Innovation Answered

From six years spent at Starbucks to designing a new countertop coffeemaker that cranks out cold brew, Mesh Gelman has been working at the cutting edge of coffee. During his time at Starbucks, he witnessed the rising popularity of cold beverages, a trend that his new startup, Cumulus Coffee Company, aims to capitalize on. In this podcast episode, we talk with Gelman about coffee trends; developing a new product from scratch; the difference between big organizations and start-ups; and his past work as an innovation consultant.

In this episode, we catch up with Geoffrey Moore, the best-selling author, consultant, and venture capitalist whose groundbreaking work has shaped how we think about innovation strategy. If you’ve ever talked about a technology "crossing the chasm" from the realm of early adopters into the early majority, or your company has put a high potential project into the incubation zone, you’ve been using language given to us by Moore. His best-selling books including Zone to Win, Inside the Tornado, and Crossing the Chasm — and lately, he’s been publishing a series of insightful LinkedIn articles on topics including the future of the office…rethinking personalization… and why it’s time to stop talking about generative AI and start doing something with it. Listen to the episode to hear the full conversation.

In this episode, we talk about the challenges of innovating in biopharma with a veteran of that industry, Dan Seewald. Seewald is the former Head of Worldwide Innovation at Pfizer, the $100 billion pharma giant headquartered in Manhattan, and now the founder and CEO of the consulting and training firm Deliberate Innovation. Among the questions that InnoLead CEO Scott Kirsner covers with Seewald: This episode was hosted by Scott Kirsner and edited by David Swope.

Who’s leading the charge on generative AI in big organizations? How are they managing the tension between moving quickly and not making major missteps? And what use cases are they moving forward with? In this episode, we dive into the rapidly-evolving world of generative AI with Paul Baier, the CEO and co-founder of GAI Insights. Baier talks about the vendor landscape and shares several examples of first-mover companies, including McDonald's and Walmart, that are making strides in deploying generative AI. You can subscribe to our podcast, “Innovation Answered,” on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts. Scott Kirsner hosts this episode; Hadley Thompson produced it.

"For too long," says Todd Dunn, "many organizations have not developed innovation as a strategic and ongoing source of competitive advantage. Instead, some organizations have used it for reputational points in the public eye, but not to deliver measurable value to consumers, customers and the company." That's a big problem, argues Dunn, who was most recently the Vice President of Enterprise Innovation at Advocate Health. Advocate is headquartered in Charlotte, NC, and it’s the fifth biggest nonprofit health system in the US. In this episode, we talk with Dunn about what went wrong in Act 1 of corporate innovation — and what needs to change in Act 2. Our discussion was sparked by Dunn's recent LinkedIn piece, "Innovation: The Driving Force of Competitive Advantage." You can subscribe to our podcast, “Innovation Answered,” on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts. Scott Kirsner hosted this episode, and Hadley Thompson produced.

Design thinking is a well-known concept in the innovation sphere — it often comes up in conversation, at conferences, or in passing. But for as much as people talk about design thinking, not everyone understands its full scope — and even fewer people use it in their day-to-day work. To help bridge the gaps, we created this "beginner's guide" podcast. For this episode, we wanted to ask some basic questions about what design thinking is, how non-experts can get up to speed, the challenges experts have seen when introducing it to others, and how it can help come to viable solutions. We chatted with Prapti Jha, a Strategist and Researcher at Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health; Scott Wolfson, Senior Strategy Director at BCG BrightHouse; and Craig Damlo, Senior Manager at Blue Origin, to get the answers. You can subscribe to our podcast, “Innovation Answered,” on Spotify, iTunes, Stitcher, or Google Podcasts. Tyler Smith hosted and produced this episode.

This bonus episode of "Innovation Answered" features Matt Baker, Head of Corporate Strategy at Dell Technologies. AI has generated so much interest with the release of ChatGPT; the announcements from Google, Baidu, Microsoft, and Alibaba about chatbots and generative AI; and increased adoption of art-focused AI platforms like DALL-E and Midjourney. So we decided to explore the basics and background of the technology — and what happens next. This episode focuses on what AI is; generative AI; how it could affect jobs going forward; and how large companies' adoption of AI may create competitive advantage or disadvantage. Our "beginner's guide" podcast episodes take on important topics at the 101 level, without jargon or complexity, assuming that you may be new to the job of making innovation and change happen inside a big organization. We want to make things crystal clear, so you can get down to business. This episode is hosted and produced by InnoLead's Tyler Smith.

In this episode, we’ll dive into four questions: what is an innovation space? What are the pros and cons of physical versus virtual spaces, what are the qualities great spaces possess... and what common mistakes do people make in setting them up and running them. For expert perspective, we consult Michelle Cohen of CME Group, Andy Miller of AARP, and Michael Cross of Entergy. Our "beginner's guide" podcast episodes take on important topics at the 101 level, without jargon or complexity, assuming that you may be new to the job of making innovation and change happen inside a big organization. We want to make things crystal clear, so you can get down to business. This episode is hosted and produced by InnoLead's Tyler Smith.

In our Persistent Innovators miniseries, InnoLead and Wade Roush explored the cultures of four large companies that have pushed the innovation envelope for decades: Disney, Apple, Lego, and Novartis. But who else deserves recognition? From making pizza ever more convenient at Domino's, to finding new markets at FujiFilm, we dissect the practices and strategies at six more persistently-innovative companies, with input from guests like Bill Taylor, Braden Kelley, and Rita McGrath. Special thanks to our friends at PatSnap and Innovation Academy for sponsoring this miniseries.

How do big companies stay innovative across many decades, and in different industries? That’s been the driving question of our Persistent Innovators miniseries. In the fourth and final episode we turn to company in a very different kind of business: discovering and developing new drugs. And we focus on the global pharmaceutical giant Novartis, formed in 1996 from the merger of the venerable Swiss companies Sandoz and CIBA-Geigy. At its Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, opened in 2002, Novartis invented a new style of biology-centric drug discovery that has changed practices across the industry—and sparked a local biopharma boom that has utterly transformed the Kendall Square neighborhood of Cambridge. Compared to the other industries we’ve covered in the miniseries, namely digital devices (Apple), entertainment (Disney), and toys (LEGO), the pharmaceutical business is downright cutthroat. Product development is risky, time-consuming, and expensive; competition is incredibly fierce; and even a blockbuster drug can become a flop once the patent expires and a generic drug makers jumps in. On top of all that, drug makers have to operate outside the traditional world of consumer marketing: You take a Novartis medicine not out of any brand loyalty to Novartis, but because your doctor tells you to. The net effect is that to stay successful, a big drug company must keep their product pipelines full and churn out hit after hit—which, when you think about it, is the very definition of a persistent innovator. In this episode, former Novartis executive and drug hunter Tom Hughes explains how Novartis’s first CEO decided to rebuild the company’s drug discovery effort around a genomic and molecular understanding of disease. And current NIBR president Jay Bradner talks about the structures Novartis has set up to protect and promote high-output innovation. Finally, we speak with Sam Wiley, head of thought leadership and customer advocacy at PatSnap—our sponsor throughout the miniseries—about a few more companies he sees as persistent innovators. Special thanks to our friends at PatSnap and Innovation Academy for sponsoring this miniseries.

LEGO is one of the world’s most famous and admired brands. The company’s colorful plastic bricks are the literal building blocks of an empire that spans a $5 billion annual toy business, hundreds of retail stores, 10 theme parks, and a series of hit movies. But what LEGO actually sells isn’t just the bricks, it’s a whole system of play: an endlessly expandable way for children (and adults) to combine hand, eye, and imagination. It was when product developers drifted away from that system in the 1990s and early 2000s—introducing a blizzard of toy lines that didn’t use the bricks at all—that LEGO stumbled into serious trouble. The company had a close brush with bankruptcy in 2003, then grappled its way back to profitability by refocusing on its core customers and their passion for building things. For this third episode of our Persistent Innovators miniseries, guest host and producer Wade Roush sought out LEGO experts like journalist Bill Breen—co-author of the authoritative LEGO history Brick by Brick—as well as former LEGO executives Robert Rasmussen (developer of the LEGO Serious Play method) and David Gram (founder of the consulting firm Diplomatic Rebels). They explain what went wrong at LEGO, how the company rediscovered the spirit of play that make its toys so beloved, and what it does today to make sure that innovation doesn’t stray too far outside the brick. The Persistent Innovators is sponsored by Patsnap (www.patsnap.com), the Connected Innovation Intelligence company, and by Patsnap’s online courseware site Innovation Academy (academy.patsnap.com).

Disney isn’t the world’s largest media company—that title goes to Comcast. But it’s probably the one that has burrowed the deepest into our psyches. As it approaches its 100 birthday in 2023, The Walt Disney Co. not only dominates in its original field of feature animation, but also operates some of the world’s most famous film studios (Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, 20 Century, Searchlight), television and streaming networks (ABC, ESPN, National Geographic, Hulu, Disney+), and theme park resorts. And to generate the content and experiences that power all of those properties, it marries the latest media technologies with storytelling at a level few other companies can match. And yet Disney hasn’t delivered with perfect consistency. In the second episode of our Persistent Innovators miniseries, guest host and producer Wade Roush talks with former executives from Disney’s feature animation, Imagineering, and parks and resorts divisions, and digs into the company’s innovation secrets, as well as a few rare but illustrative moments when Disney stumbled—and rebounded. The Persistent Innovators is sponsored by Patsnap (www.patsnap.com), the Connected Innovation Intelligence company, and by Patsnap’s online courseware site Innovation Academy (academy.patsnap.com).

If you want to understand how some large organizations manage to keep innovating, decade after decade, you need to study the companies that actually do that. And Apple is at the top of the list. Thanks largely to sales of its world-conquering iPhone, it recently became the first company in the world to reach a $3 trillion market capitalization. But Apple’s journey toward “persistent innovator” status started long before the iPhone’s introduction in 2007. In this first episode of our Persistent Innovators miniseries, guest host and producer Wade Roush travels back to the 1980s and 1990s, to talk with people who worked alongside Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak and saw how leadership, culture, and technology came together to make Apple…Apple. The Persistent Innovators is sponsored by Patsnap (www.patsnap.com), the Connected Innovation Intelligence company, and by Patsnap’s online courseware site Innovation Academy (academy.patsnap.com).

There’s a great quote in David Robertson and Bill Breen’s book Brick by Brick, a look inside The LEGO Group. They write, “The most difficult challenge in business is not to invent an innovative product; it’s to build an organization that can continually create innovative products.” How companies can become innovative and stay that way is the focus of a special series coming soon from Innovation Answered, the podcast for corporate innovators. We’ll be looking at big, established companies like LEGO, Apple, and Disney and asking what makes them so successful decade after decade and how they bounce back from challenges. Is it all about great leadership—or do these companies have a grasp on principles of persistent innovation that other companies can emulate? In today’s teaser episode, guest producer Wade Roush talks with InnoLead co-founder Scott Kirsner about where the idea for the miniseries came from and what hypotheses we’ll explore as we go along. Look for the first full episode on January 18, 2022. You can also listen to episodes of our Innovation Answered podcast on Stitcher, Spotify, Apple Podcast, Google Play Music, and our website. Special thanks to our friends at PatSnap and Innovation Academy for sponsoring this mini-series.

You may know Mars Incorporated for the sweet and tasty treats you can find on store shelves – classic Twix candy bars, Juicy Fruit gum, and so much more. However, Mars is exploring much more than just candy and snack foods. Jean-Christophe Flatin, President of Innovation, Science, Technology, and Mars Edge at Mars, talks about "innovation myth-busting," the importance of connecting with consumers, and new patterns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Venture capital funds provide the gasoline startups need to get from an initial sketch on a cocktail napkin to a global-scale giant like Uber, Amazon, or Airbnb. With so much change over the last year, we drove out to Los Altos Hills, California to sit down with Hemant Taneja, one of venture’s power players to understand what’s on his mind half way through this year. Marcus Daniels, Highline Beta’s Founding Partner & CEO, also shares his insights.

Bringing designers in early can help companies execute on big ideas more successfully and create smoother customer experiences. But how do you get that right, especially if design isn’t baked into the culture, or if other functions tend to dominate the innovation process? Phil Duncan, the Global Design Officer at Procter and Gamble, discusses his experience. Brett Lovelady and Andy Goodman of PA Consulting also share.

Weddings in the COVID-era look a little different. Many couples staged “minimonies” to celebrate their big day, sometimes with a Zoom link as a substitute for in-person celebrations. Just as celebrations have adapted, the way people shop for wedding wear also had to shift. David’s Bridal CEO Jim Marcum discusses how he’s navigating the future of the wedding business. That includes building an omnichannel experience to help brides shop from anywhere and industry trends to look out for in 2022.

How do CEOs determine focus areas and allocate budget to R&D initiatives? In this episode, Deborah Dunsire, four-time chief executive of public and private companies shares her experience. Dunsire has been the CEO of Lundbeck since 2018 — overseeing teams that discover new medicines in Copenhagen and California, as well as others who market and sell the company’s products around the world. Get her tips for innovators looking to improve their relationships with their CEOs.

How do Chief Strategy Officers balance the core business with new opportunities? And, what can teams do to build the right portfolio of activities? Megan Lyon, Chief Strategy Officer of Herman Miller, explains how she approaches crafting strategy for the furniture company. George White, Chief Innovation Officer of Cantina, also shares best practices for setting strategy.