, who is now the rightful owner. So, I was like, no, you take more percent because number one, you deserve it. Two, you kind of run the show here and three, like maybe we'll get some perks with women owned and whatever, because it actually is a better representation of the diversity, and it's pretty cool to see non-traditional people like, you know, running old school, traditional business. Then we kind of sat there and we're like, okay, now what do we do? We have a hundred percent of the company. We have all this history; we have all the assets with Bulu. Okay, we have everything now. Now we got to make it work. And so we went back to the table and really just kind of put on that ad of if I were a consultant, what would I do? I would probably come in, learn the business and strip out anything that didn't make a good margin. Anything that they weren't a core competency. I would take out without removing the ability for them to solve a hard problem. And so, what I tell people is we basically remove the subscription box, the customer service for the subscription box, the financial management, the website build, all of that stuff we ripped out. And what we were left with was this really interesting, we call it true omnichannel fulfillment for consumer brands. That's an expensive marketing word. So, we say hybrid hub and spoke. And so simply what we say that we do is we now help any consumer brand get on the shelf and ship like a major brand. So t...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, former CEO of Celebrity Cruises, and author of the new book Making Waves. Lisa and I talk about the world of innovation in a legacy industry, role of talent and teamwork, and the skills required to navigate the ups and downs of working in uncertain times. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Transcript for Interview with Lisa Lutoff-Perlo, former CEO of Celebrity Cruises Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Lisa Lutoff-Perlo. She is the former CEO of Celebrity Cruises and author of the new book Making Waves: A Woman's Rise to the Top, Using Smarts, Heart, and Courage . Welcome, Lisa. Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: Thank you, Brian. Pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on board, so to speak. No pun intended. You've had an illustrious career in hospitality going from, I think you started out maybe selling cruise packages all the way to becoming CEO of a, a major cruise line and a non-linear journey along the way. So maybe give us a little bit of background on your non-linear journey to where you are today. Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: Thank you. You captured it well. I did start selling door to door in New England where I'm from. Calling on travel agencies and promoting our brand so that they would sell more of us than anyone else. My first promotion with the company came four years later, 1989. I will have been with the company 39 years this year. Crazy. Then yes, I did so many different things. I was in sales in many different roles for 17 years. I went over to Marketing for five, then I went into operations at Celebrity, one of our other brands for seven years. Then I went back into a bigger operational role at Royal Caribbean, and then finally in 2014 I came back to Celebrity in the position of President and CEO. So it was a great journey and I learned so much along the way. Which really helped me with the innovation part of what our conversation will be. It was great experience to have done so many different things within our company and also seeing so many aspects of the industry. Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things and why I wanted to have you on the show is the cruise industry, it's been around. It's a legacy business. It's been around since what, the 1800s or so moving passengers across the ocean. And you've, in your role, both from the beginning to where you are now, moved the bar from what a traditional legacy business was to you know, you're launching the Edge Series and new ships out there and really redefining what cruising looks like. The people that you brought on board, things like that. Can you talk a little bit about how did Celebrity look at innovation process? Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: When I became president and CEO, the Edge series was on the drawing board, if you will. It was actually all drawn, and it was ready to go to the shipyard to be built. And I realized that when I came into this role that this new series of ships, there were five on order and it meant a 72% capacity increase over a five- or six-year period of time, which is a big capacity increase. Especially for a brand of our size that really wasn't as well-known as it needed to be and didn't have as much demand, consumer demand as it needed to. It wasn't enough of a brand to be reckoned with within our industry. So, I knew that we needed to transform the business. I knew we needed to transform the financial performance. We needed to transform the demand for the brand. And to do that, we needed to be very innovative and transform our brand and how people thought about cruising, especially within the affluent traveler market that we were looking to grow so significantly. And our ships aren't small. They're not really large, but they're 3000 person ships. So, you know, I really had to look at it through a completely different lens and say, what's going to be different and innovative about Celebrity that's going to draw people to our brand over others that were supposedly in our competitive set. Brian Ardinger: You know, the process of launching a new ship takes a long time. And a lot of times it's probably one of those things, like we talk to startups a lot of times and they talk about this iterative process and it's very fast. You know, it's like I can quickly, you know, launch a new feature or something and test it with the marketplace. With something like a ship, you know, there's a large lead time at, so it must be more difficult to innovate. So how do you look at innovation and having to be, you know, 10 years ahead of this schedule when you have, you know, a five-year build cycle, for example? Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: And that's exactly what it is. Sometimes six and sometimes seven, depending. And for Celebrity, at the time we were launching the Edge series, we wouldn't have launched a new ship for 10 years. And that's a long time. If you look at the environment that we're in today, you know that Brian better than anybody. Right. Everything changes at warp speed, and one of the things I say in the book, which our boss told us all the time, was if Henry Ford asked people what they wanted, they would've set a faster horse. Right? A lot of times you have to be ahead of consumer trends, and a lot of times people don't know what they want until you put it in front of them and they say, oh, wow. What a wonderful idea. So you have to be in touch with your brand. You have to be in touch with consumers. You have to be in touch with what's going on in hospitality in general. And you have to take advantage of the things that you have as an industry that no one else has. So being at sea. Consumers always say, we want a bigger connection with the ocean. So we transformed how people could connect with the ocean. We transformed the culinary experience. We transform design because people always look at ship design as ehhh, you know, nothing special. Why would I who traveled this way and go to these types of places, want to take a cruise because it's so pedestrian, right? And so my desire and goal was to completely change the perception of how people thought about cruising and use the celebrity brand as a way to break into a whole new different consumer mindset and feel. And that takes a lot of time, energy, effort, and a lot of understanding about consumer trends in hospitality. Brian Ardinger: So, are there particular things that you really dove into or, or looked at to help give you that insight or guidance as you were building these things out? Lisa Lutoff-Perlo: So, we did a lot of research with our customers, not only our customers, but then we cloned them and said, show me other people that look like our customers. Show me other people that look like the consumer we're going after, and what are the things that they are really looking for.&n...…
 
​On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we welcome back Audrey Crane, partner at DesignMap . Audrey and I talk about the challenges and costs of shadow design teams and the impact of having non designers do design work. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Audrey Crane, Partner at DesignMap Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Audrey Crane. She is a partner at Design Map, Author of What CEOs Need to Know About Design and also now a second time guest. Welcome, Audrey. Audrey Crane: Yeah, thank you, Brian. Thanks so much for having me back. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you back because it's been a while. You know, you're a long time Silicon Valley design leader and you're now resident back here in the Silicon Prairie here in Nebraska. I think you came right back right before COVID hit. So probably a lot to discuss about that but wanted to welcome you back on the show. One of the reasons I wanted to have you back is I've been following you and you've been writing about some new interesting topics in and around this world of design and one of the most recent pieces I saw was a post about the cost of what you're calling shadow design teams. So, I wanted to kind of kick off the podcast with a little talk about what do you mean by shadow design teams and what's the implications of that? Audrey Crane: It's interesting right now there's a lot of conversation about like the value of design, the ROI of design. I don't know if you've heard all the chatter about that. It seems like impossible to avoid. Recently, there's a very popular blog post about the sort of gaslighting of designers with this whole value of design thing. You know, when we first started talking about it a couple of years ago, I was like, great, you know, designers should talk business. That's part of the bounded problem solving that makes design fun and interesting. And I was all in on that conversation for a long time and I still am. It's the first chapter of my book actually is ROI of Design. And it's hard to feel like that conversation is getting us where we want to go. It's hard to feel like it's getting us very far. What has been interesting to me is to look, instead of saying to organizations like, hey, you should invest more in design. Like because of the ROI, let's look at what you're spending on design today. And if that's the most effective spend that you could possibly make. And especially right now, the economy isn't great, especially in the tech industry, like let's look more at operational efficiency. So, with some of our clients and friends, we're running a survey to understand who is doing design outside of the design team. So, we're asking product managers, engineers, QA people, business analysts, executives, anybody you can get to take the survey, how much time they're spending alone doing design. So, if they're in a room with somebody else, a designer talking about something that doesn't count. We're not worried about that. But we're just measuring, like I'm doing solo work that a designer might normally do. And the numbers that are coming back are astonishing, like flabbergast. So one client that we did it with, she has a design team of like a dozen. There are 150 engineers. So already you're like, hmm, I don't know if the ratio is quite going to hold up there. But when we ran the survey, there were 22 full time employees worth of design being done by non-designers. Which is crazy. And every time we've run this survey, it's just a shocking number. Brian Ardinger: And you talked a little bit about the fact that it seems weird because you wouldn't unknowingly pay designers to code or things along those lines. So why are we paying folks that necessarily don't have the background or expertise of what a true designer could bring to the table? And that is costing companies money, time, resources, things along those lines. Is that the premise? Audrey Crane: Absolutely. Yeah. And morale, honestly, it's been interesting. I mean, I certainly have worked with plenty of organizations where there's a front-end engineer, there's a product manager that's doing a lot of design work and they like it. And when we started running this survey, I expected a lot of the answers to be, yeah, well I do design, but I do it because I like to do it. I think my work is as good as a designer, but most of the time what we're hearing back is, I wish a designer could do it. They're faster than me. I don't feel competent at this. I am not enjoying it. I have other stuff that I need to do and this is slowing me down, but there weren't designers available to work on this project or more frightening even is I didn't know how to work with the design team that we have internally. The costs are some engineers and some product managers are probably great designers. I'm sure there are some out there. But generally, if we look across the board, it's probably lower quality design. It's probably slower design. It's also probably taking away from all the work that only an engineer can do or only a product manager could do. So, it's slowing down velocity on other fronts as well. And it's a morale hit for the people who don't want to be doing it and are frustrated by it and the designers who are on the one hand trying to make a case for investing when this huge investment is already happening in design just like in a different part of their work. Brian Ardinger: Obviously organizations probably either maybe don't know this is happening or aren't actively trying to use additional resources on projects and that. What are some of the kinds of drivers that you think are causing companies to put the design effort onto other people's backs versus hiring designers or focusing on the right mix of talent? Audrey Crane: That's a good question. I mean, I think part of it is that they just don't realize how much design work there is to do. And so that's the big part of this is like, who knew that in this organization, there was 34 people's worth of design to do, to be done. I wouldn't have guessed that, right. So, it's like kind of that old trope of the alternative to good design isn't no design, it's bad design. Like it's just not happening, right? It can't be happening. That can't be happening. So, I think that that's part of it. I do feel like design teams are often perceived just as cost centers. And that's why we're having these conversations about the ROI of design and the value of design. And we do hear some pushback from designers saying, is there an ROI of engineering, is that being calculated? I'm sure it is in some organizations, but. It's such a prevalent conversation. I do think that people like to do it. I also do think some people, not most people, as it turns out, interestingly, and I also do think that there's the, the Dunning Kru...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Richard Lyons, Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the university's first ever Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer. Richard and I talk about the evolving role of innovation and entrepreneurship at universities, as well as some key trends, opportunities, and challenges. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Richard Lyons, Associate Vice Chancellor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the university's first ever Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, we have Richard Lyons. He's the Associate Vice Chancellor at University of California, Berkeley, and the university's first ever Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer. Welcome, Richard. Richard Lyons: Thank you, Brian. Happy to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on board. I think one of the first things I wanted to talk about is, what is the role of a Chief Innovation and Entrepreneurship Officer at a major university? Richard Lyons: Ah, good question. You know, it actually, the role didn't exist four years ago. It started at Berkeley at the beginning of the year 2020. A number of universities, as you know, have launched this job category. You know, most universities that were pretty decentralized places, I like to use the phrase distributed creativity. Things happen in engineering, they happen in business, what have you. And I think the idea was, well, could we collect ourselves and become, you know, a little bit more than the sum of our parts in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship capacity? That's one way to think about why the job was created. Brian Ardinger: Well, you used to run, you're the Dean of the Haas School of Business. How does it differ when you're focused on, I guess, MBAs and the business side of things versus now there's more cross-collaborative curriculum and such. Richard Lyons: Yeah, well, I love that question because it's part of what's so much fun about being in this role You know, so CRISPR, Jennifer Doudna , one of the faculty here, shared the Nobel Prize in biochemistry a couple of years ago You know, right, science. I mean, I'm like a half an inch deep in science. I'm an economist just to put it on the table. And so, I get to mix with all these lab directors and scientists and not just Jennifer. She's just one of many but, So that idea of boundary spanning, right, in a really fundamental way, touching on people that are doing deep science, but also the social scientists and the humanists, and how do we sort of create a for all ecosystem that everybody's feeling like, yeah, well this, this serves me and is also interesting to me. Brian Ardinger: Well, it's quite interesting, you know, we've seen a lot of trends in higher education. It seems more and more Universities are jumping on this idea of cross collaboration with business. And, you know, you've always had tech transfer and things like that. What are you seeing when it comes to trends and this kind of move to focus on entrepreneurship and innovation? Richard Lyons: I think the trend is unmistakable. My own view is that you could go right to the mission statements of these universities, because I think 20 years ago, people might've said, you know, the deep why of this university is research, teaching and public service. And, and you still hear that phrase. But, you know, reaching out to, like, Simon Sinek's work, Start With Why, or whoever the idea might be, you know, those are really what and how. I mean, really important what's and how's. But the deep why is, is impact. And so, if you really thought that the mission was research, teaching, and service, Then you might look at innovation and entrepreneurship and say, oh, we're a public research university at Berkeley, and you're kind of way off on the periphery. But if the deep why is impact, no, you're kind of at the center of the mission, not the only center of the mission. Even at kind of this reframe of university missions is helping people to see that, no, this stuff is mission advancing, folks. This is not mission distracting. Brian Ardinger: Some universities get a bad rap when it comes to entrepreneurship. Maybe the old version of tech transfer where, you know, the university wanted to keep control of what was being created on the university and sharing the profits or the upside on that with the professors and venture capital and that. Can you talk a little bit about how maybe that whole tech transfer process and that has evolved and what you're seeing? Richard Lyons: Yeah, happy to. So, I was thinking a little bit before we got together here and I thought, well, I want to present four mind blows. And I think all four of these are related to your question and I don't want to get too edgy, Brian. So, here's one and we don't have to talk about all four, but, but I think it really is an answer to your question. Well, first of all, If you asked a university, is it possible for a startup, or a big company, but let's think startup, to be able to access a mass spectrometer on your campus, or a DNA sequencer, or a shake table, or in on all the IP? Is there kind of a porous way to access scientific equipment on Campus. And almost every university would say, yes, that's possible, that happens. And MP3s existed when Apple created the iTunes Store. So, Berkeley created a platform, we call it Berkeley RIC, the Research Infrastructure Commons. It's a platform with 27 labs on it, and virtually all the equipment in those 27 labs. And you, Brian, or a company of any size, could access a mass spectrometer or a cell sorter. And own all the IP it's fully priced. But this creates this sort of porous foundry and its relationship building with a lot of these companies and so forth. So that idea of opening up the infrastructure to innovation and entrepreneurship, because there's a lot of excess capacity if we're going to be honest about it. In fact, we even spun out a company based on this. It's called Second Labs, secondlab.com . And they're basically prosecuting this, you know, in a nationwide, worldwide way. So that's a fun platform. For us, it was a mind blower. Brian Ardinger: The other thing that I think comes into this conversation is the whole funding aspect. How are, and how do private funds work with, you know, public education and that? Some of the trends I know that I saw recently, you were talking about some of the interesting work around shared carried funds and that. So maybe let's talk a little bit about the finance mechanism around funding innovation. Richard Lyons: Yeah. Thanks for that. So, it actually was one of the things on my list of the four, but I'll just get right to ...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Dr. Behnam Tabrizi, Author of Going on Offense: A Leader's Playbook for Perpetual Innovation. This week we talk about some of the key drivers that make companies like Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Microsoft become perpetual innovators. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Dr. Behnam Tabrizi, Author of Going on Offense Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Dr. Behnam Tabrizi. He has taught at Stanford University in the executive programs for 25 years. He's the author of 10 books on leading in innovation and transformation, including a newly released book called Going On Offense: A Leader's Playbook of Perpetual Innovation . Welcome to the show. Behnam Tabrizi: Thank you, Brian. I'm excited about this podcast because it's my first podcast on the book, but incidentally, I just received a copy of the book. And the book is not going to be out till August 22nd, so it was a very nice surprise. Given that your interest is innovation, I think we're going to have a lot of fun. Brian Ardinger: You spent a lot of time and research digging into companies to try to figure out what makes companies innovative and, and more importantly, which ones continually innovate versus ones that are one hit wonders. So maybe you can give the audience a little bit of background on the research that you did for the book. Behnam Tabrizi: Sure. Just a little bit of background before the background. Out of the 10 books, two of them are kind of standout. One was The Rapid Transformation I did with Harvard Business Press, which talked about the sociology and structure of how you transform organizations quickly. And this was published in 2007 and in some ways, it was very different than the sequential transformation that was an accepted norm in the world. And then what I realized, and that book did extremely well, and I realized the biggest challenge to transformation is personal transformation. Leadership transformation. I did the book on. Inside Out Effect, which I'm really proud of, it is about leadership transformation. And it was a conversation with a COO, which I talk about in the book with the COO of a Fortune 50 company where he had sent his people to Stanford. Where I realized, you know, there is a third leg that's missing and that is what's the secret sauce of some of the most innovative perpetual organizations in the world. And that's something that I've been thinking about. I even thought about a topic before this conversation. And so, this was six, seven years ago, so I deep dived into this. Had a huge survey of over 6,000 people with executives, consumers, academics in terms of what they think are the best, most innovative organizations. Had an amazing research team where we sorted through data. So, after just looking at all of this, we came up with 26 firms. We wanted to make sure we don't have survivalship bias, which is only looking at successful companies and only talk about successful. So, we also had companies that didn't indeed do well, like Blockbuster, Borders, and others. So, I talk about those 26 companies, but several actually stand out and those are, they're regular organizations that we know as most innovative, which is like Apple, Microsoft, Tesla, and Amazon. The book also talks about these and how they're different. What was surprising is that companies such as Google and Facebook did not make the list. So, I was looking at the secret of Silicon Valley. I found a couple of organizations that were in Seattle. And I also realized there are some organizations in Silicon Valley that they don't fit the bill, and in some ways, it was really a secret of extremely, extremely high performance, perpetual innovative organizations. Recently, BCG has come up with the most innovative organization, 2023, I believe. Three out of four of my companies were actually top three and the fourth one was like the top five. So that was really nice to kind of know that my research still stands. It was a lot of research. It was a lot of detailed analysis and what the result was, we came up with eight key characteristics that these companies really did that was very different than the rest of the organization. And as you know, Brian, 90, 95% of organizations around the world, non-tech, high tech, are struggling with this issue. And they want to be more, like a lot of CEOs are asking me, how could I be more like, Apple or Tesla. They don't want to be like them, but more like maybe 10% more of them, 15% more of them. So that's the perennial question that I get asked, and I hope that this book and our conversation would at least uncover some of the issues. Brian Ardinger: There's plenty of places that we can start. You mentioned briefly the eight drivers that you've categorized that makes a company more perpetual innovation focused. Maybe we should start by going through some of those key characteristics and then tie it into some examples that you've seen. Behnam Tabrizi: Absolutely. So, I came up with three overarching themes, and then eight, like you said, characteristic that kind of fits with this. One of my favorite movies is Matrix and Trinity is an important figure there. The three key archetype that came out of this research about this organizations is that they were generous. And by generous what I mean is they were generous toward their commitment. There is a term I use in the book, which is existential purpose. This is not just a mission statement. This is true commitment to what they believe in. It kind of also touched on my earlier book, which is Inside Out Effect. I mean, the question that I always ask is why is it people are willing to die for a cause, but they show up completely uninspired in organizations and completely unengaged. You know, not engaged, disengaged, if you will, disengaged. The existential purpose of the organization together with the existential purpose of individual in the organization. It really stood out with these organizations. I would hate to use the word cult, defining these organizations, but my colleague Chuck O'Reilly makes the distinctions, and he says, the difference between cult and these type of organizations is that calls disenfranchised people, but these organizations, you can always leave and you can go to other organizations. And if you have an Apple or Amazon, or even Microsoft on your resume, you actually become more employable at the same time, there are very strong value cultures and each one is also very different. So that's one of the things that stands out. The other thing that I think I also want to mention, and I won't be able to go through all eight, it's the ferocious of these cultures. It's dizzying to walk into this organization because it's chaotic, it's fast paced, fast moving. So, I talk about this tempo. And what I found is that the tempo is not just always on full throttle. Sometime...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Andy Binns to talk about his follow-on book, The Corporate Explorer Fieldbook : How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies . Andy and I talk about what's happening in the world of corporate innovation and offer some insights into what's working and what's not. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Andy Binns, Author of The Corporate Explorer Fieldbook & Co-founder of Change Logic Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, we have somebody who's been on the show before. Andy Binns. Welcome Andy. Andy Binns: Hey, Brian. Thank you very much for having me back. I'm delighted to be here. Brian Ardinger: Andy, I'm so glad to have you back. For those who may not have heard you the first time around, you're the Co-founder of Change Logic. And you have authored a new book called Corporate Explorer Field Book as a companion guide, I think, to your first book, which came out about a year and a half ago called Corporate Explorer. So again, welcome to the show. Andy Binns: Thank you very much. That's right. We have now the Red Book of Corporate Explorer and the Black Book of The Corporate Explorer Field book. Becomes a family of books. The trouble is, I haven't figured out what the third one is, so I need, any, any ideas. I'm totally open to it. Brian Ardinger: It always needs a trilogy. Right. Andy Binns: Yeah, exactly. This is the Corporate Explorer Strikes Back. Right. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Let's talk about the second book. Since we spoke in, I think it was March of 2022, so about a year and a half ago, you have been exploring this space of corporate innovation. What has happened? What are some of the key things that you've seen over the last 18 months that have changed or made you want to write a second book? Andy Binns: It's interesting, isn't it, Brian? This has been such a fascinating 18 months because you have at one side this real pressure on anybody who's doing corporate innovation on budget. Interest rates going up, lots of renewed economic uncertainty. And at the other side, we have people spending huge amounts of money on AI and putting lots of pressure on corporate innovation to say, what are we gonna do with it? Right? Mm-hmm. It's a tremendous paradox and I think that the interesting thing is that companies are coming round to the understanding that AI is just a technology. What you really need to understand is the business model. And this is a question of experimentation. So, it's actually playing directly back into the world of the corporate explorer, very directly. Brian Ardinger: Your first book, it talked a lot about, you know, how do you become a corporate explorer, introducing new ideas and things like this. The field book, the subtitle is How to Build New Ventures in Established Companies. So, talk a little bit about the evolution of the first book to the second book, and what are the key highlights of the second book. Andy Binns: The thing about the second book is that this represents a movement. Really important to me is that this is not about a guru speaking with the answer. Right? This is about a community actually saying, this is what we do. This is how we're approaching it. So, we have chapters by Bosch, General Motors, Intel. There are some lesser well-known companies, but important ones, Analog Devices, Unica Insurance, who were in the first book as a case study. Now they're in the book describing some of the things that they've done after that first book, right? For me, it expresses something really important about how do we solve the issue of corporate innovation, which I just said really important when it comes to, Hey, we've got something dramatic happening in the world. You know, what are we going to do? Well, this is some of the things we actually do that work. So, it's similar in structure to the first book. You know, firstly, strategic ambition. How do we decide where we're headed? Then innovation disciplines, ideation, incubation, scaling, and then the whole question of the organizational and leadership issues as to how you make arrangements for this to work in corporations, but also how if you are a corporate explorer, you're going to get people on your side. But again, rather than me pontificating on the topic, it's actually practitioners, each chapter, different way of looking at the problem with tools and advice very practically built in. So, it's an extremely applied book. Brian Ardinger: It's great to have some of those applied stories because a lot of times I talk to a lot of corporations myself and the first thing they ask is like, well, how do we do this? Yeah. And there's no one silver bullet to make this happen. It, you know, all combines with the talent you have and the technologies you have. And what kind of vision, like you said, that you want to go after. What are some of the biggest stumbling blocks for companies to even think about this and get moving on the path? Andy Binns: And I think I've learned more about this in the last year, going around different companies, getting invited to speak places, hearing what people have to say. And the sort of the loudest story is, is yes, what, what I think was always there was this sort of having lots of ideas but no real strategy. No real sense of, well, why would this help create value? Why would the customers form a habit around the use of your idea or product? And that tends to be weak, particularly if you are in a any kind of technical community. They tend to be a little bit weak on that. So that's still there. And in this book, we've made a big focus on breaking out some of the topics we talk about in Corporate Explorer. So, I talked to in corporate explorer about hunting zones and the importance of really shaping the markets that you are in. And in this book, I explain, you know, well, how do you define your hunting zone? But we also have this genuine innovation guru, Tony Ulwick, talking about how do you define your hunting zones? With a job to be done. Right. With that whole sort of body of work. So, he brings these two ideas together. The second thing I think that which has really come loudly to me in the last 12 months is how many innovators in corporations go out to market with a sort of an immature business model. It's solving a customer problem. It's a pretty good idea, but they have no concept of the go to market. They have no idea how they're going to engage distributors, ecosystem, or any of these kinds of players around them. And you know, it has a fairly predictable trajectory, right? Because, you know, it turns out selling things matters. You, if you're going to want to bring something to mar...…
 
On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the amazing Janice Fraser, one of the leaders in the Lean Startup movement and co-author of the new book, Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama . Janice and I talk about the evolution of leadership and how today's world of uncertainty and change requires new behaviors and mindsets to lead teams and companies forward. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcription with Janice Fraser, Co-author of the new book, Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation, I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Janice Fraser. She's co-author of Farther, Faster and Far Less Drama: How to Reduce Stress and Make Extraordinary Progress Wherever You Lead . Welcome Janice. Janice Fraser: Thank you for having me. I'm so glad to be here. Brian Ardinger: This is a super honor for me, quite frankly. Janice, you, and I met over a decade ago and you've been hugely influential in my journey around this whole startup and innovation space. I think you and I met at one of the first Lean startup conferences in San Francisco, and this was when I was spinning up Nmotion startup accelerator and I said, I need somebody with the chops, who understands everything from customer discovery to product development to help our teams through this process and teach me quite frankly how to do some of this stuff. So, I brought you into Nebraska a while ago, and since then we've been friends and have learned so much through that process of watching you help teams and help people grow in this space. And, and now you're in a different journey, but how did you get involved in product development and Lean Startup, and then how did your career journey get you to the point where you've written this book? Janice Fraser: It's so lovely when I hear people say that I was influential. I'm always the most grateful when I've been helpful. Right? Honestly, that was the best compliment you could have ever offered to me, so thank you. Thank you very much for sharing that. My career journey, like so many of us in the innovation space has not been a straight line at all. And really it started my journey into product. And then from product into innovation, it really goes way back. I accidentally ended up a product manager at Netscape in 1995 when we didn't even call it that for the work that I was doing. And from there I moved into user experience consulting, and I started a company that did that. And then it became Luxer where it was like, helping startup companies kind of get off the ground. And when I look back over the arc of my career, if you remember the Crossing the Chasm model, like I'm that first person, you know, on the far side of the chasm, sort of like holding my hand out, helping people jump across the chasm. Like my job is to sit at the edge of the newest thing and make it boring. I had to write a six-word biography at one point for some offsite or retreat or something, and it was knitting at the edge of newness. Whatever the bleeding edge thing is like I'm just sitting there figuring out like, how can we do it in a way that everybody, normal people can practice. And like I keep a sticker on my computer that says regular people just to remind us all like. The world is made up of regular people and they're doing extraordinary things all the time. And so, I want to just, I just want to help that process out. And so right now it's been innovation. Before that it was product management or starting a company. And it's, what I want to do is just figure out like, how can we do it reliably better? And of course, that takes you to lean start up because you know, Lean Startup isn't going to make you successful, but it will keep you from failing or it will help you raise the floor on how bad that failure could be. And so that's how I got here. Brian Ardinger: I think you're underselling yourself to a certain extent. You've had a chance to work with some of the best companies in the world when it comes to innovation and you've kind of been behind the scenes player when it comes to a lot of this stuff and helping companies understand that. The next thing I really want to talk about is this book, because it's slightly different than a, you know, product strategy book or something. You know, Farther, Faster, and Far less drama. It seems to be a culmination of what you've seen in the workplace and in creating companies and working through this uncertainty that it, it is to create new stuff, but less from the product and the tactical side, but more from the people side, the leadership side. Talk a little bit about why you decided to write this book. Janice Fraser: So the book is co-authored by my husband, who was my co-founder at Luxr, where we had like 50 companies go through this 10 week program, which ended up being an accelerator kind of thing, right? He's still very much focused on product management. He runs a team of like 50 people who all work with federal government clients. All product managers and product designers. I come at it more from the innovation side, from, you know, how do you get very large organizations to be more agile or more lean, or to simply create value from new ideas and especially new ideas that challenge the status quo. That's a hard thing to do, to get a large organization that's been around for say, 150 years to begin to actually change their behavior. When we started writing this book, it was four years ago. That's when we first did the very first outline, and we thought that it would be a very tactical book for practitioners of like meeting facilitation. Because a lot of the ideas land at that moment of like, I need to run a strategy session, or I need to get more out of this leadership thing, and I was doing a lot of network then. But over time and, and in consulting with some editorial folks and some of my closest advisors, my ex-boss, a guy named David Kidder, who’s a dear, dear friend David said, this is bigger than what you think it is. The way that you lead is different than the way that other people lead. And those kinds of feedback over a period of a year or two really gave Jason and I pause. And so, we sat down and thought like, what is it really that we're seeing that's different and what I think is that the leaders that are most successful, whether it's agile transformation on the software side or innovation execution on the non-software side, what we see is that the most successful leaders were leading differently than the ones who seemed the most stuck. We can call it could be mindset like the Carol Dweck book. It could be any number of things. But some leaders were able to, as the book says, go farther, get there faster. And my favorite thing is to go there without a lot of bickering, without a lot of hassle, without frankly, drama. Like, we just don't have time to mess around th...…
 
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