Andrew Zolli is a futurist and foresight and global trends consultant. His firm is called Z Plus Partners and he is also a Strategic Advisor with PopTech, a global community of innovators working to increase the interdisciplinary nature and pace of innovation, especially around the world’s greatest challenges. He is the author of Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back. Mr. Zolli has been honored with inclusion in the Fast Company Fast 50, as well as Red Herring’s Top 20 Under 35. He is a fellow of the National Geographic Society, a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and holds many other positions and honors. He studies and analyzes the most critical trends at the intersection of culture, technology, and global society.

Zolli offered insight into the value of resilient response to innovators – we hear often that the ability to fail fast is critical for successful innovators and innovative organizations, but equally necessary is the ability to bounce back from failure. Zolli points to improvisation as a key ingredient to resilience, and said resilient organizations have developed capacities to anticipate, reflect on, and quickly learn from failure.

Philip Krim started his company, the Merrick Group, out his dorm room at the University of Texas. Today, he is CEO and a Co-Founder of Casper Sleep, a company that seeks to change the way individuals buy mattresses. The firm sells their own mattress directly to customers in a box the size of a set of golf clubs and delivers an outstanding sleep experience on the same day as the order in New York City with five-day delivery worldwide.

Discussing the origin and development of Casper Sleep, Krim explained that his innovation came from evaluating the market for not just a mattress, but a better night’s sleep, and reaching out to the large, relatively untapped segment of young people who don’t have back problems so won’t spend thousands on a new mattress, but do appreciate a quality product, and whose loyalty can be cultivated for years of future purchases. Krim said Casper plans to sustain its advantage by continuing to improve those customers’ comprehensive mattress-buying experiences, including plans to eliminate those exasperating four-hour delivery windows with 90-minute same-day delivery.

Robin chase is an entrepreneur who has founded numerous successful ventures, such as Zipcar, the world’s largest carsharing company, GoLoco, an online ridesharing company, and Buzzcar, a service to bring together car owners and drivers in an online community. Her work has centered on cars and rides, and especially on collaborative sharing of resources to get people where they are need to go most efficiently. She has been featured on numerous media outlets such as The Today Show, The New York Times, National Public Radio, Wired, Newsweek, Time, BusinessWeek, as well as numerous books on entrepreneurship. She has been honored with numerous awards for both entrepreneurship and environmentalism, from government and private bodies.

On her visit to Innovation Navigation, Chase reflected on Zipcar’s development and emphasized a point heard from many successful entrepreneurs – to reach the target customer base with a minimum viable product as quickly as possible to test the concept, and iterate to a final product based on their feedback. She went on to envision a world in the coming 15-20 years in which most vehicles are shared, so perhaps as few as 12% of the vehicles on the road today are necessary, enabling a new kind of cooperation between individuals and between individuals and companies.

Chunka Mui is the managing director for Devil’s Advocate Group, a consultancy focused upon helping firms stress test innovation strategies. He was previously a managing director and chief innovation officer at Diamond Management and Technology Consultants, a cofounder and director at Vanguard, and Andersen Consulting, a precursor to Accenture. He has written numerous award-winning and bestselling books, most recently including The New Killer Apps: How Large Companies Can Out-Innovate Start-Ups, and has written articles in Harvard Business Review, Chief Executive, Directors and Boards, and is a regular contributor at Forbes. He holds a B.S in computer science and engineering from MIT.

Mui built on an Innovation Navigation theme as he considered driverless cars as an example of the knock-on effects of truly disruptive innovations outside their own industry. In particular, he pointed to the ways disruptive technologies create openings for new entrants – witness Google’s leading development of the driverless car, not any major auto manufacturer – and positioned driverless cars as a kind of app, in that they provide a platform for a range of new information services that will change insurance, personal injury law, and repairs along with car manufacturing and the driving experience.

Damon D’Amore founded WayFounder after spending three years founding two start-up ventures. He has more than 15 years of experience in online and television multimillion dollar marketing integrations, has worked closely with hundreds of influential CEOs, and has managed brand integrations for Fortune 500 firms into television shows such as Undercover Boss. Prior to founding WayFounder, he was Vice President of Promotion and Development at the independent film and television studio The Shooting Gallery, and was previously a Vice President at Cantor Fitzgerald.

D’Amore advised Innovation Navigation listeners considering developing an innovative idea to find a mentor as soon as possible – mentors in your community (either an intellectual community around your idea or a geographic community), he said, provide much more than step-by-step hard assets like funding when they’re involved from the start and committed to mentees’ success on the basis of the idea rather than the eventual payout.

Elisabeth Sperling has a B.A. from Harvard University, an M.A. from Columbia Teachers College, held an endowed chair in the history department at the Horace Mann School in New York, and was awarded a Klingenstein Fellowship for a year’s study at Columbia University and a Fulbright Fellowship to China. She has been working in documentary filmmaking since 2005, and has worked on such films as The Witnesses, Perfect Disasters, Jewish-Americans for Obama, and Scapegoat on Trial, prior to One Night Stand, which will be her first as director.

Trish Dalton has directed and produced pieces for Amazon, Kashi, Danskin, About.com, Beiersdorf, Pepsi, Cossette, IDEO, illy, Cole Haan, and National Geographic. Recently, she directed and produced Bordering on Treason, Southmost U.S.A, and One Night Stand. She was also involved in various roles with Keras & Manis, Why Are We In Afghanistan, Farm Sanctuary, and Tiffany’s Story. Her films have been been featured at a variety of festivals and have won numerous awards. Today, she is traveling the nation to create documentaries of small businesses.

Elisabeth and Trish introduced the project that One Night Stand catalogs, the 24 hour musical, and how it comes together. They discussed how a group of successful and well-known writers, composers, actors, and others comes together for a 24 hour period, and envisions, writes, practices, and puts on a musical in New York to benefit charity. These people have usually never worked together either. Clearly, there are myriad challenges involved in this process, as creativity and then production must be accomplished in a very condensed timeframe. There are a great many lessons for all innovators in this show, and Ms. Sperling and Ms. Dalton particularly stressed the necessity of coming up with new ideas in the same way that improv works – nobody every says “that’s a bad idea,” they always say “yes, and also…” and in this way, everyone’s ideas come out and are developed by the group.

One Night Stand is available through iTunes at the following link https://itunes.apple.com/us/movie/one-night-stand/id594398288?ls=1 and the film’s Facebook page is at https://www.facebook.com/OneNightStandTheMovie.

Ethan Smith’s background includes product design and development, web design and development, graphic design, photography, writing, business strategy, expedition planning, and creative direction. He has worked with Nau, Eddie Bauer, and XPLANE. Today, he works for the Biomimicry 3.8 Institute, where he is the Director of AskNature. He seeks to train innovators to emulate the 3.8 billion years of design and strategy of nature in a sustainable way.

On the show, Ethan talked a lot about how firms can apply biomimetic thinking to their problems. This has certainly taken root in design firms and architects, but it is also quite applicable in other industries. The basic, universal takeaway is that innovators should consider taking a step back from their problems, and instead of asking “how would nature build an engine?” for example, an innovator can ask “how would nature create movement?” The process of applying biomimicry to innovation, according to Mr. Smith, is all about framing questions in terms of function, and then seeing how nature accomplishes those goals. To this end, Biomimicry 3.8 teaches the skills of applying biomimicry, but also compiles a large database of functions that nature accomplishes, from the microbe level to the organism level, in order to make this process available to all, even those without a background in biology or natural sciences.

Erin has supported over 30 environmental projects in a variety of roles to help build opportunities for resilient and abundant operations sustainably on Earth. Erin is a LEED AP with a specialty in Building Design and Construction and a Certified Biomimicry Professional, and she is a biomimicry instructor for adult learners. She develops holistic methodologies to drive innovation and ecosystem regeneration and conservation. She has experience in biomimicry, living building challenge, the natural step, and LEED.

On the show, Ms. Leitch discussed how biomimicry enters into design thinking especially, and how this can meaningfully firm operations. She enumerated multiple examples, including carpeting companies building carpet tiles that are replaceable within the pattern and without needing the correct tile for the place. Additionally, she discussed how the principles of the Scotch pine tree’s double helix fibrous structure in its trunk can be applied to a water bottle – the same structure that allows the tree to be stronger without needing more material allows the water bottle to be light and use less plastic, yet remain every bit as strong.

Bill Kelley graduated from Xavier University and served as an officer in the U.S. Army in both the United States and Korea. He began his career with Goelitz Confectionary Co. as president, the same role his father and grandfather held. In 2001, he merged the company with Herman Goelitz Candy Co. to form Jelly Belly. He has been honored by numerous professional organization, and has been inducted into the Candy Hall of Fame in Hershey, PA.

On InnovationNavigation, Bill Kelley talked about the story of Jelly Belly’s origins in two family companies merging, and how they gained wide popularity after future President (then Governor of California) Ronald Reagan took a liking to the jelly beans and used them frequently in cabinet meetings as talking points. Interestingly, he also discussed the process of innovation for the beans. The beans themselves are quite an innovation – previous beans had a flavorless center and flavored coating, this meant that the flavor was weak and the beans big – Jelly Bell’s beans have their flavor in the center, allowing them to be smaller and, famously, to have distinct and true-to-reality flavors. The flavors themselves come from ideas from customers, employees, and other sources. They’re then perfected by competing flavor science firms, tested in house, and then used. Finally, Kelley talked about the value of co-branding and marketing in making products a success.

Larry Popelka received his undergraduate degree from Northwestern University and his MBA from the University of Chicago. He was formerly the Vice President of Marketing, Global Development, and New Ventures at Clorox, where he led corporate innovation, strategy, and acquisitions, and was involved in developing Green Works Cleaners, Clorox Toilet Wand, Armor All, and the acquisition of Glad for $2 billion. He writes a regular innovation column for Bloomberg BusinessWeek. He does innovation consulting for consumer products companies interested in producing new products.

On the show, Mr. Popelka discussed issues facing companies seeking to optimize their innovation processes today. In particular, he spoke about how many corporations over-prepare and over-pay for their innovation efforts. In the past, large companies dominated the landscape of innovation, but today, it is startups and small companies leading the way. In part, this is attributable to their nimbleness in the global marketplace, but it is also because they approach innovation in a different way. These companies do, and larger companies can, quickly push out minimum viable products to consumers, gain deep insight into what consumers want, and they improve and iterate until they have an outstanding product, and they then gradually grow the scale of the operation. Specifically, Popelka discussed how he cautions companies to avoid “big bang launches,” nationwide, including huge marketing efforts. These all too often are far more expensive than their high risk would justify, and it is more reasonable to gradually grow a product as you move it through iterations with customers, improving it each time. To all companies, big and small, Mr. Popelka advised leaders to iterate not just as a strategy for growth, but as a barrier against competitors. The best such defense, he said, is a deep knowledge of consumer needs and desires that is reflected in your product.