IN STUDIO - RECENT GUESTS

shadow

On Air: April 15, 2014

James L. McQuivey, Ph.D, Vice President, Principal Analyst Serving CMO Professionals, Forrester Research

James McQuivey received his Ph.D from Syracuse University and also holds an MBA concentrating in marketing. He has been a graduate fellow at Syracuse University, research director at WGBH in Boston, and he taught marketing research and media management at Boston University’s College of Communication. At Forrester, Dr. McQuivey was a senior analyst and founding member of the online retail strategies practice, vice president and director of Consumer Technographics North America, Forrester’s consumer research effort, and he now focuses upon digital disruption of traditional businesses, primarily working with Chief Marketing Officers, and often working with companies in consumer media and consumer electronics. He is the author of Digital Disruption: Unleashing the Next Wave of Innovation, and has appeared in numerous keynotes, publications such as The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and has appeared on both NPR and CNBC.

Dr. McQuivey talked about the way digital disruption is changing the face of the innovation landscape. With 10 times more people seeking to bring their products to market and all doing so at 1/10th the cost, innovation is 100 times more powerful. He discussed how innovative firms have reshaped the paradigm of engineers producing what they can and handing the product off to marketers to sell it; now, successful firms are figuring out what the customer wants first, and then thinking about what the firm can reasonably produce to fit those customer wants. A lot of this innovation will take place in adjacent spheres, not the immediate ones that firms might think of, but that is the key to success in digital innovation.


On Air: April 15, 2014

Steve Ressler, Founder and President of GovLoop.com

Steve Ressler holds a Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania, where he received the Department of Homeland Security Fellowship. For six years, he worked in the Social Security Administration, Department of Education, Department of Homeland Security Inspector General, and DHS Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He has received numerous awards, including the 2010 GovTech Doers, Dreamers, and Drivers Award, the 2007 and 2009 Federal 100 Award, and the 2009 AFCEA Bethesda Social Media Award. He has also been featured in numerous publications and conferences including The Washington Post, Harvard’s Kennedy School, the World Economic Forum, The Wall Street Journal, Fox News, Huffington Post, and more. He is the Founder and President of GovLoop.com, a network of more than 100,000 government employees allowing interaction, collaboration, and more to improve their practices and the operation of the government.

On the show, Mr. Ressler talked about the foundation of GovLoop.com, and how the site was born out of the idea that there are so many people in government, and all are on the same team, so it must be true that the can help each other in their innovation efforts. Innovation has special challenges to face in government, in large part, because the central product usually cannot be changed, and flexibility is constrained by accountability to entities such as Congress. Nonetheless, innovation is happening, as the TSA outsources the management of its plastic bins in exchange for advertising rights, and GovLoop is helping, with its core product connecting innovators and its events like the virtual conferences.


On Air: April 15, 2014

Orly Lobel, Don Weckstein Professor of Labor and Employment Law, University of San Diego School of Law

Orly Lobel attended Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law for he LL.B, Harvard Law School for her LL.M, and Harvard Law School for her S.J.D. She has been a Fulbright Scholar, a teaching fellow at Tel-Aviv University Law School, a law clerk at the Israeli Supreme Court, the Clark Byse Teaching Fellow at Harvard Law School, a Visiting Lecturer at Yale Law School, a Visiting Professor at Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Law, and has been a Professor of Law at the University of San Diego since 2009. She is the author of Talent Wants to be Free: Why We Should Learn to Love Leaks, Raids, and Free Riding, among numerous other publications, and her research focuses upon innovation policy and intellectual policy.

On the show, Professor Lobel talked about Silicon Valley’s talent wars, the fight to get the best employees and then retain them. In the discussion, she raised the point of the human capital cartel between firms like Google and Apple, an illegal agreement that kept these massive firms from hiring one another’s employees. Her discussion centered on the theme that managers ought to like the flow of talent around different companies, and that this is good for firms and for the economy. It is also important, in her opinion, that firms get better at allowing employees to come up with new ideas themselves and feel that the idea will be welcomed and compensated for as the firm moves forward with it.


On Air: April 8, 2014

Jennifer Reingold, Senior Editor at FORTUNE

Jennifer Reingold received her B.A. in political science from the University of Pennsylvania and her M.A. in international affairs and economics from the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins. She has been a news assistant at The Wall Street Journal, a reporter, staff writer, and associate editor at Financial World, an associate editor at BusinessWeek, a senior writer at Fast Company, and joined FORTUNE in 2007, where she is a senior editor. She has co-written “Confessions of a Wall Street Analyst,” “Final Accounting: Ambition, Greed, and the Fall of Arthur Andersen,” and numerous pieces. Reingold has been honored with numerous awards, and has recently written a series of pieces on JCPenney and former CEO Ron Johnson.

On Innovation Navigation, Reingold shared new insights behind her analysis of Ron Johnson’s failed tenure at CEO of J.C. Penney for Fortune Magazine. She highlighted Johnson’s fundamental failure to understand the company’s existing customer base’s behaviors and preferences in favor of radical change and a “we know better” attitude without a product to back it up (retail manufacturing and buying cycles are long enough that Johnson couldn’t introduce new product until after he introduced a new brand). Reingold described this as a lesson to other would-be creators of an Apple-like retail experience for other brands – Johnson’s revolution threw the valuable parts of J.C. Penney’s culture and strategy out with the proverbial brand bathwater – and suggested that leaders pursuing transformative innovation be sure they have mentors and a team willing to point out mistakes close by.


On Air: April 8, 2014

B. Joseph Pine II, Co-Founder of Strategic Horizons LLP

B. Joseph Pine II received his B.S. in Applied Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin-Stout, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude, and his S.M. in Management of Technology from MIT’s Sloan School of Management. He has worked at the IBM Corporation, MIT’s Design Lab, he helped found Starizon Studio, a consulting company, and has worked closely with Stone Mantel as a Strategic Thought Leader. He is the Co-Founder of Strategic Horizons LLP, and has written numerous groundbreaking books, including Mass Customization: The New Frontier in Business Organization, The Experience Economy: Work is Theater & Every Business a Stage, and Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want, and advises numerous Fortune 500 firms, in addition to his speaking roles.

Pine explained the relationship between his early work evaluating the role of mass customization and the significance of innovation in customer experience in today’s economy this way: mass customization turns a good into a service, and a service into an experience. Winners in innovation, he said, have been (and will be) those who move from a product or service to a wholly engaging user experience; witness LEGO’s move from manufacturer of blocks to interactive retail experiences, movies, and theme parks. To get there, he recommends looking for the intersection of the four E’s for inspiration – Entertainment, Education, Escapism, and Esthetics – and adopting a philosophy that “work is theater” – whenever any member of the organization engages with a customer, that employee is on stage, and has an opportunity to become a story-teller about the brand and product.


On Air: April 4, 2014

Steve Gundrum, CEO of Mattson

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.


On Air: April 1, 2014

John Hagel III, Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge

John Hagel III is one of the foremost thought leaders in business and consulting today. He has attended Wesleyan University, Oxford University, Harvard Law School, and Harvard Business School. His career has included the Boston Consulting Group, Sequoia Group, Atari, McKinsey & Co., 12 Entrepreneuring Inc., and Deloitte Touche USA. Mr. Hagel has written seven books, most recently including The Power of Pull: How Small Moves Smartly Made Can Set Big Things in Motion, articles in Harvard Business Review, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, and more, and has been honored with numerous awards.

On the show, Mr. Hagel introduced the mission of the Center for the Edge, and discussed the concept of explorers in detail. These explorers are individuals with (1) a long-term commitment to a particular domain, in terms of knowing and contributing to it, (2) a disposition towards questing for new challenges as a means of getting to the next level, and (3) a constant effort to connect to relevant people. The challenge for business, Hagel says, is to cultivate the sort of environment in which explorers can thrive and help the business grow. This is non-traditional, and not easy for companies to do. Citing multiple examples, Hagel talked about how a lot of companies do not allow a particularly passionate workplace, how managers can help explorers bring their passion to the real problems the company faces, and how to select teams for passion that will help develop exploration.


On Air: March 25, 2014

Matthew E. May, Innovation/Design Strategist

Matthew E. May believes he has the best job in the world: part creativity coach, part innovation catalyst. Matt works with creative teams all over the world, helping them track down elegant solutions to complex problems. On matters of innovation and design strategy he is a close advisor to senior management of companies such as Amgen, Toyota, ADP, Intuit, and Edmunds.com.

He is the author of four critically acclaimed, award-winning, books on business innovation and a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review blogs, Fast Company Design, OPEN Forum Idea Hub, and University of Toronto’s The Rotman Magazine. His articles have appeared in frog design’s Design Mind, Thinkers50.com, MIT/Sloan Management Review, Strategy+Business, Quartz, and USAToday.

Matt’s work has been featured or mentioned in The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Fortune, USA Today, Bloomberg BusinessWeek, Time, Forbes, INC magazine, Fast Company, Wharton Leadership Digest, CIO Insight, American Enterprise Institute, The Miami Herald, and The Los Angeles Times. He has appeared on numerous radio shows, television, and online shows, including MSNBC, NPR, and ESPN.

Matt received his training in design thinking from the Stanford d school, holds an MBA in Marketing and Organization Design from The Wharton School, as well as a BA in Social and Behavioral Sciences from Johns Hopkins University, but he considers winning the The New Yorker cartoon caption contest as one of his proudest and most creative achievements.

Matt encouraged Innovation Navigation listeners to start focusing on one of the most important but most forgotten parts of the creative process – subtraction, or what to ignore and leave out. He pointed to examples of the power of simplification like Sudoku, the rules to which can be explained in a single sentence, and Apple’s ecosystem – for all its parts, developed to enable consumers to buy just one song instead of an entire album. He recommends that people and organizations trying to simplify ask those who receive their work – managers, supply chain partners, and so on – what they can stop doing or adding, and thinks we’ll be surprised by what we can start leaving out.


On Air: March 25, 2014

Bill Fischer, Innovation Management Thought Leader

Bill Fischer is a Professor of Innovation Management at the International Institute for Management Development (IMD) in Lausanne, Switzerland, where he co-founded and co-directs the program on Driving Strategic Innovation in cooperation with MIT’s Sloan School of Management. An engineer by training, Bill spent ten years in China, where he became the President of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) and received the Silver Magnolia award, Shanghai’s highest award for foreigners contributing to the city’s development. His research and writing addresses innovation and talent development and expression in a variety of organizational settings; his most recent books include Reinventing Giants: How Chinese Global Competitor Haier Has Changed the Way Big Companies Transform and The Idea Hunter: How to Find the Best Ideas and Make Them Happen.

Bill was recognized by InnovationExcellence.com as a top innovation blogger in 2012 for his “The Idea Business” <http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfischer/> blog on Forbes.com, and a top innovation Twitter sharer in 2013, @bill_fischer <https://twitter.com/bill_fischer> .

Bill Fischer’s visit to Innovation Navigation encouraged everyone to become what he calls an “idea hunter.” Fischer specializes in the processes – available to everyone – that lead to good ideas, and talked listeners through his IDEA framework: be Interested, get Diverse input, Exercise your brain, and stay Agile. Bill recommends that every idea hunter also focus on meaningful conversations with customers and value chain partners to stay connected with the user experience, which drives great innovation.


On Air: March 25, 2014

Brian Scudamore, Founder and CEO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?

Starting with just one truck, Brian Scudamore has grown 1-800-Got-Junk into one of Canada’s most successful companies. Scudamore and his company have received wide recognition in the media and business community, making appearances on Dr. Drew’s Clutter Cleaners, Dr. Oz, Dr. Phil, CNN, ABC Nightline, Good Morning America, The Today Show, and The View. Scudamore was also a guest on the Oprahshow in 2003. His impressive story has been told in Fortune Magazine, Business Week, The New York Times, Huffington Post, and The Wall Street Journal, to name a few.

Brian’s conversation on Innovation Navigation highlighted the difference between an entrepreneur and an innovator, and the importance of the on-the-ground user experience in identifying innovative ideas. His first business, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, took a common, long-standing entrepreneurial idea – trash hauling – and innovated across the spectrum in branding, internal processes, and customer relationships to turn it into an international franchise. His later companies – You Move Me, for full-service local moving, and Wow 1 Day Painting, for one-day house and commercial painting – leverage those capabilities in other settings where Brian himself had frustrating customer experiences and believed it could be done better. Brian believes that “people buy brands,” so suggests service and trust as the first places to start for any consumer-facing business.