The EPAM Continuum Podcast Network

Digital health is alive and kicking—and funded—in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts! We know this because Mike Dunkley, Continuum SVP, recently sat down with Nick Dougherry, Program Director of PULSE@MassChallenge, for an episode of *The Resonance Test.* PULSE is a vibrant new program that, Dougherty says, “actively creates the future of healthcare.” Tune in and hear how PULSE plays matchmaker between aspiring startups and established sponsor organizations, and turns startup ideas and energy into scalable solutions. “The real core of this program is working,” says Dougherty. “These startups and partners are working together in ways that they haven’t been able to do in the past.” How is PULSE different? Well, for one, they brig a whole lot of scientific attitude to the proceedings. “We want to make sure that we’re not just talking about the great work that we’re doing—that we’re *measuring* it," says Dougherty. “And if we’re off track, we have the data that shows us that we’re off track so that we can course-correct.” And, in a very cool move, PULSE embeds MBA students with their startups, and it’s their task to produce a case study for each new business. Like what you hear? Scroll down and click away…

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

Have you heard the good news? Chili’s has, at long last, lifted the lifetime ban on *The Office*'s Pam Beesly. To help celebrate this important event, we’re releasing a great podcast conversation Kelli Valade, Chili’s President, recorded with our Lee Moreau months ago. Listen up, and you’ll hear what Valade has to say about leadership, the role of storytelling at Chili’s, and what it’s like to have 70,000 ChiliHeads report to you.

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

“Biology is awesome!” says Christina Agapakis, Creative Director of Ginkgo Bioworks, the synthetic biology firm, and who would argue with that? Not us. Just the opposite, in fact. The 78th person on *Fast Company’s* list of the Most Creative People of 2016, Agapakis recently jogged over to record a fine episode of *The Resonance Test* with Continuum SVP Mike Dunkley. The pair had a fascinating exchange on rational design, user needs, mushroom fungus as furniture material, synthetic biology phobia-phobia, and more.

Tune in to hear Agapakis say things like:

• “We brew these microbes and out of that beer, effectively, we get ingredients that might end up in perfume, in food, in cosmetics, all sorts of different products.”

• In the future, “our computers might not be using DNA, but anything that is made of physical stuff is something that’s going to be potentially impacted by the field of biology.”

• “You have to build not just the understanding of the biochemistry and the understanding of the cells, but you have to also build automated tools to help you access that rapid prototyping.”

• “It’s not like my yeast is going to become a lizard.”

If you build an awesome maker space in Boston’s Innovation District, they will come. That was the hypothesis behind Autodesk's BUILD Space. Filling those 34,000 square feet of robots, water jet cutters, and other assorted items of mechanical awesomeness with people and projects? That's the task of one Rick Rundell. In this edition of *The Resonance Test,* Rundell and Continuum Principal Lee Moreau chat about how the BUILD space “allows people to fail in interesting ways," the merits of creating an external incubator in-house, and how the Cheesecake Factory uses a water jet to slice, believe it or not, cheesecake.

Should we be surprising and delighting our customers? Thomas A. Stewart and Patricia O’Connell, who co-authored a new volume, "Woo, Wow, and Win: Service Design, Strategy, and the Art of Customer Delight," say, "Erm, let's stick with 'delight'..." Listen to the spirited conversation between our service-minded co-authors and Continuum VP Toby Bottorf to learn how service design connects strategy to customers, the critical importance of delivery, and how the customer is—wait for it—*not* always right.

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

On Election Day 2016, Sam Aquillano, Executive Director of Design Museum Foundation, biked over to Continuum’s Boston studio for a conversation with Jon Campbell, our steadfast SVP of Experience and Service Design. Get an earful of these two talking excitedly about the value of public design and the challenges of designing in public. In this freewheeling conversation, the guys rethink everything from the civic meeting process to improving the voting process to starting up, of all things, a print magazine about design—*in 2016!* They even reminisce about how our two orgs once worked together in an early, trailblazing experiment in transparent design, though Aquillano does admit he was initially “scared as hell to put this process out there.”

John Wilbanks, Chief Commons Officer of Sage Bionetworks, says “the very containers” that we used to put data in, “that kept it human-scale,” have been “blown to bits.” The question is: How do we pick up the pieces and reassemble them in the aftermath? In this "Resonance Test" podcast, Wilbanks and Continuum SVP Mike Dunkley dive down into the many issues surrounding healthcare data. “We basically throw darts at the dartboard with a blindfold on right now," says Wilbanks. “Using data, statistical modeling, and machine learning *has* to be better than that.” Together, Wilbanks and Dunkley talk about smartphones and increasing sample size in health research, the idea of a “credit union” for data, and the challenge of measuring the success of precision medicine. The work is, for the passionate Wilbanks, a very human-centric activity. “Health is personal," he says. "Experience of disease is personal. Lived experience is personal, and you can start to capture these lived experiences and aggregate them in ways that tell us a lot about disease that we didn’t used to know.”

For the second installment of "The Resonance Test," architect Eric Höweler, of the firm in Höweler + Yoon, and Lee Moreau, Continuum Principal, kibbitz about such things as designing for serendipitous encounters, the sexy-sounding idea of “design desire,” Pennsylvanian submersibles (!), and Continuum’s eye-popping, show-stopping French’s Mustard Yellow floor.

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon

In the inaugural edition of "The Resonance Test," Rahn Dorsey, the City of Boston’s Chief of Education, talks with Augusta Meill about partnering with Continuum on the High School Redesign project, the purpose of test scores in education, and how design thinking can change, and possibly improve, government.

Host: Pete Chapin

Editor: Kyp Pilalas

Producer: Ken Gordon