Inside Outside Innovation

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front-row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper-uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and Miles Zero's Robyn Bolton. As we discussed, the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started. Robyn’s book, Unlocking Innovation, is available on Kindle for $.99 on September 18, 2025. Grab your copy today! Podcast Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton [00:00:30] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm Brian Ardinger, and today we have our co-host, Robyn Bolton, back. Welcome Robyn. [00:00:35] Robyn Bolton: Glad to be back. [00:00:37] Brian Ardinger: We are excited to be back talking about innovation. We were ranked one of the top 15 corporate innovation podcasts out there, so I'm excited to continue this journey and helping our audience understand this world of innovation for this new format that we've been trying. Robyn came on as a co-host. Anything new going on in your world? [00:00:54] Robyn Bolton: I think you're being very humble. You weren't just kind of in the top 15 podcasts by a hair. You were... [00:01:01] Brian Ardinger: I think we were four. [00:01:02] Robyn Bolton: You were up there. [00:01:03] Brian Ardinger: Yeah. It was a sweet spot. It was nice to be recognized. [00:01:07] Robyn Bolton: Well, and they nailed it. [00:01:09] Brian Ardinger: One of the articles that I wanted to talk about today, and actually was a newsletter of a friend of mine, and people who've listened to podcasts or know of innovation, might know of David Bland. He's the author of Testing Business Ideas, among other things. In his most recent newsletter. He had a little article talking about why most execs regret the projects they didn't cut. The gist of the article was talking about how every executive has a few projects that haunt them, and it's usually the ones that drag on too long and consume too much capital. And we always hear about the winner, so to speak, and or not betting on the winner, but the idea of a portfolio of things that you've got within your corporate environment of things that you should cut or look at. Could it be a big win if we got rid of this thing? How do you prevent that burning capital on projects that you don't want or don't warrant additional investment and time, energy, and money? I'd love to get your thoughts on what you've seen in the corporate environment and this idea of cutting your bets off or making sure that you don't continue bets down the wrong line. [00:02:07] Robyn Bolton: Sadly, I see it all the time. You know, we call them zombie projects. They're the living dead and sadly kind of the people that are staffed on them. Eventually figure it out. And I feel like they become zombies too. Zombie projects eat their brain. The thing is, they are consuming really valuable resources. They're taking up the time of really smart people. They're taking up the funding that could be used to go to another great idea that has better potential. I think back to my early days in P & G's kind of new business development group, in just one single BU, and I think there were probably, at one time, eight different projects, all new brands that were in different phases of development, and ultimately only Swiffer launched nationally and survived for several years. There was another one called Dryel that launched but didn't quite survive the first several years, and then a whole bunch that just petered out, like you kind of had to wait for the next CEO to come in and do the culling that every CEO does. But in the meantime, it was years of people working really hard on things they cared about that just were never going to work. It was heartbreaking. [00:03:26] Brian Ardinger: It's interesting because I think about why does this happen? Because if you're a...

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help innovation leaders navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to grow and thrive in a world of hyper uncertainty and accelerating change. Join me, Brian Ardinger, and MileZero's Robyn Bolton as we discuss the latest tools, tactics, and trends for creating innovations with impact. Let's get started. Interview Transcript with Brian Ardinger and Robyn Bolton Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and today we have a brand-new format. If you've been listening to the podcast for the last eight or nine years, every week I bring in an amazing guest to talk about innovation. I thought we'd try to mix it up and innovate on the format itself. And for the next few weeks, we're gonna have a guest host. My guest host is Robin Bolton. She's been a guest on the podcast a couple of times in the past. She spoke at our Inside Outside Innovation Summit in 2022. She's the bestselling author of Unlocking Innovation, founder of MileZero, and a good friend. So, Robyn, welcome to the show. [00:01:03] Robyn Bolton: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here and co-hosting. [00:01:06] Brian Ardinger: We need to innovate. We need to eat our own dog food. So I figured after all these years of interviewing amazing people about innovation, we'd mix it up a little bit, and every week we'll try to bring you some insights into innovation from what we've seen in the field and use it as a way to get your feedback from the audience as well. One of the things we thought about is to talk about innovation and what we're seeing, and so one of the things we do, both Robyn and I publish a newsletter, and we're constantly running into new information sources and new people, new insights into what's going on. Thought the first thing we're going to do is talk about the article of the week or what we've been reading. We have both called together a, a couple of different articles to start the conversation. Since people may not have heard you on the podcast in the past, why don't you give a short intro of how you got into the innovation space and some of your background? [00:01:58] Robyn Bolton: I was lucky enough to get into the innovation space kind of as it was forming, which now saying that makes me feel very old, but coming straight out of university, I went to work at P&G and it's when they were doing the very first iteration of creating new products and new brand teams. And so straight out of school went into a brand team that was working on a new business, and that new business eventually became Swiffer. I got to experience the life of a corporate innovator and all the scars and all the great stories that go with it very early on. Then, you know, a couple meanderings later, you know, meandered into Arkansas, the Walmart sales team meandered up to Boston to get an MBA, meandered over to Denmark to work for a big consulting firm. Then I ended up back in Boston and had the pleasure of working with Clayton Christensen at his firm. Spent almost a decade there working across a ton of industries, tons of different types of organizations, but always on innovation. Then, about six, seven years ago, went out on my own, started MileZero, and you know, have continued the innovation adventure since. [00:03:15] Brian Ardinger: We've talked a lot about some of the past things that you've done and the ability that you have to work across different aisles, to work in the corporate innovation space from the trenches. I think a lot of people talk about innovation, have seen it in various formats, but not necessarily the depth and the breadth that you've seen it. So that's where I'm excited to have you as a co-host on the shows. [00:03:35] Robyn Bolton: Thank you very much. I'm really glad to be here and talking about all this because it's a tough time out there for innovators. You know, whether you're in a company,...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Radhika Dutt, author of the upcoming book Escaping the Performance Trap. Radhika and I talk about the challenges with traditional OKR systems and how companies can break free from the performance theater to create a better way to lead, align, and build what matters. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty, join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering business. It's time to get started. Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Radhika Dutt. She's the author of a new book called Escaping the Performance Trap. Welcome. Radhika Dutt: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here again. We talked a few years ago. [00:00:58] Brian Ardinger: I should say welcome back. Yes, the last time you were on, I think it was episode 273. And you had your first book that came out, which was Radical Product Thinking. And when you said you're writing a new book, and it focused on things like OKRs and goals and how people are misusing that. I said, hey, we need to get her back on to talk about some of the things that she's seeing. So welcome back to the show. Let's get started refreshing the audience a little bit about your background and, and how you got here. [00:01:24] Radhika Dutt: Yeah, my background is I started as an engineer. I did my undergrad and grad at MIT. I started companies and I later went to work at bigger companies and it, it was in so many different industries from broadcast media and entertainment, advertising, robotics, even wine. Oh, and telecom was in there too. Government agencies. It was all over. And so, the one common theme in working across all of these industries, working all of these, at different sizes of companies, the one common theme was I kept seeing the same set of product diseases over and over, and I was learning hard lessons in terms of how do you build good products and avoid these product diseases? And so that's what led me to write the first book Radical Product Thinking: The New Mindset for Innovating Smarter. And It's been fantastic, like so many people have read it. It's become the staple when people are building products. And what's most satisfying for me is that really a lot of people describe it as it has changed their mindset, that now they apply product thinking to all sorts of things, even to parenting, to personal life, et cetera. So that's been wonderful to see. Right. But that it's a philosophy of how do you think systematically about products being vision-driven as opposed to iteration led, and let's just throw things at the wall and see what sticks and keep iterating. It was this vision-driven approach. How do you envision, what is the problem you're trying to solve? The end state you wanna create. And how do you systematically drive that change? So, what brings me to the second book? A lot of people who wrote to me saying, you know, just how helpful Radical Product Thinking was, there was also a set of people who wrote saying, you know, I love what you're saying in Radical Product Thinking, but what do I do in my organization that sets all these goals and OKRs and I have all these short term deliverables and that's what I have to focus on. I can't do all of this long-term vision driven stuff. And this question came up to me so many times, I realized we really do need to tackle it. And for a long time, by the way, I was seeing the downsides of goals and OKRs, but for so many years I just didn't know how to articulate for people, why should you stop using goals and OKRs? What's the, what's the problem with them? But most...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Wayne Li, author of the new book, Design Empathy and Contextual Awareness. Wayne and I talk about the changing landscape of design and some of the important concepts needed to make better products and services. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Wayne Li. He's the author of a new book called Design Empathy and Contextual Awareness: Frames of Reference for the 21st Century Creative. Welcome, Wayne. Wayne Li: Hi, Brian. Great to be here. [00:00:59] Brian Ardinger: Wayne, it's great to have you back. Why don't you give a little bit of refresher of who you are and where you've been? [00:01:04] Wayne Li: Happy to do so. It's been a wonderful journey up to this point. My background is degrees in fine arts and in engineering and product design. Wasn't always a professor, right? I started, besides my collegiate career, working at design firm such as like IDEO product development and Design Edge in Austin, Texas. And then wound up working at Ford Motor Company and Volkswagen as a car designer. So started out as a vehicle engineer doing chassis and body systems. Helping to actually design the infrastructure of a car and then moved into the studio where you draw and sculpt cars. So, for listeners who are interested in that, in that side of the business, you're thinking about the aesthetic of the vehicle, the psychology of the vehicle, its placement in society, and how people use it. People in today's parlance is user experience, right? The user experience of a car. I was at Ford for five years. At Volkswagen I was in the electronic research unit and then I wound up graduate school on the west coast at Stanford University. Was doing what they call interaction design back then, which is human machine interface. What is the interior of the car, how do the controls work, how does the interior look? And so they have an electronics research lab in Western California right in the Northern Bay area that couples with their advanced studio in Semi Valley in Southern California helping design advanced concept cars and things like that. Stanford's work was creating this philosophy, you now know it's called design thinking. Or human-centered design. So that was the very first initial work into how to understand how your creative process incorporates different aspects of your mind. In design thinking, they look at triple Venn diagram, so they look at technology, which is like the engineering side. They would call that say like feasibility. And then they have like the business circle, right? Which is, can we make this, can we produce it? Can we sell it for a profit? Now it would be like it's viability. And then there's the desirability or usability side, which is the art or the, the human element. Do people like it? Is it beautiful to look at? Is it easy to use? All those kind of psychological principles. So, Stanford helped to kind of create that philosophy. Then after that really got into the academia space. I did dabble after graduate school for five years, working at Williams Sonoma as part of the creative staff at Pottery Barn. Home decor products, furniture, all those types of things where we're part of that creative process. Wound up teaching. Taught at Stanford for seven years, and now I'm at Georgia Tech. They've kind of pulled me from the west coast to the east coast. So I've set up a design thinking center here called the Design Block Innovation...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Jeremy Kourdi and Jonathan Besser, authors of the new book, 50 Ideas that Changed the World of Work. From the Growth Mindset to Business Model Canvas, we delve into their guidebook for some of the key concepts, models, and frameworks that are shaping business leadership and workplace dynamics. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. [00:00:50] Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have some amazing guests. Today we have Jeremy Kourdi and Jonathan Besser, authors of the new book, 50 Ideas That Change the World of Work. Welcome guys. [00:01:02] Jeremy Kourdi: Hi, Brian. [00:01:03] Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you guys on because the title alone got me intrigued to reach out to you the 50 Ideas that Changed the World of Work. And when I got a copy of it, it, it did open my eyes to all the amazing work that has gone on over the years talking about innovation and workplace dynamics, and leadership. And you've decided to take on the amazing work of like, how do you tackle this mass body of work that all these other people have put together and put it into a book of your own. [00:01:31] Jeremy Kourdi: The first thing is to do it with someone. You'll know this, Brian, you'll certainly appreciate it. That life leadership business, certainly innovation is easier if you have someone that you understand, that you know, that you respect, crucially, that you have a great connection with. I always say one of the great things about rapport and connection is that that then means you can disagree, you can challenge, you can push back. And the other person that you are challenging or disagree with knows you're on their site, knows where you're coming from and appreciates that. [00:02:04] Jonathan Besser: I mean, you know, Jeremy and I have known each other for a number of years. We've worked together, we've collaborated, we've disagreed agreeably, we've argued along the way. But yeah, hopefully 50 Ideas is is the output from that discussion, from that partnership, from working together and I think is a different angle that people will enjoy and use. It'll stand the test of time. [00:02:24] Brian Ardinger: What I liked about it is, again, you talk about emotional intelligence, growth mindset, blue ocean strategy, SWOT analysis, business model canvas. I mean, the list is, is again, 50 plus, first of all, to pull that together, how did you decide which particular ideas were the ones most worthy of going into a book and, and what was the process of pulling that together? [00:02:45] Jonathan Besser: There was kind of a mental all wrestle as you went through. You know, I think Jer and I started with, with a, a long list. And yeah, with the help of our publisher and long discussions between the two of us, we whittled it down to what we thought stood the test of time. You know, what do people want to hear and what would be useful to people from, you know, Sun Tzu's Art Of War, which is centuries old, right through to some of the more modern concepts like Lean In. Samberg's Lead In is very, you really very new. And the the pieces that come in between. That help you understand the, the intention is to give people perhaps the reference book and as a first starting point. You know, the book can be one that is, you can dip into, you know, I just heard about NBTI, let me go into, yeah, to have a look at that chapter, this great reference book, to also the book that feeds through from the 50 different chapters coming through that...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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,...

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...

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...

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....

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....

​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...

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,...

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...

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...

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,...