Inside Outside

There’s no way to innovate if you only stay in your court Xavi Cortadellas is the Head of Innovation and Design at Gatorade. He focuses on breakthrough innovation, rather than incremental innovation. Gatorade invented sports drinks 50 years ago and now has an 80% market share. With little room to expand, they actively look for new spaces to grow. When entering a new market, Gatorade is careful to examine what’s the right thing to do and always have patience and perseverance. Today,...

Jeff Rohrs is the CMO of Yext and Author of Audience: Marketing in the age of subscribers, fans and followers, and The Everywhere Brand ebook. He’s also a former VP at Salesforce and ExactTarget. In this episode, Brian Ardinger and Jeff talk about managing content and brands across the web and how hard it is to put perfect information into consumer’s hands everywhere. Yext uses a digital knowledge management (dkm) platform to automate this process. With consumer behavior changing, 73% of a...

Melissa Steach is an ergonomic specialist with Herman Miller. She works to educate various communities about ergonomics in the workplace while valuing and focusing on the importance of the human for design innovation. Brian Ardinger and Melissa take a look at innovation from a design perspective and how that can impact the workplace and home environments. The built environment helps human growth, relationships and caring for the health of people. New healthcare research is reflecting this...

After years of working in startups, Sean Johnson and his team began getting approached by enterprises. These companies needed help moving on ideas, accessing specialists and understanding how to be iterative. Today, Sean's company Digital Intent works with venture-backed startups and Fortune 1000 companies wanting to be tech-enabled businesses. He is also a general partner at Founder Equity. Brian and Sean discuss a variety of corporate innovation strategies. Here are a few highlights: To...

In this episode, Brian Ardinger talks with Douglas Ferguson, founder of Voltage Control, a company focused on design sprints and getting new products to market. Douglas tries to look at the product as a whole unit and is convinced that ideas are worthless. It’s more about focused execution. Douglas brings an operators viewpoint, as he moves into consulting and thinking about Innovation from a broader perspective. Brian and Douglas discuss some of the problems companies face, when building...

In this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger talks with Christopher Bailey and Kim Bullock with ExxonMobil. They discuss successes and challenges of innovating in a large corporation. Christopher and Kim will also be speaking at the Back End of Innovation Conference in Phoenix, AZ on Oct 17-19, 2018. Key strategies and lessons learned include: At the BEI conference, Christopher and Kim will share more of their journey and stories through a two-hour workshop. They...

In this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger has a great conversation with Nicole Rufuku, author of Hiring for the Innovation Economy: Three steps to improve performance and diversity. They discuss how to hire for innovation in a world that’s changing. In her book, Nicole gives teams a set of innovation principals to use in the hiring process. They are: Nicole also provides three specific tools. They are: Connect with Nicole on Twitter @Nicolerufuku or...

Jeremy Lockhorn is VP, Experience Strategy, Mobile + Emerging Technology at SapientRazorfish and has served a wide variety of roles during his 20-year tenure. The common thread is on a focus of what’s next. In this podcast, Jeremy and Brian Ardinger discuss technology changes over the past 10 years and the implications for the future. They know each other from their days in the digital signage space. When the iPhone was launched more than 11 years ago, it was immediately breakthrough...

In this episode, Brian Ardinger talks with Doug Branson about his new book The Future of Tech is Women: How to Achieve Gender Diversity. Brian and Doug start the conversation by looking at trends in the market. Doug outlines the history of women in senior corporate positions. Of the 70 women that have been CEOs of publicly held companies, 70% have MBAs. Of the 27 women that have held exec positions in IT companies (out of 600), two have STEM backgrounds and 25 have business or law...

Canva, an easy graphic-design tool website, started six years ago, after two of its founders found success making customizable school yearbooks. Through this process they discovered the power of putting easy-to-use tools in the hands of their customers. Cameron Adams, Canva’s Co-founder and Chief product officer joined the team with his design and tech experience, and Canva was born. Today, Canva, an Australian-based company, has over 10 million users and is valued at $1 billion. In this...

Growth, Pricing and SaaS Patrick Campbell is the CEO of ProfitWell (formerly Price Intelligently), the software for helping subscription companies with their monetization and retention strategies. ProfitWell also provides free turnkey subscription financial metrics for over 8,000 companies. Prior to ProfitWell, Patrick lead was an Economist at Google and the NSA, an experience he thought was surprisingly similar. With 50 employees in Boston and Argentina, ProfitWell has been funded by...

Corporate Innovation, Mid-Level Managers and the New 20% Ralph Welborn has spent over 25 years providing business and technology advisory services to both private and public sector organizations globally. He has held a variety of leadership positions, including CEO of Imaginatik, the market-leading innovation advisory and platform company; leader of IBM's Strategy & Transformation business in the Middle East and Africa; senior vice president at KPMG Consulting; and a cofounder of an...

Peter Gardner worked for 20 years as a venture capitalist with Allegis Capital before switching to consulting and eventually launching Startgrid. Peter and Startgrid’s mission is to use software to intensify the density of resources in ecosystems outside of Silicon Valley so that innovation can continue to happen no matter where.

Shaina Stigler is chief empathy officer at the startup, Betwixt, that’s focused on enhancing communication and trust between coworkers. She shared some insight they’ve gained on how to jumpstart and measure this growth as well as how improvisation is integral to startups.

Greg Larkin is the author of "This Might Get Me Fired: A Manual for Surviving in the Corporate Entrepreneurial Underground." He talked with Brian about the impetus for his book as well as practical tactics and bits of advice for people forging ahead in new innovation waters.

Taylor Dawson is a founding member of GE Appliances’ FirstBuild Microfactory. In addition to his conversation with Brian, he spoke at the Inside Outside Innovation Summit in May. He had some great stories to tell about FirstBuild’s origins and the obstacles they’ve conquered the challenges they’re still solving.

Azeem Azhar is the author of Exponential View, a weekly newsletter about innovation. He talked with Brian about broad perspectives, geography of innovation, corporate venture capital, and why you shouldn’t take a golf club to a tennis match.

Amy Jo Kim is a longtime innovation consultant and author of “Game Thinking.” With a wealth of knowledge that she is eager to share, she talked to Brian about the concept of superfans, mainstream majority, and early majority and why identifying these demographics is crucial for success.

Randy Komisar is on Inside/Outside Innovation this week to talk about his new book "Straight Talk for Startups," why experience is so valuable now, and why startups can stop worrying about scaling.

Andi Plantenberg is an innovation consultant with about as much experience as one can have in such a new market. Her history includes large organizations, small startups, and starting her own business all on the path toward working now to expand entrepreneurial capabilities in teams. Her conversation with Brian addressed among many things: how teachable is innovation, and what’s the most effective incentive? Reach out to her on Twitter @andisf.