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Internships and Reverse Mentoring

Summer is long over and now we are getting into the fall. This time of year always makes me look back on the summer internships. I’m a big believer in “internships” as a way for people to “learn”. Each summer, we bring in interns across a wide range of disciplines: technical, legal, marketing and this year social media.

This years interns were impressive.

Over the years – I use interns to be my pulse on what is happening in the education system. In my previous role, I would select two and have them stay at my house. For their internship, they would report to someone else. At night – it was the barrage of constant questions. Why must we do something a certain way? Why aren’t we doing this?

Most people think I’m nuts for even doing this. I learn so much. It’s a process I call “reverse mentoring”

And what did I learn??

While there have always been over-achievers,  the “mass” of the students are not being prepared for what I call the innovation or creative economy.

The world is shifting from the information/knowledge economy to the innovation/creative economy. Its about have a workforce that can “invent” solutions to the worlds problems then having the other people “manufacture” what they invent.

To be successful in the innovation economy, students must have:

* Critical thinking skills

* Problem solving experiences

* Entreprenurship / Instrapraneurship skills

* Have confidence …

* Understand the process to create and idea and then take it forward through execution

So how do we give future generations that experiences they need?

In my mind, we need to raise the visibility and prestige for our top academic students to the same level we give athletes. One person is doing that is Dean Kamen, Founder of FirstRobotics  whose missions is:

.. to inspire young people to be science and technology leaders, by engaging them in exciting mentor-based programs that build science, engineering and technology skills, that inspire innovation, and that foster well-rounded life capabilities including self-confidence, communication, and leadership.

Dean and I have a met a few times at different events and I can tell you he is passionate about giving every kid the experience and opportunity to discover their passion.

Guests: Peter Lierni and Mark Varricchione are co-founders from STEMlete

Peter Lierni and Mark Varricchione are co-founders from STEMlete (a play on the word “athlete”) who saw that there were a number of online communities for the self-promotion of student athletes seeking to: exhibit their athletic excellence; share their knowledge; improve their performance; get recognized; establish a following; and be recruited and succeed; however, there was nothing analogous for those individuals who have a passion and brilliance in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM).

They are a on a mission to change the focus; build a new kind of community; identify the world’s most promising STEM talent; and enable innovation by providing an online platform with an unprecedented collection of free capabilities to enable “STEMletes” to globally connect; communicate; collaborate; and create. In particular, they hope to give academia, industry, and others globally the opportunity to get an early line-of-sight into the world’s most promising STEM talent.

You can connect with them at STEMlete.org

Brain Hack/Killer Question

How will you identify and locate customers in five years?

Every hot trend reaches a point I like to call the “Uncle Larry moment.” When one of your older relatives announces he’s taken up something that had seem...

What goes into creating an idea that can impact 100’s of million of people?

If I polled most people they would say it’s the “idea”. The core of the “idea” is table stakes but it does not guarantee success. Others would say PR and marketing. While PR and marketing are important – it does not guarantee success.

So what are we missing?

I have a saying I use:

” ..the different between a good innovation and great innovation is the timing”

In most cases you can’t control – much less predict — timing. So what do I mean by “timing”?

* Market conditions

* Customer readiness

* Channel readiness

* Social expectations (changes)

* Competitive changes

* Government / regulatory

So what can you do to make sure the timing is right ?

Guest: Bill Geiser on wearables and smart watches

Bill Geiser is a smartwatch pioneer with 20+ years focus on wearables & smartwatch innovation. He is a serial entrepreneur / intrapreneur with a talent for identifying lucrative, market opportunities and the ability to harvest them evidenced by the fact that he founded two technology start ups acquired by publicly-traded firms.

His most recent company he founded was Meta Watch –  a smartwatch technology and services company with offices in Espoo, Finland & Dallas, Texas. Formed in August 2011 via spin off from the Fossil Group, Inc., the Meta Watch management team brought together over a decade of experience helping companies like Fossil, Microsoft, Palm, Sony Ericsson, adidas and others enter the smartwatch category.

You follow Bill on LinkedIn

Brain Hack/Killer Question

What industries are analogous to ours, and what can we learn from them?

No matter what business we are in, we are all fighting essentially the same fight – no matter the industy. We are all designing a product that a customer will prefer over that of our competitor.

To do this, don’t just look to other widget makers to get a sense of how you are faring in the global business space. Look at other businesses & industries that have similar key elements in common with you.

I find the airline industry endlessly fascinating. It, like the tech industry, has gradually found ways to make its core products less expensive and more accessible to the general public. In return, their customers have had to accept a vast reduction in services and expectations. It’s an interesting seesaw between what the customer truly wants and what they are willing to give up in order to get it. In the center are the core essentials: a safe, convenient flight at a low fare. Everything else falls away in relevance as long as the core criteria are met.

What are the fundamentals that have to be in place in order to maintain an ongoing and happy relationship between you and your customer?

Suppose you were the head of operations at a megachurch like Chicago’s Willow Creek or Joel Osteen’s church in Houston. Joel Osteen’s church seats almost 16,000 people, and runs four worship services plus various meeting groups every Sunday, which means that there are up to 64,000 people. High odds of getting into fender-benders, gridlock, and potentially dangerous traffic in the church’s parking lot increases as one congregation departs and the next one arrives.

So what do you do?  Where do you go to learn the mechanics of moving that number of vehicles, and that number of human beings, in an efficient and safe manner?

You go to the Disney Academy at Disney World.  Sixty years of crowd management has made Disney operations the undisputed champion of event control and coordination. By working with Disney, these churches could learn a few things about integrating their system of traffic flow and parking.  Fender-benders would go down, customer satisfaction would go up,

Innovation Needs Inspiration

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Every August, I host an annual event for about 600 people, discussing tech and innovation. This event has been going on for more than decade and I’ve been hosting it 4 years now. The challenge is how do you keep an event – or any creative endeavor fresh and interesting??

One common approach is to go out and “copy” what others are doing such as “make it just be like TED”. I’ve been going to the main TED event for years and even they are challenged to change it up. Repetition is boring.

The world changes and your ideas/innovations need to change with it. We all get caught in the rut and we tell ourselves it worked for us “last time” it will work for us next time. Experience is not always a good thing. That is until it doesn’t work. Then what?

How do you push yourself to constantly be looking for ideas?

In my personal example, every two to three years, I go on a month-long “trend safari” in search of inspiration. I typically pick 3 to 4 events that are outside of my industry with the objective of coming back and share what inspired me.

Some events I’ve gone to …

* Milan Furniture Fair (April)

* London Design Festival (Sept)

* Paris Fashion Week

* TED (March – Vancouver)

* Detroit Auto Show

* Maker Faire (May in San Francisco)

* Comic-con .. (july – San Diego)

Now that I’ve been talking about it,  I think its time to put together another on one again! I’ve always enjoyed it more when a few people are with me. Maybe I should setup a “trend safari” for a group. What do you think? Do you want to go with me?

Guest: Noah Scalin

Noah Scalin is an artist and activist. He founded the art & consulting firm Another Limited Rebellion in 2001 with the idea that he could make a living doing what he enjoyed and effect positive change in the world. He has authored five books on design and creativity and traveled the world bringing his message of creative potential and design activism to everyone from incarcerated teenagers to Fortune 500 executives. Noah’s artwork is collected internationally and has been exhibited in numerous museums and galleries, including the Mütter Museum in Philadelphia, the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago, and Krause Gallery in NYC. His most recent book Skull-A-Day collects the work of his Webby Award winning yearlong daily art project of the same name.

Brain Hack/Killer Questions

What are your unshakable beliefs about what your customers want?

One thing is to know what your customers want to do, another is to understand how they intend to get it done. It’s easy to look at their goals and tell yourself that your product will match their needs. Most organizations make major assumptions about what the customers want … they become “unshakable beliefs”. Competing companies can have the same “unshakable beliefs” but radically different strategies about how to achieve them.

Example — Airbus and Boeing.

Both companies brought new long-range aircraft to market at more or less the same time. However, their respective offerings, the A380 and the 787 Dreamliner reflect radically different ideas of how airlines will meet the needs and desires of their passengers.

Same objectives: Both companies understand the bottom line in their industry, getting CASM—cost per available seat mile—as low as possible. Both claim that their aircrafts are highly fuel-efficient. Each also uses radically new technologies. The 787 is made of lightweight and high-durability materials The A380 boasts new integrated a...

Sharing is Critical for Innovation

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I regularly get emails from innovators looking for advice or feedback on an idea and most are very appreciative. Some of those have resulted in major new products – and a few cases — a surprise of stock windfall since the start-up couldn’t afford to pay me.

Why would I be willing to do this? It’s part of “sharing” which I think is critical to the innovation success.

My first mentor taught me to “give away more than you take” because it’s the right thing to do and you build up a relationship you can call on when you need help.

I was immersed in this culture when I went to Silicon Valley the first time in early 1984. It’s the way things operate in the valley. People will answer your questions, give you access to the contacts, make introductions and provide you advice and feedback on whatever you’re working on. Without the expectation of getting anything back – within reason.  If you’re asking for ongoing extensive help and advice, then you should be willing to either pay for it or offer equity as a way to compensate.

Sharing is critical to building an ecosystem that helps innovators be successful. Let’s face it – its lonely out here as an innovator. It’s only through sharing and support that any of us are successful. It’s that one person who gave us that one piece of advice or introduced us to someone who turned into a great customer or the introduction to the VC that funded our start-up.

Special Guest: Bryan Kramer – author of Shareology

Bryan Kramer is one of the world’s foremost leaders in the art and science of sharing, and has been credited with instigating the #H2H human business movement in marketing and social. With over 300K social fans and followers, and an intimate understanding of the intricacies and interworking of both social technologies and social behaviors, Bryan is both a practitioner and authority on the subject.

In January 2014, Bryan’s first book “There is No B2B or B2C: It’s Human to Human #H2H” rose to the #1 top selling spot in Business Books on Amazon in its first week. In January 2015, #H2H was named as the number 1 buzzword for 2015 by The Writer. His second title, “Shareology: How Sharing is Powering the Human Economy”, published by Morgan James Publishing was released in July 2015.

Blogs at bryankramer.com

Brain Hack/Killer Question

Who is the source for your innovations? Where else could this be done?

What is your organization’s philosophy about innovation? Do you keep everything in-house, or do you outsource as needed? There are two schools of thoughts on this. By keeping the innovation process in-house, a company can build a sense of continuity and cohesion that links the entire family of products together in a satisfying way. Or you can outsource as needed, hiring talent for specific products and moving on once that product is complete. Neither is right or wrong; the more important point is to have a rationale for whichever strategy you choose, and to extract the most value from it.

Herman Miller: Outsourcing Innovation

Look at a company like Herman Miller. Their Aeron chair is an iconic design for the technological age, but it wasn’t designed internally. Instead, Herman Miller outsourced the innovation to leading designers that have their own firms. The famous husband-and-wife team Charles and Ray Eames designed the classic 1950s Eames chair the same way. The point is that Herman Miller knows what their strengt...

When I look back over my career and reflect about all of the people I’ve crossed paths with such as former bosses, former team members and former members of my innovation teams — the one of the key characteristics was breadth and depth of the “diversity”. Now you may be thinking I’m talking about the HR definition of diversity. In this case, I’m talking about much more.

One of the challenges for an innovation leader is to get his team to share their opinions, inputs and ideas so that they can be considered. However, most leaders hire people like themselves. Same education. Same economic background. Same interests. Same biases. To break that trend and to create more productive teams, leaders need to break the habit of hiring people “like us”.

So what are the different “traits” of diversity that you should recruit for?

* Gender

* Ethnicity

* Age – Avoid what is becoming the Silicon Valley boas against anyone older than 35.

* Education – Do they really need a college degree?

* Relevant Experience – Mix long experience with no experience

* Economic upbringing – Did you come from a family with money? Hire someone who didn’t come from money.

* Nationality

* Hobbies/interests outside of the job – Look for the closet creative such as a musician or photographer.

* Introvert and extrovert

All of these traits have an impact on how you look at ideas and innovations . The better teams have as diverse a team as possible so that views, opinions and biases are all put on the table when discussing a new idea.

If you avoid diversity, the “homogeneous” team will look at a new idea through a very narrow lens and view themselves as a proxy for the customer.

Guest: Tara Roehl – Speech Language Pathologist on Neural Diversity

Tara Roehl is a nationally certified speech-language pathologist. She owns Speechy Keen Speech Therapy, a telepractice-based private practice in Colorado focusing on the social/pragmatic and executive functioning needs of students with ADHD, High Functioning Autism and related disorders. She speaks across the nation at national and state conventions, medical conferences and local groups for parents and professionals. Her topics include executive functioning, telepractice therapy interventions and the integration of the iPad with gamification theory in therapy.

Topic: Neural Diversity (sometimes referred to as Neurodiversity) describes those in the population who have a different thinking process than those who are neurotypical. By using a diversity hiring effort around the way people think, an organization can greatly improve their creative and innovation output and impact.

Killer Question/Mind Hack

What is surprisingly inconvenient about my product??

The designers and engineers who worked at HP face many challenges in getting their ideas signed off on. It’s a long process from an idea to a finished prototype. Before any product can hit the market, it faces one final test. I take the prototype home, give it to my wife, and say, “Tell me what you think.” Now, my wife is an extremely smart and focused individual, but she is emphatically not a techie. She doesn’t care how a gadget works; she just wants it to work.

Her lack of specialized knowledge has been hugely valuable to me over the years. If I test a new product, I can troubleshoot it almost without thinking. I might not even notice a glitch that could cause major hassles for an end consumer because the fix is second-nature to me. On the other hand, if my wife can’t get a product to work, the first thing she does is call me up and yell at me, which is a great incentive to get our products as flawless as possible.

It is always the start that requires the greatest effort. ~ J.C. Penney

Many believe we are facing one of our largest and most important challenges – the education system. We are transitioning from an information and knowledge economy to that of the creative and innovation economy which requires a different skill set. Many are attacking the problem but is it enough?

Sir Ken Robinson’s book, “Creative School” focuses on how to transform the nation’s troubled educational system.

Guest: Paul Zane Pilzer

Paul is an American economist, New York Times best-selling author, and social entrepreneur. He has written 11 books and is the founder of six companies, and has been profiled in more than 100 publications including on the front page of The Wall Street Journal.

His latest business is Zaniac – a place where kids K through 8 come to dig deeper in to STEM (science, technology, engineering and math). Some refer to it as Disneyland for geeks. The results for the kids who attend are impressive.

Contact Paul Zane Pilzer at his website.

Killer Question/Mind Hack

What are the unanticipated uses of my product??

Not all interesting discoveries have an obvious application. If you believe you have something, but you’re not sure what exactly it’s going to be good for, don’t give up.

Many innovations languished in labs for years until they were matched to a product. Such as:

* Silly Putty was invented during WWII as a failed experiment when trying to find a replacement for rubber.

* Teflon was invented in 1938, but it didn’t coat its first pan till 1954.

* The Post-it note was built on the back of some not-very-good glue. Its inventor believed it might have value but it took him five years to get any support for the concept, or find a potentially profitable use for it.

* HP had a breakthrough with a super-accurate thermometer that was created in the HP Labs. Despite its accuracy, there was no clear use for the device until it was used to measure fluctuations in ocean temperature. The resulting data is a key component in ongoing discoveries about the rising temperatures in the oceans.

If an idea is new, interesting, and has unique properties, you will find a use for it, along with customers who will want to buy the end product. Have patience; it can take a while before the customer need emerges.

So ask yourself …

* Do you have customers who can benefit from the unanticipated uses of a product? How could you identify a potential group of such customers?

* What’s the most unusual way you’ve ever seen your product utilized?

* How could you encourage other users to find out about the unanticipated uses of your products or services?

“You were born to win, but to be a winner, you must plan to win, prepare to win, and expect to win.” ~ Zig Zigler

Some believe that innovation is not something that you can manage much less measure. I don’t agree. Over the years, those of us in the innovation space have been looking for ways to understand the impact of our decisions on our respective organizations.

Guest: Steven Vannelli, Managing Director of GaveKal Capital

He oversees index creation. investment strategy, asset allocation, security selection and management of the investment team. His work is the core of GaveKal’s proprietary security selection models and indexes which are based on a novel approach to accounting for intangible capital.

Contact: GaveKal Capital website

Main points …

* There exists anomaly in the stock markets whereby companies successfully implementing an innovation strategy, over time, experience excess stock returns. In other words, companies employing an innovation strategy consistently exceed investors’ expectations and this is reflected in the stock price.

* Current accounting standards are an antiquated framework for evaluating highly innovative companies. They were developed in an industrial era where companies accumulated capital by buying it from other people.

* Highly innovative companies build their own capital, and that activity is poorly captured in current accounting conventions.

* Since 1974, the governing accounting body (FASB) has mandated that companies expense knowledge investments. This is ironic given this was 3 years after Intel released the 4004, the first commercially available semiconductor, launching us into the digital age.

* Accounting standards are a medium of communication between a company and its shareholders. When they distort or eliminate information relevant to investors, investors can make mistakes, resulting in highly innovative companies experiencing a potentially higher cost of capital and reduced access to capital.

* Evidence suggests that companies that choose to pursue an innovation strategy—rather than a mimicking strategy—experience more rapid sales growth, greater market share growth, less earnings variability, less stock price variability and greater long-term capital gains.

What’s the history of research in this space?

* Baruch Lev began the body of research in 1993 by questioning the validity of the FASB decision compelling companies to expense innovation spending. By 2005, he offered the idea that all innovation spending wasn’t the same and some companies pursue and innovation strategy while other follow a mimicking strategy.

* While others may recognize the accounting conflict, we are the only firm that has a proprietary model to incorporate corporate knowledge investments into an accounting framework.

* We use this accounting framework and some basic screening criteria to identify the companies in the global developed and emerging stock market that are successfully employing an innovation strategy.

What’s the time window for this increased performance?

* The academic literature suggests that there is a five year window of time after knowledge investments are made where companies experience excess returns.

Which companies make the cut and which do not?

* We use our knowledge adjusted framework here. We begin by transforming the financial history of over 3,000 companies into a knowledge-adjusted financial history.

* Next we apply a set of screening criteria focusing on a few types of variables. We are looking for companies that invest at least 5% of sale in intellectual property and where at least 5% of their assets are represented by intellectual property. We also consider profit margins, profitability and financial leverage.

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the conditions that surround him… The unreasonable man adapts surrounding conditions to himself… All progress depends on the unreasonable man.” George Bernard Shaw

This weeks show was broadcast live from the Unreasonable Institute in Boulder, Colorado. The mission of Unreasonable is:

… gets entrepreneurs what they need to scale solutions to the world’s biggest problems at programs ranging from 5 days to 5 weeks. We do this by identifying entrepreneurs with the potential to address problems like poverty, lack of education, and social injustice at scale, and then by swarming them with hand-picked mentors, funders, and partners to help grow their impact. And once entrepreneurs leave our program they can forever access and engage with this global network of entrepreneurs, mentors, and funders that now spans over 50 countries. Our goal is to help each of these ventures scale up to meaningfully impact the lives of at least one million people each.

Guest: Daniel Epstein – Co-Founder of Unreasonable Group

Daniel’s life has been shaped by a fundamental belief that entrepreneurship is the answer to nearly all the issues we face today. By the time he received his undergraduate degree in philosophy, he’d already started three companies. In 2012 he was recognized by Inc. Magazine as a “30 under 30 entrepreneur” and by Forbes as one of the “top 30 most impactful entrepreneurs” of the year. In 2013, he received the prestigious “Entrepreneur of the World” award along with Richard Branson at the Global Entrepreneurship Forum. Today, this passion for entrepreneurship and startups has led to the creation of Unreasonable Group ( www.unreasonablegroup.com ).

Bio

Guest: Gavin Armstrong – Founder and CEO Lucky Iron Fish

Gavin is a PhD Candidate in biomedical science at the University of Guelph and is a Fulbright Scholar. He has received the William J. Clinton Hunger Leadership Award and the Michaëlle Jean Humanitarian Award. He has also received the Mayor’s Award of Excellence, has been named one of the Top 40 under 40 in the Guelph community, and has been named a fellow emeritus of both the Hunger Solutions Institute and the Kirchner Food Fellowship.

Lucky Iron Fish website

Guest: Rubayat Kahn – Co-Founder of mDoc

Rubayat Khan is a social entrepreneur, development practitioner and data scientist from Bangladesh specialized in the rapidly growing  intersection between scalable low-cost technologies and international  development challenges. He is also a global pioneer in the use of cutting-edge data mining, predictive modeling and interactive data visualizations to make development interventions and research more impactful and efficient.

Linked-In

Killer Question/Mind Hack

How can I eliminate customer hassles and create unique benefits for my customers?

Why do people choose you over your competitors? Or, vice versa?

How do you go about eliminating a hassle or creating a benefit to your customer if there is no obvious reason for them to pick you over your competitor?

I pretty much hate flying these days, which is unfortunate, because I log a minimum of a quarter-million miles every year. Travel is at best a neutral experience, and at worst an awful one, but that’s probably not news to you.

Every new hassle of flying is absorbed into the “new normal” and accepted by travelers relatively quickly.

“It’s kind of fun doing the impossible” ~ Walt Disney

Doing The Impossible

Have you ever felt like you did something that others said couldn’t be done? There is not better feeling than completing something that the antibodies said couldn’t be done. Even when they try to use government regulations as a roadblock.

When you look at companies who have ignored the antibodies and delivered true ground breaking innovations, they tend to be small business and not the large corporations. Why? They are more focused on the one idea they are achieving to bring to the market. They don’t have time for distractions.

Background on example: e-magine platform for Teligent created in 1996.

What could/should governments do to encourage small business innovation?

Guest: Rahul Sood

“Associate yourself with people of good quality, for it is better to be alone than in bad company.” ~ Booker T. Washington

This weeks guest was Rahul Sood, the CEO of Unikrn, a Seattle based eSports startup.

Previous to Unikrn, Sood created the first incubation fund for startups at Microsoft, and eventually Microsoft consolidated their global startup activities under Sood’s leadership.  In June of 2013 he launched Microsoft Ventures.

A serial entrepreneur, Sood spent 18 years in multiple startups prior to joining Microsoft. He founded luxury and gaming computer manufacturer VoodooPC, which was acquired by Hewlett-Packard.  Voodoo brought the ENVY and OMEN product lines to HP, contributing advanced technologies, such as commercial liquid cooling, and an increased focus on design.

Killer Question/Mind Hack

Who will not buy your product because they feel something is objectionable about it?

If you are inspiring enough such that some people love what you are doing, odds are you are going to be inspiring others to dislike your product with an equal passion. Plenty of companies trade on the fact that they represent something the mainstream culture will find offensive or questionable. Look at any business that sells rebellion or a gritty counter-cultural message.

Even more mainstream products such as those found in the tobacco or alcohol industries subtly sell themselves as being a little dangerous and outside the norm.

So ask yourself …

* Have you ever tried to market your product based on what it doesn’t supply rather than on what it does?

* Can you use the thing that’s objectionable about your product to create a community of customers?

* How could eliminating the objection help or hurt you?

Creative Exercise

Just as you go to the gym to work out your physical muscles, we all need to exercise our creative muscle.

So your assignment this week:

Find 3 ways to make your product objectionable to a segment of the market

If you discover some interesting idea, post them in the comments section. That way, you can inspire others to look beyond the obvious.

Link to the podcast: Doing The Impossible S11 Ep18

 

This weeks Killer Innovations Podcast is a phone interview with Geoffrey Moore.

Geoffrey is an author, speaker, and advisor who splits his consulting time between start-up companies in the Mohr Davidow portfolio and established high-tech enterprises. Moore’s life’s work has focused on the market dynamics surrounding disruptive innovations. His first book, Crossing the Chasm, 3rd Edition: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers, has become required reading in universities around the world.

We discussed a wide range topics including:

* How organizational dynamics (corporate antibodies) block innovation

* Why innovation success requires CEO and Board support.

* Why the direct CEO sponsorship is required an innovation effort (can’t be delegated)

* Why an organization should only focus on one innovation effort a time.  Not 2 or 3.

* How Steve Jobs used the “hour glass” approach to innovation

* The best culture of innovation is “mission/cause” based

* The decline of the HP culture

* What are the “next things” that VC’s are looking at