Episode 10 of “What is Innovation?” is live! This week, Jared talks with Peet van Biljon, founder of BMNP Strategies LLC, where he advises clients on innovation strategy, new product development (NPD), and R&D transformation. Peet shares his thoughts on innovation, as well as some historical context for the way we view innovation today. Listen and subscribe today!
Peet van Biljon, the founder of BMNP Strategies LLC, shares his thoughts on innovation, as well as some historical context for the way we view innovation today.
More about our guest:
Peet van Biljon advises clients on innovation strategy, new product development (NPD), and R&D transformation. He serves clients in all sectors, but has particularly deep expertise in the high-tech, electronics, software, and advanced manufacturing industries. Peet is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, where he teaches a graduate course on Innovation and Public Policy. He was formerly a management consultant at McKinsey & Company and managed McKinsey's global innovation practice. He has held executive positions in several companies internationally.
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Episode Guide:
1:30 - What Is Innovation
3:00 - Creative and Analytical process
3:59 - Innovation as a social enterprise
6:14 - Ambidextrous learning
7:54 - Humans, Uncertainty, Creativity, and Innovation
9:10 - Peter Drecker: Systematic innovation
11:02 - What Isn't Innovation
12:34 - Mid-20th century definition of Innovation
13:10 - Elements before Innovation
16:17 - Research and Development vs Innovation
17:55 - Entrepreneurs' creative disruption
19:53 - Management thinking on innovation over the years
23:22 - Theories for Innovation by entrepreneurs
23:58 - Samuel Palmisano's "If you don't innovate, you're in commodity hell"
25:00 - Karl Marx
25:32 - Peter Drecker: Innovation and corporations in a systemic way
31:38 - Public and private sectors on risk tolerances
35:54 - "Why do you want to innovate?"
38:25 - Collaborative effort and leadership, healthy organization environment
41:05 - A triathlon or decathlon?
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OUTLAST Consulting offers professional development and strategic advisory services in the areas of innovation and diversity management.
/This transcript was automatically generated using AI; please forgive any inconsistencies. We are working to provide the correct and more concise copy of the transcript. For urgent need, please send us an email.
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Jared Simmons 00:05
Hello, and welcome to what is innovation. The podcast that explores the reality of a word that is in danger of losing its meaning altogether. This podcast is produced by Outlast consulting, LLC, a boutique consultancy that helps companies use innovation principles to solve their toughest business problems. I'm your host, Jared Simmons, and I'm so excited to have peered from the billion on the show today. piette is the founder of BM np strategies LLC. he advises clients on innovation strategy, new product development, and r&d transformation. He serves clients in all sectors, but particularly deep expertise in the high tech electronics, software and advanced manufacturing industries. piette is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University, where he teaches a graduate course on innovation and public policy. He was formerly a management consultant at McKinsey and Company and manage Mackenzie's Global Innovation practice. He has held executive positions in several companies internationally, he holds an engineering degree from Stellenbosch University, and a master's degree in economics from the University of South Africa currently lives in McLean, Virginia. Pierre, thank you so much for joining us today. I'm so excited for the conversation.
Peet van Biljon 01:24
Thank you, Jared, good to be with you.
Jared Simmons 01:26
Why don't we just jump right in? Tell me what is innovation?
Peet van Biljon 01:31
Okay, so my, my slightly longer academic definition of it is that innovation is a creative and analytically rigorous process for organizations to solve valuable problems for the customers and for themselves, they bounce back that really quickly. So the end of this to solve valuable problems for the customers and for themselves, referred to, to my belief that innovation is a means to an end, not an end in itself. We see so often, you can read annual reports, everybody loves saying innovation, you can read press releases, everybody loves saying something about innovation, I wish I could get a nickel in time somebody uses the word innovation, I would share it with you, we would do very well. So what I often end up asking clients when they say that they want to innovate more, or they want to get stuff done, or whatever, I said, What? What do you need innovation to do for you? So what kind of valuable problem do you want to solve for your Is it because you want more revenue? is it you want more profit is if you have an efficiency problem? So it becomes very real very quickly, if you say, Why do you want to innovate? Right? So that's the second part of it. And the first part, it's a creative and analytically rigorous process. So that refers to the whole left and right brain idea, we cannot do innovation. If we just doing the creative stuff, we need to do the homework, we need to do the analysis. But if we just do the analysis, and we just asked the what questions and the why questions, and we don't do the creative side, which is asking like the what if questions, how things could be different kinds of questions. We also like kind of completing the loop on innovation.
Jared Simmons 03:36
Right? Right. That's, that's so true. How do you help your students and clients think about connecting those things? Is it something that is, you know, has to be present in a single person? Is it something you balance at a team level at an organizational level, the left and right brain piece?
Peet van Biljon 03:55
That's a really good question. You it's very much innovation is very much a social enterprise. So you have to consider everything at the organizational level I want one of the biggest problems I have with the Hollywood depictions of innovators is that it's like the crazy Professor with a wild here or whatever it's like single person who managed to come up with all this stuff, this is not how innovation works. It is true that when you have a team innovating you can have different roles on it, some people can take care of more of the of the of the blocking and tackling others can be working more on the inside. So the creative part. So when you do innovations, you have like different roles, and some people are more comfortable with being in some modes than other and there are ways to to test for that when you have different team members. For example, I have one of the innovation diagnostics that I use can show you if you have people Fulfilling these these kinds of roles. It's called like the 10 personas of innovation from from, from Kelly, from from idea, which is a very good way of thinking about the personas of it. So that's the innovation process. But then in terms of how you manage it, that's really hard, because especially in an existing business, you are asking managers, you know, at the highest level, and depending on how many levels down, you're doing structure that you're asking them to do two jobs, she asked me to kind of keep the trains running with the existing business, where everything is about efficiency and optimization, and getting things done quickly. And not wasting money versus the innovation side of their activities, which is where you need to be willing to break things have much more of an open mind be willing to play around experiment, basically claim money to learn lessons, and gain insights, whether it's about the technology or your customers, this there's actually a term for that it's called ambidextrous leadership, again, this left right thing. But it's tough for people to to balance, it just just put yourself in a position of a CEO who has like a meeting about quarterly financials with with her CFO at two o'clock, and then at three o'clock, talking about some out there kind of new technology that some teams working on talking about what they're doing there, it really requires a lot of gearshifts for the managers. Yeah,
Jared Simmons 06:49
I hadn't thought about that kind of back to back sort of conversation, I can imagine, you know, having a conversation with the CFO, where you're discussing, you know, millions of dollars in terms of being where you need to be from a p&l standpoint, and then having the next meeting where someone's literally asking you for millions of dollars to go learn. And something that may be useful five years from now, when you're trying to hit a quarterly p&l target in the previous meeting.
Peet van Biljon 07:21
That's so very true. And that's the sort of thing and then there's just the mindsets thing where where with the financier, it's all tangible. If it's not in a spreadsheet, it doesn't exist, once said to me, then you look at the innovation side of things, and then you have to be able to handle the uncertainties and the ambiguities, and so on a lot more. And there's actually been research that shows that one of the things that suppress creativity is uncertainty. Human beings don't like uncertainty. So if they connect uncertainty, to creativity, and by association to innovation, that's going to suppress innovation. So you have to kind of find the right techniques to get people a bit more comfortable with that side of it.
Jared Simmons 08:13
Interesting. certainty, to me sounds a bit like, and this is probably another dichotomy that you you've seen and dealt with. It's not that innovation requires no boundaries, right? It almost sounds like when you talk about, you know, certainty being a catalyst for creativity, you need to give people the right boundaries to be innovative. Versus versus, you know, here's a pile of money, go off on this to this other, you know, to this special location and come back and tell me what you got.
Peet van Biljon 08:49
That's right, you have to harness creativity, you have to put boundaries on it. And it's interesting, because there's Peter Drucker, God, that the present generation of executives properly then read as much as they should. But but he's still considered, you know, a great thought leader in management and as well as innovation. He gave us you know, some decades ago, this idea that innovation has to be systematic, that it's a purposeful, an organized search for things that are changing, and then an analysis of what opportunities might come from those changes and how you could innovate based on those. So it's interesting how that definition kind of handles this dichotomy because what he's saying is you got to have in terms of certainty, you almost have to have a process that you know, works for you as an organization. Right, right. And then inside this process, you can kind of deliberately look for things that are maybe uncertain or unexpected As he said, you're looking for unexpected failures, right? You know, and then you might realize that you can, the glue doesn't work for this, but you can make plastic bags out of it, that kind of thing. You're looking for incongruities between things that your customers tell us tell you and things that they really do. And maybe that tells you about the products, he actually came up with a whole list of weird things or changes without to look for. But the idea that you have this robust process to handle all that is, is I think, the way to resolve this seeming chronic contradiction. It's almost like having a fire that can safely burn, you know, inside the enclosure, right? And so you figure out a way how to handle that.
Jared Simmons 10:47
Right. Right. That makes sense. So, you know, with that sort of understanding of what innovation is, in that view of it, in your mind, what isn't innovation?
Peet van Biljon 11:03
Well, very good question. And, you know, at a very practical level, I've seen people claim things as innovation or not innovation, depending upon what's incentivized, right? So there's budget for innovation, whatever you're working on is innovation. If there's no budget for innovation, but budget for other things, they whenever you're working on is is is not innovation, right? Right. So that's one way of looking at one thing to watch out for, it's just the human nature that tried to trying to adopt it. But I would say if you go back to my definition, that to innovate is to is to have an analytically rigorous as well as a creative process for for coming up with solutions to valuable problems. If you if you remove any of those elements, it's not innovation, if you're not working on solving a valuable product problem, then you're kind of just entertaining yourself. And it's not enough innovation. If you if you neglecting the analytical part of it, you're not doing your homework, then that's not properly innovation. But if you just did analytics, and there's no creativity, no attempt to look at things in a new way, then that's not innovating at all. So that's kind of a response from, what does it mean, to innovate versus not to innovate. And that's the verb. So if I go to the noun, I still go always go back to, to the definition that we got from the mid 20th century, Austrian economist who ended up at Harvard in his later years, who gave us three definitions of three things of which innovations are made the second step. So he said, of innovation, his definition was innovation is creative destruction, where entrepreneurs combine existing elements in new ways.
Peet van Biljon 13:08
And so when you're talking about existing elements, you think of well, what, what come before and Schumpeter's system what what comes before his invention, that's when you've come up, come up with the new thing. Like it's the laser, or the transistor, or whatever. So, so take the transistor, for instance, the transistor was developed at Bell Labs in the late 1940s. And the people who were involved in that the physicists and so on, they got Nobel prizes. But Bell Labs never commercialized. The transistor, and the first really, what we would call today, a killer app, the blockbuster application of the transistor was when the founders of Sony Corporation, just after the Second World War, visited the US and looked around for what they could do to build a business with. And they saw the transistors, Raytheon, were already making some other huge companies, I think Texas Instruments, they were a number of companies making transistors. And if it's not right, then it's probably some others. But a number of transistors were around that they picked business robots, most robust ones that have already kind of proven themselves because the initial ones like any new technology will not very reliable, right? And they took them, they took the idea back and they made these little pocket transistor radios that people have previous generations by remember these tiny little pocket transistor radios that were tremendous hit with the Japanese, public, especially the younger people, after, you know, in the aftermath of the Second World War, they could listen to the music or whatever they could carry it around with thing, it was like, before the Walkman before the iPod before the iPhone, smartphone that is like the original, portable electronic consumer product that was a huge, it's hundreds of millions of these things were made. So if you look at that story, the transistor was the invention. The innovation was realizing that you could put a few transistors and initial radios didn't even have many, you could put a few transistors together to make a working transistor radio. That was small, that could work with a nine volt battery, which was also an innovation at the time. And that people could could carry the music with them. So what's the third stage in this process? According to Schumpeter, it's it's what he called the fusion, we could call that table stakes or everybody else has got it, this is when the technology is so ubiquitous, that there's you can't really make much money out of it anymore, because it's everybody's got it, then yeah, then you have to come up with the next innovation to make money. So it's kind of a useful way of thinking about it. Because I think a lot of times people confuse some parts of research and development with innovation, if you if you map the parts of research and development that are really more about the invention to invention, then you can separate out the part, the parts that are more the about applying the technology of building blocks to a new product or, or other kind of offer.
Jared Simmons 16:42
Right, right. Interesting, and that has a has so many different implications to not only how big companies would think about innovation, looking at across r&d products, applies plat chain, looking across, you know, marketing, and all the different functional aspects of things, but also, potentially for even solopreneurs or, you know, small businesses out there, how they can think about what's really required to be innovative, and how to how to best apply their limited resources, time effort, to, to, to its best effect in terms of trying to create something of value that that adds value to further customers is not necessarily needing to have a creative molecule or, or a widget that no one else has it. That's only one part of the process.
Peet van Biljon 17:43
Did and and, you know, I'm glad you mentioned entrepreneurs or even solopreneurs because that is also an essential element of Schumpeter's definition because he saw the entrepreneur as being central to this process of creative destruction. Creative Destruction means both creating and destroying right so the automobile destroyed the the wall strong baggage. The streaming video is destroying, you know, DVDs and blu rays and things like that. So so so the new thing is destroying the old it's cannibalizing its market. So he says entrepreneurs do that, by combining existing elements in new way you don't have to invent you know, a new altogether new tool new to universe kind of thing to be able to innovate, that's a very important thing to realize for people you can take existing technology that's already been proven and put it together in a new way to to serve the needs of the needs of the customer.
Jared Simmons 18:55
Yeah, so important and something that I think is important to hear, you know, from an expert expert like you who's you know, knows innovation at a level that most people don't do free for you to be a you know, espousing the the the theory and the the fact that you don't have to be you don't have to invent to innovate, I think is something important for people to internalize.
Peet van Biljon 19:21
Yeah, and thanks for saying that, by the way, but I consider myself a mere student of innovation. I think that's one of these things that never quite boster Yeah, no, I,
Jared Simmons 19:33
I can imagine that you'd see yourself that way. And that's part of what what makes you makes you great to talk to you. I think, you know, the story from this Harvard professor. Makes me want to go a bit deeper on just kind of the history of innovation and how how management thinking around innovation, how has that evolved and changed over the years
Peet van Biljon 20:00
It's interesting because today, innovation, sometimes it's just a mother an apple pie thing people like to say innovation is a good thing. But But innovation throughout the ages, it was only basically around the time of the Enlightenment in Europe, that innovation became to be seen as something first acceptable, and then it's something good
Jared Simmons 20:23
that there wasn't there wasn't very long ago. I mean,
Peet van Biljon 20:28
prior to that, the ancient Greeks didn't like the idea of innovation, the medieval order, you know, in Europe, controlled by the, by the church, and so on, didn't like it, because they associated, perhaps rightly, with challenges and disruptions to the, to the status quo. And so, it was only really later on that it became more of something more acceptable around the the science, the scientific era, the Industrial Revolution, and so on. But it's interesting, we still physically live with, with the same resistance right? To the change that that's broke from innovation. So these, these concerns sometimes, sometimes ring very true, there's this wonderful quote from Niccolo Machiavelli is the thin little book, The prince, from Machiavelli, we obviously got the term Machiavellian and but he was also a very astute observer of humanity and Health Organization's work. So he said, it's one of the first quotes on innovation and this is early 16th century. There's nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct or more uncertain in in success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things. For the reformer, or you can read the innovator has enemies in all those who profit by the old order, and only lukewarm defenders in all those who would profit by the new order. And this lukewarmness arising partly from fear of their adversaries, and partly from the incredulity of mankind, who do not truly believe in anything new, until they've had actual experience of it.
Jared Simmons 22:33
Wow,
Peet van Biljon 22:34
you know, I showed this quote, when I talk about innovation in organizations and why there's often resistance, this is not new.
Jared Simmons 22:42
that's a that's a 450 year old quote, right? I mean,
Peet van Biljon 22:46
that's right. If you if you change the language, this modern style of English, people wouldn't even suspect that quote is that or
Jared Simmons 22:57
someone could have said that last week, if they were that eloquent and, and, you know, thoughtful, but yeah, it's not out of place in the 21st century. That's amazing.
Peet van Biljon 23:08
So so as these things started to happen, then the scientific or fluid, people actually started making products and so on. You know, I think entrepreneurs had the sense that if they did new things, and people liked it, they could sell them. But economists really didn't have a theory for, you know, a good theory for innovation. In fact, if you do an introductory course, even today on macro economics will teach you a lot of like new classical macro economics, you have to go to the index to see where they mentioned innovation, and they won't mention it often. And typically, it will be in the sense of, well, innovation helps you to differentiate your product from from the product of the next guy, right? And that gives you the ability to have a pricing premium, because as Sam Palmisano, former CEO of IBM said, if you if you don't innovate you, you in commodity health. So you don't want to be a commodity, or you didn't want your product to be exactly the same as everybody else's product, because then then the price is just gonna be slashed down to commodity level pricing. So so that was kind of the only way that the classical economic framework could could, you know, make room for the idea of innovation. And we had to wait for, you know, the aforementioned use of Schumpeter to come up with a basically a whole theory in the mid 20th century of how innovation can play a role in the in the whole, never at risk capitalist economy because it's funny, Schumpeter actually also studied the writings of Marx and we associate Schumpeter and he was very much a free Market economist. A lot of what he wanted, where he started was was with some of the insights, and they were good insights. It was just that these prescriptions, and talking about Marx was so terrible, but the insights that they often had on how the economy kept changing, and so on, were actually interesting. So she just started on that. And that gave us these definitions that I mentioned, that are quite useful to understand how innovation drives prosperity, and so on. And then we have to go to Peter Drucker to see the idea that innovation organizations that want to do innovation, well have to do it in a systemic way. And I would say, in the last 20 or 30 years post Drucker, what we've had is this whole edition in the late 90s, early 2000s, this whole concept of design thinking coming from Stanford coming from companies like IDEO and so I mean that that it has to be about understanding the customer needs about experimenting and testing things out. And then all that got combined with the ideas around running the winner and the ideas around to agile that started with the software movement doing quick scrums doing quick cycle developments. So that'll look up combined into the Lean Startup concept, which Eric Reese came out with about 10 years ago, which, which I think is kind of the latest thing. And the funny thing I will say about what every Greece did with the lean startup is he he he took existing elements and they always took agile out into into design thinking he took Steve blanks idea of customer development, which is really powerful way of thinking that you when there's greater uncertainty, you have to kind of develop the customer at the same time as you develop the product. So he took all these things and combined them in a very nice way into his innovation called lean startup. And that's been very influential. Now Lean Startup is one way of doing things when you are in a startup kind of environment it's not suitable for everything and you are in a startup environment where there's lots of uncertainty where if there's certainty you can kind of use the more linear kind of established ways of doing things and you actually should
Peet van Biljon 27:46
and the trick is to know the difference again if you're a manager or and you have to decide what process to use but but that's kind of where we are today we've we've we've we've seen that the role that how innovation plays a role in moving the economy forward we've seen that it's systematic like that if you want to keep growing as a company and keep being ahead of your competitors you have to be very systematic about it and look and this is the thing we got from Drucker look for those changes look for changes in markets look for changes in behavior or whatever of your customers right for changes in technology those are triggers of innovation that the I think wisely Council has to look out for and then the idea that the innovation process itself has to be very customer directed and creativity and the different roles and so on that's design thinking and then putting it all together with with with the other strains of thought around building efficiency and agile and doing things with the customer and you basically arrive at where we are today where this is all so there's a lot of tools available to in order to innovate today I think it's almost like an embarrassment of riches. You know, I sense it for clients because you you can read a new article in Harvard Business Review every every, every month or every second month that that makes you think of this is the thing this is now I need to do this now I need to do that. And and and so the trick is in selecting the right tools out of out of the toolbox and kind of combining the right way for the particular endeavor that you
Jared Simmons 29:39
got going. Yeah, I think that's that's so true. In terms of looking at your current situation and wanting to do more innovation, better innovation, faster innovation, and finding that next article or doing some googling and finding a framework. It is implies that the shortest path to more or faster or better, is a new process. And I think that's where you know, the value of having someone, someone like you, as a consultant or advisor comes in, because because people don't even realize the bias that they're bringing to reading an HBr article, the thought that an article can give you a new way of thinking or do or doing that will change your current state. But there's also the aspect of your company culture, the capability of your team, and the person that wrote that article has no perspective on that. Yeah, exactly. So that kind of leads me to there's two two things I want to want to talk about before I let you go. One is the you know, we talked a lot about the private sector and, and customer centric thinking around innovation. And I'd love for you to touch on the the sort of flipside of that around public sector innovation. And then also, I want to want to see if you have any, just any general advice for for innovators out there. So those are my last two questions.
Peet van Biljon 31:13
So let me take the first one. And this is obviously a big topic, the differences in the private sector. But it's kind of so that I could just basically touch on, I would say, innovation is just as important in the public sector, but it manifests itself differently. Sometimes. There are differences in between private and public sector in terms of the cycle time and the risk tolerances, those are the main differences. Now, this doesn't mean to say that the public sector is more risk averse, in absolute terms, then that, then the private sector, you need to quote almost double click on that. The public sector, in fact, they are willing to take on huge technological risks, very long term risks that the public sector is not willing to take on. The fact that we are talking about those made possible through the internet, which is, as many people will know is is is is a public sector. Basically invention, right? The little cameras that are on your smartphone, the reason that they actually have small little cameras that work so well take nice pictures of selfies of view, whatever your friends, is that NASA needed small miniature cameras to put on their satellites. And so that technology got developed that way, we all use GPS all the time, it is a perfect example of our public good, which which everybody can use, which which has been, so a lot of these private sector innovations will end up impossible if the public sector wasn't willing to take on those risks. And the funny thing is, the public sector seems to be more more accepting of long term technological risk in these kinds of things, but less accepting, but but less concerned about commercial risk or market risk, because we're and sometimes so they may not always innovate, most appropriately for the customer base, right, because they don't lose money if they don't lose money if the DMV experience isn't that friendly. But on the other hand, the private sector is very attuned to the commercial risk and where the customers would accept things. But often and even seen this for the startups in the VCs, they don't like high levels of technical risk, they rather want something that's already proven technically. So you can almost say that they they prefer the invention to be made and the innovation technically to be proven. And then they willing to deal with whether there's going to be enough market acceptance to make it make it profitable enough and even in established companies, that's typically the kind of discussions focus on on the more the market side of things, then then the making technology work side of things because in the private sector, technology that doesn't work is it can be really quick killer of not just a project but but of, of your entire company. So there's that difference in how innovations perceived and in terms of the risk concern is obviously difference in where the funds are coming from and wait for what the taxpayers have different expectations to private investors. The funding process is different, the public sector tends to have a very strict annual process and you lose funds that you don't use in most cases. Whereas the private sector, you know, can basically structured the way they they worked right then anytime they're like, they get to make their own funding cycles, and they can use money that they haven't used, haven't consumed. So there's a lot of those differences. But there's also a lot of things that are similar, right? All the secrets to success that you have to know. And maybe this gets more to your to your second question, in terms of what do you what do you need to do to get better at it? You need to align with the strategy. So this goes back to my original thing about why do you want to enter? You can answer that question. And if you can, put it in quantitative terms, I want to innovate because I want to,
Peet van Biljon 36:04
you know, expand my market here or whatever, and I need another 5 million customers or whatever, in this sector, that to really get your teeth into why and it also gets you the management support, because now you can show whether it's public or private sector, now you can show how you are helping the organization achieve its purpose, its mission, and its goals and the highest possible level. The other big lesson is is pick growth markets, you can be the best cell phone maker, like Nokia, if the market changes and the market wants smartphones with with touchscreens, you are going to lose out to an average maker of of smartphones. So it's about being at the right place at the right time, right actually just as important innovation as anything else than the most genius or sort of like whatever maker of of horse carriages in 1920 would not have survived the automobile. So so people sometimes forget about that, it's really you also have to find the right growth areas to innovate in. And then there's a lot of the just the howl of innovation to get to get right. And again, long conversations about having the distinctive insights that allowed to come up with good innovation, putting in place a process that works for your organization in terms of how you want to experiment and test things, and so on. And the last two points, I think, are true not just for innovation, but for everything else, executions, important innovation is complex. And it requires taking something from idea to scaling it up to launching it. So you've got to sweat the details you got to focus on on how you're going to scale up things and how you're going to get the product or the service out the door. And there's no substitute for exercising and developing those execution muscles in your organization. And then, which, which is the last word that I mentioned, that's the organization it's it's it requires the efforts of many people to get together and innovation successfully launched. And it all starts with with leadership. It requires healthy organizational environment. So that people are willing to take a little bit of a risk on willing to exchange information and knowledge and collaborate. And innovation doesn't work. If the organization is dysfunctional innovation, I was like to say is like the canary in the coal mine, you may find out that you're having problems with innovation. And then you may realize, well, these problems go way beyond just innovation. The organization itself is is is in need of attention.
Jared Simmons 39:12
Very interesting. Yeah, I could innovation stresses and put strain on the core elements of what it means to be, you know, a collaborative, communicative, effective organization innovation leans heavily on that, especially in large cross functional companies. So I could see if you have an issue in a specific area, innovation being the first the first place that that shows the canary in the coal. I love that. That's a great, a great, a great analogy. Yeah. So yeah, that was that's wonderful. I took away, you know, it's got to be connected to strategy. It has to be relentless focus on execution, and it's got to be at the organizational level for innovation to work. It seems to be the kind of three In severe of your advice there is Is that a fair takeaway?
Peet van Biljon 40:04
Um, it is fair, I mean, I would add the things that you know, have to do with the innovate part of innovate, right, the creative and the experimental part about how you get the insights from different sources, from your customers from, from technology from what other organizations are doing with business models, and so on. And, and the, and the supportive culture game comes back to the organization. And even with your experimentation, it's an execution exercise, you've got to, you've got to have a process whereby you can run these experiments, prototype, test and learn. So so I would, I would, I would, I would add those parts to it, as well. But yeah, it's, but as you say, it's, it exercises kind of all the, the organizational muscles, which is why it's so telling, for any organization. And I always like it's not a triathlon, it's like a decathlon. It's because it has these different events, because innovation requires you to be creative, and it requires you to experiment, then it requires you to execute, but it also requires you to have your strategy sorted out, and so on and so on. Right. So and, and you ask, Well, why, why does it check all these boxes? And you know, why? Because innovation is about starting a new business every time. And so that's why because it's an entrepreneurial activity. And it's almost like your back to you to the garage and your two friends and the dog or whatever, right? If you're starting with the business with so it's, it will stress this, you know, like all elements of management.
Jared Simmons 41:56
Well, well said Well said. P it thank you so much. We've been talking with PFM billion, founder of BM NP strategies, LLC. And thank you so much for agreeing to join me. We've known each other for a while. I remember when we met while I was at McKinsey, I thought, wow, this guy really knows his stuff and is a fascinating person beyond innovation, and all sorts of other topics. So thank you for your continued friendship, and I'm looking forward to talking to you again soon.
Peet van Biljon 42:32
Well, thank you very much, and likewise, and I really enjoyed talking to you. Thanks. Thank you. Take care.
Jared Simmons 42:44
We'd love to hear your thoughts about this week's show. You can drop us a line on Twitter at OUTLAST LLC, or follow us on LinkedIn where we're OUTLAST Consulting. Until next time, keep innovating. Whatever that means.