The Innovation Engine Podcast

On this special two-part episode of The Innovation Engine, we’re coming to you with conversations from the floor of DigSouth 2018. DigSouth is the largest annual tech conference in the South, bringing together more than 2,500 people who are building digital products and experiences that are changing the way people live, work, and play. DigSouth took place in Charleston, SC from April 25-27.

For this first episode, host Julia Slattery speaks with: 

• Soon Yu, an international speaker and best selling author on innovation and design. Soon gave the keynote, in which he shared some insights from his forthcoming book on becoming an iconic brand.  
• Megan Oepen, an award-winning Creative Director and Live Action Director who currently leads Under Armour’s content house. Megan took part in a panel titled 'Storytelling and Content Creation in the Digital Arena.' 
• Jason Feifer, the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur magazine and the host of two podcasts: Pessimists Archive, about the history of unfounded fears of innovation, and Problem Solvers, about how entrepreneurs solve unexpected problems in their business.
• David DeWolf, Founder & CEO of 3Pillar Global, who was on a panel at DigSouth to talk about building purpose-driven software.
• Jocelyn Mangan, former COO of Snag. Jocelyn gave a talk titled The New CMO: Why Product Development Experience Now Defines the Role. 

Learn more, get the full show notes, and listen to the second part of the DigSouth episode at: 3PillarGlobal.com

On this special episode of the podcast, we're honored to be talking to the brains behind one of the winners of this year's 1776 Challenge Cup. 1776 is a startup incubator headquartered in D.C. with offshoots around the country, and they recently held their annual startup competition, The Challenge Cup, at Anthem, the freshly opened music venue on the wharf in Southeast D.C. We talk about one founder's successful entrepreneurship journey, how an app called Airside Mobile can help you breeze through customs, and much more.

We’re joined by Hans Miller, the CEO of Airside Mobile, a company that works with leaders in the travel industry to create innovative mobile apps that make travel faster, easier, and more efficient. Airside Mobile's collaboration with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, HMSHost, MasterCard, and others have generated numerous awards and international press coverage from outlets like Wired, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Huffington Post, CNN, and many others. 

Resources:

• Download Mobile Passport: mobilepassport.us
• Learn more at AirsideMobile.com
• Connect with Hans on LinkedIn

Learn more and get the full show notes at: 3PillarGlobal.com

On this week's Innovation Engine, we're pleased to welcome Alex Tapscott back to talk about unlocking the blockchain. Among the topics we'll discuss are how far blockchain technology has come in just a few short years, what your company may be able to learn about organizing teams from a company called Consensus, and why blockchain may represent the “Internet of value.”

Alex last joined the podcast about two years ago, when the book he co-wrote with his father Don had just been published (Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World). Alex and his father Don also co-founded The Blockchain Research Institute and, in 2014, Alex wrote the seminal report on governing digital currencies for the Global Solutions Network program at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. 

Resources:

• Learn more online:
• The Blockchain Research Institute
• A16z on Cryptocurrency & Blockchain
• Jason Lopp’s Bitcoin Resources
• Read up on the blockchain:
• Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Alex Tapscott and Don Tapscott
• The Age of Cryptocurrency: How Bitcoin and Digital Money Are Challenging the Global Economic Order by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna
• The Truth Machine: The Blockchain and the Future of Everything by Michael J. Casey and Paul Vigna

Learn more and get the full show notes at: 3PillarGlobal.com

Today on The Innovation Engine, we look at how you and your teams can start Running Lean with the man who wrote the book of the same title. Among the topics we discuss are why practice trumps theory, why your actual product is not really your product, how long it should take to figure out whether you have product-market fit, and why constraints can actually be valuable for anyone looking to innovate successfully.

Our guest, Ash Maurya, is the Founder and CEO of LeanStack, a company that focuses on teaching practices that lead to continuous innovation through workshops, books, a web curriculum, and more. He's the author of Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan that Works, an "iterative book" that breaks down the process of building a successful company from the ground up, and also looks at how those same lessons can be applied by product professionals at more established companies. Ash is also the author of Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth. 

Resources:

• Learn more at LeanStack.com
• Connect with Ash: LinkedIn | Twitter
• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan that Works
• Scaling Lean: Mastering the Key Metrics for Startup Growth

Learn more and get the full show notes at: 3PillarGlobal.com

In today’s Innovation Engine, we’re looking at how we can set our product teams up for success in 2018. We discuss the top three things your product team needs to do in 2018, why you and your teams should start viewing the world with a product mindset, and what constitutes a modern day product team.

Joining us to talk about those topics and more are Jonathan Rivers and Jessica Hall. Jonathan is the Chief Technology Officer at 3Pillar, a role in which he leads more than 700 software engineers, product consultants, product managers, quality assurance, and user experience professionals. He works with 3Pillar team members in each of our locations throughout the world to foster product development best practices that lead to business value for clients. Jessica Hall is 3Pillar Senior Director of Product Strategy and Design. She helps clients build great products and more customer-focused teams.

Resources:

• Learn more about QA Automation: 3pillarglobal.com/qa-automation
• Learn more about Docker and containers: “Docker - A Different Breed of Virtualization”

Learn more and get the full show notes at: 3PillarGlobal.com

On this episode of The Innovation Engine, we'll be looking at the evolution of media. We discuss how media companies, or any company really, can make the leap to becoming a digital-first organization, why now is actually a good time to be in the media business (despite everything you may read and hear to the contrary), and what media consumption will look like a decade from now – or our assumptions about what that consumption will look like. 

Joining us to talk about that and more is Shelby Coffey, now Vice Chair of the Newseum. Shelby has had a long and distinguished career in the news business: he was Executive Vice President at ABC News in New York, News Chief at CNNfn, Editor of The Los Angeles Times, and held editorial positions with the Dallas Times Herald, U.S. News and World Report, and The Washington Post. In 2001, he was named a Fellow of the Freedom Forum, the parent organization of the Newseum, where he has studied and written about the media and First Amendment issues.

What does a company need to thrive in the increasingly competitive media space?

• An element of visionary leadership. People like Jeff Bezos are interested not just in solving a problem, but in exploiting an opportunity. The opportunity focus characterizes a lot of the people who are the winners in the digital space.
• Nimbleness (or agility): speed in adapting, and a willingness to change if adaptation is wrong.
• Individuals from old media companies will have different assumptions about consumption and the media than individuals from native digital companies – this gives native digital companies a considerable advantage.
• At the same time, the digital native employee is becoming increasingly valuable. Some people are able to adapt as the world shifts, but it’s not necessarily the same.
• Studying the competitors, and also having a future-focused mindset, is extremely important.
• Every company should consider itself a media company because of the vast range of platforms and methods of communicating. You have to be out telling your story or your competitors will exceed you, and maybe tell your story in a negative way.

Monetization for media companies is changing – how is the industry shifting, and what can companies do to adapt?

• The old gatekeeper world of big networks, big television, and big newspapers depended happily on a near-monopoly ability to funnel in a high-demographic audience.
• Now there are so many competitors, on so many different levels, competing for “the precious commodity of attention and it's handmaiden persuasion.” The result is a revenue world that is mutating almost as fast as the media themselves because advertisers are looking at what will continue to draw specific attention.
• One challenge for the news media world is that the creativity and range of how to get advertising-supported news coverage is not consonant with the actual news-gathering abilities – We need new specialists.
• No matter how brilliant you are, or how nimbly you adapt, you can't outrun the market. This article from Business Insider highlights how the digital world is affecting advertising: “In 2000, ad revenue at newspapers was $63.5 billion. It fell to $23 billion by 2013,” while Google’s ad revenue grew from less than $1 billion to over $50 billion in that same time. 

Resources:

• Check out the Newseum
• Connect with Shelby on LinkedIn
• Best Practices: The Art of Leadership in News Organizations: Insights from the careers of 20 news executives by Shelby Coffey III

Today we'll be talking about why becoming an anticipatory organization just may be the key to long-term business success. We'll look at why companies like Sony, Dell, BlackBerry, and Blockbuster (all of which were led by talented executives that knew how to be agile and execute strategy) fell behind the competition; how to anticipate and pre-solve problems before your company has them; and how to use hard trend certainties to accelerate innovation and drive results.

Joining us today to talk about those topics and more is returning guest Daniel Burrus. Daniel recently published his new book, The Anticipatory Organization, in which he shows that the future is far more certain than we realize – and knowing where to find certainty in an uncertain world provides a big advantage for those who know how and where to look. Using the principles of this unique model of thinking, planning, innovating, and taking action, readers will learn how to pinpoint and act upon the enormous opportunities of tomorrow by identifying a number of factors that help predict future events, and planning accordingly.

Resources:

• Get your free hard copy of The Anticipatory Organization at TheAOBook.com
• Learn more at DanielBurrus.com
• Connect with Daniel: LinkedIn | Twitter | Facebook | YouTube

Learn more and get the full show notes at: 3PillarGlobal.com

On this episode, we talk about how to start flexing what is likely an underused muscle, if you're like 98 percent of the population over the age of 31: the creative muscle. Among the topics we'll discuss are why creativity gets to be so difficult with age, five activities you can undertake regularly to make sure your creative capacity doesn't wane, and how IdeaToValue.com can help you make sure your next great idea doesn't fall by the wayside.

Here with us today to talk about all that and more is Nick Skillicorn, Chief Editor of IdeaToValue.com, Founder & CEO of Improvides Consulting, and a Manager in Deloitte’s Strategy Consulting Division working out of Sydney, Australia. Nick helps individuals and companies build their creativity and innovation capabilities so that they can develop the next breakthrough idea that their customers will love.

Resources:

• Learn more at IdeaToValue.com
• Listen to the Idea to Value Podcast
• Connect with Nick on LinkedIn

Learn more and get the full show notes at: 3PillarGlobal.com

Today we examine the dearth of female leaders in technology, and how we can mentor and encourage more female computer scientists. Among the topics we discuss is a new curriculum at Northeastern University, and how that curriculum is evening the demographic playing field.

Our guest is Carla Brodley, Dean of the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Dean Brodley's interdisciplinary machine learning research led to advances not only in computer and information science, but also remote sensing, neuroscience, digital libraries, astrophysics, chemistry, evidence-based medicine, and predictive medicine. She's currently serving on the board of directors of the Computing Research Association (CRA), the Executive Committee of the Northeast Big Data Hub, and as a member-at-large of the section on information, computing, and communication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

Resources:

• Learn more about Carla: carla.ccis.northeastern.edu

Learn more and get the full show notes at: 3PillarGlobal.com

Today we’re talking about the (underutilized) power of listening. Our guest, Bob London, shares why listening is such a powerful tool in a world that won't stop talking, key questions you should ask when you get the opportunity to talk to customers, and why you should (metaphorically, at least) burn the white board.

Bob is a pioneer in the marketing world – he created the outsourced Chief Marketing Officer concept more than a decade ago – and now he’s out to change the world by evangelizing the incredibly valuable insights that come from something shockingly simple: listening to the customer. Bob serves as an entrepreneur in residence at the University of Maryland's Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship and he is an international mentor at 1776, the global startup incubator.

Resources:

• You can find Bob’s listening process, questions, and more detailed in his FREE ebook at chieflisteningofficers.com/free
• Learn more at ChiefListeningOfficers.com

Learn more and get the full show notes at: 3PillarGlobal.com