Inside Outside Innovation

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...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Sonja Gittens Ottley.  She's head of diversity and inclusion at Asana, one of the best work management platforms out there.  Recently, Asana has been highlighted in Fortune as the number one best small and medium-sized company to work for in San Francisco. And Sonja and I talk about diversity inclusion within Asana, how they hire, and some of the trends that she's seeing in the world of technology. 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 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, we have another amazing guest. Today with me is Sonja Gittens Ottley, she is the head of diversity and inclusion at the company Asana.  Welcome to the show Sonja. Sonja Gittens Ottley: Thank you so much, Brian. Brian Ardinger: I'm super glad to have you on the show. You're coming from a company called Asana. If you're involved in the startup world, and have seen the growth of what you're doing, it's pretty amazing. It's a work management platform that helps teams collaborate. Asana was highlighted in Fortune as the number one best small and medium-sized company to work for in San Francisco. That's no small feat, so congratulations on that.  Sonja, let's talk a little bit about Asana and what you do at that company. Sonja Gittens Ottley: Sure. I've been at Asana for four years. And during that time we've grown from a company just about 150 when I started, to over 700 people across many different countries. And one of the things that really drew me to Asana and has really made me stay at Asana is we've consistently, and from the start, been really intentional about diversity and inclusion. Approaching it in the way that we would any other business strategy. We recognize it as something that not only is the right thing to do, but it's also something that brings value to our business and to our workplace. Meaning our teams, our employees, everyone. We're really focused on creating an inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive.If you do that, and if you are approaching diversity and inclusion as an aspect of your culture, you're not only able to recruit top-quality employees who come from a variety of backgrounds, you're really ultimately able to retain your employees. That is one of the things that we've always been focused on, and it's something that as we continue to grow, we've really scaled in a way that makes sense for us as a company.Brian Ardinger: It sounds like Asana has had that DNA or that desire from the beginning. How does a company, that it's leadership is maybe looking at this as a way to improve theirselves? How can they start that process of making diversity and inclusion a more impactful part of the business. Sonja Gittens Ottley: Part of it is really recognizing that culture and having a culture that is inclusive, ultimately benefits your company. If you think of culture as just something that's add on or something that just happens. As you build your business, you're not going to be doing this well. If you think about culture in a different way, which is that it allows you to achieve what you're trying to do as a business, your missions and your goals, and you recognize I need to have values that support that mission and that goal. How I want my company and my employees to show up and I think about values in a really intentional way. I don't think about values as something that, hmm, it might be nice to have this as a value. It's also being really intentional about what are the things that we absolutely are going to value as a company.Then you're able to think about, well, what are the programs and policies that need to be in place to support that? And some of it are really foundational. Thinking about having a policy that creates an inclusive workplace means that you have an anti-harassment  policy. You're thinking about the fact that you could have people of many different agendas, so you need to think about a parental leave policy. You need to be thinking about policies that support all of the work that you're doing and the environment that you're trying to create. And also give signals to your employees, these are things that we stand for as well as these are things that we will not stand for right. So part of it is having that culture built in and having policies that flow from that.Alongside that is really thinking about how are you training your managers who in addition to trying to figure out how they're having impact and making their teams grow, how are you training them to build and to empower inclusive teams? How will you give them skills that they probably have not picked up before? Managers do not come...As soon as they get appointed manager, they do not then magically get a set of skills. They have to be trained. So you have to really empower them to do that work well. And then alongside that is this piece around how are you essentially hiring and building a diverse team? How are you thinking about recruiting? How are you assessing people? How are you interviewing people and what are the policies in place that really look at creating a fair and level playing field? So thinking about it. Alongside the lines of not just recruiting and not just culture and not just policies, but really thinking about it along a really integrated model is ultimately how a company begins to have diversity and inclusion become a core part of their company and their company's DNA.Brian Ardinger: How can a company get started? Is it first taking a level stock of the diversity that they have within the organization already? Does it start with hiring? Does it start at upper management defining those values in that? What are some of the starting places that companies can look at to start building this?Sonja Gittens Ottley: It's really a combination of all of those things. To me, it's a Yes and. First off, what does our company even look like? Who's here? Who are the people that exist in our neighborhood, essentially? So it's really taking a stock of what are our numbers. What's our demographics? Some companies have done this through a survey of employees at Asana we did it through our HRIS where people could self-report how they identified, and we gave them a lot of different ways that they can identify in terms of race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic background, citizenship, a number of different ways, and they self report to that information. That's one aspect of it. So you get a sense of who exists. But the other, and just as important part is really understanding, well how do you feel. Do you feel as though you belong? Do you feel as though you have a voice? Do you have a sense of psychological safety. That gets into what's our baseline at our company around that sense of belonging and inclusion?Those two bits of data really allow you to understand both qualitatively as well as quantitatively, where you are as a company and then decide, well, what are the next steps. The...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alexander Fleiss. Alex is the founder of Rebellion Research, which is a research advisory firm, and also an artificial intelligence expert and robotrader. Alexander and I talk about the Corona virus and its impact on the market, how artificial intelligent traders are faring in this, and some of the differences between what's going on in Europe, China, and the United States when it comes to artificial intelligence. 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 with me today is Alexander Fleiss. He is the founder of Rebellion Research. Welcome to the show. Alexander Fleiss: Thank you so much, Brian, pleasure for having me on. Brian Ardinger: Hey, Alex, I am excited to have you on. For those who may not be familiar with Rebellion Research, why don't you tell us a little bit about the AI platform that you've got built.Alexander Fleiss: RebellonResearch.com offers managed brokerage accounts in 40 plus countries. Whether it's a small $5,000 account or a gigantic pension fund, we deal with everybody, every type of institution out there. We also are a think tank, I teach at a number of schools, constantly working on artificial intelligence and applying artificial intelligence to our strategy and the movement of the economy. We publish research on AI, machine learning, automation.  We've published a lot on the Corona virus, and in January we actually had 100,000 readers. We tried to just be all things AI. We develop AI and we write about AI. It's definitely my life's passion. Brian Ardinger: We are recording this on March 20th as most folks know, markets are down 30%.  I thought it would be interesting to have a conversation with you to not only talk about the markets, but some of the things that you're seeing when it comes to... This trend of AI has permeated the financial services market. You have all these new robotraders or things along those lines, different ways to try to take a look at data and manage it. What are you seeing out there when it comes to trends around this? Alexander Fleiss: Everybody is rushing to get all the data they possibly can to be as first as possible in understanding where the economy is going and where the markets are going. Clearly, we just experienced a terrible market crash. The American mid cap index is down 40% as of yesterday. So everybody loves to throw out the S and P, which is Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Google, but the other 2000 stocks that are, the overall U S markets, those are down 42% you know, we've had a significant crash. We've never had a virus related sell off. In the last 30-40-50-60 years. I can't think of even the last time, I'd probably guess 1918-1919 Spanish flu, last time the markets got hit. Everyone pointed to H1N1 / Swine flu and when this came out, nobody thought much of it.  Seemed like a Chinese thing or some type of bad soup disease. Turned out to be a bad virus because the city of Wuhan was not locked down. Brian Ardinger: These black Swan events, we can't always predict, and that's why they're black swans. From the perspective of artificial intelligence, were there any signals or how did the artificial intelligent robotraders react to something like this versus what you've traditionally seen in the marketplaces?Alexander Fleiss: Bridgewater apparently got annihilated down between 5%-10% for their various funds, and they are a no exposure hedge fund. Rebellion research, we have a multi-asset strategy, and we have an equity index. The equity index has done better than the market. We're an economic based system, and so we feel that during times of recession...But so far the U S economy is still very strong. Most of the economies, employee default rates are low, people have money, can pay for things, and also the risk-free rate is very low. When you have a 0% money, it's hard for risk to not start to bubble up again. And Covid-19 is obviously a great excuse to make money very cheap, not an excuse. It's what they should do. They're doing all the right things. The great depression happened because we made money expensive, and the federal reserve made a huge error, and they stymied the financial supply. Brian Ardinger: From a technology perspective, did you see anything different versus the way we traditionally look at markets and that?  Does AI give us any insight into are these technologies getting better, worse. It is what it is an in an environment where nothing can be predicted.  Alexander Fleiss: Our AI is getting better. Our AI has been learning. Our AI makes like 11,000 predictions a day. Stock market when 80%-90% of managed funds lose. The house always wins, and so we never have too much conviction in one stock if it's really done through the aggregate.  But…Well, I'll tell you, it's become a very tough environment where you have a lot of fear, but the fact is, you know, the economy is strong, so we should have a gigantic rebound. The stock market should soar, and you know, things should get a lot better. But in terms of seeing this ahead of time, no, there's only so much.I mean AI and machine learning is a lot like Dustin Hoffman from the movie Rain man. It's great at counting toothpicks, it's great at counting cards, but it really can't do a whole lot else.  It's got no social cognition. It's got no idea really what's going on. It's great at its specific tasks, but you move it from the task just one or two degrees and it's useless. Right? So what we have at rebellion research is an economic forecaster, and so we're really good at calling the economy, and that's what we first got pressed for in 08' and it was the financial crisis, and then in 2010 was the Greek debt crisis. Those were economic situations. This is not an economic situation. This is a classic black swan. It's not like looking for gold or smelling for gunpowder. What is there to smell for, that a weird virus strain will spread to the U S and infect tens of thousands of people. It's truly the manifestation of a black swan, and it's interesting, obviously it's no fun now, but I mean very educational.Brian Ardinger:  Let's talk a little bit about some of the trends that you're seeing in different markets, U.S. Versus China. Not necessarily even from a financial market perspective, but when it comes to technology and who's winning, who's losing, what are some of the trends that you're seeing out there? Alexander Fleiss: I think that's a great question. And a really awesome topic because as a teacher in AI, I have to admit that by far most of my students are Chinese. The native Chinese-born Chinese speakers. Because for whatever reason, AI intrigues China and the Chinese people more than any other country. I don't know why. It is the fact that t...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder,  sits down with Zainab Ghadiyali. Zainab is a product lead at Airbnb. She used to work at Facebook, and she's the co-founder of Wogrammer, a nonprofit showcasing amazing women in technology. We talk about the power of curiosity and persistence in building a career in today's environment of change.  We talk about Zainab's journey from coming to America with $107 in her pocket, to working some of the best and biggest tech companies in the world. And we talk about the power of finding mentors, telling diverse stories and the new trends that you're seeing in the world of technology. Let's get started.For a full transcript, check out insideoutside.io.Interview TranscriptInside 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. 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 Zainab Ghadiyali.  She is an amazing woman who came out to our IO Summit. She works at Airbnb currently, but has had an extraordinary career and we're excited to have her on the show.  Welcome. Zainab Ghadiyali: Hi.Thanks Brian. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you back on the show. You were one of the first persons I thought of to bring out to the IO summit last year. I saw a blog posts written by First Round Capital.  It was basically an interview with you talking about curiosity and the secrets of designing a curiosity-driven career. And after I read that and got in touch with you, I said I had got to have her at the show. You've had a pretty amazing career. You came to America with about a hundred bucks in your pocket and have managed to work at great places like Facebook and now Airbnb. You started great programs like Wogrammer. Why don't we talk through what it's like to come to America and kickstart a career? Coming to America and Kickstarting a CareerZainab Ghadiyali: Yeah, absolutely. You know, one thing that I talk about a lot is the importance of ignorance. For me, for example, I had no idea what living in U.S. Would be like. Of course, I was familiar to some extent, based on media outlets and looking at life, watching Friends or Seinfeld or like, you know, some of the more famous American sitcoms. I'm like, that's America. Cool. Once I landed here in a small town in South Carolina, obviously a very different world, but I could not have been more excited. For me, it was just such an adventure. I had no idea about how anything would be.  No expectations, which meant it would be hard to get let down. On hindsight, had someone told me about the challenges of like, Hey, a hundred bucks doesn't go a long way, which in India, that's a lot of money. So for me, that was like, Oh yeah, that's like one month expenses, and then I'll figure it out. Had someone like told me about that and some of the other challenges along the way, I would have probably been apprehensive about, oh my gosh, there is no way I can do this right. When someone tells you this and they're well, meaning, but when you learn about these challenges, about like how they find it hard or they could not do it, you start telling yourself that story, that you can also not do it, or you start validating and saying yes. Brian Ardinger: And you have managed to build a career in technology. Maybe tell the audience about how you even got involved in your first hack-a-thon. Finding a Path to FacebookZainab Ghadiyali: When I thought about my career. I honestly didn't know what I wanted to do, like what role I wanted to do. I knew that I'm someone who is very curious. I like to learn about new things. Like I'll read anything, even like I'll sit and read like something on a cereal box. I'm constantly reading, and I know I'm like very curious. I knew that as long as I was learning new things, I would be happy. And the second thing I knew was that I wanted to have a lot of impact in people's lives. Like I wanted to my world to reach as many people as I possibly could. And do as much impactful work as I possibly could.I knew these two things, but I didn't know what role I should really do. I signed up as a theater major. Cause I just love arts and I love acting.  It's more of a hobby than thinking of my career. And then I also signed up for the biology program because one idea was just something my parents were really excited about was me becoming a doctor. I started those tracks, realize that really like being in a theater major, like it's quite expensive with like you have to buy the props and the equipment, and I was like, I have no money for this. Doing theater was just not a realistic option at that point and continued along with biology, chemistry. I loved our chemistry department so much. I love the professors there so much that I decided to take on the chemistry courses. I did that. I realized that, you know, I wanted to get some more hands on experience and working in a hospital. I learned that to apply to medical schools, you needed to have volunteer experience, have some experience working in hospitals. But I did not have a car or any means to get to a hospital. I was like, well, how will I do this? And I was also working as much as was possible. And I was also taking classes and I was feeling burnt out as well, three years in. So long story short, I found an opportunity to go and work in Germany on research projects with doctors there. And I thought, well, this is cool.  You know, I don't have a car to get to a hospital here.  Maybe I'll just stay in Germany and go work in hospitals there. And I found this opportunity and applied. And became one of the few research scientists chosen from North America, and that's where I learned that I don't necessarily enjoy the life of a doctor. Instead of being the one on one with patients, I wanted to do things that would reach more people, and so I thought maybe public health might be a good option then. Because then you're building programs and you're thinking about how you help a wider population. And I started volunteering and working with a nonprofit and after I graduated, worked with them full-time to build business models in some of the remotest parts of the world. Like this was in South America, in the Andes, remote parts of South India. I realize two things. One is to make a difference in those communities, felt like there was a need to have power or influence in other words and/or money. And then I didn't have any of the things. I thought, well, if I really want to have an impact and maybe I have to figure it, how can I influence and how can I build something that will reach more people and actually have meaningful impact. And so then again, I started researching. A...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Paul Powers. Paul is the CEO and co-founder of Physna. They talk about innovation in the manufacturing space, 3-D data, trends Paul is seeing from the CES conference, and building a startup outside the Valley in Cincinnati, Ohio.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. To read the interview transcript, go to insideoutside.ioInterview 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 Paul Powers. Paul is a Forbes 30 under 30, a graduate of Heidelberg University with a law degree.  He is an astronomy and astrophysics alumni at Harvard. He's a serial entrepreneur, and his most recent startup company is Physna, which he started in 2015. Welcome to the show, Paul. Paul Powers: Thank you. Brian Ardinger: You've got a pretty extraordinary background.  I wanted to have you on the show for a couple different reasons. One, because you're a young founder out there in the world building some interesting things.  Your company Physna is in the manufacturing space, and we haven't had a lot of folks on the show to talk about manufacturing innovation.  I thought it'd be a really good opportunity to start the conversation with, tell us a little bit about Physna and what does it do. Physna and 3-D DataPaul Powers: So Physna is short for physical DNA. And what we do is we take three-dimensional data and we normalize that down into something that software can actually read. And we help to bridge the gap between software applications that are tech space of two dimensional, and the real world essentially, which is obviously physical and three-dimensional. We do that through a series of proprietary algorithms and we applied machine learning to our technology so that we can actually not only break down and comprehend what we're looking at, but also make predictions about how humans might classify that, that might be used for, how you might make it, what are my costs, how's my performance, certain situations, et cetera. The most common use cases for the technology are to use it to help with engineering, to speed up the process so that you're not redesigning things from scratch and helps you make predictions about what you're trying to design and speed it up.It helps in procurement by understanding what options you have. What suppliers might be able to provide the components that this thing has inside of it and who might be able to manufacture it, at what costs, et cetera. And then under the manufacturing side, understanding how to manufacture those, how it might turn out qualitatively, predicting quality, and a number of users out there who use it for a couple of other things marked miscellaneous use cases. We do have some work that we do together with the military, for example, to identify parts in the fields that aren't necessarily even a CAD model at that point. They can use AI or an image or even a 3-D scan to figure out what something is and more information about it. Journey to Finding Patent ProblemsBrian Ardinger:  Tell us a little bit about how you got started in this space. My understanding is you started with a law degree and a law background. How did you get to designing software to attack the patent problems and everything else in the physical world? Paul Powers: It's not obviously a very direct line between those two things. What happened was I studied law because I wanted to be an entrepreneur and I thought that might be given me an edge or it might just be a different way of looking at starting a business. I focused on intellectual property. That was the closest thing to technology it felt like. It was cool. You got to see a lot of neat things, but I knew that being in that field bet, it was really easy to find a patent, like, you know violations of people's logos or music, texts written as a book or whatever.  It's easy to find digital copies of that, that are not legally obtained. But as soon as it comes in those 3-D models, it was very difficult. We can never really predict violations that might be about to occur, and that really is because it was hard to even search for a 3-D model with a 3-D model or with other input.They're hard to identify. They're hard to understand. There's so many file formats out there, and you certainly can't really find it without like a perfect match of a 3 D model, it seemed. We started the company for that because there's so much cost to that problem. It's trillions of dollars annually and global loss for patent violations. And we thought if we can tackle that problem, that a benefit to society, not just because you can make more money off of your ideas, but also because it helps promote research and development by lowering the likelihood of the theft of your IP. We launched the company, we tried out everything in the world we could find that had geometric search or shape search or anything like that that we thought would be relevant.  And we tried out a lot of stuff and everything was extremely disappointing to us.Everything in the market, we always keep an eye to trying out other tools, but they were very disappointing because they didn't really do what we thought. They weren't actually breaking the stuff down into 3-D. We found a way after a lot of time, but eventually we figured out our own way to break down through the models and to truly break them down so that you could find parts with a subsection. For example, let's say you have a screw and you want to use that to find a machine that it goes into. You can do that, or if you have half of a part, you can use that to find the rest of it. You can identify what's inside of the part even if you don't have data like this is the parent file these with the children's files, but you don't have to have that.  We can figure that out. Once we had that, we went out to conventions and started telling people about this technology, and very quickly we started hearing about all these other issues that existed that, frankly, I had no idea existed, right. That engineers, manufacturing, mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, anyone who engineers something physical, you know, not a software engineer, their productivity is only 20% of what it should be. If you compare how effective software engineers are compared to engineers of physical goods, that's over a five to one ratio actually. That's because these tools are missing. They redesign things from scratch, etc. We also found issues in quality control and inspection automation, and even in healthcare, and all these other areas. And we got overwhelmed and realized that, wow, the reason that we're finding so many issues and people are coming to u...

Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, sits down with Ward Sandler, cofounder of MemberSpace, a company that helps turn any part of a website into members-only. They talk about the no-code movement, what it takes to build a remote workforce, and all things entrepreneurship. 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 give you a front row seat to the latest thinking, tools, tactics, and trends, in collaborative innovation.   To read the full transcript of this interview go to insideoutside.io.Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me this week is Ward Sandler. Ward is the co-founder of MemberSpace. Welcome to the show Ward. Ward Sandler: Hey Brian, thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the board. I actually got connected with you because I had written a blog post about the whole no-code movement and how there really are no more excuses that people can have about, I can't find developers. I can't find different ways to build my stuff. And I mentioned MemberSpace as one of those no code movement platforms out there that's making this democratization of innovation a little bit easier. I want to have you on the podcast to talk about this whole no-code movement. Ward Sandler: We started MemberSpace before “no code” or #nocode was like really a thing. We've been around since 2015 and no code I'd say has come up more in like the last two years really. But that being said, we've always been really focused on non-technical entrepreneurs. Especially for what our software does, we allow you to turn your website, any part of your website into members only in a few clicks. Like that's what we do. And for a lot of folks, that's what they want, but they don't want the headache of having to hire a developer, dig into code or anything like that. So we've been quote unquote no code from the jump. And that's always been an ethos of ours, is we want to make this really easy for anyone to use. Brian Ardinger: So tell me a little bit about MemberSpace and how did it get started and your journey as an entrepreneur. Ward Sandler: We used to be a consulting company. We did everything from custom software or to eCommerce sites. Then we narrowed in on Squarespace just building, designing, and supporting Squarespace websites. Funnily enough, it was very specific, but it was a huge need. Lot of volume of customers. And from there we found that one of the biggest requested features was membership because Squarespace doesn't have it out of the box. So people wanted to have member only pages on their Squarespace site. We figured that out by visiting the Squarespace forum and sorting the list by most voted. And that was like one of the top features. And we read through the comments and basically realized, you know, there's no real good solution for that. So we built a real quick MVP in like a month or two launch that had great feedback and then kept iterating and adding features. And it's taken off since then and we've expanded outside of Squarespace. Now we're available on basically any website. To read the full transcript of this interview go to insideoutside.io.For More Informationmemberspace.com - Link to the podcast in resource section@wardsandler or @memberspaceIf you want to learn more about the Inside Outside team, content, or services, check out insideoutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.

This is a special bonus podcast episode with RSM's George Casey.  George Casey is the Microsoft Innovation Leader and Leader of RSM's Technology Experience Center.  RSM provides audit, tax, and consulting services to help middle market leaders succeed.  Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation founder, talks with George about RSM's Technology Experience Center, collaborative partners, innovation, and digital transformation.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, 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. To read the interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.ioBrian Ardinger: George, welcome to the show. George Casey: Thanks Brian. Glad to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. We had a chance to meet a couple of weeks ago, and I had an opportunity to see firsthand what the RSM Technology Experience Center is all about. George, tell us who you are, what's your role at RSM, and then we can talk a little bit about the Experience Center.George Casey: I've been with RSM about five years, but been with this kind of organization that joined RSM through acquisition for almost 20, so been doing this type of work for awhile. And my role at RSM, you described, I'm a partner with the firm and I lead this Microsoft innovation function, which is really helping customers understand from the innovation ecosystem or broad capability set what's possible? How can we look at blurring the lines between what we used to think of as systems or functions or technologies into an overall ecosystem or platform approach to solving business problems? And a lot of what we talk about isn't very technology focused. It's more around digital transformation and business transformation. And that's where the Technology Experience Center really comes into play in giving us a platform to host people and to innovate and ideate and think about real world problems and look around the corner. RSM on YouTube - A playlist with 15 different videos that focus on technology highlights like AI, blockchain, and augmented reality.RSM Technology Experience Center - Videos and case studiesRSM Innovation To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io    Please subscribe and leave a 5-Star Review to help us connect with more innovators. Learn More - If you want to learn more about Inside Outside Innovation's team, our content, our services, check out Insideoutside.io or follow us on Twitter @theIOpodcast or @Ardinger. Until next time, go out and innovate.