Innovation Answered

The sudden onset of a global pandemic shifted priorities at many large companies. Innovation teams have been tasked with facing new challenges that can help save lives and keep people safe. Colleen Hau of Carhartt discussed how her team worked quickly to make PPE for frontline workers. Firdaus Bhathena of CVS talks about how the company’s COVID-19 testing efforts and acceleration in digital health care. Rhett Alden, Chief Technology Officer of Health and Commercial Markets at Elsevier, shares how his team created a COVID-19 Resource Center in four weeks. 

What does it mean to practice empathy? Teams need to think about end-users as real live human beings — not just a rectangle on a PowerPoint slide labeled “the customer.” To learn more, we sat down with Irina Kozlovskaya, Director of Industrial Design at Fitbit. Kozlovskaya shares how the team at Fitbit listens to customers and pairs the process with design thinking to build better products. Lisa Somogyi, Director of Business Development at Cooper Perkins, shares tips for practicing empathy in a remote world. Cooper Perkins is also a sponsor of this podcast.  

What’s changed due to the COVID-19 pandemic? What’s likely to come back? And when? Innovation Leader’s What the Future Looks Like report seeks to answer that question. Kaitlin Milliken, Multimedia Editor at the publication, shares data from the report. Stephan Chase, a futurist and founder of the consultancy Chase Intel, discusses how the pandemic has affected life downtown and the hospitality space. Peter Berger, Director of Innovation for the aircraft manufacturer EmbraerX, explains why drastic innovation cuts are short-sighted. 

Consumer packaged goods (CPG) describes any product that requires routine replacement — from personal care to food. Companies in this space have to create new offerings that shoppers will buy again and again. To find out how big R&D bets empower the process, we talked to Ranjani Varadan, VP of R&D at the meat alternative company, Impossible Foods. Jodi Benson of General Mills discusses how her team used customer insights to refresh the yogurt category. Jeff George of Hain Celestial Group also shares how his team has shifted to respond to COVID-19.

Steve Jobs once said it’s better to be a pirate than to join the Navy. Pirates refer to startups, built by nimble teams. Large organizations, which are slower to innovate, are compared to the bureaucratic Navy. But how do corporate innovators fall into this metaphor? In this installment of Innovation Answered: Essentials, Tendayi Viki explains. Molli DeRosa from Innovation Leader also reads a passage from Viki’s most recent book, Pirates in the Navy. 

How does AARP use innovation to empower people as they age? During a conversation with Innovation Leader, VP of Product and Startup Engagement Rick Robinson explains how his team uses design thinking to solve unmet needs in the 50-years-and-older community. He also discusses the importance of testing products with end users and the dangers of over relying on data.

Innovators in the public and private sectors face many of the same challenges: There’s resistance to change and internal politics that can bog down progress. However, teams in the government may have tighter budgets that come directly from tax payer dollars. These teams also face demands from both supervisors and constituents. To gather best practices for changemakers in government, we sat down with Tanya Hannah, the former Chief Information Officer of King’s County Washington. Steve Rader, Deputy Manager of NASA’s Center of Excellence for Collaborative Innovation, also shares insights. 

Pursuing new ideas can be difficult when employees bogged down with day-to-day business. To foster new processes, many companies created separate innovation teams and labs. But how have these labs shifted during this period of remote work? What sets labs up for success? Linda Elkins, Chief Technical Officer of W.L. Gore’s Silicon Valley Innovation Center, shares. Other guests include Frankie James from General Motors, Jeffrey Welser from IBM, and Sara Husk of Planbox.

What are the risks when large companies dive into the venture capital game? To answer that question and more, we sat down with Rudina Seseri, Founder and Managing Partner of Glasswing Ventures. Amish Parashar, Co-founder of the Yamaha Motor Exploratory Fund, also explains why corporate venture is like a two-tiered cake and how the venture capital world has responded to COVID-19.

Creating an innovative culture involves much more than fun activities and idea challenges. Building a healthy culture involves deliberate choices that create space for experimentation and risk. Wayfair Co-founder Steve Conine discusses how the online furniture retailer maintained its culture as it grew from a two person idea to a company with 16,000 employees. He also shares advancements in augmented reality and virtual reality at the company.