Inside Outside

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang, authors of the new book, Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Machine Learning. We sit down and talk about some of the biggest misperceptions about AI, as well as some practical advice on how to tackle creating, building, and maintaining AI projects. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset and remix yourself and your organization. Each week, we're bringing the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new innovator.

Interview Transcript with Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang, Authors of Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Machine Learning

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing set of guests. Today we have Alyssa Simpson Rochwerger and Wilson Pang, authors of the new book called Real World AI: A Practical Guide for Machine Learning. Welcome to the show.

Wilson Pang: Thank you, Brian. Really excited to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: We are excited to have you both here. This is an exciting world of technology and new trends that are happening. AI is obviously on the forefront of a lot of people's minds. And I'd love to get your input on what do you really mean when you say real-world AI and how does that differ than people's perceptions out there?

Alyssa Simpson: I think one of the things that we wanted to address with this book is sort of the in-between space between, you know, the hype and maybe what you read about AI and the headlines, or what you see AI or very smart futuristic systems depicted in the movies. And then, you know, also a very academic or technical approach to machine learning that you may have come across a textbook or learned in school.

And this is kind of the middle reality, right? Is, you know, what are real companies who are using machine learning based technology? How are they using it? You know, what struggles are they having? What successes are they having? And then how does it work in the real world. In the reality that we all live in and share and products that you probably use frequently in your everyday life?

Brian Ardinger: Well, I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what AI even is. Maybe Wilson, can you tell us a little bit about some of the myths or misconceptions about AI that people commonly struggle or fumble over? 

Wilson Pang: There's a few major common misconceptions. Number one, it's really, a lot of people think AI, they think is the kind of a machine can do whatever human can do, right? This is called Artificial General Intelligence. Basically, AI can repeat human. So that's happening in those small ways but it's far away from the reality. In reality, what AI, all the real-life AI, is really the application, which can be taught or learn to carry a specific task without being programmed to do so

So, the machine can learn from data. And then performing some tasks. So that's kind of a like what real world AI is. So that's number one misconception. Number two misconception is that people are thinking to build an AI, the team needs to spend a lot of their time to tune the model, work on the model, and get the best performance. It is more related to the signs or the model tuning.  

In reality, science is a big part of AI, for sure. But for the AI team, they spend a majority of their time, on data. Need to collect the right data, clean up the data, make sure the data has all of the representatives and also make sure that data has quality. And then the data complete the magical part is to really improve the AI performance. So those are the two major misconceptions. I hope everyone can really learn and understand that. 

Brian Ardinger: You know, you often see two sides coming out, when you talk about AI. You have one side of the spectrum where everybody talks about AI as a panacea of opportunity. And it's going to change the world for the better. On the other side, you have the folks that think AI is a massive danger and a menace and a lot of unknown repercussions. Where do you guys fall on that spectrum? 

Alyssa Simpson: I'll argue all sides of that one. I think both are true and neither are true. As with anything, machine learning and AI technology is disruptive. It already has changed the world as we know it and will continue to be an incredibly powerful and disruptive technology in almost every industry. On the other side, it's just technology, right? And there's a lot of things that are powerful and it's only as powerful as what you put it towards and how you shape it.

And in other ways, it's incredibly brittle and really narrow as Wilson was referring to, this is not a magic eight ball. It's not generalized. AI often is very narrow and specific, and only is able to accomplish a fairly narrow and specific tasks that you train it for, if you have all the data available to train it really successfully to perform that task.

And so, you know, what we see in reality is companies having a lot of success. If they are able to find a use case that this technology can perform really well and do things that previously were undoable before and open up new streams of opportunity. 

Brian Ardinger: Where are some of the industries that are getting the most out of AI right now. And where do you see the trends moving, when it comes to folks capturing the benefits of AI? 

Wilson Pang: AI only become a buzzword in recent years. But in reality, AI has been there for a long time and high-tech industry who has big company like Google, Facebook, all those tech giants. They have been using AI for a long time. And AI has been used to optimize their price sprints, to help you find the right product, to give you a better recommendation. To show you a better content. 

So those have been there for a while. The usage of those AI technologies is pretty mature, and that's also almost embedded in every part of their product. So, for high-tech industry, very mature. Meanwhile, in recent years, it's also a lot of other industries, they are catching up. Like the finance industry. The medical industry.  All kinds of industries are catching up.

So, you can see the train of AI is already, the adoption of AI has become much broader. And also, the speed to adopt AI is also a leverage spot. Meanwhile, as you mentioned earlier, AI can really bring on a lot of benefits. Can also create a lot of harm. So, with this even wider adoption, we really need to make sure people understand how to use AI in the responsible way. So that way we can get the benefit part, but meanwhile not really doing a lot of damage to the society. 

Brian Ardinger: Yeah, you definitely hear that. And you hear the use case scenarios when it goes bad and that's oftentimes hyped up. I actually just read this morning. I think it was a fast company article talking about how the New York City Council is considering new rules meant to curb bias in hiring when it comes to AI and putting AI in hiring practices and that. What's your take on some of those challenges that you're seeing in that particular space. 

Alyssa Simpson:...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and Co-founder of Voxable. Lauren and I talk about the future of voice and other wearables and the challenges of designing for new technologies and applications. Let's get started.

Inside Outside Innovation is the podcast to help you rethink, reset, and remix yourself and your organization each week. We'll bring you the latest innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneering businesses, as well as the tools, tactics, and trends you'll need to thrive as a new

Interview Transcript with Lauren Golembiewski, CEO and Co-founder of Voxable

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 Lauren Golembeski. She is CEO and co-founder of Voxable which is an agency that designs and develops chatbots and voice interfaces based in Austin, Texas, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. So welcome Lauren. 

Lauren Golembiewski: Thanks for having me.

Brian Ardinger: Hey I am excited to have you on the show. You and I connected pre pandemic. I had been reading some of your work in Harvard Business Review. You wrote a couple articles, one entitled How wearable AI will amplify human intelligence. And another one more recently called, Are you ready for tech that connects to your brain?

And I thought those articles were so insightful. I want to get some insight into some of the things that you're seeing in some of the new technologies when it comes to wearables and voice and, and things like that. So maybe to kick it off, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about how you got started in this field and tell us more about what Voxable is.

Lauren Golembiewski: Yeah, absolutely. So Voxable is a design platform for teams that want to build better voice and chat apps. We had been consulting in the voice and chat app design and development space, helping companies, large enterprise teams build their voice and chat experiences. 

And then we pivoted to creating this product because we realized that every team, no matter how much they invested in creating a great conversational experience, they still had no tool that was available to them to efficiently build that experience and define it in a way that created a great user experience for their end customers. So that's what we're currently doing today.

And we got into the voice space just by tinkering in our own homes. I was mentioning to you before we started the show that I started the business with my husband who's a software engineer and my background is in product design. And we basically, as soon as, you know, early voice technology had become available to us, we started playing around with integrating it into our smart home devices.

And we realized that in creating our own voice experiences, that this was really going to be the next paradigm shift in human computer interaction. So, we quit our jobs and started Voxable, the consulting business, or what became the consulting business. 

And then, like I said, through those five years, recognizing that the significant problem in the industry is that there's no good design tools. That's kind of our current mission is seeking to change that and to help teams create a better UX in the process. 

Brian Ardinger: That's pretty amazing. My career started back in internet 1.0 in the UX UI design research field and designing for new technologies back then when it was a screen-based kind of thing, it's obviously evolved in that. And you mentioned this term conversational design. Tell us a little bit about what does that mean? What does it entail? 

Lauren Golembiewski: Conversation Design is a new term and conversation designers is a new role that has come about on the market. And these are people who focus on creating that voice or chat experience and defining what that looks like for the end user.

And so just like today, you might have a product designer or a user interface designer. The way that we talked about that role in a voice application or a chat application is just by calling them a conversation designer because they're focusing on the actual substance of the conversation, writing the words that will be said, be spoken by, for example, an Alexa skill or sent through a chat bot in a chat application. They're dealing with those substances as opposed to, you know, HTML CSS that a web designer would be considering or iOS framework that a mobile designer would be considering. And so, a conversation designers are focused on affordances of conversational experiences, which includes synthesized speech. 

It includes new conversational AI. So that would include something like natural language understanding, that can now take the natural words that a user says and translates that into something a machine or an application can actually do something with and can perform actions based on a more natural interaction.

And so, these types of affordances are what conversation designers become experts in, and then can craft these experiences that help fulfill the end user's goal, whether it be getting help, they have a support issue in, you know, your product. And that's one big place that people are automating these types of interactions is on customer support chat.

As well as, you know, people want to be able to speak to their mobile device and they want to be able to play music and perform actions without having to use their hands. So, whether that's on a mobile device or on one of these smart speakers. And I think the other really big sector that this is exploding on is in the wearable markets because now not only do we have like a smart speaker that's sitting in a room or a personal mobile device, but we now have a kind of always on piece of personal accessorizing that people are wearing almost throughout the entire day. 

And it's like a whole other channel through which conversational interaction can happen. And it can be both very personal and on consumer level interactions where I'm playing music or tracking my fitness. Or can be on a very enterprise level where I'm trying to automate certain parts of my job and do my job more intelligently by having an assistant that can kind of help me do that on the go, either hands-free or site free. 

Brian Ardinger: One of the things that the whole field is still fairly new and it's fairly new, even for the user to understand, you know, obviously a lot of people use the Alexa to ask, you know, what the weather's going to be. What are the core applications that you are seeing that are really having an impact in this new field? 

Lauren Golembiewski: So, very similar to the early days of the mobile market, when mobile apps became really popular gaming has established itself as a very early craze. And I think a lot of people are gravitating towards voice only games. And then there is the whole media consumption landscape. 

Podcasting is a very big interest of a lot of enterprises and consumers alike. It's a channel that a lot of people are starting to recognize the value of. And so, creating voice experiences in new places whe...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Cactus Raazi, Author of the new book, Price: Maximizing Customer Loyalty Through Personal Pricing. We talk about the important, but often overlooked topic of price innovation, and how companies can use technology and experimentation to move from the traditional model of revenue maximization towards that of loyalty maximization. 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.

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 Cactus Raazi. He is the founder and former CEO of Elephant. Now part of EXOS Financial, and author of the new book, Price: Maximizing Customer Loyalty Through Personal Pricing. Welcome Cactus. 

Cactus Raazi: Thank you very much. Appreciate you having me. 

Brian Ardinger: Cactus, I'm excited to have you on the show because this is a pretty important topic that doesn't often get talked about in the innovation front. You know, if you think about pricing, a lot of the pricing models have probably been around for 50 years. And yet when I'm working with startups or people introducing new products, they're always talking about how do I set my price and that. So, I'm really excited to hear your thoughts on that. 

To get started, in the book you talk a lot about, and you encourage companies to look at price differently. So, we'll dig into the details, but how did you get involved at researching and writing about the topic of price?

Cactus Raazi: You know, it's interesting. My day job is in financial markets. And what we, myself, and the team have been working on for years are various algorithms to be able to automatically price different bonds at different times of the day for different customers under a wide variety of different conditions. 

And we started thinking about on the one hand data analytics and I had done a masters program at NYU in business analytics recently. And then on the other hand, I started thinking about the challenges of running a business in today, particularly in the B2C world. But a lot of what I had thinking about also has applications in B2B and really thinking about internet price transparency, and the destructive effects on pricing power for companies, large and small.

And so, I kind of put everything together and started really thinking about why do we think so simplistically around pricing? Why has my professional experience, as you mentioned, generally been a table of old wise men and women sort of guesstimating a price or using a sort of rudimentary cost-plus approach.

And most importantly, I think with everything that's going on around us, so many of the pricing approaches fail to take into account the individual customer, or they made it an unspoken assumption of homogeneity of the customer base. Or sort of an indifference. I don't care really who buys this good or service so long as they pay a certain price.

And I don't think that that's going to be a useful way of thinking about the world going forward. There's a whole host of tools at our disposal. Referred to generally as data analytics. And there's a whole host of new threats that one needs to be thoughtful about, particularly around internet-based price comparison. Browser-based automated discounting. And we could go on and on, we talk about it in the book. 

Put these two things together and you think to yourself, look, am I in the business of maximizing the revenue of any potential transaction in the moment, or am I actually in the business of cultivating an increasingly loyal customer base. Such that my enterprise value starts to gravitate towards sort of that have recurring revenue streams.

And this conversation is applicable for businesses, large and small. And we use a lot of examples in the book, anything from a sole proprietorship, maybe a hairstylist, all the way up to multinational corporations, airlines, things like that. 

Brian Ardinger: And I love that thought of moving from revenue, maximization to loyalty maximization. And a lot of that probably again, hasn't been really dealt with because of technology. And now we have some tools and data and that, that we didn't have at our fingertips to make some of those leaps that we can now. What do you think is holding people back from taking advantage of some of these technologies and actually going towards a more loyalty maximization model? 

Cactus Raazi: You know, in my survey of the landscape, I'm not necessarily aware of an impediment to use data in increasingly sophisticated ways. As we all know, there's so many off the shelf products. There are so many courses, everything from sort of how to use Excel on Coursera, all the way to, you know, a PhD in artificial intelligence or something along those lines at the other extreme. I feel that, particularly when it comes to pricing, just to not give you too general and answer, when it comes to pricing, I feel the fundamental question has yet to be asked, are we doing this correctly?

And have we really unpacked the assumptions of our approach to be thoughtful around whether this is the right approach and whether we should be using a different set of tools. You know, even industries that are renowned for their ability to differentiate with price something. We could use airlines as an example.

And I'm sure at maybe at one point in your career, you were probably some form of a frequent flyer. And I'm sure you would probably agree that while you were perfectly happy to pay different prices, based on various profiles and times of day. That that was not a price for you personally, it was a price meaning that if you were to log into a website, as a loyal customer and I were to log in to the same website you and I were to try and book the same thing, we wouldn't see a difference in price. 

We would see a difference in price on different days or, or, you know, you name it. There's a variety of obviously supply and demand techniques. And so right there you say, well, that's a sophisticated industry, but it hasn't really moved forward with thinking about the customer, rather than thinking about any customer who's willing to sit in the seat.

And that's really at the core of the suggestions in the book is to say that step one, start collecting data about your customers. Obviously in an appropriate fashion and in a transparent fashion, such that you can start to identify behaviors, objectives, or any other elements of the customer, which you can then correlate to the types of behaviors you'd like to see from your customer base.

And the book really exists at the level of strategy. And frankly, this conversation exists at the level of strategy. How should we be thinking about some of these questions and are there a new set of tools to be able to answer some really interesting questions around what the right price is, and right is defined as in my case, as maximizing loyalty. 

And also at the same time, there's this elephant in the room, which is the internet, and mobile commerce, and browser extensions, and couponificati...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with two innovators from Dole Packaged Foods, Dr. Lara Ramdin, Chief Innovation Officer and Barbara Guerpillon, Head of Ventures. We talk about Dole's new venture fund, its open innovation initiatives, and how it's tackling global issues from nutrition to sustainability. 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 Dole Packaged Foods' Dr. Lara Ramdin, Chief Innovation Officer and Barbara Guerpillon, Head of Ventures

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have some amazing guests. Today, we actually have two guests coming from all around the world. We have Dr. Lara Ramdin, the Chief Innovation Officer and Barbara Guerpillon, Head of Ventures at Dole Packaged Foods. So welcome to the show. 

Lara Ramdin: Thanks.

Barbara Guerpillon: Glad to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Excellent. Well, I am so excited to have you both on the show together. The two of you are at the forefront of Dole's transformation and focus on innovation. And so, we wanted to have you on the show to talk about some of the new initiatives that you unveiled in the recent months and why they're so important. How does Dole define innovation? 

Lara Ramdin: Innovation is, it's a very broad term, right? And it can often be overused in our case, it's at all touch points. So, from the farm to the fruit, to the product, to the way the consumer uses it, to the way the consumer disposes it. So, it's actually end to end, innovation can occur them, any of those points.

And that's obviously why we're here because we're trying to broaden our horizons in all of those aspects. It's time that we thought about Innovation beyond just a formulation and a pack. 

Barbara Guerpillon: It's also about innovation in ways of working and Lara and I is a very great example of how we are working on Innovation. It's just different approaches as well to solving problems. 

Brian Ardinger: So, let's talk a little bit about those different types of approaches. One of the things I wanted to talk about is you've unveiled this new Dole Promise. These are six promises that you're making to the world that by 2025 you're going to make some big changes and transformation. So, Lara do you want to talk a little bit about the Dole Promise and what it is all about? 

Lara Ramdin: What's really interesting about Dole and both Barbara and I are new to the company, right? So that's also new for Dole in terms of Innovation, having a Head of Ventures and the Head of Innovation, is that they sort of set their stool out and said, if we're really, really going to make a difference, where we're going to make a difference is by actually closing this nutrition gap, which we see happening all over the world and happening, not just in developing countries, but in developed countries.

And so, it's our mission to make nutrition accessible and affordable. And also, as part of this wider innovation agenda, try and get nutrition to people in different ways. Right? So that's the first thing. That's really the first big promise pillar. 

And then underneath that, we're really striving. For access to sustainable nutrition for 1 billion people. And then also we're looking at our current portfolio and saying, how can we make those better? And how can we take out processed sugar? And how can we take out the things that we know you don't need? Right. And how can we give you the things that we already make in this period school? So that's one big nutrition pillar, 

Brian Ardinger: Barbara, what are your thoughts?

Barbara Guerpillon: I'm specifically looking at reducing our carbon footprint. As Head of Venture, my role is to bring the outside in. Identify technology, startups, and entrepreneur we can work with. And if you look at the massive agenda on reducing carbon footprint, we know, we cannot do it all alone and we need to partner and we have innovators with new technology, and therefore reducing our carbon footprint, we'll start from, it will have to be a closed loop.

It will start from the farms, to our package product, to the way we are shipping the product to the way we are packing them. So, we also have a goal on a zero-footprint based plastic by 2025 in our world packaging, but it's not only on the packaging and so everywhere where there is today for based plastics. It also includes within our farm. So, there is a big interconnectivity between all our Dole Promises, which will be mutually beneficial. We are really looking forward to exploring those partnerships and those new developments with entrepreneurs. 

Lara Ramdin: There's a big recognition Brian that we want systemic change. And if we want systemic change, we can't do it on our own. Right. So actually, we're in this position, and I think Barbara alluded to earlier, because we want to innovate in the way we work. And actually, Dole's saying, hey guys, we can't do this on our own. Come help us. That's already really innovative for us. Right. And I think we are embracing open innovation in its truest form in that way. 

Brian Ardinger: And that leads to my next question. So, you were both new to Dole. I was going to ask, how are these initiatives different from the way Dole approached Innovation in the past? Obviously, you said it's much more open than before. Why do you think this is a different image for Dole and why are you going to go on this path? 

Barbara Guerpillon: I think I'm going to start because my answer is going to be way shorter than Lara's.  One, the Head of Venture and the Venturing Team is a new team, and it hasn't been done before. And I really, really focus on working with startups and young companies. So, the answer is quite easy because this did not exist before. It's a new initiative. It has been launched about a year ago. So that's a simple answer. 

Lara Ramdin: And then building on that. I would say that Dole has been in the past quite traditional about how it focused on Innovation. Right? So, it innovated on what it knew how to do already. And actually, we're expanding our portfolio beyond the canned Pineapple.  And so, we're saying, we want to go beyond that. We know fruit, we are the experts in food, but we want to get fruit and nutrition in fruit and vegetables and plants to people in different ways. How can we do that? 

If we don't know how to do it, let's go and find somebody that can, that's the other part of this sort of innovation continuum that I'm doing, is that person over there can do supplements, sell it. Cause we've just launched supplements. Let's go and work with them to launch fruit-based supplements, for example. So, I think that's why I'm saying it's really open innovation in its truest form.

Brian Ardinger:  That leads to my question, Barbara, about Dole Ventures and I believe you have a ne...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Adriana Cisneros Basulto, Founder of Maxwell. Maxwell was the winner of the IO2020 Get Started Showcase competition and maker of the employee benefit and work-life management software platform. Adriana and I talk about the changing world of work from flexible benefit options, to diversity and inclusion, as well as the impact COVID has had on accelerating these changes. 

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, pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Adriana Cisneros Basulto, Founder of Maxwell

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 Adriana Cisneros Basulto, founder of Maxwell. Welcome to the show. 

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Thank you. Thank you for having me. 

Brian Ardinger:  Adriana I'm excited to have you. Maxwell, you were the winner of the IO2020 Get Started Showcase competition that we had back in October. It seems like a lifetime ago, but we've been trying to figure out a time to get you on the show, to talk about what you're doing, what you're building, and really have a heart to heart with some of the things that you're seeing when it comes to the future of work. So, let's start by telling the Maxwell story. How did you conceive of this company and how did it get started?

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yeah, well, first and foremost, I'm still pinching myself from the win and yeah, I cannot believe that that was October, but I suppose in COVID time, everything just kind of flows at its own rate. I'm not going to say it was, you know, like a Eureka moment or something that all of a sudden just came to mind that this is what's going to be. It's really been an evolution.

And it has taken several years from sort of an idea into actually becoming what it is today. And it's probably going to continue to market. A lot of it was just, many founders, personal experience. As my life got just more complex, on the personal side, and by complex, I mean, just a very traditional path and the personal side, you know, like you, you get married, you decide to get a dog, you have a mortgage, that sort of thing. In terms of complexity, kids. At the same time, my career, and that of my spouse was also progressing and getting more complex and had more accountabilities.

And then we happened to both be very similar in terms of wanting to do a really good job in both fronts. So, we were always feeling spread thinly. So that was one aspect. And then the other aspect was the type of work that I did. So, my last corporate job was leading the efforts of inclusion and diversity for the largest private bank in the U S.

And one of the things that I remember vividly sitting down and listening to the results of Gallup, on one of their studies about women at work. And I mean, this is years ago, but the trend was that women were leaving the workplace. And one of the number one competitors was this aspect of how hard it was to manage work and life and keep it all together.

And that, that was the biggest competitor. And I was just like, oh my goodness, we're not coming up with better solutions is the same solutions that we had five years ago or before, like lots of things go through my mind. That was one moment there was like, there's got to be something better. So that was sort of the genesis of it, both from the personal side. And then also from a professional standpoint, me wanting to see more women stay in leadership positions because that's the work that I was doing. 

Brian Ardinger: So, talk a little bit about what Maxwell is and how are you tackling that problem? 

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yes. What I'd like to say is we make it easy for employers to support their teams. And to support them with benefits it's slash, support services that make it easy to manage work and life. Sometimes it's easier to understand when using an example. So, I'll try to do that. 

Let's say it's company, ABC company, ABC. They choose which of the services that we have on Maxwell already embedded in our mobile app to offer their employees and to fund. And then we do also something that we're testing right now. I'm curious to see how that evolves, but one of the things we're testing is the ability for employers to also integrate into Maxwell, other things that they're offering today, that don't require an additional subsidy from them. 

So maybe they already paid for an EPA program from an employee assistance program, so they can also show it on Maxwell. And then the employee now decides how much money they want to provide their employees to use on the services of Maxwell. 

Brian Ardinger: Got it. 

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: So then fast forward to now, you know, employees are onboarding into Maxwell. They can use their funds on those benefits, those support services that are going to be the most valuable for them. Maybe Tom, really what he struggles with is spending his weekends doing laundry. Yeah. He could use his, you know, the money that he got from his employer, on tackling laundry. So, he doesn't have to be doing that over the weekends. 

And maybe, you know, you have Kate, which laundry's not really an issue for her, or maybe that's, you know, she doesn't care for other people touching her laundry. She can use her funds on things that matter to her, like maybe healthy meals and getting support that way. So that's in a nutshell how it works. 

Brian Ardinger: I like the idea, and this and this movement that we're seeing towards how do you make things very customized for the employee. You know, it used to be where employee benefits, were you get your health care and, and maybe you get a couple of things else, but for the most part, it was here's your cookie cutter things that were available. But by services like Maxwell that allow the employer and the employee to find that right balance. What are you seeing when it comes to that? 

Adriana Cisneros Basulto: Yes. No, you're absolutely right. It's been, it's been, talked about for a long time on the HR space. How to really put the employee at the center of that. So providing employee centric experiences. But it really hadn't taken off. And I think we are at a moment in which this is actually going to happen, because now, well, a multitude of things are happening, but one of them is as HR teams are honestly trying to help their employees. One of the barriers that they're facing to do that, is that there is so much variety of needs. 

Like the example I gave was simple. Right. But like, how do you provide enough variety of support that is really going to meet the need of all of your employees? And actually, that is sometimes paralyzing them because they're like, well, you know, I could get this particular solution in house and use it here, but that's going to serve only my, you know, my working parents.

And that's going to...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Susan Lindner, cultural anthropologist, founder of Emerging Media, and author of the upcoming book, Innovation Storytellers. Susan, and I talk about the importance of storytelling to the new innovator and what companies can do to have their stories resonate and spread in today's changing media landscape. 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, pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Susan Lindner, Cultural Anthropologist, Founder of Emerging Media, and Author of Innovation Storytellers

Brian Ardinger: Welcome to another episode of Inside Outside Innovation. I'm your host Brian Ardinger. And as always, we have another amazing guest. We have Susan Lindner. She is a cultural anthropologist, disruptor and founder of Emerging Media, which is a brand marketing and PR agency. And we're very excited to have Susan on the show. Welcome. 

Susan Lindner: Thank you so much, Brian. 

Brian Ardinger: I am so excited to have you on the show. I want to get you on because a lot of your work is really focused around this concept of storytelling. And it's so important. And so maybe we'll start off with why is storytelling so important to innovators and entrepreneurs? 

Susan Lindner: It's so critical. And 20 years of working in tech and innovation has taught me this as the golden rule. Stanford has been very helpful to us. They have shown that a story and statistics together are 22 times more memorable than just statistics alone. And that is because the human brain is wired to receive story, not Excel spreadsheets. Not even bullet points.

So, it's critical. If you want someone to remember that fantastic innovation that you're pitching, that you actually wrap it in a story with a hero, with a plot, with a conclusion. That if you want funders, investors, stakeholders, to remember it, you had better wrap that incredible data, in a story that people can take with them and actually act on it.

Brian Ardinger: That makes perfect sense. And obviously we've seen a lot of companies that have done good at that. Telling stories that work. And others that have flamed out because they couldn't really communicate effectively with what they're doing. What's the process of developing a story? Especially at that early stage, when you're trying to get somebody to notice your new creation?

Susan Lindner: For Innovation storytelling, which is different than every other kind of storytelling, right? We're not talking about soap. Or maybe you're innovating soap, fantastic, give me a call, happy to help with a new, the next thing that will be soap. Great. But Innovation storytelling takes a different look. And so, I'm an anthropologist by training, but I was also a religion major in college. And I was fascinated by how the profits moved the word around the world.

How did they get the word to move? How did they get all the early adopters? How did they get people to convert in the midst of great danger and peril? Right? Every considerable, social, racial, economic, lions eating you alive. Who got these people to adopt an idea that was not even provable right, in the empirical sense?

And yet people did it. How did they do it? And so, I looked at the prophets, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad, Moses, and tried to create the framework to understand how do you move a message around the world? How did the prophets do it? And it turns out there's five clear steps that all of the profits employ. So, step number one is history.

You'll notice that Jesus didn't say that Judaism was wrong. Right. He certainly saw himself as a Jew called himself a rabbi. He was referred to as a rabbi, as a teacher. So, you take, what is historical about what came before us and say, this is the foundation of what the story is built upon. We all come from a common shared history.

That makes us a group, right. That makes us a try step one. It is the same reason why we employ the term email to describe transatlantic electronic correspondence that goes through a tube under an ocean and arrives in my computer. Right? It's why we call it an inbox. Cause there used to be one sitting on your desk.

It's why we use the save icon. Or it used to be a floppy disk. My kids have never seen a floppy desk. They don't even know what it is. I was cleaning out my house actually, found a floppy disk and showed it to my son. Twentytwo years old, goes to the Rochester Institute of Technology and looks at me and said, why did you 3d print a copy of the save icon from work? Because that's what I'm doing in my spare time, Brian. I'm printing a copy of the save icon. 

Brian Ardinger: You can bring those back along with the AOL CDs. 

Susan Lindner: Which, you know, some archeologist is going to have to explain one day. So, step one is the history, right? It makes it really easy to understand where we all came from. Cause that's how we transitioned into change.

Step two, what are our values and our purpose? So, the prophets were really good about describing the shared values, not just the place we come from, but the value surrounding that Innovation and our purpose. What is it that's really driving us today? That may be a little bit different than what was driving us historically.

So, you know, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. Could be one of those, like it's always been done that way. That's one of those things. So, as we shift out from what was to what could be, what are the values and the purpose. Can we get that really clear for the listener? Step three is the message, right? This is when we burn all boats.

This is when we say we're taking what works and we're leaving what doesn't. So, we're going from an eye for an eye to turn the other cheek. That's the shift we're making. And the next is finding those early adopters. So, we know that we only need about 13.3% of the market, right? Our innovators and our early adopters who are going to go forward and go, I'm going to take a risk.

I'm going to take a chance on this Innovation. So, who are those people who now that we have the message, will carry it forward? And it's not always the cheerleader in the room. In fact, better when it's the biggest skeptic. I said, gosh, I never thought that could be, but now I'm standing outside of the Apple store for three days before the iPhone comes out.

And the last is viral language. Step five is using viral language. So, we really want to look at the things that you learned in English class. Alliteration, tagline designer. We want to think about rhetoric that actually moves people. And does it incorporate emotion? We know that the way a story sticks is actually by activating brain chemicals, adrenaline, dopamine, serotonin, fear, anger, lust. Name all of the seven deadly sins. Right? 

If we can actually generate emotion, the story now has a biological marker, a physiological marker that says it's in my body and I can take it with me. And that's how stories are powerful. I was just giving a talk and I was asking people to remember the first time the...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Hege Barnes, Director of Americas at Innovation Norway. Hege and I talk about the new innovations in green tech, clean tech and electric vehicles, as well as how Norway is working with startups to help grow and support innovation, both inside Norway and around the world. 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 Hege Barnes, Director of Americas at Innovation Norway

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 Hege Barnes. She's the Regional Director for Americas at Innovation Norway. Welcome Hege. 

Hege Barnes: Thank you. I'm excited to be here. 

Brian Ardinger: Hey, we're excited to have you as well. We got connected after the Will Ferrell Superbowl ad for GM, where Will declared that he was coming after Norway. And so, we wanted to set the record straight and go straight to the source and see what's actually happening when it comes to the world of Innovation in Norway. So, what is Innovation Norway? 

Hege Barnes: Yeah, the whole EV campaign with Will Ferrell was sort of funny though. And we were very, very happy to tag along in that and sort of play along and have some fun. But it is actually true the way that we develop the country and the green innovations, our slogan is Powered by Nature. You that's how we live and that's how we develop our destination.

But Innovation Norway. Yeah. It's the government entity for trade and industry. So, we are sort of the trade council Invest in Norway. We are the tourist boards and the development agency for Norway. We help companies from birth to success, the growth, the global success. So, we have offices all over Norway and in 30 countries I think, all over the world. We work very efficiently within the unique sort of competence areas that we have in Norway, where we see that we are stronger than have competitive advantages.

And then we matched that with the opportunity areas in the markets we are in. So, I'm representing America. Ee look at what's happening in the US, Canada, and Brazil in particular. Looking at all the developments and matching that with what companies and where we can compete and use our resources efficiently.

Brian Ardinger: That makes a lot of sense. And obviously, probably a lot of us aren't familiar with everything that's going on within Norway, where you hear of, you know, green tech and clean tech and a lot around the electric vehicles. I think you're the largest market share of electric vehicles in the world. And I believe you're also expanding into other areas like the first, fully electric autonomous container ship. So, what's happening in Norway that makes it this destination or a testination for some of the new technologies when it comes to green and cleantech. 

Hege Barnes: Based on again, what I said, it it's like this powered by nature sort of mentality that we have after we discovered oil and became this big offshore industry. We are now saying that we need to move beyond that. We need to transition from an industry heavily dependent on fossil fuel into new green technologies, into new greener solutions. So, in addition to the whole offshore industry sort of technology and deep insights that we have, we also always been a seafaring nation and shipbuilding nation.

So, the whole Maritime’s there, the whole Innovation above the water and underwater has been aquaculture has been sort of core of who Norway is and our industry and the development that we've had. We live in a big country with a lot of space, but we had to innovate to sort of survive. 

And we built up the industry and we built our communities, basically the whole destination development over the last few years with this, the sort of as a fundament and we are a destination or a country that's full of smart engineers, you know. Engineers that are used to working in even harsh conditions, you know, half the country's above the Arctic circle.

We're working out deep into the ocean areas and underwater and cold-water temperatures. And we have the four, really four distinct seasons. We're used to working in tough conditions. And with this sort of engineering mentality, we have now shifted from sort of traditional industries into new technologies. New green technologies and solutions, smart solutions across sectors and industry as well.

And this has been driven a lot by the government. A lot of this is mandated by the government, by people themselves. People want a greener development. They want a sustainable development of our economy, our society, and our industries. So when they met, so this whole, the government policies meeting the locals demands and what has led to the Innovation in certain areas that has actually been very successful for us.

Brian Ardinger: Can you talk a little bit about some of the programs that have helped businesses or help entrepreneurs set up and, or get moving when it comes to this? What are some of the things that the Innovation Norway actually does? 

Hege Barnes: We can help companies. We have offices in all the different regions in Norway.  So, we can help companies fund and launch their programs. But we also build communities. We build ecosystems so we can fund clusters and networks and sort of smart Innovation groups, and from a research stage to actual commercialization stage. And these sort of clusters, they learn from each other. They learn and grow together. And we can fund this environment and help sort of support this environment.

We can also add competencies. You know, we have a qualified staff that can help companies scale and grow together with the industry. And this is probably the, the success of the model is to trust that we have in society. So, we work a lot with government and private industry. And private industry and government together actually makes things happen. And it makes it happen in a speedier fashion than a lot of other countries like here in the U S.

Brian Ardinger: So, are most of your programs focused on helping Norwegian companies get off the ground and move to the United States and get market share and that? Or are you working with companies like in other countries that want to work and build things in Norway? 

Hege Barnes: So, both, you know, we want this to help our smart sort of, the companies that comes from a green shipping cluster, you know, we see that they can win big contracts abroad. We work with the offshore wind development on the Eas...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Kathy Hannun, co-founder of Dandelion Energy, a Google X spin out and largest geothermal home energy company. Kathleen and I talk about the trends in the clean energy space and her experiences of launching a successful startup out of Alphabet's Google X Lab. 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, pioneering businesses. It's time to get started.

Interview Transcript with Kathy Hannun, Co-founder of Dandelion Energy

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 Kathy Hannun. She is the co-founder of Dandelion, a Google X spin-out and the largest geothermal home energy company. Welcome. 

Kathy Hannun: Thanks so much for having me. 

Brian Ardinger: Kathy, I'm excited to have you on. As a lot of our listeners know, we try to bring on the people that can give us insight into new trends and new perspectives on innovation, but also people who can bring us insights and perspectives on the process of innovation. And I thought you could do a great job of both. So, what is Dandelion? 

Kathy Hannun: So, Dandelion is a home geothermal company. What that means is we take a homeowner's furnace or boiler out of their home. And we replace it with a geothermal heating and cooling system. So, this is a heat pump that goes where the furnace or boiler used to be, connected to what are called ground loops, which are plastic pipes buried under the homeowner's yard.

And these ground loops are exchanging heat with the yard. So, in the winter they're drawing heat into the house, that's then processed through the heat pump to boost the temperature. And then in the summer, the whole thing works in reverse. We're actually taking heat out of the house, much like an air conditioner does and putting it into the ground.

Brian Ardinger: One of the interesting things about this company, you've just raised a $30 million funding round with Breakthrough Energy Ventures. And you're taking what used to be very much a niche luxury and trying to bring it into the mainstream technology. So how did Dandelion get started? How did it come to be?

Kathy Hannun: You're exactly right. Dandelion is really trying to take what has traditionally been a very expensive niche product, geothermal heating and cooling and making it mainstream. So, to be clear, like we did not invent geothermal heating and cooling. This has existed for decades. It's very popular in Sweden, but what we're trying to do is just make it really common. You know, much more common in this country. 

And the way we got started was I was actually working as a rap evaluator at Google's X Lab. So, this is the part of Google that comes up with like the self-driving car balloon internet, or, you know, a lot of the futuristic moonshot technologies. And I was looking for a great opportunity to do something impactful in energy. Specifically, I wanted to find an opportunity to really grow clean energy and heating and cooling buildings really stood out to me because unlike a lot of other consumer energy sectors like cars or even electricity, there really isn't nearly as much activity in trying to figure out how to make buildings that use more clean energy. Right? 

When we looked at the different solutions that you could bring to the problem heat pumps stood out so clearly. Like here's this technology that already exists. It's proven to work. It's like geothermal heat pumps are the most efficient possible way to heat and cool your home. So of course, then the next question is, well, if they're so good, why is no one using them? Right. And that was because they were too expensive. 

And so, as we studied what made them expensive, we realized a lot of the reasons they were super expensive weren't fundamental reasons. They were all just either a function of the way the industry was set up or the technologies that were being used at that time. And we thought, you know, we could really make a difference here. 

Brian Ardinger: So, what do you see as the path to mass adoption compared to other cleantech types of technologies like solar out there?

Kathy Hannun: I think what we'll see with heat pumps is going to be very similar to what we've seen with solar over the past 15 to 20 years. We're just in the early innings with heat pumps and solar as well, along the way. But I think in the same way that, you know, maybe 15 years ago, solar was a very niche technology where either the very wealthy or the very committed, like hobbyist could get it.

But for the typical homeowner, it wasn't something they have necessarily heard of or would know anyone who had. And then today you literally cannot go to a neighborhood and not see solar on somebody's house. I think, I think that is what is going to happen over the next decade with heat pumps. 

Brian Ardinger: So, from a business perspective, how are you seeing the geothermal space playing out? What makes it different? What makes it exciting? And, and what are some of the challenges that you're seeing? 

Kathy Hannun: I think one of the things that certainly differentiates geothermal is you have to put those ground loops under the yard. So, one of the big obstacles we identified at the very beginning was that there isn't really like drilling equipment that's purpose built for the suburban home, right? There's like no other thing you have to do in a suburban yard that involves drilling hundreds of feet into the earth. And so that was one of the first problems that we really explored at X. And then we've continued to develop as an independent startup.

We've created a set of drilling equipment, that's purpose-built for this exact industry. So, you know, we thought about what would your drilling equipment look like if it was designed to install ground loops in suburban yards? So, we wanted to make sure it could fit in small yards. We wanted to make sure it was very clean because homeowners don't like a lot of disturbances in their yard. We wanted to make sure it was cost effective so we could offer a good price to customers. 

So that's been one sort of major pillar of what we've been doing, but there have been others as well. We had to look into really mainstreaming the heat pump and creating a product that was scalable. We had to look into how do we provide the right financing tools to customers like the solar industry has done, so that you don't have to pay for everything upfront, but you can actually pay over time as you're saving money.

Brian Ardinger: So, let's go back to the Google X experience. A lot of corporate accelerators out there, they oftentimes take on that Horizon One or Horizon Two types of innovations, you know, things that are closer to the core or slightly adjacent to the core. Google X is known for taking, like you said, moonshots. Can you talk a little bit about the Google X experience? What's it like, how do you g...

On this week's episode of Inside Outside Innovation, we sit down with Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust and Get Results Faster. This is part of our IO Live was recorded in front of the live audience. And Stefano and I talk about what it takes to align teams, build trust, and get better results. 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 Stefano Mastrogiacomo, Author of High Impact Tools for Teams

Brian Ardinger:  Welcome to our IO Live event. I'm your host, Brian Ardinger. As always, we have another amazing guest. This is our first Inside Outside Innovation podcast of 2021, that we're doing live. We're super excited to have a special guest here. Stefano Mastrogiacomo is the author of High Impact Tools for Teams: Five Tools to Align Team Members, Build Trust, and Get Results Fast. Welcome Stefano to the show. 

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Thank you for inviting me. It's an honor and hello to all of our listeners and viewers. 

Brian Ardinger: I'm excited to have you on here. I think you wanted to show some slides and give the audience a little bit of background on the book and then we'll get into a Q and A session. 

Stefano Mastrogiacomo: Yes, of course. Thank you. So, I'm going to share the screen right now. This book, High Impact Tools for Teams, fully integrates with the Strategizer series. And as you know, the Strategizer series proposes amazing tools to help team innovate and deliver creative products and services. In this journey, in delivering innovation, I started working with teams in 2000.

So as a project manager, I've been using many of these tools, starting from delivering a banking application for large teams. We thought that there was a gap to be covered, which is the human side of innovation journeys. And mostly what I'm talking about here is how can we help cross-functional teamwork do better. 

In particular, make us more successful team members, because these are journeys in very difficult conditions. A lot of uncertainty. Things keep changing all the time. And so the idea was how to help us become more successful team members and more successful project managers, knowing that there is real room for improvement. This was a study entitled we waste a lot of time at work. Where they reported that 50% of meetings are considered unproductive and a pure waste of time.

And that was true before the pandemic. I don't know about you, but at least for me, I've participated in numerous Zoom meetings now, where actually I felt that that statistic could be even worse when the meeting isn't structured, unfocused, and on top of that, we have the barrier of distance, and all the constraints of these new communication channels.

So, we published that book. It's been a long journey, been like 15 years in the making. Where we designed, experimented, draw into many various disciplines like psycholinguistics, evolutionary anthropology, things that could help us design tools that help create better alignment in the team. As things keep changing all the time, build more trust and psychological safety. And we know the, I'll come back on that later, the impact of trust, the direct impact of trust, on the capacity to innovate in a team, and in more generally, how to communicate better. 

So, this was prior to the pandemic. You know how important it is for us, that things are visually shared by the team. That's why we designed these canvases. And that's how we used to work prior to the pandemic. And if you allow me and let me share you a workshop that took place last week. Same setting, but this time online having in parallel Zoom and digital whiteboard. 

So, what you see here is 110 agile professionals together. Establishing a team contract. You have 110 agile professionals arguing and exchanging, brainstorming on rules of the game to hold more productive meetings, using one of the templates that is presented in the book, namely the Team Contract. So that tool, called the Team Contract, is a tool designed to help teams very quickly define and agree together on team rules and behaviors.

Why do we believe this is important, but first of all, let me show you an example of how it works. So, the idea is we sit together in front of that poster, whether it's in the same room or on a digital whiteboard. This is a simplified version of a real Team Contract. And that's where every team member, before we enter the journey, especially if we are a newly created team or if the project is very different from what we're used to do. The idea is let's sit together and respond to these two questions.

One. What are the rules and behaviors that we want to abide by in our team during that journey? And as individuals, do we have preferences to work in a certain way. I mean, we all have maybe certain preferences, so let's put it that, all these things out there, and you can see here, some of the examples of what people put on these team contracts. 

It changes a lot the fact that these are said, and shared in the beginning versus not doing it, and keeping all this in our mind. Presupposing that the other think the same thing we do. That actually is a potential source of conflict. As you know, given the pace at which innovation journeys take place. 

So, this is a very simple example. A team contract conversation typically lasts between 20 minutes to one hour, depending on the complexity of the rules the team wants to put in place. And the rules we agree are in the center. And also, we can define things that we don't want to see in the team. For example, here, not apologizing, if not attending, to give a very simple example.

Now that has implications, that very fact of making the rules of the game visible and transparent by everybody in terms of psychological safety. As we know how to position that increases our confidence that we know on which rule we will play. And psychological safety, I'm quoting here at the amazing work of Amy Edmondson is the belief, that the team is a safe place for me, for interpersonal risk-taking, that I will not be punished, humiliated if I speak up.

And that is crucial for innovation journey, because I guess one of our worst enemies in innovation journeys is silence. When we don't feel confident enough to share our ideas with the rest of the team, because that might backfire on us. So very simple poster, but with the domino effect of important consequences, for the later unfolding of the innovation project. 

Another tool, for example, very quickly here presented in the book is called the Team Alignment Map. And this is a co-planning tool. This tool is as information keeps changing all the time. The idea was to have a very simple poster on which we can align frequently whenever we actually needed. But especially in the beginning of a project, where the level of alignment, the need of alignment is the highest because we have all different views.

So that poster, what's new with that poster is that we plan together. It's no longer a ping pong mechanism. We're sitting together and we talk about each other's role and negotiate a few...