thinkfuture: technology, philosophy and the future

Would you eat grown meat? In the future of food, our meat will be grown, not raised - will you - and someone who might be into natural foods - still, want to eat replicated meat? What if it used to be rubber? An old tire?

Peter Mulford is an executive vice president at BTS, where he leads the firm’s Innovation & Digital Transformation practice. Peter leads business transformation and capability-building efforts with Fortune 500 firms around the world (such as Sony, Microsoft, Time Warner and Merck) with a focus on developing innovation leadership, design thinking, and disciplined experimentation capability. His work redefines not just how to do innovation, but how to create and lead a culture in which innovation and divergent thinking can flourish.    Peter’s writing and research has been featured in CLO and Training magazines. He is frequent guest lecturer on Innovation and Strategy for the MBA program at Columbia Business School in New York. A sought-after keynote speaker, Peter regularly delivers keynote addresses at events around the world each year, including HR conferences, Technology and Innovation events, and company off-sites and sales conferences.  Peter joined BTS in 1998 and has worked in its offices in San Francisco, London and New York. From 2005-2010, he was the Managing Director of BTS’s East Coast region, leading the largest global office for BTS through a period of market turbulence and growth during which it more than tripled in size.   Peter holds an MBA in Finance from Columbia Business School, and speaks Japanese.

Humans learn by copying others - fake it till you make it is the best advice.

The closer you can align your reality with the truth, the better.

Over the past 1.5 years, Sandeep has championed an initiative to promote a culture of innovation at this Company. We cover:

Sandeep Kibey serves as the Wells and Materials Supervisor in Lab Operations at ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company in Houston TX. His team delivers high-impact Lab capabilities and technology solutions focused on Corporation’s core, high-value assets. His areas of focus include innovation, technology, and leadership. Prior to his current role, Sandeep was the Wellbore Technology team lead in ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company delivering well integrity technologies to ExxonMobil drill teams worldwide.

Sandeep is passionate about the energy industry. He is driven by the purpose of “energizing humanity” i.e., providing reliable, affordable energy to the world while preserving our Planet’s climate. In his current role, Sandeep champions an initiative to promote innovation culture within the Lab. Sandeep also serves on the Leadership Committee of the Inclusion & Diversity Employee Resource Group for ExxonMobil employees of Asian heritage.

Sandeep joined ExxonMobil in 2007 and held multiple research leadership roles in pipelines, risers, drilling, and completions in his initial assignments. He and his team have been nominated three times in the last 10 years for ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company’s annual Innovation, Creativity, and Excellence award. In 2020, Sandeep received ExxonMobil’s Advanced Skill Milestone award in Wells research.

Sandeep holds a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Stanford LEAD Executive program at Stanford Graduate School of Business.

The Internet could have solved all human problems by simply connecting every human being with every other human being. But now, its all run by the middlemen. Humans need to wrest control of the internet back from the middlemen.

Nature is hierarchical, some of us feel that we are more evolved than that. This is the truth. Like the circumference of the earth. That can be true too. Unfortunately, we don't live in the real world, we live in our own manufactured reality. A reality that is manufactured by others or ourselves. Sometimes. humans can't handle the truth. They suppress the truth. This happens when you innovate. You are trying to bring a new reality into someone's manufactured bubbles of reality. 

Check out this cool interview with Jenna Beglin, Director, Consumer Research & Insights, NA Services at Samsung Electronics  

Jenna Beglin is an applied consumer research expert, specializing in guiding concept and early-stage software/services product strategy and design. She started her career in digital strategy consulting at Accenture, before completing her MBA at Cornell. She then transitioned into brand and innovation consulting, helping her clients leverage consumer insights to re-define their brands and build out their innovation pipelines. Her past three years at Samsung have been spent building and leading a team of researchers focused on service innovation and customer experience.  https://www.linkedin.com/in/jenna-beglin-cohen-1b580016/

Early-stage consumer research and branding blending elements of design thinking - everything from one-liners to prototypes - focusing on usability, unearthing pain points, completely new directions, the importance of customer segmentation. building archetypes, the best kind of prototypes, using analytics to drive new product development, A/B testing, low-cost customer research platforms and strategies for startups, diary studies, the importance of context and timing, how people are overly positive in research, ideal numbers of people to survey, benchmarking against past products, barriers to innovation, resistance to risk, AI in innovation, why quant data will never tell you "why", the future would be great if we could predict demand in the future, why research is important.

One of the reasons that it is truly difficult to remove bias from AI is that AI is modeled on the past, not the future. Humans also model themselves on the past: we have to work hard to model the future we want, as opposed to the past reality we had.

How can you reconcile the tendency of human beings to lie with Design Thinking?