Inside Outside Innovation

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 InsideOutside.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 give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with us on our second IO Live event is James Gill. James is the founder of GoSquared. Welcome to the show, James. James Gill: Hi, thanks for having me, Brian pleasure to be here. Looking forward to chatting. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you back on the show and regular listeners will know that we had a chat probably about a year ago when you were on the show. Talking about some of this no code stuff that was just popping up and that. And so, when we decided to go to a live event, I figured, Oh, I want to get James back in to talk about...a lot has happened in the last year or the last week. Exactly. Why don't you give the audience a little bit of background about your journey as a founder, a long time ago when you started GoSquared as a wee lad, as I like to say, and then we'll go from there.James Gill: Thanks again, Brian, for having me. It’s crazy times. Sure, we've got a lot to dig into. Just as a bit of background on me, I'm one of the founders of a company called GoSquared. We're a software as a service business. We perhaps haven't taken the traditional route of a software business. We started the business, back when I was in school with two of my friends back when we were just wee teenagers.So over 10 years ago, we'd been together running a company. We used to build websites together and stumbled into building software, and we really love it. And fast forward to today. Continue to be a self-sustaining profitable software business. We got thousands of small businesses that use our software all around the world. GoSquared as a platform is all about helping small businesses grow online. So, we help you with that full customer journey from acquiring leads at the top of the funnel through to engaging with them throughout their journey, and ultimately looking after them and keeping them happy as they continue to be customers of our customers.We really love running a business. It's been a wild ride. There's so much to get into, but myself I'm pretty much a self-confessed like product geek. I love design. Obviously, there's a lot we can dig into in terms of software. We use GoSquared, and the lessons we've had since becoming an entirely remote team and trying to keep things running smoothly.  Happy to take whatever questions people have.Brian Ardinger: Let's start there. You're in London right now? Talk a little bit about your team. And did you have an office? Were the people working remotely? How are you hanging in there? James Gill: First of all. Yeah, I think were hanging in there okay. Thanks, Brian. I hope you are too, in terms of how we operate. It's a weird one actually. When we were at school, we used to all work from home. We used to work from our family homes, you know, probably coding away in the early hours of the morning or in the night when we should have been doing homework, building things and working from home. And that was how we started building GoSquared back in the day.And then as time went on, we became more of a proper business and gradually we moved to London and then we sort of centralized there and that's kind of the way we'd been until literally like a month or two ago. And we always had a team in London that was always when we had face to face, lots of benefits of that. But last year, one of the team. Well, he moved up to Scotland with his partner and he really pushed us to think like how do we operate with everyone in one office and one person in Scotland. And so, it started making us rethink quite a few things around how we communicated, how we operated. As 2019 went on we found it was working really well. And then we made our first hire from the outset. There was a remote employee and we brought in someone who is based in Costa Rica of all places. By the end of last year, we already had two people full time, remote employees, and he really taught us a lot about how to communicate, how to make sure people are, hopefully not left out of the loop, how to prioritize sort of asynchronous communication because Costa Rica, you've got a time zone issues too.And so, we've kind of tried a lot of that stuff out and, but the rest of the team remained in the office. And then obviously with this all happening, as soon as things started getting serious, like we insisted on everyone working from home. We didn't want to take any risks. And, you know, all, any of us need really is a laptop to work from home. So as far as I'm concerned, as software businesses and SaaS businesses, like we are in no rush to get back to the office. Like we are very happy to be the last businesses returning to offices. The more we can stay out of public transport and mingling with the rest of the people. Like there's no urgency for us to be back. More than happy to chat more about like some of the stuff we've been doing more recently to make this work.It's been a whole lot of stuff from tooling. Like we use Slack for team chat, but we also obsessively use great a tool called Notion for like internal documentation. We obviously use GoSquared to understand and communicate with our customers. There's been a bunch of lessons from that and also just process things as well like how we engage with the team. Brian Ardinger: Let's talk a little bit about this no-code movement. You know, one of the things that how I found GoSquared is I'm not a technical cofounder, but I put a lot of stuff together and I cobble and hack together stuff. And I found GoSquared as a really easy way for me to take a lot of the marketing automation and specifically the chat robot. I put that onto my events and that, so I could have real time interactions with customers. So, talk about how you've seen the no-code movement come to bear. And how's that affecting your customer's ability to actually interact and do more stuff with their customers. James Gill:  I think it's an interesting one, I guess, adopting that term "no code" has made it a movement, but from my perspective, I've always viewed it as making stuff easier to do and use. And, and I think just fundamentally, like we're just continuously on this train towards enabling anyone to do what they need to do online and brew software. And so I think a lot of it could be replaced from like from code to no code to just stuff that was hard to do, that's now easy to do. From my perspective, I'm not a coder. I can tinkle around with HTML and CSS, but I'm all about design and how it looks, how it works. Whereas I've always been very fortunate to have co-founders that are now a team that can actually code and engineer and develop real hardcore software. It's always frustrated the hell out of me whenever I hit that block of like, not being able to do it, you know, if you need to write some Java script or whatever, and it makes engineers almost seemed like magi...

Sean Sheppard is the founder of GrowthX. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Sean discuss the impact of COVID on the startup and investment environment, Silicon Valley, and elsewhere, trends we're seeing in the world of no code, and ways that startups can generate revenue and adapt in this challenging environment. 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 InsideOutside.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 in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian 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 Sean Sheppard. He is the founder of GrowthX. And for long time listeners, you may have heard and met Sean before. He was actually on Episode 14, I believe, back in 2016 so welcome back, Sean. Sean Sheppard: Hey, thanks Brian. I had no idea. I was so early. Brian Ardinger: We're recording this in April, and this is our birthday week for inside Outside, and we're five years into this podcasting scene, so it's been kind of crazy, but it's been fun to do all these shows.Sean Sheppard: Thanks. I can't believe it's been five years since I came there to do that talk and sat in your studio. Right? Brian Ardinger: That's one of the reasons why I wanted to have you back on. Probably a lot has changed with GrowthX and we want to talk about that. Also want to talk about now that we're in the Corona virus disruption, I wanted to get your insights into what's going on in the Valley, what's going on in startups and get some feedback there. Maybe we start by telling the audience more about what GrowthX is and where you are in the scene. Sean Sheppard: We started about seven years ago as a group of serial entrepreneurs turned investors, turned frustrated investors, because our companies weren't succeeding, not because they couldn't build products, but because they didn't know how to build markets. And we set about trying to solve that problem for ourselves, and we built a proprietary framework for helping our companies find product market fit. It was exclusive only to the companies that we invested in, but it became quite successful and very popular. And so we started to share it with the rest of the world.And now we licensed that, and I spend most of my time when I'm not in quarantine, traveling the world, working with governments and companies and countries and incubators and accelerators, on how to incorporate product market fit thinking and programming and execution into their support systems for their startup communities.Brian Ardinger: Let's talk about how the world has changed in the last four, five, six weeks, specifically around what you're seeing in the startup scene. Even what you're seeing from corporate innovators that you work with. What's the general consensus of what's happening? Where the holes that we need to be plugging, that kind of stuff.Sean Sheppard: Obviously, it's an unprecedented and interesting time for anybody who's in our generation and certainly in our lives. I've been through many economic crashes. I go back to 87'. I remember that one. I remember the dot com boom and bust, 9/11 certainly, and then the 2008 crash. This one feels much more like the 9/11 experience.And by that, I mean it certainly does feel much more like war time, you know, we do have this enemy that we're, we're dealing with. Obviously, it's not one we can see, but it's there and I think it's going to change behaviors on a global scale. The degree to which those behaviors will change and the permanence of that change and when that change starts to normalize is yet to be determined.You can watch the news all day long. Watch people predict the future. But like a smart man once told me, if you want to know the relevance of the news, just watch seven-day old news, and you'll find out just how unimportant it is. But the point is that we don't know, but we don't know yet about that. I do believe that there is going to be some measure of behavioral change.Like the way we have security measures post 9/11 that aren't going away, and over time have been relaxed, but they're there to stay. I think we're going to have similar security measures, for our health, that will be here to stay, and then there will be certain things and behaviors that we will all change, whether it's less people shaking hands and hugging, which to me is very sad because I think the need to connect basic human need that we all want, need, and desire. I think just for our own physical and mental and spiritual health. But other things like working from home. The digital transformation that everybody has been talking about that's been coming for years and years and years. I think it's going to be dramatically accelerated. Brian Ardinger: Well, I think you're right. It's not that it wasn't seen or a lot of it wasn't seen disrupting education, disrupting healthcare, disrupting all these industries that we've talked about, but a lot of us, what we talked about in the past, it's focused on like the technology being that core driver. And I think the virus just expediated that conversation and forced a lot of those folks to change faster than they even were going to have to, given the circumstances going around. So, I'm not sure that necessarily we would have been facing these things in the future, just this virus has accelerated the impact. Sean Sheppard: Yeah. So, a big part of GrowthX family of companies is our corporate business, which works on helping corporations commercialize new innovations, bring great startup technology into their environments, invest in the startup community, things like that. And when I'm having conversations with our corporate community, and partners, they're all number one in triage mode right now. Period.  End of story. They're just trying to deal with the current situation.That's number one and number two is those that are starting to actually see some stabilization around that are starting to recognize that there is more productivity than they thought, in their distributed workforce, than they thought would be there. In fact, two of the world's largest banks. I have very good friends and partners in the community that are at the C suite. Have gone through this triage mode, are trying to manage the mindset and mental wellbeing of their workforce, while creating this distributed work from home environment. And they're seeing that productivity isn't waining. So now they're rethinking their whole footprint. Like, why do I need some super expensive tower in Manhattan or San Francisco or Chicago or London when most of the people that I'm talking to are out meeting with customers half the time. They're 50% travel anyway.Do I need all this space? What does that future look like for them? We're already seeing security concerns with Zoom. But they're having those conversations about, all right, now that we've sort of standardized at least sketch a patchwo...

Laurel Lau is the founder of the innovation consultancy Six Atlas and author of the book Interplay: How to become a top innovator. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Laurel about her experiences helping manufacturing companies innovate, the impact of the Corona virus on global supply chain, and what might actually happen after disruption going forward.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 InsideOutside.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. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. Today we have Laurel Lau. She is a founder of the innovation consultancy Six Atlas and author of the new book Interplay: How to become a top innovator. Welcome to the show. Laurel Lau: Thanks for having me Brian. Brian Ardinger: Hey. I'm excited to have you on the show. You are living in Lisbon right now. We are taping this March 22nd so Corona virus has locked everybody down. What brought you to Lisbon? What kind of work are you doing in the world of innovation there? Laurel Lau: I am helping a Chinese company with innovation program. They bring international brands into China and help them sell there. They've worked with P & G and Unilever back in the days, but I was helping them with building up the innovation program, so help them to become more systematic in it. Brian Ardinger: I wanted to have you on, because you've got a new book out called Interplay, and you're talk a lot about the culture of innovation and that. Let's start by telling the audience about the book. Laurel Lau: The book is a result of me having experienced startup, working in startup and also doing a lot of coaching for startup founders. As I've gone through my journey, I realized that the way that we approach collaboration, yes we've been taught how to make it into process, and make it a little bit more systematic, but at the same time, there's a huge communication aspect and relationship aspect that's been missing for me to see that people are using these skillsets to be able to develop sustainable solutions.Brian Ardinger: So what are some of the core skills that you think make an innovator more effective than others? Laurel Lau: Let's bring it back to like where we're at right now. Everyone is social distancing. Everyone is quarantining. The whole economy is collapsing at this point. How do we know how often these type of crisis will happen in the world? I think it's being able to have foresight of seeing what kind of dangers our world is heading into and having that larger perspective is really, really important. One aspect that I bring CEO's to be able to understand is to understand the daily nuance problems that people might be having, might be reflecting a larger issue, that if you use a right communication skills to get to the bottom of it, you'll be able to unravel it much easier.Brian Ardinger: Unpack that a little bit. Can you give a story or example about how somebody actually effectively does that?Laurel Lau: A lot of times when I head into a company and do consulting, first I'll do as a reality check and get a lot of interviews done. Read a lot of their reports. Go to a lot of their meetings, show out the factories and understand their product and the services that they provide. What happens during that time when I'm trying to understand more is being able to connect the dots. A lot of times during this part of reality check, people might be revealing half the story, 10% of the story, but as consultants going in asking more questions and seeing what we're seeing, there's a gradual development of a framework that connects the dots of the insights that's been developed. Being able to see that, is there an important, because that helps us see where the leadership and culture has been locked at. And so even though we're implementing new technology, new systems, why are they not working so that we bring it up to a level where we're collaborating at a greater speed and effectiveness. Brian Ardinger: Is it an innovation readiness assessment that you go in and try to determine the organization's adaptability? Laurel Lau: That is definitely part of it. In working and allowing people to fill in this form and give us all the information and go through the interview aspect also, we're are able to collect that information and be able to understand the industry problems as long as have the corporation problems. So many of these organizations on super complex and have complicated way of compensation and motivating their staff and to be able to sift through the noise and be able to hear truly where the next one or two steps organization need to make in the next three to five years is super important to be able to get that information. Because at the end of the day, the employees are collecting a lot of the right information. They are the eyes, ears of the company, and so they should be the ones who are reflecting what they want in a corporation to help the company to be a lot more competitive.Brian Ardinger: Where our company's falling down the most are the particular trends that you see or different activities that corporations do that inhibit innovation Laurel Lau: In every industry, it would be a little bit different. So I'm much more focused in companies that have the factory aspect of manufacturing. What Chinese companies in manufacturing had to adapt to is the digital strategies and also be able to strengthen their supply chain, which is super helpful last year to be able to help them be stronger in facing the crisis of COVID-19 this year. Brian Ardinger: That brings up an interesting point with regard to culture. You're living in Lisbon right now. You've worked with Chinese companies and you work with American companies. What are some of the cultural differences or different ways different companies or cultures approach innovation?Laurel Lau: And I think it's important to understand the local culture and the company culture itself. For one of the clients we had, which is a Chinese company, it's hard for you to change all the different aspects, but you know that the level of culture change that they're willing to make and that's comfortable for them, and that's right for them. So it's important to understand the local culture. And. What's important for their innovation itself. And so there are different types of innovation styles that's right for different innovation strategies. So to be able to understand what proportion of your company's innovation strategies are more radical or just incremental, the different levels of innovation that's required for the organization to succeed. It's important to understand what level it is and also what area they lie in. ...

Thomas Weddle is the author of Innovation As Usual and his new book What's Your Problem? Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Thomas talk about why starting with a problem is so important in innovation, what it means to solve the right problem, and the framework teams can use to make better decisions in the process. 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 InsideOutside.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, in collaborative innovation.Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today we have Thomas Wedell. He's the author of a couple of different books - Innovation As Usual and a new book coming out called, What's Your Problem: To solve your toughest problems, change the problems you solve. Welcome to the show, Thomas. Thomas Wedell: Thank you, Brian. Thanks for having me on. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show because you've been in this innovation space for quite some time, working all around the world with major companies. And you've got a framework that you've outlined in this new book that I think is interesting and can give some insight to our audience for how to tackle this problem of innovation. So, my first question is, let's start by telling the audience about your background, and then we can delve into the book a little bit more. Thomas Wedell: Background wise, I'm originally from Denmark. I've been abroad for maybe 14 years, try to launch a couple of startups that failed gloriously, and then I somehow got sidelined into this whole academic space that I'm in now. And my innovation work really started 10 years ago when I started working with an old professor of mine. And we started going into companies and looking at what actually worked when it came to making innovation happen in practice. And that led to my first book called Innovation As Usual, which came out think it's like seven years ago now with Harvard Business Press. And that was also what led to my current work on the book now. So, it was all quite accidental and getting sidelined into things and suddenly discovering, wait, there's something wrong about the way we do innovation or there's something wrong by the way, we do problem solving. I can't really claim to have a red thread of any kind in my career.Brian Ardinger: Well, I like the book and your framework around focusing on the problem because as I've worked a lot with startups and early stage ideas within corporations and that a lot of people start with the solution. They have an idea, they jump immediately to that solution side, and you're taking a different framework and say, okay, that's fine, but what you're doing is probably the wrong way to approach it. So, let's talk about the book and talk about the focus on the problem and why that's so important. Thomas Wedell: It came out of the realization that we are missing a tool in the area of problem framing. As many of your listeners, I'm sure you're familiar with, there's very often a need to go in for instance, if a client approaches you to go in and say, wait, does the client actually understand the problem they're trying to solve, before we go in and just build the solution we have in mind for them? That goes for startups as well of course, understanding their customer's problem.  And I realized that while this is like a thing that a lot of people, they have a feel for, and if you go to some design agencies or whatever, I mean, they have some remnants of a process. But I was kind of interested in seeing that there's just this, we lacked a general tool and a general framework for understanding and reframing problems.There wasn't really anything out there that I felt was both...did a good job. And also, crucially was capable of being widespread. Because I think some of the methods, we have already around this, they're very complicated.  They kind of require you to be an expert in the topic and you have to host a weeklong workshop to do it and so on. I wanted to fill the gap of creating a tool around this that could really be used by everybody. That's really what led me to write the new book, which is now called, What's Your Problem? We focus of course, on the art of solving the right problems. Brian Ardinger: So, let's give an example. I've seen some of your speeches and read some of your work and one of the examples that you talk about to give the audience an understanding of what you mean by reframing the problem. You talk about the slow elevator problems. Walk us through that particular example. Thomas Wedell: Imagine you are the owner of an office building that people are complaining about the speed of the elevator. Now you have a framed problem in front of you there that the elevator is too slow. And what most people do there is jump straight ahead and say, how do we make it faster? What people with reframing are good at is to go in and say, wait, is there a different way of looking at the problem? Is there another problem to solve? Which might the better for us rather than going out and buying a new elevator. The classic example here of course, is that building managers, what do they do when they hear of elevator complaints? They tend to try something else, namely to put up a mirror in the hallway and just a beautiful and quite memorable example of what reframing is and why it's sometimes important to go in and say, is there a different problem to solve for here than the one that's necessarily, you know, put in front of us to solve.Brian Ardinger: Yeah. I've heard a similar example in the airline industry where people were complaining about baggage claim and how long it took for the baggage to get there. And the airline changed it in such a way so it reframed the problem of how you got the bags and when you got them, the amount of time it took you to walk to get to the bag, so that you weren't standing there waiting as long.Thomas Wedell: Yeah. Beautiful. I saw one of my colleagues in this space, Stephen Shapiro. He has spoken a good deal about that example. That's a beautiful instance of it.  He's, by the way, he's out with a new book as well, called Invisible Solutions, which also looks at reframing, which I can strongly recommend. It's such a big issue, and I'm curious to hear, I mean, you have a ton of experience both with your own work, with innovation and with your client work and so on. What's your observation in this? Am I right? Is there a missing tool around this, or what's your experience through your work? Brian Ardinger: I think we see the same things. A lot of times the first thing I do when I start talking to clients or startups is around that idea of what are we really trying to solve for here? And are there different ways to look at the framework, the mindset almost, and it's almost around trying to figure out is there something more there than what meets the eye? And I find that the ones,  the entrepreneurs or the inside innovators...

Mark W. Johnson is the author of Lead From the Future and cofounder of the consulting firm Innosight.  Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, and Mark discuss how companies can better prepare for breakthrough growth and how leadership teams can use future back thinking to better understand the opportunities and threats in a world of constant disruption.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 in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Mark W. Johnson. Mark is the co-founder of Innosight, a growth strategy consulting company, which he co-founded with the late, great Clayton Christensen. Mark is the author of numerous books on innovation, including Reinvent your Business Model, Dual Transformation, and his new, forthcoming book called Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking into Breakthrough Growth. Welcome to the show, Mark.Mark W. Johnson: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm excited to have you on the show. You have been one of the forefront thinkers in this whole world of innovation and very prolific in your writing about it. So, I wanted to start there. Tell us a little bit about why you decided to write another book about innovation and what's different and what should people be expecting from it. Mark W. Johnson: Writing this book, I look at it almost as the culmination of the 20 years at this effort to help companies in disruptive innovation and transformation. The reason I felt absolutely critical to get this book out is that we can innovate as companies and you know, we can try to figure out how to innovate for new growth. That's really the definition of what we talk about when companies need to be more innovative. I think their core business is innovating all the time and they're improving. They're making efficiency improvements. They're continuing to do product development and so forth. They're innovating in the marketing function, but they're really striving for breakthrough growth. And what I found was a lot of these breakthrough growth efforts would have good ideas, get the right people behind them, but if you didn't have the right leadership, the strategy behind it, if you didn't have the right enterprise strategy, a long term view that was the basis behind the innovation efforts that in the long run or even in the short run, these more breakthrough innovation efforts just didn't keep the commitment of the individuals that owned the purse strings. Really, the book is an effort to tie vision and strategy to innovation and even further, think about what is it that leadership teams need to do together in the process of developing a vision and converting that to strategy in order to become more successful as in just overall top line growth. But in particular, driving these new and different innovation efforts and the book is an effort to integrate the thinking around leadership strategy and innovation, which I feel is so important, if you're going to create sustainability and success in helping companies innovate for the long term and own their future. Brian Ardinger: You talk a lot about how leaders in the organization really need to spend some time in the future, wrestling with the ramifications of what that looks like. I don't know if you can talk about examples of companies you've worked with. I know I've read your work and seen a lot about you, and one of the examples you've shared is around the work you've done with a big car manufacturer and how the process of future-back  thinking got them to realign with what they were doing.Mark W. Johnson: I'll start with that. We worked with the top leadership team of one of the three US-based OEM car manufacturers here in the US. The work there was to look out 10 years into the future and begin to think about what the environment was to be like. This company had been thinking, of course, Hey, we continue to design and develop and produce cars and trucks and other vehicles, but we also have this work around trying to tie into things like connectivity that has become much more of a trend. And how do cars become much more connected in, and of course, that's linked also to autonomous vehicle technology and artificial intelligence and all these kinds of things. And then that's tied also to new business models like Uber and Zipcar and Car To Go, and it's also tied perhaps biggest towards a technological potential disruption and change around electrification. Much more than just around the fringes. But what if electrification just took over and then you'd be talking about a whole rethinking of the industry since its really founded the whole supply chain and the whole structure is around the internal combustion engine.We work to help think about all of these critical trends, but we tied it most importantly to where is the customer going? What's the consumer, and what's going to be most important in the context of the circumstances of the future and begin to think about that environment. What can looking out 5 to 10 years out do? Well in this case, they just had a really strong point of view about battery technology and electrification and thought justifiably at least based on today, and kind of extrapolating forward, that their best path is to be a follower as to how cars and electric is going to work out, because there was just not any evidence that people would pay a premium currently to be in electric cars, regardless of the implications of global warming and so forth.That combined with for the anticipation that regulation would ultimately turn their hand that they would follow that path. But through the course of this discussion and really thinking more closely about technology trends and technology road mapping and what was happening around the world and the implication if they were not just behind but really behind, it completely opened their eyes and it created a whole different view about the future and the implications of electrification. In that, what we would call insight that came from looking out or that change point of view, led to a practicality that there was a complete change in their level of investment and breadth of effort, as it related to putting electric vehicles on the road sooner and not just cars, but trucks and thinking about vans and how that would work in cities and so forth. That was the power of doing this, was to be able to get those aha moments that would not otherwise come again and spend time in the future. Brian Ardinger: I'm curious of how you get management to carve off the time to focus on that transformation and not the traditional optimization stuff that they're doing and think into the future. Is it having them start with a blank slate and imagining things, or what's the process that companies really need to b...

On this week's episode, we sit down with Jeremy Blaylock, CEO and co-founder of Adalo. Adalo is the no-code tool that allows you to build functioning mobile apps. On our discussion, we talk about the whole no-code movement, what it takes to build a startup in St. Louis, and some of the trends that he's seeing in the world of mobile software development.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 InsideOutside.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, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Interview TranscriptBrian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest coming to us from St. Louis, Missouri is Jeremy Blaylock. Jeremy is the CEO and cofounder of Adalo. Welcome, Jeremy. Jeremy Blalock: Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: How are you doing? Jeremy Blalock: Hunkering down but got lots of groceries and ready to stay at home for awhile. Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Yes. For the audience out there that may not be familiar with you and Adalo, why don't we get them up to speed? As a lot of people know on this podcast, we talk a lot about some of the new innovations that are going on, and Adolfo, I think is one of those innovations in the no code space.  I wanted to bring you on to talk about that. Let's get started by telling us a little bit about what is Adalo. Jeremy Blalock: Adalo is, as we put it, the easiest way to build a mobile app without knowing how to code. You can build mobile and now actually web apps, apps that do things from being social networks or marketplaces, you know a variety of other types of things. Things like, there's an app that a university built that students use to check their grades for the classes. You can build those apps without knowing how to code, generally through our web editor and then publish them to the iOS and Android app stores. Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about your background and how you got started in this.Jeremy Blalock: I'm a software engineer by training. I started writing code when I was in middle school, you know, back in the mid two thousands. I built a lot of websites and a couple of mobile apps and just always kind of was interested in building things that you could watch and have people use. And it always fascinated me. Before I started Adalo, I went and worked at a couple of other companies. I started one startup that I was the head of product for, and then after that, I worked at a company called Synack that we've met along the way, and I led one of their engineering teams. And it was kind of through that process, that I saw that there was this whole evolution of prototyping tools, tools like Envision, Sigma, Framer, that let you build these extremely high fi prototypes that he looked and felt like real apps, but lacking any actual functionality. That was my inspiration to actually go and try to build something that felt like a prototyping tool and was still easy to use like that, but then lets you build a real app with real functionality, you could actually publish to real users.And so, I started working on Adalo in 2017. And really just started by, looking at what the prototyping tools were doing and taking those functionalities and then building on top of that. We launched to our first-ever users at the end of 2017. We then open up a beta and had a few more users come in and really walk them through the process, intensely with a lot of input from us. As we kept growing, we opened up signups and some are 2019 and then and in Fall we did our big launch and got a lot more people using the products. Now the numbers are 10 times what they were then, but it's been crazy to see that whole thing grow. Brian Ardinger:  Tell us a little bit about some of the types of projects that have been built on Adalo.Jeremy Blalock: I was looking at a really cool one today. It was a guy who built an app for his son to manage his personal finances. That was like, wow, I never thought this was a thing where he is the bank and his son is the client of the bank. There's a wide variety. Like I mentioned, there's been a couple of schools, universities and high schools. have apps where students can check their grades. That's a big category for some reason. Now there's a lot of two-sided marketplaces, things like the Etsy and eBay type of setups. There are a lot of apps in the personal wellness space. Things from psychological wellness to anything related to that. And then there was a lot of productivity apps within companies, so streamlining various workflows. That's what seems to happen within more of the companies.Brian Ardinger: I've seen some other startups that are using your platform as well Tovala comes to mind. The smart oven out of Chicago who provides meals and stuff through the platform. Let's talk a little bit about this whole no-code movement. What do you think is changing out there? What are the trends that you're seeing in the space? Jeremy Blalock: When I started working on this, there wasn't really the no-code movement there is today. There were definitely people working on this and thinking about these problems, but it really wasn't at the scale that it is now. There were tools like Bubble that had been around for a while, and I think we see as a competitor, but you know, we're friendly with them. We'd like to see everybody succeed. I think that what's really happened is that people started to embrace the idea that you don't need to have a technical cofounder or technical team to build a product and get your first users. And I think that's a big mindset shift that's happened since we started the company. Originally it was trying to convince people and now it's just trying to facilitate that. You know, obviously it's necessary for this to get big over time, is that people really embrace this. But it happened first with websites, with Squarespace and WordPress. They became the de facto way of making your startup's website. Tools like Webflow, FirstStudy and Further, but I think now that's starting to happen also with apps. You don't necessarily need to hire an engineer. You can just do it yourself. And then test and iterate.Brian Ardinger:  You're a developer by trade. There's a lot of controversy in the no-code low code. When do you need developers? When don't you, and that? You're building tools to specifically solve that problem of a nontechnical co-founder, spinning some things up. What are some of the objections or things that you've seen that why you should go no code versus hiring your own development team? What are some of the things that you've seen in that space?Jeremy Blalock: One thing we're really trying to do is make it possible to leverage code when you need to. One thing that we're working on right now, that's the big focus is our component marketplace. So that will let people build, react and react native components that plug into our platform as plugin and ...

Arlan Hamilton is the founder of Backstage Capital, and author of the new book, It's About Damn Time. This episode was recorded live as part of our IO live event series. 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 InsideOutside.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, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Brian Ardinger: Hey, Arlan. How are you? Arlan Hamilton: Oh yeah. I've only been using Zoom a million times a day. Brian Ardinger: Thanks for coming on the show here. Arlan Hamilton: Yeah, thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: How are you handling the quarantine? Everything going well, relatively speaking?Arlan Hamilton: Not everything, but you know, it's the day-to-day that everybody's saying. It's very true. It's getting me by. I feel pretty optimistic even though there's some incredible things going on right now. Brian Ardinger: Let's get started. With me we have Arlan Hamilton.  She's the founder of Backstage Capital and author of the new book called it's About Damn Time. I am so excited to have you on the show. The question I wanted to start with is last week at this time, you're talking to Mark Cuban and a week later you're talking to us here in the middle of the country in Lincoln, Nebraska, and some other places.  What is your impression of the world that's been disrupted? How do you see the world changing and how is that affecting yourself and your portfolio companies that you're working with? Arlan Hamilton: It's something we've never seen before, and I think a lot of people are, are trying to figure it out. I think a lot of people are giving out some advice and trying to have it all figured it out. And I don't know if we will yet. You know, I think we're still in it. I think we're still dealing with the trauma of it, even though a lot of us don't even realize that's what this is. And so I think for me it's a slow and steady. It truly is a day-to-day. And personally, I feel at my best being a bridge to communication or connecting people, and that's why I'm having so many conversations with people around the world during this time just to kind of keep my sanity and keep me feeling like I'm useful. Brian Ardinger: I totally understand that. And I'd imagine for a person like yourself who is probably on the road a lot, I know you've been out in the marketplace, not only meeting with startups, but also talking about what it's like out there in the real world. It's probably more challenging to do that from a remote location, but we're all on the same boat. You've got a new book coming out fairly shortly. It's called, It's About Damn Time. Can you give the audience a little bit of background on what the book's about and some of the key stories or benefits that you hope people get from reading it?Arlan Hamilton: Yeah. It's about Damn Time: How to Turn Being Underestimated into your Greatest Advantage. I wrote it because I get hundreds and hundreds of inbound messages per day across multi-platforms. The number one thing I'm asked is, will you invest in my company or my idea? The second most frequently asked question is, will you be my mentor? And that doesn't scale very well. But the way that it can scale is by writing this book and all of the things that I try to do on a daily basis online with all the resources that we give. The book is my way of giving to someone, and I always try to imagine the person, right. Believe in myself in some cases, but given the person that may need it, the same thing that I received when I picked up Brad Feld's book, for instance. Venture Deals 101 in 2013 or so, and all of these books that I've read along the way in my journey from going from broke and homeless on food stamps to raising more than $10 million and investing in more than a hundred companies. There's so much in that journey and packed into the last five years that I think is relatable, believe it or not, relatable to a lot of people, because I've had all kinds of jobs and all kinds of obstacles, and it's a relatable story.It's that, and it's also the fact that when I was looking for these types of resources. They were mostly from white men in the business sections of these bookstores at the airport.  And the information was fantastic, and the people were fantastic, and I even know Brad now, which is such a wonderful journey. But it's the same thing that drove me and still drives me to invest in underrepresented founders, is there should be better representation in business books that are written for multiple people and profiles, but by a black woman. Brian Ardinger: Tell us a little bit about that journey. I know a lot of folks are familiar with your story. Tell us a little bit about, it really has been an amazing five years. I don't know if you remember, but you and I actually met via Twitter probably about four or five years ago when we were spinning up the IO Summit, which was our first event. It's been going three years. Arlan Hamilton: I do remember, yes.Brian Ardinger: And you pinged me, making sure that I had representation as far as audience and speakers, and you've got me connected with a couple of your portfolio companies to bring into the show.Arlan Hamilton: I remember where I was sitting when that happened. That's so crazy. Brian Ardinger: What I found so interesting about that. You weren't popular or big or you hadn't been on Fast Company at the time, but you reached out and you were living what you talk about now, like being engaged in the community, helping your portfolio companies and fighting the good fight. That always impressed me about you, that you were out there telling the stories and making things happen. Even at the very early stages. Why don't you tell the audience about what that journey has been like over the past five years? Going from quote nothing to being on the cover of Fast Company being at South by Southwest, all these kinds of things people aspire to, that most people don't have a chance to do.Arlan Hamilton: It's funny because as many stories as I tell in the book, I haven't gotten to all of them. There are many that have happened in the last, and that you just reminded me of one. In 2015, in March, which is like five years back. Right. I slept in a car with my mom, who was in her sixties at the time, so that I could attend the fringes of South by Southwest. Right. And nobody knew it. But that's what I did. And it was not, because you know, to be kind of cool, it was with my mom. We didn't have a place to live, but I want it to be there and try to meet people to raise the fund. And this year, if it had gone on as planned, I would have spoken seven times in keynote positions. It's just so intense to think about that. And then the Fast Company, I was on the cover of Fast Company, which is still crazy to say, the October, 2018 issue, I was a first non-celebrity black woman to be on it, and Oprah, Serena Williams, and Beyonce had been on it before as black...

Alex Goryachev is the managing director of Cisco's Global Co-Innovation Centers and author of the new book Fearless Innovation. Alex and Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder talk about a variety of innovation initiatives going on at Cisco. We talk about the power of the individual innovator to drive corporate change and the many benefits of creating a strong ecosystem of partners outside your organization. Before we start this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that we recorded a number of interviews before the Corona virus disruption started. Wanted to give some context before we jump into some of these shows. Thank you very much for listening. Being part of the Inside Outside innovation community.  We look forward to talking more about the disruption of the Corona virus and other things. Stay safe, be well. 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 InsideOutside.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 in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. 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 we have Alex Goryachev. Alex is the managing director of Cisco's Global Co-Innovation Centers and author of a new book called Fearless Innovation: Going beyond the buzzword to continuously drive growth, improve your bottom line, and enact change. Welcome Alex to the show. Alex Goryachev: Thanks for having me. I'm really excited about being here today. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. Cisco's one of those companies that you hear over and over again about the types of things that they're doing when it comes to innovation. Let's talk a little bit about what's your role at Cisco and what are some of the amazing things that you're doing when it comes to the world of innovation? Alex Goryachev: When I think about Cisco, you are absolutely right. There's a reason why we are world's best workplace. To me, it comes down to the fact that we have so many innovators in the company. I'm a bit of a matchmaker, I think internally, trying to ensure that our innovators know each other and they're able to connect them, bring their ideas to life. We do have about 74,000 employees in the company, and I would say, each one of them is an innovator. And when we connect, the magic happens. So that's on the employee side. And then connecting to the outside world is another priority of mine. And we have a number of co-innovation centers around the world. Getting our employees and our teams plugged in and working together with universities and other ecosystem partners is another part of my role. Brian Ardinger:  Let's talk a little bit about what Cisco's co-innovation center is. We hear a lot about hackathons. We hear a lot about corporations that are trying to do startup corporate matchmaking and that, what makes your program different? And tell us a little bit about the co-innovation centers. Alex Goryachev: When we think about going innovation centers, they exist in different parts of the world. For example, we have centers in Tokyo, we have them in Australia, we have them in London. When we think about that flavor, that flavor changes depending on the geography. Because what we do well in one country is not necessarily what the need is in another one.  I think what's really important and what is the common thing is our ability to listen to our ecosystem and then figuring out joint solutions. And when I say solutions, I use the term broadly, right. It could be a joint research with the university, could be an internship program, could be a way for us to partner with a local startup, but it's all about let's stay connected with others and let's move the technology or business models forward by working together. We'll look at this as a win-win for everyone who is participating. Brian Ardinger: Was there a standard way to engage with these partners? Do you have particular quarterly or monthly get togethers, how do you go about finding the right partners and then working with them. Alex Goryachev: That's an exceptional question. And again, it all depends where we are locally. For example, in Australia, we are right on the university campus. We are right in the middle of innovation, and we're right in the middle of staying connected with a lot of the startups that come from university or students themselves. Right. And then in many other countries, we've been a very active player in the local startup ecosystem for many years. We obviously know our solution partners as well. We tend to be the partner of choice for them to connect with. The one interesting fact, we do encourage our employees to volunteer and gets engaged with the ecosystem as well. Some of those connections, they just happen organically and that's what the magic of it is.Brian Ardinger: Well, I love that part about it. I've read a lot about yourself and what you do at Cisco and that, and I think we have the same feeling that corporate innovation is great, but at the end of the day, it's about individuals that are innovators within that organization that really make it or break it.  What are you seeing when it comes to what makes a great innovator within a company to actually drive change and innovation?Alex Goryachev: I think it's someone who wants to win together, because at the end of the day is the lonely innovator is a myth, right.  When we think about companies, especially large companies, there's just so much knowledge in the organization and obviously there are great opportunities for scale, but what often happens is people are just not connected, and it's not because they don't want to, but because there's so many things to do. Look, the larger organizations tend to be siloed just simply because they're large. When people look at a cut across functional approach, when they want to win together and get others on board, I think that's when magic happens. If I think about innovation leader and people that are really making a difference, they're the people that are out there connecting their teams with other teams across the company and seeing what the win could be.Brian Ardinger: From a practical perspective, it probably it didn't start out that way where you're thinking from a perspective that everybody within Cisco's an innovator. What are some of the grassroots things that you did to start that ball rolling or get people engaged in this process? Alex Goryachev: It did start that way in terms of...there are tons of good innovation programs around Cisco, but what happened is they were typically very much function based. Their work was programs for engineering or IT or other functions, but they typically focus on the scope of the organization, as well as what should happen. Then what we did is we took a very cross functional approach. It happened organically because for a number of years I've been running startup competitions for Cisco and the way we go and engage with the outside world, and every year there would be employee or two ...

Hey listeners, before we start this week's episode, I wanted to let you know that we recorded a number of interviews before the Corona virus disruptions started, wanting to give some context before we jump into some of these shows. Thank you very much for listening, being part of the Inside Outside Innovation community, we look forward to talking more about the disruption of the Corona virus and other things. On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stefan Thomke.  Stefan is a Harvard professor and author of the new book Experimentation Works:  The Surprising Power of Business Experiments. We talk about why experimentation matters, how to overcome the fear of failure and some of the latest trends that are driving companies to include a rigorous experimentation process into their business. 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 InsideOutside.IO, a provider of research events and consultant 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. 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 Stefan Thomke. He is a Harvard professor and author of a new book that just came out called Experimentation Works: The Surprising Power of Business Experiments. Welcome to the show. Stefan Thomke: Thanks Brian.Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show because obviously in this corporate innovation space and even in the startup innovation space. Experimentation has gotten a lot more buzz as people try to understand how to navigate the world of uncertainty. I wanted to start the conversation by talking a little bit about why is experimentation so important.Stefan Thomke: Brian, I mean that's a great question, and in fact, it's the uncertainty that makes experimentation so valuable. If you think about uncertainty, you can think about different types of uncertainties that companies face every single day. At one level there's R & D uncertainty. You know, I've had the pleasure of working with lots of R & D organizations over the years. I've been at this for more than 25 years. And there the question is, it could be a product, a service, or a new customer experience, does it work as intended? Another set of uncertainties is what I call scale up uncertainty. If I'm sitting on a scale upside where I have to scale up the service or scale of production, I worry about a different set of questions. I worry about whether something can be effectively made or scaled up.  You know, worry about can it be done at high quality, low cost, large volume, and so forth. And if I'm customer facing, I worry about yet another set of questions. And that is, does anybody want it? If they say they want it, do they really mean it and are they willing to pay for it. And then finally, if I'm running a business unit, of course, I need to make an investment decision, and the question here or the uncertainty here is the opportunity big enough? Does it justify the resource investment? And the problem, of course here is that the tools that we have, like, you know, calculating an ROI on net present value and also all these kinds of wonderful tools, they start breaking down, when you're dealing with a lot of uncertainty, when something is really novel, you know, how do you put a net present value on something that doesn't exist yet?  And so these are the sets of uncertainties that we face every single day.  My argument is that experimentation is really the best way to address it because it gives me information about cause and effect, which a lot of the other ways of approaching this problem don't do.Brian Ardinger: Experimentation...A lot of people think about it as the scientific method and get scared from it. A lot of folks in business world are not necessarily scientists and that, talk a little bit about what are the major barriers to business folks understanding what experimentation means and then how to adapt that. Stefan Thomke: That makes sense to do a quick detour and ask ourselves, what do we really mean by experiments? And let me tell you what I don't mean often when people talk about experiments, what they're really saying is, I've tried something. It's often the way you use it in the English language or in companies what I've always run into is we've tried something, and it didn't work and therefore it must've been an experiment. Right? That's not really what I mean. I mean, a much more disciplined approach, like the scientific method, which by the way was essentially conceived 400 years ago, almost exactly 400 years ago in 1620 by Francis Bacon when he wrote the book Novum Organum, which was a new instrument for building an organizing knowledge. Now, it was done for science back then, but my argument, it's the same thing for knowledge about management and knowledge about behaviors and so forth. The experiment is at the heart of actually finding or building this new knowledge and organizing knowledge. Now, what is an experiment? Let me give you the gold standard. And then we can work from there. In an ideal experiment, you've got to test. And what you want to do in an ideal experiment is you want to separate what we call independent variables. This is the presumed cost, and it's something that you're trying to change from a dependent variable, which is the observed effect, while holding everything else, all the other potential changes constant. Here's an example, so imagine you've got a sales force. And you're coming in and you want to give them a bonus. The independent variable is the bonus. And the dependent variable, the observed effect, would be a lift in sales, for example. And what I want to do is I want to understand whether one causes the other to happen, so causality again. Without having the experiment polluted by a lot of other things that are changing. For example, you know, whether the salesperson doesn't appeal well that day or so on and so on.  So that's really the gold standard that we're after, and in a real-world experiment as opposed to science where I can create a laboratory where I can control a lot of these other things. We randomly distribute all the other things that could influence the experiments evenly across the people that we're testing on. And we want to do is of course blind, so we don't know who we're experimenting on and they don't know that extra, they're being experiment on. But ff course, in the real world, there are some limitations in terms of what we can and cannot do. The hypothesis, of course, is at the heart of this, and your listeners may remember that the scientific method maybe from high school science days.Brian Ardinger: Talk a little bit about how companies can start both identifying what to experiment on and the process to begin putting that into their culture. Stefan Thomke: The process of beginning putting that into their culture begins with an awareness that experimentation matters. That this is really important for the reasons that we just discussed. You know, the uncertainty. Once you're aware and you understand sort ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kaihan Krippendorff. He's the founder and CEO of Outthinker and author of a new book called Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs.  Kaihan and I talk about how companies are embracing internal entrepreneurship and some of the barriers, skills, and motivations needed to foster innovation within your organization. Let's get started. 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 for the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Kaihan Krippendorff   He is the founder and CEO of Outthinker and best-selling author of a new book called Driving Innovation from Within: A Guide for Internal Entrepreneurs. Welcome Kaihan to the show. Kaihan Krippendorff: Thank you for having me. Great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Had a chance to take a look at the book. It's near and dear to my heart, it’s a lot of stuff that we talk about on the show and we do in real life. I wanted to start by asking, what made you decide that you wanted to write a book about internal innovation? Kaihan Krippendorff: I have spent most of the last 15 years helping people inside companies generate ideas through methodology, like a ideation, design, creative thinking methodology, and often when you generate an idea from inside, that goes nowhere, right?  Once the bureaucracy and all that stuff, then a couple of my clients started actually driving these innovations through, and so I said, Hey, you know, is this an abnormality or can it be done? I started researching it and I found that actually the majority of society's most transformative innovations were conceived of by employees innovating from within. And so that just captured my attention. I want to understand that if that's really an important task.Brian Ardinger: What makes innovation so hard for corporations to get a grasp on and why do you not hear more success stories coming out of it? Kaihan Krippendorff: The second question is really the big one. That is difficult, but being an entrepreneur is difficult, right? The failure rate tie is a lot of work and eating ramen noodles and all of that, so it's not that it's easier and it’s just difficult in both cases. But I think that the reason that we don't hear as many stories of internal innovators is that it's not an easy story to tell. It's not the person who went to college gets an idea and goes to the West coast and goes into a garage. We love that Elon Musk, love that Bill Gates, love that Michael Dell story. Its that hero's journey that we like to tell and the story, the internal innovators, its more complicated. Brian Ardinger: It makes sense also from the standpoint of it's not typical for corporations to necessarily want to air their dirty laundry or the 10 times that it didn't work before the time that it did work. I think there's probably a little risk from that perspective. Let's talk a little bit about the logistics. In a big corporation, oftentimes you're working on your existing business model, and that. And all your resources, all your people, all your metrics and that are driven around maximizing and making that existing business model go. What's some of the key things that you've learned about how you can actually innovate within the company, change that mindset or move things forward differently? Kaihan Krippendorff: There are a whole bunch of things like summarize into seven, but if I were to summarize them all, the one thing, it is to think of yourself. If you're innovating from within as pushing a B to B to C innovation. In other words, seeing your company as a customer and not being frustrated when your customer rejects your innovation, but just as you would as an entrepreneur, you know that customer centricity that you talk about that customer centric design. See the business as a customer? Try to understand what is it about this innovation that they are not thrilled about and then re-engineer the innovation. Brian Ardinger: Do you see B to C types of companies being more innovative because they have maybe more of that direct customer feedback and focus, I suppose, compared to B to B companies out there. Is this happening across different industries and that.Kaihan Krippendorff: Definitely it’s happening across industries. I looked at 367 companies that have appeared on most innovative lists in the last five years. And I looked at which one of these innovators are really outperforming their competition. And I found that there are only 13 that do. Yeah. Most of them are actually B to B companies, MasterCard, Alibaba. Amazon is a B to C company, but they're very much a B to B company like on a platform. So definitely your point of having that customer centric view, having the voice of the customer there and really ensuring that employees are in touch with the customer and market. That is it. A very important factor.Brian Ardinger: You've been in this space for a while. You've both consulting and working directly with corporations in this. What has changed over the years that's made it easier or more willing for companies to take an innovative approach to changing the way they do business? Kaihan Krippendorff: Two things. One is removing from a focus on competition. In the 1980s you have Michael Porter. We shifted towards a focus on the customer with Amazon and all the client-customer orientation that they inspire. I think were shifting now towards a focus on the employee, and increasingly we see successful companies saying, really the employees are customers. What we are is a platform that helps create great work for employees. Starbucks, for example, they view their primary customer as the employee that's working in the store. And so there is this paradigm shift and that's driven in part by the pace of change. It's accelerating and by the time new signals make it up to the top of the hierarchy a decision is made and it gets pushed back down, it takes too long. Companies are really recognizing that the key to surviving this fast paced, agile, digital world is to push innovation outward to employees and liberate them to innovate.Brian Ardinger: We've seen this rise of startups and the rise of brand-new companies that are using some of the same methodologies now that are now being deployed and used within organizations. What are some of the core differences between startups and corporates and how they're using these methodologies?Kaihan Krippendorff: Did you see a lot of these agile and business model canvasing methodologies being adopted inside large corporations, and these are strategic tools and concepts that corporations have been slower to adapt. For example, if you use the business model canvas, which many entrepreneurs are well familiar with, but I've found that executives in established companies are l...