Innovators on Tap

Host of the show, Chuck Swoboda, sits down with producer of the show, Kyle Hagge, to discuss the origin story of Innovators on Tap and the lessons learned along the way.

You can follow the podcast, Chuck, and Kyle on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!

This episode is a replay of the previously released interview with Leif Abraham, Co-CEO at Public.com.

Honesty kills bullshit. You’re an owner, act like one. Enable, don’t direct.

No — this isn’t unsolicited advice from me - although it could be. These are actually 3 of the 9 core culture principles for Public.com, an investing app that is making the stock market social.

Today’s guest, Leif Abraham, is the author of these principles and the Co-Founder and CEO of Public.com.

Leif developed these principles through a successful career as a creative director before founding his first two companies, And.Co & PayWithATweet, both of which went on to be acquired. 

He believes that for any company to be successful, the values have to be more than simple sayings, but the principles that guide your behavior and approach to work each and every day. As Leif says:

“Autonomy without principles creates anarchy.”

We also discuss why Leif thinks real innovation doesn’t rely on consultants, the importance of building an inclusive community around a product, and why he looks for the right values, over the right skills, in new hires.

To put it in his words: “It’s easier to teach skills than it is to teach values”

You can follow the podcast and host Chuck Swoboda on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!

This episode is a replay of the previously released interview with Danny Lange, SVP of AI at Unity. Enjoy!

Did you ever wonder how a computer can be trained to beat a human at chess?  Or how Amazon seems to anticipate what you’re looking for, before typing your request in the search bar?  Or how it is that the Uber app always seems to know the faster route to your destination?  

All of these technologies rely on the same thing - Artificial Intelligence, or more specifically Machine Learning, where computers are able to not only use past information, but to also test future possibilities to find the best way.

To some people this topic can be a bit unnerving as they struggle with the idea that machines are taking over our world, but to me this is an incredible opportunity to make our world a better place. 

One of the people that sees a better future is Danny Lange, who has led AI research at some of the world’s most well known companies: IBM, Microsoft, Amazon, and Uber - and now is applying his expertise at Unity, where they are leveraging the complexity of video games to push the technology even further.

In our conversation, we explore the difference between artificial and human intelligence, if AI can make the leap from curiosity to creativity, and some lessons learned working at some of the biggest technology companies in the world.  

We had an incredible conversation, but I was most struck by Danny’s insight that  “When it comes to AI, the real skill of the future is to understand consequences, to understand the impact of what we're doing”. 

While AI engineers will need to still be technically talented, they will also need to have a deep understanding of the human impact of their decision, and the biases that are a part of our decisions both past and present, so we can make the world how we want it to be, not just re-create the way it has always been.

As Danny says, one of the benefits of AI is that “It allows us humans to focus more on what it means to be human”

You can follow the podcast and host Chuck Swoboda on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!

Gears. Bearings. Conveyors. Drainage systems. Plumbing fixtures. Not what you first think of when it comes to innovation - but areas that maybe even more affected by innovation that all those tech companies that we normally think about.  

Why? Because while we often associate coming up with a new idea as the hard part of innovation, transforming existing industries can be even harder.  

It’s the real world for most of us.

Today’s guest, Todd Adams, is the CEO of Rexnord, one of the real world companies driving innovation across several different industries.  But like many successful leaders, he never imagined himself in that role.  As he revealed during our conversation: 

“I never aspired to be CEO. I wanted to contribute to the success of an organization and learn along the way”

Whether you want to be a CEO or not, Todd has some great advice about how you should go about any opportunity.  

“Make sure you want to do things for the right reason. People sometimes aspire to roles because they want the title, the recognition, the money...but you actually have to love the job”

If you take away one piece of career advice from all the episodes we’ve done so far, that might just be the best.

You can follow the podcast and host Chuck Swoboda on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!!

Arguably no industry has been impacted by COVID more than healthcare. And because of this disruption, no industry has probably moved as fast to embrace innovation - whether they wanted to or not. 

For example, telemedicine, which has been around for more than a decade, has suddenly become not only a mainstream option, but also a way to create access that wasn’t possible before.  

On today’s episode, we speak with someone with intimate knowledge of the healthcare industry: Peggy Troy, who is the President and CEO of Children’s Wisconsin — a hospital system with over 5,000 employees and more than a billion dollars in revenue.

In our conversation, we discuss how to innovate inside a heavily regulated industry, the importance of having passion for your work, and being a servant leader.

We also talk about Peggy’s unique career path to CEO - going from a degree in nursing to running an entire healthcare system.  Her background has given her a different perspective than your typical business leader. As she says:

“If you want to be CEO, you need to understand the value of your workforce. It’s about the people. I don’t care what business you’re in, it’s about the people”

You can follow the podcast and host Chuck Swoboda on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!

Have you ever turned down an opportunity because you thought it was too risky?  What would you do if you got a second chance?  

On today’s episode, we talk with Jim Murphy, who has had an over two decade career at Pixar -  even though he originally turned them down.  

That’s right. As a budding animator, he was offered the chance to work for Pixar, but it was only a 6 month contract with no guarantees. He decided that was too risky and so he said no…... and then something incredible happened: Toy Story.

Jim spent the next week watching the movie every day and realizing he needed to work at Pixar. Eventually, he got a second chance and has been involved in Pixar's tremendous success ever since: working on films such as The Incredibles, Monsters Inc, Ratatouille, and then even directing his own hit short film Lava.

But this episode isn’t about filmmaking: it’s a lesson in creativity, culture, and making the most out of the opportunities that present themselves:

As Jim described the early days at Pixar:

“The art form was new, we were just a ragtag bunch of artists from all different mediums. And we all had something to prove. That’s the lightning in the bottle — nobody really believes you can do it and you have this surprise for the world”

You can follow the podcast and host Chuck Swoboda on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!

Doing what others say you can’t do is an extremely powerful motivator for most entrepreneurs. 

And for today’s guest, Phaedra Boinodiris, this mindset has been integral to her story. While she was a graduate student at University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill, she was working on a case challenge sponsored by IBM so she decided to create a game that taught “business process management to non-technical people.”

She remembers one of her classmates telling her “games are for kids and IBM isn’t going to buy it.”

Well, turns out Phaedra was right and her classmate was wrong. IBM loved her idea so much that they hired her on. And ever since, her career has been focused on gamification and artificial intelligence — and today she leads IBM’s Trust in AI division.

However, she isn’t simply promoting the benefits of AI, she is equally passionate about helping people understand the potential consequences.  As she says during our conversation: 

“If you pick any industry, AI is already disrupting it. So we need to market it in a way that makes it appealing for everyone. We need explainability, transparency, robustness, and accountability.”

You can follow the podcast and host Chuck Swoboda on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!

One of the key mindsets that I’ve always looked for in people is their ability to be unafraid of failure, yet unwilling to fail.

And today’s guest, Amanda DoAmaral is someone who represents this idea. She is the CEO and founder of Fiveable, a social learning network that helps build confidence, content knowledge & technical skills in high school students trying to earn college credit.

While Fiveable today has more than 200,000 users and looks like it is destined for continued success ...but the journey to this point was anything but easy.

From living with teammates to save money, to hearing no countless times from investors, to even liquidating a retirement account to keep the company afloat, Amanda could have given up many times along the way. But she didn't’ - she kept going. 

While we often glamorize entrepreneurship, the fact is it’s extremely hard. And to succeed, you have to be unwilling to fail.  As Amanda said in our conversation:

“Failure happens. All the time. And we have to understand that even the people we admire made a lot of mistakes as well. If you have that mindset, it's easier to take risks.”

“Hey Siri” “Ok Google” “Hey Alexa”

If I told you 15 years ago that we would all be talking to our electronic devices, would you have believed me? Would you have thought I needed some therapy?

Regardless of your answer, it’s clear that speech recognition has become normalized. We now talk to our devices in order to call a friend, to find directions to a local restaurant, and even, when we are really bored, to tell us a joke.

On today’s episode, we talk with Igor Jablokov, a pioneer in voice recognition. Igor led the team at IBM that created the first ever speech enabled web browser and then went on to found the company Yap, which was sold to Amazon in 2011 and became the basis for Amazon Alexa.

Now, Igor is the CEO of another startup: Pryon — which seeks to bring the power of voice recognition to the enterprise level. Instead of having to manually sort through emails, databases, and documents at work, Pryon enables you to simply ask your device for the relevant information, and then the machine does the discovery and surfacing for you.

But Igor is more than a technologist — he’s also a self described artist and creative.

And the episode is about much more than just speech recognition — it’s about the power of adaptation, non-linearity, and believing in your own distinctive journey as you pursue innovation.

As Igor said “There’s not a recipe. You can try and hit some of the basics. But each one of us has this unique fingerprint and path. It’s just doing the hard work every day”

You can follow the podcast and host Chuck Swoboda on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!

It’s been just over one year since COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and disrupted nearly every aspect of our daily lives.

One of the industries that has been most affected has been Education and more specifically Higher Education. Once the pandemic hit, every college and university was forced to move all classes online, seemingly overnight, and campus life, normally centered on close, personal interactions, became a socially distanced affair.

Beyond the challenges associated with transitioning everyone to a virtual world, Higher Ed was thrust into a financial crisis and forced to make tough decisions on its current and future business model. The question everyone is now asking: where does Higher Ed go from here?

Well on today’s episode, we have two college leaders who are trying to answer that question everyday:

Kris Ropella, who is the Dean of the College of Engineering at Marquette University and has had a decades long career inside Higher ED, and Tim Hanley, interim Dean of the College of Business, who spent a majority of his career outside of higher ed as a partner at Deloitte.

They share their insights on the structural barriers to change and how they’re working to build a new model that will thrive in the post-pandemic world.

Whether you are in Higher Education or not, this episode provides great insight on how the world is changing and what you can do to adapt, including this advice from Tim Hanley, on what a great leader of the future looks like

“The leaders of tomorrow are bold, they don’t follow all the rules, but they are also listening, getting feedback, and are open to change”

You can follow the podcast and host Chuck Swoboda on Twitter for further exploration and discussion on innovation.

The episode is also available wherever else you listen to podcasts. Enjoy!