Inside Outside Innovation

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lorraine Marchand. Lorraine is the author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset. She and I discuss how innovation starts, how you can build your muscle of innovation through exploration and experimentation, and much more. Let's get started.Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best in the brightest, innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Lorraine Marchand, Author of The Innovation MindsetBrian 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 Lorraine Marchand. She is executive managing director of Merative, which is formerly IBM Watson Health. And she's author of the new book, The Innovation Mindset: Eight Essential Steps to Transform Any Industry. Welcome to the show, Lorraine. Lorraine Marchand: Thank you, Brian. Really happy to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you. You have been in this space for a while. For the past three decades, you have been in product development, working with companies like Bristol Myers Squibb and Covance, and Cognizant. How did you get involved in the realm of innovation?Lorraine Marchand: Well, it started when I was actually pretty young. I was reared by my dad, who was an inventor. And when I was growing up around the house, he would always challenge my brother and me, to find three solutions to every problem, usually problems that he would identify. And one summer morning, he really brought that point close to home. And he took us to a local diner called the Hot Shops Cafeteria in Wheaton, Maryland.And our job was to determine what was slowing down table turnover. So we sat in the big red vinyl booths eating our breakfast of scrambled eggs and orange juice. And after three days of using our stopwatches and writing down notes, and even interviewing waitresses and bus boys, we determined that the culprit was sugar packets. People were spewing them all over the place. True to his tenant that we had to find three solutions we did. And we ended up taking one to an MVP, minimal viable prototype. And that was the sugar cube. And we ended up selling it to the Hot Shops cafeteria that summer, and pretty soon it was distributed throughout the Baltimore Washington area.So early on, I learned that problem solving was fun and lucrative. And fast forward throughout my career, whether it was at the National Institutes of Health or Bristol Myers Squibb, or founding my own startups and the diagnostics and ophthalmology area, I found that I really did love this idea of being able to clearly define a problem, and then as my dad had taught me kind of systematically evaluate and choose solutions. And to me, the heart of the innovation mindset that I write about is an insatiable curiosity, a passion for problem solving, and embracing change. And so I have found myself, whether in large corporations or in startups, desiring to be that agent of change and bringing that problem solving methodology that I learned so early at the age of 13 with me in all of my career endeavors. Brian Ardinger: I love that story and I love, you have this in the book that one of the key mindset essential steps is this innovation starts with at least three ideas. Can you talk a little bit more about why it takes more than one idea to get something going and that process? Lorraine Marchand: You know, I like to say that first of all, your first two ideas, one of them is probably a solution that you've already been mulling over before you even confirmed that you had a problem. Because I find that we, as human beings, love to go into solutioning mode before we've really carefully defined the problem. So, if you are making your way around a problem, you probably have a bias in terms of what one of the solutions is. The second solution is always to do nothing, right? The competition is always the default, the status quo, I'm not going to change.So right there, you already have number one and two. So you have to be true to the problem solving discipline and this idea of brainstorming and coming up with the three solutions, because it could be that third one that is the winner. If you go a little bit beyond the three, I'm okay with that, but I don't allow my students or any of the individuals I coach to cheat and come up with fewer than three. That you can't do Brian Ardinger: That makes perfect sense. Like you said, you've been in this space for a long time and you've, you've helped create products, you've helped create companies and that. What are some of the biggest maybe obstacles or misconceptions that people have about innovation and starting this particular process.Lorraine Marchand: I think a lot of people are intimidated that they think that innovation has to be at the hands of some of the quintessential greats like Edison and Jobs and Musk and Gates, etc. And so, the first thing I like to do is educate and inform individuals that not all forms of innovation are disruptive. They're not all big hunt. And it is absolutely honorable, and it could be your style of innovation to create incremental improvements. To do more renovation, retooling something for another type of use case. To be optimizing, which actually my story about the Hot Shops Cafeteria, truly if I'm honest about it, it's more about optimizing than truly innovating.But I'm okay with that because like you, I'm very passionate about just encouraging more people to access the freedom, the excitement, the job satisfaction that comes from innovating. And I'm okay to use a broader set of terminology in order to attract more people to just find ways to get started. So that's the first thing. I think people are really put off by that. And then I think that a lot of innovators find that it's very difficult to do customer research. Where do I find the customer? How do I talk to them? Do they want to talk to me? How do I really write a question guide that doesn't bias them toward my solution? So that's one that is very difficult to do, and I find that a lot of individuals will gloss over it. You know, I, I say you have to talk to a hundred customers. And my students look at me with their eyes crossed going, I can't possibly do that. I can't even find five. And I say, well, how are you going to sell your product if you can only find five people to talk to about it? Okay. Right there. And then I would say the other area is pivot. I'm a real fan of pivoting you never fail. Some people will argue with me, but I like to say, you don't fail if you're constantly adjusting your strategy based on the data, based on the market dynamics, and you're moving in the direction where you keep learning and improving what you're doing and moving it closer to the customer. We don't fail, we pivot. But a lot of founders, fail to see the warning signs. That maybe things aren't taking off the way they thought. And so pivoting too late can be pretty dangerous. ...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kevin Strauss, Author of Innovate The 1%. We talk about Kevin's experiences creating products in the biomedical space, as well as his background as the founder of Uchi, a social app designed to strengthen relationships and behaviors. We also talk about the importance of both mental and physical health in the innovation process. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive, in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Kevin Strauss, Author of Innovate The 1%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 Kevin Strauss. He is the author of Innovate The 1%: Seven Areas to Nurture for Success. Welcome to the show, Kevin. Kevin Strauss: Thanks a lot, Brian. I'm glad to be here. Brian Ardinger: Hey, I'm excited to have you on the show. You are a innovator, an author, emotional health and wellness expert. Founder. How did you get involved and excited about this whole innovation space. Kevin Strauss: I think it's a combination of a few things. And I really have to bring it back to my father. As a kid, and for the first 18 years of my life, I would just follow him around and be his little helper and we would just get into every kind of project around the house possible.And that led to the engineering degree and just problem solving. And not only problem solving, but coming up with other ideas, because my dad would do that a lot. Where he would just want to do something in the house. It wasn't solving a problem, but it was just creating something that he wanted to see, you know, in the home.So, I think that's where it really got started. Brian Ardinger: You have a little bit different career. You're not in the software space per se. And you spent a lot of time in the health tech space. So, give us a little background on how you went from engineering to where you are now. Kevin Strauss: It started with engineering. He always loved the mechanical side of things, but I've always been fascinated with the human body and like how it all works and everything. That's when I went straight to a biomedical engineering degree, and I just love all that. Ended up getting like a dream job out of graduate school designing total hip replacement. So that launched me into medical device. But then there was a time that I was working at a company, where we were doing a lot of grant research. And these grants were funded by NIH. And we would come up with ideas, whatever they happen to be, and propose them. And if we won the grant, we'd do the research with the ultimate hope of bringing it to US society as a product, as a company. And in that time, I was thinking a lot about my dating life, which wasn't working out so well back then. And I was trying to figure out why my dating life wasn't working out. You know, I boil it all down to self-esteem of the people I was dating, but then 15 years later, figuring out it was my own self-esteem issues. That was also part of the problem. And it's putting all of that together and understanding why people do what they do. In 2001, it really boiled to the top where I had an epiphany that it seemed to me that most arguments occurred because people weren't sharing their true thoughts and feelings. Right.And that really took me into this other direction. We were doing some human behavior modification work at that company with the grant research. But I just kept pursuing that on my own. And with the work I was doing at the office. And trying to understand why people do what they do. Why do I do what I do?Where's all this behavior coming from? And that led me down a 20-year rabbit hole, which is understanding human behavior, which I really attributed to emotional health. It sent me down that path of emotional health and relationships and connection, and that's what's really driving behavior, and that's what led to the Uchi App, which is a tool to help strengthen relationships.Brian Ardinger: Your background again, you've been in product development. You have 80 patents to your name, I believe. And peer reviewed in a variety of different areas. And so, you've been at the forefront of taking an early stage idea and creating products around it. It's interesting to see the pivot that you've made into the human side of that. And it's not just about figuring out what feature to build or whatever, but it's about the team and it's about other things. So maybe talk a little bit about the book, Innovate the 1%, and some of those areas that we need to nurture, whether we're developing a product or developing a dating life. Kevin Strauss: The book became this like 20 years, 30 years of my career and everything that I've learned in, solving problems, and bringing products solutions to fruition. But when I actually sat down to finally write the book, I ended up writing the book in 39 days because it was just dumping, like brain dumping everything down. So, when you have an idea and you start executing on it, that actually happens to be chapter seven of the book, which is Strike While the Iron is Hot.If you've got an idea, write it down. Talk it out with people. Play with it. You know, don't let it just, oh, I'll remember that later. I can't tell you how many ideas I've had, you know, in the middle of the night or driving, and I'm like, oh, I'll definitely remember this. This is amazing. And then I completely have no idea what that idea was.But you know, the first chapter is where it gets started, which is identify the problem first. Until you identify the true root problem, you're not going to actually solve it. And so often what we're doing in society is we think we know the problem, but it's actually just the symptom. And that's what behaviors are. Behaviors are only symptoms of a deeper problem. And what I learned in my career is once you identify the true root problem, the solutions are usually shockingly simple. And that's how I've been able to come up with like 80 patents. Brian Ardinger: Can you gimme some examples of how you go through that particular process to pull away the onion and figure out what is that core root problem?Kevin Strauss: So, asking why. And I think there's like different schools of thought, like three whys or seven whys. I probably ask like 50 whys. You know, like I just don't ever stop. Like, is this really what we're trying to get to and talk to the right people about it. You know, I mean, for a lot of these medical devices, it's not just about talking to the surgeon, right? The orthopedic or neurosurgeon when it comes to all these spinal implants and all. It's talking to the scrub tech, the nursing staff. You know, we would have meetings with the central supply at a hospital because central supply is the one who cleans the instruments. And if they can't clean the instrument properly, you know, you could transmit infection and...

Neil Soni is the author of The Startup Gold Mine: How to Tap the Hidden Innovation Agendas of Large Companies to Fund and Grow Your Business. Neil spent years with startups, focusing on the sales and marketing side, trying to sell into large organizations. He then moved to Estee Lauder, where he specialized in external innovation. After seeing both sides, Neil wanted to create a resource to help startups understand the corporate side and corporations to understand the startup side. - - Neil Soni will be at the IO2022 Innovation Accelerated, Lincoln, NE - Sept 19-20. - -Brian Ardinger, Inside Outside Innovation Cofounder, spoke with Neil about how to succeed through corporate/startup collaboration.Pitfalls of Corporate and Startup collaboration - Different timeframes - Size of deals  Incentive structures for partnerships - How comfortable is the corporate team in innovating? If comfortable, they’ll have a higher tolerance for misses. Look at the entire portfolio. - Companies that allow intrapreneurship, give employees new outlets to thrive. Should you expose corporates to startups? - Inside large companies (10,000+) it’s an echo chamber. They only see direct competitors. - Need someone looking outside at competition. Expose the corporate team to new ways of startup thinking.  - Startups also get exposure to see how their tech can apply to different domains.In The Startup Gold Mine Book - Understand what is going on behind the scenes. What is your corporate counterpart doing?  - How is your colleague rewarded or punished? Are they paid for the home run? Are they new to the company?  - Corporations have been very interested in the book to shed light on the startup side.  - Reduce the language barrier between corporates and startups. To connect with Neil go to neilsoni.com or on Twitter at @therealneils. You can also get his book, The Startup Gold Mine on Amazon. FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.Originally released April 2019

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Hussain Almossawi, author of the Innovator's Handbook. Hussain and I talk about the common misconceptions about innovation and how some of the best brands in the world approach design and the creative process let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next each week. We'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Hussain Almossawi, Author of the Innovator's HandbookBrian 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 Hussain Almossawi. He is the author of a new book called The Innovator's Handbook: A Short Guide to Unleashing your Creative mindset. Welcome Hussain. Hussain Almossawi: Thank you. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me. Brian Ardinger: You are an award-winning designer, creative director, consultant. You work with companies like Nike and Apple and Google and, and many other well-known brands. I think I'd love to start the conversation with are these companies that you've worked with, that we know as creative and innovative as we think they are. Or do they struggle with innovation, like the rest of us? Hussain Almossawi: Innovation is a process. And it's all about the mindset. What I really saw in these companies was we do see this big and huge brands with maybe like thousands of employees that work for them. The reality is that it's all made up of small teams. And these small teams are made up of five or six people.And that's where like innovation happens at the core of those companies. What I really saw in these companies was failure after failure, after failure. Trying to reach to a vision that was set. And then throughout that process and throughout that journey being flexible and going from point A to B to C. And having that flexibility to move forward and push things forward. And that's really where innovation happens. Brian Ardinger: It's pretty interesting. And we'll maybe dig into some of the examples and that, from what you've seen, that works and that. But you've got a new book out. Same time as my book, it's called the Innovator's Handbook. I love the design of it. It's a square book. Which is kind of unique to the marketplace and that. So, you spent a lot of time and care in the design and creativity of the book. So, I really appreciate that. But I wanted to dig into the content. Talk us through why somebody should pick up a book on innovation when there's so many out there. What makes this one different? Hussain Almossawi: Sure. So, so for me as a designer and like growing up as an aspiring designer, I always looked at innovation as just like everybody else as something that really wows you. And is something that's amazing.And you want to take parts in it and you want to innovate and become an innovator. But at the same time, you kind of feel lost and don't know how to do it. So, it just feels very overwhelming, especially when you're first starting out. Throughout my career, working with these different companies, working with amazing teams and brilliant minds.What I wanted to do was to kind of break it down into simple insights that help shift your mindset when you're innovating. And innovation isn't supposed to be complex or difficult or hard. There are small things that you can do or understand that will allow you to, to think outside the box. For example, I'm speaking about myself, from my perspective. When I was designing and trying to innovate growing up, I always wanted to reinvent the wheel.I always wanted to do things very different, but that's not the case with innovation. With innovation, you can take things that already exist, see how you can evolve them. Take two different products that exist in the market. See how you can bring them together. There's always room for improvement. So this idea and concept of doing something that is groundbreaking and never done before, that's not really true with innovation. But it seems that way, especially for young designers.I mean, my book is geared towards young designers and aspiring designers, fresh out of college. And I want to share those perspectives and things that I saw that I wish I knew like 15 years ago. So that's like one thing. Do you evolve a product? Do you act or do you react. Do I come up with a groundbreaking product or do I create something that I'm building on something that's out there? That's like one point. Brian Ardinger: I think that's one of the, the most important points that when I talk to folks, when it comes to innovation is getting a clear definition of what innovation means. I think a lot of us immediately jump to, I've got to come up with the, the new flying car kind of concept. When you're saying that innovation starts a lot of times at just incremental improvements and optimizing and looking at things slightly differently.And I, I think that's such a great way to approach innovation because it does open it up to anybody who has opportunity to make those types of changes. You don't have to be, you know, the Steve Jobs or the Elon Musk of the world to actually innovate. Hussain Almossawi: Absolutely. I mean, even like with successful brands, like Apple and automotive companies and all those, if you look at the products that they've done the past 10, 20 years, it's always incremental changes and it's always improving one thing after the other.And I saw that a lot, like being in the footwear industry, with the different brands. It was year after year, we had the same story. Like for example, it was a shoe about lightweight. In 2020, what does lightweight look like? 2021, it looks a bit different because the technology is different. We failed a bit. We've learned a bit from the past, from the things we did in 2020So now 2021, we have a better shoe. 2022 is a better shoe and so on. So, there's always room for improvement and technology's always growing. There are new materials. There's new process. Collaboration. The idea of collaboration is huge in innovation. You meet new people, you get different perspectives, you learn new stuff. And you bring all those back into the process and into the design of the product.One interesting thing that we did like in the footwear industry, and it's done in different industries. For example, in footwear, let's say we were talking about a good shoe. What we would do is like, look at the, how are seat belts made? Look at the automotive industry. Look at the aerospace industry. Then look at things that really have nothing to do with footwear, but bring those ideas back into footwear and build something out of it. And that really leads to us asking better questions, understanding the process better, and coming up with innovative and groundbreaking ideas. Brian Ardinger: That's an interesting topic because I think a lot of times, we do get stuck in our own bubble, whether it's our own industry or own competitors. And we're constantly looking at thos...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alla Weinberg, Author of the new book, A Culture of Safety: Building a Work Environment Where People Can Think Collaborate and Innovate. Alla and I talk about how companies can increase their efficiencies, their collaboration, and their velocity of output, simply by focusing on developing physical, emotional, and psychological safety in the workplace. - Alla Weinberg will be speaking at IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated - Lincoln, NE - Sept 19-20Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript of Alla Weinberg, Author of A Culture of SafetyBrian 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 Alla Weinberg. She is Author of A Culture of Safety: Building a Work Environment Where People Can Think, Collaborate, and Innovate. Welcome to the show. Alla Weinberg: Thanks, Brian. So happy to be here. Brian Ardinger: I am excited to have you here. One of the things I was doing in preparation for this particular call, was I was looking at your website. You're a founder of a company called Spoke and Wheel where you help companies build cultures, where people feel safe and respected and able to do their best work. And you have a quote on your website that 82% of employees don't trust their boss to tell the truth. Clearly that's a problem. Alla Weinberg: So that's the problem Brian Ardinger: I wanted to start there. What's the state of today's workplace? Alla Weinberg: I think especially with COVID and, the very sudden move to remote work, it's even harder to build trust with coworkers, with employees, because we don't even see each other in person anymore.And if you want to have those social interactions, that has to be very intentional. So, you have to create a meeting and set that on the calendar. And a lot of times trust is built over time in those very small moments. That I remembered, you know, that you had an anniversary and I wished you a happy anniversary because we had a conversation about that, where I asked about how, you know, the health of your dog is doing. Small life things that just get built up in the very small moments, that get built up over time. And we're definitely missing that right now in our work environments, especially virtually. Brian Ardinger: It has definitely changed the workspace, but that this was affecting before COVID. There was a lot of issues around trust and safety and things like, let's go back a little bit in time and tell us how you got involved in writing and focused on this particular subject.Alla Weinberg: So, I got inspired to write this book based on my own experience. I spent two years working in a global multinational enterprise level company, where I felt unsafe for two years. And it started to really affect my health, my mental health, my physical health, my emotional health. And it got to the point where I didn't want to physically, when we still are doing that, go to the office, go to work anymore.And I eventually ended up leaving that experience. And from that, I've really decided, Hey, you know, the way that we're working together now isn't working.  I want to help people like myself create work environments where they feel safe, where you want to go to work, where you can do your best work. And you're really excited to do the work together. And the other thing is that I realized is especially in a corporate world, it's very, still very much focused on the individual. You know, we have individual performance reviews. We have individual bonuses as bonus structures, promotions, et cetera. But very little of the work that we do is really at the individual level. We have to do work in teams together with other people. And that's where things tend to fall apart. That's where there's a lot of room for improvement, I think. Brian Ardinger: So, what does a culture of safety look like? You mentioned a couple different things in your experience where not only psychological safety, emotional safety, physical safety, what does a culture of safety look like?Alla Weinberg: Culture of safety and as you mentioned, looks like three different and three different levels. So physical safety, meaning I feel safe in my body. Like it feels like I fit in. It feels that I belong regardless of size, of color, of gender, of age, of the number of art that I have on my body. You know, my body can fit in and I feel safe in my body.And this is biologically how we're wired. Because, you know, tens of thousands of years ago, we used to live in tribes, and we relied on that group to survive. So, people in the tribe looked out for us, literally for our physical safety. So, if a lion was coming or a different member from a different tribe was coming to attack us, we would be protected by other people.And so, it's still to this day, how our brain is wired. So, when we're at work, we want to still feel that other people will value our physical bodies and that we're safe with them. And safety in itself just means I'm internally relaxed. My nervous system is relaxed. I'm not anxious, worried on alert, ready to fight or flight.I feel open. I feel open to connection. I feel open to new ideas. This is where innovation comes in. There's a sense of relaxation around that. And I'm not worried about, Hey, how do I say something to this person? Should I say anything? What do I say? If I say anything at all. There's no like strategizing or calculating that's happening in the background.And part of that is being able to share your feelings with someone and that's a very vulnerable thing to do, but it's very much missing from the workplace. Trust comes from sharing vulnerably. So, if I say to you, Hey, you know, it really hurts my feelings when you don't reply to my Slack messages, I'm being vulnerable and I'm sharing my feelings.But I'm also saying to you in a lot of ways, I want to connect with you. I want to have a good working relationship with you. This is what's going on. And if I can say that and feel like you can receive it, you know, well, and you're like, Oh wow. You know, I really didn't know that you were feeling that way. We can have a conversation about it. Then next time, when I have an idea, I'll feel much safer to say too. It's like, Oh, I have this idea about this direction we should go in. What do you think? I won't think twice. I won't hesitate. I won't to calculate when sharing that idea. Brian Ardinger: Can you give me some examples of where these particular types of safety come into play. Where can companies actually start redefining or looking, or even evaluating where they stand when it comes to these types of safety?Alla Weinberg: Yeah. I've actually been thinking a lot about that this morning. Funnily enough, I wanted to write a series of posts about where do you begin. Where d...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Doug Shapiro, VP of Research and Insights at OFS. Doug and I talk about some of the trends in office design, the importance of developing workspaces that foster creativity, and some resources that you can use to plan both your work and your home environment. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Doug Shapiro, VP of Research and Insights at OFSBrian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. And I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. We have another amazing guest was always. Today we have Doug Shapiro. He is the VP of Research and Insights at OFS, which is a sustainable office furniture manufacturer. And also, the host of a podcast called Imagine a Place. So welcome to the show, Doug. Doug Shapiro: Hey, thanks. Super excited to be here. Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you, because you know oftentimes on our show, we talk a lot about innovation and talk about product design. And I'm fascinated by your background in this idea of place design. And designing environments that can be innovative or creative and spur that. So, I wanted to have you on the show on that. I think I wanted to start with the first question, how has the idea of place and especially the workplace changed over the years that you've worked in this space? Doug Shapiro: Well, the idea of place has evolved as we've kind of taken in also new data around not just an understanding of what place does first. But even new data around how place affects us from a health standpoint. From a mental standpoint, we understand the impact of biophilia on our brains and things like that, that we really haven't understood as deeply in the past. So, there's some scientific evolution and then there's also cultural evolution of really understanding the purpose of place and what it means for our workforce. I mean, we've all kind of gone through that here recently, where it just used to be this thing you had to go to every day to get your work done.And of course, that's evolved into being much more of a, of a center for collaboration and creativity. That's the part that I'm super passionate about is how does place support creativity. So, I'd love to get into that today with you. Brian Ardinger: Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about that. So, you know, in the past, you hear a lot about open office complex and, and this idea of collaboration and that. And you seem to have folks that really enjoy that particular way of working. And now you are seeing people, you know, working at their homes and that. What are some of the things that really make a place work for somebody? Doug Shapiro: The most important word I would say is choice. Because, you know, if you track your activities throughout a day, it's rare that you're gonna spend an entire day engaged in one part of your brain doing that same activity over and over again, right.If that's the case, you don't really need a lot of choices, but the reality is there's moments where you need peace and quiet. There are moments where you need energy. There are moments where you need to be with others. And then we also have our own neurodiversity about us. I mean, some people are very hyposensitive. And they need high energy environments. And other people are hypersensitive, and they need to be in places that are more relaxed to do their best work.So, the key is choice. I think that's the way you make environments work for people today. I'm really drawn to this evolution away from knowledge work into creative work. And I think that's a major change we're seeing in workplace today. I think it's really heavily driven by AI and the impact of AI on our jobs. So that's something I'd love to kind of get in with you and explore and see how we're moving from knowledge work to creative work. Brian Ardinger: So, tell me a little bit about what you're seeing with the clients that you're working with. And the things that you design to make it effective in that particular environment.Doug Shapiro: I think it's really, almost like a, a major cultural change to embrace maybe how far we have to go to be great at creative work. I actually, I've thought about this. Knowledge work. That phrase has been around since the fifties. Peter Drucker coined it. And what we're going through today, in fact, I heard this really cool statistic from Workplace Economic Forum, that 40% of people, office workers, feel that their jobs will become irrelevant in the next five years.That's a huge number. And so, the way I thought about looking at it is it's really not that 40% of jobs will be irrelevant, but 40% of the way you do your job right now will become irrelevant in five years. Meaning, so in, in 10 years, we're probably not going to do the jobs that we do now, the same way we do them. Right. It'll evolve. And I think AI is at the, is the undercurrent kind of shifting that. Brian Ardinger: Obviously the pandemic and, and COVID and the move to work at home has currently changed that. And I think if you would've had that question posed, you know, three years ago, how much your work would've changed. You know, most people are now very comfortable on zoom and, and all this kind of stuff. And all of that is accelerated and changed the way we work. I hear what you're saying when it comes to that, and I can see it even evolving faster over the years to come.Doug Shapiro: I agree. I think the pace will increase. So, you know, how does an environment respond to that sort of pace? Agility is, is that the key of that, you know. Investing less in physical structures that are anchored and permanent. But more in tools and structures that have the ability to keep pace with change. So, we're seeing that. We're seeing this sort of phrase soft architecture kind of emerge where people are investing in forms of separation and space creation that are more mobile and easier to manipulate. Really even from a day-to-day standpoint. So that's one way space is, is evolving. I feel like our biggest challenge is how do we get as good at creative work as we've become at knowledge work? That's the big, big shift I'm thinking about. Because I feel like our whole office system, our culture, it was based on efficiency, recording, passing, storing information. Using logic to make decisions like that was what the office culture was built on. And that is key to being great at knowledge work being great at creative work is a whole different animal and requires, I mean, it's really a sea change we're looking at. Brian Ardinger: It's interesting you phrase it that way because it very much maps to why corporates are typically not very good at innovation. You know, they've developed systems and that in place for exploitation. You know, they figured out a business model that works. They optimize for it. They hire for it. They do all that. And innovation is very much the opposite.Very much like you said, the creative side of things where you're in ...

In this episode, Brian Ardinger talks with Douglas Ferguson, founder of Voltage Control, a company focused on design sprints and getting new products to market. Douglas tries to look at the product as a whole unit and is convinced that ideas are worthless. It’s more about focused execution. Douglas brings an operators viewpoint, as he moves into consulting and thinking about Innovation from a broader perspective.  Brian and Douglas discuss some of the problems companies face, when building from within, including the desire to standardize. Companies try to jam everything together and avoid focusing on customers’ needs. For example, AT&T buys other company's services and then takes them to market. With this strategy, AT&T will never be able to provide a superb service, because they are so far from the consumer.  When companies try to innovate, often the problem is putting a lot of resource constraints on projects. Douglas uses a framework called Eco Cycles to view the innovation processes. Projects move from birth to maturity to creative destruction to rebirth. In between, there is a rigidity trap and poverty trap. Many big company projects get stuck in that poverty trap. Douglas also highlights an interesting article from Josh Baer @CapitalFactory called the Texas manifesto. In the article, it explains that Austin will never be a Silicon Valley, but that to succeed Texas needs to connect their four major cities. With that aim, Josh and others load up a bus with VCs, startups, and mentors and travel to a Texas city each month. Check it out.Austin is starting to see organizations mature and more second and third-time entrepreneurs taking more swings at bat. However, startups doing big bold things and raising large amounts of capital are still getting sucked out to Silicon Valley. To contact Douglas and read about Voltage Control check out Voltagecontrol.com  For more content like this, check out Brian's interview with Teresa Torres at Product Talk (REPLAY OF INTERVIEW - Oct, 2018)FREE INNOVATION NEWSLETTER & TOOLSGet the latest episodes of the Inside Outside Innovation podcast, in addition to thought leadership in the form of blogs, innovation resources, videos, and invitations to exclusive events. SUBSCRIBE HEREYou can also search every Inside Outside Innovation Podcast by Topic and Company.  For more innovations resources, check out IO's Innovation Article Database, Innovation Tools Database, Innovation Book Database, and Innovation Video Database.  Also don't miss IO2022 - Innovation Accelerated in Sept, 2022.

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Maddie Grant, Cofounder of Propel. Maddie and I talk about the changing dynamics of workplace culture and what companies need to be doing to navigate the new future of work. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Maddy Grant. Co-founder of PropelBrian 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 Maddie Grant. She is the Co-founder of Propel, which focuses on helping organizations prosper through cultural change. Welcome to the show Maddie. Maddie Grant: Thank you so much for having me.Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on the show. There's a lot going on when it comes to workplace culture and the future of work. For those in our audience who may not have run into your work yet, you're also in addition to working at Propel, you're an author of several books, including Humanize, When Millennials Take Over, and I think your most recent book is The Non-Obvious Guide to Employee Engagement. You know, this whole concept of work culture, work culture is being disrupted. You know, we hear about the great resignation or the great reassessment or the great return to work. Whatever the next great thing seems to be out there. You know, what are the biggest challenges and changes that you're seeing when it comes to the world of work? Maddie Grant: What's interesting is I've been kind of researching culture change in the workplace for quite a long time. For a couple of decades. So long before the pandemic, the workplace was changing in terms of needing to be more digital. You know, advent of social media changed a lot of stuff about managing and leading in the workplace, not just, you know, marketing and communicating with your customers.So, it all started with basically the digital age. And my particular interest is actually on organizations that need to transition from the old way to the new way. Right. So, I'm not so much about startups who could basically create their own culture from the get-go. What I'm interested in is how do you take like a hundred-year-old museum and change, you know, and get them like up to the digital age. And then the pandemic happened. Right? So, a lot of the things that I was exploring in my books and my research basically happened really quickly overnight. And the big disruptor beyond of course the pandemic itself was to me, the idea that all of a sudden there was a really good reason to change how we work. Right. Right. Because if you didn't, people might lose their lives, literally. So in that respect, you're going to go remote. Like, even if you said that you couldn't or only, you know, very special VIP people could take like one half afternoon off of work on a Friday. Well, all of a sudden everybody's working from home and oh, guess what? It's actually working pretty well. It's actually, you know, people are doing their jobs and they're, they're managing, you know, what they need to manage. And they've got kids, dogs, all the rest of it at home. So, there's all these new external factors coming into it. But the work is still getting done.Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about we're in a weird space now, because for lack of a better term, a lot of the pandemic's talk has, has gone by the wayside and people are returning to work. And you're seeing this push again to trying to go back to the old normal. What are you seeing when it comes to that push and pull and, and that desire to go back to the way things were and what's working, or what's not working when it comes to that?Maddie Grant: What we're seeing is that the people who want things to go back to the way they were, are almost always senior level people. So those are the people who got to where they are in the old system. And those are the ones who are very, very keen to go back to how it was. But like my partner Jamie Nadder likes to say the toothpaste is out of the tube now. So, there's some things that just cannot go back.So for example, saying that people can't do their work, can't achieve their goals or their project targets or whatever from home, you can't say that anymore because there's so much data that people were completely able to do that, you know, for the past two years. However, what I think is really interesting is there is actually value to coming back to the workplace. But that value, you know, everybody talks about, you know, the water cooler conversations and, and building relationships.And, you know, seeing people in person is better than online. You know, all of these kinds of things. But they're not defining why those things are important. Like why do we care about water cooler conversations? And in fact, water cooler conversations are actually not an equitable way of building relationships or coming up with random ideas that turn into that next multimillion dollar revenue source, because not everybody has access to the water cooler, right? Some people are not supposed to get up out of their desks for X number of hours. So that's just one example, but I think some of the most interesting work that we're doing right now is actually around the hybrid workplace. And so we wrote this eBook that was basically the four culture decisions that you need to consider when returning to the workplace.And the four are Customizing the Employee Experience. Like how much are you willing to customize? Second one is What is the Value of the Workplace, the physical workplace. Third one is Defining Collaboration and the fourth one is Supervision and Accountability. Like, so you know, that people have been able to achieve their work from home. So how does that change, how you supervise and hold them accountable in the future? And these four things are all very interrelated. But the idea is that really smart organizations will take this opportunity to rethink actually what's important about bringing people together. And they will redesign their workplace, for that purpose. And it could be multiple purposes. But you might have a group of people inside your organization who really need the workplace for quiet time. So, it's actually not about collaborating. It's about having time away from the dog and the three-year-old. For other people, it's about collaborating, but in larger brainstorming teams. So, you know, collaborating with people outside of your department. So not your regular work with your team but getting together with others that you don't normally get together with. Sometimes it might be actually very social. Like what if the workplace was now like the big cafeteria where people came in literally to eat and have coffee, and that's where you start to, you know, run into people randomly, that kind of thing.For all of those things, the reason it works or doesn't work is that you've defined that that is the reason you want people to be interacting in person. You know, so just having that thought...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Clive Chang, Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center. Clive and I talk about the intersection of arts and innovation and how people in organizations can embrace new ideas, experiments, and new audiences to create new opportunities and experiences. Let's get started. Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage, and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Clive Chang, Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln CenterBrian 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 Clive Chang. Clive is the Chief Advancement and Innovation Officer at Lincoln Center, which is the world's largest and best-known cultural venue in the world. Housing things like the Metropolitan Opera, New York Philharmonic, New York City Ballet, American ballet Theater, and the list goes on and on and on. So, Clive thank you for coming on the show. Clive Chang: Thanks so much for having me great to be here. Brian Ardinger: Well, I'm so excited to have you on this show because the arts and innovation are not a topic that's often covered. And you've got such an interesting background and, and role when it comes to this space. From my understanding your background, you're a musician, you're a composer, you're a businessperson. You used to work at Disney, and now you lead Lincoln Center's innovation efforts. How did you get interested in this innovation space and helping companies and organizations innovate better? Clive Chang: Thanks for asking. You know, I am a classically trained musician. I come from a long history of being an artist. And I also come from sort of a multitude of different forces and influences in my life. One of them being strict Asian parents, who forbade me from studying music in college for fear that it would never lead me to a fruitful career. And so, I was also rooted in very practical sort of traditions growing up.And really serendipitously found this intersection of business and art through pursuing studies in both fields. I will say also that as I was in my formative years and college and shortly thereafter, I was also seeing a lot of arts institutions financially flailing, right? Orchestras going bankrupt, et cetera. So that really piqued my interest. And I saw this opportunity that somebody who was trained from the ground up both on the creative side and on the business side could really fill for the world. And that was really helping creative and artistic organizations thrive. And I sort of found that niche quite early on and fueled my further training onward to really pursue that.And innovation, I think really is something opportunistic that I ran into. Right. And you don't get very many nonprofit art CEOs that say outwardly that innovation is their top priority. Right. And so, coming across Henry Timms, his appointment and his not only external commitment to innovation, but also his track record of having done it in the sector prior to coming to Lincoln Center was just too good to be true. And so, I very happily came on and have been really enjoying working with him to really reimagine some things in the sector. Brian Ardinger: It is pretty interesting when you think about artists and creatives, you automatically think of them as innovative type of spirits. Where, you know, they're constantly doing new and interesting kind of things, but oftentimes that doesn't seem to apply to the organizations themselves.Most arts organizations have been around for, you know, years or even centuries with similar business models and similar ways of displaying the arts and that. Why is it so important for institutions to level up today and think more about innovation as a core competency? Clive Chang: Yeah, you are so right. It's almost astounding that organizations that house so many brilliant creative outside of the box talents fail to really make full use of them in an institutional and organizational context.I would consider organizations like Lincoln Center legacy institutions. And while Lincoln Center is only about 60 years old, a lot of the art that's presented on this campus is centuries old, right? Very much rooted in tradition. And I think that's probably one keyword that ends up being a bit of a fallback or a crutch, that many arts organizations use, especially ones that present classical art.I always joke that the performing arts are one of the very, very few things in the world that we still as humans experience in the exact same way as we did like 200 years ago. Right. How many things in the world, can you say that about? When you think about it, we still file into a specific venue on a specific date. At a specific time. We sit for two hours, three hours, four hours. I mean, in the case of opera, it could be, you know, eight, 8 million hours. We passively watch other humans perform. We clap. We exit. The only difference today is we turn off our cell phones. Right? Because we have cell phones. So, another force I think that makes it important for us to really lean into the idea of innovating is that we're cyclical.The typical performing arts company operates in this sort of annual seasonal cycle, right? So, you have a typical fall season. You have a spring season. In our case at Lincoln Center, we have a robust summer season, where we take advantage of warm weather and we take advantage of one of our greatest assets, which is outdoor space. Which not everyone in Manhattan has obviously.So, being able to really take advantage of that, but the problem with the tradition and the annual cycles put together is that if we don't execute with the intention of breaking out of the tradition in the cycles, it just leads to same old, same old, same old, right. And that's the kind of, I think unintended inertia that really takes hold in legacy organizations, especially in the performing arts field like ours, if we don't actively push back against it and continuously challenge it. Right.Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things that may have happened, obviously over the last couple years with the pandemic, it's forced a lot of these organizations to rethink not only in the arts, but everywhere. But so, talk a little bit about how the pandemic and made Lincoln Center adapt or think differently about what they do.Clive Chang: Right. Sometimes it does take an inciting incident, right? Or like this moment of crisis, like COVID 19 to rattle us and create that urgency to really approach things differently. In our case, I would actually frame it as to encourage us to accelerate the change. And I say that because Henry Timms, who took the reins in 2019, the year before the pandemic, you know, was very clear about innovation and institutional change as key priorities when he set his vision coming in. But you're right. What drew me back to Lincoln Center, I rejoined. I was here a decade ago and came back a month into the lockdown. And like, it's kind of an odd time to...

In honor of our upcoming IO2022 Innovation Accelerated Summit, which is happening September 19th and 20th in Lincoln Nebraska, thought it'd be nice to pull some of the best interviews and sessions from our IO2020 Virtual Event. So, over the next few weeks, check out some of our amazing speakers and grab a ticket for the upcoming event. We'd love to see you there. Tickets and more information can be found IO2022.com. And now back to the show. Inside Outside Innovation is a podcast to help new innovators navigate what's next. Each week, we'll give you a front row seat into what it takes to learn, grow, and thrive in today's world of accelerating change and uncertainty. Join us as we explore, engage and experiment with the best and the brightest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.Interview Transcript with Karen Holst, Author of Start WithinBrian Ardinger: Karen Holst is the Author of Start Within. Karen and I met a couple months ago. Probably in mid pandemic. She had me on her show. She has a LinkedIn show that she hosts and you're always bringing on some amazing guests. I had a great opportunity to talk to her and talk about what's going on in innovation and entrepreneurship, and this intersection between corporate and startups and such. I'll turn it over to Karen to talk a little bit more. Karen Holst: Great. Thank you. I am coming in from New Zealand. I originally was in San Francisco and then moved to Montreal for a couple years and still had San Francisco based work. So, I never really changed my profile in LinkedIn. It was very confusing. I had these, this double life going on, where I was spending half my year in California and half in Montreal. And then had the opportunity to come to Auckland and, and it’s been an adventure, especially given the, the time that we're in right now.So, thank you for joining and I appreciate everyone sharing why they're joining here today. And I, I will tell you what I get excited about when it comes to innovation. It is unlocking people and doing this work and oftentimes that can be myself when I feel blocked up or maybe a little over my head in what I'm trying to do. Or it might be the team members and the people I'm consulting and bringing along and doing this work. So that's what I'm here to talk about today. Quick introduction on myself. My background, I had started a company after acquisition. I joined the California Department of Education and had this moment of what does it mean to innovate in a large organization, a state agency, no matter. And that being very different and that leading to writing the book. I joined IDEO and I also teach through LinkedIn learning. So that's the quick and dirty on me. I want to share a quick story on the importance of being bold and what it means to innovate and be the person that's igniting that in others. And this goes back to my ed tech startup. I was a co-founder in my early twenties and definitely feeling a little over my head.We were going after another round of funding. And I really needed to catalyze teams to think differently and start solving new challenges. And I had reached out to a woman that I, I didn't know, but she was someone I really respected in the corporate world and had grown businesses. She was gracious enough to give me 15 minutes of her time.And I sat down with her in a video call and said, explain where I was coming from and wanting to, you know, ignite passion and innovation in others. And what advice did she have for me in leading those teams? And she shared out of the gate, she said, don't bake goods and bring them into the office. You'll be seen as the mother caretaker, you know, the baker instead of the leader. And I was floored by that response. One, I'm not a baker. I would not put anyone into the, the task of trying to eat something that I make. I, I can do maybe a simple cake with a mix and cookies. But that is not something I would pride and force on my colleagues.But what I took out of that comment was, you know, assimilate. Fit in. And I looked around and I had, you know, an all-male board from our investment. And we were still looking to diversify our team and hadn't quite landed on how to do that. And so, I did slip a bit in my, what I think was my superpowers and being myself.And that is one of the takeaways is, you know, being yourself and acknowledging your strengths is a big part of this work and innovating. And also doing that with others when you're leading others. So, to be yourself with the caveat of, but better. And I think what all of this leads to is whether you're the optimistic yaysayer and that's me, or the kind of cross your arm, realistic, you know, pointing and poking holes at problems. All of those are great perspectives to have. It's trying to find that balance. And it's in yourself, it's in the teams that you lead. It's how your organization culture is built. All very important. And what it boils down to is being hard on the ideas and soft on people. So not focusing in on, you know, the person that's sharing the idea or talking about it, but really about the, the thing that's being said.And I really want to go deeper in that today. We have such a short amount of time. I'm going to go quickly. Please feel free to ask questions throughout. I can't see them. So, Brian, if you can let me know of any come in, I can slow down. I'll just kick off with, Start Within framework. And that's the book that I co-authored.And then we'll talk about the assumptions and mindsets about, around this work and go into two exercises that come from the book that you can use in your own work. Or you can take the teams. And then finish up with questions, of course. Where the book came from was again, when I had gone from my startup, I was hired within the California Department of Education to be entrepreneurial, but what that means within a larger state agency is very different. We obviously had lots of government funds and policies to work through and to be responsible around. But also needed to move quickly. It was all about bringing technology into the classroom. So that has to move quickly, but also responsibly.And it's also bringing in different ways of thinking. I was looking around for tools to do that. And there's so much amazing work out there on the culture of innovation and what leaders can do. But when you're a doer and you're tactically doing this work, I felt that there was an opportunity for Start Within in writing something about how to launch ideas within a big organization.So that's where it was born. It was focusing in on these doers. And I, I think so much about innovation is around this word that can feel very exclusive. But the people that are doing this work they're innovators. They're close to the problems that are plaguing the company, the customers, the employees. They see the problems and want to fix them.So, they're not just sitting back and saying, that's a problem for someone else. They're ready to take, you know, action. And they want to make things happen. In addition to that, the challenges, the tension is between getting them from that idea to actually seeing it through. That the organization that they work within there's often bias towards doing things the same. Even when we say we want to do, you know, innovate and do things differently, we just have this inclination to go back to, you know, status quo.There's also this amount of work outside of, you know, this idea. It's our day job, but we are hired to do...