Steve Gundrum is the CEO of Mattson, the country’s largest independent developer of new food and drink products. He is a professional inventor and joined Gundrum in 1987. He focuses upon using innovative technology and business techniques to quicken the process of generating new products and to increase the business potential of new ideas. Gundrum fosters collaborative spaces for innovation to improve client-consumer-innovator contact and improve the innovation output.

On the show, Gundrum spoke a lot about building a organizational structure for innovation. He famously ran an experiment, pitting three different organizational structures against one another to see which would result in a more innovative cookie design. He set up a traditional hierarchical team led by an experienced manager, an “XP,” or extreme programming team of two, and a large, flat open-source team, all with the mission of creating a healthier and better tasting cookie. Mr. Gundrum discussed the details of these results, as well as other lessons, such as how companies with traditional strengths can end up with a very narrow skill set based entirely on that strength, making disruptive innovation harder and harder. His experiences at Mattson are invaluable for understanding the application of innovative thought to all areas, not just technology, like food innovation and others.