Inside Outside Innovation

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.

Lori Bush is the co-founder and executive chairman of Solvasa. Prior to that, she was the president and CEO of Rodan + Fields, where she grew the company to over $1 billion in sales. She's had experience with Nu Skin, Johnson & Johnson, Neutrogena and Avon. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Lori about her 30 years of experience in the beauty and skincare space, entrepreneurship and her move towards integrated beauty.Interview Transcript. To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lori Bush. Lori is the co-founder and executive chairman at Solvasa. Prior to that, she was the president and CEO of Rodan + Fields, where she grew the company to over $1 billion in sales. She's had experience with Nu Skin, Johnson & Johnson, Neutrogena and Avon, and we talk about her 30 years of experience in the beauty and skincare space, entrepreneurship and the move towards integrated beauty, pulling together beauty, mindfulness, and wellness. 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 to the latest thinking tools, tactics, and trends in collaborative innovation. Let's get started. Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest. With me today is Lori Bush. Lori is the co-founder and executive chairman of Solvasa, an integrative beauty line, which really pulls together beauty, mind, and wellness. Lori, welcome to the show. Lori Bush: Thank you, Brian. Humbled, honored to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on because while I gave your current title, I'm very impressed with your background. Thirty plus years in the beauty space, and you have quite an impressive resume. Folks who are not as familiar with you. You were the president and CEO of Rodan + Fields. You grew that company to over $1 billion in sales. You were the President of Nu Skin. You have worked at Johnson & Johnson and Neutrogena, and you're chair of the board at Avon.  You pretty much got it all covered. Startups, corporates, innovators. So I thought I'd start with the fact that you've had a career spanning a number of different years in an industry that's changed. What has happened over the last decade or so that's really changed the beauty industry and what are the things that are most impressive.Lori Bush: A great question because when we were launching Rodan + Fields March 1, 2008, I was standing on a stage in front of about a hundred people, which reflecting on that is funny, because today Rodan + Fields fills stadiums basically with people for meetings and events. So at this point, I stood in front of the stage and I boldly proclaimed that five years from now, both beauty skincare and direct selling, we're going to look different than they look today, and the people in this room have an opportunity to watch it happen, wonder what happened, or be part of it.  And as I was standing there saying it, what was going through my head is we had lofty goals, but we were a brand new startup effectively, doing a complete pivot from pulling out of department stores where the brand had actually been owned by Estee Lauder for a period of time and relaunching. And as I was standing on stage saying that my website was melting down, we were one of the first companies, in direct selling to really launch as a purely digital eCommerce transaction model, which we did for a number of reasons.  And what was really an unexpected outcome of the Rodan + Fields experience was it wasn't even just about taking significant market share, which we were able to do to become the leading. Independent skincare brand, and then ultimately the company became the number one skincare brand in North America. We actually, and significantly grew the skincare market in the United States. Materially grew the skincare market. And a lot of that had to do with bringing the right channel strategy and being innovative in that channel strategy to the product value proposition and marrying the two and aligning them appropriately, in ways that were leveraging a lot of other things that were happening in the ecosystem around us at the time. Not the least of which, of course was social media. To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io 

Audrey Crane is author of the new book, What CEOs Need to Know About Design: A business leader's guide to working with designers and a partner at Design Map. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder talks with Audrey about some of the trends in Design Thinking, how to hire better designers, and what are some of the differences she's seeing in the Midwest versus the Silicon Valley design scene.Interview Transcript. (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io)Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Audrey Crane. Audrey is a partner at Design Map and author of the new book, What CEOs need to know about design: A business leader's guide to working with designers. We had a great conversation talking about some of the trends in Design Thinking, how to hire better designers, and what are some of the differences she's seeing in the Midwest versus the Silicon Valley design scene. Now on with the show. 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.  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 Audrey Crane. Audrey is a partner at Design Map and author of a new book called What CEOs need to know about design. Audrey, welcome to the show. Audrey Crane: Thank you so much Brian Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show because you've been recommended by half the people that I know in this design and lean startup space as a person I should have on the show to talk about what's going on. For folks who may not have heard of you, give us a little background on you and how you got into this design space and what's keeping you busy right now. Audrey Crane: My background goes back a while, actually. I studied math in theater in college. I was actually in college when I saw the Mosaic browser for the first time. I was using muds and like old fashioned nerdy stuff like that. I had always worked in high tech though my father and my mother were both computer programmers and so my summer job was QA and stuff like that. I came out to California to act and got a day job at a little company called Netscape. So yeah, happily, most people have still heard of it. I'm still waiting for the day when some young person has not. I was there and I met Hugh Deverly, who was a huge influence on my life, a really big deal. He's not great at self-promoting, but a really big deal inside the design world, and he was a designer by trade and training and kind of showed me the world of design and marriage of right brain and left brain, really worked for me. It really resonated. When he left to start Deverly design office, I went with him and was incredibly lucky to be the first employee there. Was there for quite a while. I left and went internal and ran my own design team and then left again and joined Design Map as a partner nine years ago now. I head up the research arm of Design Map. Many people with lots of experience and skills there, but I pitch in there where I can and then do show up in client engagements when I'm helpful and try to go away when I'm not. That's my job.To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io    Please subscribe and leave a 5-Star Review to help us get the IO podcast heard. Thank you!

Raz Razgaitis, co-founder and CEO of FloWater, talks with Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Founder, about the disruption that's happening in the water business, what it's like to be working in a big company and move to a startup, and everything in between. Interview Transcript (To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io) Brian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we interviewed Raz Razgaitis. He is the co-founder and CEO of FloWater. We talk about the disruption that's happening in the water business, what it's like to be working in a big company, and move from there to a startup, and everything in between. 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. 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 Raz Razgaitis.  He is the co founder and CEO of FloWater. Raz, welcome to the show.  Raz Razgaitis: Thanks Brian. Great to be here.  Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on board because you're trying to disrupt this new world of water. So let's start there and talk a little bit about FloWater.  Raz Razgaitis: Well, Brian, our whole mantra is really around changing the way the world drinks water. The foundation of our company is to provide decentralized distributed water purification wherever consumers work, rest and play. So that they can have what we believe is the world's best tasting water, on tap, wherever they are. And the purpose behind that is to completely eradicate, not only single use plastic water bottles, which are the new environmental cigarette, but also to provide a pathway to eliminate all packaged water.  Because not only does it end up in oceans, lakes, rivers, and landfills. For example, right now, Americans are drinking the equivalent of two credit cards worth of plastics. Microplastics. Wow. Every month as a result of their tap and bottled water. It's not just bottled water, but they're actually drinking their bottled water that's in now microplastics in their tap water. Exactly. We're literally now drinking our plastics, and the whole idea of our company is to completely eradicate that.  And what we're doing is we've built a piece of technology and a piece of hardware that right now, it's primarily available to businesses and companies and organizations. And so that's generally hotels, schools, corporations, gyms, retailers, where we provide a FloWater refill station that has a very powerful purification system in it, that takes any tap water effectively anywhere in the world and turns it into something that will be better tasting than your favorite bottled water brand. But it's available in a refillable format so that you are reusing either a multiuse bottle or a refillable bottle, or even a single use bottle that you're refilling. So if you end up having to buy a single use plastic water bottle, but you get to refill that five times, we've just seen an 80% reduction in the usage of single use packaging, which is a great thing.  To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io  Please subscribe and leave a 5-Star Review to help us get the IO podcast heard. Thank you! 

Stuart Willson is the CEO and founder of Radicle, a research and advisory company that has worked with great companies like Lego, Diageo, Proctor and Gamble, and more. Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside founder talks with Stuart about the new trends in the world of research, how companies are using information and data to make better decisions, and about the new venture model that companies like Prehype are using to create startups from scratch.   Interview Transcript - To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.ioBrian Ardinger: On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stuart Willson. Stuart is the CEO and founder of a company called Radicle. It's a research and advisory company that has worked with great companies like Lego, Diageo, Proctor and Gamble, and more. In our interview, you'll hear some insights about the new trends in the world of research, how companies are using information and data to make better decisions, and we talk a lot about what's the new venture model that companies like Prehype are using to create new startups from scratch.  Have a listen. 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. Welcome to another episode of inside, outside innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger, and as always, we have another amazing guest with us today is Stuart Willson. He is the cofounder and CEO of Radicle, a new research and advisory business. He's here to talk about some of the changes and trends that he's seeing. Stuart, welcome to the show.  Stuart Wilson: Thank you for having me.  Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you back. You were at the IO Summit and you had a great talk about some of the new trends that you're seeing.  Before we jump into that and talking about Radicle, I want to talk about how you got into the innovation space cause it's a little bit different than your traditional entrepreneur.  Stuart Wilson: I like to say I have a fairly nontraditional background relative to my peers and by which, I mean I had a pretty traditional background for most of my career. I worked and investment banking out of college. I went and got my MBA and then I was looking for a job where I've been learning a lot and be challenged and get paid to be right. And I ended up at a hedge fund and for 11 years. I was an investor investing everything from media to ski resorts and ultimately starting my own fund with a partner.  But then as is often the case in New York, my circle of friends shifted somewhat and I was introduced to and became friends with a group of people that included folks like Ben Leventhal who just sold Resy to Amex and my friend Josh Abramson, who had started College Humor, friends who were at places like Spark and Union Square, and I was the only person sitting up on Park Avenue, looking at a Bloomberg machine. And the more time I spent with them and the more I listen to what they're doing, the more I felt like I was really wasting my time and that there was this transformation happening as waves of new technologies created opportunities and democratized business building. But I wasn't participating in that and I wasn't really doing anything that I felt was driving value or utility for our customer. And so I decided to leave and I was introduced to Henrik Berglin, who started the incubator Prehype. And cofounded Bark, a dog focused startup, formerly Bark box. I told him what I wanted to do, which was to build something like pretty abstract. To read the entire interview transcript, go to http://insideoutside.io