Inside Outside Innovation

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,...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with David Rogers, Columbia University professor and author of the new book, The Digital Transformation Roadmap. David and I talk about why corporate innovation is so hard. And we unpack the iterative steps needed to navigate a path to digital transformation success. 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 David Rogers, Columbia University professor and author of the new book, the Digital Transformation Roadmap. Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have David Rogers. He's a Columbia University professor and author of the new book The Digital Transformation Roadmap, rebuild your organization for continuous change. Welcome David. David Rogers: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. Really appreciate it. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you here because your book couldn't have come out at a better time. We are in the midst of a lot of accelerating change as everybody is going through, whether it's covid or inflation or, or technology changes like AI. Your book, I wanted to delve into a lot of the details around it. One of the things that stood out is you outlined in your book several studies that have come out, basically say that 70% or more of digital transformation efforts fail. Why is that the case and why is it so hard for people to do this? David Rogers: Yeah, it's really sobering. So, I wrote, what was the first major book on the subject of digital transformation a few years back. So, I've been looking at the subject for some time, and what I was sort of shocked to see was at that point I was really sort of evangelizing, Hey, if you're an established business and you really want to grow for the long term and survive even, let alone thrive, you're going to have to embrace new digital business models. Really set aside a lot of the old assumptions of the corporate playbook of strategy. How do we think about competition? How do we think about customer strategy, use of data, et cetera. Really embrace new business models. And so that was really my approach was to help companies who had sort of been in business for decades, maybe a century or more, to say, hey, it's great that your core business is there and you have customers. But the sort of strategic landscape is really changing, and you need to sort of master this and, and really sort of open up your thinking. But what I found in the years since was people really embrace this idea of, okay, at least sort of, at least I would say, people give lip service to digital transformation. Oh yeah. We're going to do this. We're, we're going to hire somebody, a Chief Digital Officer, we'll put it on the agenda. Transformation digital. Very common now and yet, including companies where there's support from the very top. Real resources put into this, not just sort of some PowerPoints and emails sent around. And yet years go by, and they come to me and say, I don't know why we're not changing, you know, or not changing fast enough. What's going on? Why are we like stuck in slow motion? So, I started looking at the broader, you know, research and as you said, I found this pattern that, you know, by and large, all the major studies are reporting about 70% or higher of failure. That's self-reported, right? The people with don't like to admit, companies admitting by our own standards, we are not achieving what we set out here. So, what that opened my eyes to a whole, you know, second wave of research on my...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tom Daly, founder of Relevant Ventures. Tom and I talk about the challenges big companies have when trying to navigate technology and market changes. And what you can do to avoid some of the common obstacles and barriers to innovation and transformation. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty, join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Tom Daly, Founder of Relevant Ventures 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 Tom Daly. He is the founder of Relevant Ventures. Welcome Tom. Tom Daly: Thank you very much, Brian. Pleasure to be here, speaking with you. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. You have had a lot of experience in this innovation space. You worked with companies like UPS and ING and I think most recently, Coca-Cola and a lot of the innovation efforts around that world. So I am excited to have you on the show to talk about some of the new things you're doing and I think more importantly, some of the things you've learned over the years. Tom Daly: I started doing this work before people called it digital transformation or innovation. The Earth cooled, at about the same time I began getting my head around this. I'm an advertising guy to begin with, and I can't prove it, but I think I created the world's first dedicated 30 sec TV commercial to a website. UPS. In that process, I picked up some vocabulary and I learned some things about how websites, quote unquote work, so that when people started calling, you know, back in the mid-nineties wanting to talk to somebody about the web or the internet, the calls came to me. And it was during that process where I started to build new networks within UPS, learn about new things going on at UPS and discover some of the opportunities. It's been a while. Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about this ability to turn big ships in small spaces. Talk a little bit about what that means to you and, and what the challenges really are for corporations in, in this whole innovation space. Tom Daly: The idea of turning big ships in small spaces actually goes back to my boss's boss at UPS who noticed I was toiling. UPS has a reputation as a conservative company. A little bit unfair, there's some truth to that, but not quite what people think. It's actually a very, very innovative company and has been for its entire history, but it is collaborative. There's a lot of debate and a lot of discussion. So getting new things done, driving new ideas that my boss to encourage me, you'll get there, Tom, but it's like turning a battleship in the Chattahoochee. So, I don't know where listeners are, but imagine a pretty darn small body of water and a really big ship that you're trying to turn. So, a lot of back and forth, a lot of kissing babies, shaking hands, and just getting, you know politics, but in a good positive way to kind of really understand interests and concerns and build a better program, a better idea. So that's the idea, and it was encouraging to me. So, this notion of turning big ships in small spaces, it seems to be, to the degree I have any superpowers, that's the one I'm able to kind of figure out how to help larger organizations figure out how to extract value from, you know, kind of what's coming up around the corner. Brian Ardinger: Obviously you've seen a lot of changes, whether they're technology changes or business model changes that have happened over the years. Where do companies typically run into the problems when...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with the legendary Tendayi Viki. Tendayi is co-author of the book, The Corporate Startup. He's an Associate Partner at Strategizer and one of the major influencers in the world of lean startup and corporate innovation. On this episode, we explore the evolution of the lean startup movement, how corporations are developing the skills to compete and become more innovative, and we talk about Tendayi's brand new book called Pirates in the Navy. Let's get started. Find the Interview transcript and more at insideoutside.io. Interview Transcript with Tendayi Viki, Coauthor of The Corporate Startup & Pirates in the Navy Brian Ardinger: Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast that brings you the best and the brightest in the world of startups and innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, founder of Inside Outside.IO, a provider of research events and consulting services that help innovators and entrepreneurs build better products, launch new ideas, and compete in a world of change and disruption. Each week we'll give you a front row seat to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, and collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today, all the way from across the pond in London, England, we have Tendayi Viki. Tendayi, welcome to the show. Tendayi Viki: Thank you, Brian. It's a pleasure to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. We had you out in Lincoln at the last IO Summit. For those folks out in the audience, that have not heard of you. He's an author, innovation consultant, Associate Partner at Strategizer. You're the coauthor of the book, The Corporate Startup, which took a lot of the Lean Startup stuff and applied it to big organizations. You've got a new book coming out called Pirates in the Navy, so I could go on and on, but welcome to the show. Tendayi Viki: Thank you, man. Thank you. no, it’s an honor to be here. And I had a lot of fun when I was in LIncoln. It was a fun conference and good people all in. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I think I want to jump in. You've been in this space, this lean startup movement for a long time, and you really did open the door to a lot of this lean startup stuff that started in the startup world. I think applied it to bigger corporations, this whole innovation process, whether you're doing it in a startup or you're doing it in a bigger company, a lot of the same principles apply. What are the biggest challenges or changes that you've seen over the last decade of how this movement is evolved and what's gotten better? What's gotten worse in the whole process? Tendayi Viki: Yeah, so it was a really interesting movement because it came out with an interesting philosophy, which is that one of the reasons why any innovation, either from a startup or from a large company, any innovation fails when people that are working on the innovations starts scaling their idea prematurely. Which means they start building the full product and launching it and investing a lot of resources and taking it to market before they really understand who the customer is. What the customer wants. How to reach that customer. How to earn from that customer repeatedly. How to retain that customer. How to create value basically in a sustainable way. And also, how to deliver profits and whether customers are willing to pay. And how much they will have to pay. So that was the philosophy meeting, which was test your ideas before you scale them. The big challenge then became, well, we understand, we agree. How do we do that? And that's where the movement has been sort of incrementally building all the tools and resources you need to be able to do that work over the last year. Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about now where you're at. A lot of the times at the early stages when I started...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Chris Shipley, co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage. Chris and I talk about the changing forces driving the great resignation to the great reset, and how empathetic leadership will be the key to navigating change in creating value today and in the future. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Transcript of Podcast with Chris Shipley, Co-author of The Empathy Advantage. Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. In fact, this guest has been on the show before. It is Chris Shipley. She's the co-author of the new book, The Empathy Advantage: Leading The Empowered Workforce. Welcome back Chris. Chris Shipley: Hey, I'm glad to be talking to you again. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on as always. You've been so gracious to be part of the Inside Outside community for so many years, whether it's speaking in our events or the last time we spoke, you had your first book out, the Adaptation Advantage. And that came out right during the middle of Covid. And so, I wanted to have you back on with this new book, to talk about what's changed and and where we're going. You've got a new book out called The Empathy Advantage. Tell us a little bit about why you had to write a book coming out of Covid? Chris Shipley: As you said, The Adaptation Advantage, our first book with Heather and I, it launched in April of 2020. So, we had all of these plans having finished the book at the end of 2019 to do all the things you do to launch a book. And the world came to a stop. We had to adapt ourselves to really get that book out into the world. But what we recognized or what happened is it kind of became this accidental guide to leading through the pandemic, because everybody was without. We continued to read and write and work on understanding what was happening and changing in the workplace. During the pandemic, what became really, really clear is that the pandemic didn't cause this disruption. It felt very disrupting, but it was, it amplified, it put a lens on what had been happening for a long time. So, for example, the idea of the great resignation that really took hold about a year ago, people started talking about it. Well, that's been going on since about 2009. The pandemic created; we had a lens to see it maybe more clearly. It wasn't a new idea. And so what we realized is that the amplifying effect of the pandemic combined with a workforce that was sent home, given a lot of autonomy, a lot of agency, in how they would do their jobs, they're not gonna come back into an office place and say, oh, you know, all of that stuff that trust you had in me, nevermind micromanagement again, I'll be fine with that. A new kind of leadership is required to move people sort of back into a mainstream new frame of work that really embraces the way in which these workers are more empowered, they have more autonomy and agency. And we think that the bottom line is it's a change in leadership that centers on empathy. Brian Ardinger: I wrote a book. I started writing it right before the pandemic, and this idea of disruption and changes are coming and how do you start preparing for it? And then Covid hits, and it made it real. Obviously, for everybody in a way that talking about it and seeing it hitting in different industries might not have. But nowadays we're coming back into the place where, so we've had a couple of years of practice, so to speak to how do we become adaptive in that. But it...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios. Maisha has had an amazing career in corporate innovation, company building and venture capital, and we talk about the new Venture studio model and some of the things that she's seeing in the world of venture. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcription with Maisha Leek, Managing Director of Forum Venture Studios Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Maisha Leek. She's the managing director of Forum Venture Studios. Welcome to the show, Maisha. Maisha Leek: Thank you Brian. I'm excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you because you've spent a lot of time in all the different cross sections of innovation. So corporate innovation, company building, venture capital. Can you tell us about your path and journey in this innovation space? Maisha Leek: Sure. I'd love to say it was all brilliantly planned. There's a lot of trial error, error, error, error, and then trial again. I actually got into this world in the interesting route. I was for a long time in Washington DC. I was a policymaker and a fundraiser. And in DC we had oversight of most of the science and innovation agencies. So, everything from NASA to Noah to National Science Foundation, which is about the $54 billion proposition, which is a lot of responsibility. And we work with your tax dollars, placing the best bets we could to jumpstart the economy or to just position the United States to be competitive. And so that turned in everything from investing in commercial space flight. You see that now with SpaceX and Virgin Galactic and other companies. Those aren't the only ones. And investing in the advancement of batteries, which leads to all of the electric vehicles that we have now and, and sort of their ability to compete with their combustible counter parts. I knew I was far from all the action that everybody was in, in Silicon Valley and wanted to get closer to it, but by happenstance, met the founder of United Masters. Which was a music and tech company. And did not know what I was doing, except that I was an operator. I knew how to build out teams and build out a company and spent my time doing that. And we had the right as Silicon Valley goes investors. So had Ben Horowitz on our board. And David Drummond on our board. And was really active in managing those relationships. And when I was thinking about what to do next after spent some time at that startup, I had an executive coach and friends, they were like, you got to get into venture. And I'm like, that sounds really boring. And their suggestion I think is really apt for folks who are thinking about it. They suggested I would be good in the space because I had experience to do this on Capitol Hill, operating across a range of subject matters. And knowing to be sort of a generalist that can go deep in certain areas and analyze information and make quick judgements. My first experience was at Adventure Studio at Human Ventures. And that really influenced what I decided to do after that. And most of my time in the venture space, outside of being an angel investor or participating SPVs has really been in the venture studio space. I love it because of the close connection you can have with the founder and the founding team. It's not sort of like write a check. I'll call you once a month kind of thing. We're in it with them. But it also leans into the place where...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Barry O'Reilly, author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise and co-founder of the new Venture Studio, Nobody Studios. Barry and I talk about the ins and outs of a new model of creating and investing in startups called Venture Studios, and we discuss the power of collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us, as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Barry O'Reilly, Author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise & Co-founder of the Venture Studio, Nobody Studios Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. You may have heard of Barry O'Reilly. He has been part of the Inside Outside Innovation community for a while. He's the author of Unlearn and Lean Enterprise. And co-founder of Nobody Studios, which we're going to have him talk a little bit more about that. Welcome, Barry. Barry O'Reilly: Thanks very much for having me. Yeah, it's great to be here. Brian Ardinger: It's great to have you back. You've followed Inside Outside the community. You've been a huge proponent of what we've done, and quite frankly, a huge mentor to me to understand this whole world of innovation and how do we get through it. I'm excited to talk about your new venture, which is Nobody's Studios. You've spent a lot of time as an author, as a consultant, working with big companies. Helping really develop the whole lean startup movement. And now you've decided to jump into the investment space and create a a studio where you're gonna hopefully incubate some amazing new startups in the world. Barry O'Reilly: Yeah. Well, first of all, one thing I want to congratulate you on is your new book. Literally it sits outside in my reading area. There are people that walk past it and see it all the time and pick it up. So, I just want to congratulate you on getting that done, and I really enjoyed reading through it. So, congratulations to yourself on that and highly recommend folks check it out. So in terms of Startup Studio, the real inspiration for me was, as you said, I've had the chance to work with some phenomenal people over the last number of years. Helping them either identify products that they wanted to build in enterprises or work with scaling startups that were sort of building their business and taking them as far as they could. And I was enjoying a lot of the sort of advisory side, but I've been sort of doing a lot of that now for, you know, close to a decade. And I was just getting itchy fingers, if you will. You know, I was like helping all these people, like I do a little bit of an angel investing. I, you know, would take sweat equity or be an advisor for these startups. Help enterprises build products, but I miss a daily grind of sort of being like right in there, building day in, day out. So, I knew I was just sort of looking for the right opportunity for me to bring a lot of my skills to bear and rather than put time in for money, put energy in for equity in these businesses and build something that would fire outlast me if you will. You know, started to share that with a few people and one of my good friends, Lee Dee, who was actually under advisory board of AgileCraft with me, which we sold to Atlassian and has now become JiraAlign. He introduced me to a guy called Mark McNally. And Mark was based down in Orange County. He was sort of interested or starting this idea of a company called Nobody Studios. And instantly I was just attracted to the name. Anything that's sort of contrarian and odd. I was like, why did...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stephen Taylor, Chief Innovation Officer at Untold Content. Stephen and I talk about the importance of storytelling, failure narratives, and its impact on the innovation culture of companies. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive In today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Stephen Taylor, Chief Innovation Officer at Untold Content Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Stephen Taylor. He is the Chief Innovation and Chief Financial Officer at Untold Content, where he focuses on helping organizations accelerate innovation through the power of storytelling. Welcome to the show. Stephen Taylor: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here. Brian Ardinger: This whole concept of innovation storytelling, it's becoming more and more popular as people are trying to understand like, how do I actually get movement on my innovation initiatives? And a lot of it comes down to, you know, the stories that you tell. So, I wanted to have you on the show, because you have a company that focuses on this. Why don't we talk about the definition? What is innovation storytelling? Stephen Taylor: Yes. Innovation storytelling is something that is near and dear to my heart. So, I am a chemist by training. I did my PhD in chemistry, did a postdoc. Went out into industry and was there for about a decade. And I felt the pains of how you actually get buy-in, even within a smaller organization. I think we had 250 people. But how do you actually get buy-in on ideas. Or how do you kill ideas that don't fit? You know, how do you find out what is the right decision. And so that was something that I became very passionate about. And so, when I left industry and joined Untold, I really wanted to spend a lot of time focusing on how do innovators communicate, even as a scientist. How do scientists communicate? So, what we found through our research is that innovation storytelling is the art and science of communicating strategic narratives and personal stories around innovation objectives in order to drive them forward. It really works on trying to make things that are very strategic, but also bring those personal experiences in. Because what we found is that organizations have overall these strategic narratives that, that they're trying to force. When you have an idea or something that you're trying to bring forward, you have to ensure that there's good alignment between those stories and that narrative. And so, they really play in concert together. So that's why we include both those as a part of the definition. Brian Ardinger: Yeah, part of it's like that translation service almost. Sometimes it's a technical translation of, what the heck are you talking about? It's more about how do you align that with the other stories that are being told in the organization so that you can make sure that people understand what you mean. I think, you know, when I go out and talk to companies, you know, one of the first things I like to do is how do you define innovation? Because I think that alone, causes problems with a lot of organizations. It's like, well, for me it means, you know, creating the next flying car. Where another person in the organization may mean that innovation is creating something new with our existing customers. And so, right. You know, if you don't have alignment from that perspective, you can go sideways really quickly. Stephen Taylor: We spend time talking about story led innovations versus innovation led stories. So,...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Paul Skinner, author of the new book, the Purpose Upgrade. Paul and I talk about how companies can use purpose to find better problems to solve, build better solutions, and achieve better outcomes. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us, as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Paul Skinner, Author of the Purpose Upgrade 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 are talking to Paul Skinner. He's the founder of Agency of the Future, and author of the new book the Purpose Upgrade: Change your Business to Save the World. Change the World, Save your Business. Welcome, Paul. Paul Skinner: Thank you, Brian. It's a fantastic pleasure to make it onto your show for a second time. In some ways, even better than the first time because now I have some sense of what I have to look forward to. Brian Ardinger: Well, yes. Welcome back to the show. One of the reasons we wanted to have you back on is you've written another book. First time we spoke a couple years ago, your first book had just come out called The Collaborative Advantage. It was quite an interesting topic and obviously you've expanded on it. One of the things I want to ask, I've just published my first book, Accelerated and I can't imagine writing a second book. So, talk to me about that process of why did you feel a second book was important and give us a little bit of background into that. Paul Skinner: Thank you for that. And yeah, I, I certainly agree. There's so much work in writing a book that I don't think you really want to set about it until it becomes something that impinges on you so much that you can't not write it. And congratulations on your book. And my prediction is that in couple of years or so, you'll start to feel the urge. And so, I guess in my case, the second book has in some ways grown out of the legacy of the first book. So, we talked about Collaborative Advantage. I think it was episode 149, so about halfway up to where you are today. And I remember at the time arguing that many of the problems we faced in business were typically not problems we could solve on our own. Therefore, we needed to forge shared purpose with others. And I proposed collaborative advantage as a somewhat audacious fundamental alternative to the conventional goal of strategy of creating competitive advantage. Now the idea there of course, was that in competitive advantage, that you line up your resources to create a superior offering that you deliver to your stakeholders who are the seen as the passive recipients of that value. But I felt that that underestimated the value creation process and the role that all our stakeholders actively play in it. You know, people are not just consumers. You know, if we met in a Starbucks and had a chat with an economist and said, who was creating the most value around us? He might say the barista, the franchisee, the brand owner, the landlord. But he probably wouldn't say us, the customers. But actually, if I met you in Starbucks, the real attraction would be the conversation with you and the warm brown liquid would be relatively incidental. Similarly, you know, investors are not just walking checkbooks, they're people who commit to the future and can help us live up to it. You know, partners don't just have to be suppliers delivering to a contract but can define that future with us. Communities are not just markets. They're the thing that make it all worthwhile. And our shared home isn't just an asset to...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Tim Bottke, author of the new book Digital Transformation Payday. Tim and I talk about the challenges of digital transformation initiatives and how companies can better approach the implementation and measurement of them. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best in the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started. Interview Transcript with Tim Bottke, Senior Strategy Partner at Monitor Deloitte and Author of Digital Transformation Payday 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 Tim Bottke. He is Senior Strategy Partner at Monitor Deloitte, and author of the new book Digital Transformation Payday: Navigate the Hype, Lower the Risks, Increase Return on Investments. Welcome to the show, Tim. Tim Bottke: Hi Brian. Brian Ardinger: Tim, I am excited to have you on the show. You've got a very interesting book about digital transformation. What is digital transformation? Tim Bottke: You know what the funny thing is. Like over these four years of research, which I spent preparing, the book. Became clear, there is just no single universally agreed definition of what digital transformation is. And that's driven by the fact that so many different interest groups have worked on the topic. Each with their own agenda. And very often you'll find that the key word in this term is transformation. And digital, it should be it, it is not always like that should be means to an end, which is transforming. And transformation is also no objective by itself. It needs to happen to make sure that a strategy is established, which helps companies win in the marketplace. And very often you see with clients and also all the companies I researched for the book, that people transform but don't know what to transform to. And that's why people often ask for a definition. And the definition is it's about a transformation with the objective of being able to have sustainable success in the marketplace. And digital is a tool to do that. There are many others. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'd love to get a little bit more background on like, how did you get involved in digital transformation and the research that you've been doing on it? What got you excited about it and how did you get your expertise? Tim Bottke: I've been a consultant now for more than 20 years. And like transformation was always a topic in all these times. Whenever I had, we had the early stage, we had the e-commerce boom. I've been in all these faces, and I work in the TMT industry mostly, so, which has always been more digital. At least that's what we believe than many other industries. And that's why with all these companies going up, down, growing, being restructured, transformation has always been there. So it has always been a key interest area I've had. And that's why when the digital transformation hype and I'll call it came up, it has come up several times. It just became the core of my work because there was no transformation where there was no digital inside. And then I had, I still remember this meeting with a dear, really dear client of mine, a CEO who basically said, look Tim, two more years as a CEO in this company. Maybe three. I want to do bigger things. We both know I need to transform this company. Digital transformation is the term. It costs half a billion, and I'm sure I would not see any single benefit while I'm still the CEO. Is it not a better idea if I start wearing jeans and trainers? As of next week, I make my investor relations team paint our annual report with a...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sarah Stein Greenberg, Executive Director of Stanford's d.School. Sarah and I talk about her new book, Creative Acts for Curious People and dig into a number of the exercises and activities that innovators can use to move ideas forward faster. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we'll bring you latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator. Interview Transcript of Sarah Stein Greenberg, ED of Stanford's d.School and Author of Creative Acts for Curious People Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Sarah Stein Greenberg. She's the Executive Director of Stanford's d. School and author of the new book, Creative Acts for Curious People: How to Think, Create and Lead in Unconventional Ways. Welcome to the show, Sarah. Sarah Stein Greenberg: Thanks so much, Brian. I'm really excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: You know, as a person in the trenches, trying to help companies and teams think through the innovation process. It's kind of hard-to-get people on board half the time. And you've taken and created this new book, that's really the tactical guide of exercise and experiences, almost a roadmap for that. What made you decide to tackle this topic and what do you hope for folks to get the most out of it? Sarah Stein Greenberg: Oh, great question. We're living through this historic moment right now, where on nearly a daily basis, each of us are trying to solve problems that we have not faced before. So, as we were getting going, we were talking about the challenge of having one kid vaccinated. One kid not vaccinated. People are back in school. There's lots of different risk factors. Folks are starting in some cases to return to offices. Like what's the new social etiquette. And then at the same time, there are these like community level issues or global issues around whether it's wildfires, which are happening in my area, or really different perspectives about politics that we're experiencing all over the country. And it's a lot of ambiguity and a lot of uncertainty. So, while we might be used to thinking about like, how do we apply our creativity to innovation and coming up with new products and services, there's also this whole realm of use for our creative abilities that has to do with these kinds of both small personal and large global challenges. So, I wrote this book because I think that design offers a set of abilities that are really useful when you're trying to tackle problems where you don't know the right answer. Maybe there is no right answer, and you have to bring your full creative self. These are the kinds of skills and abilities that we seek to help develop in our students at the d. School and with executives and teachers and folks all over the world. And I think there's something in here for everyone, no matter where you are in your creative journey. I think you can find something that will be of use to you. Brian Ardinger: A lot of folks are understanding that to a real extent this idea of living in constant change and ambiguity and a world in flux. What are some of the key skillsets that you find are important to be able to dabble in that world? Sarah Stein Greenberg: One is the act of noticing and observing how the world is changing. And, you know, we get really habituated to the routines and the things we see every day. But when you look at what amazing designers do, somehow, they see opportunities that no one else is noticing. But there are really a set of ways, I have a few great assignments in the book based on this to cultivate your own ability to observe and notice differently. So, one of my favorites is...

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...