The Innovators Studio with Phil McKinney

This episode is the last of Killer Innovations as a radio show. Not an easy decision, but as part of our drive for innovation, we believe this is the best decision. We will discuss the show's history, my book and radio show deal, and what Killer Innovations will look like moving forward.

Throughout the show, we have talked about how important it is to re-evaluate and try new things. This is a challenge that many organizations come across as they have processes in place that often keep them narrow-minded. Our decision to leave the Biz Talk Radio format will open up opportunities for us to be more flexible, creative, and innovative. With this change coming out, I know the listeners have a ton of questions. To answer some questions, we will still be a weekly show but will be shorter and have no interruptions. We will also be using a podcast-only format.

Let's jump into the history of the podcast. The podcast was launched in March of 2005, and we are now in season 16. Killer Innovations is the longest continuously produced podcast in history. We were podcasting before iTunes was even a thing. We have averaged around 45-50 episodes per year. The motivation behind the podcast came from a conversation I had with my mentor Bob Davis, who I have mentioned many times in previous shows. In the conversation, I was asking Bob how I could pay him back for all the help he had given me throughout the years. Bob laughed and told me that I couldn't pay him back, rather, I could only pay it forward. At the beginning of the show, podcasting tools and technology were not nonexistent so I had to hand-code for each show. Following the launch of the podcast in 2005, my book deal came about. I was approached by my agent Mark who was from New York. One of Mark's staff was a listener of the podcast and mentioned it to him. I had a meeting with Mark that went well, and he has been my agent ever since. The book proposal was distributed in the fall of 2010 and had about nine interested publishers. I signed a book deal at the end of 2010 and finished writing the book in June of 2011, and the book was released in February of 2012. The content of the book basically came from the podcast. Doing this book deal was anything but easy and required a lot of lift. As far as the radio show goes, I got approached by Biz Talk Radio in 2015 at a tradeshow where I was speaking. They said they liked the podcast and my book, and we ended up launching the show in July of 2016.

I want to give you guys insights on how to structure media deals as I have had a very successful nationally syndicated radio show and book deal. Like I said earlier, there were nine publishers interested in the book. After meeting with the publishers, there was an auction to see who the winning publisher would be. Hyperion ended up winning and I committed to doing 75,000 words in eight months, which was a big hurdle. I was lucky to get a big advancement after the book was published in 2011. Publishers get paid back first in book deals, and after you get your advance, the publisher gets all the money until their costs are paid back. After this, the author starts collecting royalties. In my deal, the publisher took control of the audiobook and had a professional voice actor relay it. As far as the radio show goes, Biz Talk radio is a syndicator of the radio, so I had to do everything through them. They distributed the show all across the country as part of their service. As far as constraints, we had to comply with the FCC rules such as political messages, profanity, age appropriateness, etc. We also had to comply with a time constraint slot as there were commercial breaks. This is where the four segments of the show came from. There was a weekly fee we had to pay to the syndicator to distribute the show. As part of the syndication deal, we got several ad spots which we gave away to charity. Zoom funds part of the show production and has done so for six years. This is what allowed us to give away our ad spots to charities.

Let me share some lessons I learned in creating my media platform. Firstly, do what you love. I have been doing the podcast for fifteen years, and If I didn't love doing it, we wouldn't have lasted this long. Secondly, don't do it for the numbers. I can't tell you how many times I've been contacted by people who are discouraged about how many listeners they have for their podcasts. If you are being driven by the numbers, you won't stick with it, because the numbers are hard to get. While this show has been around a long time, some people aren't as interested in our content as they are in other people's and that is ok. If you focus on your new subscriber numbers, you will drive yourself crazy. Thirdly, be open to new possibilities and let your followers aid you in finding what works best. Also, you need to know when to walk away from something like we are doing now.

Today's topic is an extension of a show I did a few weeks ago about my innovation self-confidence. Entrepreneurship is a huge part of innovation at any level. On today's show, we will discuss entrepreneurship and the learning experiences and steps that made me a successful innovator throughout my career.

Entrepreneurship consists of having an idea, being assertive, having a strategy, etc. I quickly realized from my Deltek experiences that I was not ready to jump right into entrepreneurship. After working at Deltek, I went to a company called Individual Software where I was hired again by my previous boss from Deltek, Bob Davis. The company was small and had only been around for a few years, and my experiences there taught me how to work inside of a startup. At Individual Software, I worked on designing and building products through coding. At this job, everybody was a salesman, everybody was the shipping department, everyone was customer service, etc. As an entrepreneur, you have to do literally everything, and there is not time to just sit back and work on ideas. Individual Software did a great job of teaching me some basic skills of entrepreneurship and how it really plays out.

Before getting the first big IPO win that I could build my career off of, I was involved in a ton of startups. I realized early on that I was going to have to go to multiple different jobs to learn different parts of entrepreneurship. At Individual Software, my boss Joel was a former executive at a big company in Silicon Valley. He believed that the training technology around the PC was going to be the next big thing. I went there to be part of a team in a small organization and I realized yet again that you have to do everything as an entrepreneur. The next position I took was with an organization called Corporate Resource Associates. CRA was started by two people I worked with at Deltek, Bob Davis, my mentor, and Roxie Westfall. Here I wasn't involved in getting the startup running, but I came in once it was initially established. At CRA, I had my first engagement with HP as we were developing RISC (Reduced instruction set computing) processors. This job taught me how to communicate and help people understand complex items as we were training HP and others to use RISC. The most important thing I learned at CRA was assertiveness/standing up for yourself. Here, I was still young and didn't have any gray hair, so people sometimes thought I didn't know much. I also learned about strategy, as the business was newly started, and we were trying to grow it and make it functional.

At CRA we worked with HP, Intel, and Apple, as well as other smaller companies. CRA was focused on a combination of training and actual development work. Here, I realized that I was good at taking complex things and making them simple. The software I worked on was all about putting a face onto technology that was uncomfortable to many people at that time. I liked taking concepts and ideas and turning them into commercially successful ideas. This is where my entrepreneurship bug started to take off. After my time at CRA, I went off and started my own company called Millenium RAND (Research and Development), whose mission was to help innovators who had ideas but needed help making them real. This entailed going in with clients who had a raw idea but didn't have the people, skillsets, and confidence to make something out of it. This is where I started to build my reputation as I did everything from debugging hardware boards, writing embedded apps, writing user interfaces, etc. I had a couple of subcontractors and a couple of employees and ended up creating many products. One product called Thumbscan won the product of the year award at COMDEX. After creating this product, I was hired on by an entity funded by venture capitalists and ended up creating another product of the year award the following year.

At this point I had been involved in going to a startup, watching a startup get launched, launching my own company, and joining an entity funded by venture capitalists. Eventually, Thumbscan got sold off, and the founders of the product recruited me to work on another idea around supercomputers. This company was called Teraplex, which was a supercomputer company based on a new process called MISC, or minimal instruction set computer. The company was initially funded by the state of Illinois and some angel investors, and I came in as the president of the company. It was here that I first learned how to deal with angel investors and was able to secure additional funding for the company. Teraplex was quite successful and I was also able to secure some technology licensing agreements. Looking back at it all, I found that my skillset was taking an idea and turning it into an innovative product, and that is what I built my career off of.

The topic this is week is one that I have touched on over the years in various ways. People reach out to me all the time asking about this. Coaching, as well as mentoring, often get placed in the same category. In reality, they are different. We will discuss the differences between innovation coaching and mentoring and will run through some application scenarios.

When it comes to the topic of coaching and mentoring, many people often find themselves confused. They don't understand that innovation coaching and innovation mentoring are not the same. Coaching is the most common activity when it comes to innovation.

In general, coaching and mentoring are two of the top five most popular jobs out there. Innovation coaching is kind of like a sports coach. In baseball, there is a pitching coach who trains pitchers to improve in their craft. Pitching coaching is just like innovation coaching, as it seeks to help one improve in a specific area based on an assessment. It tends to be limited in duration. Also, it only works best with measurable and tangible improvement opportunities.

A good innovation coach will offer clear direction for improvement based on an assessment of one's needs. Coaching can be on the individual level, team level, or for an entire organization. An innovation coach should be able to assess and tell you what area you need to improve. They should lay out a plan for improving and being more successful in a specific area.

Mentoring is a less specific and tangible area that looks at the big picture, such as your career. An innovation mentor is a trusted advisor that crosses personal and professional lines and might be with you for many years. They help craft broader goals along with the skills and experiences to achieve them. When looking for an innovation mentor, choose someone you can learn from. You want one that has achieved innovation success in their career.

Usually focused on the individual, I have done long-term mentoring for innovation teams as well. Mentoring sessions are less formal than coaching sessions and are on an as-needed basis. Fees for mentoring most likely come from the individual. A successful mentoring role should last many years and stay constant no matter if the organization you're in changes.

There may be no fees required in rare cases if you become close to the mentor. Don't expect mentoring to be free just because some mentors might typically do it out of the kindness of the heart. Remember, mentoring relationships require time and transparency to be successful. A mentor can't do their job if you are not honest with them, and vice versa.

One of the best ways to show the differences between an innovation coach or mentor is to run through some scenarios.

First scenario: Your team is struggling to create a pitch for an idea to secure funding from your organization. You need to figure out the best way to structure your pitch to secure the funding. Is innovation coaching or mentoring the best way to aid you in your pursuit? In this situation, you could hire an innovation coach because it is a specific issue you are trying to resolve. You want to find a coach that has an excellent track record of helping teams craft pitches. Be sure to pay the coach for the work they are doing, rather than saying you'll pay them upon success.

Second scenario: Your CEO has asked you to develop innovation leaders within your existing staff. Would this be innovation coaching or mentoring? With a longer-term goal that is not tangible, so in this case, it would be innovation mentoring in a team setting.

Third scenario: Your team is running up against internal and external innovation anti-bodies (naysayers), and you need help in crafting a strategy to win the organization's support. In this situation, you need help with a specific issue within your organization, so this is an innovation coaching opportunity. You need a strategy coach to help deal with the anti-bodies and win your organization's support.

Fourth scenario: You have decided to improve your innovation abilities and skills to be more successful. This scenario is a textbook case of innovation mentoring. Here you need help in establishing your long-range career to have a successful career in innovation.

Today, we talked about the differences between innovation coaching and innovation mentoring. As we discussed, there is a difference between coaching and mentoring. Coaching is about solving particular issues such as communication skills, deliverables, executive presence, etc. Mentoring comes with long-term career advice.

My first mentor was my boss at Deltek, Bob Davis. Bob hired me and put me into the first management role of my career. He knew I could be a great software engineer, but as my mentor, he told me I had broader skills than that. I had to put in a lot of extra work to develop myself under Bob's mentorship. He put me on a career rotation, placing me in finance, marketing, advertising, sales, and IT, which helped me grow. Bob helped me think through my long-term goals and what opportunities I should look out for.

Today, I do innovation coaching and mentoring and have done small companies up to Fortune 10 companies. I've coached and mentored CEOs, CTOs, and CIOs, some lasting up to seven years long.

Check out the Disruptive Ideation Workshop that acts as a long-term investment for you or your team's success.

People are always asking me how I made it to the point I'm at today in my career. While I can't cover the full extent of my career, I want to share some valuable learning experiences. On today's show, we will discuss how I built my innovation self-confidence and what I learned early on in my career that shaped the future of my career.

Self-Confidence and Soft Skills

Looking back on my career, I realize it is all about building self-confidence. I am very thankful for those early leaders and organizations that invested heavily into me. Despite being sort of a "know-it-all", they didn't put me down, but taught me how to be a leader and encouraged me to pursue my passions. Wherever you are in your career, there are elements existing that build up self-confidence. The first area revolves around team spirit and knowing how to build a team. Your self-confidence isn't about showing people up or being the smartest person in the room. It's about being a part of a team, knowing how to build a team, and knowing how to lead a team. In the innovation game, there is no such thing as the lone innovator. Early in my career, I fed off my name being mentioned in the press. As I progressed in my career, I learned just how important the team is over the individual. The second self-confidence building element is based on being confident you can achieve and build things from what you have learned. The third area is confidence in your communication skills and knowing how to communicate effectively. Another key area of self-confidence is being able to empathize with people. The last one is assertiveness, which should be based on standing up for your ideas.

My Experience at Anchor Industries

Like I said earlier, I want to walk you guys through some of my own experiences. My wife and I met when we were young and got married in our sophomore year of college. The summer after our wedding, my wife helped me get an internship at Anchor Industries, one of the largest producers of canvas products. My wife knew the family that owned the company and had mentioned that I was looking for an internship. My initial job at Anchor was to go through and reverse-engineer the blueprints of their products as they were outdated. I started off doing drafting but also learned how to do time studies. One of the things Anchor built was pool covers. At this point in the 1980s, they would get a blueprint of the pool cover and hand draw the pool on the factory floor. Then they would lay out edges, lay the fabric, stitch or weld it, and add other things to it. This was a slow process and I felt like I could do something better. I went back after my internship and designed an automatic pool cover layout plan for a project class I had at school. This had a huge impact on Anchor's ability to make pool covers and I ended up working for anchor and building out this program for a year. Because of my self-confidence in trying new things, I was able to impact Anchor Industries and build a lasting relationship with the company. To this day, Anchor Industries is still one of the biggest producers of pool covers.

My Experience with Deltek Microsystems

After working with Anchor Industries, I worked with Deltek Microsystems, a subsidiary of Deltek. The company focused on the early stages of PCs and sought to create training materials for new PC users. I ended up there due to my success at Anchor. At Deltek, I learned a lot about teamwork as it was a new company. I was hired on as a manager of the company and this was my first-time experiencing leadership. Deltek pushed me to give talks and speeches and built my communication skills up. I also experienced failures at Deltek that taught me a lot. I learned assertiveness in this position, as I had to express my opinions and ideas to those around me. This was new to me as it was only my second real job. My boss at Deltek Microsystems, Bob Davis, my first mentor, taught me how to be a manager, to take risks, and get back up after failure. He also taught me to be self-aware and learn my strengths and weaknesses. Bob taught that if I wanted to be a good leader, I had to be experienced in running the business, not just doing the software. I sat in just about every leadership seat at Deltek from Finance and Marketing to IT.

Wrap-Up

The building of my innovation self-confidence was based on my early career experiences. Each experience contributed to all the soft skills I needed to become the leader I am today. When looking at team spirit, both Anchor and Deltek had a huge impact on my understanding. It is important to provide feedback to others and contribute your expertise to the team's ideas. Both companies impacted my self-confidence by giving me the chance to go out and try things. Deltek helped me approve my communication skills in a way that I could adapt my language to my audience. In the case of empathy, I learned to empathize with customers as well as employees. Deltek taught me to be assertive in pushing and selling your ideas. All these soft skills learned at Anchor Industries and Deltek were vital in future success with my innovation self-confidence.

This show might come off as controversial to those who are innovation consultants. However, these are my personal views on the subject. Consultants can have a significant effect on an organization for better or worse. We will discuss innovation consultants and why I believe 80% of them are not worth the money.

A consultant has some expertise and is getting paid for sharing it with a client. I started my career early on doing consulting for a company called CSC. I was working heavily in the wireless and mobile arena. In my case, I had very deep expertise in the mobile space before being a consultant.

Most people hire consultants because they lack expertise in specific areas, and this effort is becoming ever so popular in the innovation space. I get calls all the time from people asking for recommendations on consultants. Based on what I have observed, 80% of innovation consultants are not worth the money. Why am I saying that? You don't become a driving instructor after reading a book on how to drive cars. Instead, you drive the car and then teach others how to do it. There are loads of innovation consultants out there that have never actually done it.

Today, I'm going to share the four questions you should ask innovation consultants before hiring them. Firstly, "is this innovation consultant a proven innovator?" Like innovation, you can't teach people how to drive if you haven't done it before. You need to ask if the consultant has led innovation for organizations known for innovation success. Have they been a CIO, led innovation teams that have delivered, or are they credited for creating successful innovations in the marketplace? Does the industry recognize them for innovation leadership? If they don't check these boxes, they try to teach how to drive without ever doing it themselves.

Question number two is, "Who else have they been hired by?" Assuming they have the expertise and have successfully done innovation, you need to look at who has hired them. If they are endorsed by those who are known for their innovation efforts, they will have more credibility. If a company is known for its innovation efforts still felt the need to hire this person, that is a good sign. If they have zero experience working with a company with an innovation reputation, that is not necessarily negative but is something to look at.

Another thing to look at is whether they completed any projects for their clients and have been brought back by their clients multiple times. This precedent shows that the consultant does excellent work and is getting the company success. The last thing to look at is whether you can call up the clients they mentioned in their proposals or pitches. If the consultant hides the company name from you but mentions their work, I count it as a negative mark.

Despite all that I have said, don't hire someone solely because they have done work for a well-known company. Dig deeper and validate whether they did the work and were successful or are lying about it. It amazes me how many organizations fail to do reference checks for employees and consultants. If you choose the wrong innovation consultant, your credibility goes down, and you can turn your organization off to innovation.

The third question to ask is, "What about this innovation consultant attracts their following?" It is essential to evaluate why a successful consultant is successful with its clients. Firstly, look at the number of clients they have worked for/use their process or framework and whether they can prove it. An example of this is the FIRE framework, where about 2,000-2,500 organizations use it. Secondly, evaluate whether or not they are willing to share the details of their approach. I am a big believer in paying it forward and giving it away. With that being said, I don't use this to make a living while most consultants do.

Your organization is unique, and you need to know that a consultant's approach will work for you and your organizational needs. If you bring in a consultant that is not a match, you will run into some big problems.

Question four is, "Can you adapt and adopt the approach from the innovation consultant?" You would not believe how hard this is to do. When hiring an innovation consultant bringing an approach to the table, it is crucial to know where they stand. Do you get granted the rights to use their method within your organization or offer a training class? Are they willing to adapt it to your organization's culture, approach, and language? An example of this is how Kroger implements the FIRE framework while using their own Kroger language.

I started today's show off on the premise that 80% of innovation consultants are not worth the money. Let's recap the four questions you should ask an innovation consultant before hiring them:

• Is this innovation consultant a proven innovator?
• Who has hired them?
• What about their innovation consulting attracts a following?
• Can I adapt and adopt the innovation consultant's approach to my organization?

If you are looking for an innovation consultant and aren't so sure about it, drop me an email or hop over to The Innovators Community for feedback from other innovators and myself.

If you are interested in the FIRE framework for your organization, check out our Disruptive Ideation Workshops.

Innovations can happen in any industry and a variety of different ways. Today we are going to take a deeper dive into part of the FIRE framework known as ideation. We will focus on combining individual ideation and team ideation. On today's show, we will discuss Walt Disney's "Plus it" approach and how it changed the customer entertainment experience.

Walt Disney used a concept known as "plus it" to improve his company's ideation. He would tell his Imagineers (people who design the Disney experience) to "plus it" as a way to motivate them to take their work to another level. He challenged them to see what was possible and then encouraged them to take it a few steps further. "Plus it" is a technique to iterate on ideas without using any harsh criticism. It's about finding what is good about an idea and tweaking it to make it even better. The question is, how do you do it? The first step you need to do is to conduct brainstorming activities and set up a quota of ideas to iterate. You need to come at the problem from different angles. Good ideas will get people excited so keep an eye out for reactions. Remember, evaluation happens after, not during this process. After brainstorming, grab some sticky notes and crank out unique ideas. This is when individual ideation comes in to play. Do this for about twenty minutes and come up with a minimum of twenty ideas.

The next step is to post and group ideas. Each person on the team posts and shares their ideas to the rest of the group by posting their sticky note on a board. This is done through a short and quick process. During this time, one idea may trigger another's idea. If this happens, write down the new idea and post it. If two people have similar ideas, post those ideas next to each other. The next step is to do team ideation or "plus it". One at a time, everyone chooses somebody else's idea that they like. Then, they ideate and build upon that idea and have others jump in. Throughout my work, I have found that around 30% more and better ideas come from this combination of team and individual ideation. I've also found that there is a collective ownership aspect of this that is elevated. People feel like more of a team and are more passionate and energized through this combination.

Walt Disney focused on making ideas better for many years and made it fundamental to Disney's culture. Many other organizations have embraced plussing it and have applied it to their organizations. Walt Disney made breakthroughs using his "plus it" method in many different ways. Walt applied plussing it early on at Disney with the idea of Disneyland. He came up with the idea for a Christmas parade going through the park. The financial people at Disney disagreed with Walt's idea as people were already going to the park and didn't expect anything different. Walt wanted to deliver an experience that was never seen before. Despite what the finance people had thought, the idea became a huge success and drew many more people to the park. Another example of plussing the experience was when Disney's ride Space Mountain was rebuilt for their 50th anniversary. They redid the whole ride and synchronized audio to it which created a completely new experience. The third example of plussing a product was when the Apple iPod and the iPhone came about. Steve Jobs cited the influence of Disney on his work many times. It comes down to the little things that most people don't notice but make Apple products stand out. Another example is Elon Musk's company, Tesla. The company has breakthrough features such as the summon feature. This feature allows you to call your car to come to a different spot and pick you up. The company is constantly adding features to their products and are never done improving. Disney is also constantly improving and innovating and will never stop plussing it. The last company we will discuss is Zoom, a sponsor of our show. In the last year, Zoom averaged 300 new features and does so every year. Eric and his team are constantly asking how to make the experience bigger and better.

Today we discussed Walt Disney's approach to "plussing it", which is significantly improving ideas and products by thinking differently and pushing the limits. Walt applied the concept to his early work at Disneyland and his hand can be seen all over the Disney experience to this day. The concept is about using each other's ideas for inspiration and building upon them without using harmful criticism. Improving someone's challenge instead of being an innovation antibody is key to plussing it. This all starts with individual ideation and combining it with team ideation to make ideas that stand out and are better.

Throughout the show's history, we've done interviews with medical professionals and those pursuing innovations in the medical field. This week's guest created a breakthrough product used during this pandemic. Clive Smith, the CEO and founder of Thinklabs joins us on the show. We will discuss a stethoscope innovation and what he's doing to disrupt the medical field.

Clive grew up in South Africa and was greatly influenced by the moon landing as a kid. It showed that technology happens in the United States, and that is where he knew he needed to be. Clive studied for his masters at the California Institute of Technology and focused on analog electronics and signal processing. After finishing school, he worked in the corporate world for a few years but realized that was not what he wanted to do. While he didn't stay there, he is grateful for what he was able to learn.

After leaving corporate America, Clive started Thinklabs. The context was that it would be an incubator for Clive's and other people's ideas. He had a long-term interest in medical devices, and while at his undergrad in South Africa, he developed an electrocardiographic device with a friend. On top of that, many of Clive's friends from school went on to become doctors. Clive's brother was also a cardiologist, so being surrounded by the medical professionals boosted Clive's interest.

Clive stumbled across an article in a cardiology journal about the stethoscope. The journal people measured the acoustics on stethoscopes and studied the original stethoscope made by Rene Laennec. They realized that the acoustics of the original was almost the same as the modern stethoscope. The device hadn't had a performance improvement for nearly 180 years.

Clive decided that he was going to fix the issue and started prototyping in his garage. He came up with a unique sensor for the stethoscope. After talking with cardiologists and comparing his medical innovations to others, Clive started talking with HP medical. They ended up funding his product, but while they were funding it, another company bought the healthcare division.

Due to Clive's contract, he could leave and put all the technology out on the market himself. The first version of the stethoscope came to the market in 2003 and manufactured in China. In 2013, the production of the product moved from China to the U.S.

Clive made himself more vertically integrated when he moved from offshore manufacturing to onshore. He did this because he wanted to be able to innovate quickly. Outside manufacturers like the ones in China want to crank out a product efficiently and keep things moving. It's not that easy to make changes with all of that. Another part of it was 3D printing. 3D printing offers flexibility because it is mostly software.

Moving onshore wasn't mainly for the cost nor "for American manufacturing". Many of the suppliers in the U.S had a hard time making high-quality products that Clive wanted. He ended up with a global supply chain as he does assembly in the U.S but gets some components from Japan, China, etc.

With regards to Clive's digital stethoscope, some physicians are particularly interested in listening to sounds. Many people still use conventional stethoscopes, and if they hear something that sounds weird, they pass it on to a specialist. Users of the digital stethoscope use it to get a more thorough read upfront. On top of that, regular stethoscopes are known to carry diseases and pathogens and not useful in infectious situations.

In 2014, Clive and his team were called on to help doctors listen to their patients remotely when they were in isolation during the Ebola outbreak. Fast forward to COVID, and they were able to create a process that uses remote Bluetooth transmitters and headphones to listen to patients in isolation.

The future is going to include a lot of remote healthcare. It is an incredible enhancement to the quality of life, especially for older people. Clive says the hospital at home is going to continue to grow. The internationalization of healthcare will be a massive change as we advance with borders broke down.

In the past, Mayo Clinic ran into problems as doctors licensed in Minnesota weren't able to practice healthcare in different states. Due to COVID, many states have gotten rid of that requirement, which will significantly impact healthcare and policymakers. Government rules and regulations need to find ways to keep up with the fast-growing innovations of this day and age. Policy always follows technology.

If you want to keep up to date with Clive and what he is doing at Thinklabs, check out their website here.

Clive Smith founded Thinklabs in 1991, a company developing electronic products and systems. He released the first Thinklabs stethoscope in 2003 and held numerous patents in the stethoscope technology field. He was profiled in the annual 2013 Caltech Alumni ENGenious publication. Raised in Johannesburg, Clive spent his early life in South Africa.

He received a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from Wits University, where he first developed his interest in medical electronics. He and classmate David Cohen received the Siemens Prize for Best Thesis for their research on multi-channel electrocardiography. Smith came to the United States for graduate study, receiving an MSEE from the California Institute of Technology, focusing on various electronics design disciplines including analog, integrated circuits, digital signal processing, and power electronics.

For the first time, we are recording a show in the mobile studio in Austin, Texas. Once we get past COVID, we plan to travel a lot more and visit different innovators in various areas of the country. This past week, I interviewed three CEOs of billion-dollar companies for a virtual event online. I asked them a set of questions and on today's show I am going to ask and answer those same questions.

The questions will get people to think and share things that they usually wouldn't share. I'm going to run through and randomly pick these questions out of a notebook I have. This notebook contains creative and exciting questions that I have collected over the years.

The first question is: What is the most important invention in the last five years? I think electric car vehicles are fascinating, and I've had the benefit of spending some time with Elon Musk. I would call an invention that's having a massive impact as being something that becomes commercially buyable. I think electronic vehicles fall right into this category. There are also a lot of spinoffs that have come from the development of these vehicles. The spinoffs include "battery technology," which is very important. With products like electric cars, there will be a push in the battery industry to create more improvements.

The next question is: What is your dangerous idea? The answer to this question pertains to an idea that is disruptive and turns everything on its head. My dangerous idea is to rethink education on a global scale. It's no longer about memorizing formulas, facts, or figures. It is about teaching future generations how to think, solve, and have a passion for lifelong learning. Whatever skill we're teaching in the classroom today won't apply in five or ten years due to the rapid change of technology. There needs to be some rethinking done on traditional education structure to promote teamwork, collaboration, empathy, ideation, experimentation, etc. That's the work environment students will be entering into when they join the workforce.

Years ago, I did some work with the Singapore government and the state of Ohio building textbooks that included innovation and creativity. Some school districts wanted to treat innovation the same as reading, writing, and arithmetic. We must think of innovation as creative reading and apply it to those topics. Innovation and creativity need to go across all the subject matter.

Step two is to create school environments where there are team projects, creative problem-solving, and experimentation. The key with experimentation is that not all experiments are successful. Whatever the result, you have completed the work and learned in the process. The mindset that you passed or failed needs to be changed. We have to develop ways to experiment and fail while still getting an A in the classroom because you learned from it.

The third question is: What are you optimistic about? During the time of this recording, there are many uncertainties. Examples of this would be COVID, the election, social unrest, etc. Despite these issues, there is still a lot of optimism. As humans, we can come together and get through these times using our ingenuity. Look back at the time of the polio epidemic. There was a consorted effort on the issue, and scientists came up with a vaccine and tamed the disease. I think the same thing will happen with COVID.

When we are face to face with crushing problems, we will innovate around them. We can solve these problems when we come together and attack them as one. We have done it for thousands of years and will continue to do it.

Another question I posed is: What have you changed your mind about? There have been many times I changed my ideas, such as when I thought certain technologies were going to be successful, and they weren't. The most challenging changes are when you have to consider somebody's perspective on politics, beliefs, sports teams/players, etc. I ask this question because people are often so locked in one idea that they don't even consider the other options. We all need to change in different areas, no matter what they are.

There is one question that gets an interesting response, no matter who interviews. That question is: What should be the role of government in encouraging innovation? Looking back on my own life, I've seen some phenomenal things come about due to government research and development. This includes the space program and Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, which I watched live as a kid. The blood oximeter, which tells how much oxygen is in your blood, is a spinoff of the NASA program.

Another example is the origin of the internet. The internet came from DARPA, which the government designed to use should Russia nuke the U.S. Governments invest in areas that are transformative to their people and their economies, which will improve the lives of the people.

This week, we look at an old show that has recently come up. It is a show I did in February of 2012 about innovation metrics. We'll discuss the core set of innovation metrics that every organization should use.

Before we get started, I want to address one thing. Bad metrics are very prevalent and extremely popular in areas such as Wall Street and publicly traded companies. These metrics get defined by analysts who have never run any innovation efforts or businesses.

The most popular bad metric that Wall Street has is the percentage of revenue spent on RND. They try to rank organizations based on this metric. I have run tests and trials, collected data from public companies coached and mentored CEOs, and CIOs worldwide from various industries. I am here to tell you that this is a bogus metric that is not predictive of future success. If this metric was true, if I spent 50% of my RND revenue, I should be two times better than somebody who only spends 20% of their RND revenue. False. It varies by industry and company. I spent a lot of time trying to convince the board of directors at HP that this is a bogus metric and not useable.

When it comes to good metrics, I look at it from input, output, outcome, and impact. I spend the most time on input and impact. When it comes to innovation, the impact your innovation is making, and the input you are investing in is key.

Let's look at what innovation input metrics you should consider having as part of your success measurement. The first one is the number of new ideas in the funnel. It would help if you kept the funnel full of ideas. This metric is about keeping your organization focused and continuously developing new ideas. At my current organization, we sit down twice a year and look at everything in the funnel. You want to find ideas that are reasonable for your organization.

The next metric is the acceptance/idea kill rate. Acceptance is the number of ideas that make it to the funding phase. You want that acceptance rate to be anywhere from 10-30%. The idea kill rate is when you decide to kill an idea rather than move it forward. At HP, we had a four-phase funnel to managing ideas and turning them into products. At each phase, there was about a 55% kill rate. We would start with ten, go to five, go to two or three, and finish with one. You need to look at your current acceptance and kill rate and set a target, possibly putting it into your Objectives and Key Results (OKRs).

The third metric is a balanced investment. This metric is how you will use your innovation spend to influence your organization. This metric has products and services across the bottom, and vertical is your customers and markets you serve. 70% of the innovation spend should be in the core. The 20% should be in new products to existing customers and existing products to new customers. And lastly, 10% in new customers, new markets, new technologies, etc.

The first one is the 3M metric, which is the percentage of revenue from new products. 3M has an innovation metric they have tracked for decades. The metric is what percentage of their revenue that comes from products produced within the last three years. The revenue percentage forces them to come up with new ideas constantly.

The second metric is the quality of your patents, which differs from the number of patents. When I first went to HP, Carly Fiorina was the CEO. She pushed us hard to ramp up the number of patents. Organizations get ranked based on how many awarded patents. She wanted HP to have as many patents as possible to get on the list. I argued that having a large number of patents does not add to your innovation value.

We eventually shifted the focus at HP to the quality of patents. Measured through the Chi Index, look at all your patents. Then look across your industry at other patents that referenced them. The more times your patent gets referenced, the more value it has.

The third metric is the innovation impact on gross margin. I got HP to replace the RND metric's revenue with this, which is the gross margin impact for every dollar spent on RND. Very important, because if you do good innovation on products, your customers will reward you with a margin premium.

Today we talked about the six-innovation metrics every organization should use. The input metrics are the number of new ideas in the funnel, the acceptance and the kill rate, and balanced innovation investment (70, 20 10). The impact metrics are the percentage of revenue from new products (3M metric), quality of the patents (quality over quantity), and innovation impact on gross margin. Look at these six-innovation metrics and figure out how you can apply them to your organization.

If you want to learn more about metrics and apply them to your organization, check out the Disruptive Ideation Workshops, now done virtually.

This week, we will continue the discussion on the FIRE framework and expound upon it. We will discuss a technology that will enable your FIRE framework, known as an Idea Management System (IMS).

The Idea Management System supports everything from the focus, ideation, and ranking, to managing your funnel for the execution phase. I deployed my first IMS in 2008 while I was CTO at HP. Not known as IMS yet, we chose a particular platform back then. Every IMS system has its built-in assumptions as part of its basic platform. They have to work on enhancing their platforms due to competition continuously.

If you have procured an IMS, are building one, or are integrating one with other systems, there are seven must-have features you need. The first feature is known as the ease of idea capture. This consists of getting all of your ideas captured and putting them into your IMS. The key here is to get every idea you have into this system. It is also important to track who came up with each idea for legal reasons.

The second feature is all about the support for your community of innovators. Especially critical for IMS because it brings all of your innovators together in a common system. It becomes a back and forth communication process between innovators. Most IMS systems don't grasp the idea of bringing people together. People often take it as a passive process, observing but not engaging. A common feature needed is the ease of how you "plus an idea." When someone creates an idea, you want other innovators to build on it. You want a way to communicate feedback on ideas as well. An IMS is also a great way to celebrate an idea, whether it got funding or ended up stopped.

The next feature is to enable an open innovation opportunity. This feature consists of allowing people outside of your organization to contribute. It includes things like public competitions for the best idea and rewarded with a prize.

Another feature that I am a big believer in is university joint ventures. These are opportunities where you fund PHDs or grad students who work in your focus research area.

The next feature on my list is what I call a flexible and powerful workflow. In many cases, designed enterprise applications have a particular philosophy in mind. While not intentional, they inherently create a step of workflows that enable the feature set within that IMS.

In reality, you want an Idea Management System that adapts to you, not the other way around. It would help if you defined the workflow for your innovation framework and all the tools and processes you use to build upon it. When selecting your IMS, make sure you allow for the system to be easily updated.

Next is a must-have feature; the management of the entire idea life cycle. Ideas get touched by many people. They may get funded, stopped, or even resurrected in the future. An example of managing the idea life cycle revolves around the selection. We talked about this on some previous shows on ranking. In your IMS, you want to capture the answers from the process of ranking. Years later, the scoring for these ideas could be completely different due to innovations.

The next vital feature is protection or how you protect your catalog of ideas. This feature can be basic security and encryption, which is very important. In this case, however, I am talking about patents. I am not aware of any IMS systems that have a built-in patent management system. In this case, you need to interface your IMS platform with the system you are using to track the patents you are submitting to or want to submit.

The seventh must-have feature is incentives and recognition. People don't participate in innovation efforts out of the goodness of their hearts. Some organizations I have been a part of pay for patented ideas that are submitted. Use your IMS system to track this. Award badges for the ideas that people submit. Incentives and recognitions are a great way to get people to get engaged.

The seven must-have features in your Idea Management System are:

• Ease of Idea Capture
• Support the Community of Innovators
• Enable Open Innovation Opportunity
• Flexible and Powerful Workflow
• Manage the Idea Life Cycle
• Protect the Catalog of Ideas
• Incentives and Recognition

I based these features on my dozen years of employing these systems and helping CIOs or CEOs find what they want in their systems. This platform is a tool that supports the overall framework. We discuss and teach all these things in our Disruptive Ideation Workshops, whether virtually or in-person.